Frank’s Case Book

The word and suffix “phobia” derives from the Latin word phobos for fear. In psychiatry, a phobia refers to any irrational fear. [1] Arachnophobia is the irrational fear of spiders. People who fear heights suffer from acrophobia. People who post at political web sites obviously do not suffer from doxophobia or fear of expressing opinions. Recently, a secondary meaning of phobia has fallen into a too common usage. The new definition of phobia includes not only fear, but also aversion and hate. For example, homophobia has come to mean hate of homosexuals, not just fear of the same. Actually there is a double intended meaning here. Certain activists for homosexuals would like people to believe the aversion to homosexuals is borne of a phobia about personal sexuality. There is no use arguing about the new usage of phobia. Changes in usage happen in living languages.

In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, David Brooks argues that we are encountering a new phobia, a phobia characterized more by hatred than by fear. According to Brooks, this “Bourgeoisophobia” explains why European and Arabs have come to hate America and Israel. [2] Brooks recently wrote Bobos in Paradise on how a unique combination of bourgeois and bohemian values and attitudes characterize the new upper class in America. He has thus spent considerable time studying the history and evolution of bourgeois values.

According to Brooks, the attitude of Islamic fundamentalists iseasy to understand. They hate the values of the “meritocratic capitalist society.” They hate highly commercial cultures and what they are based on: individual liberty for the masses, even women. They hate what free cultures produce: everything from popular music to videos. Most of all, Islamic fundamentalists are “inflamed” by “humiliation.” In the 1960’s and 1970’s, some Arab societies attempted to embrace a modern economy, but wouldn’t allow their cultures to adapt. The lingering and unhappy residue of these attempts is a sense of failure and anger. America represents the West with its bourgeois values and Israel is the foothold of the West in the Middle East. Hence, they both evoke a particular animus.

Europeans both love and hate America. The love American popular culture, while showing a distaste for the idea of American exceptionalism. Europeans embrace bourgeois values at least as much as Americans. How then can Bourgeoisophobia explain European anger with the United States? Part of it is a little jealously of American economic success. Some Europeans view Americans as many of us might view a rich uncle who wears checked suits, sports a $5 haircut, and became wealthy by selling brightly colored Cadillacs. We have to acknowledge the monetary success even while our sense of fairness and justice is assaulted because of our conviction that the uncle is our moral and intellectual inferior. Even worse, unlike the uncle, to Europeans Americans possess a blithe, casual, and infuriating certainty in their own goodness.

As Brooks explains:

“No European would ever acknowledge the category, but America and Israel are heroic bourgeois nations. The Israelis are driven by passionate Zionism to build their homeland and make it rich and powerful. Americans are driven by our Puritan sense of calling, the deeply held belief that Americans have a special mission to spread our way of life around the globe. It is precisely this heroic element of ordinary life that Europeans lack and distrust.”

Once Europeans thought themselves to be the economic, cultural, military leaders of the world. Europe had a colonial empire that extended around the globe. Two world wars and their aftermath splintered off what was left of European colonial holdings while dissipating European self-confidence. American hubris reminds them of what they once were and can be no longer. Retaining a sense of moral superiority by creating the myth of the unsophisticated American cowboy blustering unthinking into the world acts as a mild analgesic to European frustration at self-imposed impotence.

1. On-line list of Phobias.
2. Brooks, David, “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” The Weekly Standard, 20-72, April 15, 2002.

There is something of a global, political, economic, and demographic race on. On one side, we have Western and Western-class countries with their open and transparent societies, ethos of tolerance, respect for individual liberties, adherence to the rule of law, and robust economies. On the other side, are various authoritarian countries, that use ideology or religion as a yoke to control their populations. In terms of wealth, growth, and technological leadership, there is a large gulf between the West and the rest.

However, the fertility rates of Western and Western-class countries are rapidly decreasing. In countries like Italy and Spain fertility is far far less than what is required for replacement. In Western Europe, the fertility rate is about a third less than required for replacement. Residents of the United States are not producing children at a rate necessary for replacement. Were it not for immigration, the population of the United States would be decreasing. Though there are a few countries like China that have used Draconian methods to limit population growth and others that match high birth rates with an AIDS epidemic so pervasive that there is the threat of population decreases, the population in developing countries is growing far more rapidly than in developed countries. Even with an expected drop-off in the fertility in developing countries, the ratio of people living there to those in developed countries will significantly increase this century.

