The Fighting Never Ends

Han Chinese protesters seek Muslim Uighur targets
Tue Jul 7, 2009 9:52am EDT

By Chris Buckley

URUMQI, China (Reuters) - Han Chinese armed with iron bars and machetes spilled down side streets and into the stairwell of an apartment building on Tuesday, looking for Muslim Uighur targets two days after bloody ethnic clashes killed 156 and wounded more than 1,000.

Chinese riot police used tear gas to try to break up protests in the capital of the Muslim region of Xinjiang and will enforce an overnight curfew to try to quell the violence in which many people were wounded. There were no immediate reports of deaths.

Hundreds of protesters from China's predominant Han ethnic group, many clutching meat cleavers, metal pipes and wooden clubs, smashed shops owned by Uighurs, a Turkic largely Islamic people who share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia.

Some Han Chinese shouted "attack Uighurs" as both sides hurled rocks at each other. Some entered the stairwell of one apartment building and tried to smash open the door of another as residents rained down rocks from the roof. Police eventually dispersed the crowd.

Police used tear gas to try to disperse the crowd, but for a while it only emboldened the demonstrators, caught between two sets of anti-riot police 600 meters (yards) apart.

Some used water to wash the gas out of their eyes as they pressed toward police at the mainly Uighur end of the street.

"They attacked us. Now it's our turn to attack them," a man in the crowd told Reuters. He refused to give his name.

Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in China and in both places the government has sought to maintain its grip by controlling religious and cultural life while promising economic growth and prosperity.

The violence, which has showed signs of spreading in the volatile region, appeared to have little impact on China's financial markets. Stocks slipped on technical factors while the yuan was trading higher against the dollar.

Xinjiang has long been a hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by a yawning economic gap between Uighurs and Han Chinese, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han Chinese migrants who now are the majority in most key cities.

Beijing has poured cash into exploiting Xinjiang's rich oil and gas deposits and consolidating its hold on a strategically vital frontierland that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, but Uighurs, who launched a series of attacks to coincide with the buildup to last year's Beijing Olympics, say migrant Han are the main beneficiaries.

"TIME TO FIGHT BACK"

Part of the crowd briefly surged forward singing the Chinese national anthem before police drove them back with tear gas.

Anti-riot police armed with clubs and shields pushed protesters away from a Uighur neighborhood but hundreds managed to break through police lines.

Many of the Uighur protesters were women, wailing and waving the identity cards of husbands, brothers or sons they say were arbitrarily seized in a sweeping reaction to Sunday's rioting in the city of Urumqi.
"My husband was taken away yesterday by police. They didn't say why. They just took him away," a woman who identified herself as Maliya told Reuters.

Abdul Ali, a Uighur man in his 20s who had taken off his shirt, held up his clenched fist. "They've been arresting us for no reason, and it's time for us to fight back," he said.

Ali said three of his brothers and a sister were among 1,434 suspects taken into custody. Of the 156 killed, 27 were women.

Human rights groups have warned that a harsh crackdown on Uighurs in the wake of Sunday's violence could merely exacerbate the grievances that fueled ethnic tensions.

Navi Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said demonstrators had the right to protest peacefully and that those arrested should be treated in line with international law.

"I urge Uighur and Han civic leaders, and the Chinese authorities at all levels, to exercise great restraint so as not to spark further violence and loss of life," Pillay said in a statement. "This is a major tragedy."

Urumqi Communist Party boss Li Zhi defended the crackdown and confirmed the government had cut internet services to parts of the city to prevent violence spreading.

"It should be said that they were all violent elements who wielded clubs and smashed, looted, burned and even murdered at the scene," he told a news conference.

UNREST SPREADING?

Some Xinjiang newspapers carried graphic pictures of the violence, including corpses, at least one of which showed a woman whose throat had been slashed.

Despite heightened security, some unrest appeared to be spreading in the volatile region, where long-standing ethnic tensions periodically erupt into bloodshed.

Police dispersed around 200 people at the Id Kah mosque in Kashgar in southern Xinjiang on Monday evening, Xinhua said. The report did not say if police used force but said checkpoints had been set up at crossroads between Kashgar airport and downtown.

Almost half of Xinjiang's 20 million people are Uighurs, while the population of Urumqi, which lies around 3,300 km (2,000 miles) west of Beijing, is mostly Han.

Chinese officials have already blamed the unrest on separatist groups abroad which it says want to create an independent homeland for Uighurs.

The Chinese embassies in Germany and the Netherlands were attacked by exiled pro-Uighur activists who smashed windows, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday. China condemned the attacks.

Wu'er Kaixi, a Uighur and one of the best known dissidents from the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing 20 years ago, said there had been no improvement in China's human rights record.

"For a long time, Uighurs have been discriminated against and suppressed in China," he told a news conference in Taiwan. "So much so that we're almost colonized by China."

(Additional reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison, Yu Le and Benjamin Kang Lim in Beijing; Paul Eckert in Washington; Ben Blanchard in Shanghai; and Christine Lu and Ben Tai in Taipei; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

ROBERT S. McNAMARA 1916 - 2009

ROBERT S. McNAMARA 1916 - 2009
'Terribly Wrong' Handling of Vietnam Overshadowed Record of Achievement

By Thomas W. Lippman - Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In that capacity, he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.

