Harry Potter and Primo Levi

Just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

My initial impressions are mixed -- on the one hand, it's a real page turner, and it reaches deeply into the past six books to tie things together, so that the whole book feels through-composed. On the other hand, I found the epilogue to be utterly unnecessary, a tiddly-bump happy ending that some editor somewhere probably insisted upon because "that's what the readers expect", even though Ms. Rowling had done an estimable job in the last chapter planting little seeds of closure that would have grown quite nicely in the readers' imaginations on their own. Indeed, I found the change in tone to be jarring, so much so that it almost felt like the epilogue must have been written by someone other than Ms. Rowling.

But what surprised me most was the overwhelming sense that what I was reading was a fictionalized exploration of Europe's struggle against Hitler. Certainly, there are obvious parallels to Nazism -- one of the central themes of the book is racial purity, and the ways in which the Death Eaters terrorize the so-called "Mudbloods" are eerily reminiscent of the campaigns against the Jews in the 1930s -- there's anti-mixed blood propoganda, Voldemort supporters misuse pseudo-science to score political points, there are public humiliations, mixed-blood wizards and witches are stripped of their wands (rendering them unable do magic), their businesses are closed down, there are show trials where they must (in vain) prove their purity and on and on. The Death Eaters form a sort of Brown Shirt brigade, or perhaps a wizarding version of the SS Guard. Voldemort's supports also seek legitimacy by propping up a puppet government at the Ministry of Magic. Of course, like Vichy France, it's riddled with resisters both organized and not, with the Order of the Phoenix standing in the role of the French resistance. There's even an underground radio station to rally the resisters.

One of the parallels felt more subtle, and so I can't decide if it was intentional or coincidental. I don't want to spoil the plot, but it will suffice to note that for a significant part of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione hide out from Voldemort and the Death Eaters by camping out in woods and forests around the English countryside. They are on the move constantly, lest they be discovered, and most of the time, they sit around waiting for something to happen (exactly what, they're not sure, and this is part of the dramatic tension), stealing what they need to survive and generally living off their wits.

Of course, this being the wizard world, they travel in style, complete with a tent that is bigger inside than it is outside and things like invisibility cloaks, but even so, I was struck by the parallel in tone to Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, which recounts the story of Jewish partisans in Eastern Europe during World War II. In that book, the partisans hide out in the woods, steal what they need to survive and generally live off their wits. In both books, the time in the woods, doing nothing, weighs on them, and in the end their lives take on a weird sort of routine despite a world turned upside down. They take turns gathering food, and standing watch for the enemy, and they bicker, love, laugh, cry with the frustration of it all. Their existence is punctuated by moments of sheer terror, as they find themselves in situations that they must bluff or fight their out of or run away from, or die. But mostly they wait around for something to happen, and it is the waiting that weighs on them most heavily.

As Levi so achingly recounts, and Rowling echoes artfully, the partisans get by by reminding themselvs of their vision of an idealized future, a world without the evil that they are forced to confront moment by moment. Their resolve flags sometimes, and is revived by sporadic news from the outside world that reminds them that they're not alone. Each band has a mission -- to reach Italy and freedom, and to destroy Horcruxes, respectively -- and during the long days and even longer nights, they lose and then rediscover their faith in the mission, before finding its underlying meaning. And in the end, the ultimate victory of the cause for which they have been fighting is bittersweet, laden by the burden of the struggle, tinged with the guilt of the survivor.

Amazingly, in each book, the partisans retain their essential humanity even as the world around them seems to shed its own. At key moments, they show empathy for enemy soldiers who have shown some measure of remorse at what they've done or become, and forgive their attackers. But they do not romanticize the enemy, either, and are not afraid to fight or to kill if necessary.

I haven't reread If Not Now, When? recently enough to identify other parallels, but thought this one was worth mentioning. Not bad for a kids' book, huh?

Spinning the F-word

The Democrats in the Senate attempted to force a vote on a bill (the "Reed-Levin Amendment") that would have required a reduction in troops in Iraq beginning 120 days after enactment of the law. The Republicans blocked Reed-Levin from coming up for a vote, by means of a parliamentary procedure in which they voted against something called "cloture".

