Are we too afraid of touch?

Our aversion to innocent physical contact has gone a touch too far

By Julia Neuberger, The Times of London

Look around you, there are notices everywhere: “Be careful: keep your eye on your possessions”, “Swim at your own risk — no lifeguard on duty”. We are told by government to be alert to the risk of terrorists. And we are watched by CCTV wherever we go. But all this advice to be watchful makes us fearful. It makes us shrink into ourselves. We become unkind, unconcerned for others, and our children become terrified of the outside world.

These days, you have to have a Criminal Records Bureau check before you volunteer to work with anyone described as vulnerable — children, anyone over 65, and a whole lot of others besides. That makes many young men, especially, nervous about volunteering at all, and others deeply irritated that they are being asked for a CRB check to work, say, in hospital radio.

If a young man has a criminal record, but now wants to help others who are younger still — just getting into trouble with the police and at risk of worse — he has to be incredibly determined not to be put off by the marathon of bureaucracy.

Hospital staff are often told not to put an arm round patients to comfort them lest it be viewed as assault. So it tends to be the porters and care assistants who give a bit of comfort, while the nurses only touch the patients when they have to carry out some kind of intervention. Many people, especially older people, don’t want too many interventions. What they want is human contact, a bit of tender loving care.

We are all so terrified of child sexual abuse that we have outlawed taking photographs of children at nursery school without parental consent. And adults are terrified that their motives will be suspected if they talk to a child or, even worse, hug one. So, a few years ago, when Clive Peachy, a bricklayer, saw two-year-old Abigail Rae walking down the road after she had escaped from her nursery school in Warwickshire, he did not stop and help her because he thought people would think he was trying to abduct her. The result? She drowned in a pond.

Young male volunteers in primary schools describe feeling like pariahs, viewed with suspicion by many staff — when all they are doing is trying to help. And children want comfort if they fall over in the playground, yet teachers have been told never to touch the children in their care. So you get 12-year-olds with broken legs crying for their mothers, with staff unable to give them a hug, and five-year-olds putting sunscreen on each other because the teachers have been instructed not to touch them. The mess that ensues, and the visits to hospital because cream gets in their eyes, would be funny were it not so ridiculous. Equally absurd are the letters informing parents that children should not bring home-made birthday cakes into school in case of food poisoning — a position that results in children being less likely to share.

So what is all this about? First, there is a real fear of being sued, far greater than the actual numbers of cases would warrant. Second, there is a fear of what others might think. We have begun to internalise the messages that people might think we are abusers when we are not. Third, we are fearful of our children being injured, being killed, being abducted. Yet, in terms of ordinary accidents happening to children, the numbers have gone down dramatically rather than up over the last 30 years.

Nevertheless, our children are frightened to go outside because, as the think-tank Demos and the Green Alliance demonstrated a few years ago, they fear the outside world. They think the streets are full of terrorists, murderers and child-abductors. Worse, they think they know what they look like. They are white, male, middle-aged, wear horrible clothes and have a funny look in their eyes.

But children would not feel like this if adults did not encourage them. It is adult fear, stoked by government and insurers, by risk assessors and hospital and school managers. If we aren’t careful, the next generation will consist entirely of wimps. They will go off on adventure holidays abroad, but they will not walk down the street or get on the Tube alone for fear of attackers. The net result will be not only a lack of life skills, but overwhelming fear: of predators, of accidents, of life itself.

Meanwhile, the sexual predators will carry on just as before — largely in the family — because no system of checks will root them out completely. And we will have created a whole generation of unhappy people. We need to be sensible, not risk-averse; we need to look out to see where we can help others. And, sometimes, we may even need to touch them.

Bruins take the fight to Trojans

USC wins the game, of course, but Neuheisel's team shows promise of better days ahead.


By Bill Plaschke, The Los Angeles Times
Published December 7, 2008

It was the most striking beauty to hit this town in years, a Rose Bowl bathed with vivid blues and striking reds, from field to stands to sky, a rivalry as a painting.

