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November 26, 2013

Much Ado About Bitcoin

By ADRIAN CHEN The New York Times

FOR the obsessive followers of the volatile virtual currency bitcoin, the price of a single bitcoin at the time their fixation began holds undue significance. I know one bitcoin cost around $9 when I first stumbled on it in the summer of 2011. That was before I single-handedly sent the price of bitcoin soaring.

I wasn’t trying to manipulate an underground economy. I was just doing my job as a blogger for the website Gawker when I broke the story of the online underground illegal drug market Silk Road, on which bitcoin was the only accepted currency because of its relative anonymity. The article went viral and introduced hundreds of thousands to bitcoin.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, helped, too. During a news conference a couple of days after my article was published, he called bitcoin “an online form of money laundering.” I suppose a lot of people thought that sounded pretty cool. The price of bitcoin surged to $14.

Huh, I thought, maybe I should buy some bitcoin.

But I didn’t, and as of this writing, one bitcoin is worth around $880. Senate hearings held to discuss regulating bitcoin earlier this month were “lovefests,” according to The Washington Post. Abroad, Chinese investors are flocking. Bitcoin seems on the brink of respectability.

Still, there’s a zaniness about the currency. Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of the most old-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology. Boosters say that bitcoin is the currency of the future. I’d argue that the phenomenon is a digital gold rush perfectly emblematic of the present.

Some of bitcoin’s appeal comes from the fact that it does not physically exist. Each bitcoin is just a string of numbers. Instead of a bank, a decentralized network of computers ensures the authenticity of bitcoin and issues new ones by doing complex calculations. This allows bitcoin to be traded peer to peer, bypassing credit card companies and payment processors. It’s digital cash, offering the same relative anonymity and freedom as a paper sack of bills. WikiLeaks began accepting bitcoin donations in 2011 in order to bypass PayPal and credit card companies, which had frozen payments to the organization.

The WikiLeaks episode hints at the utopian promise built into bitcoin by its creator, a mysterious programmer called Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is a subject of dispute and intrigue. The ideas behind bitcoin can be traced to a 1988 tract called the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which loftily predicted a future where anonymity-protecting technology made state control of the market impossible. Everything would be for sale to anyone all the time, 100 percent tax-free. Many of bitcoin’s hard-core fans see the currency as a revolutionary step toward this anarchocapitalist wonderland.

I’m skeptical. I don’t think we’ll all be paying in bitcoin for tickets to Kanye West’s 2024 presidential victory tour. You can’t use bitcoin for much today besides gambling in online casinos and reserving seats on Virgin Galactic spaceflights, and a vast majority of it is held by speculators. Even with the imprimatur of government regulation, the promise of bitcoin seems to end with helping online retailers avoid credit-card processing fees. Bitcoin is mainly innovative in the way of credit default swaps: new ways to gamble with money.

Bitcoin is most interesting on an emotional level. Its sheen of technomagic has let uber-rational geeks treat the casino-floor frenzy as a serious technological story. Tech blogs breathlessly track the price of bitcoin. Each new business that accepts bitcoin is heralded with the fanfare of a despot opening his country’s borders to a new, previously outlawed luxury. The drumbeat suggests that getting rich is as simple as being an early adopter.

So many have bought in because the Internet is very good at stoking the fear of missing out. There’s even a trendy acronym, FOMO, to describe the anxiety inspired by scrolling through the social media accounts of people having more fun than you. Bitcoin fosters a particularly potent brand of FOMO. Recently there was the story of the Norwegian 20-something who discovered that his long-forgotten bitcoin, bought for basically nothing, was worth so much that he traded some of it to buy an apartment. Bitcoin holders have taken to posting screenshots of their swollen accounts. I know a guy who bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of bitcoin as a sort of joke years ago. Now he’s made enough to buy a nice car.

All I can say is that the crash is going to be great. Bitcoin is too dependent on speculative mania to be of practical use as a currency. But as a symbol of the misguided dream that one can tap into the global data stream and download riches like a pop song, it’s gold.

Adrian Chen is a freelance journalist and an editor at The New Inquiry.

 

If you need reason for the death penalty read here...

A Jailhouse Interview With David Goodell

The letter sat on my desk like a dead bird. Just seeing my name written in that familiar handwriting with the capital letters and the loops sent me backing away.

I knew right away it had come from the Bergen County, N.J., jail, from David Goodell, Inmate No. 93313. I had spent a year investigating Mr. Goodell as part of a series of articles that I wrote for The New York Times about New Jersey’s troubled halfway houses.

He was a career convict who in 2010 had escaped from a halfway house in Newark and murdered a former girlfriend, Viviana Tulli.

I had read his parole officer’s reports and studied the crime scene photos. I had pored over dozens of letters he wrote to Ms. Tulli, letters that veered from boyishly innocent to menacing in a single page.

“What’s the good word, Mama?” they always began.

Now, I opened his letter to me.

“Mr. Dolnick,” he began, “what’s the good word?”

He wanted to talk.

In September, a week after Mr. Goodell’s letter arrived, I went to Hackensack for his sentencing. He had pleaded guilty in June to murder.

The courtroom was packed, and more than a dozen court officers lined the walls. From the makeshift press box, the room looked like a gruesome mockery of a wedding — her loved ones filled the benches on the right, his sat on the left.

Only about five people showed up on his side. They shifted quietly in their seats, trying not to look at the Viviana T-shirts and the framed portraits that her family clutched across the aisle.

As the crowd waited for the judge to appear, a film crew from MSNBC fiddled with recording equipment and chatted with the court officers. Finally, with multiple cameras trained on the courtroom door, Mr. Goodell, shackled and surprisingly slight, was ushered in.

He wore an orange jumpsuit open at the chest to show off his tattoos — a huge 7 surrounded by elaborate script that read “Only God Can Judge Me.”

He had a thin, manicured beard, a shaved head and a small tattoo on his temple. He wore immense black and gold aviator glasses that swallowed his face, making him look like a deranged Mr. Magoo.

