Book Notes 5: In the Aftermath of 9/11

This review essay was published in The Metro Herald on September 28, 2001, under the general heading of "Fathoming the Unfathomable." It was a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that month.

Book Round-Up:

New Publications Achieve Unintended Relevance

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Most publishing companies plan their seasonal lists far in advance. The lead time for a typical new book is at least a year, if not longer. Exceptions are made, of course, when current events dictate: Several “quickie” books came out after last year’s protracted election, for example, and we are no doubt going to see a number of books in the next few weeks about Osama bin Laden, terrorism, and Afghanistan that were either completely unplanned or in their early production stages when the events of September 11 caught us all (including publishers) by surprise.

It is rather chilling, then, to discover books on this fall’s lists that have remarkable relevance to the world since September 11. Here are a few of them.

Dr. Seuss Goes to War
The surge of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and severely damaged the Pentagon has reminded more than one observer of the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. December 7 and September 11 are no two dates “that will live in infamy.” In putting the United States on a war footing, President Bush has invited comparisons to President Franklin Roosevelt, despite the fact that it is fairly clear that the 21st-century war against terrorism will not involve the sort of mass mobilization of the general population that characterized World War II.

With these parallels in mind, it is fascinating to examine – “read” is not the most appropriate word here – the new paperback edition of Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, edited by Richard H. Minear (New York: The New Press, 272 pages, $17.95). The publication date was set for September 28 [2001].

Before he became the world’s most famous author and illustrator of children’s books, Dr. Seuss was a successful advertising artist, working in New York for Flit®, an insecticide as well-known in the 1930s as Raid® and Off® are today. (“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was a popular catchphrase.) Living on a comfortable income from that steady job during the Great Depression, Dr. Seuss became concerned as war broke out in Europe, and he began submitting editorial cartoons to PM, a short-lived (1940-48) New York daily newspaper with a decidedly left-wing bent. PM was associated with the “Popular Front” of pro-Communist, anti-fascist organizations, many of which were headquartered in New York at the time and which fed, and were fed by, a network of New York intellectuals. While Dr. Seuss apparently did not share his publisher’s pro-Communist sympathies – some of his cartoons actually lampooned Stalin – PM was happy to have his sharp wit and sharp pen contribute to the debate.

Dr. Seuss’s career as an editorial cartoonist was brief, barely two years, from January 1941 to January 1943, when he joined Frank Capra’s film unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. But in that short period, he created about 400 separate cartoons and caricatures. He viciously attacked the expected villains, such as Hitler and Mussolini, as well as people that we today, far removed from the moral and intellectual climate of the times, would find unexpected: Charles Lindbergh, for instance, who as part of the America First movement seemed to favor Germany and who was said to espouse anti-Semitic views.

Dr. Seuss also attacked slackers on the home front, whiners, windbag politicians, and racists and bigots. Several of his cartoons criticized employers who refused to hire blacks or Jews for war industries. At the same time, his characterizations of Japanese and Japanese-American figures were nothing but racist themselves. These not-so-benign Dr. Seuss cartoons are striking reminders of a dark time in U.S. history, when American citizens were herded into concentration camps simply because their skins were a different color, and their ancestors came from a different continent, than those of the majority.

What’s most fascinating, in looking at Dr. Seuss’s cartoons of 60 years ago, is the way they reflect the political debates at home in the months leading to Pearl Harbor, when the United States could not decide between assiduously protecting its neutrality and leaning towards Britain through the Lend-Lease Act, and continuing debates about how best to conduct the war in the months after Pearl Harbor. Just as today there are calls for national unity in the face of the terrorist enemy, so there were in December 1941 and throughout 1942 – calls that would not be necessary if there were not factions threatening that unity in word and deed.

It should be added, unfortunately, that much of the explanatory text provided by the book’s editor, Richard Minear, is unnecessary. For readers unfamiliar with the times, a bit of historical context is necessary, and Minear does a fairly good job in doing that. He goes overboard, however, in describing in detail cartoons that are included in the collection (as well as some that were left out; why any were left out remains a mystery), leading to a soporific effect. Another fault of the book is that the cartoons are not arranged in a simple chronological order; instead, they are grouped according to loose themes that seem to be idiosyncratically chosen. Despite these misgivings, this is a book worth recommending; it would even be interesting in the absence of historical parallels between 2001 and 1941.


The Brand New Kid
While Dr. Seuss Goes to War is not a children’s book, despite its title, The Brand New Kid is. Written by NBC News anchor (and Arlington County, Virginia, native) Katie Couric and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman, The Brand New Kid was published by Doubleday late last year (hardback, 32 pages, $15.95). We include it here because it is, as Couric notes in a brief introduction, “a springboard to talk about the importance of basic human kindness and compassion in our daily lives.” She wrote the book as a way to help parents “do a better job helping our children learn about tolerance and inclusion.”