Oh, and purple.

UCLA brought the purple.

In a game that will be remembered for the return of the crosstown colors Saturday, USC scored most of the points, but UCLA applied all the welts.

The Trojans outplayed, outclassed and outscored, by a count of 28-7.

The Bruins, however, outfought.

"Man, from start to finish, we did fight them," said Bruins linebacker Reggie Carter, still sweating in a T-shirt and uniform pants nearly an hour after the game.

The Bruins outworked.

"We were huge underdogs, but that didn't matter to us, we never stopped playing," said cornerback Michael Norris, his eyes still wide.

The Bruins out-and-out burned, from the marching band's knee-pumping opening act to Rick Neuheisel's resilient final speech.

Moments after the game ended, as is his custom, the UCLA coach grabbed a microphone to address the fans.

Only this game had long since been lost, and most of the UCLA fans had departed, leaving the Rose Bowl to a patch of blue surrounded by waves of cardinal, and the booing began with Neuheisel's first syllable.

He didn't care, he kept talking.

"We're going back to work!" he shouted through the distant jeers. "We'll see you in September. We'll make you proud."

I believe him.

Watching the Bruins hustle where they once walked, watching them care where they once didn't, watching a team win two fewer games but experience a complete turnaround, I believe him.

They finish 4-8, no bowl, sitting home when Karl Dorrell was usually not, but their ceiling is higher, sitting atop a room that is far more charged.

Watching them run out to midfield to challenge the Trojans at halftime Saturday, I became convinced.

USC was dancing and shouting as the third-quarter kickoff approached, the entire team moving toward the center of the field, bouncing together like a giant red trampoline.

It was similar to the way both teams bounced here two years ago, during a late television timeout, a dance that brought the teams helmet to helmet in a memorable moment in UCLA's upset win.

USC players said later that they were just dancing to a tune on the loudspeaker. UCLA guys weren't buying it.

"Our team felt like we weren't going to be shown up here at the Rose Bowl, and our team matched that," Neuheisel said.

They matched it everywhere Saturday, from the Trojans' backfield to the receivers, hit after hit, little guy peppering big guy.

For the record, USC outgained UCLA, 478-157, so rarely did little guy get results.

But they kept peppering, with Trojans quarterback Mark Sanchez knocked down so much, he actually had to leave the game for a play.

"We could all see how slow he got up," Norris said. "Slower every time."

They peppered the receivers so much that in the second half, they caught only four passes, with Sanchez completing only 10 of 24 after the first quarter, with USC held scoreless after the first three minutes of the third quarter.

"They weren't going to back down for nothing," said the Trojans' Patrick Turner, who caught a touchdown pass.

They sometimes peppered so much, they got salty, committing 11 penalties for 117 yards, some of which led to USC scores.

But I have a feeling that, at this stage in his depleted program, Neuheisel is willing to ignore a flag if it means embracing the effort.

"Coach is cooler than a fan, we love him and play hard for him," Carter said.

Of course, USC played much, much better, because USC is much, much better.

Don't confuse applause for UCLA's effort with any sort of criticism of USC's victory. The Trojans could have let down but didn't.

The Trojans aren't thrilled with going back to the Rose Bowl game, but they'll be fired up enough to dominate Penn State next month.

Don't believe any of this "trap game" stuff. With a month to prepare, PeteCo will scheme JoePa out of the back of the press box.

Even with Steve Sarkisian acting as a lame-duck coordinator -- can you believe Washington didn't demand that he start now? -- the Trojans will have enough firepower from an offense that will include, for maybe the first time this season, a reasonably healthy Sanchez.

And against the best defense in the country, how is Penn State going to score enough?

The only way the Bruins scored Saturday was on a trick play after a fumble recovery.

Their offense is so bad, coordinator Norm Chow waited all of six plays to call a pass from a wide receiver to a running back, with Dominique Johnson hitting Kahlil Bell on a 21-yard touchdown toss.

