Tom Watson

Trouble in the Heartland

Like many men of my age and geography, I will purchase just about anything Bruce Springsteen sells, and that includes his strange and raucous new release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, nominally a tribute to octogenerian folksinger Pete Seeger, but more broadly another small piece in Springsteen's ongoing reinterpretation of American culture. The record covers traditional folk material - no originals. It sounds entirely live, recorded with a wide-ranging group of musicians, the errant tuba occasionally reminiscent of Springsteen's whirling, precocious early sound.

Being both a careful producer and a careful liberal, Springsteen is always controlling about both his musical releases and his statements. But this record is sloppy, haphazard. So is the message, but the results are less joyful. Because there in lineup is that old folk warhorse, the Ballad of Jesse James - and because of it, the calliope crashes to the ground.

Everybody knows the song, and perhaps in its inherent long-standing myth, there's an innocence that calls for forgiveness to actual history, at least for aging rock musicians:

Jesse James was a man
And he killed many men
He robbed the Glendale train
And he took from the rich
And he gave that to the poorer
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain

History tells a different tale. Skip the heart - in history, Jesse James had a hand, and a gun, and a brain - that brain belonged to the lost cause of the Confederacy, to race hatred, and to revenge. And the gun belonged to American terrorism.

Jesse James was terrorist who killed without compassion. The record on that is clear. Oh, he wasn't the mastermind of a movement like Osama bin Laden (that honor in the Border Wars belonged to the hate killers Bill Anderson and William Quantrill), but he certainly was of the ilk of killers like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasser, and others on the U.S. most wanted list of international terrorists. And the U.S. government, on behalf of its terrorized civilian population in Kansas and Missouri and the midwest, hunted Jesse and his brother Frank and the rest of their gang with at least the relentless passion we now employ against killer hiding in Pakistani provinces.

Author T.J. Stiles wrote a brilliant revisionist book a few years back that tore the cover off the James myth (created largely in the 20th century, long after his death at the hands of bounty hunter Robert Ford). Jesse James : Last Rebel of the Civil War is a terrific page-turner, but it's also terrifying to those who believe in the ancient values of the American heartland, who go for the Disney view of the Civil War's aftermath, western expansion, and the deadly growth pains of our nation. It's surprising that Springsteen hasn't read it, and that musicians like Seeger and Van Morrison (who also prominently covered the ballad) don't have a clue as to the real story.

Under a greater "lost cause" movement led by Quantrill after the Confederacy to punish pro-Union supporters in Missouri, James and his ilk engaged in ritual torture, murder, scalping, dismemberment, attacks on unarmed civilians, destruction of property, and general violent mayhem. They also lined their own pockets. But James is remembered primarily because of his canny use of the media of the day, mainly pro-Southern newspaper publishers who created in him a Robin Hood figure for the lost cause of the South. "In his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes," wrote Stiles. "Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist."

There is nothing but religion and modern munitions technology to seperate the Quantrill/James movement of the midwest from the al-Qaeda of today. Yet, when Stiles' book reached the Amazon best-seller list a few years ago, some reviewers attacked it as "anti-southern." In an instant, you could see the distant, historic connection between the defeat of the Confederacy and its violent aftermath and the successful "Southern Strategy" of Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, which leveraged the chip on the South's historic shoulder to provide stunning electoral success - and reward the very political party that Southerners once believed had ravaged their culture forever. Steve Gillard writes about this quite often, under the banner of not letting the GOP off the hook (and I think, under the hope that the strategy is on its last legs in 2006). He has another good post on the traditional Reagan-based Stars and Bars strategem; here's a piece:

There are two Confederacys, one of history and one of imagination.

The one we deal with today is of imagination.

The one of rebel flags and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the cult of the dead rebels.

It has little to do with reality.

The real Confederacy was closer to Biafra than Nazi Germany. A poor, break away Republic destined to be crushed by the larger neighbor.

