Superior Leader - Warren Buffet by: Michael J. Spindler

Superior business leader and American investor Warren Buffett is often called “Oracle of Omaha” or the “Sage of Omaha” and philanthropist. (Wikipedia, 2007) Buffett is the CEO, and the biggest shareholder of the Berkshire Hathaway Company. Buffett’s has an estimated current net worth of approximately $52 billion in US funds. Forbes Magazine ranks Buffett the third richest person in the world in September 2007 behind Carlos Slim and Bill Gates.

Warren Buffett is known for his economical and plain lifestyle. Buffett still lives in the same Omaha, Nebraska house that he purchased in 1958 for $31,500 with a current value of $700,000. In 1989, Buffett spent $9.7 million of the Berkshire’s funds on a corporate jet. He jokingly named it “The Indefensible” because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. (Wikipedia, 2007)

Warren Buffett decided to make a commitment to give his fortune to charity back in June 2006. Buffett’s charity donation is approximately $30 billion, which is the largest donation in the history of the United States. The donation was enough to more than double the size of the foundation with 83% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett believed that his family had enough money to get started in life so Buffett decided to give his fortune to charity. Buffett’s annual salary in 2006 was only $100,000. In 2007, Buffett was listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. (Wikipedia, 2007)

What makes Warren Buffett a good business leader? This is what everyone wants to know because Warren buffet is so successful. It all starts with leadership. Warren buffet is a true leader where his leadership makes a difference in the world. Leadership is very much related to change and Warren Buffett has the capabilities of leadership change to fit the changing world. Warren Buffett has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to map read in the irregular waters of change. Is Warren Buffett born a leader? The authors of this paper believe not. Experience and research has shown little evidence that an individual who comes to power is a “born leader.” Warren Buffett took the falls that any other leader has to take. Warren Buffett learned from his mistakes and turned his mistakes into a positive thing. Warren Buffett shares his leadership at all organizational levels and Buffett is empowered to share leadership responsibilities. In the world of business, many titles related to leadership roles are actively used in business and Warren Buffett wears those titles to make him effective in multiple leadership positions in business. Distinction between good leadership and good management is made often. Managers are made to be organizational, controllers and budgeters. Warren Buffett has leadership in all three departments and one must have these traits to be a good business leader.

Another important trait in Today’s business leadership is communication. Warren Buffet is a skilled communicator in all aspects of life. Communication is the real key of leadership. Skilled communicators have an appreciation for positioning in the business world. Warren Buffet is experienced at positioning himself at the right place at the right time. Warren Buffet has the understanding of the people he is trying to reach and what he can and cannot hear from the people. Knowledge of audiences’ needs and wants gives the orator the ability to listen. Warren Buffett is an excellent listener with the ability to convey his understanding.

When Warren Buffett talks, people listen. Warren Buffett can send a message through an open door and does not have to push the message through a wall.

Leadership is crucial to any successful business and good leadership is what Warren Buffett is all about. This is what makes Warren buffet a good business leader.

Mr. Warren Buffett’s investment strategies and course of leadership are shining examples of characteristics shared by cognitive theorists. Cognitive theory is an approach of explaining behavior through perception, anticipation, and thinking. Mr. Buffett’s continual approach of analyzing both possible investment choices, market trends, and the ability to place management resources of the right caliber in the right position has consistently brought this investor to the forefront amongst peers and the marketplace. At the core of every sound investor is a creative innovator.

Innovation demands creativity. Creativity in turn draws on our cognitive faculties, across the full amplitude from emotion to reason. In the number-heavy world of global investing, innovative thinking is critical. Innovative investors decipher future trends, spot likely winners by combining science (financials) with art (acuity and perception) and continuously mitigate risk. They assess user needs, product features, the proper deployment of money, professional organizational structures and risk management. (Kore Kalibre, 2006)

Mr. Buffett’s instinct and ability to interpret market trends is also held by tight reigns. Despite over 50 years of growth, Mr. Buffett always adheres to one of the most basic business principles: “…only compete where you have a competitive advantage. Warren Buffett refers to staying within your circle of competence. Social psychologists tell us, though, that we are prone to overconfidence when it comes to assessing our abilities…” (Arthridge, 2006) A man of Warren Buffett’s position and track record could easily be derailed to a sense of over confidence. The principle of only competing within your range of competitive advantage is a principle that can be applied to many other areas in life, and Mr. Buffett’s ability to work and live by this idea has allowed him to continue forward with minimal bruising.

By establishing the previous examples, the authors can reinforce the principles of cognitive theory in that Mr. Buffett behavior patterns are clearly dictated by thought processes, which include interpretation, analysis, and foresight. “As experiences and events gain meaning and value, the process becomes increasingly top down as the mind in (a) attempt at an orderly process influences perception though beliefs, goals and external process” (Gardener, 2007)

Warren Buffett’s is a self empowered leader, because he is loyal, sets goals, plans a strategy for achievement, and stays committed until he accomplishes his purpose. Up to date, he is the greatest stockbroker of all-time. He is a very conservative investor that prefers to invest in companies that sell name brand products that he uses. For example, Coca-Cola, Gillette Razors, See’s Candy, Gulfstream Jet, and GEICO are the major companies he invested in. In the nineties his assets quadrupled in less than five years. He is a smart investor that usually does not take big investment risks. For example, he will not invest in internet stock, because the return is unpredictable. He likes to invest in companies that he is sure will be successful 20 years later. He buys the company with the intentions of keeping it forever. Usually, the management team of each company is the same staff that sold it Warren Buffett from the beginning. He stays loyal to his partners, and the team workstheir best to keep him happy.

After Warren Buffett’s wife died, he decided to donate 85% of his money to charity. However, “he wants his money to be used the same year he donates it”.(Harris, 2006) The requirement will accelerate the process to help the world. According to Fortune magazine, five-sixths of his money will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation which focus on finding cures for diseases that are common in poor nations. The rest of the money will be split among four other charities, that are each run by his three children and one that is in his late wife’s name.

Warren Buffett is not a huge spender. In fact, he still lives in the same house he bought 40 years ago. Warren “told ABC News “Nightline” that being born into wealth did not entitle his children”(Harris, 2006). In addition, he told Fortune magazine that, “A very rich person would leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.”(Harris, 2006) In other words, he wants his children to work earn their money and value hard work and smart choices.

In the year 2006, Warren’s first annual donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was $1.5 billion and the rest was divided among the four charities. He was the first person to make a donation better than Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. It seems as if Bill Gates and Warren Buffett set a good example and lead others to be more generous, because now the Barron Hilton has committed to donating half of his fortune to charity also. Barron Hilton is the founder of the Hilton Hotels and is worth $2.3 billion. Hopefully, a trend started among the fortunate to give to the less fortunate.

The personality of Warren Buffett ties to the Social Cognitive Level, because he tries to understand and make sense of other people. He observes the differences in social knowledge when dealing with people. Social cognition refers to making sense of ourselves, others, and how the information is used. In the sixties and seventies Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel were psychologists, studying personality development. They found that social learning and cognitive principles improve ones abilities to self-regulate and to follow goals. Warren investment choices were successful, because he conditioned his the way he processed information, choices, and expectations.

References - DO Not Strip References!

Gardener, J. (2007). Cognitive Behavior Theory. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.cognitivebehavior.com/theory/index.html

Harris, D. (2006, June 26,). Warren Buffett's Unprecedented Generosity. Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2118501

Kore Kalibre (2006, March-April 2006). Warren Buffett’s Innovation: Staying away from Rapid Product Innovation. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://www.korekalibre.com/index.php?option=com_magazine&task=show_magazine_article&magazine_id=26

Legg Mason Value Trust (2006, October 26). Legg Mason Value Trust (LMVTX) Letter to Shareholders. Retrieved December 26, 2007, from http://markets.kiplinger.com/kiplinger?GUID=323448&Page=MediaViewer&Ticker=LMVTX

Wikipedia (2007, December 25). Warren Buffett. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

About The Author Michael J. Spindler - http://www.localmusichits.com - A Musicians Community for Fans and the Bands to promote hits in local music on a national stage. Free to distribute - However- Do not strip Article References, remove the HTML if needed, but keep the URL’s. Do Not Remove the Authors name, Michael J. Spindler and keep the hyperlink to http://www.localmusichits.com - I use software that compares my “library” and scours the web for placements. When I find my article on your site and you have not followed the above binding agreements, Lawyers will be involved.

How to Successfully Navigate Your Business through an Economic Downturn by: Terry H Hill

An economic downturn is a phase of the business cycle in which the economy as a whole is in decline.This phase basically marks the end of the period of growth in the business cycle. Economic downturns are characterized by decreased levels of consumer purchases (especially of durable goods) and, subsequently, reduced levels of production by businesses.

While economic downturns are admittedly difficult, and are formidable obstacles to small businesses that are trying to survive and grow, an economic downturn can open up opportunities. A well-managed company can realize the opportunity to gain market share by taking customers away from their competitors. Resourceful entrepreneurs capture the available opportunities, from an economic downturn, by developing alternate methods of doing business that were never implemented during a prior growth period.

The challenge of successfully navigating your business through an economic downturn lies in the realignment of your business with current economic realities. Specifically, you, as the business owner, need to renew a focus on your core clients/customers, reduce your operating expenses, conserve cash, and manage more proactively, rather than reactively, is paramount.

Here are best practices that will help you to successfully navigate your business through an economic downturn:

Goals:

The primary goal of any business owner is to survive the current economic downturn and to develop a leaner, more cost-effective and more efficient operation. The secondary goal is to grow the business even during this current economic downturn.

Objectives:

• Conserve cash.

• Protect assets.

• Reduce costs.

• Improve efficiencies.

• Grow customer base.

Required Action:

• Do not panic… History shows that economic downturns do not last forever. Remain calm and act in a rational manner as you refocus your attention on resizing your company to the current economic conditions.

