Tampa First Responders

Via Time

Mitt’s PR Team

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Post Convention Fact Checking

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Manufacturing Taste: The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner — a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are

The Walrus:

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK of Kraft Dinner, and I will tell you who you are. If you belong to Canada’s comfortable class, you probably think of the dish as a childish indulgence and a clandestine treat. The bite-sized tubular noodles are so yielding and soft, you will say a little sheepishly, and next to impossible to prepare al dente. The briny, glistening orange sauce tastes a little bit sweet and a little bit sour — at once interesting, because of the tension between the two flavour poles, but not overly challenging or unfamiliar. And its essential dairyness connects it to that most elemental of foods: a mother’s milk. KD is the ultimate nursery food, at least if you were born and raised in Canada, where making and eating cheese has been a part of the culture since Champlain brought cows from Normandy in the early 1600s — a tradition nearly as venerable as the fur trade. It may be the first dish children and un-nested students learn to make (“make,” of course, being a loose term; “assemble” may be more accurate). This only strengthens its primal attractions.

If you recently immigrated to Canada, you will have a very different association with KD, as a dish that polarizes family meals. Your children nag you for it, having acquired a taste for it at school, or at the house next door. And if you count yourself among the 900,000 Canadians who use food banks each month, you may associate the iconic blue and yellow box with privation: a necessary evil while you wait for your next cheque to arrive, bought with your last dollar, and moistened with your last spoonfuls of milk.

The point is, it’s nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world’s first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised “dinner in seven minutes — no baking required,” we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.

This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: “If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more.” In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.

True, Canada is just one outpost in Kraft’s globalized food system. The company’s iconic brands are on the rise in emerging markets, which is to say in the ancient cultures beyond the borders of North America, Europe, and Australia. In China, another Kraft product, the Oreo, has been re-engineered for the Asian market, with such success that it is now the country’s number one cookie. But this is history repeating itself: our own food system was colonized long ago by Kraft, a company that has always striven to give us (or at least our consumer, magpie selves) what we want: cheaper food that is faster to prepare. We have been only too happy to drink the Kool-Aid, another Kraft brand.

KD’s popularity is a symptom of a world that spins distressingly faster and faster. We devote a total of forty-two minutes to cooking and cleaning up three meals a day — six fewer minutes than we spent in 1992. Over half the dinners we consume at home involve a prepared or semi-prepared food. As the clock ticks, we spend more of every food dollar on these shortcuts.

But what does it mean if a national dish is manufactured, formulated by scientists in a laboratory in Glenview, Illinois, and sold back to us by the second-largest food company in the world? Kraft Foods employs 126,000 people worldwide, and raked in $54.4 billion in 2011. By the end of this year, it will formally split into two divisions — North American groceries and global snacks — no doubt to go forth and multiply. Kraft Canada isn’t just manufacturing 120 million boxes of powdered cheese and noodles at its factory in the desolate Montreal suburb of Mont-Royal. It is manufacturing taste. In so doing, it has left an indelible mark on what and how we eat, and therefore how we live. At the Canadian corporate headquarters in Don Mills, in Toronto — where three flags, for Canada, Ontario, and Kraft Foods, fly outside the doors — the “one percent” doesn’t refer to the über-wealthy, but to the tiny fraction of Canadians who do not stock a single Kraft product in their pantries.

DESPITE OUR ever-present nostalgia for the foods of childhood, tastes and recipes are always evolving. We have no definitive version of macaroni and cheese, or any dish for that matter. The word “macaroni,” first coined in Italy, describes any short tubular pasta; there, the cheese of choice was often Parmesan. Although I have yet to uncover a primary source to prove the point, I would wager that macaroni, which first became fashionable in England in the eighteenth century, most likely reached Britain in the trunks of travellers. (Thomas Jefferson is said to have introduced it to Virginia.) The dish soon grew so popular among anglophones that “macaroni” became slang for a dandy who favoured outlandish wigs, which is why Yankee Doodle “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.”…

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Pakistan’s Briefcase Warriors

Foreign Affairs:

One of the truly disheartening aspects of researching Pakistan’s history is uncovering evidence that, at critical moments, the country’s central bureaucracy provided its rulers of the day with rational and wise advice, only to be ignored.

