David K. Shipler's Blog, page 16

By David K. Shipler
                If you’ve seen the musical Hamilton or read the book by Ron Chernow, you might have gained some appreciation of dueling, not so much as a method of ritualized murder but as a conflict-resolution device. Of course Alexander Hamilton was shot to death by Aaron Burr, which is always a risk in political confrontations, at least metaphorically. Yet it didn’t have to end that way. It could have been played more deftly to regain and preserve honor for both parties.                Perhaps that’s the answer for President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as my friend Steve Weisman impishly suggested over lunch in Washington this week. Trump is stubborn, and Pelosi’s scrappy, and they’ve wrapped themselves in their egos as some 800,000 Americans, unpaid during the government shutdown, discover the pitfalls of working for Uncle Sam.                In Hamilton’s age, Chernow writes, duels following insults were “de rigueur” among those “who identified with America’s social elite.” To restore dignity, demonstrate courage, and avoid being marked as cowardly, rising to the challenge was unavoidable. However, “duelists did not automatically try to kill their opponents,” Chernow explains. “The mere threat of gunplay concentrated the minds of antagonists, forcing them and their seconds into extensive negotiations that often ended with apologies instead of bullets.”                If things went too far and you faced off with pistols, you could “throw away your shot,” that is, aim wildly to avoid inflicting a mortal wound. There’s evidence that Hamilton did just that in his duel with Burr. But the youthful Hamilton of years earlier, alight with revolutionary fervor, sings at the outset of the musical, “I will not throw away my shot!” That’s about both him and his cause. It’s enough to stir the patriotic heart of any American audience, even in our dispiriting time.

By David K. Shipler“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”                                                                                                                   --The Wizard of Oz
            Watching the United States on the world stage today is like suffering from double vision. President Donald Trump strides, postures, and dramatically decrees. Then his subordinates stay approximately where they were before.Trump credits Vladimir Putin’s denials that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and then the Justice Department indicts a bunch of Russians for doing precisely that. Trump announces a sudden withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria, and then his national security adviser, John Bolton, says they’re staying there to fight ISIS and defend our Kurdish allies.It’s not that Trump has no influence over his own foreign policy. It’s that he has no policy. He has only impulses and whims—not all of which are necessarily bad. But since he detests veteran professionals who have been working on these problems for decades, and since he has let Bolton strip the National Security Council bare, Trump’s tweets are unsupported by any process of deliberation or execution that might actually translate into action on the ground.Although the president is excoriated for this incompetence, it could someday save us from an impetuous war that he thinks up after watching Sean Hannity. Inertia, the tendency of a body to continue traveling at the same speed in the same direction, is fundamental in government. Whether you’re a right-wing conspiracy theorist who calls it the “deep state,” or a center-to-left citizen who laments the paucity of “adults in the room,” your nation’s well-being these days is protected by the difficulty of turning the ship of state on a dime, as Trump repeatedly tries to do.It would be interesting to know—and in some future year we might find out—whether the generals and admirals have developed a secret method of resistance to this demented commander-in-chief’s rash orders. There have been reports of their slow-walking certain commands that can be bogged down in logistics and bureaucracy. But what if Trump wakes up early one morning, gets incensed by something on Fox and Friends, and calls in the officer with the nuclear football to obliterate a country that has ticked him off? Is there any subversive understanding in the military about how to defy such an order? If so, would it be treason? Probably, but it might also save the country.

