California's budget crisis

No gold in state

Voters reject a ballot they could not comprehend

Hair-raising stuff

AT ONE point during his desperate campaign for six ballot measures meant to reduce California’s gaping budget deficit, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, pleaded with voters not to make California “the poster child for dysfunction”. But on May 19th they did exactly that.

Confused and bored by the wonky and tangled wording on the ballot, most voters ignored the election entirely. Those who did turn out rejected all measures except one that freezes legislators’ pay during budget-deficit years—a ritualised form of venting general anger. Mr Schwarzenegger, already unpopular before this crisis, may well now be remembered as a failure. On election day, he fled the state for the more flattering photo opportunity of joining Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden to announce tighter national fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

As a result of California’s election, the state now faces a $21.3 billion gap between revenues and spending. Life, which has been no picnic for many in this state since the recession began, is about to get a lot worse. There have already been two rounds of budget cuts since last autumn. A third, savage, round must now follow.

Mr Schwarzenegger has already hinted at the cuts he will propose to the legislature. The easy part is to release prisoners. California’s 33 prisons, with about 168,000 inmates, many of them locked up because of inflexible sentencing laws passed by voters, are scandalously overcrowded. Mr Schwarzenegger is thinking about freeing 38,000 people. Half of them are undocumented immigrants whom he would transfer to federal custody.

But “the real money is where the pain is”, says Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, a research firm in Sacramento. In health care, for instance. Just as Mr Obama is trying to give more people access to medical care, California will be taking it away: by cutting funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s programme for the poor, and changing eligibility rules for another programme so that 225,000 children are likely to lose coverage. And this at a time when many of their parents are losing their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance.

Other programmes, from help with birth-control and HIV-prevention to counselling against drug abuse and domestic violence, will be made smaller or eliminated altogether. Child-welfare programmes will be cut by 10%. This means fewer investigations into allegations of child abuse and less supervision of foster care, even as more children are likely to be abused in difficult economic times, says Linda Canan at the Napa County Health and Human Services Agency.

Cuts in the education budget will probably shorten the school year by a week, require teachers to be laid off and cause classes to get bigger. The University of California, a network of ten campuses, will face cuts equivalent to 50,000 fewer students and perhaps 5,000 fewer staff.

It doesn’t end there. A plan, previously rejected, to drill for oil off the coast near Santa Barbara will be revived. And a statewide yard sale will be held. State properties, from a big coliseum in Los Angeles to concert halls and fairgrounds, will be auctioned off. Even the San Quentin prison, built during the gold rush and housing the state’s death row, may go. Jeff Denham, a Republican state senator who votes resolutely against any attempt to raise taxes, has for years wanted to move the prison to a cheaper place inland in order to sell its “ocean-front property” in the bay north of San Francisco. He may now get his way.

An indictment from the grave

Crime and politics in Guatemala

An indictment from the grave

A murder foretold has convulsed Guatemala’s government. Its investigation will provide a test of whether or not Central America includes a failed state

RODRIGO ROSENBERG was not the best-known, richest, or most powerful victim of the endemic violence that dogs Guatemala. His murder on May 10th—he was shot by an unknown gunman while bicycling on a busy avenue—was not even unusually brazen by the country’s grim standards. But Mr Rosenberg, a Harvard-educated lawyer, did something to distinguish himself from the other 6,000 people killed in Guatemala in the past 12 months. Four days before his death, he recorded an 18-minute video in which he began by saying: “If you are watching this message it is because I have been murdered by President Álvaro Colom” with the help of Gustavo Alejos, his chief of staff, and Gregorio Valdez, a businessman, and the approval of Mr Colom’s wife, Sandra Torres. With that he plunged Guatemala into its most serious political convulsion since the end of a 36-year civil war in 1996. He also highlighted the continuing lawlessness of a country that comes as close as any in the Americas (Haiti apart) to a failed state.

According to Mr Rosenberg’s posthumously publicised testimony, Mr Colom’s government offered a seat on the board of Banrural, a partly state-owned development bank, to one of the dead lawyer’s clients, Khalil Musa, a farmer and textile manufacturer. The proposal was then withdrawn, Mr Rosenberg claimed, out of fear that Mr Musa would reveal rampant corruption at the bank. It was to keep this episode quiet that Mr Musa and his daughter were murdered last month, according to Mr Rosenberg, who feared that for the same reason he would be next.

No independent evidence has emerged to corroborate these accusations. But for many, mainly middle-class Guatemalans, the case casts doubt on the credentials of Mr Colom, a businessman of the centre-left elected as president in 2007, as a crusader for good government and justice.

Guatemala desperately needs both those things. The state is weak, even by Latin American standards. Tax revenues total just 11% of GDP, depriving governments of the wherewithal to provide such basic public services as security, health care and schooling. The war between left-wing guerrillas and (until 1986) a string of military dictators claimed some 200,000 lives and flooded the country with guns. When peace came, drug-trafficking syndicates were springing up across Central America to transport Colombian cocaine to the United States. Many former combatants drifted into crime. The murder rate (of nearly 50 per 100,000 people) is higher than its average during the war. Police and courts are understaffed, underpaid and susceptible to bribes and threats. According to the United Nations, just 2% of crimes in the country are solved.

Crime and corruption have contaminated politics. Political office confers immunity from prosecution. Drug money helps to finance campaigns. “You have to join up with the mafias to be a successful politician in Guatemala,” says Nineth Montenegro, a human-rights campaigner and congresswoman. Those who resist often pay with their lives: 56 politicians or party activists were killed during the 2007 presidential campaign.

Mr Colom has taken some measures to tackle the crime wave. To the dismay of some of his left-wing allies, he has given a bigger role in fighting crime to the army, which killed thousands of civilians during the war. He has set up a new intelligence service. Arrests and weapons’ seizures have gone up this year.

But Mr Rosenberg’s allegations have raised worries as to whether Mr Colom’s government is any cleaner than its predecessors. Critics object that Ms Torres, who has no cabinet role or political office, is managing the government’s welfare programmes. She has refused to turn over a list of the identity cards of beneficiaries to auditors and legislators.

Mr Colom, his wife and the others named by Mr Rosenberg have all angrily denied his claims. After at first questioning the video’s authenticity, Mr Colom then suggested that it was part of a right-wing plot to destabilise his government. (The journalist who recorded the video, Mario David García, is a conservative commentator who in the 1980s expressed sympathy for an attempted coup.)

The first couple have tried to turn the case into a political battle along class lines. They ordered mayors to mobilise supporters for a large pro-government demonstration outside the presidential palace in Guatemala City on May 17th. Although this was organised with public money, it was outnumbered by a rival protest demanding justice in the Rosenberg case. “They’re well-groomed, with new shirts and shiny shoes, when there are more than a million malnourished children nobody worries about,” Ms Torres said of the protesters. She seems to model herself on Eva Perón, Argentina’s populist heroine; some think she wants to succeed her husband as president, following the example of Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The investigation of Mr Rosenberg’s murder will determine the Coloms’ political future. The president raised suspicions when he held a meeting with the supposedly independent attorney-general the day after the video was released. But he then asked the UN and the United States’ FBI to join the investigation. In 2007, with the previous government’s support, the UN set up a special commission charged with combating legal impunity in Guatemala. It now has its most important case. Whether or not Mr Rosenberg’s killers are brought to justice will show whether or not Guatemala is indeed a failed state.