Cloture is a term in parliamentary procedure in which the senators agree to end the debate and call for a vote on the bill being debated. When the cloture motion was made, 52 senators voted for cloture, and 47 voted against it. Since a successful cloture motion requires 60 "yea" votes, the cloture motion was defeated despite garnering the support of a majority of the senators. As a result, there was no vote on Reed-Levin.

This is called a "filibuster". Filibusters have a long and illustrious history in the Senate, and have featured prominently in the movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and in an episode of "The West Wing", among others. Clearly, they have dramatic potential.

As an aside, I should note that I have nothing against filibusters, although personally, I dislike today's way of doing it. In the old days, in order to mount a filibuster, a senator (or group of senators) had to hold the floor continuously -- that is, keep speaking without sitting down, and without yielding the floor to the opposition -- until the Senate either gave up on calling for a vote on the bill being debated, or successfully voted for cloture. In other words, a filibuster caused the entire Senate to grind to a halt, which gave the filibuster some of its power and effect. Today, there's some kind of gentlemen's agreement that allows the Senate to, in effect, hold several debates at the same time, so that the filibuster doesn't stop other bills from being debated and voted. Hence, the filibuster becomes just another obscure parliamentary tactic, rather than a Hail Mary parliamentary spectacle, the last refuge of a beleagured minority. End of aside.

My point in giving this brief history of filibusters is that, properly explained, they're not hard to understand, and can actually be interesting.

Which brings me to the Democratic Party's inability to spin what happened with Reed-Levin and the media's appalling lack of balance when describing the Republican filibuster of Reed-Levin. Filibusters, you may recall, last made serious headlines when the Democrats in the Senate used the tactic to block the Senate from voting on some of President Bush's judicial nominations. Then, the F-word was all over the news, as the media parroted the Republican talking point -- "Let's just have a straight up-or-down vote" -- and lambasted the Democrats as intransigent children having a temper tantrum. The Republicans at the time were so incensed that the Democrats would use the filibuster this way that they threatened to rewrite the rules of the Senate to effectively do away with the filibuster altogether -- the so-called "Nuclear Option".

That's right, America. We had a knock-down drag-out full-on front page partisan brawl over a parliamentary procedure. And Americans ate it up! I believe that largely as a result of Republican propoganda at that time, most Americans now assume that filibustering is a bad thing.

So what do the Democrats do to spin the Reed-Levin issue? Right. They studiously avoid the word "filibuster".

The DNC's website headline? "Republicans Block Levin-Reed Amendment To Withdraw Troops". And the lede isn't much better: "After an all-night debate on Iraq, Senate Democrats tried today to end a Republican block on a vote on the Levin-Reed amendment..." Boring.

The same is true around the party. Here's Hillary Clinton:

When the Senate votes on motions to allow debate on both the Feingold-Reid and Reed-Levin Amendments, I will vote for cloture on both.

Ho hum...And on and on. Here's Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Reid: Republicans Continue To Block Democrats' Efforts To Change Course In Iraq, Make America More Secure

And Joe Biden:

BIDEN Decries Republican Refusal to Vote on Iraq War on Senate Floor Today

Even Carl Levin, one of the eponymous co-sponsors of the bill, shies away from the F-word both in the headline and in his remarks:

Senate Floor Statement on the Cloture Vote on the Levin-Reed Amendment

...

If the Republican Leader’s procedural roadblock succeeds this morning, we will be denied the opportunity to vote on an issue which just about every American has strong feelings on: whether or not to change course in Iraq by setting a timetable to reduce the number of our troops in Iraq. Because of that procedural roadblock, we will not be voting at 11:00 a.m. on the Levin-Reed amendment but on whether to proceed to the vote on Levin-Reed.

Of course, it stands to reason that if even the Democrats are avoiding the F-word, so will the media. To wit, you'd think that today, the headlines would be screaming about the Republican tantrums and intransigence that prevented Reed-Levin from coming to a vote. But you'd be wrong. The headlines today talked about Republican "blocking tactics" and how a majority of the Senate "rejected" a vote on troop withdrawal. Really. Even C-Span (!) got in on the act, with the headline "Senate Blocks Iraq Withdrawal Timeline, 52-47".

