Category: History

Posted on

Evita the Movie: Rewriting History, Because I’m Worth It!

Most people going to see the movie version of EVITA or renting the video for a snuggly Friday night probably never listened to the original recording by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and are even less likely to have seen one of the early stage productions. What percentage only saw the movie? It’s hard to say– the movie was not a great success. But let’s make a conservative guess: 70%?

That’s the percentage of people who will get a slightly different picture of EVITA than the ones who heard the original recording or saw an early stage production (the newer stage productions are likely to be modeled on the movie version). The original was based fairly closely on the known historical facts about the life of Eva Duarte Peron, who rocketed to fame and power in Argentina in the 1930’s and 40’s and then died very young, of cancer, at the height of her influence, on July 26, 1952. The picture of Evita, as drawn in the original, is somewhat ambivalent. If she is admirable in any sense, she is admirable only for her remarkable ability to rise from almost nothing to one of the most powerful women in the world. But the original EVITA also makes it clear that the way she accomplished this feat was by whoring herself up the rungs of a ladder of influential men. And once she was married to the top dog in the military, Colonel Juan Peron, she became co-responsible for one of the most brutal and repressive regimes ever to rule Argentina. Snubbed by the aristocracy, she extrapolated bundles of money from everyone–including the labour unions– for her celebrated “Foundation Eva Peron”, and distributed unknown amounts (no books were kept) to the poor. Without a doubt, most of the money went into her own pockets, and to pay for jewels and dresses and her extravagant lifestyle as unofficial queen. It was a little like the Ontario lotteries, except that the lotteries steal from the poor instead of the rich. Eva stocked government officialdom with her relatives and cronies and severely punished any newspapers (including La Prensa) that dared to print critical commentary about her or her husband.

Now, I don’t mean to brag, or maybe I do, but not many of the people sitting in the movie theatres watching the Madonna version of EVITA know every single word of every song in the original. I do. And I immediately noticed many significant changes to the lyrics. Furthermore, I noticed a distinct trend. All of the changes functioned to improve the image of Evita herself. One of many examples: when an aristocrat observes that “statesmanship is more than entertaining peasants”, in the original, Evita snarls, “We shall see, little man!” In other words, yes, statesmanship is merely a matter of entertaining peasants. In the movie version, this line is given to a minor character. The result leaves open the possibility that Eva was more far-sighted than that.

The most disgusting change–because it is so patently self-serving–is the assignment of the beautiful aria, Another Suitcase in Another Hall, to Evita herself, when it was originally performed by Peron’s young mistress after Evita gave her the boot. This aria (remember, this is not a musical, but an opera, in spite of what the movie promoters tell you), had an important function in the original. It followed Evita’s initial seduction of Peron, during which she portrayed herself as a humble, innocent girl, who was so overwhelmed with Peron’s goodness and charm that she couldn’t help but throw herself at his feet. Then she nastily tosses Peron’s 14-year-old mistress out into the streets. The mistress sings a very plaintiff, introspective song about her dismal prospects. Interestingly– and in sharp contrast to Evita– she claims to be hard on the outside but confesses that, in her heart, she is devastated.

Time and time again, I’ve said that I don’t care/
that I’m immune to gloom/
That I’m hard, through and through/
But every time it matters, all my words desert me/
so anyone can hurt me/
and they do

In the original, you feel a twinge of your heartstrings for this poor, vulnerable girl. And your perception of Eva’s heartlessness and ruthlessness is enlarged. The contrast with the scheming Eva makes it plain that her seduction of Juan Peron is nothing more than a ploy to whore herself up another rung of the ladder.

In the movie version, Evita herself sings this song! This is a little like rewriting THE SOUND OF MUSIC and taking “Do Re Me” away from Julie Andrews and giving it to one of the Nazis. What a fun-loving, charming guy!

The reason for the change is obvious, and no, it’s not quite as sinister as you might think. Though the Peronista’s are still a force to be reckoned with in Argentina, I don’t think their reach extends all the way to Hollywood. No, it’s more banal than that. It’s Madonna’s Evita-like ego.

Madonna didn’t just get asked to do this picture: her representatives played an active role in getting her part, and, indeed, in getting the movie made (the property has been around for years but no-one was able to put the package together until recently). Strings were pulled. Everybody knows that the most captivating song in the show is the little aria sung by Peron’s mistress. Well, Madonna wanted that song for herself, and if she had to revise history a little in order to get it: so be it. In fact, all the other little changes also seem calculated to present Eva as less of a conniving slut and more like a poor girl who was merely ambitious and clever. As a result, many people will leave the theatre thinking that Eva Peron may have been a little rough around the edges, but maybe she was genuinely in love with Juan Peron, and maybe she really cared about the poor and dispossessed, and maybe her death was a real tragedy because Argentina was deprived of her gossamer presence as a result of it.

And you know, when you think about it, there are a lot of parallels with Madonna’s life. After all, hasn’t she been accused of the same things that Eva was accused of? Didn’t Madonna exploit her sex for money and power? And wasn’t Madonna reviled by some critics who didn’t really appreciate how sweet and vulnerable she really was, inside? And thus that obnoxious song they added, to ensure airplay for a “new” release: “You Must Love Me”. That’s all the poor girl wanted: to be loved.

The truth is that Peron was a Hitlerite and a fascist (Argentina was Germany’s very last ally), and Eva was a little dominatrix who abused her husband’s office for pure personal gain. The tragic results of her ascendancy to power–violence and social and economic instability–were still felt up until the 1970’s. The idea that she really wasn’t so bad is not a harmless delusion. When Bill Clinton talks about teaching Saddam Hussein a lesson, and when Jesse Helms spouts off about Castro, and when Le Pen in France denounces foreigners, and when Bouchard talks about “humiliation”, we are hearing echoes of the same demagogic impulses. EVITA could have done us all a favour by showing us, unflinchingly, just how attractive an evil political philosophy can make itself.

By the way, as a movie, EVITA isn’t great either, though it’s not as bad as some reviewers have decreed. And Madonna’s performance is relatively faultless: the girl does have a set of pipes. But there are too many moments where the singers don’t really know what to do with themselves. See Jesus Christ Superstar for an example of what they could be doing.