By David K. Shipler
                The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is faced with a tricky feat of navigation. It must appeal to the upsurge of national outrage against President Trump from the left while steering a course that will also attract the respect of moderate Americans near the center. And to do that, its committees that draft bills and conduct investigations will need to find an elusive sweet spot where liberal principles meet pragmatic governance—with broad appeal.                It goes without saying that the behavior of the House Democrats will set the stage for the 2020 presidential election. Trump will vilify them no matter what, but if they give him ammunition by flying off into fits of extreme rhetoric and blizzards of subpoenas, they run the risk of appearing politically vindictive and irresponsible. If such accusations stick, they will stain whatever Democratic candidate emerges as the party’s nominee.Therefore, every argument and assertion has to be well-phrased and factually unassailable. Every subpoena—and there should be many—has to be carefully supported by legitimate grounds for investigative necessity. No flamboyant grand-standing, no smear campaigns, no positions too radical to woo back independent Trump voters are likely to work.                Furthermore, whatever positions and policies the Democrats adopt need to be explained and justified better than Nancy Pelosi is usually able to do. She’s an accomplished fund-raiser and herder of the cats in her caucus, and she can get legislation passed. But let’s face it, she’s not a great messenger on broadcast news, the unfortunate test these days of a successful politician. Too often she can’t put a persuasive sentence together. Either she has to practice her lines or let a more articulate Democrat do the talking.                Liberals are feeling too heady after the mid-terms, with voters having elected Native Americans, Muslims, and record-breaking numbers of women. It’s reasonable to think that the tide has begun turning against a Republican Party bent on dismantling much of the good that government does for the people. But the operative word is “begun,” for this is not a revolution so much as a stirring, perhaps the prelude to a sea change that might mature eventually into a dramatic expulsion from power of the pro-rich, anti-minority misogynists who have diminished America.

By David K. Shipler
                There is a vacuum in America. Where leaders of virtue should reside, citizens find only a void, which echoes with yearning.                So we have to invent heroes, and we rely on myth-making. These days, whenever a decent Republican dies, bringing that endangered species nearer to extinction, the firmament is flooded with rhapsodies of adoration: first, John McCain, now George H.W. Bush, their reputations amplified as counterpoints to Donald Trump. As the outpouring for Bush has shown this week, we love them more after they’re gone. They are never as pure in life as in death.The hunger for heroes is one reason for Trump’s popularity among a core of supporters whose cheers cannot be dampened by his insults, his lies, his corruption, his racism, his misogyny, his impulsiveness, his ignorance, his hatreds, or his damage to the prized institutions of democracy. We are a needy people, and a large minority of us, it turns out, are excited by a large, brash personality who crashes through convention and waves his fist in the faces of more than half of his compatriots, plus most of the globe.This infatuation with Trump’s autocratic bullying reveals a deep fault in American society. Coming when the country faces neither war, depression, rising crime, nor widespread terrorism, the readiness to be afraid is remarkable. Bedraggled families seeking refuge are “invaders.” Democrats threaten “mob rule.” Whites and men are victims. The world’s biggest economy is at the mercy of foreign countries. Imagine if the United States confronted actual risk, how vulnerable we would be to demagoguery—which can be a real danger in itself.The search for heroes, then, can imperil security. It can let loose toxic impulses. It can undermine the constitutional system, which regards traditional institutions and venerable procedures, not individuals, as the protectors of the country’s freedoms. It can flit from one character to another, conferring Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame on the person of the moment.
Athletes and actors might satisfy the star-struck, for a time. Polemicists and politicians might fuel the admiration of those who share their views. Combat veterans might tap a well of regard and gratitude. But nothing can take the place of a so-called figure against the sky, a maker of history who can apply wisdom to the cause of justice—a Nelson Mandela, a Vaclav Havel, an Abraham Lincoln, a Martin Luther King, Jr. If heroism has any transcendent quality, it is the mobilization of morality--not just the personal ethic of a leader, but the capacity to energize the heart that glows within the citizenry.That is what America lacks. It is not enough to condemn President Trump, as easy as it is. His careful cultivation of his outsized public personality, with the help of his propaganda machines in Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and the Republican Party, awards his followers with a false feeling of triumph, even a misplaced sense of righteousness. He could not do it in isolation. He swims with a current in society. For millions of Americans, he fills part of the void.But where is the mobilization of morality? Where are the leaders who can stir the honorable passions of America? Where are the clergy? Where are the teachers? Where are the corporate executives, the university presidents, the