It does not take much of an imagination to realize that unsuccessful leaders in developing countries will find the West convenient targets for demagoguery. The assertion that “We are poor, because the West is rich,” has a saliency in the developing world and insolates local repressive leaders from accountability. Unless developing countries can be rapidly integrated into the world economy and unless living standards begin to approach those of the West, there is a strong potential for political instability and increased terrorism. The race is whether these developing countries can achieve some level of economic prosperity before the developed and undeveloped worlds come into more conflict.

The Middle East, particularly the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, is an extreme example of this phenomenon. While Israel is a relatively affluent country, it floats in a sea of despair and economic stagnation. Much of this economic stagnation is a consequence of the authoritarian rule by Palestinian leaders, pervasive corruption, and a consequence of the devotion resources to arms and security as opposed to economic development. This economic despair combined with a culture of misogyny causes birth rates that are so high that it is difficult for any economic development to keep pace. In the West Bank, the Palestinian fertility rate is 5.8 children per woman in a lifetime, far in excess of the 2.1 replacement rate. In the Gaza Strip the rate is an astounding 7.8. It is small wonder that life has become so worthless, that suicide bombers seem to be a renewable resource.

The best foreseeable near-term outcome for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is some sort of agreement where Palestinian leadership, not intent on the destruction of Israel, agrees to live with borders roughly corresponding to the 1967 borders between Jordan and Israel. Even given such an outcome, unless there is very rapid economic development on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the world will be faced with an Israel of modest population density, bordered by high population density areas of relative poverty. No political accommodation can withstand this extreme level of economic disparity. Any honest armistice between the Palestinians and Israelis must be accompanied by intensive economic development. Unfortunately, hopes for the necessary cultural and economic changes are probably more desperate for than those for political change in Palestinian-controlled areas. Without political peace, adoption of a Western economic model, and perhaps massive economic aid to the area, one lap of the world race will likely be lost here.

Tt is especially depressing and disheartening when people of intelligence, quality, and substance make unaccountably foolish mistakes or serious errors in judgment. Those of us involved in more ordinary and less conspicuous pursuits have our values reinforced and validated when people of character live up to our common ideals. When respectable people are flawed, it, unfortunately, has the unwanted side effect of making it easier to excuse our own lapses. The responsibility incumbent on famous people is an insidious burden. It is with great sadness that we consider the sad lapses of three such people.

Stephen Ambrose is perhaps best know for his books about the World War II. Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany are probably the most well known. Unlike many other historians of the war, Ambrose focuses his formidable narrative skills to describing the intelligence and heroism of the soldiers and airmen who actually fought in the war rather than on the strategies of generals. This has made him popular among veterans and the experience of the war more accessible to the lay reader.

Ambrose’s gifts are not limited to World War II. Ambrose used to take students on summer trips following the path of Lewis and Clark. The experience helps account for the insight and readability of the Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.

Unfortunately in recent years, Ambrose may have rushed too quickly to push books into print. His book Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 suffered from repetitiveness and just plain poor editing. Even worse, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard reported that passages from The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s were almost verbatim excerpts from Wings of Morning, The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in WWII by Thomas Childers. The borrowed passages were sentences long and not set off in quotations. Although Childers book was cited there was no indication that the questioned passages came from Childers.

Ambrose is apologetic. He writes on his web page that:

“Recently I have been criticized for improperly attributing other author’s writings in a few of my books. In each case, I footnoted the passage in question, but failed to put some words and sentences into quotation marks. I am sorry for those omissions, and will make relevant changes in all future editions of my books.”

One wonders whether Ambrose would have accepted a similar apology for a paper from graduate student.

Everyone’s favorite Liberal is Pulitzer Prizing winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Unlike many dour and grim-faced modern Liberals who whine and sulk about victimhood, Goodwin is a Roosevelt Liberal who wears a ready and happy smile. Her best and most acclaimed book is No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II,. It is a sympathetic treatment of Franklin Roosevelt and Goodwin’s obvious personal hero Eleanor Roosevelt. One could not imagine being around Goodwin without being infected by her smile. Goodwin’s good humor and Liberalism seem to sprout from a genuine concern about others.

Unfortunately, it now turns out that Goodwin has been, at best, very sloppy in her writing. In The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, Goodwin borrowed so extensively from Lynn McTaggart’s Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times without appropriate attribution that Goodwin was obliged to destroy unsold copies of her book, reissue another corrected edition of the book, and reach a monetary settlement privately with McTaggart. The Guardian reports that Goodwin stepped down as a Pulitzer Prize judge in the wake of this controversy.