Bust and boom

The oil price

Bust and boom

From Economist.com

The price of oil has leapt to nearly $62 a barrel. Another spike may be on the way

RISING oil prices, believes Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, may soon “take the wheels off an already derailed world economy”. On the face of things, this concern is absurd. The plunge of $115 in the price of oil from its peak last July to its nadir in December was the most precipitous the world has ever seen. Demand for oil is still falling, as the world economy atrophies. Rumours abound of traders hiring tankers to store their excess oil. Rich countries’ stocks cover 62 days’ consumption, the most since 1993 (see chart 1). The average over the past five years has been 52 days’ worth.

Nor are oil firms pumping nearly as much as they could. OPEC has announced three separate rounds of production cuts since September in a bid to steady prices. In all, it has vowed to trim its output by 4.2m barrels a day (b/d). That leaves them with as much as 6m b/d of spare capacity. Despite this growing glut, however, the price of oil has been rising steadily in recent weeks (see chart 2). On Wednesday May 20th it closed above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than six months. That marks an increase of more than 75% since February. The price of futures contracts suggests that energy traders see the price rising higher still in the coming months and years. (During the day on Friday it appeared to be nearing $62 a barrel.)

The explanation is simple. Oilmen are worried because they believe that many of the factors behind the record-breaking ascent last year remain in place. Much of the world’s “easy” oil has already been extracted, or is in the hands of nationalist governments that will not allow foreigners to exploit it. That leaves firms to hunt for new reserves in ever more inhospitable and inaccessible places, such as the deep waters off Africa or the frozen oceans of the Arctic. Such fields take a long time and a lot of expensive technology to develop. Worse, new discoveries tend to be smaller than in the past and to run dry faster.

So oil firms must work doubly hard to replace declining fields and to increase output. Yet the oil industry is short of equipment and manpower, thanks to underinvestment in the 1980s and 1990s, when prices were low. As soon as the world economy starts growing again, the theory runs, demand for oil will once again outstrip the industry’s ability to supply it. In other words, the global recession has only interrupted the “supercycle” of which many analysts used to speak, during which the normal boom-and-bust cycle of oil and other commodities would give way to a protracted period of high prices, as ever-growing demand from emerging markets swallowed everything the extractive industries could produce.

Oil bosses, OPEC ministers and anxious bankers all agree on what is needed to prevent this scenario becoming reality: lavish investment in the development of new fields and in exploration. Yet the reverse is happening. The oil industry is cutting its spending, bringing fewer new fields into production and exploring less. The International Energy Agency reckons that overall investment will drop by 15-20% this year.

In theory, this should not be happening. Big Western oil firms (“majors” in the industry jargon) claim that they continue to invest steadily throughout the cycle, irrespective of gyrations in price. Big fields, they argue, can take a decade or more to develop, and may then produce oil or gas for several decades more. The price of oil at the time the investment is approved is irrelevant; the important thing is to make sure projects will be profitable across a range of possible future prices. If anything, given that most oilmen expect prices to rise in the medium term, you would expect them to be increasing their investment, to capitalise on the good times to come. Nonetheless, the extreme volatility of prices over the past year must have made big firms more cautious about future investments.

Then there are the state-owned firms in oil-soaked countries. These companies control the overwhelming majority of the world’s oil. The better managed and funded of them plan to continue investing despite the downturn. Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil producer, recently completed a five-year scheme to expand its production capacity from 10m b/d to 12.5m b/d, at a cost of $70 billion. But in Russia, the world’s second-biggest oil producer, output is falling largely because private capital has been scared off by a series of expropriations, while the state starves the firms it controls of sufficient cash for investment. And most oil-rich states, naturally enough, are happy to see the price rise. Many have become used to bumper revenues in recent years and have struggled to balance their budgets since the price slumped last year.

Falling costs within the industry will offset the impact of falling investment budgets to some extent. BP argues its slight cut in investment does not really represent a reduction, thanks to deflation. Yet many constraints on expansion remain. For one thing, the world still does not have as many experienced petroleum engineers and geologists as it needs, says Iain Manson of Korn/Ferry, a recruiting firm. He expects it to take a decade or more to overcome the shortage. Meanwhile, he says, wages in the oil industry are not falling by nearly as much as other costs.

Worse, there is little sign that governments are willing to grant oil companies easier access to the most promising territory for exploration. Iraq’s plans to sign big new contracts with foreign firms are years behind schedule, as is its new oil law. American sanctions continue to impede investment in Iran. The Nigerian government has been unable to quell the insurgency in the Niger delta, making it difficult for oil firms to operate there. Even in America, despite years of debate, most coastal waters and much of Alaska remain off-limits to drilling.

So when demand begins to revive, a sharp rise in prices is inevitable. That does not mean that a price spike is just around the corner, however. The speed with which it arrives will depend on the strength of the global recovery. For the moment, global consumption of oil continues to fall, despite the slight brightening of the economic outlook. At the recent OPEC powwow Mr al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, argued that a low oil price always sowed the seeds of a future price rise, since it led to underinvestment. The only question this time is how quickly the strain will emerge.

History as Fiction Designed to Unite Us

Mises Daily by Jeff Riggenbach

Today, history is regarded, if not as one of the social sciences, then at least as an independent discipline that deals in facts, not fancies; in edification, not entertainment. But it was not always thus. Harry Elmer Barnes reports that before the 18th century, "there had been either no attempt to cite sources or else the citations had been hopelessly confused; there had been no general practice of establishing the genuineness of a text; there had been little hesitancy in altering the text of a document to improve the style."[1] And even after the 18th century itself had begun to fade into history, the new standards Barnes describes had still not really become universal. On the contrary: "Prior to the French Revolution," Hayden White writes,

historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art. … The eighteenth century abounds in works which distinguish between the study of history on the one side and the writing of history on the other. The writing was a literary, specifically rhetorical exercise, and the product of this exercise was to be assessed as much on literary as on scientific principles."[2]

In point of fact, until late in the 19th century, most historians regarded themselves neither as social scientists (a concept that did not even exist before the 19th century) nor as humanistic scholars, but rather as literary men, men of letters. The stories they were telling were true, of course, but nonetheless they were telling stories, just as though they were novelists, and their job, as they saw it, was to tell their stories as vividly and poetically as any novelist. Peter Novick reports that

George Bancroft, William Lothrop Motley, William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman … each, in at least one of their major works,employed the organization of the stage play, with a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue. Sir Walter Scott was, by a wide margin, the most popular and imitated author in the early-nineteenth-century United States, and the florid style of the "literary" historians gave clear evidence of his influence.[3]

And not only did the most representative 19th-century historians think of themselves as litterateurs, most of them saw themselves in particular as the providers of an important kind of inspirational literature. As Novick puts it,

[t]he "gentleman amateurs" wrote not to keep the pot boiling, or out of professional obligation to colleagues, but because they had an urgent message to deliver to the general reading public. "If ten people in the world hate despotism a little more and love civil and religious liberty a little better in consequence of what I have written, I shall be satisfied," Motley wrote.[4]

More specifically, most of the 19th-century American historians were convinced that, as Peter Charles Hoffer writes,

by celebrating our history we might heal our political differences. Look to the Founders, these historical boosters argued; praise, exalt,and honor them. Ignore their faults and failings, for the message must be an uplifting one to which everyone can subscribe. The greatest of the Founders, George Washington, became at the hands of the itinerant bookseller and preacher Mason Weems an unblemished paragon of virtue, whose "great talents, constantly guided and guarded by religion he put at the service of his country."[5]

Of course, in order to transform George Washington into "an unblemished paragon of virtue," Weems had to exercise a bit of literary license,even making up one of his most famous anecdotes — that of the young Washington and the cherry tree — out of whole cloth.