Given the way in which Americans of Arab, Near Eastern, and even South Asian ancestry have come – literally – under attack in recent weeks, Couric’s book will be welcome in many classrooms and homes as it opens up discussion about how we treat people who are “different.”

In the case of The Brand New Kid, the protagonist – Lazlo S. Gasky – is not Arab, but vaguely Eastern European (perhaps a refugee from the upheavals of the fall of Communism?) who dresses funny and smells funny (to the other children in his new school). Before long, however, some of his classmates take the brave step to make friends with him, risking being made fun of themselves, and – this comes as no surprise, since Couric makes no attempt to be cynical – it turns out he’s not so “different” after all, and all the kids get along. An important lesson, told perhaps too simplistically, but one that needs repeating far too much.


Is Tolerance Possible?
A book intended for adults – indeed, for educated readers – asks whether religious tolerance is truly possible, even in a pluralistic society. In Getting Over Equality: A Critical Diagnosis of Religious Freedom in America (New York University Press, 214 pages, $45), Notre Dame University law professor Steven D. Smith points out the conundrum of religious tolerance: People who truly believe in their religions cannot admit the validity of other religious beliefs, which leads inevitably to a climate of intolerance.

The paradox of American history has been that, for most of the past 225 years, we have achieved a degree of religious tolerance unequaled elsewhere and in any other time. In a chapter entitled “The (Compelling?) Case for Religious Intolerance,” Smith points out:

“To the modern mind, at ease in a pluralistic culture, religious intolerance seems an anomalous and anachronistic vice, like dueling or racial bigotry. Human association is a presumptive good, after all, so why on earth should anyone be reluctant to accept and associate with others merely because they adhere to different faiths (or to none)? How does it hurt me if you profess a different creed than I do? The classic expression was Jefferson’s: ‘[I]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’

“From this perspective, religious intolerance seems a manifestation less of outdated thinking than of a failure to think at all; intolerance is an expression of that quintessential (although unexpectedly resilient) modern vice – ‘irrational prejudice.’ It is nonetheless important that we understand the case for religious intolerance, in part because an understanding will help us appreciate the development by which tolerance can evolve from a character flaw into a virtue, and in part because toleration is not a completely secure achievement; it is something that still needs defending.”

Indeed, recent events underscore the salience of Smith’s last sentence. We are learning today the price of religious intolerance worldwide, and the fragility of tolerance even in our own country. Smith asks about the American experience of general religious tolerance: “How has this achievement been accomplished?”

He replies, in part: “The answer is no doubt multifaceted, involving a combination of political, legal, religious, and cultural factors, and probably a certain amount of plain good fortune.”

Steven Smith has written a provocative book that deserves further attention in this time of religious and cultural introspection.


What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Finally, in the fortnight following September 11, Americans have raised and contributed more than half a billion dollars (that’s $500,000,000) to assist the recovery from the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings. That’s an incredible accomplishment and serves as an experiential rebuttal to the argument made by David Wagner, a professor of social work and sociology at the University of Southern Maine in his new book, What’s Love Got to Do With It? A Critical Look at American Charity (New York: The New Press, 210 pages, $18.95 paperback).

In a new-Marcusian mode, Wagner argues that charity in America is something of an illusion, “that America’s ‘virtue talk’ has a great deal to do with obscuring how little we as Americans actually do for people who find themselves in adverse circumstances. More subtly, America’s worship of giving, volunteering, and nonprofit human service work as the center of moral acts and heroic achievement allows the two other sectors of American life – the for-profit business sector and the government – to be legitimized.”

Wagner’s book deserves a more thorough review at a later time, but the juxtaposition of this month’s immense generosity and his crabbed vision was too much to ignore.

(This essay has also appeared, in a slightly different format, on Rick Sincere News & Thoughts, on September 30, 2005.)

'Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech' by Paulina Borsook

This book review originally appeared in the January 2001 issue of Liberty magazine (Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 52-54).  It has not previously been published on line.


Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, by Paulina Borsook. Public Affairs, 2000, 256 pages.

Cyberfoolish
Richard Sincere

Have you ever read a book that you simply could not set aside, so compelled were you to turn page after page after page? Perhaps it was Atlas Shrugged or Catch-22 or, in a lighter moment, a treatise on Swedish land-use planning.

Cyberselfish is not one of those books. In fact, I had to force myself to read it all the way through, much the same way one forces oneself to swallow bitter medicine, because I did not want to be accused, as a reviewer, of not fully engaging myself with the material. Of course, that would likely not be a problem for author Paulina Borsook, who goes to great lengths to avoid engaging the arguments she pretends to refute in this book.

Borsook is shocked, quite shocked, by the libertarian philosophy that infests Silicon Valley. (She limits her critique almost entirely to the high-tech world of Northern California.) Yet it is clear that her research did not include a single book by a libertarian thinker or about libertarianism. She mentions some books — such as Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies — in a feeble attempt to prove her credentials, but her lack of engagement with the arguments and her frequent errors of fact show her self- described credentials to be fraudulent.

