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"The Search for a Long-anticipated Discovery The history of Indo-European studies reads with all the straightforward clarity of a family saga, with its founding fathers, child prodigies and even misguided sons. It also forms part of the catalogue of great scientific sagas, on a par with the discovery of penicillin, gravity and electricity. Of all the discoveries claimed by the social sciences, it is probably one of the few that the "hard" sciences (i.e. sciences concerned with physical matter and nature) are willing to acknowledge. Not only was the recognition of resemblances between the languages that we now term "Indo-European" an achievement in its own right, but the comparative grammar of these languages became the foundation on which general linguistics was gradually constructed as a scholarly discipline over the course of the 19th century: indeed, it is the only social science to have developed, and successfully applied, widely recognized mathematical models, much to the envy and fascination of other social sciences. As early as the mid-19th century, the German grammarian Schleicher made specific reference to Darwin in the construction of his family tree of Indo-European languages. In parallel, biologists taking this biologically-inspired tree at face value are today attempting to uncover traces of the Indo-European migrations hidden deep within the human genome. The Indo-European Golden Legend The saga had its pioneers, those who at the end of the 18th century had the intuitive genius to spot relationships between languages, initially by comparing Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. The best known of these pioneers was Sir William Jones who, in the 19th century, inspired three generations of mainly German linguists. The first generation was led by the German Franz Bopp (from 1816), and the Dane Rasmus Rask (from 1818), who defined the principles and tools of comparative grammar and who extended the corpus to include all Indo-European language families (Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Persian, Armenian, Albanian). The second generation was that of August Schleicher, who was the first to construct a family tree of these languages based on the natural sciences model (in 1861, only two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species); he was also the first to write a short fable in the reconstructed "primordial language" (Ursprache) . And finally, the generation of Leipzig "Neo-Grammarians" who, deeming the methods of their predecessors insufficiently rigorous, defined a corpus of phonetic laws capable of explaining both the evolution and reconstruction of languages, laws "that would not tolerate any exceptions". Out of this century of German scholarship would emerge an etymological dictionary of Indo-European (initiated by Wahlde) and a comparative grammar of Indo-European languages (by Brugmann and Delbrück), two key tools that still remain indispensable to this day"--

Moore's comment probably isn't quite right. (Are teenage gang members fundamentally monstrous today in a way they weren't in 1968?) But as one reads The Other America in 2002, it's impossible not to share Moore's sense of rage and anguish at opportunities lost. If only the American left had been a little tougher, a little smarter during the last forty years, what might Metcalfe Park look like today? Suppose the poor people's movements that fought for welfare expansion in the 1960s had not demobilized in the following decades--that they'd continued to fight for job training, child care, health care. Suppose the labor movement had seized the industrial recession of the 1980s as an occasion to fight for federal job creation to repair our economy's chronically deficient job demand. The social democratic activists who governed Milwaukee in the early twentieth century would surely scorn our failures of imagination, will, and backbone. Wisconsin is a flagship state for welfare reform. Its alleged success is a large reason why former governor Tommy Thompson was tapped to head the federal department of health and human services. Thompson has publicly insisted again and again that anyone who wants work can find it. Is this hypocrisy and dissembling? Of course it is, but that very hypocrisy makes the new welfare/work-support regime much more susceptible to popular pressure than was the AFDC structure of a decade ago. If unions or churches (or organizations like Larry Moore's) organized Metcalfe Park residents under the banner 'WHERE ARE THE JOBS?,' Wisconsin's political leadership would have no easy answer. If Metcalfe Park's 1,483 tax filers who were below the poverty line even after factoring in their earned income tax credits organized to demand a higher minimum wage and/or a higher EITC, the state's political elite would have, again, no comfortable way to reply. They have declared that work will pay; it's now the left's responsibility to make that declaration a true one. Harrington wrote in 1962 that 'what is needed if poverty is to be abolished is a return of political debate.' The reality and the suffering of the 'invisible poor' had to be injected into the complacent political atmosphere of post-Eisenhower America. We are in a similar bind in 2002--only today the smothering consensus isn't the myth that We Are All Middle Class. Today's myth is that the labor market can and will serve us all, if only we reduce taxes (the Republican version) or raise our education levels (the Democratic). The left's responsibility is to point out that for thirty years, except for a brief blip in 1998-2000, the U.S. economy hasn't seen anything like true full employment. Like Harrington, we should find the will to move forward, even where we see very little basis for optimism.

Skepsis ist das Urelement der Demokratie. Doch längst schon hat westlicher Selbstzweifel selbstzerstörerische Züge angenommen. Eine solche Grundhaltung trifft sich mit der Herrschaftsideologie des Putinismus, die Menschenrechte und demokratische Freiheiten zu Propagandaerfindungen und Camouflage westlicher Vormachtsinteressen erklärt hat. (IP)

ON THE FIFTH floor of Harvard's Lamont Library, near the men's room, there is an old, well-thumbed volume of Dwight Macdonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Halfway down page 39, in a 1945 essay called 'The Responsibility of Peoples,' Macdonald argues that the Nazi death camps were uniquely anti-human. In the right margin, someone has commented, sniffily: 'Fellow traveler McDonald neatly overlooks Comrade Stalin's purges, where 2 x 10 7 people died.' Your reviewer unsheathed his pen upon seeing this, but then read further down the margin, where a knotty, penciled hand had done good work. 'Fellow traveler McDonald,' it said, 'had been denouncing Stalin for over a decade.' 'Fellow traveler `McDonald," yet another student had added beneath this, 'is spelled wrong.' Yes, Podhoretz. This is, by my informal count, Hitchens's fifth contribution to the venerable subgenre of the anti-Podhoretz essay. He is as scabrously funny as ever--'As a literary critic, [Podhoretz] rather resembles an undertaker scanning the obits for trade'--but at this point one has to wonder whether there is a compelling reason, intellectually speaking, to continue engaging a reactionary whom Hitchens himself has nominated as 'the most unscrupulous man of letters of our time.' And this question, I think, brings the Hitchensian conundrum into focus: it would be nice to ignore the likes of Podhoretz, but their deceptions are piling up. If once in this country there was a Big Lie (maybe two), there are now hundreds of little lies, scattered across dozens of periodicals. 'A thing that you have to read,' says Hitchens, mostly in earnest, 'if you desire to know what's cooking in the culture, is the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association.' This is a statement that should drive all would-be Hitchenses back to grad school: a librarians' newsletter is decidedly not what one had in mind for the writer's life. But it describes, in a weird way, the work that Hitchens does, and the remarkable quantity of his output. Not a week goes by without Hitchens appearing in some back-of-the-book to dispose of another fraud, slander, revisionist misinterpretation. He is everywhere, perpetually arguing; it's as if mad America had hurt him into prolificacy. 'My friend Michael Kinsley,' 'my friend Gaff Sheehy,' and, always, 'my friend Alexander Cockburn' (formerly)--it is a rhetorical construction one encounters almost pathologically in Hitchens. It cannot be, as it initially seems, a short-hand form of full disclosure, because Hitchens is friends with everyone: so either all his journalism is tainted by his contacts or none is. 'My friend' could also be an epithet, Hitchens helpfully tagging the animals in the intellectual zoo: 'that old coward and fraud,' 'the little putz,' 'my friend,' 'my friend.' But this too is false, for Hitchens's friendship crosses party lines and even lines of honor--he is not above being friendly with men he considers scoundrels. To wit: 'my old friend Sidney Blumenthal.'.