With the cameras rolling, he seemed to take to his role as master villain, licking his lips and adjusting his oversize glasses. Mr. Goodell, 33, smiled as the judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison.

“You have no conscience, no remorse, no soul,” the judge said.

Mr. Goodell barely stifled a laugh.

Moments later, as he left the courtroom, he looked back over his shoulder and yelled, “If it ain’t life, it ain’t long!”

Then he laughed. “Ha HA!”

The correction officer told me to leave everything behind except for a pen and paper. He pointed me toward the visiting room, through a heavy door and past a metal detector. Mr. Goodell would be waiting for me there.

He was sitting on the other side of a clear, plastic divider. His orange jumpsuit hung open, revealing his collage of tattoos. He nodded at me and smiled. He motioned for me to pick up the black phone hanging on the wall.

My first question was about those glasses, which he wasn’t wearing now. He laughed. “Those are the Louis Vuittons! Millionaire glasses, fall ’08 editions,” he said. A friend had bought them for him on eBay.

As for his courtroom performance — the taunts, the smiles, the outfit — he said he did it “to be funny.” He wasn’t interested in a public display of remorse. “You want me to cry? You’re not going to see that,” he said.

He was jittery, cutting himself off in midsentence, jumping from thought to thought and then losing his way.

It took less than five minutes for him to begin arguing that Ms. Tulli, who was 21 when he killed her, was not as innocent as she appeared — precisely the kind of debate I didn’t want to have.

He reached into a stack of folders two feet tall, his entire case file, and pulled out a packet of photos. “Here! Look! Look at the tattoo on her shoulder!” he said, thrusting the picture against the clear divider. He flipped to the next one, taken at a different angle, then another and another.

He seemed untroubled that they were autopsy photos.

In court, Mr. Goodell’s lawyer said his client had never been given a chance, and Mr. Goodell now agreed, though he thought his lawyer had laid it on a bit thick. “He had me feeling bad for myself,” he said.

Page 2 of 2

His parents were alcoholics and drug addicts. He grew up shoplifting with his father — a trip to do the laundry ended with the laundromat arcade games sticking out of the car’s trunk, he said. “It was a life of crime from Day 1,” he said. “I live in jail and visit the streets.”

His schooling stopped before the ninth grade. By the time he was 15, he had been arrested for robbery and been in court on charges of aggravated assault, weapons possession and criminal mischief.

He is meticulously organized, and picked out of his stack of papers a 1995 psychological evaluation. It said that his mother, who was unemployed, could not control him, and that his father “has not been seen in quite some time.” It described him as angry and hostile and cited a “severe character pathology.”

He put the paper down. “If I was brought into another family, I would have been all right,” he said.

I asked him about the first time he met Ms. Tulli. He sat back and described a classic suburban scene: He spotted her in a mall parking lot when she was just 16. (He was about 25.) “Nice little body, cute face,” he said.

Ms. Tulli was from a stable, middle-class family, the youngest of three children. Her mother was from Puerto Rico, her father from Argentina. She doted on her Chihuahuas, Mikey and Hennessy, and was known in her circle as the practical joker, the one who still thought water balloons were the world’s greatest joke.

Their relationship began in earnest when he went back to jail — he has spent about half his life behind bars — and they began writing letters back and forth. But it was stormy, off-again-on-again.

He had her name tattooed down his entire forearm, and again on his wrist. He opened his mouth to show me the word “PRINCESS” messily etched on the inside of his lip. “I really loved her,” he said. “I wanted everything with her.”

But he soon became suspicious that she had other boyfriends. He called her incessantly and would get furious when she wouldn’t answer. When she said she was going bowling with friends, he would call the bowling alley to ask if she was there.

Finally, he said he couldn’t take it anymore. At Logan Hall, a Newark halfway house, he faked a seizure so he would be taken to a hospital and he could make his escape from there, he told me.

He said he had pulled the same stunt at least a half-dozen times before, so he could bring back drugs to sell inside the halfway house. (A parole board official confirmed that Mr. Goodell had been taken to a hospital several times.)

He met up with Ms. Tulli at a friend’s house, and they stayed up late watching “Reservoir Dogs.” He pretended everything was fine, but it was an act, he said. “I’ve got murder on my mind,” he said.

He went on to describe the killing in methodical detail, getting more and more animated as he talked. There was no shame or remorse in his account. At times, he seemed almost proud. He stood up to demonstrate what he had done, describing each step with eerie precision.

I thought about walking out. I didn’t.

He kept talking, manically, describing how he drove around with her dead body for hours. In the car, he slashed himself with a blade. He said he was determined not to go back to jail, and “the last thing I wanted to see was her.”

But he didn’t die. He was spotted in a school parking lot, and arrested soon after.

A police report said that the day after the murder, he requested a photograph of Ms. Tulli for his cell. He asked the detective to apologize to her family for him.

I asked him what he felt in the days after the murder.

He leaned forward and said: “After I killed her, I slept better, I ate better. Because I didn’t have to worry about what she was doing. I felt better.”

It was time to go, I felt that I'd seen and heard enough. Two days later I recieved a note 

“If there is anything else you need, contact me,” Mr. Goodell wrote. “It was a pleasure.”

Mavis Batey, Allied Code Breaker in World War II, Dies at 92

New York Times

After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Mavis Lever, an 18-year-old British university student, volunteered to be an army nurse. Instead, because of her expertise in the German language, she was referred to the intelligence services.

“This is going to be an interesting job,” she recalled thinking, “Mata Hari seducing Prussian officers.”

But playing the role of temptress was not what the military had in mind for her. She was assigned to one of World War II’s most secret and important operations, an ambitious Allied effort to decipher secret codes used by the Axis powers — chiefly Nazi Germany’s mind-boggling one, aptly given the name Enigma. She was ordered to report to the unit’s headquarters, at Bletchley Park, a Victorian estate in southeastern England.