scoutmasters, the lawyers, the physicians, the grassroots models of probity? Where are the television editors and anchors who still believe in letting the unbiased facts inform the public discourse? Where are the candidates for office who put the country ahead of party, whose principles reach beyond their own victories?They exist, of course, but largely unseen in the broad, national landscape. They work quietly in their smaller circles of influence, mostly excluded from the larger public square whose ground is held by scoundrels of assorted stripes.That is why George H. W. Bush, in death, has drawn such excessive flattery. As the historian David Greenberg noted in Politico, Bush’s political record bears some nasty scars of opportunism: He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He conducted an ugly 1988 presidential campaign featuring the racist Willie Horton ad, and implied a lack of patriotism by his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, for accepting the rule of law: a state supreme court opinion that found unconstitutional the requirement of public-school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Bush’s 1992 campaign was snarky as well, casting aspersions on Bill Clinton’s patriotism for opposing the Vietnam War and visiting Moscow.Bush had no trouble shifting on major issues for short-term gain, as Greenberg observes. He abandoned his support of abortion rights and flipped to endorse the fraudulent, supply-side economic theory that favored the rich and had earned his earlier denunciation as “voodoo economics.” He nominated an unqualified right-wing ideologue (and sexual harasser), Clarence Thomas, to fill the Supreme Court seat that had been occupied by the towering Thurgood Marshall. Bush did little to restrain his party’s race to the right; he mostly rode the wave. He helped legitimize the extremists Roger Ailes, who later led Fox, and Lee Atwater as they helped take the Republicans down into the gutter of radicalism. Bush may have detested Trump, but Trump is the natural result of Bush’s earlier accommodation to the unsavory trends in the party’s ranks.In a symptom of our hunger, however, we have now nourished ourselves with hymns to Bush’s courtesy, moderation, calm, international collaboration, and his support of bipartisan steps such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are all facts and truths, testifying to the human complexity of leaders who are rarely one-dimensional. Bush was known as a good listener; a cultivator of multinational consensus (witness the unprecedented coalition he assembled against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait); and a sober-minded sophisticate about the intricacies of foreign affairs. Flaws and all, he sure looks good from the troubling perspective of the Trump era.In short, we want heroes. We don’t have any. So we have to make them up.

By David K. Shipler
                A measure of a country’s health is its capacity for self-correction. The same holds true of an institution, even of an individual. The test is what happens when behavior departs from a course that is moral, legal, decent, and humane; when it sacrifices long-term vision for instant gratification; indulges in fear and fantasy; abandons truth; oppresses the weak; and promotes cruelty and corruption. The election tomorrow is a test.                An open, pluralistic democracy can reform itself, and the United States has a long history of moral violations followed by corrections--or, at least, a degree of regret. The colonies’ and states’ persecution of religious minorities led to the First Amendment’s provision separating church and state. The atrocities against Native Americans led eventually to more honest teaching of history, although not the compensations for stolen land and destroyed cultures that the victims deserved. The scourge of slavery led to its abolition by the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil War to a stronger (if imperfect) union, the Jim Crow segregationist laws to an uplifting civil rights movement and a wave of anti-discrimination measures by Congress and the courts.The denial of women’s suffrage was reversed by the Nineteenth Amendment. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was ruled unconstitutional, albeit too late for the prisoners. The character assassinations by Senator Joseph McCarthy of imagined communists, ruining careers and lives, were ultimately repudiated as repugnant and, in themselves, un-American. The illicit FBI and CIA spying on antiwar and other dissident groups led to a series of federal statutes regulating domestic surveillance, although those laws were watered down after 9/11. And most recently, the society’s broad distaste for homosexuality was revised into broad acceptance, including a Supreme Court decision overturning laws against gay marriage.These and many other issues demonstrate that progress does not move in a straight line. The correction is never quite complete, and there is backsliding. While blacks in the South were once denied the vote by means of poll taxes and literacy tests, Republicans have now employed other means to the same end, purging registration rolls, for example, moving and reducing polling places in minority areas, and discarding registration forms on the basis of flimsy inconsistencies.But in the long run, when this democracy damages its own interests and others’ well-being, it experiences something of a gravitational pull toward the more solid ground of social justice. That happened in the civil rights movement when the brutality of the segregationists, unleashing dogs, cops, and thugs to attack nonviolent demonstrators, became ugly enough to mobilize the conscience of the country. What will it take to mobilize the conscience today?