In 1952, for example, G. Ahmed, Pakistan’s Secretary of the Interior, urged Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin to restrain the members of his party from treating the state as their personal estate, abandon manipulating religious fundamentalists for short-term political gain, and focus on policymaking. Nazimuddin ignored Ahmed. In March 1953, sectarian rioting broke out in the Punjab as rival factions of the ruling party aligned themselves with religious fundamendalists. The governor general and the military took the opportunity to push Nazimuddin out establishing the bureaucracy and army’s primacy over the elected government.

Similarly, in the early and mid-1980s, Syed Ijlal Haider Zaidi, Secretary Establishment (in charge of the administrative tasks of posting and transfers within the civilian bureaucracy) produced a series of prescient summaries for Zia-ul Haq, Pakistan’s third military dictator. His writings dealt with the need to reform the civil service and rehabilitate the provincial administration. Zaidi proposed a number of feasible solutions, such as creating specialized civil service elites to administer education, health, and infrastructure; restoring supervisory functions to the field level; and strengthening the provincial governments. These all could have been implemented, given the relatively healthy finances of Pakistan at the time. Instead, Zia opted to do nothing.

In 2000, Zafar Iqbal Rathore, a retired police officer serving as chairman of Pakistan’s Focal Group on Police Reform, advised the country’s fourth military regime, this one headed by Pervez Musharraf, to set up neutral bodies to supervise the transfer, promotion, and disciplining of officers. This was meant to reduce arbitrariness within the state machinery, starting with the criminal justice system and eventually extending into other civilian sectors. His advice met with the same fate as earlier noteworthy attempts to advise the rulers.

Since then, the problems Ahmed, Zaidi, and Rathore identified have intensified. Now the state’s ability to deal with any one of them, let alone the dysfuction that underlies all of them, is doubtful. Connecting all these men’s prescriptions was the idea that the state needed to be less arbitrary and that its rulers needed to accept some institutional autonomy; each tier of government (federal, provincial, local) needed adequate independence to respond to specific needs. And that required an able, motivated, well-paid, law-abiding, and efficient civil service. These civil servants would be the frontline in the fight against the primordial pressures — kinship, clan, tribe, sect, and so on — that held the country back. They would work as agents of integration. This wise advice routinely fell on deaf ears because it ran counter to the perverse logic of Pakistan’s indigenous culture of power.

Traditionally, states in South Asia were organized along three main principles. First, that the state was the personal estate of the ruler. Second, that managing the estate required the ruler to appoint loyal personal servants in the military, civil service, and religious establishments. Third, that the ruler was divinely sanctioned and could not be lawfully challenged.

In practice, this meant that South Asian rulers exercised arbitrary power over and through servants who were highly insecure and could be removed at whim. Since that could happen at any time, the rulers’ servants were driven to plunder as much wealth as possible while they could. Kautilya, prime minister to the founder of the Mauryan dynasty (c. 320 BC) famously compared the emperor’s servants to fish in the sea, deeming it impossible to determine how much water they were drinking. In the Mughal Empire, a few hundred senior military and civilian officials typically intercepted more than half of the total state revenues, amassing vast fortunes. They consumed as much of it as they could as quickly as they could, since the emperor’s ability to withdraw his favor and confiscate their fortunes always loomed large.

Under the British Raj, which formally succeeded the Mughals in 1858, the colonial rulers tried to remake South Asia in their own image. They had high regard for institutions, the rule of law, meritocracy, and civilian supremacy over the military. They tried to instill those values in their subjects, and thus seeded South Asia with the basic cultural requirements for constitutional democracy. One example was the steady growth of local governments organized on the principle of self-taxation. Another was the drive to recruit civil servants from both England and India through competitive examinations.

Following independence in 1947, however, South Asia — particularly Pakistan — started reverting to earlier patterns. Indeed, due to the proportionately greater trauma of its birth and the fact that it was always on the frontier of the Raj, the British veneer wore off rather quickly.

Two of Pakistan’s modern rulers illustrate the trend particularly well. The democratically elected government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (December 1971-July 1977) purged the bureaucracy, brought in thousands of political loyalists, nationalized many of the country’s industries and services, and changed the pay and service structure for the bureaucracy with the conscious aim of humiliating and demoralizing the civil servants. In effect, even as he gave the state more control over the country’s assets, he destroyed the prestige, autonomy, and efficiency of the civil service charged with managing those assets. Over time, the service lost it ability to resist unwise and even unlawful directives…

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The Next Great Growth Cycle

The American:

 Today’s techno-pessimists say technology and America have plateaued. Such naysayers flourish during economic recessions. They have been wrong in every one of the 19 economic downturns we have experienced since 1912. They’re wrong again.

