At first glance, September’s airborne attacks might seem like a clear vindication for Amtrak. With all flights in the country grounded in the days just after Sept. 11, the national railroad honored airline tickets from stranded travelers and drew a stampede of passengers. “Virtually every train” sold out, says an Amtrak spokesman; the company’s phone reservation line was almost unreachable for days, and unreserved trains in the heavily traveled northeast corridor experienced standing-room-only conditions.
At the same time — and in contrast to airline industry woes — Amtrak ridership has actually grown slightly nationwide. In October, ridership on express Metroliner and high-speed Acela trains in the northeast corridor between Washington and Boston was up 43 percent over a year ago, and a third to one-half of those trains have been selling out and turning passengers away. On long-distance routes, Amtrak also reports that 40 percent of its sleeper cars have been selling out as well.
“We’re in an environment today when 20 to 25 percent fewer passengers are flying than they were a year ago, and our ridership is about 1 percent higher than the year before,” says spokesman Bill Schulz of Amtrak’s nationwide performance in October. “That is pretty phenomenal.” Amtrak carries an average of 60,000 passengers a day — the equivalent of hundreds of flights.
While there is significant new interest in trains, however, the future for the national passenger-rail system remains unclear. Sept. 11 and its aftermath have brought Amtrak more riders, but also an increase in the railway’s expenses. Amtrak has been paying for new security measures such as round-the-clock watches on bridges and tunnels, as well as greater operational costs on older cars and other equipment that has been brought out of storage to help meet new demand. Earlier this year, Amtrak also mortgaged part of New York’s Penn Station, and the railroad is in a $200 million legal dispute with the builder of its new high-speed Acela trains.
Political developments have been confusing as well. Proposed federal and state investment in high-speed rail service around the country has been under consideration for years, but the legislation still has not moved. Unlike the airlines, Amtrak — which, if it were an airline, would rank as the seventh or eighth largest in the country — has so far received no emergency aid or additional funds to deal with increased security costs.
Perhaps most surprising, however, is the Nov. 9 vote by the Amtrak Reform Council — a bipartisan commission with a congressional mandate to oversee efforts by Amtrak to break even. The ARC issued a finding that Amtrak will not meet a fall 2002 deadline for running in the black. The decision on what to do next passes back to Congress, but Amtrak is now required to draw up plans for its own liquidation, even while carrying more passengers and shouldering new responsibilities in the wake of Sept. 11.
All this turmoil raises a natural question. Stephen B. Goddard, a transportation historian and the author of “Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century,” says that September’s terrorist attacks have uncovered America’s “soft underbelly of vulnerability in the lack of an integrated transportation system.” But at a time when air tragedies have highlighted the role that passenger rail can play, why is the U.S. rail network still so hamstrung? How could it possibly be under renewed political attack? The problem is especially striking compared to the situation in many other countries, where trains regularly run faster — well over 100 mph in some cases — and far more conveniently.
The answer is a complicated mix of factors, not least of which is a long-running deliberate government effort to promote modes of transportation like highway and air travel at the expense of rail. But there has also been a basic failure on the part of some politicians to understand a basic point about rail travel: It doesn’t have to make money, or even break even, to be an important cog in a healthy economy.
Amtrak critics say the national agency is, quite simply, a business failure. The surprise is that Amtrak agrees. “For 30 years, Amtrak has labored under the weight of a business model that does not work,” said Amtrak president George Warrington on Nov. 1, in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee.
The reason Amtrak has never broken even, representatives and supporters say, is a contradictory mission from Congress: Amtrak is not only supposed to operate as a public service that stretches over transcontinental distances. It’s also supposed to make money, or at least break even — a goal that became a legal requirement with a 2002 deadline, thanks to legislation passed four years ago.
Since then, Amtrak has trimmed costs and introduced new services that have generally been well received, but the agency maintains it’s difficult at best to provide national service and become profitable without capital investment for upgrading trains and the infrastructure they require. The result has been short-term compromises at the expense of long-term solutions. At the expense of reinvestment in better technology and infrastructure, Amtrak cross-subsidizes unprofitable routes with revenue from more popular ones. Congress, meanwhile, has paid out hundreds of millions a year just to keep the trains rolling, instead of providing funds for improvements that might eliminate or at least reduce the need for subsidies.
Some Amtrak critics say the way to resolve the contradiction is to simply eliminate the railroad, or at least to drop unprofitable routes. In 1985, President Reagan argued that it would cost less to hand out free airline tickets than for the government to continue subsidizing some rail routes. As a result of this and other criticism, Amtrak has gradually reduced service, with cuts in recent years such as the elimination of a route between Denver and Seattle.