Their offense is so bad, Johnson has one more touchdown pass than quarterback Kevin Craft threw in his last five games combined.

"We're going to hang in there, get more players, get better," Chow promised. "Freshmen become sophomores, and sophomores become juniors, and . . . "

And Bruins become men. Hard to believe, but harder to ignore.

Coming home to a new America

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Tobar family

L.A. Times reporter Hector Tobar visits Sortata, Bolivia, in 2004 to report a story. Two weeks after 9/11, Tobar moved his family from L.A. to Latin America, where he gained a new perspective on the U.S.

A reporter who left after 9/11 to work in Argentina, Mexico and elsewhere returns to a nation that now seems more like those others.

By Hector Tobar, The Los Angeles Times
December 5, 2008

Two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, I packed up my L.A. home and moved to Latin America with my wife and family.

In the years that followed, I watched the United States from afar. My country went to war and elected George W. Bush to a second term. We built new walls on our southern border and started deporting people by the hundreds.

In Argentina, Mexico and other places I lived and visited as a foreign correspondent, people asked me if my country had gone crazy.

I listened to taxi drivers in Buenos Aires rail against "the imperialist Bush." In Mexican villages, farmers asked me: "Why does everyone over there hate us so much?"

And yet, from thousands of miles away, I pined for the U.S.

When you write about young democracies, as I did, you learn to appreciate the comforts of old ones. I covered historic votes in Brazil, Nicaragua and other places but cast my own ballot by mail in every Los Angeles County election. I collected U.S. quarters and used them to teach my children some basic American history and geography. Illinois: Land of Lincoln; North Carolina: First Flight.

After suffering through an economic collapse in Argentina, and the chaos of overcrowded Mexico City, I came to think of the United States as an orderly place where people obeyed the traffic laws and the banks never lost your money. When I visited California on family vacations, everything looked bigger than I remembered. The size of a "large" soft drink kept booming, along with the price of real estate. All my old friends seemed to be flush with cash.

Then I moved back home, permanently, this summer. I discovered a country different from the one I had left behind.

For one thing, a sizable chunk of Latin America had followed me home, bringing more of their customs and their language with them. I saw Angelenos proudly wearing the jerseys of obscure Honduran soccer teams. At the Glendale Galleria, I wandered into a boutique that sold T-shirts emblazoned with the word "cipote," which is Salvadoran slang for "kid."

Another unmistakable sign of change was all the signs that cried out "Change." My old neighborhood, on a hillside overlooking the Arroyo Seco near downtown Los Angeles, filled up with posters for a man with an African name who was running for president.

I knew, of course, about Barack Obama but was unprepared for the full impact of Obamania. People were registering to vote in record numbers. Even my own young children were swept up by the spreading democracy fever.

At the same time, Wall Street was collapsing and banks were crashing. My country seemed embarrassed by its fall. For a moment, being an American bore some resemblance to being a Guatemalan.

"We've become a banana republic with nukes," the columnist Paul Krugman wrote, just a few days before he won the Nobel Prize in economics.

As the son of Guatemalan immigrants, I have some experience with banana republics. My grandfather worked on a Guatemalan banana plantation. Until recently, my reporting duties took me to countries that some people still call banana republics.

We are not yet living in a banana republic. Here, there are no generals or death squads waiting in the wings to take over should the elected president fail at his task.

But the new United States I've encountered does resemble a country like Guatemala or El Salvador in at least one important respect.

"Papa, why were so many people at that party speaking Spanish?" my 9-year-old son asked the other day, after a birthday celebration in Eagle Rock that climaxed with mariachis singing the birthday song "Las Mañanitas."

One of the Spanish-speaking people at that party was a top aide to the mayor of Los Angeles. And the mayor, I informed my children, is a guy named Antonio whose father was born in Mexico City.