The reason you get people like Jim Webb playing cute and George Allen praising the Confederacy has to do with how the Confederacy was resurrected in the postwar period. It was about race and integration, not history.

He is exactly correct. And it's really not such a Southern Strategy any more - as Steve has said, it's a dissatisfied, disenfranchised whites strategy nowadays, going far beyond the borders of the Southern states. But it's showing its age and fraying at the edges as well, mainly because the economic reality for so many middle class white people is so starkly disadvantaged when compared to the wealth of those who actually run the Republican Party. These days, the civil rights battles of the old South make for good tourism in the new South. I've been the Birmingham and Montgomery recently - civil rights history is bringing the tourists in.

Still, this love of Confederate myth - the glorious lost cause - persists. A few years back, I was in Charleston on business and a friend and I took a walking tour of the old part of the city. Fascinating and beautiful. But in the old church downtown, there's a memorial to the martyred sons of "the nation" - and it's ain't the United States they're talking about. My friend was horrified, and vilified the local guide - who calmly described the pre-Civil War Charleston as a city in a golden age when African-American slaves had it pretty good. We passed on the Bobby Lee statues in the gift shop and decided on a self-guided tour from that point on.

Bruce Springsteen should know better. This pining away for the Confederate past and its post-war terrorist followers shouldn't make his latest record - no matter how traditional the tune is. The hero myth should die.

In Kearney, Missouri they still hold their Jesse James Festival every year - paid for partly with municipal funds - and the official history of the town on the Web still rails against the cruelty of "the Federals." A group of citizens gives tours at the nonprofit Jesse James Farm Museum, and raises money to preserve the hallowed ground.

Tourism, I guess - maybe someday there'll be a similar set-up in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Free Fallin'

Los Angeles is very old. Sure, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola led a little jaunt across southern California with Franciscan Padres Junipero Serra and Juan Crespi in 1769, naming a small stream "El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula." So it's as old as some of those quaint New England towns with their "established 1700" signs.

But I'm not talking conquistador old. I'm talking old, as in Dragnet old. Rockford Files old. Sanford and Son old. Mannix old. Really, really 20th century old. This place is ancient.

Strange how a New Yorker who has spent maybe a month [llifetime] on the West Coast could form such an opinion, especially a New Yorker sensitive to the grand, American history of his native Northeast states. But I'm near the end of a full week in Los Angeles (sorry for the lack of posts, TW fans), and man, it feels brittle and gray, and four decades past its prime.

The roads tell the story, of course. Roads with names worthy of celebration in the canon of California song: the works of Warren Zevon, Tom Petty, and a few others. The freeways are falling apart: they make the FDR look like a modern motorway. The traffic is worse than ever. Hollywood is - well - a cesspool on its way towards better packaging. Cary Grant is still dead, fellas. There are no more real movie stars, and the pretenders certainly don't live in Hollywood.

Still and all, when you glimpse the Capitol Tower, you get a zing. Sinatra and Nelson Riddle, knocking out those glam hits, baby. When you drive up into the hills, subdivided with nary a thought to zoning or natural forces, and see the little modern palaces clinging to grassy hairlips, their tiny patios jutting like preposterous chins over their neighbors, you get a sense of what was. Not the Spanish missionary what was; but the swinging era from the 30s to the 60s, from Crosby and Hope, to the Manson Family and the Stones.

That was more than 30 years ago. There are more office towers and corporate parks. More cars. Legacy neighborhoods like Beverly Hills (where I'm writing this on a balconly overlooking the downtown lights) and the boomtown of Santa Monica.

There was a day last week, however, when it all seemed real and good and the place to be - when I wasn't missing New York. That was the sun-filled day we drove out along Pacific Coast Highway, past the Colony, and then finally down toward a small cove by the ocean. The children explored the tidal pools, and rocks, and sand, and birds. We watched the dolphins spinning just off shore, had lunch with some cold beers and then motored to Westwood for a barbecue with some friends. A long day. A sweet day. And not as old as all that.