One wishes to be charitable. Under the axiom that it is best not to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a sufficient explanation, it is possible to forgive Ambrose and Goodwin for carelessness born of a pressure to publish what have proved to be monetarily rewarding books. Both have done much to reacquaint Americans with their history. However, what then can we say about Michael Bellesiles, the Pulitzer-prizing winning presidential historian famous for thoughtful and sophisticated commentary on PBS?

In 2000, Michael Bellesiles published Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. The book examines records of private estates and wills to make the claim the personal firearms were not a common possession during the Revolutionary War Era. This argument contradicts the assertion that the Founders instituted the Second Amendment to protect personal gun ownership. If personal gun ownership was uncommon, the argument goes, the Founders could not have possibly intended the Second Amendment to protect it.

Liberal groups were quick to seize on the import of Bellesiles’s thesis. Bellesiles’s book received supportive reviews. The New Republic loudly praised Bellesiles for his scholarship in disposing of the “influential mythic narrative composed by the contemporary right” of American self-reliance, liberty, and independence protected by a right to bear arms. The book won Bellesiles the Bancroft Prize for history writing.

Unfortunately, Bellesiles’s book does not appear to pass historical muster as a scholarly work. �Others have examined the same probate records he did and have found radically different results. Not only have others not been able to duplicate Bellesiles’s results Bellesiles can’t easily do so either. Apparently his data were collated on legal pads that have since been partially destroyed when, as Bellesiles explains, “the pipes in Emory University’s Bowden Hall burst and flooded the building. ” When confronted with inconsistencies in his book, Bellesiles’s explanations have changed so frequently that Princeton historian, Robert Churchill, lamented that, “Six years after Bellesiles published his findings, those of us engaged in the professional responsibility of evaluating his work are still guessing at the composition of his sample.” [8]

Representatives of Emory University, where Bellesiles is a professor of history, are examining the entire matter. National Review quotes an Emory faculty member as stating that, “A number of [us at Emory] think the questions that have been raised by critics whose motivations are not in any way political, are exceptionally serious.”

Perhaps Bellesiles will ultimately be able to explain his results or at the very least the water will become sufficiently muddied that Bellesiles will be spared further embarrassment. Whatever the truth is about historical levels of gun ownership is a truth that will have to be dealt with by both sides of the gun control issue. � The real disappointment has little to do with Bellesiles’s argument. Rather, the disappointment is that Bellesiles may have allowed passion for an argument to overwhelm fidelity to truth.

Historians should not be attorneys attempting to win a case. � Scholars are expected to not only draw conclusions from their research, but to point out potential weaknesses in their own arguments. �At this point, Bellesiles appears not to have lived up to these standards.

References

1. AP Report, “Twice Told Tales: Goodwin Admits Improper Credits,” Washington Post, January 23, 2002.
2. Barnes, Fred, “Copycat,” The Weekly Standard, January 14, 2002.
3. Bellesiles’s web page at the Organization of American Histories.
4. Burkeman, Oliver, “Plagiarism Row Topples Pulitzer Judge,” The Guardian, March 6, 2002.
5. Crader, Bo, “Get Me Rewrite,” The Weekly Standard, February 26, 2002.
6. Lears, Jackson, “The Shooting Game,” The New Republic, January 22, 2001.
7. Ringle, Ken, “Stephen Ambrose and the Rights Of Passage,” The Washington Post, January 11, 2002
8. Seckora, Melissa, “Disarming America, Part II: Why Won’t Michael Bellesiles Seriously Respond to His Critics?” National Review, November 26, 2001.
9. Skinner, David, “The Historian Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” The Weekly Standard, February 15, 2002.
10. Tschida, Ron, “Plagiarism Scandals Hurting History Profession,” MSNBC, February 22, 2002.

“It’s short of soap, so there are lice in the hospitals. It’s short of pantyhose, women’s legs go bare. It’s short of snowsuits, so babies stay home in the winter. Sometimes it is short of cigarettes so millions of people stop smoking, involuntarily. It drives everybody crazy. The problem isn’t communism; no one even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages.” — John Chancellor of NBC speaking of the Soviet Union, August 21 1991, as cited by Bernard Goldberg in Bias.