In the new United States, we are more comfortable with the Latin American, Asian and African roots of our multitudes. Thus, the president-elect with the funny name, and the proliferation of languages around us.

The United States I returned to is a more colorful place than the one I left. And we Americans seem mellowed and slightly more humble.

If I could meet those Buenos Aires taxi driver drivers again, those Mexican farmers, I would say:

"The United States is a lot like your country. We're going through a rough time. We speak a lot of Spanish. And we're wondering how safe it is to keep our money in the bank."

When I lived in Argentina, I watched the middle class disappear in a whirlpool of bank failures. People rioted and attacked bankers in the Buenos Aires financial district.

I interviewed a 59-year-old woman who had poured alcohol over her head and set fire to herself in the lobby of her bank. Her failed suicide -- "a moment of madness," she called it -- came after she lost most of her life savings.

This October, three blocks from my daughter's new preschool in Pasadena, a 53-year-old woman set fire to a foreclosed home from which she was about to be evicted. Then she shot and killed herself.

Today, in our suffering United States, too many of us know someone who's been laid off, someone in danger of losing their home.

On a plane trip last month, I sat next to a Texas bank executive, a man in his 50s whose job consisted of visiting "clusters" of foreclosed properties around the country.

"You see the things people leave behind in their houses," he told me. "Like the overdue bills for their kid's dance class in the mailbox." He grew quiet, with a faraway look that suggested the toll that came with seeing so much loss.

One week later, federal regulators closed the executive's bank.

How much deeper will the recession sink us? Can the new regime in Washington rescue us? No one can say.

Residents of Latin America, generally speaking, have more experience living with that kind of uncertainty.

There is a Spanish proverb that is resonating in my brain these days. It's a favorite of my mother, who lives in Guatemala, where the people know a thing or two about hard times.

No hay mal que dure 100 años, ni enfermo que lo aguante.

Translation: There is no illness that lasts 100 years, and no sick person who could survive it anyway.

I can see a new United States being born on my television, in the images of the first family-elect.

Change will be coming to the White House. Already, it sometimes comes directly into my home, or into my new, company-issued Blackberry, thanks to that bane of all owners of phones in the 213 and 323 area codes -- wrong numbers.

For a time, my Blackberry rang repeatedly for a Salvadoran laborer named Ramiro. Having run out of money to pay for his own cellphone, Ramiro graciously left his old number to me.

"No, Ramiro doesn't have this number any more," I'd tell the callers in Spanish. I talked to Ramiro's relatives in El Salvador (who hadn't heard from him in months) and to a guy downtown who told me: "Well, if you talk to him, tell him I need him. I got a job installing a floor this afternoon."

Migration and urban sprawl have made Los Angeles and Mexico City, the last "Third World" metropolis I called home, the twin bad brothers of North American metropolises. The list of things the two cities share goes on and on: Spanish-language billboards, bad air, the soccer games in public places.

At my neighborhood barbershop in Highland Park, as in Mexico City, it's possible to step inside and greet barbers and customers alike with a shout of "¡buenos días!"

On the Santa Monica Freeway, as on the Viaducto Miguel Alemán, I've gotten stuck in traffic behind a guy with a Virgin of Guadalupe sticker on his rear window.

Still, they are dramatically different places to live. Like two siblings, you can look at Mexico City and Los Angeles and see similar features but discover that dramatically different personalities lie hidden underneath.

Once a week or so, I am reminded that I am not in Mexico City by a small, everyday miracle of life here. A siren sounds in the distance. As it gets closer, all the cars around me part ways, in a synchronized dance. An ambulance or a fire truck speeds past, and seconds later, all the cars dance back into traffic.

What happens when an ambulance hits crowded traffic in Mexico City? Few if any drivers move. The ambulance driver's strategy is to pull up to the bumper of the vehicle blocking his path and emit an ear-shattering siren blast.

Every time I see an L.A. car stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk, or when I see an L.A. commuter use her turn signal before switching lanes, I think: Ah, it's good to be home.