Apple went public in December 1980, before today’s 50 million millennials were born. And there followed the longest run of economic growth in modern history, spanning five presidencies from Reagan through Clinton. Apple grew to become the world’s largest market cap company and a tech icon.

That was then. This is now. According to today’s techno-pessimists, nothing like that can happen again because technology and America have plateaued. Such naysayers, who flourish like mushrooms in the depths of economic recessions, have been wrong in every one of the 19 economic downturns we have experienced since 1912. And they’re wrong again.

Let’s quote a few prominent examples:

“We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau.” — Tyler Cowen, economist, popular blogger, and author of The Great Stagnation.

“The harsh reality … is that the next 25 years (2013-2038) are highly unlikely to see more dramatic changes than science and technology produced in the last 25 (1987-2012).” — Niall Ferguson, uber-historian, Harvard professor, and widely read author.

“No more fundamental innovations are likely to be introduced to change the structure of [today’s] society …. Like every previous civilization, we have reached a technological plateau.” — Jean Gimpel, technology historian, professor, and author.

There is one salient difference amongst the above three views. The first two were written in 2011 and 2012, respectively, while Gimpel’s conclusion comes from his excellent 1975 book, The Medieval Machine; The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, wherein he extrapolated history’s lessons to inform the future. On the book-flap of the 2003 re-release of Gimpel’s book we find:

Gimpel … did not foresee the digital boom of the 1980s and 90s and the development of post-industrial economies. Nevertheless, his predictions may provide valuable material for historians of the recent past.

Indeed they should. The issue is more than an academic exercise. The techno-pessimists are innovation Malthusians cut from the same cloth as the resource Malthusians. Every time reality proves them wrong following each crisis, they say a variant of the same thing: I may have been wrong before, but I’m right this time.

That long, post-1980 run of “irrational exuberance” happened because of an underlying technological revolution: The advent of distributed computing and the Internet. Technological innovation is pivotal to whether the American economy will experience prosperity growth again. In a world with a growing population but a tepidly expanding economic pie, we see shrunken expectations and a reversion to fighting over how to get one’s “fair share.” People lose faith that the pie will ever grow again; in essence, they lose faith in the future itself. Certainly there’s limited optimism today about technology’s future and what that might mean for the economy, jobs, debt, taxation, and fairness.

Indeed they should. The issue is more than an academic exercise. The techno-pessimists are innovation Malthusians cut from the same cloth as the resource Malthusians. Every time reality proves them wrong following each crisis, they say a variant of the same thing: I may have been wrong before, but I’m right this time.

That long, post-1980 run of “irrational exuberance” happened because of an underlying technological revolution: The advent of distributed computing and the Internet. Technological innovation is pivotal to whether the American economy will experience prosperity growth again. In a world with a growing population but a tepidly expanding economic pie, we see shrunken expectations and a reversion to fighting over how to get one’s “fair share.” People lose faith that the pie will ever grow again; in essence, they lose faith in the future itself. Certainly there’s limited optimism today about technology’s future and what that might mean for the economy, jobs, debt, taxation, and fairness.

We’ve been here before. Back in 1980, America was deep in the mire of the Carter recession with a wounded economy barely limping along. The real estate and the job markets were in a shambles. Boomers faced dim prospects as they poured out of colleges in record numbers. Then as now, the Middle East was in turmoil, and energy entered center stage for the first time as a subject for national debate. And most people thought the big innovations that transformed the world during the preceding three decades were essentially played out.

The big worry of the day was that Japan, having launched a national effort to leapfrog America’s mighty computer industry, was about to overtake our economy. The Japanese juggernaut seemed unstoppable. The journalism and headlines of that era are eerily similar to those today bemoaning China’s ascendance and America’s lethargy.

Then came the post-1980 boom arising from the confluence of two great forces. There was a government that, through three successive administrations, held a favorable attitude toward the private sector. And that private sector was unleashed at the right moment in history, just when the next cycle of information industries began to emerge.

It was understandable that people then did not see the next wave coming. They were witnesses to such momentous change over the 30 years since 1950 that it was hard to envision what could come next, other than incremental variants on what was already in place. They did expect more computing and communications, to be sure, but mainly more mainframes and landlines.