Before taking office as secretary of defense in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. He was said to have built a record of achievement and dedication in business, government and public service that few of his generation could match.

After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues.

More than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered almost exclusively for his orchestration of U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, a failed effort by the world's greatest superpower to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded.

In his 1995 memoir of the war, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn Johnson around.

He elaborated on Vietnam and the other events that shaped his life in Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara" (2003). He described how as a young man he had analyzed bombing operations under the command of Gen. Curtis LeMay during World War II and in that job played a role in making the firebombing of dozens of Japanese cities "more efficient."

"We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo -- men, women and children," he told Morris. "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost," he added. "But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

* * *

From the day in 1961 when he burst upon the Washington scene as a political unknown selected by Kennedy to be secretary of defense, McNamara's trim figure, slicked-back hair and rimless glasses made him instantly recognizable, a Washington monument whose interests covered everything from nuclear war to the fiscal health of local governments.

At the Pentagon, he reorganized the military bureaucracy, built up the country's nuclear arsenal and instigated a massive campaign to end racial discrimination in off-base housing.

At the World Bank, he was often described as "the conscience of the West" for his relentless efforts to persuade the industrialized world to commit more capital to improving life in have-not nations. In retirement, he avoided celebrity-for-hire appearances on the lecture circuit and TV talk shows, devoting his time to improvement of education, government and health in the United States and abroad.

As secretary of defense, he was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile.

His reputation foundered in Vietnam. Many Americans held him largely responsible for the futile and humiliating military adventure there, a responsibility he accepted in a 1995 memoir of the war.

It was "McNamara's war," matching his technology, statistics, weaponry and organization charts against a peasant army from a small, impoverished country. The peasants won. In retrospect, it could be seen that McNamara's can-do, technological approach to military issues might have been perfectly suited to a conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe, but it led him into disastrous miscalculations in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam.

On his first visit to South Vietnam in 1962, before most Americans had heard of the place and before the involvement of American combat forces, McNamara said that "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war."

It was a statement often quoted by his critics in later years, because it seemed to encapsulate the fallacy of his approach. American troops did prevail in many of the big battles, and the United States did win the war by every statistical measurement on the Pentagon charts that McNamara so admired. But the numbers -- even the few that were accurate -- had little to do with the political reality on the ground.

* * *

Despite his addiction to charts, statistics and briefings in which the United States and its ally in Saigon were always winning, McNamara privately had a broader appreciation of what was happening in Vietnam. As early as 1964, after Buddhist uprisings that shook Saigon's political structure, he observed that the Viet Cong had "large indigenous support" and were held together by "bonds of loyalty." In 1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War tensions gripped Europe, he said it was "a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped word. . . . The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so."

McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could not cripple the Viet Cong because the Viet Cong hardly needed any supplies other than ammunition. But as critics pointed out and as he admitted many years later, he was unable or unwilling to translate these assessments into policy reversals that would extricate Johnson's administration from the Asian morass.

The harshest critic of all, journalist and author David Halberstam, describing McNamara's trips to Saigon in "The Best and the Brightest," wrote that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was "a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie."

In Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in "The Lost Crusade" that McNamara's brilliant staff and his "unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington." But McNamara's insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara's approach in a memorable portrait:

"His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o'clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings. . . . . While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers."

The problem was that as the war escalated, the briefings grew increasingly irrelevant to what was really happening. McNamara tolerated, even encouraged, a system in which optimistic Washington analysis dictated the content of the briefings, rather than the other way around.

For all his participation in the great events of his time, it was the Vietnam war that shaped the nation's perception of McNamara and his performance and eventually eroded his credibility. When he said, in 1966, that manpower requirements and draft calls would be reduced the next year, hardly anyone seemed to believe him. When he told Congress that the purpose of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail was to reduce North Vietnamese troop infiltration into the South, newspaper analysts pointed out that the Pentagon's own charts showed infiltration was increasing.

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "Murderer!"

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirt sleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd: "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

* * *

It is inaccurate to portray McNamara as an unreconstructed hawk to the bitter end; his early doubts became known after the war. But he failed to persuade the president and such hard-line White House insiders as national security specialist Walt W. Rostow to moderate their views. McNamara succeeded only in hastening his own ouster from the Cabinet, and because he waited 20 years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to go public with his confession of error about the war, he retained his reputation as a technocrat committed to firepower above all else.

McNamara later dismissed as "absurd" and "baloney" suggestions that he devoted himself to helping Third World countries through the World Bank to atone for his record in Vietnam. But he never attempted to defend himself against critics of his role in Vietnam or to justify the escalation there. For more than two decades after leaving the Pentagon, he avoided the topic of Vietnam in his public statements.

Publication of his 1995 memoir opened some kind of intellectual floodgate for McNamara. He developed a virtual fourth career of organizing and participating in seminars about the war -- about who did what and why, and about how doing something else might have meant, if not a different outcome, at least less death. In 1999, he published a book about this quest for the truth about the war, with a title signaling that he did not find it: "Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."

Thus in the final years of his life, the war again took over the reputation of a man whose life in many ways had embodied the American dream.

* * *

Robert Strange McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, where his father was sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. He demonstrated academic brilliance from the time he was in elementary school and achieved straight A's in high school. At the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied economics and philosophy, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa after his sophomore year.