One last note: when is someone going to do an opera based on the story of Eva’s corpse? It was embalmed remarkably well and apparently remained quite life-like for years afterwards. It was stolen by the government when it feared Juan Peron would use it to regain political power, after he was turfed in 1955. After years of chaos, Peron was invited to return and he did so, but only after her corpse, which had been hidden in a crypt in Italy, was returned to him. He kept it on a living room table and his third wife, Isabel, (Eva was wife #2) dusted it every day for him, when she wasn’t occupied with her duties as vice-president! Isabel, eventually achieved what even Eva had not been able to achieve: the Vice-Presidency. In July 1974, upon the death of her husband, she became President of Argentina.

Her administration was an unmitigated disaster, as Eva’s likely would have been.

So how about it, composers?

Update 2009

Updated January 16, 2009

The real “Evita” in action, leading a rally (left).

Not the first revision… when introduced in Europe, the musical was controversial — did it glorify a woman associated with Fascism? When brought to America by producer Hal Prince, the authors (Rice and Webber) apparently agreed to develop a character based on Che Guevara to “balance” the role of Eva. He tells the audience what to think… a bad development artistically, if not morally. You can hear it in his songs– let me frame it for you, so you understand just how bad she is. Or good. Or both.

Still, the best lines in the show are Che’s reaction to the monumental funeral of Evita: “Oh what a circus, oh what a show….”

On the other hand… keep in mind that in the process of extorting millions of dollars from workers, the rich, and corporations to give to the poor (in a manner that suggested to them that they were personal gifts from Eva’s own pockets), Eva was merely practicing a form of socialism that benefited families and individuals who managed to come into her orbit. The actual numbers helped probably pale in comparison to the numbers helped by, say, an increase in the minimum wage, which applies to everyone, regardless of whether they have the opportunity to personally thank Evita. It’s a bit like a socialist lottery. In this context, it’s hard to have any sympathy for the upper classes who thought that politics was more than “entertaining peasants”.

Posted on

The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

*

Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.

Posted on

Stuffed Prig for Dessert

I recently went to see the Water Street Theatre’s production of “Shadowlands”, the play by William Nicholson, about the love affair between an aging C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, and an American poet, Joy Grescham.

I like the Water Street Theatre. We’ve been subscribers for about three years now. It is a dedicated little professional theatre company that operates in a small space (about 200 seats) and maintains a high level of polish in their productions. If they have one weakness, however, it is that almost all of their productions lack the fire, the spark, the intangible element that brings good theatre to life. First-rate theatre companies find this spark about half the time. Community theatre groups are lucky if it strikes once in two years. One of the luckiest plays is Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”– it seems to weave it’s own magic. The Water Street Theatre, however, has never found it. I don’t know why it eludes them. There is something about the composition of the company, the combination of actors and directors and scripts that just doesn’t work.

For one thing, Theatre and Company takes bigger risks than most community theatre groups, but never a really big risk. For another thing, they occasionally do something really dumb. And one of the dumbest things they do, about once a year, is a British play, in accent.

I think most fourteen-year-olds with a minor interest in theatre know that you should never do an accent unless you can do it well. Alan Sapp, who played C.S. Lewis in “Shadowlands” can’t do it. Not even close. In fact, embarrassingly distant. I don’t think he uttered a single compound sentence all night without wavering back and forth, between British and Canadian. The result was like watching Tonya Harding skate: sure, she’s got the training and the outward skills, but she can’t hide the trailer park make-up or the bingo-hall manners.

The accent wasn’t the only problem. Sapp was surrounded by actors, good ones, who knew timing and intonation and rhythm, and proved over and over again that he didn’t. And in scenes with Linda Bush as the dying Joy Gresham, he displayed all the warmth and sensitivity of a buccaneer. He emoted towards the audience mostly.

One of the reviews tacked up in the theatre lobby claimed that the only good thing about the second act was Sapp’s brilliant performance. I think this reviewer confused style with substance here. Sapp raised his arms often and gestured towards the audience and hammered away at his lines like a good thespian should. But none of it belonged in the play. There was a dying woman on the bed, but Mr. Sapp might as well have been standing on a soapbox, or a pulpit.

I never liked C.S. Lewis, and I never understood why he was so popular with Christians. He was really a stuffed shirt, a prig, and he held archaic views on almost everything. The charm of his Narnia stories has always eluded me, and as an apologist for Christianity, none of his ideas were new or particularly convincing.

Posted on

Nixon vs Clinton

Many Republicans in the U.S. have publicly compared the Monica Lewinsky scandal with the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration. Some of these same Republicans used to say that Watergate was nothing more than politics and Nixon should never have been forced to resign. Nixon used to say so himself. So if the Lewinsky scandal is similar to Watergate, then I guess they are saying that Clinton shouldn’t resign either.

Just to set the record straight, I thought I would render a public service by offering a short refresher on Watergate.

In the early planning stages of the 1972 election campaign, a night watchman at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. spotted some masking tape over a lock on a door leading to the National Headquarters of the Democratic Party. He called the police and several men were arrested and charged with burglary. At the hearing before a District Court, one of the men admitted that he had been an employee of the CIA. A reporter for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, got curious about this connection and started investigating the case more thoroughly.

So Watergate began with a criminal act. A criminal act is a violation of the public laws of the land. The Lewinsky affair, of course, began with a case of adultery. And because Lewinsky was a consenting partner to the offense, there was no criminal act involved (though the Republicans made more than a passing attempt to characterize Clinton’s actions as “sexual harassment”, because it involved an employee. Republican House Leader, Newt Gingrich, at precisely the same time, was having an affair with one of his own office employees, while his wife was ill with cancer!)

A few months later, Bob Haldeman, one of Richard Nixon’s top aides, informed the President that the FBI was investigating the burglary. Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell the FBI to stop their investigation, and he agreed to a payment of “hush money” to the burglars. This is called “Obstruction of Justice” in legal terms and is a serious criminal offense, especially when it is committed by a public official entrusted with the authority to enforce the law.