"Parson Weems' Fable"

Grant Wood's 1939 painting illustrating Parson Weems telling the story of George Washington's honesty

But Weems was far from alone in employing such techniques. As Hoffer puts it, "Against the vast profit perceived in this approach, what reader could object to the historians' rearrangement of their subjects' language, or to their selective use of facts?" Hoffer calls attention to "an 1835 edition of Washington's letters, edited by Reverend Jared Sparks,"in which the editor "regularly altered Washington's words" and "sometimes pasted one piece of a document into another document entirely."Yet, so far as readers and other historians were concerned, "[i]t did not seem to matter …. After all, the entire purpose of editing the letters was moral instruction, and ministers like Sparks long had the tradition of cutting and pasting Scripture in their sermons." [6]

Hoffer also suggests that we take a close look at George Bancroft's "monumental ten-volume History of the United States, the last volume of which appeared in 1874. Bancroft's History was to become the standard work on American history for generations. … When he died in 1891, he was the most honored of our historians, and his works were widely read." Bancroft "believed that his job was to write a chronicle that would make his readers proud of their country's history," Hoffer tells us,

[a]nd when it suited his didactic purposes, he fabricated. He "felt free [as Bancroft himself explained in the preface to his great work] to change tenses or moods, to transpose parts of quotations, to simplify language, and to give free renditions." If the purpose of history was to tell stories that taught lessons, such "blending" could hardly be objectionable, and for contemporary reviewers, it was not.[7]

Hoffer notes that Bancroft was also sloppy about crediting his sources. For example, he "made no real distinction between primary sources and secondary sources. When a secondary source cited a passage from a primary source, Bancroft felt perfectly free to reuse the language of the secondary source in his own account without identifying it as such. He cited the secondary-source pages, but copied or closely paraphrased rather than quoted." After all, a work of history was a work of literature, was it not? All that really mattered was whether the passage in question fit into the flow of the style, whether it fit artistically into the work — not whether it was accompanied by some sort of footnote!

It was the tail end of the 19th century before the calling of the historian had been professionalized and academicized to such an extent that a majority of practitioners in the field had come to hold the view of their discipline that we now take for granted — the historian as dispassionate seeker after truth, a scholar, much more like an anthropologist or sociologist than a novelist or playwright. Still, there were holdouts. The long tradition of historical works written by novelists and poets and offered frankly, not as scholarship but as lovely letters, died particularly hard. In the 1890s, just as the new social-scientist paradigm was at last coming to dominate the historical profession, Edgar Saltus, a then very popular and successful writer who is now utterly forgotten, was putting the finishing touches on his best known and most frequently reprinted book, Imperial Purple (1892), a specimen of what Claire Sprague calls "a genre almost non-existent today — history decked in the colorful impressionism of the magazine essay of the last [19th] century."[8] Before his death in 1921, Saltus would also do for Russia's Romanov dynasty what he had done for the Caesars of imperial Rome in Imperial Purple. The Imperial Orgy was brought out by Boni and Liveright in 1920.

A few years later, the renowned poet Carl Sandburg would begin publishing an even more ambitious work, though one quite as free of footnotes or bibliography as Saltus's works had been — a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. "The two volumes of The Prairie Years were the publishing event of 1926," reports James Hurt, "and the four volumes of The War Years were an equal success in 1939." [9] As late as 1969, Richard Cobb, whom John Tosh describes as "a leading historian of the French Revolution," could write of the historian that "His principal aim is to make the dead live. And, like the American 'mortician,'he may allow himself a few artifices of the trade: a touch of rouge here, a pencil-stroke there, a little cotton wool in the cheeks, to make the operation more convincing."[10] Only five years later, in 1974, the late Shelby Foote, who made his early reputation as a novelist, published the last volume of what The New York Times called his "2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military history, The Civil War: A Narrative," a work characterized by "punctilious, but defiantly unfootnoted research." It was immensely popular, earning "considerably more in royalties than any of his novels had earned," and winning him an invitation to serve as a consultant and onscreen expert for the "smash hit" Ken Burns documentary on the war, a job that made Foote into "a prime-time star."[11]

It is difficult indeed to ignore the many similarities between the historian's task and that of the novelist. As Hayden White writes, "[v] iewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another." Moreover,

the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of "reality." The novelist may present his notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point to some extra-textual domain of occurrence or happening, as the historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some domain of human experience which is no less "real" than that referred to by the historian.[12]

To achieve this common end of "providing a verbal image of 'reality,'" both historians and novelists tell stories. "The late R. G. Collingwood insisted," White reminds us,

that the historian was above all a story teller and suggested that historical sensibility was manifested in the capacity to make a plausible story out of a congeries of "facts" which, in their unprocessed form, made no sense at all. In their efforts to make sense of the historical record, which is fragmentary and always incomplete, historians have to make use of what Collingwood called "the constructive imagination," which told the historian — as it tells the competent detective — what "must have been the case" given the available evidence ….

"Collingwood suggested," according to White, "that historians come to their evidence endowed with a sense of the possible forms that different kinds of recognizably human situations can take. He called this sense the nose for the 'story' contained in the evidence or for the 'true' story that was buried in or hidden behind the 'apparent' story."[13] Journalists, those historians in a hurry who provide what legendary Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham famously called the "first rough draft of … history" (and whose rough draft not infrequently becomes the final draft), make a very similar distinction. You either have a "nose for news," they say — good "news sense," good "news judgment" — or you don't. If you do, you can see the story contained in the evidence, the true story buried or hidden behind the apparent (or, sometimes, the official) story.

The important point here is that describing any historical event,whether one that took place yesterday or one that took place a century ago, by telling a story is inescapably an act of imagination. As White sketches the problem,

traditional historiography has featured predominantly the belief that history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative, the truth of which would reside in the correspondence of the story told to the story lived by real people in the past.[14]

Yet, "real events do not offer themselves as stories …."[15] In fact,

the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really represent itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see "the end" in every beginning? Or does it present itself … either as mere sequence without beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude?[16]

In short, "stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story,this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true."[17]

A metaphor is a lie that conveys truth — or, at any rate, what the maker of the metaphor regards as truth. "Men are pigs." "The world is a ghetto." "The years are gusts of wind, and we are the leaves they carry away."[18] Taken literally, all these statements are untrue. They are falsehoods, lies. Taken figuratively, however, each of them conveys an arguable truth about its subject. A novel — a long, elaborate lie, involving the events in the lives of wholly imaginary human beings — is a metaphor for human life in the world as we know it. In this sense,every work of fiction is philosophical, because every work of fiction conveys an at least implicit statement about or judgment upon the human condition.

This does not mean that every fiction writer is also a philosopher or even philosophical by temperament. Consider, in regard to this issue, the testimony of three fiction writers who are also, in some sense, philosophers: Jean Paul Sartre, William H. Gass, and Ayn Rand.[19] According to Gass, "fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy," and "the novelist and the philosopher are companions in a common enterprise, though they go about it in different ways."[20] "The esthetic aim of any fiction," he writes, "is the creation of a verbal world …, often as intricate and rigorous as any mathematic, often as simple and undemanding as a baby's toy, from whose nature, as from our own world, a philosophical system may be inferred …."[21] Moreover, "the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical model of our own."[22] Nevertheless, "[t]he philosophy that most writers embody in their work… is usually taken unconsciously from the tradition with which the writer is allied." Alternatively, "[h]e may have represented, in just the confused way it existed, the world his generation saw and believed they lived in …."[23]

Rand agrees. "The art of any given period or culture," she writes, "is a faithful mirror of that culture's philosophy." This is so because "[s]ome sort of philosophical meaning …, some implicit view of life, is a necessary element of a work of art." Art is "the voice of philosophy."[24] Indeed, in a sense, art is the language we employ to express philosophical ideas.