After graduation in 1937, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where he received his MBA in 1939. He went back to the West Coast for a year to work for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse and Co., and during that time he married a former classmate, Margaret Craig. She died in 1981.

In 2004, he married Diana Masieri Byfield, whom he met through mutual friends. Besides his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Craig McNamara of Winters, Calif., and Kathleen McNamara and Margaret Pastor, both of Washington.

In 1940, McNamara returned to Harvard as an assistant professor. When the United States entered World War II, McNamara volunteered for military service but was initially rejected because of weak eyesight. He worked closely with the military, teaching courses for officers and serving as a consultant to the Army Air Forces on the establishment of a statistical system for the control of logistical operations.

He took a leave from Harvard to go to England on a military mission in 1943, and there he was finally granted a commission and accepted into the service as a captain.

In three years of active duty, he traveled in several Asian countries. He later said that it was the experience of visiting Calcutta during a famine, when there were as many dead people in the streets as live ones, that first stirred his interest in trying to improve conditions in the poorest nations.

McNamara left the service in 1946 at the rank of lieutenant colonel. Instead of returning to Harvard, he joined with nine other statistical control experts who offered their services as a group to various corporations. This extraordinary ploy resulted in all 10 being hired as a team by Ford Motor Co.

Ford was plagued by deficient management at the time, and Henry Ford II, chairman of the board, sent the 10 into every department to study operations and make recommendations. Their unending questions at first earned them the snide appellation "Quiz Kids," after a radio program of the period that featured bright youngsters, but their performance soon changed the title to "Whiz Kids."

Several of the "whiz kids" made careers at Ford; McNamara rose fastest and highest. Although his specialty was the application of statistics to management, he was also credited with a sense of public taste that led him to bring out new models that scored great success in the market. He started as manager of Ford's office of planning and financial analysis and by 1957 had become a director of the corporation. In 1960, he succeeded Henry Ford II as president -- the first president who was not a member of the Ford family.

He had been president of Ford only a month when Kennedy offered him the Defense post. When he left to join the New Frontier Cabinet, he said he was relinquishing $3 million in personal profits he would have realized from his stock options had he remained with Ford.

While he was at Ford, the McNamaras stayed out of the Grosse Pointe, Mich., social orbit dominated by the auto industry. They lived in Ann Arbor, where they cherished the academic atmosphere around the University of Michigan. Once they got to Washington, it became more difficult for McNamara to insulate his family from the demands of his job, and except for skiing vacations in Colorado it often seemed that he was on duty all the time.

"Bob lives an 'on-call' kind of life," his wife Margaret once said. When he had time to himself, McNamara tended to spend evenings with his wife and a few close friends, not on Washington's party circuit. The McNamaras kept their three children out of the news.

According to his widow, McNamara left written instructions that no funeral or memorial service be held, not even among his children. She said his decision was not because of his legacy as secretary of defense. "The reality is that he's been a very private person all his life and tried to avoid limelight and publicity," she said. "Of course he couldn't, because of the position he was in. And so he wanted to fade away quietly. His children maybe would have liked to, but he was against it."

At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management revolution. He centralized control, broke down the traditional fiefdoms of the individual services, and imposed multipurpose, multi-service weapons on the brass.

According to an account published in The Washington Post at the time, "he shook all five floors of the Pentagon in his search for the tools he needed to get a firm grip on the biggest military establishment in the world. . . . McNamara brought in computers to help with the spade work, hired systems analysts to comb through the technical points and then list the pros and cons for the generalists, reassessed the war plans, regrouped weapons into programs."

The Kennedy administration came into office vowing to close the "missile gap," the apparent Soviet lead in strategic nuclear weapons. McNamara later acknowledged that there was no "missile gap" -- he said it was based on "a total misreading of the information" -- but by that time the United States had greatly expanded its nuclear arsenal and the Soviets had responded in kind.

According to critics such as John Edwards, in his 1982 book "Superweapon," the United States actually had nuclear superiority over the Soviets in 1960, and the U.S. buildup only convinced Moscow that the United States was seeking the ability to attack the Soviet Union with impunity.
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The U.S. nuclear buildup, Edwards said, "far exceeded the forces developed by the Soviet Union in the first half of the 1960s. The secretary himself later judged that the American buildup contributed to the dramatic expansion of Soviet forces."

McNamara sponsored development of missiles that could carry up to 14 nuclear warheads each, giving the United States the ability to strike more Soviet targets without adding missiles and the capability of launching more warheads than the Soviets could fend off. This, McNamara later acknowledged, was substantially responsible for the nuclear arms race.

"I have no question," he said in a 1982 interview, "but that the Soviets thought we were trying to achieve a first-strike capability. We were not. We did not have it. We could not attain it. We didn't have any thought of attaining it. But they probably thought we did." Their response, he said, provoked a counter-response by the United States, and the cycle became self-perpetuating.

He was at the center of Washington decision-making during the 1962 confrontation with Moscow over the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro's Cuba. After a retrospective discussion of those dramatic days with his Soviet counterparts in 1989, McNamara wrote in a Newsweek essay about the crisis that "as I left President Kennedy's office to return to the Pentagon, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night" -- so great was the threat of nuclear war.