There is no evidence that Clinton attempted to use his office to influence the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Even if you believe the worst case scenario, that Clinton asked Lewinsky to lie to the Special Prosecutor, no sane person would regard such activity as being in any way comparable to authorizing the disbursement of bribes or attempting to interfere with the criminal investigation of a burglary of a political party’s national headquarters. We should add that the burglars were attempting to plant listening devices on the phones in the offices of the Chairman of the Democratic Party. This certainly goes beyond what Nixon liked to characterize as “dirty tricks” when discussing other acts of sabotage conducted by his underlings during the election campaigns. At the core of the Watergate scandal, there were a number of discrete criminal acts, and the cover-up was intended to prevent the men who committed these acts from being caught. As much as the Republicans would like to suggest that Clinton’s attempts to conceal his affair with Monica constituted a similar act of malfeasance, it is absurd to say that because both Nixon and Clinton tried to conceal that they were concealing actions that were substantively similar.

Nixon’s legal advisor, Charles Colson, was instructed to keep a list of “enemies”. This list included political commentators like CBS’s Daniel Schorr, liberal activist performers like Paul Newman, and other public figures and journalists. The Internal Revenue Service was instructed to conduct thorough audits of the tax returns of many of the people on the list. This is a rather serious abuse of authority.

Nixon’s staff hired former CIA employees to break into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a coordinated attempt to discredit the well-known source of “The Pentagon Papers”. This, of course, again, was a criminal act. We don’t know if Nixon knew about it before it was carried out, but he definitely knew about it afterwards and again authorized a cover-up.

Nixon ordered secret bombings of Cambodia despite legislation which clearly required him to inform Congress promptly of such measures. He ordered his staff to lie about the bombings before a Congressional Committee. As a result of these bombings, the government of Cambodia was destabilized and subsequently over-thrown by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge conducted wholesale massacres afterwards, leading to the deaths of millions of Cambodians. The U.S. was already in a state of undeclared war with North Viet Nam (no official declaration was ever made). The bombing of Cambodia was a very serious violation of the rights of a sovereign nation.

Nixon’s personal choice for Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was charged with influence peddling and extortion and forced to resign. I suppose it’s not a crime to select a criminal to be second-in-line to the office of President of the United States, but it ought to be. Al Gore, on the other hand, is squeaky clean.

Nixon fired the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, after the Supreme Court ruled that the President must accede to his request to turn over the secret tapes of conversations held in the Oval Office shortly after the Watergate break-in. Had he not resigned, this action alone, which was in defiance and contempt of the highest court in the nation, would have been almost certain grounds for impeachment. When Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, refused to fire Cox, Richardson was fired. When Richardson’s deputy refused to do it, he too was fired. FBI agents were then ordered to seize the offices of the Special Prosecutor.

The move backfired, and alienated even some of Nixon’s staunchest supporters. He was forced to back down and appoint a new Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who promptly renewed the demand for the tapes.

Having exhausted his legal options, Nixon finally turned over some of the tapes, after announcing that several were missing and that one of the key tapes had an 18-minute gap. Nixon denied that he had ordered the destruction of evidence, but it stretches credulity to believe that he was unaware of the gaps or missing tapes until the day he finally turned them over to the Special Prosecutor.

The tapes revealed that Nixon had in fact participated in the cover-up, ordered the destruction of evidence, ordered his staff to lie to Congress and the Special Prosecutor, ordered hush money to be paid out to informers out of a secret fund controlled by the White House, and had openly suggested that intimidation and extortion could be used to obstruct the investigation. More significantly, the tapes demonstrated that Richard Nixon believed that he was above and outside of the law. The conversations reveal a petty, insecure, vindictive little man who thought nothing of using the privileges of his office to lash out at political enemies and intimidate those who thwarted his plans. When he tried to use “Executive Privilege” to hide evidence of his wrong-doing, he became a genuine threat to the rule of law and the democratic process and to the institutions of accountable government. His crimes were very serious and, had he not resigned, he deserved to be impeached, and he would certainly have been impeached, and a large number of Republicans, (including present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen), would have joined the Democrats in voting for impeachment.

To compare the Lewinsky affair to Watergate is ludicrous.

Posted on

The Wrong Issue: Welfare Bums in Ontario

A surprising number of my friends and acquaintances absolutely agree with Mike Harris when he says he wants to kick those lazy free-loaders off the welfare roles and put them back to work. Why should the government subsidize able-bodied adults who should be out there working? Why am I working hard just so my tax dollars can pay for you to have a good time?

Maybe I agree, maybe I don’t. The thing is, I don’t think most people realize how much a smoke screen this issue is.

The thing is, when the government writes a check for $450 to Mabel Smith (not a real person) and her two children because she doesn’t have a job and needs to pay for her apartment and food, we cry “hand out”! Welfare bum! Parasite!

But when a corporation receives a tax exemption…. we get confused. The government doesn’t give Molson Breweries, for example, a check, so it isn’t a handout… or is it?

You tell me: what’s the difference? There isn’t any. If Molson owes the government $10 million in taxes on it’s net profits and the government says, hey, tell you what, pay me $5 million instead, what we have is the government giving Molson’s $5 million dollars as surely as if they handed it to them in small denominations in a little black briefcase. If it was true, this would be a massive government “hand-out”. It would be unfair.

Well, the government does this all the time. It does it when it allows corporations to deduct the cost of renting a box at the Skydome as a “business” expense. It does it when it allows corporations to pollute the environment without paying the cost of cleaning it up. It does it when it uses tax money to pay for sports stadiums, or when it defers taxes on a new factory, or subsidizes the cost of electricity for aluminum plants. It does it when it builds highways and bridges for the cars manufactured by Chrysler, GM, Ford, and Toyota. It does it when it helps bail out the banks that made stupid loans to third world despots who used the money to buy weapons from American manufacturers. It does it every time two businessmen go out for lunch and bill their expense accounts.