UPDATE: I got a terrific comment from an LA native that contrasts (and really complements) this late-night post, so I'm dropping it in here. Also, thanks to my bandmate Adam, I've been humming the Decemberists' Los Angeles, I'm Yours all freaking week.

Having grown up here, I'm actually finding it growing old in the right way. For a long while it seemed to have lost its way, maybe a decade, but now it seems to have found its footing as a grown up city. Its got its own laugh lines and crowsfeet now, not just from aping the Other Coast. And it seems like it finally has a healthy sense of its history and its mortality.

Oh, and Fred's right - Flickr rocks. Here are the pics.

Shout Outs

Quick words of recognition, praise and encouragement on this Monday evening:

- A hearty backslap and "well-deserved!" to newly-bestowed Pulitzeree Nick Kristof, who won his award for commentary today, partially for his columns on the slaughter in Darfur and particularly (in this blogger's eyes) for introducing the world to the magnificent human strength of Pakistani hero Mukhtaran Bibi. Now if only the Times would tear down their egregious wall.

- Best of luck to the Rev. Tom Watson in the New Orleans election. Sure, the name is pure magic. Goes without saying. But the Rev. Tom - himself a refugee in Texas post-Katrina - seems a real strong candidate in a crowded field, possibly a unifying force. As my parliamentary namesake points out, there are at least two Democratic TW's active in the nation today. UPDATE: The TW connection is called out by, well, this TW, the one with the cool extra "h." And funnily enough, I also received an email today asking for advice on a vintage Fender Stratocaster from well-known guitar writer (and editor of Strat Collector), the fretful Tom Watson. Wrong guy, of course. I play a Tele.

- Finally, a throaty whoop for another great Democrat and his triumphant colleagues: young Carlos Delgado, who went yard (as the roustabouts say) in tonight's big Pedro Martinez win over the formerly dynastic swells of the NL East, your Atlanta Braves. Mssrs. Wright, Reyes, Beltran, LoDuca, Nady, Floyd have the big cat at the center of their lineup - and good lefty Billy Wagner in the ninth. 10-2. A five-game lead. Echoes of '86?

Our Star-Spangled Banner

[Photo by Albert of the Philly blog - more great photos here]

With all their talk about invasions and threats to U.S. security, the American nativist right thought the traditional Republican melange of fear and flag would create a groundswell on immigration reform.

It did. But the flags are flying over millions on the march in L.A., in Phoenix, on the streets of Philadelphia, here in New York, and all across the national mall in Washington DC. They're American flags for the most part, brilliant red, white and blue in the spring sunlight. And they're swirled by the hands and arms of those who do a good bit of our manual labor - immigrants, legal and otherwise. Americans, new and not, proud of their myriad heritage but even prouder of being Americans.

The outpouring was not from the right-wing base, as hoped. Oh, immigration reform is in the wind alright - but it's not moving in the direction that people like Tom Tancredo, James Sensenbrenner, and JD Hayworth intended. It's moving the other way, entirely. By stirring the pot in a desperate attempt at a galvanizing issue in what is shaping up as a disastrous election year for the home team, the Tancredo Wing has pretty much ensured that immigration reform in the United States will lead to a liberalization of current law. One more trip to the well with the old fear-laden, us-versus-them cultural themes of Ronald Reagan's craven Southern Strategy has yielded disaster for nativist conservatives.

The Bush Administration, meanwhile, has handled this issue with all the characteristic skill it applied to creating a new civil society in Iraq. That is to say, badly - although the President himself favors liberalized immigration law, his neo-Reaganist political calculations always tilt toward the precious base - a base, by the way, that is sick of being played and not all that loyal or motivated going into November.

Blogger Maskow from USworldcast [via Steve] writes a smoldering, full-on blast on race and the voting right - dead-on, in my view:

White, fundamentalist, voters of the lowest Republican income-brackets have been feasted on God, guns, and gay-bashing. Finger-lickin' good distractions as their jobs and sometimes whole factories were sent overseas, their sons and daughters to war, their treasury into the pockets of profiteers and speculators, their legal protections into the shredder. Even as their incomes shrank they were exhorted to spend lest the terrorists win, fattening the credit card companies that eventually took away even the hope of bankruptcy. 