Budget shortfalls and criticism continue, however, and today, one of Amtrak’s leading critics is Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Earlier this year, McCain said Amtrak should not be a “money pit” and called the proposed High Speed Rail Investment Act “another desperate attempt by Amtrak to receive federal money without any accountability.” The bill would let Amtrak sell $12 billion in bonds to help finance high-speed rail projects around the country.
Amtrak supporters argue that criticism of transportation subsidies is fine — it just needs to be spread around.
“There’s nothing wrong with this argument if you apply it evenly, but if we apply that principle only to rail and not to aviation and highways, you have a tremendous skewing of investment,” says Scott Leonard, assistant director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP). Leonard and others point to a longstanding “investment gap”: in fiscal year 2001 federal highway investment totaled $33.5 billion, while aviation spending was $12.6 billion. Intercity rail got only half a billion. Amtrak also lacks a predictable mechanism for capital investment, such as the taxes on gasoline and airline tickets that provide a ready source of funds for road and airport infrastructure. The railroad goes begging every year.
Amtrak’s history over the last three decades, however, is just the latest chapter in a story that stretches back more than a century. Deliberate decisions have sacrificed U.S. passenger rail for the sake of promoting highway and air travel. “We are being affected by policy decisions that were made as long as a hundred years ago,” says Leonard. Goddard says that the best one-word way to explain the current U.S. rail situation is “underinvestment.” Instead, most of the investment has gone to highways and air travel. “As for road, rail and air, rail is the only one of the three to have paid for its own infrastructure, which immediately puts it behind the eight ball,” Goddard says. Much existing rail infrastructure was built with private funds, while federal and state governments have arranged much of the funding for projects like highways and airports. Making matters worse, Amtrak runs most of its routes over tracks that are owned by private freight railways, making it subject to freight delays that it has little or no control over.
“In public policy terms, Americans think of road spending as essential infrastructure, rail spending as an expense. This results from 75 years of conditioning,” says Goddard. In his book “Getting There,” Goddard notes the widespread and genuine resentment of monopolistic railroads in the 19th and early 20th century, but he describes other excesses as well, such as U.S officials who brazenly promoted highway development. Goddard writes that Tom MacDonald, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads for 30 years until 1953, “could not have been a more effective spokesman for the [motor] industry had he been on a full-time retainer to it.” He largely credits MacDonald for reshaping the U.S. transportation landscape in favor of highways at the expense of rail. Then in the ’50s, Goddard says, the U.S. interstate system was built with Congress paying 90 percent of highway costs.
Similarly, the airline industry has received significant federal aid as well. Most recently, this took the form of a $15 billion bailout package for the airlines in the wake of Sept. 11. And looking further back over time, James Coston — a member of the Amtrak Reform Council who voted against the decision that requires liquidation plans — says direct and indirect airline support, such as airport construction and pilot training in the military, has made the airlines “the beneficiaries of one of the largest taxpayer subsidies in the history of American socialism.”
Efforts like these “created the paradigm” that American transportation is still in today, says Goddard. Instead, he says, we need to think “intermodally.” “Let’s become Europeans,” says Goddard. “They began thinking intermodally more than a century ago. A truly intermodal system is one that operates as a team and in which the capacity of each mode can absorb the traffic of the others when one of them is at risk.”
Some of Amtrak’s biggest critics are Republicans such as John McCain and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, but the railroad also has bipartisan support. In addition to a wide variety of Democrats, Amtrak supporters include Gramm’s Republican Texas colleague Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a sponsor of the High Speed Rail Investment Act (HSRIA), and New York Republican Rep. Jack Quinn, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads.
Quinn says the Amtrak Reform Council’s liquidation decision “could not have come at a worse time.”
The debate is not so much over whether passenger rail has a role. Instead it’s a disagreement between those who believe Amtrak cannot do what needs to be done, and those who think it can — if longstanding problems are addressed.
On the anti-Amtrak side are critics like Paul Weyrich, vice chairman of the Amtrak Reform Council’s board of directors. Weyrich, a conservative activist and president of the Free Congress Foundation who also served on the Amtrak board for six years and played a role in getting President Nixon to sign the bill that created Amtrak in the first place, says he has been an Amtrak booster for most of the railroad’s existence. But he doesn’t support the railroad anymore.
“I am for a national passenger-rail system, and I am for the government investing a lot of capital in it, but we ought to be able to put a system together that at least breaks even,” Weyrich says. “Amtrak is broken. It cannot be fixed. Congress can continue to pour endless sums of money into it, but it’s never going to prove itself because the culture is such that it can’t.