From 1950 to 1980 the world had gone from vacuum tubes and copper wires to transistors and fiber optics; from the first transatlantic phone cable to geostationary satellites. Wired communication speeds had risen 10 million fold.

From 1950, when Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, to his becoming president, we went from the Univac vacuum-tube computer to the ubiquitous IBM 370 mainframes. Computer speeds rose 1,000 fold while computing costs collapsed 10,000 fold.

That era saw the idea of software emerge from mathematical musings to an industry meriting an employment line-item in the Census. By 1980, no bank, business, or university worth its salt was without a computer. We were deep in the Age of Central Computing.

But then came the post-1980 economy that was built on the technology advances that had already occurred. We saw entirely new businesses, services, and opportunities that were not imagined, but that were enabled by the technology that preceded them.

What can we say now about what will be built on the foundations of the advances that have taken place since 1980? We know one thing. Over the past 30 years, compute-communicate technologies have advanced even more than they did from 1950 to 1980.

Computing speeds are up 200 thousand fold since 1980, while costs have collapsed 1 million fold. We’ve seen the emergence of wireless networks with speeds 1 million times faster and bandwidth costs down 100 fold.

What exactly does all this portend for our future, for new services, products, and companies, and for the next Apple? When it comes to predicting the future—especially of technology—with all due respect, one does not turn to historians or economists. Peter Drucker, the brilliant management consultant famous for his predictions, used to say that he only predicted what already happened.

We are poised to enter a new era that will come from the convergence of three technological transformations that have already happened: Big Data, the Wireless Wired World, and Computational Manufacturing…

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View From The Left, Convention Edition

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View From The Right, Convention Edition

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How Right?

Via AJC

‘Who Is That Guy?’

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And Now, A Word From The Klan

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Persian Pride: At the heart of Iran’s drive for nuclear power is the belief that it can be great again

American Review:

For many foreign observers, Iran’s determination to pursue a nuclear program appears both incongruous and nonsensical. This is particularly the case in light of the growing international isolation and the economic costs being inflicted through increasingly punitive sanctions, culminating in an embargo on Iranian oil by the European Union.

Few are convinced by Iran’s repeated protests that the program is wholly peaceful: Why is it that a country lavishly endowed with oil and gas resources should require nuclear power? Why is it that for all the enriched uranium, there appears to be no extant plan for the construction of power plants? These questions, along with the persistent reckless rhetoric about the existence of the state of Israel and the veracity or otherwise of the Holocaust, have combined to reinforce a sense of unease among international observers, especially in the West.

Even those who remain agnostic about a weapons program agree that Iran has questions to answer and contradictions to clarify. Subject to satisfactory clarifications and reassurances over the peaceful nature of its program, they argue, Iran would be permitted to continue within the rubric of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran, of course, argues that it has not broken the terms of the NPT. It argues that, unlike some other states, it signed the NPT, that a number of signatories have not strictly adhered to its terms, and that fundamentally the persecution of Iran is politically and legally driven.

It should be apparent from even this briefest of surveys that the legal arguments around the NPT are underpinned by a much more powerful narrative of distrust that has emerged between Iran and the West over the better part of three decades. But there are deeper sentiments shaping Iranian attitudes that stretch back further into a history of greatness, decline, and a yearning to recover a status once enjoyed and now denied. At its heart is a nationalist narrative that few in the West have understood and many in Iran have exploited.

FUNDAMENTAL to any understanding of Iran’s nuclear program is the development of a particular narrative of Iranian nationalism and how it is applied. Iranian politicians, and President Ahmadinejad is no exception, have frequently deployed the myth of victimisation, portraying Iran as a victim of Western—essentially Anglo-American—persecution and double standards. But this sentiment can only be properly understood as part of the broader belief in the historical grandeur and distinctiveness of Iranian civilisation. Put simply, Iran once was a great power and will be so again. This status and prestige will be achieved through technological prowess and those who seek to obstruct this achievement are against the greatness of Iran.

This narrative of prestige is the simplest and most emotive aspect of the nationalist argument. Other dimensions include the popular legitimacy that scientific progress proffers. In his will, Ayatollah Khomeini urged Iranians to pursue science, in part because, he argued, secularists had always suggested that religion was against science and that Islam in particular was backward and reactionary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islam had always promoted science and if the faith was to flourish and grow, it had to do so again. If the development of nuclear technology empowered the nation, it legitimised the Islamic Republic.