All parties to the confrontation in Cuba, McNamara wrote, were guilty of gross miscalculations and errors that nearly resulted in a catastrophe. A quarter-century later, he wrote, "It is inconceivable to me that we should be content to continue on the present path of East-West confrontation for another 40 years. The risks of disastrous military conflict, so dramatically demonstrated by our re-examination of the Cuban missile crisis, are totally unacceptable." The hardware-loving strategist of the Cold War had come full circle.

* * *

McNamara never publicly broke with Johnson over the war in Vietnam, but a gradual process of disillusionment seemed to set in as he lost control of tactics to the generals. In one well-publicized incident, he rejected a list of bombing targets that the military officers wanted to hit, including targets near Hanoi and other civilian population centers. The joint chiefs of staff went over his head to Johnson, and the president authorized the strikes.

Even when he resigned to move to the World Bank, McNamara remained publicly loyal, staying on as secretary for a transition period of several months until his successor, Clark Clifford, took over in early 1968. During that interval, the Viet Cong staged the Tet Offensive, the nationwide uprising in South Vietnam's cities that shocked American public opinion by demonstrating the hollowness of all the Pentagon's claims of military success.

Unlike other high government officials who seemed to spend their years out of power waiting around Washington for a chance to get back in, once he moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank, McNamara threw himself into his new assignment with zest and concentrated on using the bank's resources to help alleviate the poverty of the most underdeveloped nations.

The year before he took over the bank, it had a staff of 767 and made 60 loans totaling about $954 million. In the last fiscal year of his tenure, a staff of 2,400 made about 250 loans, totaling $11.7 billion. And yet he wanted more, and he importuned the industrialized nations to expand their commitments.

As president of the bank, he could have given a speech a day if he wanted, but he chose a low profile and private persuasion. "I just don't give a damn whether I'm on TV or not," he said. "I just am uninterested in personal publicity. I've had all I need. Other people in town have different objectives."

He limited his public appearances to one or two a year because, he said, he wanted to speak out only when he had "new ideas" to offer, and "I don't get those ideas so frequently as to require me to speak out on them." His technique was to choose his spots, decide what message could best advance the objectives he was pursuing at the bank and take his time deciding what to say.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America's "century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to [pay] a heavy price for it for decades to come." He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

In retirement, McNamara maintained an office on K Street and worked, by his own count, with 55 corporations, universities, foundations and other groups in which he was interested. He was a director of The Washington Post Co., Royal Dutch Shell and several other companies, and he chaired the Overseas Development Council, a nonprofit organization that sought increased American understanding of economic and social problems in developing countries.

"I'm not wealthy, but I don't have to do anything I don't want to do," he said, "and I decided not to do anything that doesn't meet two criteria: expand my understanding of the world and allow me to apply whatever understanding I have in some productive way."

Why manual labour is making a comeback

Why manual labour is making a comeback

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson. Interviews by Susannah Snider

Published: June 27 2009 01:27

Americans have been searching for a guide out of the economic underworld into which they’ve descended (bringing the rest of us along). The candidates for escort and saviour have included Barack Obama, Fed chief Ben Bernanke, personal-finance guru Suze Orman, the state of Idaho (which has largely escaped the effects of the recession), the nation of China (which the US hopes will start sharing the burden of consumption) and, of course, Bono. Motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford didn’t make the list, at least not until late last month, when his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work became a surprise hit.

“Shop class” is the American term for technical studies courses at secondary schools – classes that are fast disappearing from US curricula. The book is a protest against that sort of development – against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it. Crawford, who has a PhD in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labour. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, intellectually and financially satisfying than the information-processing jobs for which students are typically prepared.

Just three days after publication, Shop Class reached number 23 on The New York Times bestseller list. And in the following three weeks, it went through five printings. When The New York Times Magazine ran a 5,000-word excerpt, readers responded on the newspaper’s website with comments like: “Without doubt the best article that I have read in 13 years. Thank-you”; “This is a wonderful, thought-provoking piece. I read it with mixed emotions: elation, admiration, envy, empathy, inadequacy”; and “You have no idea how much this article means to me. I suspect – hope – it represents the beginning of a shift in thinking.” Americans, perhaps, have found their guide.

Skilled labour has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at the age of 14. He picked it up again at university, to make extra money. He only began working on motorcycles in 2000, rebuilding his own 1975 Honda when he was supposed to be revising his dissertation on Greek political thought. In 2001, disenchanted with the insularity of academia, he accepted an executive job at the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think-tank in Washington. It turned out that his primary role there was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to be consistent with those espoused by oil interests. The work, says Crawford, wasn’t “befitting a free man”.

Crawford found he was yearning for work with real goals and tangible results – rewards he had always encountered working with his hands. So six months after joining, he left the think-tank to set up a motorcycle repair shop. As he writes in Shop Class: “there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think-tank.” And he began to wonder why the rest of America hadn’t cottoned on to this. Why did the culture deem the labour of carpenters and electricians inferior to drafting memos and policy papers?

It’s a question that Britons, too, have been asking. This spring, the inventor James Dyson argued that the country’s way out of the recession depended on it becoming a place that “makes things again”. “The recession is teaching us a hard lesson,” he wrote. “Modern Britain cannot wholly rely on the financial sector, or service industries … Britain needs to invent, patent and create.” Dyson thinks the change needs to start with education. And so does Crawford. Whereas students were once required to learn vocational skills that actually interested them, Crawford argues, today, they take courses to make them competitive university candidates.