• Focus on what YOU can control… Don’t let the media's rhetoric concerning recessions and economic slowdown deter you from achieving business success. It´s a trap! Why? Because the condition of the economy is beyond your control. Surviving economic downturns requires a focus on what you can control, i.e. your relevant business activities.

• Communicate, communicate, and communicate! Beware of the pitfall of trying to do too much on your own. It is a difficult task indeed to survive and to grow your business solely with your own efforts. Solicit ideas and seek the help of other people (your employees, suppliers, lenders, customers, and advisors). Communicate honestly and consistently. Effective two-way communication is the key.

• Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate! The value of a strong negotiation skill set cannot be overstated. Negotiating better deals and contracts is an absolute must for realigning and resizing your company to the current economic conditions. The key to success is not only knowing how to develop a win-win approach in negotiations with all parties, but also keeping in mind the fact that you want a favorable outcome for yourself too.

Recommended Best Practice Activities:

The Nuts and Bolts… The following list of recommended best practice activities is critical for your business' survival and for its growth during an economic downturn. The actual financial health of your particular business, at the outset of the economic downturn, will dictate the priority and urgency of the implementation of the following best practice activities.

1. Diligently monitor your cash flow: Forecast your cash flow monthly to ensure that expenses and planned expenditures are in line with accounts receivable. Include cash flow statements into your monthly financial reporting. Project cash requirements three-to- six months in advance. The key is to know how to monitor, protect, control, and put cash to work.

2. Carefully convert your inventories: Convert excess, obsolete, and slow-moving inventory items into cash. Consider returning excess and slow-moving items back to the suppliers. Close-out or inventory reduction sales work well to resize your inventory. Also, consider narrowing your product offerings. Well-timed order placement helps to reduce excess inventory levels and occasional material shortages. The key is to reduce the amount of your inventory without losing sales.

3. Timely collection of your accounts receivable: This asset should be converted to cash as quickly as possible. Offer prompt payment discounts to encourage timely payments. Make changes in the terms of sale for slow paying customers (i.e. changing net 30 day terms to COD). Invoicing is an important part of your cash flow management. The first rule of invoicing is to do it as soon as possible after products are shipped and/or after services are delivered. Place an emphasis on reducing billing errors. Most customers delay payments because an invoice had errors, and therefore, will not pay until they receive a corrected copy. Email or fax your invoices to save on mailing time. Post the payments that you have received and make deposits more frequently. The key is to develop an efficient collection system that generates timely payments and one that gives you advance warning of problems.

4. Re-focus your attention on your existing clients/customers: Make customer satisfaction your priority. A regular review of your customers' buying history and frequency of purchases can reveal some interesting facts about your customers' buying habits. Consider signing long-term contracts with your core clients/customers which will add to your security. Offer a discount for upfront cash payments. The key is to do what it takes to keep your current customers loyal.

5. Re-negotiate with your suppliers, lenders, and landlord:

i) Suppliers: Always keep your negotiations on the level of need, saying that your company has reviewed its cost structure and has determined that it needs to lower supplier costs. . Tell the supplier that you value the relationship you have developed, but that you need to receive a cost reduction immediately. Ask your supplier for a lower material price, a longer payment cycle, and the elimination of finance charges. Also, see if you can buy material from them on a consignment basis. In return for their price concessions, be willing to agree to a long-term contract. Explore the idea of bartering as a form of payment.

ii) Lenders: Everything in business finance is negotiable and your relationship with a bank is no exception. The first step to successful renegotiations is to convince your lenders that you can ultimately pay off the renegotiated loan. You must point out to your lenders why it would be in their best interest to agree to a new arrangement. Showing them your business plan and your action plan that includes your cost-savings initiatives, along with "the how" and "the when" of the implementation of your plan is the best way to achieve this goal. Explain to them that you will need their cooperation to insure that you can survive, as well as, grow your business during the economic downturn. Negotiated items include: the rate of interest, the required security to cover the loan, and the beginning date for repayment. A beginning date for repayment could be immediate, within several months or as long as a year. The key is to realize that your lender will work with you, but that frequent and continual communications with them is critical.

iii) Landlord: Meet with your landlord. Explain your need to have them extend the term of your lease at a reduced cost. Make sure you have a clause in the lease agreement that entitles you to have the right to sublet any or all of the leased space.

6. Re-evaluate your staffing requirements: This is a very critical area. Salaries/wages are a major expense of doing business. Therefore, any reduction in the hours worked through work schedule changes, short-term layoffs or permanent layoffs has an immediate cost saving benefit. Most companies ramped up hiring new employees in the good times, only to find that they are currently overstaffed due to slow sales during the economic downturn. In terms of down-sizing your staff, be very careful not to reduce your staff to a level that forces you to skimp on customer service and quality. Consider the use of part-timers or the current trend of outsourcing certain functions to independent contractors.

7. Shop for better insurances rates: Get quotations from other insurance agents for comparable coverage to determine whether or not your present insurance carrier is competitive. Also, consider revising your coverage to reduce premium costs. The key is to have the right balance-to be adequately insured, but not under or over insured.

8. Re-evaluate your advertising: Contrary to the other cost-cutting initiatives, evaluate the possibility of increasing your advertising expenditures. This tactic realizes the advantage of the reduced "noise" and congestion (fewer advertisers) in the marketplace. The downturn period a great opportunity to increase brand awareness and create additional demand for your product/service offerings.

9. Seek the help of outside advisors: The use of an advisory board comprised of your CPA, attorney, and business consultant offers you objectivity and provides you with professional advice and guidance. Their collective experience in working with similar situations in past economic downturns is invaluable.

10. Review your other expenses: Target an across-the-board cost-cutting initiative of 10-15%. Attempt to eliminate unnecessary expenses. Tightening your belt in order to weather the downturn makes practical, financial sense.

Proactively managing your business through an economic downturn is an enormous challenge and is critical for your survival. However, through well-planned initiatives, an economic downturn can create tremendous opportunity for your company to gain greater market share. In order to take advantage of this growth opportunity, you must act quickly to implement the above best business practices to continue realigning and resizing your company to the current economic conditions.

Copyright © 2008 Terry H. Hill

You may reprint this article free of charge in your newsletter, magazine, or on your website, provided that the article is unedited, and that the copyright, author's bio, and contact information below appears with each article. Articles appearing on the web must provide a hyperlink to the author's web site, http://www.legacyai.com

Terry H. Hill is the founder and managing partner of Legacy Associates, Inc, a business consulting and advisory services firm. A veteran chief executive, Terry works directly with business owners of privately held companies on the issues and challenges that they face in each stage of their business life cycle. To find out how he can help you take your business to the next level, visit his site at http://www.legacyai.com

To download a copy of this article, click on this link: http://www.legacyai.com/Article_Downturn.html.

About The Author An author, speaker, and consultant, Terry H. Hill is the founder and managing partner of Legacy Associates, Inc., a business consulting and advisory services firm based in Sarasota, Florida. A veteran chief executive, Terry works directly with business owners of privately held companies on the issues and challenges that they face in each stage of their business life cycle. Terry is the author of the business desk-reference book, How to Jump Start Your Business. He hosts the Business Insights from Legacy Blog at http://blog.legacyai.com and writes a bi-monthly eNewsletter, "Business Insights from Legacy eZine." By signing up for Business Insights from Legacy eZine at http://tinyurl.com/2t4fxs you can keep abreast of the latest tips, tactics, and best business practices. You will, also, receive the free eBook, Jump Start Your Knowledge of Business. Contact Terry by email at http://www.legacyai.com or telephone him at 941-556-1299.

Digital Copyright Jessica Litman

Digital Copyright

Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet

Review of: Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright, Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2001. 208 p.

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By Karen Coyle; published in Information Technology and Libraries, December 2001. pp 220-222.

If you're like most of us you have some idea of what the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about but feel you should know more. And if you're like most of us you're not about to read a whole book on the topic in order to gain (or attempt to gain) more understanding of the topic.

Jessica Litman offers us an informative, intelligent and even amusing way to further our knowledge of the DMCA and other copyright issues through her book Digital Copyright. To begin with, this is not a law book, although it is about law. Digital Copyright is instead a social history of copyright law. It is not about the law per se but about how the technology developments of the 20th century changed how copyright law is crafted in the United States and who reaps the benefits.

Although few of us will ever read the 30,000 words of the DMCA (and we probably wouldn't learn much from it if we did), Litman's book provides the reader with a clear picture of why the DMCA matters by presenting a picture of how this law evolved, who it favors, and why it is generally bad for the rest of us.

History

Litman begins Chapter 3 with the sentence: "If history bores you, you should skip this chapter." Don't. This is the most important chapter in the book. It explains how our copyright law went from being a piece of legislation (like other laws) to its current state as a negotiated compromise between the major commercial stakeholders. It began early in the 20th century when the legislature and the Copyright Office decided that although the copyright law clearly needed updating, the issues were too complex for the legislators to understand. The Copyright Office therefore drafted the proposed legislation in a series of meetings with representative members of industries with an interest in copyright issues. This technique led to the copyright law of 1909 and has been the method of revising copyright law ever since.

Admittedly, it does make some sense that stakeholders would be included in the making of laws that affect them and their business, and presumably this is not uncommon in our law-making today. (That's what lobbyists are all about, after all.) The consequences of having the stakeholders dominate the process, however, are quite negative for all who were not part of the discussion. Not included in the process are representatives of future or emerging technologies, minority and non-commercial interests and, of course, members of the public.

Each iteration of the copyright law in the 20th century addresses particular technologies and their commercial interests. The 1909 copyright law addressed mainly issues relating to composers and music publishers. Not included in that process were members of the piano roll and "talking machine" (phonograph) industries, whose representatives were not present at the discussions. The law made the unlicensed manufacture of piano rolls and phonograph records illegal. The 1912 law addressed the right of movie companies to make motion pictures based on books, arising from a lawsuit over a movie version of Ben Hur. Movie companies participated to negotiate a law that limited their exposure in copyright infringement actions. But of course radio and television were not included.