Since Donald Trump began campaigning for the presidency, and continuing into his tenure in the White House, he has led the United States down a steep descent. He has played to the bigotry of his base of rightwing extremists and created a tinderbox of domestic terrorism, as Stephen Tankel warns. He has given license to racism and other forms of hatred. He has stoked the flames of grievance and resentment toward nonwhites, immigrants, and others considered outsiders. He has continued the Republicans’ practices of politicizing the courts, thereby undermining that vital branch of government. And now, by sending troops to the Mexican border as props in the midterm election campaign, he has politicized the military as well.He has lied steadily, created imagined threats, and dragged the Republican Party along with him into abysmal dishonesty. His attacks on the press, aimed at sowing disbelief in accurate reporting, have helped to set the country adrift from factual reality. He has thereby hung a blank canvas on which he can paint any monstrous fantasy that he wishes—and a large minority of Americans will believe him.He touts himself as a promise-keeper, but he has broken his nation’s promises internationally, on climate, on nuclear nonproliferation, and on trade—and with tariffs has damaged farmers and small businessmen who supported him. He has insulted allies and praised autocrats, who now cite him to justify their oppression. Trump has thereby converted the United States into a model for dictators, not democrats.            The President has dislodged his great country from its pinnacle on the international order—diplomatically, militarily, and economically—into a go-it-alone outlier which will have fewer friends when needed. He has planted the seeds of global collapse into an anarchic array of parochial nationalisms.             Domestically, he is dismantling to an extreme the regulatory mechanisms that have promoted cleaner air, cleaner water, workplace safety, consumer rights, restrictions on harmful chemicals, pharmaceutical oversight, and protections for employees and investors. The radicals in his cabinet have gone far beyond reasonable trims of excessive regulation, and are putting ordinary Americans at risk. His Republican Party has slashed corporate taxes and increased the deficit, pushing up job growth but also injecting what some analysts regard as an unsustainable “sugar high” into the economy and the stock market. He runs the most corrupt government in modern history, self-dealing and using his position to enrich himself and his family. He and the Republicans in Congress continually threaten health benefits under Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid.             Trump has not created anything significant. His new trade deal with Mexico and Canada contain only marginal improvements over NAFTA, which he campaigned to eliminate. He has no new trade agreement with China, and he cast aside the Trans-Pacific pact that would have strengthened American commerce in the region at Chinese expense.He has done nothing for Israeli-Palestinian peace except antagonize one of the parties, the Palestinians, by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and thereby eliminating the US as an honest broker. He has given Saudi Arabia a blank check in its merciless war in Yemen, bringing widespread starvation to innocents there. In abandoning the nuclear pact with Iran, he has squandered leverage to negotiate an improvement. He has nothing to show for his vaunted summit with the North Korea leader, Kim jung-un, except a suspension of testing and hostile rhetoric, which is all to the good, except that there is no deal to end their nuclear program.             And despite Vladimir Putin’s miscalculation in preferring Trump over Clinton in the 2016 election, Trump’s awed admiration for the Russian leader has not translated into real policy. Trump has simply withdrawn from the 1987 INF treaty restricting intermediate-range nuclear missiles without trying to negotiate a new agreement that would stop Russia’s cheating and include China in a set of restraints.            The one thing that Trump has managed to create is a cult of personality among his followers, to the point of terrifying Republicans who go against him. That has given voters tomorrow little choice of sensible Republicans who would put a check on Trump. Now, only Democrats can do that. Contrary to some expectations during the 2016 campaign and shortly after his election, Trump has not become a political liability to his party. So he’s made this midterm vote all about him. It will be a referendum of sorts, and therefore a test of whether the country is ready to take a first step in the process of self-correction or will have to continue farther down this path before realizing where it has led.