Despite his academic background, Crawford claims that not all students benefit from university study. It’s not a new idea; what’s remarkable is that Crawford escapes the charges of elitism it usually invites by offering his own experience as proof of the intellectual and emotional satisfaction manual work yields. He also notes that plumbers and electricians often earn more than graduates, partly because they have a level of job security that, in the age of outsourcing, white-collar workers no longer enjoy.

It’s tempting to liken Shop Class to Robert Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a road trip across the US, Pirsig’s narrator reflects on technology and reason through the relationship between man and bike. Crawford acknowledges Pirsig as an influence, but Shop Class is not Zen. Crawford’s metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his way using knowledge he has acquired from coping with physical materials. “A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician the question whether the lights are in fact on,” he writes. “Such standards have a universal validity.”

In promoting the cause of the individual craftsman, Crawford rejects the “big business” model of capitalism. But he does so when the excesses of the financial system have extended beyond the limits of what is tolerable to even staunch proponents of a free market, when many of us are ready to reconsider what kind of work is valuable. Now, Crawford writes, “it becomes possible once again to think the thought, ‘Let me make myself useful’.”

Margaret Wheeler Johnson is a freelance writer and graduate student in cultural reporting and criticism at New York University

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Danny Keane, musician, is at home with his celloThe musician
Danny Keane, age 31,
cellist and pianist

Do you have a typical day?
Every day is different. Usually I drag myself out of bed and think about doing some practice. Often, I’ll spend the day writing, and then I’ll go to a recording session, a gig or even rehearsals.

Do you like studio work?
It’s a really good way of experimenting. You can press “record” and if it sounds like rubbish, just delete it.

Doesn’t that get exhausting – play and delete, play and delete, play and delete…?
There are some people who like to do endless takes, but I think the general rule is that if you do too much, then it becomes stagnant and lifeless. It loses its initial energy and excitement.

What about improvising?
I play cello with a band called the Heliocentrics – we’re into a kind of free-groove, psychedelic jazz, which means that I’m improvising most of the time. Literally, I get on the stage and I have no idea what I’m going to play. It’s like writing an album on the spot.

What advice would you give someone who wants your job?
You gotta live it. You’ve got to live and breathe it. You have to be 150 billion per cent dedicated to it, not only with your discipline but also with your passion.

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James Beattie, gardener and collections horticulturalist at Kew GardensThe gardener
James Beattie, age 34,
collections horticulturalist,
Kew Gardens

What do you do each day?
I’ll come in and do the watering between 8am and 10am. I’ll also work on specific tasks in my area, for example, if there’s an outbreak of pests to deal with. After 10am, we work in teams, doing stuff like re-potting plants because they’re feeling a bit put down. Today, we’re doing propagation protocols, working out the best way of growing rare plants. We might also play around with soil mixes. In the nursery we’ve got 21 climactic zones, so there’s lots to experiment with.

How long have you worked as a gardener?
I used to have a job in healthcare recruitment, but it didn’t fire me with passion. I’m interested in conservation, and so gardening has more meaning to me. It does come with a pay cut, and at the end of the day, it does share many of the stresses of an office environment. Still, horticulture is pretty different from healthcare recruitment…

Not only has working with plants been proven to be therapeutic, but it’s also far more satisfying than sitting in front of a computer all day. It’s not physically exhausting but it’s very active; most of the people who work here are in pretty good shape. And, in general, you don’t get anyone shouting at you.

The plants can’t yell at you
No. They tell you when something is wrong and you just have to sort it out.

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Shane Kearney, plumber, at workThe plumber
Shane Kearney, age 25,
Go Green Plumbing

What’s it like to be a plumber?
You have good conversations. It’s not a lonely trade. You get used to other people.

What’s the most challenging part of the work?
The customers. Physically, plumbing isn’t so bad. You work in a lot of tight spaces – that can be demanding.

So it’s dealing with people that can wear you down?
You have to have patience, lots of patience. Customers don’t understand plumbing, so you try to explain that you’re not ripping them off. You have to explain to them because they don’t have a clue.

What advice would you give aspiring plumbers?
If you do a job, you have to do it properly. No short cuts. Just do the proper training. Short cuts will catch up with you in the end. There are courses out there that claim to be able to teach you plumbing in 12 weeks; it took me four years to become qualified and get my certificate.

Do people value your work?
Our loyal customers do. They have confidence in you when they send you out to a job. They know you’re not going to flood the house.

How is plumbing rewarding?
We do get a lot of good reviews. Plus there’s the fact that you’re creating something. That’s rewarding – your workmanship when you do a decent, tidy job.

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Andy Stuart, mechnic, is fixing a taxiThe mechanic
Andy Stuart, age 45,
taxi body shop manager

Why specialise in taxis?
A black cab costs £36,000 – that’s more than a middle-of-the-range Mercedes. Rather than just any Joe Blow, you’ve got to know what you’re really doing on them. It’s a specialist sort of thing.

