(from Blogcritics)
I have been a huge fan of Kevin Starr’s boosterish histories of California since I read the first book, Americans and the California Dream. His work is the perfect anodyne to Mike Davis’ self-flagellating critique of California and modernity, City of Quartz.
Compare Starr:

So too in the popular entertainment of 1940, so much of it originating in California, did the desire for amusement, fantasy, humor, and escape resist the dawning recognition that the United States would soon be entering the conflict.

To Davis:

Such relations of ‘pure capitalism’, of course, are seen as invariable destructive of the identity of ‘true’ intellectuals, still self-defined as artisans or rentiers of their own unique mental productions. Snared in the nets of Hollywood, or entrapped by the Strangelovian logic of the missile industry, ‘seduced’ talents are ‘wasted’, ‘prostituted’, ‘trivialized’, or ‘destroyed’. To move to Lotusland is to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud.

Embattled Dreams is the sixth book in Starr’s series, and in some ways the key one, because the roots of modern California were planted in World War II. There were older Californias, and we still can see their traces, but the California in which I live, and the California which serves as a bellwether for modernity, was laid out and built during and immediately after the war.
In it he details the cultural and human impact of the war, and then touches on the rise of Republican Progressivism which has defined much of the postwar era. He talks at length about Earl Warren, the Republican prosecutor turned Progressive Governor turned liberal Supreme Court Justice.
He also, I believe, tries to answer Davis and the critical challengers of the left by emphasizing the pernicious racism of the era, manifested by the anti-Japanese agitation that culminated in the relocation camps, and by the challenges of wartime integration.
Where the book fails, I believe is in integrating both of those histories…of the hopeful, optimistic Folks (as he calls the Midwestern immigrants) with the hope and optimism that led the Japanese, Hispanic, and African-American immigrants to also settle in California – and what happened when their dreams and the fears of the Folks clashed.
He concludes the book with the opening chapter of California red-baiting (which will figure prominently in his next book, I assume), and

The ensuing decade would witness Earl Warren emerge as one of the most influential – and liberal – Chief Justices in American history. Calm, majestic, Warren seemed destined for the marble corridors of the Supreme Court. Now, as Chief Justice, the other side of Warren’s nature – the liberal side of the California duality – was free to emerge. Historians would later describe Warren as reversing his philosophies and values after being appointed to the Court and turning liberal, even going soft, did not know the full complexity of Warren’s California Progressive sensibility with its admixture of conservative and liberal values.

I wish that the book had dug deeper into California Progressivism; I think it hold the key to understanding how we can reclaim the territory abandoned by the culture warriors of the right and left.
Starr needs no defense against Davis; California itself is his defense.

Read this Boston Globe Online op-ed, and understand that the principles of 4th Generation defense are beginning to percolate upward to mass consciousness.

When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other is distributed and egalitarian and accords with what the Framers of the Constitution expected of the citizenry.

More later.
(link via Instapundit)