Moreover the cause, as narrated here, unifies disparate groups that may have no particular affection for the government and regime behind it. Indeed, one of the striking aspects of the nuclear program as an act of resistance has been the ease with which the government of the Islamic Republic has been able to unify Iranians behind a general cause that it has chosen to continue. And this last distinction is an important one. This is not a cause of the Islamic Republic but a national cause that transcends the revolution and has its roots in the period of the monarchy. It can therefore be supported by the very people the revolution rejected, and perhaps, more importantly in terms of support among the diaspora, among Iranians who rejected the revolution.

This was the narrative constructed by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi in his opinion piece in the Washington Post in April this year. The essay traced Iran’s nuclear program to the Shah and effectively played down the consequences of the Islamic Revolution on the domestic and international political landscape. Continuity, not change, was what mattered in this particular respect. Here was a national cause that all Iranians could agree upon whatever their particular political perspective. It allowed diaspora Iranians to satisfy their desire to portray their nationalism with little immediate cost to themselves, while at the same time allowing the officials of the Islamic Republic a broader legitimacy as champions of a nationalist cause of resistance.

The narrative of resistance was further reinforced through a particular economic dimension. Thus it was argued that the West was obstructing Iran’s nuclear program because it sought to hinder and constrain Iran’s economic development. Put simply, Iran should by right be the economic powerhouse of the region, but, in typical historical fashion, the West was seeking to prevent this from happening.

Other aspects of economic development were largely sidelined, and when some Iranians commented that this determination to resist the West at all costs may actually end up doing exactly what the West apparently seeks to achieve—in other words, bankrupt the country—they were quickly silenced and marginalised. Such nuanced arguments simply did not have the populist appeal of resistance at all costs, and at worst resulted in the proponent being labelled a traitor.

For those who might counter that Iran’s economic development might be better served by improving infrastructure and the oil and gas sectors, the response alternated between pointing out that sanctions prevented their development (this was a circular argument since it could also be argued that better international relations and a settlement of the nuclear impasse would alleviate sanctions), and that the economic and scientific gains of the nuclear program were unquantifiable but essential for a developing economy. Such arguments served to maintain support among the country’s intellectuals and scientists, who again might not have seen eye-to-eye with the regime but who had a certain pride in the historic contributions of Iranian civilisation to science…

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A Woman’s Place? The Dearth of Women in the Secular Movement

The Humanist:

The following article is adapted from a speech given at the Women in Secularism Conference sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and held in Washington, DC, in May 2012.

The underrepresentation of women in the expanding American secular movement is an uncomfortable issue for many secularists and atheists. Many deny that there is a “woman problem” in organizations dedicated to the promotion of secular values. As an author who speaks about secularism—specifically, America’s secular history—to many different kinds of audiences, I can assure you that there is a problem.

When I speak before non-college audiences—that is, audiences in which no one is required to be there to get credit for a college course—75 percent of the people in the seats are men. The good news is that this is a significant improvement over the situation that prevailed eight years ago, when my book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was published; at that time, my audiences were about 90 percent male. The bad news is that the gender gap in this movement remains as large as it is, although it’s less striking among people under thirty. The question is why.

The first and most obvious reason is that women, in the United States and every other country, are more religious and more devout in the practice of their religion than men. Public opinion polls show that this disparity affects every income, educational, and racial group—although it is much narrower among the highly educated than among the uneducated and the young than the old. African-American women, regardless of their level of education, are the most religious demographic in this country. This fact alone tells us that education is not the decisive factor, because although black women as a group are better educated than black men, black men are less religious. Space doesn’t permit a lengthy analysis of why women are more religious than men, so I’ll simply say that the greater religiosity of women means that both secular humanism and atheism are tougher sells to women.

I’ll also note that the very question of why women are more religious than men often elicits a prejudiced, sexist response. When I first began writing for the “On Faith” section of theWashington Post, one of the earliest questions asked for an explanation of women’s greater religiosity. An amazing number of men on my blog answered baldly, “Because women are stupider than men.”