The most egregious example of this kind of lavish government subsidy of the rich is, of course, professional sports. The Minnesota Twins are, at this moment, demanding that the hardworking taxpayers of the State of Minnesota fork over about $400 million to pay for a new stadium for the Twins. The owner of the Minnesota Twins is a billionaire. But, he weeps, he can’t afford a new stadium. The old stadium, built to last 30 years, is only 15 years old, but it doesn’t have a private entrance for the boxes, you see, so those rich people actually have rub shoulders with ordinary plebes on their way to their exclusive, private, privileged seats.

At the same time, these idiot owners are offering their players contracts for up to $100 million over seven years. Everyone on the face of the earth knows that this is insane, but most people seem to think that it doesn’t directly affect them because they don’t go to many professional sporting events and if the owner wants to squander his money like that, so be it. The truth is though that you and I are paying Joe Carter $6.5 million to hit 25 home runs and bat .240 this year, because we paid for the Skydome with our tax dollars and the money that the Blue Jays didn’t have to pay for a stadium was thereby freed up to pay for their players. Just to add insult to injury, they gave the exclusive food concession rights to McDonald’s so they could charge twice the regular price for a hot dog. You would think that since we paid for the stadium we could at least get decent food at a fair price. And, of course, McDonald’s is thereby getting a government subsidy. Where are all the free market believers when it really matters?

This is madness. This is insane. This is the product of a society that is full of macho sports freaks who get visibly upset when they hear about a welfare mother spending $30 of her money on booze and cigarettes instead of food but stare with envy when see a basketball star show up with his two bodyguards. What that welfare mother should really do is learn how to play baseball.

The solution is simple. The reason Minnesota even considered subsidizing the stadium for the Twins was the threat to move the Twins to another town that would be willing to pay for a stadium. (Minnesota turned them down). It should be illegal for any town or any state or province to subsidize, with tax dollars, a professional sports stadium. All of the other subsidies should also stop, including “hidden” subsidies, like the costs of dealing with environmental damage caused by factories and industries.

Every corporation should be required to clean up after themselves– if they complain that they can’t afford to do this, they shouldn’t be in business. Should car manufacturers pay to build roads? They’ll scream bloody murder. They’ll say that it would make cars too expensive. Well, isn’t that a thought! You mean the real cost of cars is far higher than the sticker price? How about the cost of bodily injuries caused by speeding? Maybe we should have built up the public transit services instead of the highways. Maybe we should have more trains and buses today and less Firebirds and Intrepids. Read the history of the development of our cities: this idea is not as far-fetched as you think.

Finally, no bank– including the IMF– should be allowed to loan money to any government that is not certifiably democratically elected. Why should the people of Brazil or Argentina pay for F-14 fighter jets ordered by the illegal governments that ran those countries in the 1970’s? Do you know what those jets were used for? Nothing. Do you know where the money is coming from to pay back those loans? It’s coming out of the schools and hospitals and development projects that are needed to help the average people of these countries survive.

Either that, or we should learn to shut up about welfare recipients.

Posted on

Damien Echols

Unless his appeal to the Supreme Court succeeds, Damien Echols is going to die some time in the next year or two. He was charged with the murder of three little boys in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. After a trial in which no conclusive physical evidence was presented, he was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

I think most people, even if they occasionally become aware of some negligence or corruption involving the police, generally believe that justice gets done and that bad guys get caught and life goes on. Give a thought, if you will, to Damien Echols, and to Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard, and Donald Marshall.

The most disturbing thing about the Guy Paul Morin case to me was not that the police made a mistake. (If you believe the police themselves, 99% of the time they are faultless.) It is the fact that the methodology used in handling the evidence was designed not to investigate the crime and identify a suspect, but to make a case against a suspect they had already decided was guilty. And they decided he was guilty because, well, he was a little weird. He was single and lived with his parents. He liked to play the recorder. And with the public very upset about the rape and murder of little Christine Jessop, there was a lot of pressure on the police to make good their mandate as protectors of the weak. Maybe they really believed Morin did it. Maybe they were happy to have a reasonably believable case. Maybe they were just plain incompetent. The bottom line is, the evidence against Morin was never very good but the police and the crown attorneys decided to pursue the case against him anyway.

If you look closely at the Donald Marshall and David Milgaard cases as well, the similarities are striking: shady informants, suppressed evidence, and intimidated or bribed witnesses. In each case, the police decided first who the suspect was. Then they seemed to see their task as that of playing a game, moving the correct pieces along a board until they had achieved the desired result, a conviction, without any regard for the truth. Along the way, they consciously discarded any evidence which might have implicated other suspects.

The pattern is repeated in the Damien Echols case in Arkansas, except the circumstances are far more egregious than they were in any of the three recent Canadian wrongful convictions.

On May 6, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys (Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore) were found in a creek in Robin Hood Hills near West Memphis, Arkansas. The police investigated of course, but couldn’t identify a suspect. In fact, it appears likely that they let the man slip right through their fingers, when an officer was called to a local restaurant after a man covered in dirt and blood entered the woman’s washroom. The officer refused to go in and the man left. Blood samples taken the next day were conveniently misplaced by the time the trial rolled around.

With no other likely suspects at hand, the police turned the focus of the investigation onto Damien Echols, a local teenager who was known to be “different”, by local fundamentalist Christian standards. Damien wore his hair long, dressed in black, listened to heavy metal bands like Metallica, and talked weird. The cops were familiar with him and didn’t like him. And some of the cops, fresh from a workshop led by a hopelessly inadequately trained “psychologist” on satanic cults, became convinced that Damien was their man.

I won’t go into all the details of the pathetically incompetent investigation, the politics, the leaks to the press, the intimidation, the bloodlust of the citizens. The details are available on the Internet at www.gothamcity.com/paradiselost.