When I lived in Mexico City, I told a Mexican friend the story of my family trip to Washington, D.C., in 2007, and the visit my sons and I made to Capitol Hill.

My older son, then 10, wrote and hand-delivered a letter about the Iraq war to the office of our California congressman. I wrote one too.

This Mexican friend, the owner of a dry-cleaning business, nearly fell on the floor laughing. "Yeah, like I would ever write a letter to my congressman," he said. He considered "legislator" a synonym for "swindler." Writing a serious letter to such a person was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard.

Call us naive, but in the United States we have an earnest faith in the idea that government must listen to us.

Not long after we settled in our Los Angeles home, a neighbor appeared at our front gate with a clipboard. She was circulating a petition addressed to our city councilman, Jose Huizar, who happens to be a native of Zacatecas, Mexico. The petition asked that our street be repaved. You see, I told my sons after I signed my John Hancock. That's how American democracy works!

"We know, Papa," my younger son said, unimpressed. He explained that one of the fifth-graders in his Pasadena school had been circulating a petition to overturn a ban on Halloween costumes.

The school wanted to celebrate Day of the Dead (a Latin American tradition) and didn't think costumes would be appropriate.

"I signed it," my son said. On Halloween, he and his fellow students were allowed to wear costumes.

On Nov. 4, my wife and I gathered our three children around the television, where were treated to another civics lesson, this one courtesy of John McCain.

"This is an American tradition," I explained as McCain conceded. "The loser congratulates the winner. He asks the country to unite behind the new president."

"Not like in Mexico," my 12-year-old son said.

Two years ago, we watched the loser in Mexico's presidential election declare himself the country's "legitimate" ruler. He took the oath of office and donned the presidential sash -- even some of his supporters thought he looked silly.

In its long history, Mexico has had only one orderly transition of power between rival political parties.

We Americans are old pros at that sort of thing.

On Jan. 20, I'll turn on the television again, and gather the family for another civics lesson. The president who annoyed all those farmers and taxi drivers I met in Latin America will hand over the White House keys to the son of an African immigrant and a white woman from Kansas. The new guy gets a big job: rescuing us from economic collapse.

This, I'll tell my children, is what we call American History.

Tobar is a Times staff writer.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

Raising the World’s I.Q.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times

Published: December 4, 2008

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan

Travelers to Africa and Asia all have their favorite forms of foreign aid to “make a difference.” One of mine is a miracle substance that is cheap and actually makes people smarter.

Unfortunately, it has one appalling side effect. No, it doesn’t make you sterile, but it is just about the least sexy substance in the world. Indeed, because it’s so numbingly boring, few people pay attention to it or invest in it. (Or dare write about it!)

It’s iodized salt.

Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness.

When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world.

Development geeks rave about the benefits of adding iodine and other micronutrients (such as vitamin A, iron, zinc and folic acid) to diets. The Copenhagen Consensus, which brings together a panel of top global economists to find the most cost-effective solutions to the world’s problems, puts micronutrients at the top of the list of foreign aid spending priorities.

“Probably no other technology,” the World Bank said of micronutrients, “offers as large an opportunity to improve lives ... at such low cost and in such a short time.”

Yet the strategy hasn’t been fully put in place, partly because micronutrients have zero glamour. There are no starlets embracing iodine. And guess which country has taken the lead in this area by sponsoring the Micronutrient Initiative? Hint: It’s earnest and dull, just like micronutrients themselves.

Ta-da — Canada!

(Years ago, New Republic magazine held a contest for the most boring headline ever. The benchmark was from a Times Op-Ed column — not mine — that read “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” Alas, that’s salt iodization!)

Pakistan is typical of the challenges. Until recently, 6 in 10 Pakistani schoolchildren were iodine-deficient. Iodine just wasn’t on anyone’s mind.