Two examples of error leap out at the reader. In the introduction, she says the Libertarian Party “is the party that routinely nominates Harry Browne as its presidential candidate.” That’s like saying the Democratic Party “routinely nominates Bill Clinton as its presidential candidate.” It hardly takes into account the fact that in every election since 1976, the GOP ticket has included someone named Bush or Dole. And, for a book that was published on June 6, 2000 — one month before Harry Browne became the first person in the history of the Libertarian Party to be nominated twice as a presidential candidate — it demonstrates a high degree of ignorance of the Party’s performance, not to mention its core beliefs (more on this later).

Toward the end of the first chapter (titularly about “bionomics” but really about so much more), Borsook says the Cato Institute has been “hugely funded since the late 1960s and early 1970s” Borsook says the Cato Institute has been “hugely funded since the late 1960s and early 1970s” — a neat trick for an organization established in 1977! (66) — a neat trick for an organization established in 1977! Although Borsook acknowledges Cato’s pride of place in the libertarian pantheon — such as it is — she obviously knows nothing about the Institute itself, much less the philosophy that animates it. (On page 17, she says of Cato: “To them, government is fine for dealing with the anachronism of nation-states [foreign policy, defense, import-export hassles] but is irrelevant to all else and should just get out of our way.” Someone should alert Ted Galen Carpenter before he decries non-interventionism again.)

Not only does Borsook fail to engage her opponents, she often fails to sustain her own arguments long enough to bring them to a suitable conclusion. When I say she fails to engage her opponents, I do not mean she does not argue with them. She does, but more often, she merely mocks them. She does not even take the trouble to set up straw men to knock down. Instead, she avoids ideas and focuses on tone and attitude. (Borsook’s personal tone is a breathless, neo-Joycean style of stream-of-consciousness that is exasperating at best, frustrating at worst.)

In a series of anecdotes about conferences sponsored by The Bionomics Institute (TBI), later taken over by Cato, Borsook talks about the types of people there, how they dress, where they come from, their preferences of suburban locales over downtown conference sites. She never once mentions an idea the participants or the speakers address. For instance, in describing one conference speaker, Peter Huber, she cites a paper he wrote on telecommunications deregulation, asserting that it posited that “in the realm of communications, everything would interconnect and self-heal and route most efficiently if left on its own without the Great Satan of regulation and the devil would take the hindmost and, as I think it was said by a terror of the Counter Reformation, ‘God will sort them out'” (68), going on to explain this reference to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre — but never once telling us readers what Huber himself said, in the sense of quoting his spoken words at the conference or the text of the paper Borsook so colorfully critiques.

Nowhere in the book is there a mention of the non-coercion principle. Her only substantive mention of Ayn Rand is to attack — no surprise here — not Rand’s ideas, but her attitude (“her fiction demonstrates all the humorlessness, lack of irony, 2-D heroes, and political exhortation of the collectivist world she despised” [144]). The word “objectivism” cannot be found in the book. To Borsook, libertarianism can be summed up as the belief system of people “violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation,” while libertarians themselves are the embodiment of “nastiness, narcissism, and lack of human warmth” (5). She writes of “the most virulent form of technolibertarianism [as] a kind of scary, psychologically brittle, prepolitical autism” (15). No wonder she describes her “fascination” with libertarianism as one of “mongoose-to-cobra style” (4). She doesn’t have to understand the snake in order to kill it.

At the same time Borsook makes it clear which thinkers she admires, to wit: “The ‘Communist Manifesto’ has it right... Marx and his pal Engels had other relevant things to say about the spread of global capitalism (much more accurate for the description of what is happening at the end of our own century than at the end of his)” Borsook talks about the types of people there, how they dress, where they come from, their preferences of suburban locales over downtown conference sites. She never once mentions an idea the participants or the speakers address.(44).  And: “I am a Luddite — in the true sense of the word. The followers of Ned Ludd were rightfully concerned that rapid industrialization was ruining their traditional artisanal workways and villages. . . . like the Luddites, I am not so sure most change benefits most people” (47-48). (I guess that’s why stagnant, traditional societies in the Third World have the longest life spans, the lowest rates of illness, the lowest infant-mortality rates, universal literacy, such high standards of living, and such low levels of pollution. Oh, but they don’t, you say? My bad!)

Borsook’s eschewal of intellectual engagement goes a long way toward explaining why this book lacks a bibliography or references of any kind. One cannot list the works one has used for research if one has not read any articles or books on the topic one writes about. (At least no one will ever accuse Paulina Borsook of plagiarism.)

Some other writer may come up with a convincing critique of the rampant technolibertarianism” that Borsook has discovered in Silicon Valley. In order to do so, however, that writer must first understand what libertarianism is, who its major proponents are, and what those proponents say about it and about public policy issues as well as philosophy. Borsook has failed in all three tasks, and as a result has given us a dense, unreadable book about what could be an interesting and engaging topic.