Just as language converts abstractions into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units — so art converts man's metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man's direct perception. The claim that "art is a universal language" is not an empty metaphor, it is literally true ….

The philosophical ideas that are "in the air," taken for granted, during the lifetime of a fiction writer need not, cannot, be the only source of the philosophical ideas that find their way into that fiction writer's fiction, however. Another source, one drawn upon by many novelists, is religion, which Rand calls "the primitive form of philosophy."[25] Still another, drawn upon inescapably by every fiction writer, is the individual writer's "sense of life."

"A sense of life," Rand wrote in 1966, "is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence."

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics,man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him — most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion — an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.[26]

According to Rand, "[t]he key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term 'important,'" and it is crucial that we understand, she says, that

"[i]mportant" — in its essential meaning, as distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses — is a metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental view of man's nature. That view involves the answers to such questions as whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not,whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The answers to such questions are "metaphysical value-judgments," since they form the basis of ethics.

In the end, "[i]t is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as 'important,' those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man's subconscious and form his sense of life."[27]

And what has all this to do with fiction writing? Everything, for, as Rand puts it, "[e]sthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?" Another way of saying this is that "[a]n artist … selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant — and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence."[28] Thus, particularly among those fiction writers who are unphilosophical, but to some extent among all fiction writers, "[i]t is the artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style."[29] Accordingly, Rand defines art as "a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments."[30]

Needless to say, then, by publishing a novel, a novelist displays his metaphysical value-judgments, his sense of life, for all to see. As Rand puts it, "nothing is as potent as art in exposing the essence of a man's character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work …."[31] Sartre saw the same phenomenon. Literary artists, he wrote, are noted for "the involuntary expression of their souls. I say involuntary because the dead, from Montaigne to Rimbaud, have painted themselves completely, but without having meant to — it is something they have simply thrown into the bargain."[32] They could hardly have done otherwise, however, Sartre notes, for

[i]f I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation.[33]

For when it comes to "the unique point of view from which the author can present the world," it is always and everywhere true that "if our creative drive comes from the very depths of our heart, then we never find anything but ourselves in our work."[34]

But of course, all this is true of historians as well. Most historians are no more philosophically minded than most fiction writers. On the contrary, they are notoriously "sceptical of abstraction," as John Gray put it not long ago in the New Statesman.[35] Yet every work they produce has philosophical implications, provides support for various general ideas — ideas about the nature of government, for example, and the utility of war, and the way national economies work. Where do these ideas come from, in the works of unphilosophical historians wary of "loose generalization" (as Gray puts it)? Some of them are inherited, so to speak, from earlier practitioners of the historian's particular area of specialization. Some are absorbed unthinkingly from the culture in which the historian grows up and matures. Still others are provided by a sense of life. For every historian has a sense of life, just as every fiction writer does — a set of "metaphysical value-judgments" built up subconsciously over years of living until they provide a sort of "automatic response to the world" and an automatic answer to such questions as "whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not." How any given historian has inwardly answered such questions will exercise considerable influence over what that historian regards as a realistic view of government, war, and economics — and, thus, how that historian treats these subjects in his or her work.

It is little wonder, then, that Roy A. Childs, Jr., ever an assiduous student of Ayn Rand, offered the following definition of history in his influential essay, "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism": "History is a selective recreation of the events of the past, according to a historian's premises regarding what is important and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human action."[36] Childs saw clearly that the historian proceeds much as the fiction writer proceeds, and obtains similar results. Nor was he alone in doing so. John Tosh writes that "[i]n many instances the sources do not directly address the central issues of historical explanation at all. … Questions of historical explanation cannot, therefore, be resolved solely by reference to the evidence. Historians are also guided … by their reading of human nature ….[37] The legendary economist and social theorist Ludwig von Mises notes that any historical writing "is necessarily conditioned by the historian's world view" and stresses the importance of what he calls "the understanding" in making sense of historical evidence.

The historian's genuine problem is always to interpret things as they happened. But he cannot solve this problem on the ground of the theorems provided by all other sciences alone. There always remains at the bottom of each of his problems something which resists analysis at the hand of these teachings of other sciences. It is these individual and unique characteristics of each event which … the historian can understand … because he is himself a human being.[38]

More recently, the historian John Lewis Gaddis has proposed that every historian approaches his subject with certain assumptions, based on personal experience, about "how things happen" in the world — assumptions about "the way the world is," [39] the way the world works. "Sorting out the difference between how things happen and how things happened,"Gaddis writes, "involves more than just changing a verb tense. It's an important part of what's involved in achieving [a] closer fit between representation and reality."[40]

But if the historical enterprise can be difficult to distinguish from the fictional enterprise (particularly in light of the concept, introduced some four decades ago by Truman Capote, of the "non-fiction novel"),what does this imply about so-called "historical fiction"? Is there any reason a reader should place any more confidence in the work of an historian than in the work of an historical novelist? The answer is that everything depends on what historian we're talking about, what novelist we're talking about, and what kind of historical fiction we're talking about.

Obama to Government Motors: "Let's Roll"

Mises Daily by Karen De Coster

The last remnants of the American free-market system are experiencing a quick death by strangulation. Perhaps the most disturbing casualties of government intervention are General Motors and Chrysler, two disgraced automakers that have gone from private ownership to the public trough virtually overnight. The US government has effectively grabbed a financial stake in each company while attempting to control the reorganization process without any constitutional authority to commence such actions.

The takeovers, which have occurred at breakneck speed, are alarming. A defining characteristic of economic fascism is the control of private property and business through a government-business "partnership." This public-private alliance, while permitting private business ownership, is an arrangement that allows government to control and plan private industry. What we are experiencing from the schemers in Washington, DC is a planned capitalism, or soft fascism, that is being rolled out at an unprecedented pace.

One of the more disturbing actions on the part of the Washington establishment has been the blatant disregard for property and contract rights. First, consider the case of Chrysler. The government, while coming to the aid of a dying Chrysler, lobbed offers to its lenders, the bondholders. A group of dissident bondholders spurned the government's offer that would have given them a minuscule stake in the company while the UAW received a majority ownership position.

In response, the president denounced the bondholders, publicly proclaiming their obligation to sacrifice and referring to them as "vultures" because they insisted on maintaining their rights as senior creditors. Chrysler's bondholders, by law, are secured creditors, and they hold a senior ranking above unsecured creditors or shareholders in a bankruptcy or reorganization. Yet they were vilified and bullied for refusing to agree to a shoddy deal. Some of the holdout bondholders finally did buckle under; they dropped their legal challenge and agreed to the government's lowball offer, but only because they were strong-armed by Washington's bully tactics. Thomas Lauria, the attorney representing the group, stated that his clients weren't able to "withstand the enormous pressure and machinery of the US government." Thus the senior creditors were plundered while ownership was redistributed to the UAW, whose members are junior creditors. This makes a mockery of US securities law.