I think most of us can agree, without parsing SAT and IQ scores, that this is not exactly a reasonable, evidence-based answer. It represents the so-called thinking of a group of modern-day social Darwinists who make up one component of the secular movement. These were the same angry white guys who would often call me “Susie” in their comments. Interestingly, the religious right-wingers on the blog simply referred to me as an “ugly old atheist.” (Apparently the former were under the impression that using a diminutive would make any woman burst into tears, while the latter group thought that calling you ugly or old was the worst possible insult.) I don’t want to make too much of this, in part because I place about as much value on anonymous opinions expressed on blogs as I do on professions of eternal love after drinking the night away in a bar. However, I don’t think it can be denied that the idea that women aren’t as, shall we say, tough-minded as men has long been held by an element in the secular movement, including the twentieth-century movement as it developed after World War II.

This misogyny sometimes shows up as a distinction between “soft” and “hard” atheists, describing people like my friend Sam Harris as a “hard” atheist because he argues that so-called moderate religion is even worse than fundamentalist religion, because moderate religion provides a respectable cover for fundamentalism. Speaking only for myself—and certainly not for womankind—I don’t agree with Harris about this. The job of the secular movement would be much easier if religion in the United States consisted only of liberal Protestantism, along with the liberal Catholicism that tells its bishops just where they can stick their doctrines, and Reform Judaism.

So does that position make me a “soft” atheist? A kinder, gentler atheist, as the religious historian Steve Prothero once described me? Such distinctions merely reduce a genuine, reasonable disagreement—one as much about tactics as principle—to a difference between the sexes. Because what’s really being said here is that in disagreeing with a male colleague on an intellectual issue, a female is “soft”—a word that’s synonymous with flabby and weak-minded. And she’s soft because, well, she’s a girl.

When I was writing my Washington Post column, “The Spirited Atheist,” I was often challenged to defend certain statements made by Harris or Richard Dawkins, and the point I always made was that one of the big differences between atheism and religion is that no atheist is obliged to agree with every single thing another atheist says. Richard Dawkins is not the pope, Sam Harris is not a cardinal, Christopher Hitchens is not the Holy Ghost, and I am most definitely not a nun. Now I’m in my sixties, and calling me soft—or even Susie-—is unlikely to crush my spirit or convince me that it’s time to repent and rejoin a church. But this kind of stereotyping is unwelcoming to young women atheists now on the fringes of the secular movement. My two nieces are both in their twenties and both atheists, but they are not at all involved in organized secularism. They consider this a quaint activity of mine, only to be expected from the generation that came of age in the 1960s—a decade which, of course, they’re sick of hearing about.

Looking back further historically, it is just a fact that a great many founders of twentieth-century secular organizations, like the Center for Inquiry or the American Humanist Association, came from either a philosophy or science background—and these two areas of academia were particularly inhospitable to women before the 1980s. I should also point out that the few women who were engaged in science and philosophy had to work twice as hard as their male counterparts to maintain themselves professionally. They didn’t have the time to become involved in a marginalized secular movement. The energies of many of the smartest and most energetic women of my generation instead went into the feminist movement, which directly affected our everyday lives for the better. Personally, I’ve been an atheist since I was fifteen, but I simply saw this as something Iwas—not as something in which I wanted to invest my energies as a writer.

Looking at this from the historical perspective of my generation as we came of age, I must also mention the seemingly anomalous fact that the best-known atheist in the United States in the 1950s and early ’60s was the founder of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray, known as “Mad Madalyn” to her detractors. (She later married a man named O’Hair and took his last name—something I found curious at a time when many women were beginning to keep their own last names.) Now she had not, for the most part, said anything more forthright or abrasive to Christians than have Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—but let’s not forget that she made her points at a time when atheism was much more demonized than it is now…

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Conceived in Liberty: How William Livingston gave the American Revolution its rationale

City Journal:

In John Adams’s view, the American Revolution started long before the shots rang out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” he asked in an 1818 article. “Do we mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations . . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” And anyone who wants to trace how that revolution managed “to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation” need only consult the “pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills” that flooded America between 1760 and 1775. However spectacular, the war “was only an effect and consequence” of that revolutionized worldview, Adams told Thomas Jefferson in an 1815 letter.