Better yet, there is a riveting documentary on the case called Paradise Lost. Suffice it to say that the police had their suspect…. but no evidence. This might prove to be an obstacle to the average citizen, but the West Memphis Police were nothing if not resourceful. They pressed forward with the case anyway. Jurors aren’t necessarily bright, and the defense lawyers in town are even dumber than we are. What if we just make the guy look like some kind of weirdo Satan worshipper? Then we won’t need any evidence:

The judge took one look at the prosecution’s hopelessly inadequate “case” and tossed it out right? In America, you can’t convict someone of a crime without proof, right? Yeah, right. Maybe in a Disney film. The police tried to pressure Damien into a confession, but he was too smart for them. Well, how about Jessie Misskelley, a boy distantly acquainted with Damien, and very susceptible because, after all, he had the mental age of a five-year-old. It only took eight hours of relentless intimidation to get Jessie to sign away all his rights and make a “confession”. Never mind that the confession was incorrect about all the important details of the crime, and never mind that, as a developmentally delayed youth, his constitutional rights were ignored. The confession implicated Damien and Jason Baldwin and the two were arrested. And once Jessie realized that he was not going to be freed in exchange for his “help”, as promised, he immediately recanted his confession and denied any involvement. And never mind that he was placed by witnesses 30 miles away from the crime scene at the time the murders were committed… well, you get the idea.

The odd thing is that the dubious confession wasn’t even admitted into evidence at the trial of Damien and Jason. And without the confession, there was virtually no evidence at all. No motive. No weapon. The police couldn’t even demonstrate that they knew where the crime had taken place. The prosecution merely characterized Damien as a member of a Satanic cult (he was actually interested in Wiccan, not Satanism) and let slip that Jessie Misskelley had confessed and been convicted for the crime as Damien’s accessory… and the jury, which surely barely exceeded Jessie’s capacity for reasoning, convicted him. Even more preposterously, Jason Baldwin was convicted, apparently for the simple reason that he was a friend of Damien’s.

Damien was sentenced to death by lethal injection, Jason to life imprisonment. It is only through the good fortune of having HBO present with their cameras that their predicament got any attention at all. Even so, the appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court (howdy y’all) failed, and Echols’ only hope right now is an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, loaded with all those tough-on-crime justices that Reagan and Bush have been appointing for the past fifteen years.

It is hard to have any faith in humanity after becoming acquainted with all the facts of this case. But, hey, let me really add to your cynicism:

  • Mark Gardner, a fellow death-row inmate at Arkansas State Prison, has confessed to repeatedly raping and beating Damien Echols.
  • Damien Echols’ parents separated after the guilty verdict. In the fall of 1993, two men argued over Echols’ mother, Pam, while his father watched. One man shot the other dead.
  • Mr. Misskelley, Jessie’s father, inadvertently destroyed his house trailer while trying to move it in the summer of 1995. Later he accidentally set fire to himself and was burned over 75% of this body.

The families of the victims did not fare much better.

  • Melissa and John Mark Byers were arrested for burglary.
  • John Byers, who admitted beating his son with his belt the day of the murders, was charged by a neighbor with whipping their five-year-old boy with a fly-swatter and firing shots at their house.
  • Mrs. Byers was later charged with assaulting a pair of carpet installers after threatening them with a shotgun.
  • In March 1996, Mrs. Byers died under suspicious circumstances. It took more than six months for a toxicological analysis to be completed: it showed significant levels of an illicit drug was in her system at the time of death. Mr. Byers moved away, complaining about how weird his neighbors were.
  • Diane Moore ran over and killed a 26-year-old woman and was charged with vehicular manslaughter.
  • Terry Hobbs beat his wife with his fists, was confronted by his brother-in-law, whom he shot in the abdomen, and was charged with aggravated assault.

These are the normal, law-abiding citizens the police in West Memphis sought to protect from the deadly and dangerous Damien Echols?

From the documentary, Echols, who dominates the second half, comes off as the most intelligent and articulate persons in West Memphis, which, I guess, does make him “different”. But he was foolish enough to be cryptic, though honest with the police and in court when he would have been wiser to be silent. His attorneys did not adopt a wise strategy and it is only in comparison to them that the prosecution’s efforts resembled a “strategy” at all.

It is hard not to despair for humanity. First there is the atrocity of the murders, and the fact that the perpetrator is still free. Then there is the graceless lust of the victim’s families for revenge. Then there is the gross incompetence and negligence of the police. The hack of a judge. The phony “expert” on Satanic cults. The gullibility of the jury. The facetiousness of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The disgusting political machinations of senior politicians who fear that a concern for justice will be misinterpreted as softness on crime. The subsequent disasters in the lives of the victims.

A sensitive person could be forgiven for wanting to opt out of the human race. Let me confess that when I was younger, especially when I was in college, I thought there was a certain worldly-wise cache to this kind of cynicism. Secretly, we assumed that we would be proven wrong, that the world could be better, and that we would be admired for being aloof from it all. Well, I’m over 40 now, and the glamour of it has worn very thin indeed. Nowadays, it’s just depressing.

Posted on

Seymour Hersh does an Albert Goldman on John F. Kennedy

Reporter Seymour Hersh has just published a book on John F. Kennedy in which he attempts to trash the late President’s memory by making allegations of sexual and political misconduct. In recent interviews, Hersh sounds like a victim himself, complaining about the terrible backlash which is making the response to his revelations concerning the My Lai massacre tame by comparison. He also acts as if he has discovered something new and shocking and should be admired for courageously  bringing it to the attention of the public.  One could almost believe him if he weren’t touring around promoting the book, and if the book was about anything other than titillating scandals.

Well, the public can be pretty stupid, and I think Hersh is counting on that. Informed critics have already lambasted the book as a rehash of rumours and rumours of rumours that have circulated for years. But the public will lap it up, the way it lapped up similar books on Elvis, John Lennon, and Princess Diana.

What about Kennedy? Was he a bad president? Those who think he was a lousy president can be divided into two schools of thought. The Hersh school, which might number a few liberal Democrats among them, thinks of Kennedy as a immensely successful fraud because he seemed more interested in sex than legislation. He had lots of personal charisma, but no real agenda. The conservative school thinks of Kennedy as a fraud because he was too interested in legislation, and the legislation he did present was bad because it was sometimes– but not always –liberal.

