OBAMA'S VIET NAM

Those among you who read this blog faithfully may have noticed that every morning, President Obama checks it for advice, just after kissing his daughters goodby and sending them off to school, and before his daily national security briefing. The time has come, therefore, for me to advise him on this whole Afghanistan thing. Let us be clear: I know next to nothing about the region in which Afghanistan is located. I have, to be sure, read Kipling's great novel, KIM, and I have even seen the movie, several times [I love the part where Kim is being trained for the Great Game, and has to memorize a table full of objects in no time at all.] Needless to say, I do not read, write, speak, or understand any of the languages of the region, and my grasp of the history of the area is sketchy, to put matters as delicately as I can. In short, I am as well prepared to pontificate on the subject of America's Afghan policy as perhaps 432 of the members of the House of Representatives, at least 96 of the senators, and all of the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls. So here goes.

Afghanistan threatens to be Obama's Viet Nam. The reference, of course, is to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, when he ascended to the presidency upon John Kennedy's assassination, had dreams of being a domestic affairs president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kennedy had sent "advisors" to Viet Nam to pick up the slack from the collapsing French Empire, but it was not too late, in 1963-64, to shut the whole escapade down and back off. Tragically, Johnson was intimidated by the Ivy League whiz kids [MacNamara, Bundy, et al.], who suckered him into a bigger commitment that then produced the downfall of his presidency and the death of fifty thousand Americans and several million Viet Namese.

We are way deeper into Afghanistan than we were into Viet Nam in 1963, of course, but the principle is the same. It would perhaps help if Obama had a bit of the Old South in him, and remembered Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

Let us recall that this country essentially created the Taliban during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, arming them with everything up to, and especially including, Stinger ground-to-air missiles with which to shoot down the Russian attack helicopters that were devastating the resistance forces.

Joe Biden. God bless 'im, has apparently weighed in with a strong dissent from the proposal to expand American forces, and even George Will, one of my very least favorite human beings, has called for us to get out.

If Obama pulls put of Afghanistan, he will be beat up on by the Republicans for a while, but the public, which couldn't find the country on the map with a seeing eye dog, will forget about it soon enough. If Obama gets suckered into accepting the myth that just one more troop increase, just one more surge, will do the trick and stabilize the country, then his presidency will be held hostage to the vagaries of internal Afghanistan politics, and all our brave hopes for him will be dashed. What can we do? Not a thing. This is not, unlike health care, an issue on which mobilized public opinion will in the short run make any difference. Right now is the last moment when Obama can back off, treat both wars as a legacy from the previous administration, and cut America's losses. If he buys the troop increase, he buys the war, and from now on it will be Obama's war.

I suspect Obama actually knows all this. But does he have the political courage to take the hit up front? He may well have to temporize until the health care battle is over, but that is now a matter of weeks.

All we can do is wait and see.

After writing and posting the above, I went to Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, and there, under a heading "Obama's JFK Moment?" found essentially the same analysis. I take this as a good sign, not as evidence that I have been "one-upped." What I am most encouraged by in the posting, which is by George Packer, is the statement that the people around Obama are all drawing the analogy and are fully aware of what is at stake. Let us hope so!

I WOULD LAUGH IF IT DIDN'T HURT SO MUCH

I was idly googling myself at three a.m. this morning, having just arrived home from Paris [let us not have any cheap snarking here, please. Who among us has not done the same?] Deep into the sixty-eighth page of sites, I came upon the Blog of Jeremy Farris, a very interesting doctoral student at Oxford in political philosophy, who has, among other things, taught at Morehouse College. Farris has some nice things to say about me, but the line that caught my eye and brought a lump to my throat was this one: "Wolff appears to be much more active with his blog than I am, which is not bad for a man who is nearly an octogenarian."



Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am clearly, firmly, irrefutably a septuagenarian! I am nine months past the mid-point of my decade long stroll through the seventies. My Lord, Barack Obama will be re-elected before I hit eighty! [But it will be close]



At first, I was stunned, appalled, devastated. But after regaining my composure, I tried to see things from Farris's point of view. The book of mine that has clearly had the biggest impact on him is IN DEFENSE OF ANARCHISM, which, though it was published in 1970, was actually written in the Summer of 1965. Farris's father was probably in grade school at the time, so in a certain sense, Farris bears the same relationship to the time of that book's writing as I do to the run-up to the First World War, when my father was in about fifth grade.



