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Times Watch for June 30, 2003

Bill Keller Stands Up For Discrimination

Bill Keller stands up for racial discrimination and bashes Justice Clarence Thomas in “Mr. Diversity,” his Sunday op-ed on Thomas’ passionate dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision upholding racial preferences. (Keller is a Times veteran who many consider the odds-on favorite to succeed Howell Raines as Times executive editor.)

In fact, Keller sounds downright Rainesian on the issue of race. Keller writes: “And sometimes the best [the Supreme Court] can do is give us the muddle of real life. ‘A cynic,’ protested The Wall Street Journal, ‘might conclude that yesterday's decisions mean universities can still racially discriminate, as long as they're not too obvious about it.’ Yes, just so. The editorial might have added that this is pretty much what the first President Bush did when he appointed a black jurist of questionable distinction to the Supreme Court, insisting all the while that it had nothing to do with race.”

For the rest of Bill Keller’s column, click here.

• Affirmative Action | Discrimination | Bill Keller | Race Issues | Supreme Court | Clarence Thomas

Another Reason They Hate Us: The Declaration of Independence?

In Sunday’s Week in Review section, reporter John Leland notes the upcoming 227th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by dissecting that document’s celebration of the “pursuit of happiness.” In liberal academic fashion, Leland interprets Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” negatively, as the acquisition of goods in America’s “ravenous consumer culture.”

He writes: “This American acquisitiveness, which drives the economy, is an extension of Jefferson's ideal, said Jackson Lears, a history professor at Rutgers University and author of ‘Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.’ In claiming the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, Mr. Lears said, Jefferson mirrored the overarching logic of the free market: ‘each individual pursuing his own happiness will contribute to the general welfare.’ Mr. Lears added that as market definitions of happiness began to grow with the economy in the 19th century, they brought their own doses of unhappiness. ‘The consumer culture,’ he said, ‘is about keeping us dissatisfied and unhappy, until we get the next thing. For Jefferson and his generation of thinkers, the whole notion of happiness was more sustainable, embedded in social and community responsibility.’”

Leland then explains that the “pursuit of happiness” is part of the reason the world hates America: “After so much social conflict, perhaps Americans have learned their lesson. But more likely they are responding to another Jeffersonian paradox: that the pursuit of happiness, an ideal to which any people might aspire, bundles the arrogance, entitlement and loose morality that so much of the world hates about America. The happiness wars, as the culture wars might be called, only get more intense when the rest of the world is asked to play too.”

Well, if the pursuit of a life of freedom and fulfillment is a crime, then let us all be guilty, says Times Watch.

For the rest of John Leland’s take on the pursuit of happiness, click here.

• Declaration of Independence | Fourth of July | Thomas Jefferson | Pursuit of Happiness

Bob Herbert, Living In Oblivion

Bob Herbert, NBC reporter turned soporific liberal columnist, is the neglected stepchild of Times scribes. The strident Bush-bashing of respected-economist-turned-pit-bull columnist Paul Krugman gets more attention, while Nicholas Kristof fascinates when in his pseudo-stream-of-consciousness mode (he sometimes seems to be thinking aloud). Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd is culturally and stylistically stuck in 1998, unable to adapt her flighty tone to the seriousness of a post-9/11 world.

Meanwhile, stodgy Herbert is a reliably one-note voice for populist paleoliberalism, making him easy to ignore. And, unlike Dowd and Krugman, he’s been known to do actual reporting for his columns, putting him a cut above. But this time Herbert’s anti-Bush reporting is ludicrously wrong.

In Monday’s “Oblivious in D.C.,” Herbert takes his usual tack, portraying the country as divided into haves and have-nots and declaring it all Bush’s fault: “The president, buoyed by the bountiful patronage of the upper classes, seems indifferent to the increasingly harsh struggles of the working classes and the poor. As Mr. Bush moves from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, building the mother of all campaign stockpiles, states from coast to coast are reaching depths of budget desperation unseen since the Great Depression.”

But the truly silly part comes later: “There's a reason those campaign millions keep coming and coming and coming. A Times article last week noted that the wealthiest 400 taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier.’ The influence of the wealthy has always been great, but it hasn't always been so cruel….The Bush juggernaut, at least for the time being, is rolling over everything that dares to get in its way. And fairness is not something it is concerned about.”

One tiny problem with Herbert’s Bush-bashing: The Times article he cites measures income inequality that took place during the period 1992-2000. Remind us who was president of the United States during those eight years?

Why is Herbert blaming Bush for something that took place in the Bill Clinton era? Perhaps next week Herbert will discuss Bill Clinton’s “decade of greed,” but we at Times Watch aren’t holding our breath.

For the rest of Bob Herbert’s column, click here.

• Maureen Dowd | Bob Herbert | Income Inequality | Nicholas Kristof | Paul Krugman

Frank Bruni Sees Red In Italy

Frank Bruni has an odd piece in Sunday’s paper: “Political Foes of Berlusconi See Red Flag In an Exam” seemingly accusing Italy’s right-leaning Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, of going too hard on Communism. Bruni’s evidence? A question about Communism on a national high school graduation exam.

Bruni begins: “The specter of Communism has long dominated the discourse of Silvio Berlusconi, who casts himself as Italy's last line of defense against a tenacious scourge. It has also had a leading role in his legal stratagems, which portray the prosecutors who have charged him with corruption as left-wing zealots wielding hammers and sickles. But the prime minister's fear of the Red Menace has crept unexpectedly into a new sphere of Italian life, and some of his political opponents are wondering how it got there.”

Having given an outlet to this anti-Berlusconi conspiracy theory, Bruni continues: “The evils of Communism appear front and center in one of the themes that hundreds of thousands of Italian high school seniors could choose to write about in graduation exams given this month. That topic invited students to ponder ‘terror and the political repression in the totalitarian systems’ of the 20th century and gives brief descriptions of Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and Communism in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Communism is blamed for the executions of about 100 million people, five times greater than the killings attributed in the exam to Nazism. In the wording of the topic, it takes one sentence to denigrate Fascism. It takes four to vilify Communism.”

The next paragraph suggests that Italy’s teachers could use some additional education; many still think Communism was a good idea gone bad. “Some historians and teachers have complained that the balance of the question is out of whack. ‘I teach my students that of course Communism must be seen in a negative light, but the goal of Nazism was to kill people, and the goal of Communism was to unite them,’ said Giuseppe Costantino, 61, who teaches history in a high school in Naples.”

Later, Bruni adds fuel to the paranoiac fire of Berlusconi’s left-wing enemies: “He also owns one of Italy's biggest publishing houses, Mondadori, which several years ago released ‘The Black Book of Communism,’ a harshly negative appraisal of the ideology's legacy. He once distributed hundreds of copies at a political rally, and it is mentioned -- and quoted -- in the essay topic on totalitarianism.” (Berlusconi denies involvement in the putting together of the exam, a requirement for graduating high school.)

Again, it’s an odd piece, whose point (besides giving Berlusconi’s left-wing critics a dubious target for their rage) remains a mystery. Meanwhile, Times Watch seriously doubts the Times has ever criticized, even indirectly, a book for going too hard on Nazism.

For the rest of Frank Bruni’s piece on Berlusconi, click here.

• Silvio Berlusconi | Communism | Fascism | Italy