“I had never heard of iodized salt,” said Haji Sajjawal Khan, a 65-year-old owner of a small salt factory here, near the capital of Islamabad. Officials from the Micronutrient Initiative and other aid agencies reached out to factory owners like Mr. Khan and encouraged them to iodize salt, in part to help make Pakistanis healthier and more intelligent.

“It will prevent people’s necks from being swollen and will make people smarter,” Mr. Khan said. So he agreed to add an iodine drip into his salt grinder.

One of the obstacles is the rumor that iodized salt is actually a contraceptive, a dastardly plot by outsiders to keep Muslims from having babies. That conspiracy theory spread partly because the same do-good advertising agency that marketed iodized salt also marketed condoms.

Yet progress is evident. One of the attractions is that a campaign to iodize salt costs only 2 cents to 3 cents per person reached per year.

“We are spending very little, but the benefit is enormous,” said Dr. Khawaja Masuood Ahmed, an official of the Micronutrient Initiative here. “We’re preventing people from becoming mentally retarded.”

Indeed, The Lancet, the British medical journal, reported last month that “Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of preventable mental impairment worldwide.”

Occasionally in my travels I’ve been unnerved by coming across entire villages, in western China and elsewhere, eerily full of people with mental and physical handicaps, staggering about, unable to speak coherently.

I now realize that the cause in some cases was probably iodine deficiency.

Indeed, the problem used to be widespread in the Alps. The word “cretin” is believed to come from a mountain dialect of French, apparently because iodine deficiency in the Alps produced so many cretins. The problem ended when food was brought in from elsewhere and salt was iodized.

There is talk that President-elect Barack Obama may reorganize the American aid apparatus, perhaps turning it into a cabinet department. There are many competing good causes — I’m a huge believer in spending more on education and maternal health, in particular — but there may be no investment that gets more bang for the buck than micronutrients.

So, yes, salt iodization is boring. But if we can add 1 billion points to the global I.Q., then let’s lend strong American support — to a worthwhile Canadian initiative.

An ugly attack on Mormons

The religious group has been the target of a campaign by liberal supporters of same-sex marriage.

By Jonah Goldberg, The Los Angeles Times
December 2, 2008

Did you catch the political ad in which two Jews ring the doorbell of a nice, working-class family? They barge in and rifle through the wife's purse and then the man's wallet for any cash. Cackling, they smash the daughter's piggy bank and pinch every penny. "We need it for the Wall Street bailout!" they exclaim.

No? Maybe you saw the one with the two swarthy Muslims who knock on the door of a nice Jewish family and then blow themselves up?

No? Well, then surely you saw the TV ad in which two smarmy Mormon missionaries knock on the door of an attractive lesbian couple. "Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!" says the blond one with a toothy smile. "We're here to take away your rights." The Mormon zealots yank the couple's wedding rings from their fingers and then tear up their marriage license.

As the thugs leave, one says to the other, "That was too easy." His smirking comrade replies, "Yeah, what should we ban next?" The voice-over implores viewers: "Say no to a church taking over your government."

Obviously, the first two ads are fictional because no one would dare run such anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim attacks.

The third ad, however, was real. It was broadcast throughout California on election day as part of the effort to rally opposition to Proposition 8, the initiative that successfully repealed the right to same-sex marriage in the state.

What was the reaction to the ad? Widespread condemnation? Scorn? Rebuke? Tepid criticism?

Nope.

This newspaper, a principled opponent of Proposition 8, ran an editorial saying that the "hard-hitting ad" was too little, too late.

The upshot seemed to be that if the pro-gay-marriage forces had just flooded the airwaves with more religious slander, things would have turned out better.

At a pro-gay-marriage rally in Los Angeles after the vote, chants of "Mormon scum!" were reported. Envelopes containing white powder have been sent to Mormon temples in California and Utah; vandals hit other temples. Lists of businesses to boycott -- essentially Mormon blacklists -- have sprung up on the Internet. The artistic director of the California Musical Theatre resigned because of pressure after it was revealed he gave $1,000 to a pro-Proposition 8 group.