Do you ever crave a less physical job?
I wouldn’t want to work in an office. The women aspect would be fine, but even then it would get boring because you’re seeing the same faces all the time. Working in an office, sitting in front of a computer screen, picking up the phone … that’s not my idea of a man’s job.

Why is being a mechanic a man’s job?
It’s more physical, it’s not mental. Sitting in front of a desk has to be more mentally tiring. A man doesn’t want to sit around all day staring at a computer screen.

When is it rewarding?
When you have a cab that’s been hit in the back or in the side by a bus. I mean, you’ve got to imagine when it first comes in. You look at it and say: “Oh my god, the side is pushed in, the roof’s caved in as well, the floor’s up.” But putting it all back together again gives you a good feeling.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a mechanic?
I’d advise them to do it. You get job satisfaction – and it beats working in an office. People think working in an office is easy. I mean, it probably is, but it’s lazy, isn’t it?

What’s the worst part of the job?
Painting cabs, which are black, is boring. That’s boring on the eyes, boring on the brain. It’s a pain to paint them. It’s black, black, black, black. It’s really monotonous. How I’ve ever stuck with them, it’s beyond me.

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Set designer George Jeffery at work on a stageThe set designer
George Jeffery, age 41,
Sky Sports

Describe your typical day
It really depends where I am. If I’m in the office, I’m mostly designing on the computer. If I’m out, a lot of time will be spent building the set, making sure the lighting’s right and checking the camera shot is correct. It’s more hands-on, lifting and carrying, just building in general.

Which do you prefer?
I prefer being out in the field. It’s more my bag, really. Sitting in front of the computer doesn’t really work for me. I’d rather be out there solving problems, getting stuff done. Although the computer work is quite creative, I don’t get as much out of it as I do in the field.

Is it mentally stimulating to do the outdoor work?
For me, it is. It’s more problem-solving. It’s a different type of mental challenge.

How physical is it?
It is physical but not overly so. I’m not a builder, I’m not laying bricks or building houses. There is a physicality to it, but it’s combined with a little bit of problem-solving and a little bit of getting on with people.

What are the rewards?
Getting recognition from people in the industry. Getting to go to sports events around the world. I’m at the US Open in New York right now – if you’re a golf fan, you’d really want to be here.

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Darren Smalley, hairdresser, at work in his saloonThe hairdresser
Darren Smalley, age 40,
4th Floor, Clerkenwell, London

What’s the most boring part of your job?
I don’t find it tedious at all. I’ve been hairdressing for 20 years, and I really enjoy it. Part of it is working here – it’s so open and airy. If I worked in a factory-type place, I’d be crazy by now.

What are the big challenges?
Finding out what people want. Often it’s quite difficult for them to explain what they want. You have to use every skill to figure it out – I feel like a bit of a therapist sometimes, but I enjoy that. Sometimes I feel a bit antisocial in the evenings because I talk all day.

Do people value your work?
People rely on me quite heavily for more than just hair. From the haircut, they get more than just how they look: they get confidence. It’s quite an intimate process.

What would you advise someone who wants to go into hairdressing?
We are always looking for assistants – and it’s difficult to find them. I think it’s sad that young people don’t want to go into hairdressing. The best time to start is as a school-leaver. It’s a fantastic career and I would encourage young people to take it up.

Does any aspect of your job make you angry?
Nothing about my job makes me cross. I feel quite lucky about it. I wouldn’t trade it, even if the money were amazing. No way.

About Chavez by Fidel

Reflections of Fidel

Tireless educator

(Taken from CubaDebate)

CHAVEZ is a tireless educator. He does not hesitate in describing what capitalism means. He takes apart all its lies, one by one. He is relentless.

He describes the meaning of each one of the measures brought to the people by socialism.

He knows how much a human being suffers when he, his wife, his children, his parents, his neighbors, have nothing, and when a precious few have everything.

He demonstrates the egotism of the rich who subordinate everything to the blind and inexorable laws of the market, opposed to all rationality in the deployment of the productive forces. He is constantly demonstrating that with the work underway in Venezuela.

Chávez inundated Venezuela with books. First he encouraged all citizens to learn to read and write. He opened schools for all children; secondary and technical schools for all adolescents and young people, the possibility of higher education for all of them.

The crème de la crème of oligarchic and counterrevolutionary thinking is meeting in Caracas to announce to all the country’s media that there is no press freedom in Venezuela. Chávez challenged them to take part in the “Aló Presidente” program – which is celebrating its 10th anniversary – to discuss the issue with Venezuelan intellectuals; he would take a seat in the audience, willing to listen to the debate. As I write this Reflection, they have not responded.

At 6:40 p.m. “Aló” recommenced

. Chávez’ impassioned words can be heard once again on the second day of the commemoration. It began with the presence of the ALBA ministers of culture, who are participating in an international meeting of ministers in that field.

During the activity, brilliant speeches are being made that enrich political thinking.

Chávez reiterated his challenge. Once again, he invited the luminaries of the international oligarchy to join the discussion and they have not responded; it is now past 7 o’clock at night.

I shall now concentrate on the brilliant and heartfelt speeches being made. Excuse me.

Fidel Castro Ruz

May 29, 2009

7:23 p.m.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Reflections of Fidel
Ten years of teaching and learning
(Taken from CubaDebate)

"HELLO, President" began broadcasting on May 23, 1999. On that same date this year, Chávez was in Ecuador celebrating the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha. Tomorrow, celebrations to commemorate the program’s tenth anniversary will begin.