There, Miss Lever — one of the few women in the operation — was critical to at least two major successes in the war effort, including a British victory at sea in the Battle of Cape Matapan, off the coast of Greece, in March 1941, when an Italian convoy was ambushed and three heavy cruisers and two destroyers carrying 3,000 sailors were sunk.

When asked years later, after she had married and became Mavis Batey, she could hardly say why she, while still a teenager, was chosen for such a top-secret enterprise. But she did know that Dillwyn Knox, known as Dilly, a top code breaker at Bletchley Park, selected her for his team. In a largely masculine environment, Mr. Knox, an eccentric classicist by training, liked to hire women, especially pretty ones, and give them considerable responsibility.

Whatever the case, Mrs. Batey, who died on Nov. 12 at 92, more than justified her selection. The evening of the Cape Matapan success, John Godfrey, director of naval intelligence, called Mr. Knox at home and left a message: “Tell Dilly that we have won a great victory in the Mediterranean, and it is entirely due to him and his girls.”

The team at Bletchley Park — 12,000 people, including Americans, worked there at one time or another during the war — was composed, among others, of mathematicians, linguists, crossword mavens and an assortment of acknowledged eccentrics. Its existence was kept secret until the mid-1970s. Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, official historian of British intelligence during World War II, has said that the operation’s code-cracking work shortened the war by two or more years.

One of its chief challenges was decoding messages scrambled by what the Allies called Enigma machines. The device, used by the Germans and other Axis powers and resembling an oversize typewriter, used a series of electrical rotors to scramble messages in an astronomical number of ways; each letter could appear in more than 150 million million million permutations.

The messages, sent by radio using Morse code, were intercepted by spies and sent to Bletchley Park, where code breakers had access to their own Enigma machines, originally obtained by Poles and given to the British. A principal tool they used was a computerlike device, made by the genius mathematician Alan Turing, connecting a series of Enigma machines.

But Mr. Knox preferred to work through linguistic cues, which required thinking in sometimes counterintuitive ways. In his book “Enigma: The Battle for the Code” (2000), Hugh Sebag-Montefiore wrote that a question Mr. Knox asked potential recruits was which way the hands of a clock go around. Everyone, of course, said clockwise. A delighted Mr. Knox would reply, “Not if you’re inside the clock.”

One of Mrs. Batey’s hunches that proved accurate in deciphering code allowed the British to read a long, detailed message on Italian naval plans in the Mediterranean, paving the way for the Cape Matapan victory. The plans, she recalled, revealed “how many cruisers there were, and how many submarines were to be there, and where they were to be at such and such a time.”

“Absolutely incredible that they should spell it all out,” she said.

In December 1941, Mrs. Batey collaborated with her colleague Margaret Rock to decipher a small segment of a message by the German secret service. Not until years later did they know the effect: It helped British spies to learn that German generals believed that Allied forces would invade at Calais, France, not Normandy, on D-Day in June 1944.

Making a play on the names of his code breakers, Mr. Knox said, “Give me a Lever and a Rock and I will move the universe.”

Mavis Lilian Lever was born on May 5, 1921, in South London to a postal worker and a seamstress. Inspired by a vacation to Germany with her parents, she went on to study German Romanticism at University College, London.

But when the war broke out and she was assigned to intelligence duty, any thoughts of working as a spy were quickly dispelled. “I don’t think my legs or my German were good enough,” she told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2001, “because they sent me to the Government Code and Cipher School,” the official name for the Bletchley Park operation. It was also called Ultra and Station X.

At Bletchley Park, she fell in love with another code breaker, Keith Batey. They married in 1942. Mr. Batey, who died in 2010, went on to be the chief financial officer at Oxford.

And Mrs. Batey went on to write books about Mr. Knox and the experience of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, as a code breaker at Bletchley Park. A longtime president of Britain’s Garden History Society, she also wrote books on the landscapes of Jane Austen and the gardens of Oxford.

Her survivors include her daughters, Elizabeth and Deborah; her son, Christopher; and several grandchildren. The children knew nothing of their mother’s wartime exploits until files about the Bletchley Park operation were declassified.

In the 2001 movie “Enigma,” Kate Winslet at least partly molded her portrayal of the code breaker Heather Wallace on Mrs. Batey, with whom she had tea before shooting the film. Like Mrs. Batey, the Heather character falls in love with another code breaker and marries him.

Some Bletchley Park veterans criticized the film as inauthentic. Mrs. Batey’s criticism was that its women appeared “scruffy” compared with the originals. As she told another British newspaper, The Daily Record, in 2008, “We borrowed each other’s pearls, so we always looked nice.”

Remembering a stellar talent swallowed up by depression and loss

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More on fiction from The Atlantic Monthly.

More Flashbacks from Atlantic Unbound.





Flashbacks 
 
Transcripts of a Troubled Mind 

April 29, 2004 
 
wenty-five years ago this month, on the evening of April 8, 1979, the young author Breece D'J Pancake placed the barrels of a shotgun in his mouth and took his own life. He was twenty-six. At the time of his death he had published six short stories, two of them in The Atlantic Monthly. Two more would appear in The Atlantic's pages over the next few years. Phoebe-Lou Adams, Pancake's editor at the magazine, said in 1982, "In thirty-some years at the Atlantic, I cannot recall a response to a new author like the response to this one. Letters drifted in for months, obviously from people who knew nothing about him, asking for more stories, inquiring for collected stories, or simply expressing admiration and gratitude. Whatever it is that truly commands reader attention, he had it." When the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown jointly published Pancake's twelve completed works as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in 1983, he achieved posthumous acclaim as a writer of the first order. "One is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's," wrote Joyce Carol Oates in her review of the book; the quote graces the cover of a recent paperback edition of the collection, released in 2002.