It's amazing. Hollywood liberals, who shout "McCarthyism!" as a first resort, see nothing wrong with this. If Jews were attacked in this way for giving too much money to a political cause, Barbra Streisand would already have a French passport.

Never mind that Proposition 8 carried nearly every demographic slice of voters. Put aside the fact that the Catholic Church and scores of other Christian churches supported it too. Discount the inconvenient truth that bans on gay marriage have now passed in 30 states. It's all the Mormons' fault.

The argument is that Mormons used illegitimate power, in this case money, beyond their numerical standing in the population to secure victory for the measure. Golly, wealthy gay liberals would never do anything like that! I bet they're not giving a dime to the legal effort to overturn Proposition 8.

No, it's just that Mormons are the most vulnerable of the culturally conservative religious denominations and therefore the easiest targets for an organized campaign against religious freedom of conscience.

Traditional religion is the enemy anywhere it runs afoul of complete social acceptance of homosexuality. In New Mexico, a wedding photographer was fined nearly $7,000 for refusing to shoot a gay commitment ceremony. The dating site eHarmony, run by evangelicals, was just bullied by gay activists via the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights into starting up a site for gays. The first 10,000 registrants must get six months free.

It's often lost on gay-rights groups that they and their allies are the aggressors in the culture war. Indeed, they admit to being the "forces of change" and the "agents of progress." They proudly want to rewrite tradition and overturn laws. But whenever they're challenged democratically and peaceably, they instantly complain of being victims of entrenched bigots, even as they adopt the very tactics they abhor.

My own view is that gay marriage is likely inevitable, and won't be nearly the disaster many of my fellow conservatives fear it will be. But the scorched-earth campaign to victory pushed by gay-marriage advocates may well be disastrous, and "liberals" should be ashamed for countenancing it.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

Jihad’s True Face

By WILLIAM KRISTOL, The New York Times

Published: December 1, 2008

Much of the reporting from Mumbai the last few days has been informative, gripping and often moving. Some of the commentary, on the other hand, has been not just uninformative but counterinformative — if that’s a term, and if it’s not, I say it should be.

Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.

This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

Jim Leach is also a professor, at Princeton, but he’s better known as a former moderate Republican congressman from Iowa who supported Barack Obama this year. His contribution over the weekend was to point out on Politico.com that “the Mumbai catastrophe underscores the importance of vocabulary.” This wouldn’t have been my first thought. But Leach believes it’s very important that we consider the Mumbai attack not as an act of “war” but as an act of “barbarism.”

Why? “The former implies a cause: a national or tribal or ethnic rationale that infuses a sacrificial action with some group’s view of heroism; the latter is an assault on civilized values, everyone’s. ... To the degree barbarism is a part of the human condition, Mumbai must be understood not just as an act related to a particular group but as an outbreak of pent-up irrationality that can occur anywhere, anytime. ... It may be true that the perpetrators viewed themselves as somehow justified in attacking Indians and visiting foreigners, particularly perhaps Americans, British and Israeli nationals. But a response that is the least nationalistic is likely to be the most effective.”

If, as Leach says, “it may be true” the perpetrators viewed themselves as justified in their attacks, doesn’t this mean that they did in fact have a “rationale” that “infused” their action?

But Leach doesn’t want to discuss that rationale — even though it’s not hard to find. Ten minutes of Googling will bring you to a fine article, “The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups,” from the April 2005 issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. It’s by the respected journalist and diplomat Husain Haqqani, who, as it happens, is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani explains, is a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.” He notes that “Lashkar-e-Taiba has adopted a maximalist agenda for global jihad.” Indeed, the political arm of the group has conveniently published a pamphlet, “Why Are We Waging Jihad?,” that lays out all kinds of reasons why the United States, Israel and India are “existential enemies of Islam.”