The bailout and ensuing appropriation of General Motors is no less tragic. The current restructuring plan calls for the US Treasury Department to have controlling interest in General Motors, which amounts to absolute nationalization. In GM's headquarters in Detroit there is a cluster of bureaucrats from the government's task force telling GM how to run its business. The task force, assembled by the White House, has the power to exercise significant control over product decisions. According to a GM news release, the Treasury Department will have the power to elect all of GM's directors and control the vote on matters brought before the stockholders. Additionally, the bondholders who have funded the company are being offered a paltry piece of the equity of the reorganized company — another major blow against the sanctity of contract.

Furthermore, the White House fired General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. When the executive branch intervenes in a private business and ousts management, bailout or not, it is a staggering violation of the American ideal of free enterprise. This sets a precedent for unlimited government trampling over the private sector. On March 30th, Obama said, "Let me be clear. The United States government has no interest in running GM. We have no intention of running GM." If that's the case — and we know it's not — then why scoop up majority ownership?

The revolving door between Wall Street and the bowels of Washington are getting a workout. It's the guys from Wall Street who run the government and the guys from government who run Wall Street. Only the guys from Wall Street - especially Goldman Sachs - who have taken over the Treasury Department are now taking over control of the domestic auto industry. You know what happened when they tried to run their own company, Goldman Sachs. How in the heck did I miss the part in the Constitution where powers were granted to the Treasury Department and its hired hacks?

Another notable abomination is the use of taxpayer dollars, on the part of the political establishment, to grant preferential treatment to one group of constituents — the unions — at the expense of each company's creditors, the bondholders. Not only is this an illicit use of the executive office for political pandering, it's a deliberate redistribution of wealth. It's also a handsome payoff to the loyal unions, who have long been big supporters of the Democratic Party.

The GM and Chrysler takeovers are orchestrated political restructurings aimed at serving the larger interests of the US government. The apparatchiks on the Potomac have the authority to coordinate production in a manner that compliments their political and social agenda. The White House has not been shy about its ambitions for green policy and the future of American-made automobiles. This coup paves the way for big government to get its tentacles into an industry that will allow the feds to ram their socialist-totalitarian, green agenda down all of our throats.

Moreover, the Obama regime already announced that it is buying 17,600 green vehicles (hybrid sedans) from Detroit's Big Three by June 1, using $285 million from the $787 billion stimulus bill. Representative Sander Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, stated, "The federal government's purchase of thousands of hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles from the Big Three shows that our domestic auto industry will weather this current crisis and build the cars of the future." But certainly, it shows nothing. If the car companies were capable of building the cars of the future that consumers want to buy, no bailout would have been needed, and the government would not have to place an enormous, personal order for automobiles in order to keep the assembly lines moving and inventory lots turning over. The only thing the mega-purchase "shows" is Detroit's inability to sell its automobiles at bloated prices in the free market, thereby leaving the government to spend taxpayers' money on goods they refused to buy on their own.

In fact, giving the kiss of life to two dead horses, GM and Chrysler, illustrates the futility at work here, considering that both companies have just announced there will be a considerable number of dealership closings all over the country. Chrysler plans to close about 800 dealerships while GM will trim back 2,600 dealers by 2010. The fact that GM is cutting back its dealerships to the tune of 42 percent speaks volumes about its bloated, bubble-fueled predicament. The government has been pouring billions into each company's bailout bin in order to keep these inefficient, surplus dealerships around so that they could continue on their path of chasing invisible customers and not selling cars. The misallocation of resources has been staggering. Half-baked investment decisions, like these, are what we can expect from a politically anointed task force that will centrally plan the manufacture of automobiles.

As the Chrysler resuscitation continues and GM morphs into Government Motors, we can expect that the government will prepare to churn out its environmentally correct greenmobiles that the market has rejected over and over again. Freedom, choice, and capitalism will pay a dear price because a group of government bureaucrats, on the receiving end of political favors, will run a major sector of the US economy and foist a prescribed lifestyle upon American consumers.

The funeral bell is ringing a reminder of capitalism's mortality. And I won't dare touch on what happens when government-run automobile manufacturers perform like the post office or the DMV.

Mises Daily by Karen De Coster

The funeral bell is ringing a reminder of capitalism's mortality. And I won't dare touch on what happens when government-run automobile manufacturers perform like the post office or the DMV.

Parsing Obama's and Cheney's Dueling Speeches

India and the Future of South Asia

Another Mumbai-style attack can't be allowed.

MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Islamist insurgencies in Afghanistan and, cue really scary music, Pakistan preoccupy Washington. But let's not forget that the elephant -- what else? -- in this neighborhood is India.

Once, India was part of the problem. François Mitterrand's old line about wanting to keep two Germanys after the Cold War got morphed in India into a revealing quip, "We like Pakistan so much we'd like to have five or six of them." Those attitudes are fading. "A stable, unitary Pakistan is in our interest," says G. Parthasarathy, former Indian ambassador to Pakistan. And a Pakistan torn apart from the inside is an existential threat to a new India defined by an economic awakening and with a recently forged alliance with the U.S.

Though Pakistan barely figured in the parliamentary campaign, the incumbent Congress-led alliance emerged Saturday with a strong mandate and the same pounding foreign-policy headache as the Obama administration -- how to save Pakistan from itself. India's election result gives President Barack Obama a pretext to drop his strange reluctance thus far to engage New Delhi, which got on famously with his predecessor. After all, most of the worst-case scenarios in Pakistan (including nuclear war) involve South Asia's leading power.

Start with Pakistan's nukes. From the Indian vantage point, Pakistani assurances, echoed by U.S. leaders, about the security of the arsenal are worth little to nothing. Imagine the Taliban, another extremist group or rogue elements in the Pakistani military get their hands on one or more of the country's nearly 100 warheads. Then what? If you're Washington, you brace for a pre-emptive strike by India or better yet coordinate with it.

Compounding concerns are what Indian and U.S. officials believe are ongoing Pakistani efforts to enlarge and modernize its nuclear arsenal, including by developing plutonium warheads, as well as to improve delivery systems. The Chinese, who share Islamabad's dislike of India, "help us upgrade," says a Pakistani official. That only serves to heighten Indian anxieties.

The Taliban insurgency in Pakistan's western tribal regions spills over into Afghanistan and puts a chunk of Pakistan beyond Islamabad's writ. The insurgents recently came within 60 miles of the capital before the Pakistani military counteroffensive this month. But potentially more worrisome are signs of radicalization in the Punjab. Contagion in this traditionally moderate and most populous Pakistani province could encircle Islamabad and bring instability to India's borders. It also may mark the moment when an ideological Islamist uprising, predominantly among the Pashtun minority in the unruly tribal regions, mutates into a broader challenge to Pakistan's social order. For any Pakistani revolutionary, India is a convenient enemy and a fifth Indo-Pakistani war in 62 years a desirable goal.

Hoping to spark one, a Punjabi group called Lashkar-e-Taiba launched the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November. At least 173 people died. India's response was restrained. But next time? "One of my worst nightmares is a repeat of Mumbai," Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a visit to New Delhi last month. The Indians know as well as anyone that Pakistani military intelligence, or ISI, helped bankroll Lashkar, the Taliban and other extremist groups. To this day they are considered "strategic assets" in certain Pakistani quarters.

Without saying so, the U.S. will have to be an intermediary. With Indians, American officials insist the Mumbai attacks woke Pakistani leaders up to the true threat of extremism -- in particular Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who controls the Punjab. India still distrusts him for past ties to Islamists. President Asif Ali Zardari may be politically weak, but the U.S. points out that India won't get a friendlier Pakistani leader. In a recent interview with me and a couple other reporters in Islamabad, Mr. Zardari called problems with India "a land dispute" over Kashmir, implying it was less immediate or serious than the "ideological threat" from the Islamists in Pakistan's western regions.