The argument for ethnic and racial diversity in newsrooms is one that Liberals are familiar with and adept at explaining. Regardless of good intentions on the part of the dominant racial and ethnic group, the argument goes, different groups bring with them different life experiences and different perspectives on stories and on what stories deserve more or less attention. Setting aside for the moment the question as to whether race and ethnic origin are accurate metrics of perspective, the argument has saliency. One wonders, therefore, why newsrooms to not also make formal and concerted efforts to insure political and ideological diversity in newsrooms.

Assessing the extent of Liberal bias in the major national media is often clouded by :what is meant by, Liberal, Moderate, and Conservative. There is an understandable tendency for everyone to view themselves as balanced, moderate, and near the center of the political spectrum. The recent book Bias by long-time CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg illustrates this tendency. After Goldberg had written an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal asserting that the national news programs were plagued by a Liberal bias, CBS’s Dan Rather expressed his chagrin to Goldberg that he had published his critique in the Conservative Wall Street Journal. Goldberg pointed out that Rather himself had published op-ed pieces in the New York Times. That was all right, according to Rather, because the New York Times is middle of the road. From Rather’s perspective, the New York Times swims in the middle of the political mainstream. This rather disturbing lack of circumspection and understanding of the American political scene on the part of Rather, goes a long way toward understanding why those in the major media do not believe they are burdened by bias.

During the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, Peter Jennings introduced the Senators who would decide the President’s fate. He was careful to identify for his audience Conservative Senators like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, while Liberal Senators like Barbara Mikulski from Maryland were just Senators. From Jennings perspective Mikulski was mainstream and needed no special notation to inform viewers. While Jennings’s descriptions were accurate, they were misleading because they tended, not matter how inadvertently, to make Republicans appear at the far extreme.

Searches of news databases reveal similar systematic biases in identification. A Nexis search shows that during the Clinton years, critics of the President were referred to as “Clinton-haters” or “Clinton bashers” (subtly suggesting an anti-Clinton psychosis) far more than similar terms were applied to critics of President Ronald Reagan. (See: Milzcik, Eileen, “Nexis Search Finds Few Bush or Reagan,” Suite101.com, published September 1, 2001. ) This bias is even apparent in selection of news stories. During the Reagan years stories about the homeless (who were invariably portrayed as middle class people down on their luck as opposed to people with pathologies such as drug or alcohol addiction) appeared far more frequently than during the Clinton years, though the homeless problem did not abate or abate nearly as much as the coverage.

Any objective definition of the location of the political mainstream must be made with reference to the country as a whole. The middle of the political spectrum is clearly smack dab in the middle between Republicans and Democrats. In the last four presidential elections, the Democratic Party has won twice and Republicans have won twice. Though President Bush won the last election, it is clear the electorate was pretty much split down the middle. Republicans control the House of Representatives by a narrow margin and the Democrats control the Senate by virtue of a single Senator who changed his allegiance from the Republicans and became independent, aligned with the Democrats.

Do the political affiliations and ideological perspectives of the national media even approximate those of the nation as a whole? Not even close. As Goldberg points out:

• In 1992, while 43%of the public cast their ballots for Clinton, 89% of journalists did.
• Half of journalists identify themselves as Democrats, while only 4% are Republicans.
• While 50% of journalists call themselves liberal, only 23% of the public does.
• Half the country is pro-choice, while 82% of journalists are.

The Conservative viewpoint is radically underrepresented in national newsrooms. From the perspective of the newsroom, the news coverage does represent the mainstream perspective. However, their mainstream is a little meandering tributary far to the left of the national mainstream.

People are not stupid. They realize when the news is being presented from a perspective far different from theirs. When the three broadcast networks had a monopoly, the viewing public had little choice what to watch. However, the Liberal slant of the news gave rise to Conservative talk radio as a refuge for like-minded people further to the right of the national media. More recently, viewers have hemorrhaged from the broadcast news to cable channels and the Internet. This has contributed to the meteoric rise of the Fox News Channel. At one time the major three broadcast newscasts enjoyed 75% of the audience. This dominance evaporated to 43% by 2001. At this rate, it will become harder and harder to argue that the national broadcast media is Liberally biased. There will be less left of the national broadcast media to criticize.