By David K. Shipler
                On a December evening twenty-some years ago, Fern Amper, a Jewish resident of Teaneck, NJ, made a startling statement to a small group of Jews and African-Americans who gathered at her home periodically to discuss the issues of race, privilege, and bigotry. When the Jews spoke of anti-Semitism, the blacks mostly minimized it, preferring to see themselves as the country’s primary victims of prejudice and picturing Jews—who were white, after all—as comfortably powerful.So, to make her point about Jews’ vulnerability, Amper claimed that they were always poised to flee. “I would venture to say that there’s no Jew sitting in here—and I’ve never spoken to you about this—who does not have an up-to-date passport for yourself and your kids in your desk drawer,” she declared. “Tell me if that’s true.”“It’s true,” one said. “Absolutely,” said another. “Absolutely,” said all the Jews in the room.The blacks were flabbergasted. “Why? Why?” asked Ray Kelly, an African-American. “Are you really serious with this paranoia?” A moment of silence followed, then a couple of voices said, “Yes.”If the scent of perpetual danger seemed exaggerated in the 1990s, it seems more warranted in the era of Donald Trump’s winks and nods to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists among us. It is no coincidence that since his election, anti-Semitic attacks, both physical and verbal, have soared, culminating in the mass murder of 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue last Saturday. As president, Trump has created an environment favorable to the undercurrent of anti-Semitism that American society has long harbored. It has surfaced dramatically since his election in 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, counted a rise in the number of neo-Nazi organizations from 99 to 121 between 2016 and 2017. Murders by white supremacists have doubled, and the Anti-Defamation League reports “a 258% increase in the number of white supremacist propaganda incidents on college campuses.”In addition, the ADL found that a 57% jump during 2017 in anti-Semitic incidents, defined as harassment, vandalism, and assault, was the largest one-year increase since the organization started keeping tallies in 1979. “Schools, from kindergarten through to high school, were the most common locations of anti-Semitic incidents,” the ADL reported. Jewish journalists and critics of Trump have been flooded with online threats, anti-Semitic portrayals, and disinformation, according to a voluminous study by the ADL.
The demons of hatred have been unleashed. And they are inside our own borders, not outside—not outside in the trade practices or climate agreements or weapons pacts that Trump despises, and certainly not outside in the ragtag “convoy” of desperate, impoverished children, women, and men fleeing violence and poverty in Central America to seek refuge in the United States. The demons live inside our own fears, not fears of true threats but of the phantasmagoria conjured up by the master manipulator in the White House. What measure of responsibility for the rise of anti-Semitism, among other forms of hatred, can be laid at the feet of Trump? Anti-Semitism has grown more virulent in Europe as well as in America. Its ingredients have roots even earlier than the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Prejudice masquerading as admiration for Jewish power has long contained encrypted aversion: Some of the African-Americans at Fern Amper’s house, for example, slid close to traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes by portraying Jews as controlling business and the media, and therefore as too influential to be at risk.Trump has not stood up and attacked Jews per se, as he has journalists. He operates behind the cover of his daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism, and her Jewish husband, Jared Kushner. He wears the camouflage of a pro-Israel zealot and, for that, garners campaign money and support from right-wing American Jews such as Sheldon Adelson.But Trump is indirectlyresponsible. He has denounced “globalists,” which some white supremacists take as code for Jews, akin to the age-old libel “cosmopolitans.” He recently called himself a “nationalist,” bringing praise from the rightwing fringe. He buoyed the neo-Nazis who marched last year in Charlottesville, VA chanting, “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” They included “some very fine people,” Trump said afterwards. Supremacists have declared themselves emboldened by what they interpret as his implicit sympathy and endorsement.Trump did not pull the trigger in the Pittsburgh synagogue. Yet his vicious attacks on immigrants as criminals who “invade our country” fed into the stated motive of the shooter, Robert Bowers, and informed the killer’s vocabulary. Bowers cited the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, which is under contract with the State Department to assist refugees entering the US. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Bowers posted online shortly before taking his guns to the synagogue. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”That hard connection between Trump’s rhetoric and the shooter’s impetus has not deterred the president, who continues to inflame our fears against immigrants, awakening the lurking demons that now stride across this troubled land.