Team Obama wants India to draw down along the frontier to give Pakistan's military cover to shift forces westward against the Taliban. Back have come lectures from Indians about Pakistan's superior force strength on the border. India won't take orders from Washington lightly.

The U.S. has to play a balancing act and start with relatively easy stuff, such as promoting talks to ease commercial ties between India and Pakistan. New Delhi and Islamabad could be encouraged to reopen a back channel to discuss Kashmir and "comprehensive peace." None of this will be easy. But the solution to the Obama administration's so-called "AfPak" problem runs through India.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

'Feigned Outrage Based on a False Narrative'

People who consistently distort the truth are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.'

The following are excerpts from a speech yesterday on U.S. antiterror policies by former Vice President Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country. We didn't know about al Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.

Maybe you've heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

Even before the interrogation program began, and throughout its operation, it was closely reviewed to ensure that every method used was in full compliance with the Constitution, statutes and treaty obligations. On numerous occasions, leading members of Congress, including the current speaker of the House, were briefed on the program and on the methods.

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about "values." . . .

The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the president is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. When just a single clue that goes unlearned, one lead that goes unpursued, can bring on catastrophe -- it's no time for splitting differences. . . .

Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual. . . .

And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility, and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.

As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of [the president's] defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won't let the American people decide that for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I've formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned, and the consequences for national security.

And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected. It's worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the president himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.

A Governor and His Veto Pen

Minnesota's illuminating budget brawl.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

'Minnesota nice" comes in two forms: the first, gracious hospitality; the second, smiling stubbornness. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty this week delivered his spendthrift legislature a humiliating taste of the latter. You betcha.

If Republicans are looking to get back their conservative groove, they could do worse than study Minnesota's budget brawl. Mr. Pawlenty deftly (and amusingly) outmaneuvered his Democratic opposition, not only saving his state from huge tax increases but clearing the way to cut government spending. Call it a refreshing break from the financial-crisis norm.

Like most states, Minnesota has been facing a huge budget shortfall -- an estimated $4.6 billion over two years. These dire financial straits didn't deter the DFL-controlled legislature (the DFL is Minnesota's chapter of the Democratic Party), which got to work on big new spending bills. Included were not just the usual increases in appropriations but gems like $1.2 million in grants for TV and film producers and $200,000 for a youth environmental education program. Recession? What recession?

Associated Press

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

To fill in the hole they'd blown in the upcoming fiscal budget the DFL then proceeded to float every tax hike known to Garrison Keillor. A short list: A new top income tax rate of 9% (the fourth highest in the nation); across-the-board income tax increases; sales taxes on Internet downloads; the end of the local property tax cap (enacted only last year); alcohol taxes; cigarette taxes; eliminating the deduction for an organ donation (no joke); and killing the home mortgage interest deduction.

Throughout this spectacle, Mr. Pawlenty kept voicing three simple principles. "Number one, we must have [because of the constitution] and should have a balanced budget," he told me. "Number two, the state government needs to live within its means, just like everybody else. Number three, we shouldn't raise taxes in the worst recession in 60 years." Minnesota already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.

The DFL wasn't listening. As the clock wound down (the session ended at midnight this past Monday), the legislature sent Mr. Pawlenty one large spending bill after another. The assumption was he'd veto them, be forced to call a special session, and then be negotiated into tax hikes. That's when the governor got Minnesota nice.

Upon receiving the last spending bill, he announced that he would exercise the power of "unallotment," which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to "unallot" (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session's end. Too late. The governor said he'd veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.

Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead. He tells me this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. "The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures," he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.

A red-faced DFL is lecturing the public to be angry at the governor -- and the governor alone -- for any cuts in government services. Pawlenty critics have accused the governor of grandstanding, readying for a possible presidential run.

And? Voters elsewhere might wish for a little more such show. Mr. Pawlenty's hardball has earned him glowing praise from the state's job creators, in particular small businesses, who are relieved to be spared additional tax burdens in today's economy. The governor's message -- that it is simply "inappropriate" for state legislators to keep spending like lunatics and raise taxes in a recession -- has resonated with cash-strapped voters.

That sort of tax-and-spend governance is precisely what has now pushed California to the brink of insolvency. California voters revolted this week, defeating five budget ballot initiatives. "The sky isn't going to fall," Mr. Pawlenty told reporters on Tuesday, just because Minnesota has to trim 3% to 4% from a $34 billion budget. Oh, to hear such words from a California pol.

The Minnesota episode is also a lesson that leadership inspires. At one point in the session, Mr. Pawlenty did receive a tax bill, which he vetoed. The DFL has an override majority in the Senate and is only three votes shy of that in the House. Yet minority Republicans stuck with their governor to uphold his veto. If they hadn't, the rest of this story would be moot.

Congressional Republicans -- the ones who got tossed because of their embrace of spending and earmarks -- might start looking for a message up north. Fiscal responsibility? "It is the fundamental tenet of our party, and the conservative coalition more broadly," says Mr. Pawlenty, nicely. "If we don't have that, we are nothing."

Those Who Make Us Say 'Oh!'

A tribute to America's war heroes, past and present.

By PEGGY NOONAN

More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made "saints" of civil and political figures. George Washington was our first national hero, known everywhere, famous to children. When he died, we had our first true national mourning, with cities and states re-enacting his funeral. There was the genius cluster that surrounded him, and invented us—Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. Through much of the 20th century our famous heroes were in sports (Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, the Babe, Joltin' Joe) the arts (Clark Gable, Robert Frost) business and philanthropy (from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates) and religion (Billy Graham). Nobody does fame like America, and they were famous.

The category of military hero—warrior—fell off a bit, in part because of the bad reputation of war. Some emerged of heroic size—Gens. Pershing and Patton, Eisenhower and Marshall. But somewhere in the 1960s I think we decided, or the makers of our culture decided, that to celebrate great warriors was to encourage war. And we always have too much of that. So they made a lot of movies depicting soldiers as victims and officers as brutish. This was especially true in the Vietnam era and the years that followed. Maybe a correction was in order: It's good to remember war is hell. But when we removed the warrior, we removed something intensely human, something ancestral and stirring, something celebrated naturally throughout the long history of man. Also it was ungrateful: They put themselves in harm's way for us.

For Memorial Day, then, three warriors, two previously celebrated but not so known now by the young.

Alvin York was born in 1887 into a Tennessee farming family that didn't have much, but nobody else did, so it wasn't so bad. He was the third of 11 children and had an average life for that time and place. Then World War I came. He experienced a crisis of conscience over whether to fight. His mother's Evangelical church tugged him toward more or less pacifist thinking, but he got a draft notice in 1917, joined the Army, went overseas, read and reread his Bible, and concluded that warfare was sometimes justified.

In the battle of the Argonne in October 1918, the allies were attempting to break German lines when York and his men came upon well-hidden machine guns on high ground. As he later put it, "The Germans got us, and they got us right smart . . . and I'm telling you they were shooting straight." American soldiers "just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home."

But Cpl. York and his men went behind the German lines, overran a unit, and captured the enemy. Suddenly there was new machine-gun fire from a ridge, and six Americans went down. York was in command, exposed but cool, and he began to shoot. "All I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting. . . . All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to." A German officer tried to empty his gun into York while York fired. He failed but York succeeded, the Germans surrendered, and York and his small band marched 132 German prisoners back to the American lines.