Breece D'J Pancake wrote exclusively about the sons and daughters of the dissipated Appalachian world in which he was raised. They were the people he knew, and he seems to have felt honor-bound to give them a voice when, in his early twenties, he entered the genteel University of Virginia to pursue a master's degree in English. He published three short stories in school publications during the mid-1970s; then, with the help of his advisor James Alan McPherson, a member of The Atlantic's editorial board at the time, he landed his first Atlantic piece. The story was "Trilobites," and it begins:

I open the truck's door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.

I see a concrete patch in the street. It's shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny's yearbook: "We will live on mangoes and love." And she up and left without me—two years she's been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.

The speaker is Colly, a young man whose old, familiar world is collapsing around him. His father's death has not only cut him off from his past, but threatens to cut him off from his future: without Pop's guiding hand, the family farm is failing, and Colly's mother plans to sell it. Meanwhile, Ginny's return —she is back from college for a visit—is dragging up painful memories of their broken love, only emphasizing to Colly the passage of time and the loss of his youth. He is a man apart, driven to isolation by a history over which he has had no control, and he faces a choice: to play out his lonely life with the hand he has been dealt, or to cut and run.

"Trilobites" is, in this sense, a classic coming-of-age story, but Pancake flips the model on its head. Colly does not leave and then come back, the chastened prodigal son; he goes back, as it were, seeking answers to his dilemma in the history of the land and his family, and then decides that his salvation lies in escape. The density and depth of Pancake's memory—or, rather, Colly's—can astonish.

I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I have only the bottoms and the stone animals I collect. I blink and breathe. My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge.

In the end, Colly decides to follow the old Teays riverbed westward out of the mountains, hopping a freight car just as his father did years ago. But unlike his father, he will not come back. The final passage of the story finds Colly alone at night, resting beside the train depot, Ginny forgotten, the farm sold, the lessons of his father's "mistake"—his return to the hill country—fresh in his mind. It reads like an exhalation:

I get up. I'll spend tonight at home. I've got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don't know yet. I walk, but I'm not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

ne can search through all of Pancake's works and find none that better represents him. Everything that would come to characterize his art—the voice, alternately idiomatic and literary; the preoccupation with dead fathers and lost loves; and the lurking sense that the past holds sway over the present—every bit of it is there, even in those spare opening lines. (In this light, the comparison to Hemingway appears particularly apt: both men seemed to emerge fully formed as writers.) 

"Trilobites" is vintage Pancake in another way. It is not a story driven by plot; it is, instead, the transcript of a troubled mind's attempts to come to peace with itself. Again and again, Pancake would return to this form, and each time the crisis is resolved by the main character's breaking away from the past that seems to govern him. 

"Hollow," from October 1982, ends in symbolic violence: Bud, abandoned by his lover and slowly dying of black lung, rouses himself a final time, killing a deer in the hills behind the lonely double-wide trailer he calls home. The next day, he will call a wildcat strike at the coal mine that enslaves him—a final desperate and destructive act of freedom. "The Honored Dead," published in January 1981, ends on a more hopeful note. The narrator has spent a long night revisiting the death of his best friend, Eddie, in Vietnam, a fate the narrator avoided by retreating into college. But in the final lines he reaches some sort of peace:

I cannot go away, and I cannot make Eddie go away, so I go home. And walking down the street as the bus goes by, I bet myself a million that my Lundy is up and already watching cartoons, and I bet I know who won.

"Hollow" and "The Honored Dead" are strong stories, and stand on their own as works of art, but if the masterly "Trilobites" has an equal in Pancake's collection, it is "In The Dry," published in August 1978, six months before his death. The title comes from Luke, chapter 23:

For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bear, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

The story is in a way a mirror of "Trilobites." Here, the young man has already left home, and the narrative begins with his return.

He sees the bridge coming, sees the hurt in it, and says aloud his name, says, "Ottie." It is what he has been called, and he says again, "Ottie." Passing the abutment, he glances up, and in the side mirror sees his face, battered, dirty; hears Bus's voice from a far-off time, I'm going to show you something. He breathes long and tired, seems to puff out the years since Bus's Chevy slammed that bridge, rolled, and Ottie crawled out. But somebody told it that way—he only recalls the hard heat of the asphalt where he lay down. And sometimes, Ottie knows. Now and again, his nerves bang one another until he sees a fist, a fist gripping and twisting at once; then hot water runs down the back of his throat, he heaves. After comes the wait—not a day or night, but both folding on each other until it is all just a time, a wait. Then there is no more memory, only years on the hustle with a semi truck—years roaring with pistons, rattling with roads, waiting to sift out one day. For this one day, he comes back.

The history is richer here than in "Trilobites," the pain more complex and its sources more various. Ottie is not an orphan but a foster child, a sort of half-son to his adoptive father, and so a sort of half-brother to the true son, Bus. There is no death to cut Ottie free, but a half-death: Bus is alive, but paralyzed. And there is no broken heart to push Ottie into anger and escape, but rather the memory of a doomed love affair to draw him back. Sheila, Bus's blood-sister, still lives on the old homestead, and it is to her as much as anyone that Ottie returns.

But Ottie also comes on a mission of atonement. His foster father suspects he is responsible for Bus's injury, and still seethes with rage over the loss of the son who held all his hopes. The accident is the focal event of "In The Dry," but we never get a clear picture of it: Ottie cannot recall what happened. And so the familiar Pancake mission, the excavation of the past in order to gain mastery of the present, is doomed to fail. There can be no resolution: not between Bus and Ottie over Sheila, the sister-lover, and not between Ottie and Old Gerlock, the father who lost his only son. As in "Trilobites" there can only be a decisive break, but in "In The Dry" it is not an escape to freedom, but a flight from the infested past into a barren future:

Outside, the yard is empty, dark. He climbs the ladder into his semi's cab and tries to remember a wide spot by the mill, a place to pull over. The ignition bell rings out, and gears—ten through forward—strain to whine into another night, an awful noise.

t is always tempting to find in an author's work the reflection of his life, but in Pancake's case the parallels are too clear to avoid remark. Born in South Charleston, West Virginia, he grew up in the nearby town of Milton. The family was middle class, though on the poor end of that scale; Pancake's father worked for Union Carbide, which had replaced coal and timber as the town's main employer after World War II. Pancake was close to both of his parents—their numerous letters are affectionate and solicitous, a correspondence among friends—but Pancake led an otherwise solitary life. As a child his quiet and intellectual nature meant he spent many hours alone, often searching the hills around Milton for the fossils which appear so frequently in his stories. As an adult, his isolation took on aspects of depression, false garrulousness, and ultimately self-abnegation, frequently accompanied by heavy drinking.