The concept of a ‘non-combatant’ is one that really did not arise until feudal times in Europe and Japan (I don’t know enough about Chinese, African, or MesoAmerican history to comment on their history). Before that, wars had most likely looked Homeric, as community fought community and alliance fought alliance. The able-bodied men of one community fought the able-bodied men of another, with their lives, the freedom of their women and children (this was in times when they spoke of ‘their’ women) and all the assets of the community at stake.
(I haven’t unboxed the Homer and Hesiod yet, so can’t provide a quote; but I’m sure there are a number of them about the ‘sad-eyed women being led away from the burning city’, etc. etc.)
The increasing depth of the economies (partly driven by consolidation due to conquest) began to generate larger and larger surpluses…both of labor, so that a class of landowners and retainers began to grow up whose daily labor was not needed…and of technology and wealth so that more elaborate fortifications, larger food surpluses to feed armies for longer periods of time, and most of all, more sophisticated weapons and armor were available.
Using these weapons and defeating the more-sophisticated defenses required more and more training, which consumed the time of the landowners and their retainers, and began to define them as a military class, distinct from the agrarian and mercantile classes.
Eventually, laws were passed (both in Europe and Japan) prohibiting non-members of these classes from owning weapons, or being trained in their use. (Of course there were substantial exceptions; in England, young men were required to train in the use of the longbow…)
The styles of warfighting changed as well; from the melee to the set battle and the siege, and as the practice of fighting began to become formalized, so too grew up riles designed both to define ‘honorable’ military practice, which meant both defining how to behave toward other combatants, and toward this new class of people who were to be left alone…in part because devastating a large economy meant that the wealth necessary to support armies would be destroyed.
This professionalization progressed in both cases through the Industrial Age.
It was the American Civil War which showed the impact of industrialization on warfighting. The North may have been outgeneraled, but it outmanufactured and outtransported the South. And as industrialization and the economy that supported it became the key to Northern success, their efforts to weaken the Southern economy…first through blockades, then as Sherman headed to Atlanta, through devastation of the local economies…were a key part of their military effort. Note that Sherman evacuated Atlanta before he burned it, and his orders were not to slaughter the farmers whose corn he burned and whose livestock he slaughtered. His goal was economic devastation and collapse, not massacre. And, to a large extent, it worked. It was strategic warfare…war fought against the strategic (economic) assets of the enemy, rather than the tactical (military) assets. Note that this wasn’t the first time this had been done; just one of the more successful.
The industrialization of warfare meant both that it was integrated backwards into the economy in some unprecedented ways (i.e. the factories that made the weapons and the railroads that shipped them were a part of the ‘weapons system’), and that warfighting itself was changed, as the industrial skill of Krupp and the Germans made the difference in the second Franco-Prussian war, and the invention of accurate, transportable, rapid-firing artillery, the rapid-firing infantry rifle and then the self-loading machine gun changed the way in which war itself was fought.
World War I was the last purely ‘tactical’ (as I’m defining it…meaning a war defined by maneuver and tactics addressing the opposing forces) major war.
After this war, the English led the way in refocusing their efforts on strategic warfare, as they refocused production on large bombers. Trenchard led the effort to arm the UK with a fleet of heavy bombers, with the deliberate intent of attacking an enemy’s economy, thereby collapsing the industrial supply train that supported their army.
When World War II began, the UK attacked German cities with night bombing; the techniques of precision daylight bombing would have to await the Norden bombsight. But until the German defenses were degraded, the level of losses remained unacceptable high, so the allies continued high-altitude bombing aimed at generally weakening the German economy…by destroying it’s infrastructure, killing its participants, and straining its resources (forcing them to deal with the damage done through bombing).
In effect, we had returned to the tribal warfare of Homer; the women and children of the combatants on the front lines were now directly hostage to the fortunes of the war.
And with Hiroshima, and the ensuing decades in which we concentrated on ‘strategic warfare’…meaning the demolition of enemy civilian infrastructure and the associated civilians, it sure looks like we have returned to the notion of tribal, ‘total’ warfare.
So, in effect, it looks like we have effectively blurred the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in today’s warfare.
Ironically, as that distinction has been blurred by the emphasis on strategic warfare at the top and on terrorism and intergroup violence (former Yugoslavia, Rwanda) at the bottom, we have worked diligently to bureaucratize and formalize the conduct of war, creating ever more complex rules of engagement, and using modern communications to have military attorneys review orders in real time.
So if we have passed the traditional values which separate legitimate targets (opposing military) from illegitimate targets (opposing civilians), how do we judge the appropriateness of attacks in which civilians are killed?
And to take it further, as warfare becomes increasingly economic, how do we judge the appropriateness of attacks in which civilians are indirectly killed, through famine, disease, or other indirect effect?
These questions cut to the heart of not only the Israel/ Palestinian conflict, but to the conduct of the United States in the near future as we try and deal with the aftermath of 9/11. It is obvious to me that there both is and must be some appropriate basis for judgement. It is equally obvious that different interest groups – supporters of Israel or Palestine, of immediate invasion and normalization of relationships – most likely are applying different grounds for judgement.
Next, some suggestions on sorting this mess out.

William Burton does it again, with a personal, accurate, and serious explanation of why our drug laws are stupid.
I think it was William Burroghs who pointed out that being a rich junkie wasn’t such a big problem.
And as far as Mr. Burton is concerned – just go there every day before you come here. I can’t think of anything more reasonable to do. Someday he may write something I disagree with, or that isn’t damn smart.
And it may snow here in L.A., too.

