Inaugural - The Benediction

January 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m not much of a connoisseur of religious speech (did anyone else notice – how could you fail to notice – Obama’s shout-out to “nonbelievers”?), but I thought Rev. Lowery’s benediction closing the inaugural was perfect. OK, maybe a bit too long. But what a finish. It stayed right on topic, a serious topic, but still provided needed smile at the end of an hour, a day, a two-year campaign, of gravity and high drama.



(Full text here.) Even if you don’t listen to the whole thing, drag the time button to 4:30 and listen to the last thirty seconds. And look at Obama and the others with him smiling.

help us work for that day when
black will not be asked to get in back
when brown can stick around
when yellow will be mellow
when the red man can get ahead, man
and when white will embrace what is right.
That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

There’s a weak “amen” from the crowd, so he repeats the call twice. And you get the sense that hundreds of thousands of people on the mall and millions of people across the country were saying “amen.”

I watched the inauguration in a classroom full of undergraduates. They were all attentive. I didn’t hear any chatting, and I didn’t see anyone texting on a cell phone. Most of them filed out after the speech, so there weren’t too many of us left in the room when Rev. Lowery spoke. But I’d bet that none of the students who had been in the room with me knew what he was talking about in those last lines. Too bad.

Listen for yourself.

Is War Hell?

January 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ann Coulter got one right. Sort of. She takes the New York Times to task for a recent article on Iraq veterans who have committed murder. (Full Coulter column here.)

The Treason Times' banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group.

She’s right about the lack of data. She’s also right that by focusing on anecdotal evidence and not using rates, the Times appears to be deliberately promoting the crazed-war-veteran stereotype.

Coulter, on the other hand, is arguing that among things that drive people to murder, a year or two patrolling the streets of Baghdad is no worse than life in these United States. Is she right?

Coulter provides some comparative stats.

From 1976 to 2005, 18- to 24-year-olds -- both male and more gentle females -- committed homicide at a rate of 29.9 per 100,000. Twenty-five- to 35-year-olds committed homicides at a rate of 15.8 per 100,000.

The Afghanistan war started in late 2001, Iraq in 2003. But Coulter uses data spanning 1976 to 2005. Using data from the Iraq war era (2003-2008) would give a somewhat lower figure, no higher than 27 per 100,000. Ideally we would adjust that by age, sex, race, and region to make it comparable to the demographics of the army.

The crucial question is: what is the rate of homicide among Iraq war veterans? To answer that, we need to know how many veterans there are and how many murders they committed. Not easy.

The Times cites 121 murders by Iraq vets, but The Times’s research on “homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans” turned up “349 cases . . . about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.” And those are just the ones the Times found by searching through court records and newspapers. So 270 is a minimum estimate. Considering that the Times included the years starting with the Afghanistan invasion of late 2001, it works out to about 40 per year.

That’s the numerator. What about the denominator?

How many veterans? Coulter gives the number of troops who have served as 1.6 million, a very high-end estimate. John Hinderaker, a conservative who launches grenades at the Times article from PowerlineBlog, proposes less than half that. “For the sake of argument, let's say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

But should we count all of them? The war-crazed-vet hypothesis is concerned with the psychological effects of combat and the daily exposure to death, mutilation, and danger. Should we count the airmen and sailors? Should we count soldiers who serve in some support capacity and never see battle or go out on patrol?

We also need to know not just the total number of returned vets; we need to know the number for each year. That 700,000 number is cumulative. There were certainly not 700,000 returned troops in 2002 or 2003.

So Ann Coulter is right, not in what she says but in the implications of what she says: to see if war is hell and whether that hell has lasting consequences on those who go there, we need good data. The trouble is that we don’t have it.

Winners

January 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In some places these days, there’s more than one reason to celebrate.


(For those who don’t recognize this image – could there be such? – it’s Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. For more on the link between the broader appeal of the Steelers and the Democrats, see this post from the early days of the Socioblog.)

I don’t know much about copyright law, but I imagine that the Obama campaign wouldn’t have wanted to copyright “Yes we can” even if they could. As for the visual, I guess you can’t copyright a style, a look, or a technique. Besides, Shepard Fairey, who created the Obama picture, says he’s not interested in enforcing the copyright, at least not against those who are using it for a worthy cause. And Mike Tomlin and the Steelers are certainly worthy.

The graphic was created by CommonWealth Press, a printing company on Pittsburgh’s South Side. If you want a t-shirt (and of course you do), go here. Pittsburghers take the Steelers seriously. The fifteen highest rated TV broadcasts of 2008 in the Pittsburgh market were fifteen Steeler games, with a 44.5 rating and a 66 share.

Privilege and Invisibility

January 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

It has been months since I felt the need to scream with a blood-curdling cry at some commie, partisan subordinate (i.e., most of the [Voting] section staff until recently). And I feel like the people I now work with are all complete professionals. What a weird change. Granted, these changes are nice in many respects, but bitchslapping a bunch of [Division] attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while. I think now it's all Good Cop for folks there. I much preferred the role of Bad Cop. . . . But perhaps the Division will name an award for me or something. How about the Brad Schlozman Award for Most Effectively Breaking the Will of Liberal Partisan Bureaucrats. I would be happy to come back for the awards ceremony.

That’s a memo (June 2006) from Brad Schlozman, a Justice Department official.

The Bush administration tried to turn the Justice Department into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee. That’s obvious to everybody. Well, almost everybody. What’s interesting is that those most responsible for politicizing Justice seemed to think that they were being anti-political. Schlozman seems to have seen his hiring policies as getting rid of politics, taking Justice out of the hands of partisans and returning it to “real Americans.”

There’s a broader lesson here: Privilege – of race, gender, class, ideology, or anything else – works best when it’s invisible. As soon as people become aware that some groups enjoy privileges denied to others, the game is half over. To maintain their position, the privileged groups will now have to resort to obvious forms of power. It’s much easier if the system goes unquestioned.

Also, those who benefit most from privilege are usually the last to notice it. They cling to the idea that the system is neutral. Things that work in favor of the dominant group are “natural.” It’s only those who point out the privilege who are playing politics. For example, the Bush tax cuts, in the Republican view, were right and good – letting people keep their own money. To point out that the tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the wealthy was to engage in “class warfare.” Similarly, although nearly all the people Schlozman hired had ties to the Republican party or conservative groups, he saw himself as getting rid of “partisan bureaucrats” and replacing them with “complete professionals.”