But the cultural transformation that Adams described had started even earlier than the 1755 Harvard grad remembered. It began in New York, with a shy but inwardly fiery lawyer named William Livingston, the “most experienced polemical writer in the colonies,” judges Bernard Bailyn, our leading historian of colonial thought. Livingston edited and mostly wrote a weekly magazine, The Independent Reflector, that from November 1752 to November 1753 infused throughout British America the Lockean ideas of government by consent and the right of the people to depose a tyrannical king. Livingston won loyal subscribers, including Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, and colonial newspapers reprinted theReflector’s essays for years afterward. James Madison recalled that his fellow Princeton students read them avidly two decades later and strove to emulate their distinctive “energy and eloquence” in their public-speaking assignments. Though Livingston remained an active polemicist for the next quarter-century, and though he served in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and as governor of New Jersey for 14 years, no mark he made on the fate of the continent proved as indelible as the one he imprinted in those 12 momentous months in the mid-eighteenth century.

At 13, rather than the usual 17, Livingston went to Yale, and he emerged after graduation in 1741 a youth transformed, not by the dry Presbyterian orthodoxy of the college’s teaching but by the riches of its library, which electrified him. He devoured Locke, along with other classics of mid-seventeenth-century English republicanism that he later cherished in his own large library. He read Joseph Addison’s 1712 verse drama of Cato, the heroic champion of Roman republicanism against Julius Caesar’s military dictatorship and the embodiment of what the colonists meant by republican virtue, and he read the popular magazines Addison wrote with Sir Richard Steele—the Tatler and the Spectator—which, in their breezy way, sought to cultivate in their readers the skeptical good sense and educated taste that judge everything freely, politics included. He also read the era’s greatest writer, Alexander Pope, whose poetic satires proved the power of public ridicule to combat abuses.

Livingston’s father, a great Hudson Valley landowner and merchant, apprenticed him in 1742 to New York City’s leading attorney, James Alexander. The young clerk began copying wills, deeds, and so on, in that pre-photocopier, pre-computer age, and reading, often from dawn until midnight, the then-standard text, Volume One of Sir Edward Coke’sInstitutes, a treatise on property law that seemed to get longer the more he read, he lamented, “so that ’twas impossible to attain the conclusion thro’ all the ages of Eternity.” In 1745, the frustrated clerk complained in a pseudonymous newspaper column that “To make a young Fellow trifle away the Bloom of his Age, when his Invention is Readiest, his Imagination Warmest, and all his Faculties in their full Vigour and Maturity” was “Drudgery . . . fit only for a Slave.” If his boss recognized his authorship, he said nothing; but when the clerk’s next pseudonymous article satirized Alexander’s social-butterfly wife, he got fired on the spot. His father got him a clerkship with New York’s other top lawyer, William Smith, Sr., and made him take it.

A decade earlier, Alexander and Smith had been key figures in the famous trial of printer John Peter Zenger for seditious libel, in which, for the first time, the colonists asserted the rights of free speech, a free press, and trial by jury (see “How American Press Freedom Began on Wall Street,” Autumn 2010). “The trial of Zenger in 1735 was the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America,” Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the final draft of the U.S. Constitution, judged long afterward. In his apprenticeship, Livingston marinated in a radical legal and journalistic tradition that he was soon to carry on.

Livingston’s fellow clerks—the boss’s son, William Smith, Jr., and John Morin Scott, both Yalies related to Livingston by marriage, and both, like Livingston, Presbyterians—became his close friends and allies. The year after he joined the New York Bar in 1748, the triumvirate met to plan a weekly magazine on the model of Addison and Steele’s “The Spectator, for correcting the taste and improving the Minds of our fellow Citizens,” Livingston wrote.

When the first issue of The Independent Reflector appeared on November 30, 1752, politics, not taste, was its keynote. The magazine, Livingston wrote, wouldn’t shrink “from vindicating the civil and religious RIGHTS of my Fellow Creatures: From exposing the peculiar Deformity of publickVice, and Corruption: and displaying the amiable Charms of Liberty, with the detestable Nature of Slavery and Oppression.” Nor would he hesitate to point fingers, since “the obdurate Criminal, who fears not GOD himself, is seized with a Panic, at the Apprehensions of having his Actions publickly exposed by a Writer of Genius and Magnanimity,” he wrote, paraphrasing Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires.

In the tenth issue, his corruption probe hit a nerve, when he exposed a scheme by city councillors to sell their relatives publicly owned East River lots at such low prices and easy credit terms as to amount to a theft of nearly £6,000 of the public’s money. Magazine sales soared, and, in a city and province whose squalid eighteenth-century politics often turned on the business and personal feuds of the Livingston and De Lancey clans, William Livingston also liked shaming the De Lanceyite villains in this case…

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The Wrapper

Via AJC

Media, Race And Politics

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Comrades!