By David K. Shipler
                Hypocrisy is a cardinal feature of foreign policy, and it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump. Saying one thing and doing another, or doing different things simultaneously, or saying contradictory things about the same situation are venerable traditions in diplomacy, and no more dramatically than in the area of human rights.                Most countries skate along easily in this slippery practice, but the United States sometimes bumps up against its inconvenient national myth: that America is the beacon of democracy, the shining city on a hill, the bastion of freedom, the model of liberty—and promotes the same the world around.  When the collision between idealism and realism occurs, American policy toward whatever country is committing egregious violations either hits a wall and retreats, or it finds a pragmatic detour around the obstacle to continue on its way, rationalized by national security and commercial interests.                The second route, returning soon to business as usual, seems likely to be taken by Washington in the case of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for the Washington Post who had exiled himself in the US to write critically of Saudi Arabia’s anti-democracy. As Trump has pointed out in various contorted statements, the US has a strong stake in close relations with the kingdom. He appears willing to stand up against the clamor of bipartisan outrage over the gruesome spectacle, as portrayed by Turkish authorities, of Khashoggi’s torture and dismemberment inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the widespread skepticism about the official Saudi claim that he was killed during a fistfight. Perhaps if the Saudis had used Israel’s technique against terrorists—a precisely placed bomb or a drive-by shooting—the reaction would have been muted. It has certainly been muted over broader transgressions by Saudi Arabia, such as its lack of a free press, its intolerance of dissenting political speech, and its ongoing carnage of civilians during the war in Yemen. No administration, whether Democratic or Republican, has seen fit to sever the ties of accommodation. America’s supposed passion for human rights has been overcome by several considerations.
One, Saudi Arabia has plenty of oil, able to drive global prices up or down with the turn of a spigot, and only recently has the US, with shale production, grown to depend much less on imported petroleum. Two, Saudi Arabia has plenty of money, which it likes to spend partly on shoring up the American defense industry by purchasing weapons systems. Trump, being mostly a money-man, has cited this as a main argument for maintaining close relations. Third, Saudi Arabia has allied itself with the US to counter Iran, which was strengthened by the last Republican president’s strategically canny decision to eliminate the main counterweight to Iran-- Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.Fourth, and most interesting, the Saudis provide intelligence and cooperation on counter-terrorism. They do this even while funding Salafi Sunni mosques and madrasas abroad that promote an extreme variant of Islam, which nourished the rise of al-Qaeda. But here is a point of complication, for as Tom Friedman writes, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has shown signs that he might be a force toward a tolerant Islam. If some Islamic reformation occurred, it would outdo all the other benefits that the US derives from its Saudi connection.Avoiding cutoffs and sanctions over rights violations can be a worthy strategy to promote internal liberalization. But that requires sophisticated policy management, which is beyond the Trump administration’s capability. Clearly, Trump cares nothing about human rights, and he’s transparent about it by openly admiring such authoritarian strongmen as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Rodrigo Duarte of the Philippines.That makes him less hypocritical on this point than most of his predecessors, for overlooking human rights violations has been integral to American policy toward many other countries for decades.Especially during the Cold War, anti-communist credentials were usually enough in a ruthless dictator to win American support: The Shah of Iran, for example, overthrown by the Islamic revolution; Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, whose abuses led to the revolution by Fidel Castro; Muhammad Suharto of Indonesia, whose mass murder of purported communists in 1965 was supported with strategic help and encouragement by the US.American subversion of democracy was rampant in the Western Hemisphere. In 1954, the CIA toppled Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and installed a military dictatorship mostly to benefit the banana business of the United Fruit Company, which had, under the previous government, enjoyed tax exemption on huge tracts of company land, amounting to about 40 percent of the country’s territory. When Arbenz initiated land reform to distribute undeveloped acreage to the poor, United Fruit claimed inadequate compensation and mobilized friends in high