Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Wisconsin Book Festival

Attention Book lovers, the Wisconsin Book Festival is approaching!  The four-day festival will take place between October 22-25, in and around the Madison Public Library's Central Library in downtown Madison.  

The festival will feature more than 60 events with plenty of opportunities to meet authors, discover new books or favorite writers, and have books signed.

This year’s lineup includes:
-2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction Adam Johnson for Fortune Smiles
-New York Times Bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi for The
Republic of Imagination
-Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss for Once In a Great City
-The New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris for Between You and Me
-Wisconsin’s own master storyteller Nickolas Butler for Beneath the Bonfire
-Caldecott medalist and beloved children’s book author Kevin Henkes for Waiting
-Acclaimed journalist Evan Thomas for Being Nixon
-Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich for Saving Capitalism
-National Book Award winner Timothy Egan for The Big Burn
-2015-16 Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser

See the full festival lineup at http://www.wisconsinbookfestival.org. Be sure to join in on some of these exciting events!

Time to Repeal NAFTA, etc. There is no Free Trade

It is time to recognize that there is no such thing as 'free trade.' There is no such thing as free trade so long as workers are paid $17 a week, or industries can pollute the air, the land, and the water in their efforts to provide me with a cheaper computer or shirt.

Some say there will be retaliation which will hurt American farmers.

I have no problem paying for price supports.

Frankly I like the good old days. I do not mind paying higher prices and paying higher taxes if my neighbors are employed and everyone does better.

Would someone tell me what is wrong with this thinking?

"Free Holden Caulfield" - Learning To Question Authority

In his New Yorker blog, Hendrik Hertzberg wrote last week of his high school encounter with J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."  Hertzberg remembers the "cool" English teacher, Mr. Perkins, who assigned the book to his Suffern, NY, eleventh-grade class. A few days later, school authorities confiscated the books and the next year Mr. Perkins was gone. But the spark was lit.

As for me and my friends, we were shocked. We were hurt. But we were also wildly excited—energized to the point of exhilaration. By the end of the day the whole school knew what had happened. For weeks afterwards no one talked of anything else. It was never clear exactly why the book had been banned. The word was that there had been pressure from the school board. Too many dirty words was one reason, that was certain—all those hells and goddams that Holden sprinkles throughout his story, plus (if I’m recalling this right) one solitary “fuck.” It’s not Holden’s word. He sees it scrawled on a bathroom wall (if I’m remembering this right), and he doesn’t like it any better than our school board did. I suppose that the dirty words were sufficient to stampede the school board, but we were sure that Holden’s real offense was what the school board presumably saw as his disrespect for authority and we saw as his insistence on deciding for himself which authorities were worthy of respect and which were not.

Anyhow, our clique made as much of a fuss as we could. Pooling our pocket money, we bought a whole bunch of copies of the Signet paperback (fifty cents each). Then we set up a table just outside the school grounds and hawked them. They went quickly. Instead of just one class reading “Catcher in the Rye,” half the school read it—not as a sullenly accepted duty but as an act of curiosity and rebellion, a rite of passage, an unexpected gift. For more than a few, it was the first time in their lives they had ever read a book on their own initiative. How could they resist, once their natural enemies had deemed it unfit for their eyes (and deemed them unfit to read it)?

Calling the 1959 experience " excellent preparation for what was about to arrive: the nineteen-sixties," Hertzberg was able to pinpoint a moment when his young development took an important turn, a "question authority" event.

Mine wasn't a book (although I read "Catcher" in my teens and thought it was pretty cool), or a school board's overreaction (although the Bayonne, NJ, school board was reactionary and anti-intellectual),  or even November 22, 1963 (although I cannot ever forget that day and weekend). It was a steady diet of listening to Jean Shepherd on the radio late at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Known now mostly as the voice and writer of "A Christmas Story," Shep was the guy who corrupted the minds of hundreds of thousands of pimply know-it-all kids, and entertained many late night workers from firehouses to restaurant kitchens throughout the east coast via powerhouse New York radio station WOR. We've written about Shep before here on Waxing America. There's a great book dedicated to the genius who never quite found the success he sought. But Shep's rants did provide excellent preparation for the nineteen-sixties.

- Barry Orton

Vonnegut Letter Home After Surviving Dresden Firebombing

On a favorite new site, Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, Shaun Usher posts original versions and transcripts of "fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos."  While most are really interesting, this first letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family after he survived being a German POW in World War II is gripping.  As Vonnegut readers know, he survived the firebombing of Dresden because the POWs were routinely locked in an underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse; an experience that became the focus of his classic anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

The letter home, written in May of 1945, was Vonnegut's first since he was captured in December 1944.