Technology progressed and copyright discussions continued. From 1912 to 1976 numerous attempts were made to pass a law that would cover all of the new technologies: commercial radio, talking movies, commercial television. Negotiations fell apart before bills could be drafted or during the actual legislative process when new stakeholders got wind of the changes afoot and complained to their representatives. It was a chaotic tug-of-war of competing interests, each with their specific needs. Some of these needs introduced new concepts into copyright law: where once there had been one single copyright for a work, new technologies allowed copyright holders to license diverse uses for the same work, such as a music recording, radio play and use in a film.

The 1976 copyright law, which was a major revision, was the result of decades of committee meetings, negotiations, drafting and compromises. The final steps to this law began with a 6-year study and five years of conferences that produced bill text. Another eleven years passed as Congress and the "interested parties" met to compromise on specific issues and add new language to the bill. The resulting law was a pre-agreed upon statement of copyright that satisfied those who had participated in its making.

This doesn't mean that everyone was covered. "Just as there had been no commercial broadcaster to invite to the conferences in 1905, there were no videocassette manufacturers, direct satellite broadcasters, digital audio technicians, personal computer users, motion picture colorizers, online database subscribers, or Internet service providers to invite in 1960." (p. 51) It took decades of work to craft the law and it was out of date before Congress voted on it.

Even more important, however, was the nature of the law that came out of such a process. Copyright law that is crafted in this manner tends to address very specific industries, technologies and situations. These specific legal points do not lend themselves to application to situations that weren't included in the negotiations; they don't generalize well. As an example, application of the 1976 copyright law to computer technologies has led to some very unfortunate court rulings, at least some of which were used to bolster the early process that resulted in the DMCA. One of these rulings stated that every use of a computer file, such as turning on the computer and launching the operating system or opening a document to read it on the screen, made a copy of the software or file and therefore was potentially an infringement of copyright. In the story of the DMCA, it just goes downhill from there.

"... a failure of imagination."

Most of the book, and decidedly the most engaging part of it, revolves around the development of the law that became the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and its aftermath. Litman introduces the Internet into the copyright picture and prefaces the remaining two-thirds of her book with a pithy one-line wrap-up of the process that led to the DMCA's implementation: "What happened next was a failure of imagination." (p. 89) The members of the Clinton administration charged with looking into the potential effects of the Internet on copyright, along with the usual bevy of industry representatives, showed so little understanding of the new technology that it would have been amusing if it hadn't led to such a tragically mistaken law.

As we know now, the recent changes to the copyright law have greatly enhanced the rights of copyright holders and have consequently greatly reduced the rights of the reading public. The justification for this shoring up of the law was good old American patriotism: according to the Working Group on Intellectual Property, chaired by the Clinton Administration Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman from 1994 to 1996, nothing short of the entire future of the American economy was at stake. New protections for copyright in the networked economy were needed to protect American profitability in that environment. There would be no investment in the National Information Infrastructure and no content to sell both at home and abroad if adequate protection was not provided.

For those of us who were actively working on the Internet in those years, it is astonishing to hear that the Net was considered by Washington insiders to be "... a collection of empty pipes, waiting to be filled with content." (p.93) The entire movement to reform our copyright law ignored the fact that we already had a vital electronic information infrastructure bursting with content, albeit primarily non-commercial content. Yet it wasn't difficult to sell this vision to industry, the legislature, and the few members of the press who got wind of the Working Group's activities, most likely because most people had very little, if any, experience with the Internet itself. If they had, they dismissed it as being "academic" and therefore not relevant to the vital commercial world that the National Information Infrastructure promised to be.

The entire DMCA was based on a vision of a market that didn't exist in a world that was destined not to be. Not only that, the resulting bill was so long that it was subsequently itself published in book form. The original bill was about 3,000 words long. As it passed through committees it grew to 4,000, then 12,000, finally being passed at a whopping 30,000 words. It covered not only the digital millenium but such special interests as boat hull designs. And no one, not even the most ardent of copyright attorneys, understands it all. As Litman says: "Our current copyright statute has more than merely a provision or two or three or ten that don't make a lot of sense; it's chock-full of them." (p. 114)

This incomprehensibility of the copyright law has a great effect on the ability and willingness of the public to obey it. A theme that runs throughout Litman's book is that no law is effective if the people whose behavior it is supposed to control cannot understand it, or find it so absurd they are not willing to believe in it. Laws that are not obeyed are ineffective, as we saw with the Federally imposed 55 mile-an-hour speed limit that was routinely ignored even by those who consider themselves generally law-abiding. Rather than embarrass itself further, the government rescinded the law. The DMCA already has examples of public disbelief, the foremost being the development of the DeCSS program, a "hack" that allows the owners of DVDs to play them on Linux machines even though the DVD industry hasn't provided drivers for that platform. To many individuals it is an affront to be told that you can't choose the hardware platform to view a movie of which you own a legal copy. It's also rather absurd that the industry is making a big deal about the decryption of their copy protection when the details of the copy protection scheme are at this point public knowledge, having been published on the Internet, and simple enough that it was first broken by a 15-year-old. Litman doesn't come right out and say that the DMCA is doomed to failure, but she offers some good reasons not to bet on its success.

Criminalizing the Customer

Arguably the most significant development in the DMCA is that for the first time in the history of our copyright law we have specific provisions aimed at the individual. Previous incarnations of copyright law were focused on competing commercial interests, and individual non-commercial actions, although theoretically infringing, were not considered sufficiently threatening to warrant a response. As Litman says: "As a comprehensive strategy, litigation works best against commercial actors." (p. 167) The anticircumvention language of the law makes breaking through technological protection, such as the CSS encryption of DVDs, a criminal act. This might be an effective strategy unless a large portion of the public engages in such acts, in which case an industry is faced with having to treat its customer base as criminals. Even those who haven't passed Marketing 101 can see that taking legal action against the bulk of your customers is probably not good for an industry's bottom line.

You can add to this the complete failure of some major industries to understand the new technology, most notably the music recording industry. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spent years trying to outlaw the sale of devices that play MP3 files, while the total number of available files in that format grew into the millions. Meanwhile, the RIAA offered no alternative format to MP3. While talking the moral high ground, the recording industry continued to sell CDs at inflated prices (which became even more obvious when writable CDs came to the consumer market and people learned that even they could purchase the blank CDs for around $.50 each). And although Metallica sided with the recording industry (and alienated many of its fans) other artists spoke out against the industry with stories of exploitation and near starvation, even while they were making number one hits for record companies. Napster is the evidence that many, many individuals don't believe what the record industry is saying, even though they care about its product. "If forty million people refuse to obey a law, then what the law says doesn't matter. It may be that people flout it because they're natural lawbreakers, or it may be... that they don't comply because it doesn't make sense to them. Whatever the reason, the law is not going to work well in the real world." (p. 169)

The DMCA is a huge, incomprehensible law that entirely failed to taken into account the hundreds of millions of consumers of intellectual property. It has placed the intellectual property industries in direct opposition to the public, and the very public that buys its goods. When you think about it in these terms, it's a pretty amazing mess that they have gotten themselves into.

Access

I first encountered Litman through her testimony at hearings related to the Green Paper on Intellectual Property that was the draft report of Lehman's Working Group. The transcripts of the hearings were published on the Department of Commerce web site (presumably, though, without counting as "content" by the Working Group's own definition). After slogging through hundreds of pages of some of the most toady-ing lawyer-ese, Litman's testimony leapt from the page like some minor miracle of truth and justice. It was Litman who pointed out during those hearings that, as formulated in the Green Paper, copyright law was moving from control over copying to control over access. For the first time the law sought to control the acts of reading, listening and viewing of copyrighted materials. She said then (and reprises this theme in her book): "What I think is needed now is for someone to act as the copyright lawyer for the public. To examine these proposals as one would if the public had retained one as its copyright lawyer and said: here is a proposal--is this in my interest? . . . I believe that the public's copyright lawyer would see an amendment expressly privileging individuals using their computers for ordinary reading, viewing, or listening to authorized copies of copyright work." (US Department of Commerce, National Information Infrastructure Task Force Working Group on Intellectual Property, Public Hearing on Intellectual Property Issues Involved in the National Information Infrastructure. September 22, 1994.)

Unfortunately, the public's copyright lawyer did not appear and the DMCA was crafted without such representation. We now have a law that actually encourages limitations on access and use of copyrighted materials. The CSS program that protects DVDs does not prevent copying of the DVD content, it only prevents unlicensed access, even though the DVD may itself be a legally owned copy. The digital rights management systems that are being developed for electronic books will have the same effect: they will regulate access and use, not copying. The intellectual property industries seem to be bent on developing some of the most user-hostile controls over their products that the world has seen. Where can we possibly go from here?

The Future

The last chapter of Litman's book opens with the sentence: "As of this writing, the future is murky." I wanted the book to have a neat ending, one that wraps up the whole question and makes me feel better about things. Of course, it's difficult writing a book on such a volatile topic, and Litman can't be faulted that she can't predict where we are going with digital copyright -- no one else knows either. We can only hope that she comes back to us from time to time to continue her analysis. When she does, she'll be speaking or writing to an audience that has a better understanding of the current situation. Although we may not know where copyright is going, thanks to Litman we can understand how we got to where we are today.

Oddballs in the Desert

By ALEXANDER THEROUX
August 1, 2008; Page A11

From Greenwich Village to Taos
By Flannery Burke
(University Press of Kansas, 248 pages, $34.95)

The protagonist of Witter Bynner's misogynistic play of 1926 -- "Cake: An Indulgence" -- is a wealthy, oft-married woman, identified only as "the Lady," who seeks adventure, romance and pleasure in various exotic locales. It was well understood at the time that the Lady was modeled on the domineering but irrepressible Mabel Dodge Luhan, the "salon primitivist," in D.H. Lawrence's words. Between 1917 and 1929, Luhan transformed her adopted Taos home in northern New Mexico into a cultural hinterland for those on the avant-garde of cultural expression, including artists and writers she had come to know in New York City. This salon in the desert is the subject of Flannery Burke's entertaining "From Greenwich Village to Taos."