Via Time

Romney’s Road To The White House

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Convention Poll Numbers

Via Newsday

The Humanist Interview with Gloria Steinem

The Humanist:

2012 Humanist of the Year Gloria Steinem sat down with the Humanist magazine at the 71^st Annual Conference of the American Humanist Association, held June 7-10, 2012, in New Orleans. The following is an adapted version of that interview recorded on Friday, June 7. Previously solicited questions from leading secular women writers are noted herein. Steinem’s speech in acceptance of the Humanist of the Year award will be published in the November/December issue.

The Humanist: You’re being honored with the 2012 Humanist of the Year award. What led to you accepting this award from the American Humanist Association? Do you feel that your writing and activism as a feminist intersects with humanism?

Gloria Steinem: I always thought that “humanist” was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word. It seems to me that it means you believe in the great potential and the best of human beings, so I didn’t have to overcome anything to accept this award; it seemed an unmitigated honor. And since the ultra-right wing has tried so hard to make it a bad word— “humanist” has been demonized in much the same way that the word “feminist” has—it seemed especially important to identify as humanist and support humanist groups. This is the only national group I know of, but I run into local ones, too.

The Humanist: So let’s talk a little about women in secularism. I attended the first-ever Women in Secularism conference in May, and I’m wondering if it would surprise you to learn that there are problems with sexist behavior within the secular movement, including in online forums and at conferences.

Steinem: No, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that there is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we’re arranged in a hierarchy, that we’re ranked rather than linked. I think we’ve learned that we have to contend with these divisions everywhere.

There might have been more surprise, say, in the 1960s and ’70s when people were active in the antiwar movement or in the Civil Rights movement, only to discover that women sometimes had the same kinds of conventional positions there. But I think there’s a much deeper understanding now of how widespread patriarchy is, on the one hand, and that it didn’t always exist, on the other.

The Humanist: So, if humanists and secularists consider themselves enlightened individuals—reasonable, progressive, and so forth—shouldn’t we hold these men up to a higher standard in terms of sexist behavior?

Steinem: Yes. But, it’s not only holding humanist men up to a higher standard, it’s saying you can’t win unless you’re a feminist. Because the patterns that are normalized in the family—the whole idea that some people cook and some people eat, that some listen and others talk, and even that some people control others in very economic or even violent ways—that kind of hierarchy is what makes us vulnerable to believing in class hierarchy, to believing in racial hierarchy, and so on.

The Humanist: Can men be seen not just as participants, but as effective leaders in the feminist movement?

Steinem: Yes. I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don’t think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf. Until I thought, wait a minute, how dare anybody tell me who my friends are or where I should live. That only happened after living in India and suddenly coming home and seeing how race-conscious we were, and how restricted I was, in a different way, as a white person.

The men I’ve met who were the best allies of feminism are those who see their stake in it; who see that they themselves are being limited by a culture that deprives men of human qualities deemed feminine, which are actually just the qualities necessary to raise kids—empathy and attention to detail and patience. Men have those qualities too but they’re not encouraged to develop them. And so they miss out on raising their kids, and they actually shorten their own lives. When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders.

The Humanist: In May, when President Obama came out in support of same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting, Newsweek’s cover anointed him “The First Gay President.” Maybe it was just a catchy headline but still, it makes you wonder, if he were to come out and say something really bold about women—that we’re truly better off when we can decide how many children to have (or not have)—would we call him “The First Woman President”?

Steinem: No, of course not. We would call him a feminist or a feminist-leaning president. And it also makes little sense to call him a gay president because being gay specifically means that your affectional, sexual energy is, at least some of the time, engaged with people of your own sex.

The Humanist: Journalist and author Susan Jacoby, whose books include the New York Timesbestseller, The Age of American Unreason (2008), asks this: Some say the importance of secular women in the feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s has never been properly acknowledged by leading feminists—as was the case with nineteenth-century feminists. Was there a fear that equality for women would be tarred by ungodliness?

Steinem: I don’t know. I’m more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don’t feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. Helen LaKelly Hunt, for instance, wrote a book called Faith and Feminism in which she writes about how the feminist movement seemed so secular to her that she didn’t feel like she belonged. On a personal level, I’ve felt pressure when reporters asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I do say, “No. I believe in people. I believe in nature,” but I still understand how much cultural pressure there is…

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