The case of Hugo Chávez is an exceptional one in the history of politics. Others have achieved fame and celebrity through the written press, on the radio or television, but never has a revolutionary idea made such efficient use of a communications media. In the Bolivarian Revolution’s epic struggle, if it hadn’t been for this program, imperialism and the oligarchy would have destroyed the Revolution in Venezuela with its almost absolute control of the mass media, its slander and lies.

I have made a conservative calculation that in those ten years, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has dedicated 1,536 hours, the equivalent of 64 full days, to a program for informing and educating the nation.

In that unending exchange, he has been teaching and learning, educating and being educated by the people. He has read, acquired and transmitted knowledge. He has studied and recommended books, remembering the rich history of his country, the struggles and prophetic dreams of Bolivar, many of whose speeches he knew by heart.

"Hello, Mr. President" became a program for Venezuela and for those of us on this planet who want to know what is happening and what may happen. As part of my weekly agenda, I dedicate some time to "Hello."

The most encouraging thing is that the modest and combative people of Venezuela are increasingly showing their support for Chávez. A growing number of workers and youths are joining the revolutionary ranks. He is winning the battle of ideas.

Close relatives tell me that he is in good health and that they have never seen him more enthusiastic and dynamic; he runs for 40 minutes every day and has lost several pounds in weight in the past month. We are glad. He has been a great friend in the difficult days for the Revolution. We have resisted and we shall steadfastly continue to resist. Today we have more reasons than ever to do so.

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 27, 2009
8:37 p.m.

Faltering Free Trade

Faltering Free Trade - The market crisis

Bear Stearns, the merchant bank that disappeared in a puff of smoke yesterday, had been a Wall Street pillar for eighty-five years. The world of finance is in shock. A profit machine whose shares were worth one hundred seventy dollars a year ago went under in a crisis that eventually forced the Federal Reserve to step in to avoid a market crash. What is left of Bear Stearns now belongs to JP Morgan, which paid two dollars each for shares that only a week ago changed hands for seventy. With America in recession, Wall Street on the ropes, and Washington launching plans to stabilize the economy at the taxpayer’s expense, you might be tempted to view the United States’ problems as the crisis of globalized capitalism.

Some hold that it is now time for us to re-examine the role of the state and protect Italian businesses – as proposed by Giulio Tremonti in a recent book – from Asian competitors who have become rather too aggressive. The eve of major elections is probably the least appropriate moment to serenely analyze phenomena that are shifting society’s equilibria and the power relations that hold together the world’s various zones. This is as true of Italy as it is of America, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are falling back on the protectionist rhetoric that is as much a vote-grabber as it is at odds with their political track record. Election campaign or no election campaign, we have to be careful not to confuse the American crisis, which has its origins in the grotesque version of free trade applied by some of the country’s more hamfisted, hyper-ideological leaders, with a failure of the liberal economic model. The Bush presidency’s years have been a time of decline in administrative skills for central government, and of the dogmatic application of deregulation, which has swept aside the controls that are necessary for the market economy’s healthy development.

The subprime disaster – which saw loans mushroom as the regulating authorities looked on from the sidelines, despite their awareness of the perils – is the most visible manifestation of this era of irresponsibility, but certainly not the only one. Examples of the Bush era’s inappropriate or erroneous application of economic deregulation are legion. Take the privatization of the war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of contract workers were called in to manage logistics, security, and even the interrogation of prisoners while costs shot up instead of shrinking. Where does the market come into it when a soldier’s job is being done by a private contractor – generally another soldier, recently recycled as a civilian – who is paid ten times as much and didn’t even tender for the contract? Ronald Reagan, a president sorely missed by all good Republicans, may have induced an ideological sea change, albeit by stretching one or two points, but he did at least govern pragmatically.

His deregulation of the skies, which in any case began under Carter, stimulated America’s air transport into extraordinary progress. But with the awkward sham deregulation of recent years, which has seen up to one hundred thirty departures an hour authorized at terminals barely able to cope with a hundred, we are facing chaos in the country’s airports. When necessary, the pragmatic President Reagan did not hesitate to renege his philosophy by introducing curbs on imports of automobiles, steel, textiles, and sugar. Of course, those were other times. Since then, technology even more than the political decision to open up the markets has made globalization a phenomenon that we can attempt to harness, but no longer ignore. This is as true of America as it is of Italy. The difference is that for decades the Americans enjoyed the benefits of privatization before they suffered the consequences of its excesses whereas in Italy, the process never even began.

America is still a benchmark for meritocratic, innovation-capable societies. It should not inspire demands for “more government,” even should this wounded country attempt to put together a new New Deal. We should not forget that in the United States the proportion of the economy covered by public spending, whether federal or local, is more than one third less than in Italy, even though Americans spend twice as much as Europe (in terms of GDP) for defense and internal security. Italy is less exposed to globalization-driven outsourcing, which in America extends into the professions and services, and also has a much higher level of social spending. We should be worrying about other things. While we are busy speculating about “welfare-state America,” we might find that the market has taken its revenge, from Detroit to California. Thanks to the mini-dollar, an America on the brink of a financial abyss could well become the new Shangri-La of low-cost, high-quality manufacturing.