Pancake entered the University of Virginia in the mid seventies, after college and a few years teaching at a military academy. James Alan McPherson, in his introduction to The Stories, paints him as a perennial outsider there: the ambiguous West Virginian, neither Northern nor quintessentially Southern; the middle-class Appalachian, unable to claim either ennobling poverty or birth into the planter aristocracy. 

Pancake quite literally announced himself to McPherson, wandering the hall outside McPherson's office while chanting in a loud voice, "I'm Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president." It was jest, a challenge, and a mask: I'm a southerner, but I'm not who you think I am; let's see if you can find the real me. Pancake's first questions to McPherson were whether he liked to drink, if he played pinball, if he hunted—let's see, professor, if I can find the real you.

The two men shared an ambiguous relationship with their homeland (McPherson is black, and so always an outsider in the South). McPherson came to UVA specifically to try to re-engage the society into which he was born, but which he had left as a young man, making his home in the North. And Pancake, McPherson wrote, was on a similar mission:

Breece Pancake seemed driven to improve himself. His ambition was not primarily literary: he was struggling to define for himself an entire way of life, an all-embracing code of values that would allow him to live outside his home valley...

Pancake sought to engage the university community, but without success—he found himself an outsider among the city-types and southern patricians who made up most of the student body, and consequently he made few friends. Perhaps in response, he adopted a self-consciously "cracker" personality, dressing in shabby jeans and driving a rusty old car around town. He spun wild tales of his supposed poverty and backwoods ways, once claiming to have resorted to eating roadkill to survive. It was an odd, and sad, retreat by someone who so clearly wished to prove himself the equal of the flatlanders who had looked disdainfully for so many years at hill people.

As his career at the university wore on, Pancake became known for giving gifts to any and all who might make his acquaintance. Often these gifts followed a perceived failure by Pancake to live up to his own values regarding friendship. Something as small as an uncomfortable silence might send him into bouts of self-recrimination, prompting him to bestow some small token of apology on the one he felt he had let down. McPherson once received a trilobite. 

Pancake was pained by the same losses he heaped upon his characters: his father had died, in September 1975; he felt himself an outsider; he was unlucky in love. (His one serious girlfriend at the university was from Richmond society; her parents vetoed all talk of marriage, dooming the relationship.) McPherson wrote of a "private room" into which Pancake retreated from time to time, particularly when drunk, in which

were stored all his old hurts and all his fantasies. When his imagination entered there, he became a melancholy man in great need of contact with other people. But because he was usually silent during these periods, his presence tended often to make other people nervous."

The real Pancake—the one that, loosened by drink, spoke often of ex-girlfriends and his beloved father and the hills he loved to tromp over—was in that room, but none could enter it, and it is not clear that he truly wanted anyone to. "I always thought that the gifts he gave were a way of keeping people away from this very personal area," McPherson continued, "of focusing their attention on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits." 

Letters Pancake wrote to his mother in his final years suggest he wanted one day to go home, to leave behind the fancier world against which he was testing himself, and whose approval would be the only proof of his success. Then the room would open, and as a free and self-made man, he would take up his history again. It goes without saying that he never made it. He lived, and died, still torn between escape and return, past and future, his home and the wider world.

wenty-five years later, Breece D'J Pancake's legacy remains unclear. As a writer, he was southern by birth alone, not style. He eschewed the decadent retrospection that characterizes Faulkner, O'Connor, McCullers, and their more recent disciples; the touchstones of his failed South are not Jim Crow and the Civil War, nor the conflict between free spirit and social obligation, but things much older: the land itself, with its isolating hollows and impoverished soil; the Indians who built immense burial mounds in honor of their dead; and the even more ancient seas from which the hills rose.

Thomas E. Douglass, the author of the only serious academic work on Pancake, A Room Forever (the title is the same as one of Pancake's short stories), lists Bobbie Ann Mason, Pinckney Benedict, Cormac McCarthy, Lee Maynard, and Meredith Sue Willis as among those who have been influenced by Pancake's work. But though the opening chapter of Benedict's Dogs of God is a clear homage to Pancake's short story "The Scrapper," beyond that the relationship is less clear. Pancake's voice is so personal, and his works so few, that he cannot be accorded the honor of having founded a "school," as both Faulkner and O'Connor often are.

What Pancake left instead was an honorable ongoing project, yet to be completed by anyone else: to reveal the men and women of Appalachia as fully human—as people as complex, intelligent, confused, articulate, lonely, and loving as the urban and suburban intelligentsia who Pancake surely understood made up the majority of his audience. His Appalachian readers loved him for this display of brass. And they loved that he did not pretty them up, or dumb them down: he wrote in their language, in which a turtle is a turkle, a loose girl is a chippy, and the glowing mist in the trees on the ridge is the willow-wisp, come to spirit them away. 

If Pancake has a forebear in his task, it is perhaps the journalist, screenwriter, and novelist James Agee, who in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men took on the same challenge of illuminating the lives of a marginalized people. That Agee, by his own admission within the pages of his 1939 masterpiece, could not but fail only strengthens the impression that the two men shared this impossible goal. James Agee drank himself to death. Breece Pancake, Ishmael of Appalachia, chose the gun.

—Tim Heffernan

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Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

More Flashbacks from The Atlantic's archive.

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Tim Heffernan is a writer based in New York City and a staff editor at Sixbillion.org. He spent his childhood summers in West Virginia. 