His Medal of Honor citation called him fearless, daring and heroic.

Warriors are funny people. They're often naturally peaceable, and often do great good when they return. York went home to Tennessee, married, founded an agricultural institute (it's still operating as an award-winning public high school) and a Bible school. They made a movie about him in 1941, the great Howard Hawks film "Sergeant York." If you are in Manhattan this week, you may walk down York Avenue on the Upper East Side. It was named for him. He died in Nashville in 1964 at 77.

Once, 25 years ago, my father (U.S. Army, replacement troops, Italy, 1945) visited Washington, a town he'd never been to. There was a lot to see: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial. But he just wanted to see one thing, Audie Murphy's grave.

Audie Leon Murphy was born in 1924 or 1926 (more on that in a moment) the sixth of 12 children of a Texas sharecropper. It was all hardscrabble for him: father left, mother died, no education, working in the fields from adolescence on. He was good with a hunting rifle: he said that when he wasn't, his family didn't eat, so yeah, he had to be good. He tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor, was turned away as underage, came back the next year claiming to be 18 (he was probably 16) and went on to a busy war, seeing action as an infantryman in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. Then came southern France, where the Germans made the mistake of shooting Audie Murphy's best friend, Lattie Tipton. Murphy wiped out the machine gun crew that did it.

On Jan. 26, 1945, Lt. Murphy was engaged in a battle in which his unit took heavy fire and he was wounded. He ordered his men back. From his Medal of Honor citation: "Behind him . . . one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back."

Murphy returned to Texas a legend. He was also 5-foot-7, having grown two inches while away. He became an actor (44 films, mostly Westerns) and businessman. He died in a plane crash in 1971 and was buried with full honors at Arlington, but he did a warrior-like thing. He asked that the gold leaf normally put on the gravestone of a Medal of Honor recipient not be used. He wanted a plain GI headstone. Some worried this might make his grave harder to find. My father found it, and he was not alone. Audie Murphy's grave is the most visited site at Arlington with the exception of John F. Kennedy's eternal flame.

I thought of these two men the other night after I introduced at a dinner a retired Air Force general named Chuck Boyd. He runs Business Executives for National Security, a group whose members devote time and treasure to helping the government work through various 21st-century challenges. I mentioned that Chuck had been shot down over Vietnam on his 105th mission in April 1966 and was a POW for 2,488 days. He's the only former POW of the era to go on to become a four-star general.

When I said "2,488 days," a number of people in the audience went "Oh!" I heard it up on the podium. They didn't know because he doesn't talk about it, and when asked to, he treats it like nothing, a long night at a bad inn. Warriors always do that. They all deserve the "Oh!"

How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Confirmation Process

The vice president can't complain if Republicans object to Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

COLLIN LEVY

Vice President Joe Biden is widely praised for the expertise he brings in helping Barack Obama choose a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Having served for three decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is considered an asset both for his relationships with committee members and his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of judicial nominations. So let's have a look at how the confirmation process actually fared under Mr. Biden's leadership.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden was present for the nomination and confirmation of every currently sitting Supreme Court justice except for John Paul Stevens. In 1986, the year before Mr. Biden took over as committee chairman, Antonin Scalia was approved by the Senate in a vote of 98-0. Then came Robert Bork and a presidential election.

Before Judge Bork's nomination, Mr. Biden had said he would support him. And why not? He was widely considered a dazzling legal mind and had even received (during his confirmation to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals) a rating of "exceptionally well-qualified" from the liberal-leaning American Bar Association. "Say the administration sends up Bork," Mr. Biden told the Philadelphia Inquirer in November 1986, "and, after our investigations, he looks a lot like Scalia. I'd have to vote for him, and if the [special-interest] groups tear me apart, that's the medicine I'll have to take."

But by the time of the actual nomination, Democrats were promising to play "hardball" with President Ronald Reagan's nominees and Mr. Biden was running for president. Mr. Biden's Democratic colleagues lined up against the nominee. They were led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who demonized him with a monologue on "Robert Bork's America," which he promised would be "a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions." Liberal groups joined the chorus for Mr. Biden to recant his earlier support, which he did, helping to defeat Mr. Bork's nomination.

Back then the tactics were considered shocking. Warren Burger, the former chief justice, said he was "astonished" by the comments he'd read about a nominee he thought was one of the most qualified he'd seen in 50 years. If the Senate rejected Mr. Bork, he said, "then they shouldn't have confirmed me."

Just one year after the conservative Mr. Scalia's unanimous confirmation the winds had changed dramatically. The Senate had hitherto proceeded on the principle that it owed the president deference on his judicial selections. No longer.

"The framers clearly intended the Senate to serve as a check on the president and guarantee the independence of the judiciary," Mr. Biden said in August 1987 in defense of his newfound opposition to Judge Bork. "The Senate has an undisputed right to consider judicial philosophy." With that marker placed, the ultimate winner of the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. was a nominee nearly devoid of political philosophy -- Anthony Kennedy.

Mr. Biden's obstruction was further rewarded by the first President Bush. In attempting to dodge controversy, he gave liberals David Souter, whose appeal was enhanced by the fact that he had been a federal judge for less than a year and had almost no paper trail.

By the time Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings came around, Mr. Biden's modus operandi was well known. In his book, "My Grandfather's Son," Justice Thomas recalls that before the Anita Hill inquisition began, Mr. Biden called him and said "Judge, I know you don't believe me but if the allegations come up I will be your biggest defender." "He was right about one thing," Justice Thomas wrote, "I didn't believe him."

Under Mr. Biden's leadership, holding up nominations to the nation's appeals courts also became a routine exercise. In 1988, the Senate Judiciary Committee delayed 17 months before refusing to confirm law professor and scholar Bernard Siegan to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because of his libertarian positions on economic issues. In 1992, Mr. Bush's nominee to the 11th Circuit, Edward Carnes, endured an eight-month delay and an attempted filibuster before finally being confirmed. By 1992, 64 judicial nominees were stuck in the senatorial muck waiting for the Judiciary Committee to give them a yea or nay.

The Senate obstructionism that began with Reagan's nominees thus became a game of political revenge as each new batch of nominees was made to suffer at the hands of one party for the treatment its nominees had received in the last round. Republicans blocked some of President Bill Clinton's nominees, including briefly, Sonia Sotomayor, the Second Circuit judge said to be on Mr. Obama's short list to replace Mr. Souter. Unable to bottle up Miguel Estrada in committee in 2003, Democrats filibustered him on the floor of the Senate. Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) held up as many as four judicial nominations for years in retribution for Republicans blocking Mr. Clinton's nomination of Helene White (she was confirmed for the Sixth Circuit last year). And so on.

The effect of this game has been toxic not only for the nominees but for the courts. Many circuits have suffered judicial emergencies, defined as vacancies on courts overwhelmed by their caseloads, or vacancies languishing more than 18 months on busy circuits. Some stood open longer. The Bush administration's 2006 appointment of Peter Keisler to fill the D.C. Circuit seat vacated by John Roberts was left to expire, unfilled, at the end of the administration.

True, Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito were confirmed -- but without the support of then Sens. Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Mr. Alito was confirmed by a vote of 58-42, the second narrowest margin in Senate history (after Clarence Thomas). Even Chief Justice Roberts's margin of 78-22 was contentious in historical terms. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 93-3, Sandra Day O'Connor 99-0, John Paul Stevens 98-0, and David Souter 90-9.

