New Quaker Notebook

I have to laugh whenever I hear anyone refer to John McCain as a "maverick." Here's why.

When I attended college at the University of South Florida, my dormitory package included a meal ticket for 3 meals per day. I thought it was a great deal, especially since the food was pretty good and I could eat all I wanted. Every once in a while, though, they would put out food that just had me puzzling. One was an evening dish called "Savory Beef Casserole." I know we do strange things with clothes and there is even a politics of hair,¹ but we can do much stranger things, I think, with language. The problem was that the casserole in question wasn't savory, so calling it "Savory Beef Casserole" ended up doing double duty: not only did it look like a description of what you were about to eat, it also incorporated an evaluative term meant to nudge you toward eating it.² But because it wasn't savory, which our senses disclosed to us, we learned that this was a lie and that collaborative trickery was involved in the naming of the food.

I'm going to suggest that McCain's media-blessed moniker is the same thing. Never mind that George Will thinks McCain is less a maverick than a mainstream Democrat,³ or that he is really "yesterday's maverick"⁴ or perhaps simply "irreverent."⁵ Calling him a maverick ends up doing double duty: not only does it look like a description of the candidate, it also incorporates an evaluative term meant to nudge you toward voting for him.

So as not to be taken in by a lie, we really ought to heed our senses—and remember the savory beef casserole.

1. Still the best example of this is the focus of the Broadway musical Hair, but see also "The Politics of Hair," Alternet, December 8, 2003; "The Politics of Hair" on NPR's Talk of the Nation, July 13, 2004.
2. Not for nothing do Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call their important new book Nudge.
3. "George Will: McCain's 'Maverick' Is Dems 'Mainstream'," Washington Post, January 20, 2008.
4. See "George Will: McCain is 'yesterday's maverick' compared to Ron Paul," Raw Story, October 29, 2007.
5. "George Will: McCain a different kind of maverick," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 19, 2007.

Palast on Exxon's Re-Sliming of America

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Oil Spill
by Greg Palast
June 25, 2008

Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the oily company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought in by Natives of Alaska to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, whose company offered the Alaskan Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal—but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect ten cents on the dollar of their award, two decades too late.

[ READ MORE » ]

New Plans for War Crimes Trials

Law School Dean Calls Conference to Plan Bush War Crimes Prosecution
ABA Journal
June 17, 2008

The dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions, and the targets are President Bush and other administration officials.

The dean, Lawrence Velvel, says in a statement that "plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

Other possible defendants, he said, include federal judges and John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote one of the so-called torture memos.

"We must insist on appropriate punishments," he continued, "including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war criminals in the 1940s."

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Is McCain a Maverick or Savory Beef Casserole?

Palast on Exxon's Re-Sliming of America

New Plans for War Crimes Trials