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Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

Anyone Who Counts Obama Out Hasn’t Reckoned on His Survival Skills

Joshua DuBois The Daily Beast

The president has proven his knack for surviving political and governmental crises time and again.

It’s been a week of football metaphors in politics. President Obama said this week that the administration “fumbled” the health care rollout. A lot of folks believe that this turnover is decisive, handing the ball to Republicans in Congress and opponents of health reform with the second half well underway. And now we’re starting to see frightened Democrats on the sidelines hovering over Obama like uneasy linemen, wondering if their QB has enough left in him to turn the game around.

Not me. I’ve seen this game–and this particular quarterback–far too many times before. And as sure as I know never to count out Peyton Manning when he’s down by a couple scores heading into the fourth quarter, I never bet against Obama when the press and pundits have declared game-over. It rarely, if ever, is--this guy knows how to win.   

It started early. A young state legislator with a really odd name decided to run for United States Senate against better-funded primary opponents, including a comptroller, Dan Hynes, who hailed from one of the most prominent families in Illinois politics.  The result? A landslide primary and general election victory, breaking records in the state.

And don’t forget 2007. When we look back at Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign now, we think of the soaring acceptance speech in Denver and the Iowa caucus victory and the triumph of election night in Chicago’s Grant Park. But I was there in the summer and fall of 2007, when almost every smart pundit in the country thought that Barack Obama was charbroiled toast. He was too “arugula” for Iowa. He wasn’t “black enough” to win South Carolina. And his former pastor had surely taken white voters across the country off the table. That was a long, hot summer and fall, a confidence-sapping time to work on the campaign. At times it seemed like the only people at the top tier of politics who really thought he was going to win were Senator Obama himself and those who knew him best, folks like David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Valerie Jarrett. But Obama would keep calm, and tell his staff to chill out, and get back to work. And we know how that election turned out.

The comeback-kid phenomenon wasn’t just limited to campaign politics. Time and again in the White House, we’ve seen President Obama bounce back, and the country with him. Remember early 2009, when the economy was still in the tank and folks thought it was going to stay there? When the Dow bottomed out in March of that year, and Republicans were pointing to lack of confidence in “socialist” Obama as the reason, and General Motors was on the verge of collapse? It’s hard to remember those dark days now, with a resurgent auto industry and stocks at all time highs. But there were a whole lot of people crying “fumble” then, too.

Or how about the oil spill of 2010, another supposed “Obama’s Katrina” moment, one that we’ve almost forgotten about because of a difficult--but effective--public/private response? Or the bloodbath midterm elections of that year, and Scott Brown’s surprising win, which supposedly spelled doom for the president’s reelection? Or the 2011 debt-ceiling debacle, or the credit downgrade, or the high gas prices in 2012, with Republicans were standing at gas stations taunting the president and asking voters to send him back to Illinois? And don’t get me started on the first presidential debate; if you left it up to the talking heads then, President Obama should have resigned before he left the stage.

This is a president, and a country, who have been counted out more times than we remember, and bounced back in ways we quickly forget. The reality is, if we take the long view, we’ll see that our country has been on an upward trajectory over the last 5 years–a slowly improving economy, a steadily progressing education system, advances in immigrant rights and housing and unemployment, and yes, health care–even if there have been significant challenges along the way.

Now we’re at a moment when, on the road to a health care system where insurance companies will have to treat consumers with a basic level of fairness and better insurance will hopefully be available to more people, we’ve hit another very rough patch.  We’ve got to get this glitchy website fixed, and we’ve got to make sure consumers have clarity about what plans they can have, and how to get them.

That is a big, complicated problem, but it’s fixable. Especially when we have a quarterback who knows how to turn the game around when his back is against the wall. The ball may have been fumbled, and momentum may be in the other direction. But if history tells us anything, it’s this: the smart money’s on the gray-haired, steady-handed guy in the White House, who has been down this field a few times before. 

Blighted cities chose demolition

From The New York Times/Science

By Timothy Williams

BALTIMORE — Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. And on the corner a few weeks ago, a pair of houses that were damaged by fire collapsed. The city bulldozed those and two others, leaving scavengers to pick through the debris for bits of metal and copper wire.

“The city doesn’t want these old houses,” lamented Mr. Smith, 36.

For the Smiths, the bulldozing of city blocks is a source of anguish. But for Baltimore, as for a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, it is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation. Because despite the well-publicized embrace by young professionals of once-struggling city centers in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles, for many cities urban planning has often become a form of creative destruction.

“It is not the house itself that has value, it is the land the house stands on,” said Sandra Pianalto, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “This led us to the counterintuitive concept that the best policy to stabilize neighborhoods may not always be rehabilitation. It may be demolition.”

Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable, as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight, and increase environmental sustainability.

A recent Brookings Institution study found that from 2000 to 2010 the number of vacant housing units nationally had increased by 4.5 million, or 44 percent. And areport by the University of California, Berkeley, determined that over the past 15 years, 130 cities, most with relatively small populations, have dissolved themselves, more than half the total ever recorded in the United States.

The continuing struggles of former manufacturing centers have fundamentally altered urban planning, traditionally a discipline based on growth and expansion.

Today, it is also about disinvestment patterns to help determine which depopulated neighborhoods are worth saving; what blocks should be torn down and rebuilt; and based on economic activity, transportation options, infrastructure and population density, where people might best be relocated. Some even focus on returning abandoned urban areas into forests and meadows.

“It’s like a whole new field,” said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, who helped plan for a land bank in Detroit to oversee that city’s vacant properties.

In all, more than half of the nation’s 20 largest cities in 1950 have lost at least one-third of their populations. And since 2000, a number of cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Buffalo, have lost around 10 percent; Cleveland has lost more than 17 percent; and more than 25 percent of residents have left Detroit, whose bankruptcy declaration this summer has heightened anxiety in other postindustrial cities.