It is a commonplace claim about the experience of old age that one recalls events from one's youth more easily than what one had for breakfast. Now, this is not true of me at all. I recall vividly what I had for breakfast this morning. [I am helped, to be sure, by the fact that I have the same thing every morning, which saves me the trouble of deciding, and leaves me more time to plan my blog posts.] But what IS true is that those of us on the downward slope of life can survey a sweep of time and events that extends far beyond the immediacies that young people mistake for the totality of reality. That is why we are persuaded of our superior wisdom, despite the fact that we must ask the help of grade schoolers when struggling with our cellphones.



So, I recommend that you Google Farris and check out his blog, while at the same time cutting him some slack because of his extreme youth. It is not his fault that he is so young, and if we all just wait a while, the infirmity will correct itself.

FOR JENNIFER

One more time to the market, for the makings of the last dinner I shall prepare here in Paris, before we head home next Tuesday. Susie opted for quail, so I got two cailles, san tetes. Some courgettes [that is Zucchini, in English, but that is such an ugly word that I cannot bring myself to use it. Courgettes sounds infinitely better, and tastes the same.] Then home.

Today, for some mysterious reason, Boulevard Saint Germain was blocked off by Police, and an enormous outpouring of young people took it over, dancing, fire eating, shouting, listening to ear-shattering music played over huge amps on trucks. I have no idea what was up, but there were some thousands of people parading down the Boulevard. One truck had placards calling for free medicines for AIDS sufferers, but I suspect that was just an excuse for what was basically a celebration of the end of summer.

In a desperate effort to use up whatever I found in the kitchen, I peeled and sliced a dozen shallots, carmelized the courgettes, sauted the shallots with butter [Julia Childs is quite right that everything tastes better with butter], grilled the quail until they were "rose" [i.e., pink], and served it all up with a Beaume de Venise for me and a bottle of rose for Susie.

I started with rabbit and ended with quail. Not too bad. Tomorrow, we shall see my French cousins, Andre and Jacqueline Zarembowitch [retired distinguished scientists -- Andre's grandfather was my great-grandfather's brother].

I hope you have all checked out the link to my son's talk. He is truly brilliant -- visiting this semester at Harvard Law School -- the leading young Civil Proceduralist in the country -- and a really great looker. I believe I have what, in a different context, would be called trophy sons.

A TOUCH OF BRILLIANCE [HEM HEM]

For anyone interested in a brilliant analysis of the struggle for GLBT equality in America, I strongly recommend a speech given by -- wait for it -- my son, Tobias Barrington Wolff. The entire hour and a half event can be found at the following link, but the first fifteen minutes really need to be seen and heard. http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/159617/show_type/video?browse=none&category=0&search=

IS IT RACISM?

Everyone is getting into the discussion now about whether Joe Wilson's outburst, and the rabid support for it from the right, is an instance of, or evidence of, racism. Jimmy Carter says yes. The White House says no. Today, on the Huffington Post, John A. Bohner posted a comment entitled "The GOP is Too Crazy to be Racist." Here is, as they say in the blogosphere, the money quote: "[T]he color of the President's skin does not matter to the lunatics dictating the direction of the Republican Party. I mean, it matters in that it's icing on the cake -- but they were baking regardless of all that." He concludes by writing: "Are there some racists out among the crowd? Absolutely. Is race an overtone? You bet. But -- and it's a big 'but' -- is "the overwhelming portion" of it based on race as President Carter contends? No."

Bohner is right, in an odd way, even though he misconstrues the role played by race in American economic, political, and public life. His commentg treats what is called racism as a personal attitude, an aversion to people with skin somewhat darker than that of Northern Europeans, a matter of taste, an individual irrationality. But slavery was never about skin color. Jim Crow was never about skin color. Redlining and job discrimination are not about skin color. The Civil War was not about skin color.

My colleague in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass, John Bracey, brought this home to me one day during the very first year of our doctoral program. We were in class with the first group of doctoral students [that first year, crazy as it may sound, all seven members of the graduate faculty attended every one of the twice-a-week seminar meetings required of all seven graduate students -- by the time we got finished arguing with one another, there was scarcely enough oxygen in the room for the poor students to take a deep breath.] I was making some inane remark about the racism of the early slave owners, and John interrupted. "Bob, the English settlers didn't get to Virginia, look around, and say, 'this is a wonderful place. All it is lacking is black people to discriminate against. Let's go get some.'" He didn't need to finish the thought, because I immediately saw what he meant. The settlers, who were out to make a killing in tobacco, took a look around and said, "This is a godawful bug-infested unhealthy place, but if we had some cheap labor to plant and tend tobacco crops, we could make a bundle. Let's go get us some cheap labor."