Long suckered into believing that they made enough money to be Republicans, there is the creeping realization that someone has made off with the till and they will be much poorer than when love was new. The sense of betrayal is rising. First to sense trouble in the herd is their long time leadership: talk radio.

The raw meat talkies may not sense that immigration has backfired, but keen Republican politicians like Senator Lindsay Graham and former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie clearly know it's a loser in a losing year. Here's Gillespie [via Joe] on immigration and the GOPs electoral strategy:

Hispanic voting percentages are increasingly decisive in swing states like New Mexico, Nevada, Florida, Colorado and Arkansas. Mishandling the immigration debate today could result in the Republican Party struggling in these states and others in the same way it now does in California. People who come legally to this country with nothing and labor in the most menial ways to get a new start should feel at home in our party. As a rule, they are hardworking, law-abiding, freedom-loving and patriotic Americans.

The so-called mainstream Republican center is also between a rock and hard place with another huge sector of the electorate: Catholics. Liberal, ethical, welcoming treatment of immigrants is a core guideline in the American Church, and has been endorsed strongly by the Bishops conference. Republican candidatess have seen massive gains nationally in Catholic voters over the last two decades. Fumbling immigration can roll that back, especially as leading Democrats march to the center on abortion rights.

If the GOP needed any reminder of this, there was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick front and center on the Mall yesterday. In his address to the crowd, delivered mostly in Spanish, according to the right-wing CNSNewsService:

McCarrick compared the protest to civil rights marches of the 1960s. "We must still fight against racial discrimination in our land," he said, adding that Catholics are in "prayerful protest against discrimination ... of the immigrant who comes to our country seeking a better life for himself and his family."

Cardinal McCarrick may as well have delivered a tough, blunt message to the Sensenbrenners and the Tancredos on the Hill: You want to make this a cultural battle? Game on!

UPDATE: Conservative pundit Michael Savage does not, er, agree: "And I say...to the politicians, I warn you personally. You will not be re-elected. If you take to the streets with the vermin who are trying to dictate to us how we should run America, even though they're not even entitled to vote or be here, you're going to be thrown out of office. The people will throw you out of office. There are not enough of them to re-elect you. You will be out of a job. You will not have a living. You will be hunting for a job. Maybe, you'll be picking the vegetables." Nice.

UPDATE II: Neither does Jack Cafferty: "March through our streets and demand your rights. Excuse me? You have no rights here, and that includes the right to tie up our towns and cities and block our streets. At some point this could all turn very violent as Americans become fed up with the failure of their government to address the most pressing domestic issue of our time ... where's the immigration service? Why don't they pull the buses up and start asking these people to show their green cards? And the ones that don't have them, put them on the buses and send them home." Very nice.

UPDATE III: Strangely, neither does James Farrah, founder of the intolerant (but widely read) WorldNetDaily conservative site (via Wolcott): "Every day now, it seems, hundreds of thousands of ungrateful human parasites rally in American cities condemning their host country's lack of hospitality...These invaders have made it easy for drug dealers, criminals and terrorists to hide behind the skirts of ordinary civilians." Very, very nice.

Hey, Typepad...

The software this blog and millions of other blogs use to publish is Typepad, run by Six Apart, based on its Movable Type platform. In more than two years, I have few complaints - especially as an erstwhile analyst/commentator whose modest output hardly taxes the system. It's great. But listen Six Apart: just do everything Bruno suggests. You will put your company in a stronger position, possibly able to head off the open source competition and make it to the next round. [Further, read what Fred has to say as well]. Typepad should be a first-mover, not second or third - yeah, it hosts millions but if it doesn't get out front with features and the open structure bloggers want, it's gonna end up like WordPerfect. Update: Mark Pincus wants your help moving off Typepad.