The result of this shrinkage, also called “ungrowth” and “right sizing,” has been compressed tax bases, increased crime and unemployment, tight municipal budgets and abandoned neighborhoods. The question is what to do with the urban ghost towns unlikely to be repopulated because of continued suburbanization and deindustrialization.

“In the past, cities would look at buildings individually, determine there was a problem, tear them down and then quickly find another use for the land,” said Justin B. Hollander, an urban planning professor at Tufts University. “Now they’re looking at the whole DNA of the city and saying, ‘There are just too many structures for the population we have.' ”

Cleveland, whose population has shrunk by about 80,000 during the past decade to 395,000, has spent $50 million over the past six years to raze houses, which cost $10,000 each to destroy, compared with $27,000 annually to maintain.

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Some neighborhoods have lost two-thirds of their residents since 2000. There are so many vacant lots that the city, now home to more than 200 community gardens and farms, zones for urban farms and allows people to keep pigs, sheep and goats in residential areas. A vineyard has popped up as well.

Two miles northwest of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which has at least 6,000 vacant buildings, is an uninhabited deciduous forest where a sprawling 74-acre housing development once stood before the city demolished it because so few people lived there.

Philadelphia, which has 40,000 vacant lots, has promoted the benefits of lower-density living by allowing people in largely vacant neighborhoods to spread out to the lot next door — where a neighbor’s home once was. The city has been studying a plan to sell $500 leases to urban farmers. One such farm, Greensgrow, which was built on a former Superfund site, sold $1 million in produce in 2012.

Baltimore has begun to turn over vacant lots to groups of amateur farmers. Boone Street Farm, boxed in by abandoned rowhouses on an eighth of an acre, is completing its third season of growing tomatoes, spinach, sweet potatoes and other fruits and vegetables in the city’s Midway neighborhood. It sells produce to restaurants, has a table at a local farmers market and delivers $10 boxes of produce weekly to members of its community-supported agriculture program.

But even as they bulldoze thousands of vacant houses, Baltimore and other shrinking cities have continued to seek new people.

“I’m trying to grow the city, not get smaller,” said Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor, about the notion that the city could be fine with between 500,000 and 600,000 people. “I’m not the first to say that a city that’s not growing is dying.”

Baltimore lost nearly 110,000 jobs from 1990 to 2010, about 23 percent, and has seen its population drop from 950,000 in 1950 to 621,000 today. The city has 20,000 vacant buildings and lots, and more than one house in eight is vacant.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake wants to attract 10,000 families to the city within a decade and has reached out to immigrants, gays and lesbians (Maryland allows same-sex marriage), and Orthodox Jews who might want to buy newly refurbished three-story rowhouses that the city is selling for as little as $100,000.

At least one city that has taken a pioneering approach to confronting diminution has found that accepting shrinkage does not mean problems go away. Youngstown, Ohio, once a bustling steel city of 170,000 but now with only 66,000 people, has sought to head off collapse by tearing down thousands of vacant houses — 3,000 so far and 10 more each week.

But while the city had planned on a stable population of 80,000, more than 1,000 people move away every year, leaving behind 130 additional empty homes in addition to the city’s 22,000 vacant properties and structures. Four thousand of those homes are in dangerous condition, according to the city, but each demolition costs $9,000 and the city has yet to decide whether to close nearly abandoned neighborhoods to try to save money.

“It’s almost anti-American to say our city is shrinking,” said Heather McMahon, the executive director of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, a Youngstown community group.

“But if we’re going to survive as a city and not go bankrupt like Detroit,” she said, “we’re going to have to figure something out.”

How the Tea Party’s Apocalyptic Politics Are Destroying the Republican Party

From the Daily Beast

Tea Party leaders view themselves as modern prophets of the end of times, ratcheting up their rhetoric to prove that Obama is evil and God is on their side.

Want to know why the Tea Party so eager to grievously wound the Republican Party? The answer is as simple as it is counterintuitive: its leaders view themselves as modern prophets of the apocalypse

In the aftermath of the great government shutdown of 2013, the Tea Party continues to cause heartburn for establishment Republicans. Consider the results of last week’s elections, which offer clues to the internecine GOP battles that lie ahead. Although it’s much too early to draw hard conclusions, Chris Christie proved that a moderate, common-sense Republican could win in deep blue New Jersey, while in purple Virginia the wild-eyed social reactionary Ken Cuccinelli failed to gain traction outside his uber-conservative Christian-right base.

Yet the Tea Party is willing to defy overwhelming negative public opinion, wreck the government, risk plunging the world economy into chaos and invite political defeat. The driving force behind this destructive strategy is that Tea Party zealots answer to a “higher calling.”

They believe America teeters on the brink of destruction, and hold as an article of faith that liberals, gays, Democrats, atheists and the United Nations are to blame. This “end-times” world-view is a foundational precept of the evangelical movement, from which many of the so-called Tea Party favorites spring. Scholars call it apocalypticism.

Of course, the Tea Party is not just composed of members of the Christian right. Many are genuine libertarians. Some nurse an unreconstructed Confederate grudge, while others harbor a thinly disguised racism. However, the real energy, the animating force for the movement comes from evangelicals, of whom Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are the most strident. These are the modern-day ”apocalyptic prophets.”

Although the issues are secular, the prophets’ anti-Obamacare rhetoric rings with religious, end-times cadences. So to understand why they invoke chaos, we need to know where their ideas about an “apocalypse” came from.

Most theologians, including the revered Albert Schweitzer, believe John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth were Jewish apocalypticists. Simply put, these first-century prophets believed they were living in the “end times” before God would send his representative, the “Son of Man” (taken from a rather obscure passage in the Book of Daniel), to overthrow the forces of evil and establish God’s justice on earth. Apocalypse literally translates as “the revealing” of God’s will. For these early prophets the Kingdom of God was not to be a church, but a military and political kingdom on earth.