places, including  CIA director Allen Dulles, who had served on the company’s board of directors.In 1973, Chile’s embryonic democracy was killed by the CIA, which helped engineer a military coup against the elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. He had many opponents in the Chilean middle class, but the American involvement was encouraged by a media tycoon, Agustin Edwards, heir to an old and powerful family, whose long friendship with the Rockefellers opened doors in Washington. According to declassified US documents, Edwards met with Richard Helms, head of the CIA, which had secretly funded Edwards’s newspaper, El Mercurio, to provide Helms with information on military officers likely to participate in a coup. The result was 17 years of a brutal military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.  (An intriguing footnote: Years later, David Rockefeller, president of Chase Manhattan Bank, transferred to Edwards an entrancing, uninhabited Maine island, which I am seeing from my window as I write. Edwards, who died last year, was said to have loved landscape architecture, and he hired a caretaker to clean up downed trees and brush, cut tasteful paths, and groom the island for hiking and picnicking.)Another friend of Edwards was Donald Kendall, CEO of PepsiCo, who displayed his own taste for business over human rights on at least one occasion that I witnessed. In the late 1970s, Kendall visited the Soviet Union and spoke to an annual conference of the Soviet-American Trade Council, of which he was co-chairman. Its members, Soviet officials and American executives, were keen on promoting trade between the two countries. At the time, Soviet restrictions on the emigration of Jews was an obstacle to improved relations.  American diplomats invariably raised the matter with their Soviet counterparts, all the way up to the Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister. Trade was linked to this issue under the Jackson-Vanick Amendment, which prohibited granting the Soviet Union most-favored nation status to reduce tariffs, unless the Russians freed up emigration.At the conference, Kendall denounced the law, predicted that the trade-emigration link would eventually be repealed, and praised his Soviet hosts for their patience in trying to improve commerce. It was an astonishing thing to say to that audience at that time. I came away thinking that Soviet officials, schooled in the view that capitalists ruled the US, had just been encouraged to believe that they wouldn’t have to liberalize. All they’d have to was wait until the capitalists had their way.You can’t blame Kendall for the Soviet oppression of Jews who wished to leave the country. There were many calculations that went into the policy, particularly an anxiety about permitting citizens to vote with their feet to leave a closed society. But Kendall certainly misled Soviet officials, and his priorities live on, long after his retirement. While scores of companies have pulled out of Saudi Arabia’s trade conference next week over the Khashoggi murder, Pepsi has said that it will attend.In American foreign policy, human rights are often for sale.

By David K. Shipler
       The men and women who go out on the water in Maine before dawn to haul lobster traps come up with some inspired names for their boats. Many call them after their children or spouses. Others have painted on their hulls the fragments of life that speak to them: the anxious hope for a good catch, the sassy wit that brushes off danger, the reverence for divine force, the flinty swagger of independence, the poetry of the sea. In sailing the coast of Maine the past few months, I collected names, and put them here into something of the rhythm of the winds and tides. (There really was an up arrow beside the final name, seen near Jordan Island in Blue Hill Bay.)
                                                Kyle Thomas, Buggin’ Out,                                                Seanior Moment, Get It Done,                                                Wildest Dreams, Final Round,                                                Karma, Twilight, Sea Chimes
                                                Autumn Dawn Faith,                                                Family Tradition,                                                Illusion, The Gambler, Never Enough, Learning Curve
                                                Miss Sara, Centerfold,                                                Somp’n Fishey, Rough Rider III,                                                No Problem, Long Faces,                                                Next Week, Dream Weaver 
Nancy and Jamie,Two of a Kind,Tidewalker, Orca,Thin Line, Sea Flea
Sarah Oakley, Lazy Days,Kill Switch, Dreadnought, Finest Kind,Steppin’ Up, Money Move$,Force of Habit, Heritage
Sandra David, Lobstah Tales,Hey Cap, Time Out, Breezy Dawn,Mary Joseph, Daily Bread,Armageddon, Praise the Lord II
Criss Tina II, Still Smokin’,Defiance, Enginuity,Insanity, Venom,Black Thundah II
Lindsay and Lacey,Fair Maiden, Freedom,                          Ledgehammer,                                               ↑This End Up