Race in America has always been about forced labor, cheap labor, labor that can be exploited to make a profit for capital. The liberation of the slaves deprived the planters of their captive labor force, and the Black Codes and Jim Crow legislation that brought an end to the brief period of Reconstruction had as its manifest purpose re-enslaving that labor force in all but name. The ante-bellum slave owners were not phobic about people with black skin. They raped them, had babies by them, gave their infant children to them for suckling, lived cheek by jowl with them, and took them as mistresses when they couldn't have them as slaves. They used them not only as field hands, but also as skilled artisans -- wheelwrights, cartwrights, carpenters, blacksmiths, builders, architects, even factory workers. So long as the owners could control the labor of the slaves, they valued it, paid top dollar for it, depended on it. Once they lost control of that labor, almost overnight the myth grew up that the former slaves were shiftless, lazy, no-account layabouts.

For much of the last century and a half, the well-being of White workers, always in danger, has depended on excluding from the labor force a sizeable fraction of the available workers, so as to maintain a decent level of wages. Starting with the period just after the Civil War, that meant excluding Black workers from all but the most poorly paid jobs. The working class in America has been under siege for decades now, with stagnant wages and vast job losses contributing to persistant unemployment and underemployment. The election of Barack Obama has panicked millions of Americans, who fear that this highly symbolic event means a final and complete loss of the comparative advantage White Americans enjoy so long as they can effectively exclude Black Americans from jobs and some measure of economic security. Not at all surprisingly, the severe recession of the past year has been catastrophic for Black workers.

The recent outbursts are about the fact that there is a black man in the White House, as I said in an earlier post, not because of his skin color, but because of the threat that this legitimating of a dispossessed fraction of the American population poses to those already under attack by a capitalist economy that no longer needs their labor so urgently. The attacks operate at the level of symbolism and hysterical phobia, but the underlying cause is economic through and through. These attacks will grow more stronger, and the public faces of the attacks will become more unhinged. We are in for an ugly time in America. It is only a matter of time before there is an attempt on Obama's life. The Secret Service hasn't lost a president in forty-six years. Let us hope they can run the string out for another seven.

IS MAUREEN DOWD READING MY BLOG?

Maureen Dowd, the resident NY TIMES snark, had a column yesterday suggesting that the real reason for the hysterical reaction to Obama's rather middle of the road health care reform proposals is simply that some people cannot come to terms with the fact that we have a Black president. I refer you to my earlier post. It is nice to know that I am being read. :)

By the way, those of you obsessively following the counter that adds up the number of visits to this blog [I do hope I am not the only one afflicted with this disease] will perhaps have noticed that after the counter proceeded slowly and sedately toward the 2000 mark [many of these are me, of course], suddenly it jumped by 10,000, so that now it is approaching 12,000, not 2000. There are two possible explanations. The first, which I secretly favor but officially doubt, is that overnight I acquired ten thousand new readers. The other is that there is some glitch in the counter. [A third, that someone at Google looked at my pathetic numbers and took pity on me, is touching but unlikely].

By the way, the boeuf bourguignon was spectacular. We shall eat the second half tonight.

SUCCESS!!!

Success has crowned my efforts! I am proud and pleased to announce that I have succeeded in creating un vrai boeuf bourguignon. The entire process took about four and a half hours today, and an hour or so yesterday [everything marinates for twenty-four hours] and the result now sits on a large pot on the stove, awaiting the dinner hour. I shall follow tradition, and serve it with little boiled potatoes. It is rich, intense in taste, deep in color, and delicious.

There is enough to serve at least four comfortably, so Susie and I will have several dinners before it is all eaten. One of the odd and unexpected aspects of the process is that near the end, after the pot of meat and vegetables has been simmering for three hours, one separates and [supposedly] throws away the vegetables. Susie is at the moment reading a book about the creation of style in 18th century France, and she reports that in the days of the Bourbon kings, the aristocracy did not eat vegetables. They were considered suspect, and good only for peasants, who could not afford to eat meat. The veggies that I separated out from the pot taste wonderful, and we shall eat them tonight or tomorrow night.

I have had greater triumphs, of course -- the birth of my two sons, for example, and the time I successfully played Beethoven's Opus 59 #3, with the super-fast viola part in the last movement. But this ranks right up there.