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to ('the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border'?). There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39's) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.

Go read the whole thing.

In an introduction to a 1976 edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut wrote:

"The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in."

- Barry Orton

Unusual Silliness from the New Yorker - Gladwell Needs A Sense of Humor

For the better part of the past fifty years, I have read The New Yorker with regularity. Never has it presented anything as silly as Malcolm Gladwell's The Courthouse Ring - Atticus Fitch and the limits of Southern Liberalism.

Gladwell contends that Scout's dad, Atticus Fitch, "sought to humanize Jim Crow, not challenge it." When Fitch learns the fate of Tom Robinson, he reacts calmly, and Gladwell argues:

        If Fitch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict.

Perhaps it was an isolated childhood, or too many cartoons, but clearly Gladwell was deprived of the opportunity to understand the complex reactions to change experienced by so many Americans confronted by the changing times of the 1950's and 1960's by both the civil rights movement and the response to the war in Vietnam.

I need not tear through the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird, but only to make two points.

First, many of the most committed and dedicated attorneys of the period were moderate Republicans fully committed to the First Amendment, sober in tone and demeanor, but as passionate as William Kunstler (who represented me in 1967-68) when it came to civil rights and civil liberties. These were men who wore suits as conservative as their politics and were as committed to the civil rights movement and free speech as any freedom rider.

Secondly, it was impossible to gauge the militancy of any American during this period until they were directly confronted with one of the string of horrors that was to unfold on a regular basis on the new medium of television. Whether it was fire hoses and murders, or campus beatings and bombings, you did not really know your neighbor until you saw their response to the brutality and the carnage. They did not know themselves.

Gladwell noted that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's story told through the eyes of a child about her Daddy. Clearly he wishes to capitalize on that. He receives the attention he craves, but adds nothing to the brilliant conversation started by a seven year old.

As for the comparisons of Tom Robinson's trial with the prospects of a Boo Radley trial, clearly Gladwell needs a sense of humor. Boo Radley would never go to trial - he committed no crime.

Scott McClellan: A John Dean Moment, Not A Democrat

Tuesday night I watched the first of the Bush Administration talking heads, including some 'expert' from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, respond to Scott McClellan's  "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The former White House press secretary was quickly assaulted with a limited and dull collection of bromides:

• If he was so concerned about these matters, he had the obligation to speak up at the time.
• He betrayed the White House.
• He sounds like a Democrat.

From  Bush apologist Frances Townsend, on CNN we got "Scott never did that on any of these issues as best I can remember or as best as I know from any of my White House colleagues."

From the White House,  the AP reports,"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan."

As for Secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (also AP), we are told her response was, "Those who were skeptical should have spoken up at the time and argued against U.N. sanctions such as the oil-for-food program, she said."

None of these and the myriad of other replies addresses one fundamental point - no one will take on McClellan head on and deny the truth of his allegations.

The notion that he sounds like a Democrat, must bring a smile to the lips of John Dean. The Watergate Era staffer to Richard Nixon, and author of Blind Ambition,  faced a similar, though somewhat more demanding, crisis.

Both men knew that eventually history would catch up with them (also see Stanley Kutler's  The Wars of Watergate ) and their presidents.

Faced with the ugly lies and the disapproval of their colleagues, both Dean and McClellan chose the truth, the temporary label as turncoat, and the long-term contentment of honesty.

That is not a Democratic quality, I hope.

Blaska on Meadowood Crime: A Disappointment

When Marc Eisen of Isthmus called to request that I write a few words on solutions to Meadowood crime, I jumped at the opportunity. When he added that he made the same request of Dave Blaska, a conservative who once represented the community on the Dane County Board, I figured it would be interesting.

Wrong.

When I opened my Isthmus on August 30, 2007 I found this from Blaska:

Giuliani's police chief in New York, William Bratton, upended the conventional wisdom that "crime...was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention," reports the August edition of Governing magazine. He proved that effective policing does not respond to crime, it actually prevents it...

...Yes, send in the surge — hire more police. But give them the Giuliani-Bratton marching orders: drive, walk, bike, and bus the beat. Issue citations for littering, public drunkenness and vandalism. Respond to every noise complaint, crack down on loitering, throw the pissers off the bus and, yes, bust minor drug users.