My point here is that the Democrats are doing a horrible job of explaining exactly what's going on. In fact, they're doing such a bad job of it that C-Span even got it all wrong: what actually happened was the 52 senators (mostly Democrats) voted to bring Reed-Levin to a vote, and 47 senators (Republicans and Connecticut for Liebermaniacs) voted not to, not that the Senate affirmatively voted against the withdrawal timeline. Put another way, the Republicans successfully filibustered the bill.

Thankfully, there was one notable, though unsurprising, exception to the mealy-mouthedness of the Democrats: Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and Senate maverick, who used the F-word appropriately and boldly three times in a one-paragraph statement.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold On Republicans Filibustering the Levin-Reed Amendment

July 18, 2007

Today, a majority of the Senate backed binding legislation with a firm end date to redeploy our troops from Iraq. This shows how far we’ve come since August 2005 when I became the first Senator to propose a deadline to bring the mistake in Iraq to an end. If we had enacted my proposal when I first offered it, our troops would be home right now. Although a number of Republicans have finally acknowledged that the President’s Iraq policy is a failure, their filibuster of the Levin-Reed amendment shows they are still failing to back up their words with action. The Levin-Reed amendment is by no means perfect, but its binding provisions to end our extensive military involvement in Iraq are a significant step forward. With their decision to filibuster, the Republicans have prevented the Senate from voting to bring the open-ended mission in Iraq to an end, and have once again ignored the calls of the American people.

Sigh.

Great Speeches

A propos of nothing, I was reading a book review on Arts & Literature Daily [link] about great speeches in American history [link]. As the book review makes clear, there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of oratory in the United States over the years.

Which got me to thinking. I don't know exactly which speeches are included in the volumes being reviewed, but a Google search of "great speeches" yielded several websites purporting to collect great speeches, including a site known as "History Place" [link].

As I read through some of the more recent ones, I was struck by the power of a good speech. Two stuck out, however. The first was President Reagan's speech in Berlin in 1987, the speech in which he said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The speech is lucid, well written and powerful. [link] But even this speech, as powerful as it was, pales in comparison to the 1962 speech by President Kennedy on why we chose to go to the Moon.

That speech, fittingly entitled "We Choose to go to the Moon...", is a powerhouse of persuasive oratory that elevates, motivates and elucidates noble ideals, but never departs from simple imagery or clear phrasing.

For example, in order to explain the magnitude of our achievement as humans, and the duty that that imposes on us to reach further, President Kennedy captures, in one paragraph, how exciting it is to live at the edge of such amazing scientific progress. And he does so without bogging down in soporific detail or getting lost in gauzy abstractions:

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

It almost makes you want to jump up and shout, "Who are we to stand in the way of such incredible progress?"

The speech is also notable for making some of the science involved accessible (not an easy task -- after all, it is rocket science). For example, rather than talk about the complexities of calculating trajectories and launch windows, he gives a (if you'll pardon the pun) down to Earth example that neatly sums up the degre of difficulty:

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium [Rice University in Houston] between the 40-yard lines.

Note also the subtle sports imagery, which taps into the America's image of itself as the winner who does the undoable, and makes it look easy to boot.

Kennedy's penchant for plain talk continues when he is talking about a most difficult subject -- how much it will all cost. Note how he deftly defuses the question of cost by putting it into terms we can all understand (and does so with a touch of pointed humor):

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year's space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.

His rhetoric doesn't skirt the hard issue, either -- as much as it's cost so far, it will cost more in the future -- but he contrasts this with an appeal to our nobler ambitions -- to be bold:

Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority...But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.

[I should note here that management consultants love this last part of the speech as an excellent example of true leadership that inspires us by setting out a vision statement (to paraphrase, "invent a machine and a process to go to the Moon and come back safely") that focuses the collective effort.]

All in all, I found the speech to be uplifting, honest and a fine example of what rhetoric can be in the hands of a skilled orator.