Lest this sound far-fetched to modern ears, listen to our modern Tea Party prophets in their own words:

“You know we can’t keep going down this road much longer. We’re nearing the edge of the cliff . . . We have only a couple of years to turn this country around or we go off the cliff to oblivion!” - Ted Cruz at the Values Voters Summit, Oct. 11

“. . . I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history. Rather than seeing this as a negative . . . we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand. And so what we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this, that these days would be as the days of Noah. We are seeing that in our time.” - Michelle Bachmann, Oct. 5, 2013

“And this administration will been [sic] complicit in helping people who wants [sic] to destroy our country.” – Louie Gohmert on the floor of the U.S. House

“The biggest war being waged right now is against our religious liberties and traditional values.” - Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Values Voters Summit

“The fight for religious freedom starts here at home because we are one nation under God.” - House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Values Voters Summit

For these apocalyptic prophets, the issues aren’t even political anymore; they’re existential, with Obamacare serving as the avatar for all evil. In this construct, any compromise whatsoever leads to damnation, and therefore the righteous ends justify any means.

Much of the prophets’ message is couched in populist language. It sounds familiar to us because we’ve heard it all before. Historically whenever our country has experienced economic stress an angry, reactionary vein of populism surfaces. Sometimes called “Jacksonian,” this common thread actually reaches back to the American Revolution, then to Shay’s Rebellion, through Jackson’s “Augean Stables” to William Jennings Bryan’s rants against science in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”  It includes “Know-Nothings,” Anti-Masons and Huey Long’s “Every Man a King.” George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and Ross Perot sabotaged George Bush the Elder’s re-election. Except for Andrew Jackson, each burst of populist fervor ended badly.

Our modern prophets are fundamentally different. Their dogma springs from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, through James Dobson’s Family Research Council, to the eerily omnipresent Fellowship and its C Street house. 

Ted Cruz’s father, Raphael was seen in recently uncovered videos calling for America to be ruled by “kings” who will take money from anyone who is not an evangelical Christian and deliver it into the hands of fundamentalist preachers and their acolytes. This is a movement is called “Christian Dominionism,” and it has many adherents the evangelical right. It is also obviously and dangerously anti-democratic. These new apocalyptic prophets, and the demagogues who profit (pun intended) from them, see themselves locked in mortal combat against the Anti-Christ in a fight for America’s soul – and wealth.

Now if you are battling the forces of evil for the very survival of the nation, there can be no retreat, no compromise, and no deals. Like the Jewish zealots at Masada, it’s better to commit glorious suicide than make peace with the devil. There can be no truce with the Tea Party because its apocalyptic zealots can never take “yes” for an answer.

Since the apocalyptists cannot compromise, they must be beaten. President Obama and congressional Democrats seem to have finally grasped this fact, and are learning how to deal with them. By refusing to knuckle under to extortion in the government shutdown drama, Obama exposed their reckless radicalism and won resoundingly.

But Democrats can’t solve this problem alone. To bring any semblance of order back to the American political system and restore a functioning two-party system, the GOP has to find its own equilibrium. Thankfully, this process has already begun.

Establishment Republicans, corporate CEOs and Wall Street moguls stand appalled at the Tea Party monster they helped to create. Formerly cowed into silence, they are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall and speak out against the self-destructive zealots.

In conservative Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli was largely abandoned by the GOP establishment. Many Republican leaders even went so far as to endorse the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe. Unable to raise significant money from the Republican establishment, Cuccinelli was outspent more than ten-to-one. While Virginians rejected a conservative who believes government’s role is to regulate morality, New Jersey voters chose a conservative Republican who believes government has a constructive, practical role to play.

The contrast is striking – and instructive. Until Republicans slug it out among themselves and decide which kind of party they want to be, we will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis.

This family fight will not be easy or bloodless. The Tea Party represents roughly one-half of the Republican base. They love Cruz, Palin and the chorus of other voices crying in the wilderness. They are unified in their hatred of Obama, and they are organized down to the precinct level. More importantly, they despise the moderate voices in their own party.

Gerrymandered congressional districts guarantee many safe Tea Party seats. Powerful think tanks and advocacy groups like The Heritage Foundation, the Chamber of Commerce, American Enterprise Institute and others, which in years past underpinned the Republican establishment, are now heavily invested in the right-wing agenda and will not be easily co-opted. Deep-pocketed militants like the Koch brothers will keep the cash flowing, and right-wing talk radio-heads will whip up the aggrieved faithful.

It’s almost impossible to predict how this family fight will end, but there are at least two possible outcomes:

First, the pragmatists win. The Grand Old Party could be led out of the wilderness by a charismatic figure a la Chris Christie, who is viewed as a straight-talking, practical problem-solver. Any such leader will have to arise outside Washington. The pragmatists’ backers would include big business, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, GOP lobbyists and a plethora of wealthy patrons who can’t afford any more Tea Party shenanigans.

They have a strong case. Moderates have won some dramatic conservative victories over the years, delivering massive tax cuts, reforming welfare, de-regulating Wall Street, diluting Roe v. Wade, reviving federalism with block grants and reshaping today’s conservative Supreme Court.

Second, the hard-liners revolt. The party splinters, and out of the wreckage a new center-right “Whig Party” emerges. This is not so far-fetched as it may seem. A recent bi-partisan polling by NBC and Esquire Magazine reveals a wide plurality:  51% of Americans view themselves as centrists, not deeply invested in either party.

Not surprisingly, these moderates have both liberal and conservative views. 64% support gay marriage, 63% support abortion in the first trimester, 52% support legalizing marijuana, and they support a strong social safety net by wide margins. But 81% support offshore drilling, 90% support the death penalty and 57% are against affirmative action. So a new moderate coalition might well attract significant support from the moderate middle, establishment Republicans, Independents and centrist Democrats too.

Unfortunately for the apocalyptic prophets, only 29% of the moderate middle thinks churches or religious organization should have any role at all in politics. So like the prophets of old, they seem fated to join that long sad procession of failed zealots and martyrs who were overwhelmed by hard reality and their own rigid dogma.