What is in store for Mr. Obama's nominees remains to be seen. Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he isn't inclined to the filibuster even if it is an option and most expect the president's Supreme Court choice will be confirmed.

As a matter of judicial philosophy, however, Mr. Obama has said he wants a nominee who "understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book." If that is considered by opponents as grounds for rejection Joe Biden will know where they're coming from.

Ms. Levy is a senior editorial writer at the Journal, based in Washington.

Bush's Gitmo Vindication

Obama still hasn't said where the worst terrorists will go.

President Obama delivered a major speech yesterday on how he intends to prosecute the war on terror (or whatever it's now called), and in particular his desire to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. As rhetoric, his remarks were at pains to declare a bold new moral direction. On substance, however, the speech and other events this week look more like a vindication of the past seven years.

The President's speech came after both houses of Congress had denied his funding requests to shut down Guantanamo and relocate some of the most dangerous prisoners to the U.S. The 90-6 vote in the Senate was especially notable because all but a half-dozen Democrats opposed their own President, on that high-minded principle known as not-in-my-backyard.

So, to the idea that isolated Alcatraz Island could serve as one possible location, California's Dianne Feinstein says it is a historic landmark and instead suggests a prison in another state. But the most state-of-the-art "supermax" prison in America is in Colorado, and this week that state's new Democratic Senator, Michael Bennet, vetoed that idea; as it happens, he's running for election in 2010.

Then there is the voluble Jim Webb, who in January said Mr. Obama had offered a reasonable timeline in ordering Guantanamo closed in a year. But now the Virginia Democrat opposes closing Gitmo anytime soon while observing to ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that "We spend hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases. There are cases against international law." That was the Bush Administration's point all along.

Mr. Obama, for his part, still wants Gitmo closed, and he cited South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham in saying that the idea that the detainees could not be securely held in the U.S. was "not rational." Apparently also irrational is FBI Director Robert Mueller, who this week told Congress that bringing the detainees even to U.S. prisons raised serious concerns, "from providing financing, radicalizing others, [to] the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States."

Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making "decisions based upon fear rather than foresight," Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor's support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.

Mr. Obama also pledged to release at least 50 detainees to other countries -- about one-tenth the number released under President Bush -- and added that the Administration was in "ongoing discussions" to transfer them. Good luck with that: The Europeans who were so robustly against Gitmo in the Bush years have suddenly discovered its detainees are dangerous. Meanwhile, the countries that might take them, such as Yemen, can't be trusted to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, where they can kill Americans again.

The President will also seek to try some of the detainees in federal courts, citing the recent case of al Qaeda sleeper Ali al-Marri who last month pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and may be sentenced to a mere 15 years, and possibly much less, in a civilian prison. But what the al-Marri prosecution -- and the soft plea bargain -- really shows is how hard it is to convict terrorists in civilian courts when much of the evidence against them is either classified or wasn't gathered on the battlefield at the time of capture.

Mr. Obama's most remarkable Gitmo sleight-of-hand was on the matter of how to handle the hard cases, those who Mr. Obama said "cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people." After acknowledging this was "the toughest issue we will face" and pledging that he would not "release individuals who endanger the American people," the President proposed . . . well, he didn't really say what he'd do, except that whatever it is must be "defensible and lawful." No wonder the ACLU is in a tizzy.

Which brings us back to Guantanamo. The President went out of his way to insist that its existence "likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained," albeit without offering any evidence, and that it "has weakened American security," again based only on assertion. What is a plain fact is that in the seven-plus years that Gitmo has been in operation the American homeland has not been attacked.

It is also a plain fact -- and one the President acknowledged -- that many of the detainees previously released, often under intense pressure from Mr. Obama's anti-antiterror allies, have returned to careers as Taliban commanders and al Qaeda "emirs." The New York Times reported yesterday on an undisclosed Pentagon report that no fewer than one in seven detainees released from Gitmo have returned to jihad.

Mr. Obama called all of this a "mess" that he had inherited, but in truth the mess is of his own haphazard design. He's the one who announced the end of Guantanamo without any plan for what to do with, or where to put, KSM and other killers. Now he's found that his erstwhile allies in Congress and Europe want nothing to do with them. Tell us again why Gitmo should be closed?

Worrying parallels between now and 1929

Oil, Retail Stocks Drive Gains

| A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP

Stocks picked up some steam on Friday morning, drawing strength from gains in energy and consumer stocks, as some of the pressure on the dollar relented.

At 10:50 a.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up by 61 points. It was supported by gains for Exxon Mobil, up 1.7%, and Chevron, up 1.8%, as oil prices hovered above $60 a barrel. Kraft Foods, Walt Disney and DuPont were also higher.

Market Data Center >

The S&P 500-stock index crept up 0.7% as its energy sector gained 1.5% and its consumer-discretionary sector rose 1%. The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 0.5%. The major indexes have moved in a tight range in morning trading.

A smattering of mixed earnings reports helped lure some investors to retailers' shares. Sears Holdings shares rallied 18% after it posted a surprise first-quarter profit amid cost cuts and tighter inventory controls. Gap reported a 14% profit fall, with sales in all four of its divisions falling. Its shares climbed 2%. Teen retailer Aeropostale reported an 81% profit rise as its first-quarter results set a company record; its shares were up about 4%.

The financial sector moved slightly higher after the FDIC seized BankUnited Financial in the 34th -- and largest -- bank failure this year, at an estimated cost of $4.9 billion to the agency's insurance fund.

BankUnited's failure is a reminder of how fragile many banks remain. The U.S.'s 19 biggest banks performed better than expected on government "stress tests" and several large and midsize banks in recent weeks have successfully raised capital through public stock offerings. But officials are still concerned about dozens of banks across the country that made bad bets on real estate, and those troubles will likely continue to ripple through the financial system.

Shares of some smaller regional lenders, including SunTrust Banks, weakend. But many larger banks, including U.S. Bancorp and J.P. Morgan Chase, made modest gains in recent trading.

Investors had stream out of the dollar and Treasurys after Standard & Poor's warning on Thursday that it may cut the credit ratings of the U.K. government raised fears that the U.S. could face a similar threat. But some of that trend was softening by midmorning on Friday

The dollar was down against the euro and the pound but regained some ground on the yen. Like the U.K., the U.S. has borrowed heavily to finance aggressive efforts to turn back the financial crisis.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield jumped to 3.43% Friday, a fresh high for the year, as traders geared up for a healthy dose of new Treasurys next week. The 30-year bond touched its high yield for the year, at 4.37%. But in recent trade, Treasurys turned up slightly

Friday, May 22, 2009

No gold in state

Voters reject a ballot they could not comprehend

An indictment from the grave

A murder foretold has convulsed Guatemala’s government. Its investigation will provide a test of whether or not Central America includes a failed state

Bust and boom

The price of oil has leapt to nearly $62 a barrel. Another spike may be on the way

History as Fiction Designed to Unite Us

Obama to Government Motors: "Let's Roll"

India and the Future of South Asia

Another Mumbai-style attack can't be allowed.

'Feigned Outrage Based on a False Narrative'

People who consistently distort the truth are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.'

A Governor and His Veto Pen

Minnesota's illuminating budget brawl.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Those Who Make Us Say 'Oh!'

A tribute to America's war heroes, past and present.

By PEGGY NOONAN

How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Confirmation Process

The vice president can't complain if Republicans object to Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

Bush's Gitmo Vindication

Obama still hasn't said where the worst terrorists will go.

Oil, Retail Stocks Drive Gains

| A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP

Thursday, May 21, 2009

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