This is pure nonsense. Just add Blaska to the long list of conservative pundits who do not have a clue as to what Bratton did in New York City.

Three days earlier, I posted: Misinformation: From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to Charlie Sykes,  where I took them to task for relying on the Governing Magazine article and not having a clue as to what Bratton did in NYC. Everyone is picking up on Bratton's assertion:

Crime, the theory went, was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention. That was the unchallenged conventional wisdom espoused by academics, sociologists, and criminologists. I intended to prove them wrong. ----  New York City Police Chief, William Bratton, in his book, The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.

The problem is they are not reading the entire book but just taking he filtered material from Governing Magazine. This misses Bratton's point.

As noted in that post:

There is no bigger an advocate for Community Policing than Bratton.  He understands that quality of life variables influence crime, and that law enforcement needs to acknowledge that. Bratton used neighborhood police officers, decentralized command and gave more authority to the precinct officers. Referring to his mentor,  Bob Wasserman, a firm opponent of racial profiling, Bratton wrote:

Wasserman explained that police can't be an island, that we have to work in partnership with the community...He was one of the first in the profession to understand and define the elements and potential of what we came to know later as community policing...

...But the central point of this post is that Slaske's op-ed piece and Sykes' blog post is a far cry from what William Bratton did in New York.

If the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission uses Slaske and Sykes as a measure for hiring a new police chief, they will not get a William Bratton.

Bratton worked with the academics, sociologists, and criminologists; he simply did not allow their analysis to leave his department feeling that police intervention was meaningless and ineffective. But he used the tools of those other professions in building his overall strategy to combat crime.

By the way, Bratton supports gun control laws and firmly opposes conceal and carry.

Madison's Kite Aerial Photographer

Craig M. Wilson is Madison's photo-documentarian from above, but not from a helicopter or airplane.  Craig's is more a bird's-eye view: a few hundred feet up and very dependent on the winds.  Craig, in his day job a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat in the City of Madison's Department of Planning and Development, has a hobby/business/artistic calling as an internationally recognized kite-assisted aerial photographer.

Browse his website, "FromaKite," and check out his photos of Madison places and events from above.  Shots of the Terrace, Camp Randall during football games, and the Capitol are spectacular.  He's got a great book, too, "Hanging by a Thread."

- Barry Orton

Book Review: "Shadow Divers" and "The Last Dive"

Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything To Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War Two and The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths by Bernie Chowdhury both tell the same story of the risky attempts by a group of amateur divers to identify a wrecked World War II German U-Boat off the coast of New Jersey. 

Chowdhury narrowly focuses on the father and son who died in a futile attempt to gain glory by finding the logbook that would definitively ID the submarine and its mission. A pedestrian and uneven accounting of a  disaster caused by male bonding through thrill-seeking, The Last Dive drafts behind the wake of Shadow Divers like a VW behind an 18-wheeler on the Interstate.

Kurson takes the wider view and lets us in on the lives of the two key organizers of the many dives and archival research trips that ultimately let them piece together the real history of the U-Boat and its crew, whose remains still lie in the twisted steel coffin of the sub, not far from the entry to New York's harbor. In Kurson's hands, the historical detective story becomes every bit as interesting as the thrilling and dangerous dives. It's a book well worth reading.

There's been a PBS special, "Hitler's Lost Sub," and director Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner," "Thelma and Louise,"  "Gladiator") is in preproduction of a full-blown movie of Shadow Divers.

- Barry Orton

Book Report: "Charlie Wilson's War"

The late George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, tells the tale of the CIA's secret support of the Islamic mujahadeen's ultimately successful war against the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Red Army.  Pushed by Democratic east Texas Congressman "Goodtime" Charlie Wilson, the CIA armed and financed Afghan tribes' guerrilla forces to the point that the Red Army suffered their equivalent of Viet Nam, which set the stage for the  Soviet Union's collapse.

Taught by the CIA to wage a high-tech hit-and-run war of resistance, the mujahadeen became the foundation for the Islamic fundamentalist movement that has come back to bite its sponsors in a big way.

The intricate details of Congressional logrolling, secret defense spending, and illegal CIA foreign policy involvement, and how they revolved around Wilson's personal foibles, make this book fascinating reading.  How the CIA secretly armed, trained, and financed the mujahadeen with our tax dollars makes it required reading to fully understand today's political morass.

(Tom Hanks is producing and starring in a movie version that will be released this winter.  Read the book now before the details get lost in the publicity shuffle.)

- Barry Orton