It was an art colony predominantly, but it included a range of creative guests: the painter Georgia O'Keeffe; the journalist John Reed; writers D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein; the feminist Mary Austin; and Carl Van Vechten, one of the guiding lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Mabel Dodge Luhan knew everybody and, in a sense, everybody visited her in Taos.

"You have a certain faculty," the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens once told her, "a centralizing, magnetic, social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves!"

This somewhat crackpated romantic from a banking family in Buffalo, N.Y., had a compulsive passion to celebrate art, beauty and nature. Though three of her four marriages failed, she was able to take the money she accumulated -- added to her family wealth -- and move to Florence, Italy, and Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Greenwich Village and eventually Taos, collecting artists and writers along the way. To be at the center of modernity, to explore the "now," meant everything to her. Radical journalists, anarchists, mad activists, sex elves, naturopaths and networkers had gathered around her long before she moved west in 1917.

Curiously, Luhan herself was not an artist or a writer or an activist. She was generous, though -- with her money, her invitations, her advice and quite notably her body. "Free love" advocates abounded in her circles. She vamped whom she wanted and bedded all she could. John Reed, who covered the Russian Revolution in "Ten Days That Shook the World," was one of her lovers. Witter Bynner said that she had a "frontier libido."

Her fourth marriage to the full-blooded Pueblo Indian Antonio ("Tony") Lujan (later changed to "Luhan") did not stop her from throwing herself at the young black writer Jean Toomer, to whom she lustfully wrote: "I hardly could look towards you for fear of starting something psychologically bad for Tony -- yet more & more as time went on I felt with you & in a relationship that was positive and wonderfully refreshing. I am not mistaken, am I? You do feel it too, don't you?"

D.H. Lawrence's wife, Frieda, objected when Dodge invited her novelist-husband to work on the rooftop that formed a patio to Dodge's Taos bedroom. The Lawrences soon moved to a ranch north of Dodge's home. (I recall driving up north of Taos one snowy spring day 10 years ago and finding a small memorial to Lawrence, a sort of roadside grotto just off the road.)

"I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had," Lawrence himself wrote. "The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up high over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend." Yet Lawrence mocked Luhan and other Anglo women for "romanticizing" their Pueblo neighbors. Lawrence seemed to find the land in the Southwest -- and only the land -- transfiguring.

Ms. Burke commendably records in detail how Luhan was let down by the work that Lawrence did in Taos: among other titles, "St. Mawr," "The Plumed Serpent," "Mornings in Mexico" and "A Little Moonshine With Lemon." They hardly amounted to the triumph she expected when she invited the author of "Women in Love" to her special domain. But Lawrence's own sense of the primitive -- a dark, subintellectual "blood-understanding" between attuned people -- was different from Luhan's simple, natural volkishness. And the control she wanted to exert -- as a sort of queen ruling over her ranch-world -- was at loggerheads with his odd principles of manliness (and womanliness).

Ms. Burke has done her research and neatly documents the tensions in New Mexico among Mexicans, Native Americans and Nuevo-Mexicano "Americans," residents descended from Mexican families or Spanish-Native American unions. Luhan and her Anglo arts community plunked itself down right in the midst of all this.

But Ms. Burke too often meanders among a variety of themes and strikes a humorless note pretty much throughout her book when the oddballs on hand invite something more exuberant or mocking. There is Carl Van Vechten, for instance, invoking the primitivism of Harlem to try to outdo Luhan and her pueblo Southwest; or Mary Austin striving to make of northern New Mexico a "woman's sphere"; or Georgia O'Keeffe painting memorable pictures but also engaging in "romantically charged correspondence" with busy Jean Toomer -- did Mabel Dodge know about that?

When Ms. Burke writes of Mabel Dodge "that her marriage with [Tony] Lujan brought white people into contact with a culture necessary for humanity's survival. Only by incorporating an Indian worldview, she believed, could whites undo the harms of civilization," I thought I spotted a moment of whimsy. Humanity's survival? Indian worldview? Mabel wanted Tony in bed!

Mr. Theroux's latest book is the novel "Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual" (Fantagraphics Books).

A Look Back at the New Age

By PAUL BESTON
July 22, 2008; Page A17

Farm Friends
By Tom Fels
(RSI Press, 407 pages, $19.95)

While campaigning, Barack Obama has criticized the politics of baby boomers who are still "fighting some of the same fights since the sixties." Such a criticism must resonate with many Americans, who have grown weary of the boomer cohort's fondness for itself.

Tom Fels's "Farm Friends," although a 1960s memoir, does not really belong to his generation's self-celebratory tradition. It concerns a group of people who, in the manner of 19th-century utopian communities, lived on a communal farm in western Massachusetts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked diligently to usher in the New Age -- living as self-sufficiently as possible (aided by the stealing of food and tools), sharing responsibilities and avoiding "the world of trauma outside." That world included the Vietnam War as well as American middle-class culture, with its apparent lack of interest in realities deeper than consumerism. Farm life would supposedly help create the kind of peace and harmony that the 1960s counterculture was so keen to find.

Naturally, the New Age did not arrive, and the farm members went their separate ways. But Mr. Fels is not intent on merely condemning the experiment or praising it. He shows an appealing resistance to sweeping philosophical explanations and to aphorisms disguised as existential truths, both favorites of the 1960s. In "Farm Friends," he describes life on the farm, interviews the commune members in later years and examines how their lives reflect (or do not reflect) the ideals they once espoused.

Dozens of people pop in and out of the narrative. We meet the prodigal daughter of a French admiral who, as Mr. Fels puts it, "believed that the world was in a stage of decadence, degeneracy, and decay comparable to Rome." Then there is a writer who begins as a chronicler of commune life and eventually composes a novel that he deems "the 'Godfather' of the stoned generation." The commune's founder, Marshall Bloom, is a frequent subject of conversation. He was an iconic figure of the counterculture who committed suicide in 1969.

Mr. Fels treats his friends with gentle skepticism but also respect, and he writes with considerable psychological insight. Still, he can be overly indulgent. He labels one commune member an "entrepreneur" even though the man's first business is drug dealing. In fact, drugs are a constant among the farm friends, who consume them with the same aplomb with which an earlier generation drank scotch and sodas. The taste in drugs tracks consumer trends -- pot and hallucinogens during the 1960s, cocaine a decade later.

But Mr. Fels seems determined not to pass judgment. He quotes without comment from one friend's 1970 book, "Total Loss Farm," an earlier commune memoir whose author recounts the militant radicalism that he came to reject: "We dreamed of a New Age born of violent insurrection. We danced on the graves of the war dead in Vietnam, every corpse was ammunition for Our Side." Mr. Fels writes of the admiral's daughter, apparently without irony: "On her thirtieth birthday, at the farm, she had changed her name to Lilly Stillwater and adopted the calm, organic lifestyle that ought to have gone with it, only to be deeply disrupted shortly after by the growth of a consuming passion for the music of Tina Turner."

Mr. Fels visits with one farm friend who has become a drug-taking hipster corporate attorney. "Isn't it great?" the man exults. "Corporate America is paying for this lifestyle!" Like other former radicals, he is eager to maintain the fiction that, even by joining "the system," he is somehow subverting it. Other farm friends take up social causes, like the anti-nuclear weapons campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the campaign against nuclear power. One former commune member is arrested for toppling a weather tower that had been erected as part of a nuclear-power plant.

Still other farm alumni make no pretense to continuing the revolution but instead engage in the boomer habit of replacing youthful extremism with a middle-aged version: "We used to think money was the least important thing. Now I can see that it's the most important," says one former commune member, sounding like a budding Randian. "Money buys freedom."

Few of the farm friends are terribly likable or sympathetic -- with the notable exception of Tim, an "alienated citizen" of the farm while he lived there. Tim found the commune's group dynamics stifling. He wanted time to himself and was promised that he could build his own room and work space in the barn, but the objections of others to his solitary plans thwarted him at nearly every turn.

Of the farm's whole New Age mission, Tim remarks: "The error was, I think, imagining that there was somewhere new to go, someone new to be. It became increasingly clear that a closed system of myth did not jibe with the world as it really was." Looking later at the outside world, Tim saw "a system formed less from malice than from a kind of natural order, less from inordinate greed than from longings much like our own for privacy, comfort, individual freedom, and one's familiar or chosen way of life." Unfortunately, "Farm Friends" spends too little time with Tim.

In the last part of the book, Mr. Fels details his studies in art history and his career as an independent art curator. For all his memoir's moderate tone, he cannot resist a note of narcissistic complaint: "Have you noticed that . . . we have had to make compromises, find ways to support our visions, create a framework in this difficult world through which to live and to survive?" Usually, though, he leaves the self- involvement to others. "I'm still doing my thing," a friend tells the author in a typical passage, "such as it may be, and my thing goes on, and on, and on." We've noticed.

Mr. Beston is the associate editor of City Journal.

Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky

Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings By and About Maxim Gorky

Translated by Donald Fanger

(Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30)

Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, the future Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga River, and grew up in what he later described in his melancholy, violent autobiography as "that close-knit, suffocating little world of pain and suffering where the ordinary Russian man in the street used to live, and where he lives to this day." It was the world of the provincial petty-bourgeois--neighbors cut the tails off each other's cats and sons besieged their fathers' houses, knocking all night on the doors with fists and clubs.