So much for Leach’s notion that the Mumbai terrorists had no “cause” or “rationale.” But Leach’s refusal to see this is in the service of persuading India not to respond in a “nationalistic” way — and of persuading the United States not to see itself primarily as standing with India against our common enemies.

But if terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India (and the United States), governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit. This can happen if those nations’ citizens decide they don’t want their own country to be dishonored by allegiances with terror groups. Otherwise, other nations may have to act.

Patriotism is an indispensable weapon in the defense of civilization against barbarism. That was brought home over the weekend in an article in The Times of India on Sandeep Unnikrishnan, a major in India’s National Security Guards who died fighting the terrorists at the Taj hotel. The reporter spoke with the young man’s parents as they mourned their son: “His father, dignified in the face of such a personal tragedy, was stoic, saying he was proud of his son who sacrificed his life for the country: ‘He died for the nation.’ ”

Deficits and the Future

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: December 1, 2008

Right now there’s intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.

But the deficit worriers have it all wrong. Under current conditions, there’s no trade-off between what’s good in the short run and what’s good for the long run; strong fiscal expansion would actually enhance the economy’s long-run prospects.

The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing “crowds out” private investment — that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy’s long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there’s a lot to this argument.

But circumstances right now are anything but normal. Consider what would happen next year if the Obama administration gave in to the deficit hawks and scaled back its fiscal plans.

Would this lead to lower interest rates? It certainly wouldn’t lead to a reduction in short-term interest rates, which are more or less controlled by the Federal Reserve. The Fed is already keeping those rates as low as it can — virtually at zero — and won’t change that policy unless it sees signs that the economy is threatening to overheat. And that doesn’t seem like a realistic prospect any time soon.

What about longer-term rates? These rates, which are already at a half-century low, mainly reflect expected future short-term rates. Fiscal austerity could push them even lower — but only by creating expectations that the economy would remain deeply depressed for a long time, which would reduce, not increase, private investment.

The idea that tight fiscal policy when the economy is depressed actually reduces private investment isn’t just a hypothetical argument: it’s exactly what happened in two important episodes in history.

The first took place in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt mistakenly heeded the advice of his own era’s deficit worriers. He sharply reduced government spending, among other things cutting the Works Progress Administration in half, and also raised taxes. The result was a severe recession, and a steep fall in private investment.

The second episode took place 60 years later, in Japan. In 1996-97 the Japanese government tried to balance its budget, cutting spending and raising taxes. And again the recession that followed led to a steep fall in private investment.

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that trying to reduce the budget deficit is always bad for private investment. You can make a reasonable case that Bill Clinton’s fiscal restraint in the 1990s helped fuel the great U.S. investment boom of that decade, which in turn helped cause a resurgence in productivity growth.

What made fiscal austerity such a bad idea both in Roosevelt’s America and in 1990s Japan were special circumstances: in both cases the government pulled back in the face of a liquidity trap, a situation in which the monetary authority had cut interest rates as far as it could, yet the economy was still operating far below capacity.

And we’re in the same kind of trap today — which is why deficit worries are misplaced.

One more thing: Fiscal expansion will be even better for America’s future if a large part of the expansion takes the form of public investment — of building roads, repairing bridges and developing new technologies, all of which make the nation richer in the long run.

Should the government have a permanent policy of running large budget deficits? Of course not. Although public debt isn’t as bad a thing as many people believe — it’s basically money we owe to ourselves — in the long run the government, like private individuals, has to match its spending to its income.

But right now we have a fundamental shortfall in private spending: consumers are rediscovering the virtues of saving at the same moment that businesses, burned by past excesses and hamstrung by the troubles of the financial system, are cutting back on investment. That gap will eventually close, but until it does, government spending must take up the slack. Otherwise, private investment, and the economy as a whole, will plunge even more.

The bottom line, then, is that people who think that fiscal expansion today is bad for future generations have got it exactly wrong. The best course of action, both for today’s workers and for their children, is to do whatever it takes to get this economy on the road to recovery.