Jeff Cooper, already one of my favorite bloggers, shows insane amounts of class in this post rethinking his position on the Central Park ‘wilding’ convictions.
It’s not just because he ‘kinda sorta’ ends up agreeing with me, or with Tom McGuire, who has carried a lot of water on this. The way he handles is is a freaking model, and I hope to respond to challenges half as well.

I’m working semi-diligently on the ‘combatants’ post, but haven’t got it to come out right yet (i.e. I’m not impressed by the arguments I’m making, and yet haven’t revealed interesting enough gaps in them); so was browsing around and just read the Patio Pundit’s take on why we should invade Iraq.
Rather than get into a point-by-point discussion (I don’t disagree, I don’t completely agree, I’m kind of tilting slowly over the fence toward ‘do it’), I thought I’d present a thought experiment.
Take a live cat, and put it in a sealed box…no, wrong experiment.
Try this one instead.

One nice afternoon, I’m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break.
The power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don’t work. My backup AM/SW/SSB radio in the garage doesn’t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud.
We’ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small…5KT…nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle.
We’ll skip over the hundred thousand or so who have just died or will die at each site in the coming week, from burns and radiation poisoning, or from one of the diseases or a lack of medical attention caused by the collapse of the public health system.
My family and I are not in immediate danger, because I’m maybe 10 miles from the blast center, and shielded by the mass of Palos Verdes hill, and the prevailing winds are onshore, meaning they blow the radioactive dust inland and away from me, but the next few days are pretty chaotic.
They’ve declared martial law, and imposed strict limits of transportation, because about half the refinery capacity for Southern California is destroyed or offline; the dark clouds from the burning tank farms and the smell of burning oil still fill the air. But I’m upwind, so it isn’t too bad. The shortage of distillates like gasoline and jet fuel will last a while, because even though the offline refineries only represent maybe 5 – 10% of the national refining capacity, the emergency uses have taken priority.
The economy is at a halt, both because of the martial law and because three of the five national shipping centers have been devastated and contaminated beyond immediate use, meaning that Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor and Seattle harbor on the West Coast are out of commission, as is the Port of New York on the East. They aren’t letting container ships into San Francisco Bay yet, and probably won’t for a few weeks. NEST is setting up a scanning system on helicopters and positioned on the Golden Gate Bridge, but emergency and military supplies will get precedence, so many of the ships simply turn around and head back to Japan and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, politics have gotten a little complicated.
There is a lot of saber-rattling going on, and everyone in national office is pretty much ready to sign any declarations of war the president asks for; he gets broad emergency powers, and habeas corpus is suspended, along with a number of other rights as large parts of the country are placed under military control.
Internationally, everyone is lining up to send aid, and the Arab countries are falling over themselves to send monetary aid and to deny any role in this.
The ships themselves were from Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, and the origins of each container on the ships is being investigated, along with the detritus of the bombs themselves.
Saddam Hussein swears on his mother’s life that he had nothing to do with it.
The President needs the resources of the military at home, to manage the martial-law driven economy, and the new demands for autarkic security, so we begin to withdraw troops from Europe, Korea, and the Middle East, trying to degrade the readiness of each area as little as we can.
There is some evidence that one of the weapons was a Russian tactical nuke, in a batch that was thought to have been in Georgia, and that Chechen militants were suspected of having access to it; they suddenly have a national treasury that is $100,000,000 richer, and it looks like some of the funds came from madrassas hawalas (thanks, William), the Middle Eastern ‘cash’ banking community.
One of the weapons appears to have been homemade, and we can’t figure out where the other one came from.
The pressure is on the president to do something.
The U.N. issues statements deploring the ‘tragedy’ and supporting direct action against the perpetrators, as soon and sufficient evidence is found to identify who they were.
We find that some of the funds which might have paid for one of the weapons might have been paid by a Jordanian oil trader who is thought to sometimes act as a front for the Iraqi government. We’ve turned a blind eye to him in the past, because the funds that went back were partially used for humanitarian purposes, and because he gave some of our intelligence assets entrée to the Iraqi underground.
Hussein goes on CNN and Al-Jazeera, and states that a conspiracy among his senior officers was responsible for ‘this humanitarian tragedy’ and publicly executes them and their families on live television.
He offers to open the country to inspections by a joint French/Swiss/German inspection team, and to pay $1,000,000,000 in reparations to the U.S. once the oil embargo is lifted.
The UK offers troops to assist with ‘humanitarian aid’ in the U.S.
There are fistfights in the Capitol, as the question of how to respond to this splits the House and Senate.