Gorky was struck from the start by the chaos and the carelessness of the life that he saw around him. Many of the most lyrical passages in his autobiography describe the silences that followed the savage outbursts of his relatives. He remembered his lazy cousin Sasha, whose two rows of teeth were "the only interesting thing about him": "I liked to sit close to him," Gorky wrote, "neither of us speaking for a whole hour, and watching the black crows circling and wheeling in the red evening sky around the golden cupolas of the Church of the Assumption, diving down to earth and draping the fading sky with a black net.... A scene like this fills the heart with sweet sadness and leaves you content to say nothing." The cruelty around him made him want to embellish and to correct what he saw. In his best work, however, he told his stories without ornament.

Literarily speaking, Gorky was never a true "realist": inventing heroes who were better than life, he placed them in realistic settings and convinced his readers and himself that he was a "chronicler of everyday events." According to the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, "he himself half-believed in that half-truth all his life." Gorky had a tendency toward a broad, bright clarity that blurred life into myth. "In Gorky's books," Victor Shklovsky noted, "things take on an inflated quality without being enlarged out of proportion.... It's like a card game played by some officers sitting in the basket of an observation balloon a mile up in the air."

Gorky may have been his own greatest character, but the story of the character Gorky is one of the most disappointing and upsetting in modern literature. It is, in fact, the sort of story against which Gorky himself protested all his life: a story of disillusionment and "low truths," of a revolution wildly off its course.

In his youth, Aleksei Peshkov tramped numberless miles all over Russia--the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, the Mozdosk steppe, Bessarabia--and worked an endless series of odd jobs: ragman, stevedore, icon seller. In each new town, he would show up with a change of underwear and a small suitcase full of books, and dazzle his listeners with stories of the bizarre men he had met. At the age of twenty, he spent his last money on a pistol and shot himself in the chest. He survived, but he carried the bullet in his lung for another forty years. His friend Leonid Andreyev later told him, "You know yourself that a man who hasn't tried to kill himself isn't worth much."

In 1892, he published his first story in a newspaper in Tiflis under the pseudonym Maxim Gorky, which means "Maxim the Bitter." It was the age of invented names--Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin--as the thought of revolution promised every individual a chance at a new history. When, in 1898, his first collection of stories was published in two volumes, Gorky was launched into an iconic celebrity, his picture appearing on matchboxes, postcards, and cigarette packs. Here was the author as "emissary from the anonymous masses," the representative of the "Lower Depths," as he later named his most famous play, which depicted the destitution, both physical and spiritual, of prostitutes and minor thieves. For two decades, Gorky was the object of adoration by many Russian readers, and even took on the image of a kind of people's protector. (On Gorky's fiftieth birthday, a convict sent him this request from prison: "Dear writer!... I am in prison for murdering my wife, whom I killed on the fifth day after we married because she [followed by a series of extremely frank details].... Would it be possible to obtain an amnesty for me?" ) In fact, Gorky's immediate ancestors--particularly his grandfather, who owned a dye factory--were of a higher class than those of Chekhov, whose grandfathers were both serfs. Across Russia, false Gorkys began turning up wearing his trademark long overcoat and boasting a collection of anecdotes about the heroic outcasts they had known.

An obsessive corrector, Gorky would sit for hours with a blue pencil annotating manuscripts--his own and everyone else's. Finishing a newspaper, he would cover the pages with additions and alterations, then throw it away. A conservative group once sent him a rope noose and a threatening note. He threw out the noose and corrected the note in blue pencil, so that the rabid ideas remained but were expressed more clearly. No one ever saw him sleep. His bed was as neat as a hospital bed. He stayed up nights, making himself a medium for grammar.

His memory was prodigious. Many who knew Gorky recorded his miraculous ability to remember the names of streets and towns that he had visited decades before, and to recall the plots of hundreds of novels by writers whose names had already been forgotten. He was astonished when someone once asked him how he knew a certain fact. "How could anyone not know?" he asked. "There was an article about it in The Messenger of Europe for 1887, the October issue."

Gorky appeared bearing tales of hoodlums and tramps, but also scraps and pamphlets of anarchist ideas charged with revolutionary hopes. His financial support, much of which came from his own royalties, bolstered Lenin and the Bolsheviks from 1903 until their seizure of power in 1917. Wishing to believe all his life that human reality could be improved and even perfected, Gorky achieved a greatness that was ultimately social, not artistic; at his best he was a grand-scale inspiration for a worldwide cult of human progress and social struggle. He was a famously mesmerizing raconteur, but many who heard his stories in person were disappointed when they read them. He was himself attracted to power and the raw energy of self-assertion, and idolized men who tried to remake the world.

When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. His memoir of Tolstoy is the centerpiece of Donald Fanger's fascinating new volume of translations.

The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.

Always fascinated by the way people talked to and about God, Gorky caught in Tolstoy's preaching the wavering false note of the non-believer. His memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. In this, Gorky was challenging the Tolstoy cult, which insisted on the authentic martyrdom of its patron saint. It was not for his gigantic faith in God that Gorky admired Tolstoy, but for his gigantic faith in Count Tolstoy. Searching the world for a spiritual mentor, a figurehead for the theory of men's elevation that would enable his country to transcend the darkness of the past and the mindless cruelty and ignorance of the present, Gorky found Tolstoy, who must have appeared to him as the incarnation of his hopes.

Gorky's literary portraits capture the culture of reading in which their subjects lived: classics, forgotten treatises, learned tomes, and pulp novels are mentioned in single breaths and passed between interlocutors like playing cards. References swing back and forth like punches. The Tolstoy memoir contains one of the most vivid accounts anywhere of the physicality of literary conversation, the atmosphere of toughness and prowess, the insults, the writers' comparisons of each other to bewitching women, the emphasis on work and perfection of technique, the cultivation of style and personality. The conversations between Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, and their friend L.A. Sulerzhitsky, each competing for the affection of Lev Nikolaevich, read like a mixture of a boxing match, a tea party, the judgment of Paris, and a pilgrimage to an enlightened and damaged hermit. Chekhov plays Jacob to Gorky's Esau, but he requires no fur on his arms to gain the patriarch's blessing: it is his smoothness--"like a young lady!"--that Tolstoy secretly prefers.

Tolstoy appears in the memoir as a Russian god who "sits on a throne of maple under a golden lime tree"; a wizard; a satyr with the mouth of a sailor; Sviatogor, whose name means "sacred mountain," the Russian hero whom the earth itself could not hold; a force of nature. Once, in the Crimea, Gorky saw him walking along the edge of the seashore:

And suddenly, for one mad moment, I felt that he might be about to stand up and wave his arm, and that the sea would grow calm and glassy, and the rocks would move and begin to shout, and everything around would stir and come to life and start talking in different voices about itself, and about him, and against him. I cannot put into words what I felt then; I was filled both with rapture and with horror, and then everything came together in one happy thought:

"I am not an orphan on the earth so long as this man is alive."

Whereas Tolstoy's work, especially War and Peace, is shot through with protest against the idea of the "great man," Gorky's life and work record an ongoing search for just such a figure--a "Man with a capital M," as he called Lenin. "I think that such men are possible only in Russia," Gorky wrote, "whose history and way of life always remind me of Sodom and Gomorrah." In his literary portraits, Gorky is so drawn to his subjects that his admiration at times verges on chameleonic impersonation. In one uncanny photograph from 1920, Lenin stands in front while the much taller Gorky, in an identical suit and with his head shaved, leans diffidently to one side behind his idol, like an uncertain, elongated mirror image. The scene is right out of Zelig--Gorky the remora, the parrot, the perpetual acolyte.

He found his first hero in Tolstoy, and then hoped to find an alternative in, of all people, Mark Twain (who invited him to a banquet in New York and then dropped him because Gorky, on a fund-raising mission for the Bolsheviks, crossed the Atlantic in 1906 with a woman who was not his wife); and later found an even more beguiling one in Lenin; and lost his will altogether before Stalin, who badgered him to write his biography (Gorky never did) and lured Gorky back to Russia with the promise that Gorky, too, would be recognized as a great man.

Gorky sought a man with a "living faith," but in Tolstoy he settled, ironically, on the embodiment of possibly the greatest spiritual crisis of the age. Tolstoy sought the simple truthfulness of the peasantry, and instead met the eyes of a proletarian revolutionary lighting up at a usable idea. Each mistook the other for the mascot of his cause. Considering Tolstoy's view of Western influence upon Russia, Gorky observed that "the culminating figure of our history ... wished (both consciously and unconsciously) to lie like a mountain across the road that leads to Europe, to that active life which demands of men the utmost concentration of all their spiritual powers." Tolstoy stands for the "Old Russia" that the revolution would leave behind; but still he offered something without which it could not succeed.

When Gorky published his memoir of Tolstoy in 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, he must have been thinking of Lenin. (It would be useful to have a translation by Fanger of Gorky's memoir of Lenin, which in its controversial original version--never translated in full--contains Lenin's praise of Trotsky and Gorky's comment about Sodom and Gomorrah quoted above, along with bitter remarks on the Russian peasantry.) Immediately following the Revolution, Gorky became the most prominent source of internal criticism of the Bolshevik government's methods and ideology. He published articles ferociously attacking Lenin and the authorities for their brutality, arbitrary violence, double-dealing, and hard-headed disregard for Russia's intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution had no greater believer than Gorky, and he believed it could go another way. The way it actually went was nothing like the way he dreamt it.

Shklovsky called Gorky the "Noah of the Russian intelligentsia." He formed committees to provide work and shelter for Russia's threatened poets and scholars, composing hundreds of letters of recommendation, and swore into the phone at Lenin. He secured ration tickets by claiming all writers as members of his family, suddenly boasting dozens of siblings, children, and wives. Most notable among his ventures was the World Literature Publishing House, which set out to translate into Russian the world's literary classics for "the new Soviet reader." Sitting in his office, Gorky discussed the best translator for Gilgamesh while sporadic gunfire erupted in the streets.