Mr. Nisenholtz, Tear Down This Wall!

The great hero of the modern world is a little less safe today because of a short-sighted, pig-headed, money-grubbing policy instituted by the most important newspaper in the world.

That newspaper is The New York Times,which has placed the Op-Ed columns and bulletin boards of the paper's columists behind a fee-wall. By doing so, it is cutting the distribution of the ideas generated by those columnists down by many factors of ten. When it comes to Mo Dowd's Bushwhacking, the anti-woman rants of John Tierney, or the dueling economic views of Krugman and Brooks my answer thus far has been a big, fat "so what?" Sure, the political blogs hate it - they must retype if they want to quote; more often, they ignore those columns now. But a newspaper's not a charity.

Then came Nick Kristof's latest piece about a personal hero of mine: the indomitable Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan. Those who have followed this blog know that Mukhtar Mai (also known as Mukhtaran Bibi) has become a cause of mine over the last year or so. Many of you, indeed, have posted links to my psots or written your own about her incredible story of government-sanctioned gang rape that ended not in death, but in redemption and generosity. Kristof is the guy who brought Mukhtar Mai to the world, who made her case a famous one, who pressured the Pakistani government and its junta to back off in their threats.

But now Kristof's columns are behind the wall known as TimesSelect, which requires a fee to read him online and to take part in his forums. Given, that Kristof's columns are among the foremost venues for charting human rights abuses worldwide, this is an unconscionable act by a paper that purports to hold the common good - and its own lofty responsibilty - as the highest ideal.

This week, Kristoff wrote that Mukhtar Mai's life is in serious jepoardy; that there are people in Pakistan - possibly in the regime - who want her killed. The more people who know this - and who comment on it, spread the world, discuss it openly - the less likely anything sanctioned by Pakistan will happen.

The guy behind the Times online is Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations. Now, I'm not suggesting Nisenholtz and the Times are guilty of anything but a terrible oversight; I don't think the guy should go on trial in The Hague or anything. Nisenholtz has, over the years, worked wonders with the Times online (note: I worked there back in the day as a columnist with Chervokas) and created both a revenue channel and a broader, younger audience for the Gray Lady. I can't believe that if Martin and his boss Arthur Sulzburger think this one over carefully that they wouldn't open up Kristof's section - and shine a bigger, brighter light on human rights cases around the world.

Here's what I typed to excerpt the story - please spread the word; visit the site of the ANAA, which has worked tirelessly on Mukhtaran's behalf and has some of Kristof's stuff up, along with a stirring video.

...Partly because of her success, there's a good chance that Mukhtar will be murdered. "The traditional landowners want me dead," Mukhtar said sadly. "And the government doesn't want me around, efther."

[snip]

President Pervez Musharraf is a modern man, and I'm sure he is privately repulsed by acid attacks and rapes. In some respects, he's doing a fine job — above all, he's presiding over a stunning 8 percent economic growth rate (those socks you're wearing may be manufactured in Pakistan). But Mr. Musharraf seems to feel that Mukhtar is casting a spotlight on Pakistan's dark side, so he is leading an effort to bully her into silence.

The authorities confiscate Mukhtar's mail and feed vicious propaganda to sympathetic journalists, portraying her as a liar, a cheat and an unpatriotic dupe of India (and of me).

"My life and death is in God's hands," she said. "That doesn't bother me. But why does the government keep treating me as if I were a liar and criminal?"

[snip]

Dr. Amna Buttar, an American citizen who has interpreted for Mukhtar in the U.S. and heads a Pakistani-American human rights organization that is supporting herf. According to Dr. Buttar, Mr. Shah started by defending the president's record on women's rights. But then, alluding to a planned visit by Mukhtar to New York, he added: "We can do anything. ... We can just pay a little money to some black guys in New York and get people killed there."