And how have Goldberg’s former colleagues, colleagues how make a habit of seeking out whistle-blowers in other industries, reacted? Well, Goldberg no longer appeared on Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News after his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

It is hard to characterize Goldberg a right-wing fanatic given that he is “pro-choice” on abortion rights, voted for George McGovern in 1972 and never voted for Ronald Reagan given two opportunities in the 1980’s. Nonetheless, he has been accused of having an “agenda.”

It is hard to impugn Goldberg’s journalistic credentials given that the has won seven emmys for his reporting. Nonetheless, critic Tom Shales of the Washington Post, answered the thesis in Bias by describing Goldberg has a “full-time addlepated windbag” and “a no talent hack” who “usually looked disheveled and bleary-eyed on the air.” Then, with out the slightest touch of irony, Shales accused Goldberg of “a laughably inept hate campaign [emphasis added].” Goldberg could not have made his point about the inability of media to be self-critical more eloquently than Shales inadvertantly did.

“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.” — Roger Angell.

In early 1990, I was flying home after having been away from home for over a week. At the time, my boys were nine and six. The movie on the return trip home was Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. The film was a fantasy about an Iowa farmer who is haunted by voices imploring him to construct a baseball stadium in the middle of his cornfield. “If you build it, they will come.”

To some, the movie was about the fictitious return of “Shoeless Joe Jackson,” who had been unfairly banned from baseball after the Black Sox World Series fixing scandal in 1919, to play baseball once again. On a more profound level, it is about how families support each other. Baseball is often the medium within which the conventional passages of life are played out.

The young Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella, who is the protagonist of the film, has been estranged from his father since the age of 17. Even when they disagreed, baseball used to be the one thing Ray and his father could generally discuss civilly. They could talk while tossing a baseball between them. Their estrangement was deeper than baseball, but it was an argument about baseball that symbolized their final separation. As Ray and his father parted, Ray insulted his father by wondering aloud how his father could idolize a criminal Joe Jackson. Ray’s father died before they could reconcile.

At the end of the movie, old ballplayers emerge from the cornfield to play on the field Kinsella had built. One of the players was Ray’s father, youthful before the worries of age had overwhelmed him. Ray reconciles with his father through the simple expediency of grabbing a mitt and tossing a ball with his dad. Anyone who would not want to immediately go home and toss the ball around with his son after seeing the movie needs a remedial parenting class.

It is often unclear whether baseball is a metaphor for life or visa versa. Nonetheless, how one tosses a baseball with his child measures the stages of a child’s growth as certainly as the marks on a doorway mark a child’s height. In the beginning, you sit inside with your son or daughter on a soft floor legs spread, feet touching, so you form a small, enclosed, and protected world. The simple rolling of the ball back and forth unites father and child in a common endeavor.

When a child gets a little older, you can toss the light whiffle ball back and forth with them until, through trial-and-error and instruction they master the coordination required to guide the ball’s trajectory. When they get older still, you entrust their young hands with a hard ball, capable of great velocity and damage. Placing a hardball in the hands of a youngster says, “I trust you” more eloquently than poetry. Nonetheless, you carefully throw the ball back to them so they do not get hurt as they master the art of predicting where the ball will fly off your hands and placing their mitt into a position to received the advancing ball.

Then there comes a wonderful moment, sometimes imperceptibly, when your faith becomes complete. You can throw the ball at them, without taking a little speed off of it, confident that they can catch the ball. Kids know when you are going easy on them and when they realize you are not pulling pace off the ball, their pride swells within.

Raising children, however, is not without pain. Part of being a teenager is testing limits and testing yourself against adults. There comes a time when a child not only returns the ball with pace, but tests you by throwing the ball as fast as they can, happy if they can elicit a wince from the sting of hard thrown ball. Throwing the ball hard is an assertion of independence. It tells the parent, the time when your child needs your constant attention is nearing an end. Finally, they find they do not need to throw the ball too hard. They relax and throw the ball just for the enjoyment of throwing a ball. Your kids have grown up. They have the confidence of adults.

Both my boys are now in college and have passed through the stages of the simple baseball toss. I do not know yet, but I am fearful that there is another stage. A stage when they do not throw the ball at you with all their might; when they do not throw the ball at you as an equal; a stage when they deliberately take pace off the ball so as not to endanger you.

Recently, my 14-year-old daughter asked to play catch with me. I now can throw the ball at her with little worry about her ability to handle it. She surprised me by throwing the ball at me as hard as she can and the ball stung a little. She is getting to be a big girl now. I am a proud parent.