A subsection of his enterprise, the Committee for Historical Representation, would produce plays based on every great event in human history. When Alexander Blok, one of the great poets of the age, read his play on the life of the Pharaoh Ramses, Gorky suddenly remarked, "You should do it a little like this," and stretched out his arms to the sides like an ancient Egyptian. There was also the Studio for Literary Translation, the House of Scholars, the Expert Commission for the Preservation of National Objects, and so on. (It is worth noting that in Kafka's The Trial, the only communal activity in which Joseph K. participates is the Society for the Preservation of Municipal Monuments of Art.)

Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of the dystopian science-fiction novel We, which appeared in 1921, imagined the World Literature venture as a spaceship on an interplanetary mission which, after an accident, began to fall, though it would be a year and a half before the vessel actually crashed. Wondering how the voyagers would behave, Zamyatin pitched the story to Gorky, who responded: "Within a week, as if nothing had happened, they will start shaving and writing books and in general acting as if they had at least another twenty years to live.... We've got to believe that we won't be shattered, otherwise all is lost. "

Gorky's decision to leave Russia in 1921 was most likely made because of his extreme disillusionment with the Soviet government--Blok had died from scurvy, exhaustion, and spiritual despair; another poet was executed for supposedly participating in a conspiracy. He was also repeatedly encouraged to leave by Lenin, who claimed that Gorky's weak lungs needed a rest. Gorky was furious with Lenin, whom he denounced as a theoretician who "carried out a planetary experiment" that failed. He was deeply exercised by the condition of Russia, which was experiencing a catastrophic famine. After three years traveling Europe, raising money for famine relief, Gorky moved to a villa in Sorrento with a view of Mt. Vesuvius, where he lived for almost ten years before returning permanently to Russia. While in exile, Gorky remembered a scene from his days with Tolstoy:

Leo Tolstoy once asked a lizard in a low voice:

"Are you happy, eh?"

The lizard was sunning itself on a rock in the bushes along the road to Diulber, and Tolstoy stood facing it with his hands stuck into his leather belt. And looking around carefully, that great man confessed to the lizard:

"I'm not ..."

(Heinrich Heine, whom Blok was translating for the World Literature Publishing House, wrote in one of his Italian travel sketches that the lizards on a certain hillside had reported that the stones expected God to manifest Himself among them in the form of a stone.)

Where was the revolution, with its elemental image of man in search of meaning? One source records that, in Italy, Gorky received thirteen thousand letters from Russia. But what sorts of letters was he getting? According to the KGB archives, many of them were from Soviet citizens detailing the injustices and the absurdities of Russian life. Convincing himself that Russia was nonetheless on the right track, Gorky chose not to focus on their warnings.

Like Tolstoy, Gorky appears to have experienced during his exile a spiritual turning point that impelled him to take a false position. But whereas Tolstoy's crisis demanded that he disown his past life as harmfully misdirected, Gorky's crisis forced him to act as though his past actions, and the revolution as a whole, had been right. What was at stake was Gorky's place in the narrative that he had spent his life constructing: if the revolution had been a failure, his role as its prophet and its bard would be meaningless, or worse.

Gorky's return to Russia was marked by a fury of re-naming in his honor, at the suggestion of Stalin. The main street, the central park, and the Literary Institute in Moscow as well as the Art Theater; the city and region of Nizhni Novgorod; hundreds of collective farms, factories, and schools--all took Gorky's name. He was given an Art Deco mansion and estates outside Moscow and in the Crimea. In 1932, an airplane named Maxim Gorky, which boasted the widest wingspan in the world, flew over Moscow in a tribute to him. (The plane crashed the following year.) By the end of his life, Gorky's remarkable talent for remembering the names of places was no longer necessary: every place he went was named "Gorky."

And so Gorky became the single most prominent apologist for Stalin's regime. During the drive toward collectivization, which resulted in the deaths of millions of peasants, he provided a slogan for the authorities' struggle against the kulaks: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated." Perhaps most notoriously, he led an expedition of writers to the site of the White Sea Canal, the first grand-scale construction project completed by the labor of convicts in the Gulag, during which more than ten thousand prisoners died. Gorky edited and contributed to an anthology praising the work for its ambition and its successful rehabilitation of criminals. The scholar John Freccero has pointed out that Dante's Inferno resembles a prison camp. Returning from Hell, Gorky told the world that it was only Purgatory.

And yet, at the same time, Gorky continued to write letters to the secret police for "the release of prisoners or leniency in punishments." He appears to have been kept under a stultifying house arrest in "the country of the pharaohs. " Observers noted that he barely touched the food at the banquets in his mansion. At the end of his life, Gorky, the great believer in positive literature, was given specially printed newspapers with "the necessary cuts and alterations." Just before he died, he proposed that one hundred writers should be mobilized for a new project:

All world literature and history, the history of the church and philosophy must be rewritten: Gibbon and Goldoni, Bishop Irenaeus and Corneille, Professor Anfilonov and Julian the Apostate, Hesiod and Ivan Volnov, Lucretius and Zola, Gilgamesh and Hiawatha, Swift and Plutarch. The entire series must end with oral legends about Lenin.

The project was typical of Gorky--the variety of reading, the love of collective work, the certainty that the answer can be found in books, the fanaticism for correction. The taste was bitter.

Tolstoy found that the truth was a leveler that cut across every aspect of life, leaving the same inhospitable wilderness of death and suffering. This revelation jarred him, and his "teachings" were constructed and preached in an effort to regenerate his own faith. Yet his faith in himself was always vast. He was a great man and he knew it. His attitude toward the truth never really wavered, but he could not bring himself to face completely the consequences of his search for it. Women reminded him of death, and he hated them for it.

Gorky, by contrast, felt extreme pity for mankind, but he seems to have been pursued by the suspicion that the fight was fixed, that the smart money was on the world and on suffering. What Fanger's book strikingly shows is the extent to which other writers had Gorky's number, even early on. During the Russian Civil War, Blok, on the steps of World Literature Publishing, had told Gorky, "We have become too clever to believe in God, yet not strong enough to believe in ourselves. As a basis for life and faith there is only God or oneself. Humanity? Can anyone really believe in the reasonableness of humanity after the last war, with new, inevitable, and crueler wars in the offing?"

But Gorky put his faith in humanity. And he embellished and polished humanity so as to keep his faith in it secure. "You always want to paint over all the nicks and cracks with your own paint," Tolstoy told Gorky. Like Tolstoy, Gorky was unable to face life as he suspected it to be, but he lacked the belief in his own powers that kept Tolstoy from committing any real self-betrayal. Gorky's terror at powerlessness was so strong that in the end he favored cruelty itself to the acknowledgment of cruelty. He appears to have believed that from where he stood, down in the "lower depths," there was nowhere to go but up, and that people needed to be convinced to strive to this end. Any repression would be temporary. Always the believer in revision, Gorky treated Russia like a young writer who needed only to be further edited and encouraged. He was wrong: there was an even lower depth. His need to adorn life caused him to side with those who, for their own purposes, wanted to show it as better than it was. The corrected manuscript metamorphosed into the correctional facility.

And yet the Tolstoy memoir is so strange and moving that it is hard to comprehend completely what followed. It is a great work (Gorky never approached its quality before it or afterward), but it is not a modern work; and it is misleading to class Gorky among the ironic prophets of the twentieth century, when he was in many ways a nineteenth-century writer who lived on into the next awful age. The memoir is utterly lacking in irony. Two elements appear to have misled its readers. The first is its subject: Tolstoy himself comes off as the massive, tormented precursor of modern man--a Moses of the Modern who peers into the promised land but does not enter it. Readers seem to have taken this to mean that Gorky was modern, too, when in fact the whole piece could be read as his attempt at exchanging one certainty (religion) for another (the collective faith in Man). The second is its open-ended, fragmented form, which looks not only modern but even modernist. For Gorky, however, this form was conceived not in a modernist spirit, out of experimentation and irony, but rather out of necessity. When he writes that he cannot finish his letter, he means it: he actually could not finish it. For us, however, there can be only modern writing. We have lost the ability to write with Gorky's certainty, or even to read him with certainty. Where Gorky saw a bridge, we see a chasm.

There was certainly a sense of the Promethean in Gorky's hopes for the Russian Revolution. Man would acquire for himself aspects of the gods and gradually replace them, in this way eliminating all suffering and chaos. Kafka himself retold the story of Prometheus, dividing it into four legends. In the first, Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus for betraying the gods to men, and eagles fed off his liver, which perpetually grew back; in the second, Prometheus pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock to escape the beaks, and became one with the rock; in the third, the betrayal was forgotten by the gods, the eagles, and by Prometheus himself; in the fourth, the gods and the eagles became tired of the meaningless story, and the wound closed wearily. Finally, Kafka concluded, "there remained the inexplicable mountains of rock." So, too, in the story of Gorky, we are left with rock: the rock of the hero Sviatogor, the "sacred mountain"; the rock of Tolstoy stretching himself like a mountain range; the rock of Vesuvius, seen from the Sorrento villa; the rock of the White Sea Canal; the mysterious rock of the individual; and the sight of a mountain that makes us imagine moving it, being negated by it, recreating it.

A Seperate Peace By Dorris Lessing

A Separate Peace
The Nobel Prize winner imagines her parents' lives without World War I.

By Reviewed by Valerie Sayers
Sunday, August 3, 2008; BW02

ALFRED & EMILY

By Doris Lessing

Harper. 274 pp. $25.95

Last year, Doris Lessing, almost 88 and the outspoken, iconoclastic author of more than 50 books -- novels, story collections, poetry and nonfiction -- became the oldest writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. This year, she has published yet another volume, a clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. Alfred & Emily is a culmination of Lessing's ongoing interest in formal experimentation and the relationship between reality and imagination. It's also a testament to her ongoing literary vitality.