That's right. The racism is the least of it: one of President Musharraf's closest aides was warning that unless Mukhtar piped down, the government of Pakistan might murder her and her American interpreter on the streets of New York.

Shining a light. Isn't that the higher job of The New York Times? Doesn't TimesSelect interfere with that goal in this instance? Couldn't Kristof's columns be exempted? Nisenholtz is a smart media veteran who has done yeoman's work for a formerly staid, gray, conservative media empire. Sulzburger has spoken many times about the paper's great responsibility and role in society. Forget whether the Times is anti-blog or open source or supports "the conversation" - whether it pleases the RSS crowd - that hardly matters. Neither do a few extra dimes and nickels. The world's great hero is in danger.

Mr. Nisenholtz, tear down this wall!

Metsie, Metsie, Metsie

I saw the headline in my inbox: "Mitchell to Investigate Steroids in Baseball" and I thought: "Kevin Mitchell, strange choice!" Then another headline on CNN - "Rice and Straw in Surprise Visit to Iraq." Wow - finally a real lefty slugger on the Bush Dream Team, and a clutch hitter besides. Darryl with the troops, sweet idea.

I'm not kidding here: I actually thought these thoughts. Which shows either how out of it I can be day to day - or just how much baseball occupies my withered mind. Can't tell which. Doesn't matter. Season starts tomorrow. I'll be there. And things are more right with my world.

To business. The Mets will be very good this year, among the elite of the National League. Biggest reason? Bullpen. Perusing the rosters of other NL teams, it would seem the impossible has transpired. New York has the best, deepest pen in the league. Of course, Omar signed the league's top closer in Billy Wagner, he of the 100-mph fastball and the 40-plus saves. But a great closer does not a great team complete - look crosstown for evidence. The Yanks still have the amazing Mariano Rivera but the rest of their bullpen corps hasn't made the grade for more than half a decade. Aaron Heilman was the finest set-up in major league baseball the second half of last season, unhittable by lefties and barely touched by northpaws, but he handed the ball to Braden Looper. Now, although he wants to start, he gives the ball to Wagner. And not just Heilman: Duaner Sanchez, easily the most unheralded pick-up of the off-season, and Chad Bradford, the submariner. Way, way down are the project Jorge Julio (formerly the O's closer with a 95-mph fastball) and the heavily traveled Darren Oliver - both fifth and sixth inning guys.

Now, the rotation is not as deep and at the top, it's elderly and fragile. Pedro's toe has been a distraction, nothing more, and write him down for 17 wins. Trachsel will give you .500 and much innings. Zambrano is testy: unhittable today, Rick Ankiel wild tomorrow. Brian Bannister was a nice find but let's see where he is in July. No, the real key is 40-year-old lefty Tom Glavine. The question is this: do we get the first-half Glavine, who pitched no better than cranky Bob Feller could pitch today. Or do we get second half Glavine, with the gaudy 2.22 ERA and a new strategy of pitching inside, instead of nibbling for the near corners that the Questrec machine out at Shea no longer allows. We need that Glavine - and we probably need a deadline deal for a starter in his walk year. Chervokas thinks Zito. Good choice.

No worries about the lineup. Carlos Delgado instantly gives the Mets their best everyday look since Mex hit third in '86 - with an assist from the underrated Paul LoDuca. Reyes and Wright remain the beating heart of the team, with Lastings Milledge on Triple A deck waiting for tthe day when Cliff Floyd's aching body gives it up. Beltran will be improve. Nady will be fine. The Mets chose the wrong second baseman of the future (Keppinger's the guy) but it doesn't matter. This team will hit and generally catch the ball. It's loaded.

So last year, I predicted 88 wins and we got 83 - fading in August before a late run in September. Generally, my love affair baseball lenses bump my win total forecast upwards by four or five wins. So I'm thinking 97 or 98, which means 92 or 93. And I'm still thinking division title - the Braves' closer this year is Chris Reitsma. The Mets have Wagner and a bunch of real soupbones. The pen gives the Mets the win. See you tomorrow!