Both schools of thought miss the point. They don’t even come close to the mysterious allure of Kennedy and why so many people continue to admire him and mourn his death. For the answer to that question, one need only view some of the tapes of Kennedy’s press conferences. JFK remains the only President since FDR who seemed capable of thinking on his feet. He was witty and smart and reasonable, and didn’t sound like a whiney hack the way Nixon and Carter did, or a smug ignoramus like Bush and Reagan. Oddly enough, the only other President in recent times who was anywhere nearly as articulate was Johnson, who has an undeserved reputation as a loser.  Reagan was all folksy and down to earth and if that’s what passes for poetry in your household, so be it.  Nixon could be articulate, but he could not be gracious or reasonable: he was too small-minded and vindictive. And he hated Kennedy with a passion, for he knew, better than anyone else, that Kennedy had all the great attributes that he didn’t have. Above all else, Kennedy was confident and self-secure, and those are good qualities in a leader.

It is quite possible that, had Kennedy lived, he might have turned out to be a failure, but I think it unlikely. Without a doubt, he would have been less popular, because he would have had to make at least some unpopular decisions. There are some strong indications that he would have pulled the U.S. troops out of Viet Nam altogether, which would have saved America a decade of agony. He was leaning towards the right decisions on the immensely important civil rights issue. His brother, Bobby, as Attorney General, attacked the mob and corrupt union officials with a tenacity that has been unmatched before or since (instead, we have the colossal fraud of the “war on drugs”, $50 billion spent in four years on increasing the street value of heroin, thereby increasing the number of dealers). Above all else, Kennedy was modern in a sense that no President since was modern. He understood the passion of youth for change, for reform, for social justice, and he seemed actively engaged in trying to accommodate this passion within the realities of U.S. politics.

The shock that many of us felt after his death was more than grief for a dead leader, for Kennedy seemed to be a fundamentally decent, intelligent man. Our grief was permutated with a sense of realization that politics was back in the control of the filthy, smarmy, corrupt, petty, small-minded wheelers and dealers who had controlled it before Kennedy. Or maybe it had never really left their control, and Kennedy’s bloody murder merely revealed the truth to us. Either way, Kennedy had transgressed this old order and paid dearly for it (unless you still believe in the myth of Oswald as a lone assassin). In some crucial way, it doesn’t matter whether he himself was free of the corruption that surrounded him: the youth of the 1960’s thought there was reason to hope, and, through Kennedy, thought it was possible to effect reforms through the power of government.

Today, there is Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich. Jesse Helms. Bob Dole. Eighty-five percent of congressmen get re-elected because once they are in power they are able to exchange legislative favours for huge amounts of cash from powerful Political Action Committees with which to attack their political opponents.  The average citizen doesn’t stand a chance of being heard, so most don’t even vote. It makes you want to puke.

Posted on

Modern Medicine

We were wrong about doctors and science.

For the past 100 years, we all thought that we were all living longer and healthier lives thanks to science and modern medicine. We could eat whatever we wanted, do all kinds of daring things– like lock ourselves into two tons of jagged metal and glass and hurl ourselves down the highway at 100 miles per hour– and cover the earth with refuse and soot, and still live longer and longer and longer.

Life expectancy at the turn of the century was, oh, about 22. Now, men can expect to live to 75 and women to 75 and four days. And it’s all thanks to modern medicine.

Or is it?

Turns out, maybe it isn’t. Turns out maybe we don’t even believe it ourselves: everyone is flocking to alternative remedies. Got some strange rash on your bum? Go to a chiropractor. Stomach upset? Get a massage. Broken arm? Take some natural herbs and stick some needles into your arms.

Why are so many people doing this? There are a gazillion television programs telling us that doctors are smart and compassionate and nurses are beautiful and sexy. Why do we suddenly prefer tea enemas?

Maybe it’s because we discovered some kind of secret truth about doctors and hospitals. For one thing, an awful lot of people seem to die after seeing a doctor. For another thing, hospital food is pretty well uniformly bad.

We all have been raised to believe that science– doctors– saved us from the awful polio virus. That fact is like a totem of modern science, a cathedral: it hovers over us constantly, hammering into us the idea that science saves, that modern medicine can cure everything. But I was shocked a few years ago to discover that the incidence of polio had waned to practically nothing before Jonas Salk invented a vaccine for it. (Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.) All these years, we thought that science had saved us from polio, but it didn’t. It was something else. What was it? If the real doctors know, they sure won’t tell us. “Go home, eat a variety of foods, and stay out of wars.” Not good tv. The pharmaceutical companies sure won’t tell us. “This drug, which cost you 100 times more than it cost a vet to give to a hamster, will cure you if you take it tonight since we have figured out that most people go to the doctor just after a particular virus has peaked in strength and, therefore, will feel better the next day no matter what, so you might as well think it was the drug that did it so we can make zillions of dollars to invest in research so that some day we might be able to copyright your DNA and sell parts of it to other people.”

But we’re all living longer, aren’t we? So if it wasn’t science and medicine that saved us, what did?

Probably, the simple abundance of relatively nutritious food. You may think about McDonald’s and laugh, but it might surprise you to know that even a Big Mac has some nutritional value. You can walk into a McDonald’s and pick up a Big Mac and some fries and a milk shake pretty well any time you want to. That’s affluence. It wasn’t like that for thousands of years. Does a Big Mac sound nutritious? Not very. But consider a world in which many people didn’t even know if they were going to have enough food to last them through the winter.

So yes, we are fat and unfit, but we are living longer than ever, even though, if you believe the TV preachers, we are the most drug addled, promiscuous, violent, and pernicious generation that ever lived. Think about that! If even one tenth of what the TV preachers– and more than a few pulpit pundits–say about the human race was true, wouldn’t life expectancy be declining?

A few years ago, the doctors in Israel went on strike. A well-known study (so well-known I can’t remember the name of it) was done on mortality rates during the strike. It turns out they went down. Some people rationalized that this was because patients were forced to postpone surgeries, stop eating hospital food, and pay smaller health insurance premiums, but it’s not true, according to the researchers. The death rate actually went down. It went down and it stayed down. Eventually, the pr got so bad that the doctors went back to work without getting anything that they wanted. Maybe that’s the real reason there hasn’t been a doctor’s strike yet in Ontario.