The real Alfred and Emily were Lessing's parents: he a clerk and veteran of the Great War, in which he lost a leg as well as dear friends; she a nurse to desperately suffering soldiers. In the aftermath of that war's horrors, they ventured from England first to Persia, where Lessing was born, and then to Rhodesia, where she spent her childhood. They hoped to improve their fortunes by farming, but like so many pioneers before them, they had a rough go of it. Emily suffered a breakdown that sent her to bed for a year, and Alfred was stricken with diabetes, which led them finally to abandon the farm.

Lessing tells their stories -- pieces of which she has previously recounted in her autobiographies -- in two ingenious forms: The first is a novel that imagines her parents' lives in an England that never entered World War I; the second is a true, rueful accounting of all the ways their wartime scars shaped their futures. What is most intriguing about the imaginary lives that she gives her peacetime parents is her own erasure. In this version, Alfred and Emily, though they are friends, do not marry each other. The fictional Emily, a nurse like her biographical counterpart, marries a doctor and remains childless; Alfred, a mild and playful family man, farms in rural England.

Despite the breadth of her literary interests, Lessing has often been narrowly defined or dismissed as a feminist writer. Readers who do not know her work or were not impressed by her previous forays into science fiction may be delighted to discover the Lessing of Alfred & Emily. She tells her parents' imagined lives in a gently ironic voice that uses concision and elision to sweep through time. The narrative's old-fashioned cadences call to mind many of the authors so central to its plot: Alfred & Emily is filled with books, classical and popular. Even the fictional Alfred, a sportsman and not a bookworm, admits, "I always did fancy Zane Grey." The novel's attention to how consciences and sensibilities are formed through reading is an echo of Lessing's ringing Nobel Prize call for support of the struggling teachers, librarians and readers in Zimbabwe. (Lessing herself left school at the age of 14 but was able to rely on her childhood delight in reading to sustain her intellectual development.)

Emily, with her gradual recognition of the power of books and literacy, dominates the first half of Alfred & Emily. When the fictional Emily loses her independence in marriage, the results are as constraining as they must have been for the real Emily isolated on a Rhodesian farm: "Her household allowance was generous, and so was her dress allowance: he liked her to be well dressed. But it was bitter, that moment when he handed her the money in its separate envelopes. She had earned her own living since she was eighteen, and perhaps of the by now many things that dismayed her about her marriage, it was that moment, that money, handed her with a smile, that dismayed her most."

Widowed, she struggles to regain the intellectual energy that was stilled in the doldrums of a conventional marriage. Alfred is a simpler soul who flourishes modestly in peacetime, saved from his wartime nightmares, but England without war is no Utopia. Beyond the need for women to claim their autonomy, there's class struggle to be engaged.

Indeed, in the second, nonfictional half of this book, Lessing makes clear that her own well-known Marxism and eventual split from the Communist Party were both born of her evolving understanding of her parents' and Rhodesia's sorrows. In the evocative photographs accompanying the text, her father is a handsome soldier gazing soulfully at the camera; in real life, we learn, this empathetic man gracefully endured a steady downward slide.

In nonfiction, Lessing's famous ferocity also returns: "I hated my mother," she says, the words not so much shocking as jarring, after the lengths she has gone to make the fictional Emily a moral heroine. The miracle is the transformation that fiction achieves, the way that imagining a different life for her mother allows Lessing to forgive and honor a trying but vibrant woman. Lessing's fiction, from the autobiographically inspired The Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest novels to the Sufi-inspired speculative fiction of her "Canopus in Argos" series, has always implicitly explored the links between her own and her characters' political, philosophical and spiritual ideas. It is fascinating to see her, at the apex of her career, explore those connections explicitly here. By imagining fairer, more decent lives for her parents, Lessing affirms that even in their failures they were worthy of attention and respect. By allowing her readers this insight into the connection between autobiography and fiction, between form and content, she reaffirms fiction's powers and possibilities. ·

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, writes novels, stories and essays.

What is keeping oil prices so high?

Fears of disruption to supplies is one factor behind the sky-high price

Despite an emerging global consensus that oil prices are dangerously high, there seems little chance of the cost of oil falling significantly in the near future.

Analysts say measures agreed at Sunday's crisis summit in Jeddah are unlikely to have a dramatic impact on market trends.

But what is keeping prices close to record levels of almost $140 a barrel?

WEAK US DOLLAR

• The sharp jump in prices since 2005 has coincided with the plunge in the value of the dollar against other leading currencies
• Dollar weakness encourages financial investors to look for other more lucrative investment opportunities, with oil top of their list
• As oil is traded in dollars, it also makes it cheaper to buy
• Signs the US economy may be on the brink of recession have undermined the dollar, boosting prices. Prices rose $11 on a single day last month when the unemployment rate rose

SUPPLY CONCERNS

• Analysts say growth in global supplies is worryingly failing to keep pace with growth in demand
• Supplies from countries such as Russia are thought to have peaked and finding new sources of oil is difficult and expensive
• Increasing reliance on members of the Middle-East dominated oil producers group Opec, many of which are already pumping as much oil as they can
• Saudi Arabia is one of few countries with spare capacity but it has been reluctant to boost output substantially

DEMAND GROWTH

• Global thirst for oil is intense. Demand has risen by about 3 million barrels a day since 2005 and is expected to rise by 32 million barrels a day in the next two decades
• The US remains the world's largest oil consumer and high individual fuel usage continues to put pressure on crude stockpiles
• Fast-growing China and India are forecast to account for 40% of the growth in oil demand by 2030, as industry grows and demand for travel increases

POLITICAL INSTABILITY

• Much of the world's oil is concentrated in volatile regions, leading to fears of frequent and unpredictable disruptions to supplies
• Despite oil output being at a six-year high, Iraq is still beset by violence while militant groups in Nigeria's main oil-producing region have recently impeded about a quarter of its output
• 
  
Tensions over Iran's nuclear programme. There are fears that an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations could trigger a wider conflict and threaten traffic through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, used to ship 40% of the world's oil.

MARKET SPECULATION

• Oil exporters say the price surge cannot be explained by the fundamental ratio of supply to demand and point their fingers at market speculators
• It is claimed that some traders are making huge amounts of money betting on the direction of prices, in turn forcing prices higher
• Others maintain that traders are simply hedging their investments against future market developments to reduce risk
• US regulators are looking for evidence of market manipulation while the IMF is examining the role of traders in the price spike

Spring 2008 »

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Reflections of a Sometime Israel Lobbyist

By Leonard Fein

HERE'S A SECRET, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves.

But first, you may be wondering who this “we” is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But the problem with “Jews” is—well, not all Jews are in on the secret. Or maybe it is the Zionists. But the problem with “Zionists” is that the word has come to seem musty, at best, and in these last several decades it has been appropriated by exclusivist fanatics. So let me spell it out: the “we” here means old-fashioned liberal Zionists, people who intuitively endorse the idea of a Jewish state, people who acknowledge that to secure the safety of that state and to ennoble its character are the compelling Jewish projects of our time, hence people who these days suffer considerable anxiety and are not strangers to disappointment. Things are not going very well, or even just average well.

And what is the secret we hardly acknowledge? We are all for a two-state solution, we are eager to call a halt to Israel’s expansion, to put an end to the settlement movement, to restore Israel’s good name, to make almost any compromise consistent with the preservation of Israel’s character as a Jewish state and its commitment to democracy. We are, in a word, “doves.” But we don’t trust the Palestinians; we worry about Iran; we haven’t a clue about how you get from here to peace; we don’t take America’s support for granted; and even if we did, we are not exactly proud to have to depend on that support. We worry that Israel has taken multiple wrong turns, not only on the big question, its peace policy, but on a range of domestic issues as well—most notably, its increasingly inegalitarian economy (where it now ranks with the United States on disparities in income distribution); its corrupting entanglement of religion and state; the decline in the quality of its educational system; its manner of dealing with the 20 percent of its citizens who are Palestinian. We are dismayed by the extent of public corruption. In short, we fear that Israel is at risk both domestically and internationally.

Now, none of that is secret. Psychic dissonance is hardly an unknown phenomenon. The secret is that because we are apprehensive, we are not entirely upset that “out there,” in the public square, those who speak authoritatively on Israel’s behalf—meaning, principally, AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations—are considerably more rigid, more hawkish, if you will, than we are.

Which brings me, of course, to the curious case of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who make a repeated point in their controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, of the discrepancy between “official” Jewish pronouncements regarding American policy toward Israel and the consistent finding of public opinion surveys, which show that American Jews are considerably more dovish than those who speak in their name.

Mearsheimer and Walt don’t know the secret, meaning they don’t know the Jews. They look at Israel and see the strongest military power in the region, a prosperous, high-tech economy, and they conclude that all the talk of Israel’s vulnerability is merely hokum, clever propaganda intended to keep American aid at its (allegedly) wildly disproportionate level. The source of the propaganda, the explanation for the level of American aid? The Lobby. “The Lobby,” in their view, is a social scientist’s dream; it explains not only America’s unconditional support for Israel, it explains everything. Two words, three syllables, and you have the key to the whole of the special relationship: you know why America invaded Iraq, you know why Camp David II failed, you know why both Congress and the administration are without spine in dealing with the chronic conflict between Israel and its neighbors. It’s the lies the leaders of the Lobby have told and continue to tell us.

What Mearsheimer and Walt miss (among many other things) is any understanding of the depths of apprehension currently experienced by the Zionist left. On any given day, in connection with any given episode, Israeli officials and much (but not all) of the pro-Israel activist community in the United States may, indeed, repeat the tired slogans, the inflated claims, the whole of the familiar litany of rationalization and justification: Israel is the only democratic state in the region, it faces implacable enemies, it is America’s ally in the war on terrorism, its values and America’s are the same, its response to threats to its security is measured—all dismissed by Mearsheimer and Walt as false pleadings. That may be true, but it is essentially irrelevant. Whether true or false (and it is at least partly true), the dismissal doesn’t speak to Jewish apprehensions, shared fully by liberal Zionists. Our leaders may inflate, exaggerate, even lie; the lies of Israel’s enemies are vastly larger. But neither lies nor truths are assessed by a dispassionate lie-detecting machine. They are assessed by people riddled with apprehension, and if there is any one word that captures the substance of the apprehension that word is “abandonment.”