Massimo Gaggi

World’s Best Hotel is Villa d’Este, Cernobbio

World’s Best Hotel is Villa d’Este, Cernobbio
Seven out of ten guests are British or American. Past visitors include Verdi, Callas and Onassis

CERNOBBIO – With its 140-year history and enduring appeal, the world’s best hotel stands on Lake Como. US-based Forbes magazine, which draws up an annual league table of the world’s 400 best hotels, this year put Villa d’Este at Cernobbio in first place, ahead of the Peninsula in Bangkok, the Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, the Four Seasons George V in Paris and Dubai’s Burj Al Arab. It is the first time that an Italian hotel has topped the prestigious list.

Built in 1568 and converted as a hotel in 1873, Villa d’Este today has 152 luxuriously appointed rooms – the high-season rate is 900 euros a night – in two buildings set in long-established parkland in one of the loveliest corners of Lake Como. There is a unique heated swimming pool that floats on pontoons, a private sandy beach for children, indoor pool, wellness centre, eight tennis courts, restaurants and night club. CEO Jean-Marc Droulers says: “The award to Villa d’Este is an award for tradition and a milestone that honours hospitality in Italy”.

Over the centuries, Villa d’Este’s rooms have welcomed droves of dukes, kings, queens, presidents, film stars, writers, singers, musicians and fashion designers. The first customer was Giorgio Ricordi, who took a whole floor of the Queen’s Pavilion, where his guests were Giuseppe Verdi and then Giacomo Puccini. Villa d’Este has seen celebrities like Alfred Hitchcock, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Leopold of Belgium, Vittorio Emanuele, the princes of Monaco, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, John Kennedy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner, the shah of Persia, Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis and many more besides. Every year, the great and the good of world finance, politics and industry assemble here for the Workshop Ambrosetti.

In awarding the distinction to Villa d’Este, the Forbes jury of entertainers, journalists, writers, television presenters, all frequent stayers at luxury hotels, listed the delights of the five-star hideaway at Cernobbio, pointing out that it is easy to get to and has everything: “Location, views, architecture, beauty, service, decor, history, easy accessibility, a spa, sightseeing and weather”. Villa d’Este was built in 1568 by Pellegrino Tibaldi for Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, whose family owned it for two centuries. Later, it became a residence of various European aristocrats. In 1815, the property was purchased by Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of George IV, and in 1873 a group of business men converted it into a luxury hotel. Today, Villa d’Este, some 70% of whose guests are British or American, belongs with two other luxury hotels in Como and one in Florence to a company that in 2007 posted record profits of eight million euros. The parent company is owned by the Brianza-based Fontanas, a family of leading bolt manufacturers.

Luigi Corvi
25 giugno 2009

Everywhere tourists are always fleeced by some indiscriminate locals - a Japanese experience

An Excerpt

Nightmare Bill for Two Japanese Tourists – Meal at Passetto Cost 695 euros
Tip of 115.50 euros added to bill. Complaint against owner for fraud. Mayor Alemanno says restaurant should never open again.

It was going to be a romantic meal à deux in the world’s most beautiful city for the two holidaymakers from Japan. An outdoor table just off Piazza Navona, cooled by a gentle breeze, made a perfect setting for the two lovers. But then the bill arrived to shatter the spell: 695 euros for two starters, two plates of pasta, two main courses and two ice creams. An eye-watering total that included a tip of 115.50 euros.

DINNER – The incident took place in the early evening of Friday 19 June at the Passetto, a well-known mid-to-top-end restaurant just off Piazza Navona and a short distance from the Senate. When the couple arrived at the restaurant, no one offered them a menu from which to select their meal. What they did get was a friendly English-speaking waiter who persuaded them with his graceful manners: “Trust me. I’ll take care of it”. As a result, the couple did not choose for themselves and were unaware of how much each course cost. But they did eat and enjoy their meal.

THE BILL – When the bill came, it was rather less digestible: 695 euros. At first, the couple thought there might have been a mistake but their doubts vanished when their credit card came back. The receipt showed that a modest tip of 115.50 euros had been added without their consent. The pair complained but the owner was adamant that those were the normal prices for his restaurant. Refusing to give in, the holidaymakers left the restaurant and reported the incident to the police.

COMPLAINT AND CLOSURE – Later on, the couple made an official complaint at the Trevi Campo Marzio police station. Officers made an inspection at the restaurant and it emerged that the prices charged to the two Japanese tourists were not those advertised on the menu. Health checks were then carried out by the Rome A health authority’s hygiene, food and nutrition service, which ordered the immediate closure of the restaurant for serious health-related infringements after finding structural defects, dirty work areas and refrigerators that were not working.

ALEMANNO – “As far as I’m concerned, this restaurant should not reopen. Possible penalties for this sort of thing should include revoking the licence”. Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, went on to say: “I have instructed the municipal police to carry out extraordinary inspections with uniformed and plain clothes officers to root out this kind of fraud. Offenders should be resolutely punished and possible penalties should include revoking their licence. Individual cases like this, which are a tiny proportion, risk besmirching the reputation of the vast majority of Rome’s restaurateurs, who are known the world over for the excellent quality of their food and service, and for the fairness of their prices”.

English translation by Giles Watson