Do you suppose that if church ministers unionized and went on strike, that the church might actually grow? Well, think about that a bit too. In our church, the Christian Reformed Church of North America, ministers generally spend a lot of time at big meetings hollering at each other about purity and orthodoxy and scriptural authority and the like. What if they just went out into the cities and cleaned up a few vacant lots and distributed sandwiches to the homeless instead?

Here’s another juicy piece of information: what professional group do you think declines surgical procedures more often than any other? You guessed it: surgeons. That’s worth thinking about a lot the next time your doctor recommends surgery to you.

I have one last little gripe: most of us are gradually coming to the realization that animals deserve a little more respect than we have been giving them in the past. We used to see animals as steak-fodder, beasts of burden, and incipient fur coats. Now, thanks to the extremists, we moderates are beginning to realize that animals are not all that much different from us. I mean, sure, lions and tigers kill indiscriminately, while we only kill when we really, really have to, like when our oil reserves are low so we can’t hurtle ourselves across the highways in our metal and glass behemoths anymore, but, basically, we’re not all that different. Then why does a vet get, like, 50 cents for doing surgery on a dog, while a doctor gets mega-bucks for doing surgery on a human being, like, say, Preston Manning? Does this make sense? Do you really believe that a doctor is that much smarter than a vet?

What I think we should do is de-regulate surgery. Let anyone do it. After all, the free markets have given us this wonderfully rich and meaningful lifestyle we all now share (unless you are lazy). Why not let it work its magic on medicine? If you get a few really, really bad surgeons setting up shop, hey, people won’t go to them after a while and they will go out of business, like Microsoft, so we will only be left with the best surgeons. And they will have to price themselves competitively or else people won’t go to them anymore, unless you are very rich, in which case you probably also pretty smart, in which case you wouldn’t go to a surgeon anyway. I mean, would you rather have some crackpot cutting into you with a knife or giving you a tea enema?

Posted on

What a Circus

Oh what a circus, oh what a show
Argentina has gone to town
Over the death of an actress called Eva Peron
We’ve all gone crazy, mourning all day and mourning all night
Falling over ourselves to get all, of the misery right.

[Evita – Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber]

Added March 12, 1998:

Crazy is right. Diana may be the most monumentally insignificant person of the 20th century. What I mean is that the scale of her media coverage exceeded her real importance by an unimaginable degree. Quick, name one thing Diana was good at? Name one of her “achievements”. Name one of her special talents or remarkable gifts? The truth is that any well-brought up girl could have done as well or better at the few things we think she was good at: smiling and giving short, inconsequential speeches.

And while the world wails about her death and spends millions of dollars on flowers and tasteless mementos, another 10,000 children will have died of starvation or malnutrition around the globe. But that’s the point, you see. In Diana’s death we feel validated as people. Look at me– I am weeping. I have a heart. I am compassionate. I have real human feelings! I supported her opposition to land mines and her concern for AIDS victims! I bought the Elton John record…

One last comment, if you can forgive me the cynicism: the height of these cheap emotions was reached with Elton John’s new version of Candle in the Wind. Just in case you didn’t know, Candle in the Wind was written for the memory of Marilyn Monroe, another physically beautiful woman who first courted, then seemed to despise media attention. Then it was rededicated to AIDS victim Ryan White.

I think it was a monumental miscalculation on John’s part to not write a new song for Diana. It makes the whole thing look cheap and tawdry. And British.

What’s the matter Elton– can’t come up with anything new anymore?!

Marilyn Monroe, depressed, and alone in spite of her popularity, probably committed suicide (some paranoids believe the Kennedys had her snuffed). “Candle in the Wind” was a beautiful song that captured something of the tacky ambivalence with which we adore then destroy celebrities (the prurient curiosity about the fact that her body was found “in the nude”).

So Elton John and Bernie Taupin took this sensitive, honest song, and quickly rewrote it to accommodate Princess Diana’s funeral. Unfortunately, they also debauched it. They removed the lines about how the media, ever exploitive, reported that Marilyn had been found in the nude, ironically proving that while overtly despising the media that “hounded” Diana to her death, Elton wishes also to provide a “tasteful” version of the lyrics for mass consumption.

Geez, you have to wonder if Marilyn, up there in the sky with all the other dead celebrities, feels a little jilted. Elton, you’re an idiot.

Posted on

Colin Powell’s Disgrace

When it comes to projecting potential Presidential candidates for the Year 2000, no name is mentioned with more awe and reverence than that of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. He seems to have an impeccable war record, having served honorably in Viet Nam. He is a black man who rose through the ranks to the highest position in the military. He bears the glow of military victory (the preposterously one-sided Gulf War). The media– especially Time Magazine–write fawning, adoring pieces about him. If he does run, it will likely be as a Republican, and the Republicans expect that he will garner the largest percentage of black votes in the history of the party.

General Colin Powell is a coward and a moral disgrace.

Firstly, let’s please toss out the Gulf War. Iraq is a tiny little country with a population of about 14 million (20% of which are rebellious Kurds) in a remote part of the world that happens to have a lot of oil. You heard me right: Iraq has–count them–about 14 million people. The United States, at 260 million, is about 18 times as large. So we have a 800 pound gorilla taking on a 45 pound weakling. Time Magazine tries to make you think that Iraq is huge and powerful by using distorted maps that show the country almost encompassing the globe.

Saddam Hussein is a petty, tin-pot dictator who can’t even count on the unabridged support of his own armies. The U.S. victory over Iraq was a masterful exercise in public relations. Militarily, it was the most one-sided battle in modern history: more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died compared to about 50 Americans. I am not exaggerating. This was not a “war”– a war has to have at least one or two battles. Had Schwarzkopf, Powell and company lost, it would have been the most ridiculously unbelievable result in the history of the world. Even Goliath was only three times the size of David. So don’t tell me that Powell was courageous or extraordinarily clever or “ingenious”— please. All he had to do was tell his men to point their nose cones or turrets at Baghdad and count out the medals afterwards (more than one per combatant). One look at the $50 billion in hardware bearing down on them and the Iraqi’s fled. Yet, with overwhelming military, political, and economic superiority the U.S. didn’t even succeed in removing Hussein from power. Nor did they “restore” democracy to Kuwait (the same fat cats rule as before). Considering subsequent events, this was a colossal failure. It was a failure of will, a failure of intelligence, and a failure of diplomacy. Powell deserves credit for looking very nice in his uniform.

