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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
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bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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and Osama bin Laden
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
American Journal
The Year of the Yellow Notepad
By Alexander Cockburn
Call it the year of the yellow notepad. Doris
Kearns Goodwin, ejected from Parnassus, from Pulitzer jury service
and kindred honorable obligations, sinks under charges of plagiarism
consequent, she claims, upon sloppy note-taking on her trusty
yellow legal pads.
Michael Bellesiles, taking heavy artillery
fire for knavish scholarship in his Arming America, says that
his notations from probate records central to his assertions
about gun ownership in eighteenth-century America were on legal
yellow pads that were irreparably damaged when his office at
Emory sustained an inundation in 2000, the year his book was
published. Connoiseurs of such sports of nature or of plumbing
may note that, unusually, this particular flood came in September
rather than mid-April, when people have completed their tax returns.
Stephen Ambrose, overtaken by charges
of plagiarism, did not have recourse to the yellow-notepad defense,
presumably because he had become rich enough not only to discard
them in favor of teams of researchers, whom he duly blamed for
the lax citations, but to make a out-of-pocket donation amounting
to $1.25 million donation for environmental good works, including
restoration on the Blackfoot River, no doubt hoping that water
in Montana would be as efficacious as in Emory in purging the
record.
The plagiarist lurks in all of us, and
temptation or carelessness loom closer with the cut-and-paste
function on the computer. But computers notwithstanding, the
most majestic plagiarism I can recall was wrought by the Scottish
poet Hugh McDiarmid. When I was working at the Times Literary
Supplement in the early 1960s a review commended some lines by
McDiarmid on a bird's skeleton on a beach. A few weeks later
someone wrote in to point out that these same lines could be
found in an earlier short story, not by McDiarmid.
The poet took refuge in the "selective
retentive memory defense" whereby he claimed to have unconsciously
remembered the lines though not their author. This posture became
harder to sustain when it emerged after various other discoveries
of plagiarism that McDiarmid had transcribed several hundred
lines from an essay on Karl Korsch, inserting them into his own
well known "Homage" to the Austrian satirist. If it's
any comfort to Goodwin and Ambrose, I don't think this damaged
McDiarmid any more than did his use of Hollinshed William Shakespeare.
With Bellesiles the stakes are higher
because his subject addressed the issue of gun ownership in America
and the Second Amendment. By the mid-1990s the battle was tilting
decisively in favor of those arguing that the Second Amendment
asserts the right of individual American citizens to own guns
for self-defense and, if necessary, to counter government tyranny
by means of armed popular resistance. (NB: the preceding sentence
concludes with 22 words lifted from a piece by Chris Mooney in
Lingua Franca.)
Like any good tactician, Bellesiles shifted
the terms of discussion. He said he'd reviewed more than eleven
thousand probate records between 1765 to 1850 from New England
and Pennsylvania and had discovered that roughly 14 per cent
of all adult, white, Protestant males owned firearms, meaning
about 3 per cent of the total population at the time of the revolution
and that hence "all this talk about universal gun ownership
is entirely a myth that I can find no evidence of." (More
cribbing from Mooney.)
So if the people weren't armed, and if
even official militias were mostly a disheveled rabble without
arms, the second amendment was really an antic fantasy, like
feudal armor in the mock Tudor hall of a Bradford cotton millionaire.
The anti-gun crowd greeted Bellesiles
with as much ecstasy as any relief column by early settlers in
Indian country. The Organization of American Historians gratefully
pinned the Binkley-Stephenson Award to Bellesiles' chest for
his 1996 essay on the origins of American gun culture. Arming
America elicited not only fervent applause by Garry Wills in
the New York Times Book Review and by Edmund Morgan in the New
York Review, but also the Bancroft Prize.
Bellesiles came under attack, but since
his assailants included NRA types and even Charlton Heston (who
said memorably that Bellesiles had too much time on his hands)
their often cogent demolitions were initially discounted as sore-loser
barrages from the rednecks. Even so, the sappers pressed forward
and began to penetrate Bellseiles' inner defenses.
A crucial chunk of battlement crashed
to the ground when Bellesiles' most sedulous critic, James Lindgren,
investigated his claim to have researched probate records at
a National Archives center in East Point Georgia. The center
told Lindren no such records existed. (Cockburn's source here
is Daniel Postel in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since
Cockburn once borrowed Postel's car in Chicago and saddled him
with a couple of parking tickets he definitely owes him a cite.
These two tickets were probably the final straws in a load of
fines that prompted Postel to flee Chicago for Washington DC.)
Then it turned out Bellesiles had invented probate records in
Vermont and San Francisco that don't exist.
Bellesiles' Waterloo comes in the February
edition of the William and Mary Quarterly, as entertaining a
bout of scholarly combat (though far more decorous) as I've read
since Warden Sparrow's review of an American edition of Housman
in the early Sixties, done anonymously in the TLS.
Primed in part by Lindren, Gloria Main
of UC Boulder pounds Bellesiles with medium range artillery,
as in "[Bellesiles] found only 7 per cent in Maryland with
guns. My own work in the probate records of six Maryland counties
from the years 1650 to 1720, ignored by Belesiles, shows an average
of 76 percent of young fathers owning arms of some sort".
Ira D. Gruber of Rice slides the bayonet into Bellsiles with
incredulous harrumphs about misrepresented evidence on casualty
rates in American and European battles ("But Bellesiles
has counted 18,000 prisoners among the killed and wounded at
Blenheim"). In an interesting essay on guns, gun culture
and murder in early America Bellesiles is finally dispatched
by Randolph of Ohio State ("every rally of homicides Bellesiles
reports is either misleading or wrong.")
To give him credit, Bellesiles falls
with some dignity ("Arming America is admittedly tentative
in its statistics") but fall he does. Now Emory is making
nasty noises, and erstwhile allies are fleeing into the hills.
Morgan, who whooped him up in the New York Review, says he's
rethinking. Gary Wills says he's too busy now to address the
matter, which is pretty light-hearted, considering that Bellesiles'
phony scholarship is as devastating a blow as the anti-gun crowd
has sustained in decades of fighting over the Second Amendment.
(I speak contentedly as the owner of a 12-gauge and .22 who supports
the interpretation of the amendment as upholding individual rights
to bear arms.)
What about Knopf, which published Arming
America. Jane Garrett tells Postel that the house "stands
behind" Bellesiles, that his were not intentional errors
but the result of some "over-quick research". Knopf
is renowned for its cookbooks. Suppose Bellesiles had suggested
putting dried Amanita phalloides into the risotto. I don't think
Garrett would be so forgiving.
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