Got the picture??
So here are some questions for all parties.
For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody…anybody…who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?
For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?
See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I personally don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off).
One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.
The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.
As you can imagine, I see problems with both.
What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?
[10/2/02: followup discussion is here]

The Bloviator has a teriffic post on the Administration’s smallpox plans, and on issues in managing bioterror generally.
Take a look and comment.

Ranting Screeds takes me to task for laying the roots of hostile political discourse at the feet of Newt Gingrich. They go far deeper, says he, and liberals were among the founders.
I’ll have to hit the books and think about this…

Just a quick one between under-6 soccer and an afternoon of work.
Devra M, over at Blue Streak (whose link I’ve fixed on the blogroll, BTW) has a followup on Dawn’s parenting post I’ve commented on below (enough dependent clauses and links yet?).
Devra’s post is a great, nakedly honest, self-revelatory comment on her fears about being a good enough parent.
I think the fact that she has those fears and can articulate them certainly means that she almost certainly is someone who can be a good enough parent. I largely raised myself; my parents, while competent adults in the outside world were certainly not competent parents, and my brother and I carry the burden of that. I resolved long ago that I would be the parent my parents couldn’t be, and that’s the rock I’m always pushing up the hill.
She says:

But I wonder if they weigh the mistakes they’ve made against the positives & find they’re somehow lacking. I can’t imagine that a loving parent would say they ‘regret’ having children, but I wonder if there isn’t a small voice inside asking “Are you sure you made the right decision?”
If you’re a parent, are you allowed to wonder if you’re the last person in the world who should be trying to raise children? If you’re a parent, are you allowed to doubt yourself? How do you get past that terror? How do you get through each day without thinking you’re fucking it all up?

Let me answer for a moment by telling a story.
When my oldest was an infant, we had a dinner party and had some friends over. It was early, he was still up, and then as happens, he needed changing. I ran upstairs with him and changed him (with poop, sub 30-second changes were always my goal – I was the Woods Brothers of diaper changers), then not wanting to miss the conversation, hurried back down.
I was barefoot, as I often am in the house, and slipped on the carpet at the top of the stairs.
Today, seventeen years later, I still remember what it felt like to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to recover; to feel my body stretching out over the stairwell, and to know that I had my son in my arms. I thought I had killed him. I thought my life was over, that I had through carelessness failed as a father and that I was worthless as a man who should take care of his children. And while I was thinking that, some other part of me…some part more active and less articulate…dropped my shoulder and pulled him into my chest so that when I fell, I hit and rolled around him.
I wound up lying on my back on the landing, my feet in the air, with two cracked ribs…and my son was laughing and waving his arms, suggesting, I’ve always felt, that that was a lot of fun and we should do it again.
Every parent I know has a story like that.
Not all these stories end well. But what I know about the good parents…the ones who try, the ones who, when the moment comes, drop a shoulder and roll into whatever is being handed them…is that regardless of the outcome, they are better people for having tried it.
This doesn’t mean I think everyone should have kids. I desperately wanted them. But I do think that fear is a bad reason to choose not to, because what I’ve learned from being a parent is that a child brings out the part of you that has the will to walk through whatever fears you have and come out the other side.

As a man who enjoys a well-turned phrase almost as much as a well-turned ankle, I often find myself reading one, and giving my usual reaction: “Bastard! I should have written that!!”
Recent email from reader Marshall has had me muttering under my breath.
I said:

“I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can
build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that
perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for.”

He replies:

“The root of conservatism is that belief that human systems are not built
but grow naturally, believing that perfection is unattainable and therefore
not worth struggling for.”
“The root of socialism is that belief that we can strive toward building
the system, believing that perfection is attainable and is worth
legislating toward.”
“The root of totalitarianism is that belief that we can build human systems
that are perfect, believing that perfection has been attained and is worth
killing to maintain.”
“The root of libertarianism is that belief that we can discard inconvenient
human systems, believing that that is perfection and is worth blogging for.”

Bastard.