Then there was Bosnia.

I can’t, in this space, give you a detailed history of the Bosnian conflict (check the Globe & Mail, or the New York Times Review of Books for some excellent summaries), but this is essentially what happened: Bosnia and Serbia were the two largest components of the former Federation of Yugoslavia. They became separate nations when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the late 1980’s. Bosnia, comprised mostly of Muslims, but with a substantial population of ethnic Serbs, declared itself independent in April 1992, and was quickly recognized by the U.S. and other Western powers. War broke out and in the first six months, Serbia– please don’t call it a “Christian” nation–, with the aid of a rebel force comprised of Bosnian Serbs, and with overwhelming military superiority, seized 3/4 of Bosnia’s territory. Within those same six months, at least 20,000 Bosnian Muslims–men, women, children–were systematically exterminated. This was quickly termed “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs themselves. Their intent was not only to conquer the territories of Bosnia, but to make it impossible for Bosnians to repopulate the area afterwards. The correct term was genocide. It was only the beginning.

It is well-documented (see the New York Times Review of Books , December 18, 1997) that George Bush and Colin “Neville Chamberlain” Powell were fully aware of the nature of this conflict by September 1991. The CIA (right, for a change) reported that Serbs were raping, beating, torturing, incarcerating and starving tens of thousands of Muslims, and that the Muslims, heavily out-gunned, were unable to resist. These reports were corroborated by reporters, U.N. officials, and aid workers. In other words, atrocities on a scale unseen since World War II were taking place in Bosnia while the Western Powers– which the U.S. tirelessly brags of leading– did nothing.

Actually, the U.S. did worse than nothing: they imposed an arms embargo on the entire region. This had the effect of preserving a huge military advantage for the aggressor, Serbia, and preventing a member nation of the U.N. from defending itself against massive, relentless terror. It was as if we had announced that to prevent the Nazi Holocaust, we should have prevented the Jews  and Nazis from getting any more weapons from us. There is good reason to believe that if the Western Powers had allowed Bosnia to arm itself, the conflict would have soon stale-mated and the world would have spared the hideous tragedy that followed instead.

It is important at this point to consider the two ghosts haunting U.S. foreign policy at this stage. They are the Holocaust (World War II) and the Viet Nam War. In the case of the former, the Western Nations waited too long before taking concerted action against Hitler, thereby allowing six million Jews to die in the concentration camps. The Western powers even refused to accept Jewish refugees from Germany in the early stages of the Holocaust, thereby proving, to Hitler’s satisfaction, that nobody wanted the Jews. After the war, the world collectively pledged to never again stand by and do nothing when confronted with such a monstrous evil.

In the case of Viet Nam, the U.S. embroiled itself in a war it could not win, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and paralyzing domestic conflict. After this war, the U.S. promised itself to never again get involved in a “quagmire”. Powell sees this failure as a lack of will on the part of the U.S. More sensible commentators observe that the U.S. intervened militarily on behalf of an unpopular, unelected, undemocratic government.

Colin Powell and George Bush looked at Bosnia and saw the Holocaust but chose to report to the American people that they saw Viet Nam and chose to do nothing to stop the genocide. Bush hoped it would go away by itself before the elections of 1992. When candidate Clinton attacked Bush’s inaction, Colin Powell, in a major speech given during the election campaign (which Generals should stay out of), declared that he would never allow U.S. soldiers to be committed to another Viet Nam-like quagmire. So here we had a General telling elected politicians just what kind of war he might be willing to fight if asked. Just who is running the country here? Powell should have been dismissed immediately, like McArthur, but his personal popularity was such that politically it could not be done. And why was he popular? I don’t know. Would he have been so popular in a business suit instead of a uniform with lots of medals on it? How about a waist coat and top hat?

The point cannot be made forcefully enough: Colin Powell, along with George Bush and Lawrence Eagleburger, and other foreign policy advisors are personally responsible for a policy that resulted in massive genocide. They created this policy in direct opposition to their own staffers who knew what was going on. Several of them resigned in disgust. Some privately cheered Clinton when he spoke out against the inactivity.

You might argue that their policies merely reflected a consensus of the U.S. electorate. However, polls taken during the presidential election in 1992 showed an alarming (to Bush) tendency among voters to favor some kind of decisive action. The average voter wasn’t so stupid as to think that the world should stand by and watch thousands of innocent women and children murdered in cold blood. The average voter didn’t believe that Bosnia was an inexhaustible quagmire that could never be saved. So Bush and Powell were not being merely politically astute when they decided not to intervene: they were also cowards.

We all went to see Schindler’s List and we all tsk-tsked and wrung our hands and then breathed a sigh of relief. The fact that this movie exists and even won a few academy awards proves that our society knows evil when it sees it and is prepared to do the right thing! Well, this movie took no courage to make: in hindsight, we were all in the resistance. If Spielberg had had any guts he would have done a movie on Bosnia because, yes, we did stand by once again, wringing our hands and shaking our heads, and we let it happen when we could have prevented it. And while Christian talk shows and magazine are all abuzz with Paul Marshall’s book on the persecution of Christians around the world, no one weeps for Sarajevo and Srebrenica.

It should be noted that Clinton’s performance on the issue was only marginally better. Once he was elected to office, he did everything he could to evade responsibility for his campaign promise to help the Bosnians. He sent William Christopher to Europe to get consent for military action but the Europeans were afraid of retaliation against the U.N. ground troops. This was convenient for Clinton because he could blame them, for a time, for his inactivity. The U.N. troops should have withdrawn immediately and air strikes should have commenced immediately. In the end, the Bosnian’s themselves rallied and took back some of the territory. By this time, the entire region was a cauldron of seething racial hatred.

Colin Powell’s actions during this crisis are morally indefensible and cowardly. I hope and pray that if he does choose to run for president, voters take a very close look at his performance and quickly relegate him to the dustbin of history where he belongs.