For Jews, abandonment is an old, old story. The world may abandon Israel; Israel may abandon the Zionist dream. The project may fail. Look around, the portents are everywhere. There’s a rush to disinvestment, a palpable abandonment. There are mainstream claims that Israel’s own policies are the necessary and sufficient explanation of the conflict, that Israel is therefore the villain of the piece. And, for liberal Zionists especially, there’s the growing fashion of Left alienation from Israel, sometimes (though not always) combined with romanticization of the Palestinians. Nathaniel Popper, a young journalist who works for the Forward, writes that when he reported to his friends on his recent visit to Israel, “they seized on my skepticism—of both the Palestinians and the Israelis—to rail against Zionism. Something snapped; I whipped to Israel’s defense, summoning arguments I had heard at the pro-Israel conferences I attend for work.” He does not add, but might well, that part of what snapped was his comfort with those friends, his ability to take for granted a roughly similar weltanschauung. Whiplash, and suddenly we are Israel’s embattled defenders, perceived as imposters on the left, insufficiently dismissive of the parochial claims of the Jews. Where, then, do we belong?

As if empathy for the Israelis precludes sympathy for the Palestinians. As if this is all a zero-sum game, as if Mr. Bush’s gross “You are either with us or against us” were a sober appraisal not only of the battle with terrorism but also of the war between Israel and its neighbors—as if there’s no place for qualification, for ambiguity, for nuance. As if there’s no appreciation for tragedy.

NADAV SAFRAN was a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

Born in Egypt, he’d lived in Israel (and fought in its War of Independence) before coming to the United States. His first major book, published in 1963, was The United States and Israel. In his preface to that book, Safran wrote, “I believe that fundamentally both Arabs and Jews have an unassailable moral argument. A person who cannot see how this is possible does not understand the essence of tragedy; much less does he realize that his position serves only to assure that the Palestine tragedy should have another sequel, and yet another.”

Safran was prescient. Exclusivists on both sides of the conflict have indeed brought on sequel after sequel, by now an ongoing calamity. It matters not at all which set of exclusivists is the more to blame, which less. What matters is that together they’ve come to own the crowded stage.

There’s Hamas, of course, in a class by itself. There are the settlers and their avid defenders. There are a handful of hard-line American Jewish organizations like the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America). And there are Nathaniel Popper’s friends—presumably (I don’t know Popper) people of the left—who have neither use for nor patience with the Jewish state. It’s racist, it’s militaristic, and it’s an anachronism. Nationalism was never a good thing, and the Jews were supposed to know that.

AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are at most unwitting support personnel for the tedious drama. Nominally, they support a two-state solution, which—by definition—the exclusivists do not, and which by now has become the litmus test of a pro-peace (which means pro-Israel and pro-Palestine) stance. True, there are times when they and some right-leaning others set the bar so high that their endorsement of a two-state solution seems little more than lip service. But it is not helpful or accurate to lump them together as part of the exclusivist camp.

THERE'S A dynamic here, worth attending to: where the left has closed the door to Israel, gone beyond tough criticism all the way to demonization, we are left out in the cold; we will have no truck with exclusivists, whether of the right or the left. But while we cannot, do not, will not dance with those who believe that pro-Zionist passion requires the suspension of critical judgment, we prefer the company of those who wish Israel well to the company of those who wish it ill, even though the course endorsed by those who wish it well seems to us too often mistaken.

The left has a hard time with nationalism and is particularly irritated by Jewish nationalism. “Tribalism,” they call it, and tribalism it sometimes is. Somehow, it is supposed that the Jews should know better, whether because we have so often in the past been victims of nationalism or because there’s something awkward about people who have been comfortable living at the margins suddenly insisting that they have a fixed address and a fire in the fireplace or because nouveau powerful is no more attractive than nouveau riche or because statecraft is not a particular strength of a people of artists, scholars, merchants, a people with so pacific a history as ours. And look, they say, at what a mess the Zionists have made of things. Pacific? Only so long as they were not allowed to carry guns. Now, with guns, they become hunters.

Well, look: though pocked with imperfections, some no cosmetics can mask, the record’s hardly one of unrelieved bungling. There are grace notes galore and much to admire: freedom of speech, the rule of law, distinguished science, and an ongoing effort to balance the twin imperatives of the Jewish understanding—on the one hand, the claims of the tribe; on the other the claims of the whole world; on the one hand, the particular; on the other, the universal.

And yet we know there’s an urgency to boundaries; Esperanto doesn’t work. Again and again, Hillel’s questions are heard simultaneously, not sequentially, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” and “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Others may find contradiction here; we find enduring and productive tension.

Some of us get it wrong all the time, opting either for radical universalism or for stultifying particularism. And all of us get it wrong some of the time. But we are held together (when we are) by memories of the dreams we have dreamed, of what it is supposed to be like: the swords into plowshares, the spears into pruning hooks, all under their own fig tree and none shall make them afraid.

Is it necessarily the case that the moment you tie a rag to a branch and call it a flag, you become obsessed with your own narrowly defined interests and to hell with the others? There is that risk, as ample precedent makes clear. And Israel’s destiny, in the end, may be to be a nation like all the other nations rather than the light unto the nations that the utopians imagined. In the Jewish tradition, there are two Jerusalems. In the heavenly Jerusalem, Moses teaches, David sings, Solomon dispenses wisdom; in the earthly Jerusalem, there are curses alongside the blessings, people shove in line and cheat on their income taxes, they laugh and hug and hate, grandeur and pettiness cohabit. The haunting question is how the two Jerusalems can be brought closer together.

And maybe they cannot be, neither here nor anywhere. Or maybe they can be, but we are still off course somewhere in the desert. All we have learned so far is that being Jewish does not immunize against the baser appetites and the evil inclinations. And that hurts; we were taught to expect more and better. We had it figured out, what Max Weber called “the theodicy of disprivilege.” How does an oppressed people explain its persecuted status? By imagining that it is morally advantaged. That is what we were taught, quite often explicitly: the oppression, the advantage. Now both seem remote. And though we still proclaim our unbending commitment to justice, we also whine a lot.

Some of us have given up, dream dreams derived from other stories; others of us feel betrayed, thereby embittered; and there are those who take their cue from Anthony Burgess in his retelling of the Exodus story (Moses: A Narrative), when the people complained to Aaron: “And one said: ‘I don’t like this sort of talk at all. It’s all blown up, like a sheep’s stomach full of wind. Life is . . . life is what we see, smell, feel—the taste of a bit of bread, a mouthful of water, sitting at the door, watching the evening come on with the circling of the bats. The things you talk of are only in the mind. We are too old, I tell you, for this talk of common goals and purposes and journeys.’” Today life is no longer just the taste of a bit of bread or a mouthful of water; these days we have pastries and fine wines. These days, busy meeting with senior officials of the Defense Department to talk about Israel’s pressing needs for this new weapons system or that, meeting over at State to make sure that Israel is not pressed too hard, meeting with Members of Congress to trade support for support—who has time or disposition for talk of purposes and journeys?

THE ISRAEL LOBBY includes all those who, because they take neither Israel nor America’s support for Israel for granted, because they remain haunted, prowl the corridors of American power to press the case for “the special relationship.” And yes, they are powerful, albeit not nearly so powerful as their critics contend. And yes, power, as Acton taught, corrupts. But we know that impotence is even more corrupting. And the strange truth is that we feel both powerful and powerless at the same time. That is how we see ourselves and that is how we see the Jewish state, and that is also how the Israelis see themselves and their nation. We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt and we have known pharaohs ever since; underneath our designer costumes we wear a shroud.

FOR SOME OF US, that means that even with the Land, we still remain in Exile, Exile as an existential condition rather than a geographic space. All the pastries and the fine wines cannot erase our tortured wisdom; though rich, we are not comfortable. We are imprisoned both by our memories and by the world’s disorder. Our only remedy is to remain prisoners of hope as well, to remember not only yesterday but also tomorrow, the promised tomorrow.

The world of the lobbyists, by and large, is less fragmented. They have learned to work the system; in some ways, they have become the system. If that were a crime, they would be guilty. But it is not a crime. The argument cannot be whether there should be a lobby or whether, once there is a lobby, it is entitled to be powerful. Those are the givens of the system.

So the argument is really about the means by which the lobby maintains its power and the ends to which it devotes that power. The broadest statement of the lobby’s purpose is that it seeks to preserve and enhance the special relationship between Israel and the United States. That relationship has deep and diverse cultural and historical roots; it is not an artifact of which the lobby is the author. AIPAC (and the others) work within a hospitable context; the engine of its power is a vast and devoted grassroots constituency.

And what of the liberal Zionists? Chiefly Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom—we also lobby, and just as energetically, albeit with considerably more limited resources. Pound for pound, we may even be as effective, as powerful one might say, as the others, but we are welterweights. We do what we can to promote a genuine two-state solution and to reverse those policies of the Israeli government—settlements especially though not exclusively—that stand in its way, thereby evoking rebuke and sometimes condemnation from the mainstream. We insist that “pro-Israel” has many shades of meaning and cannot be a term reserved for the most hawkish of Israel’s supporters. We persist in our love of Zion, thereby evoking rebuke and sometimes contempt from erstwhile and natural allies on the left. We believe that classical Jewish values and current Israeli interests are of a piece and, with Seamus Heaney, that one day “hope and history will rhyme.”

Leonard Fein is a Boston-based writer and teacher, a regular columnist for the Forward, founding editor of Moment magazine, and a member of the board of Americans for Peace Now.