“Amtrak was a system that was inherited from the freight railroads. A lot of the attitudes and practices that were part of the old way of operating railroads came with Amtrak and it has been almost impossible to get rid of it. There are routes where you have pretty good service, but there are routes where the attitude is surly, the food is lousy, the trains run hours and hours late.”
In its defense, Amtrak says it has changed significantly in the last several years by trimming costs, rolling out service improvements like Acela high-speed rail, partnering with other businesses like airlines and car-rental companies, starting a guest-rewards program similar to frequent-flyer programs, and offering a satisfaction guarantee: The agency offers passengers an equivalent credit toward another trip if they aren’t happy with Amtrak service.
Amtrak also has consistent proponents, such as Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., and others who have come to its defense in the wake of the Amtrak Reform Council’s finding. “Now is not the right time to do this,” says Quinn. “I understand that Amtrak might have difficulty making the self-sufficiency deadline, but now is not the right time to begin the liquidation process.”
Amtrak also has significant support at the state and city level, in the form of endorsements for the High Speed Rail Investment Act from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Governors’ Association. State transportation officials in particular are also eager for federal help in building high-speed rail corridors, some of which are already in development. Construction is already underway, for example, on a high-speed rail link between Chicago and St. Louis, and Mike Monseur, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation, says the state is “absolutely” hoping to get additional federal money for other rail projects.
Under the proposed Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, Chicago would be the hub of a nine-state network of trains that could run more than 100 mph.
In California, state Department of Transportation director Jeff Morales says, “From a lot of perspectives — air quality, quality of life, the management of dollars — rail makes a lot of sense as an element of a balanced transportation system.” Morales says new rail services that have already been introduced in California in partnership with Amtrak are “struggling to keep up with demand. We’ve essentially created a new market, and now it’s growing faster than anticipated.”
Morales says that California has also had a “very good experience” working with Amtrak, and adds, “We absolutely would like to see some sort of major rail package passed. California stands to benefit significantly from any national rail program.”
In addition to the High Speed Rail Investment Act, which currently has 57 cosponsors in the Senate (enough to pass, but not enough to break a filibuster) and about 180 in the House, other measures have recently been proposed and introduced in Congress to help the country’s rail service begin to catch up.
For its part, Amtrak asked earlier this year for capital funding of $1.5 billion a year for 20 years. The agency says the money could be used for a wide range of service improvements, like reducing travel time between Seattle and Portland by an hour, from 3.5 hours to 2.5 hours, or two hours between Chicago and Detroit, from five hours and 46 minutes to three hours and 40 minutes.
On Oct. 11, Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., introduced the Railroad Advancement and Infrastructure Law of the 21st Century. Also known as Rail-21, the bill would remove Amtrak’s self-sufficiency deadline next year, authorize $3.2 billion for new security and capacity needs, and provide funds for capital investment, including $35 billion in direct loans for passenger rail, freight rail and security enhancements. Hollings says Sept. 11 “not only proved that Amtrak works, but that Amtrak is a critical part of our transportation infrastructure during a national emergency.”
Going even further, in a way, is a bill introduced on Sept. 25 by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, the Rail Infrastructure Development and Expansion Act. The bill would provide a total of $71 billion in bonds and loans for freight and passenger rail projects.
“The tragedies of Sept. 11, and the resulting short-term cessation of air travel, demonstrated the need for transportation alternatives for passengers. It is time for the United States to make high-speed passenger rail a transportation priority,” said Young in a statement.
Rail observers like Scott Leonard at the National Association of Railroad Passengers express concern about loan programs. “It’s never been a realistic expectation that high-speed-rail programs would be so successful they’d be able to cover the cost of their operations and capital,” Leonard says, and Goddard criticizes the expectation of turning a profit.
“No national railway of a developed country has ever run a profit. They’re not supposed to. The correlative economic and social benefits they throw off — bringing commuters to taxpaying corporations daily, for one thing — more than offset any net loss they suffer.” Operating expenses can be reduced, but rail proponents argue that capital investment needs to be provided for rail, just as it is for other forms of transportation, and just as it is for other public services.
“Unlike every other passenger rail system in the world,” said Biden when introducing the 2001 version of HSRIA earlier this year, “Amtrak has lacked a secure source of public support for its capital needs … The bill that Senator Hutchison and I introduce today is designed to provide Amtrak with the capital funds to establish a truly national high-speed passenger rail system. The idea is simple, and it is modeled on a program we already have in place to support another important public priority, public school construction.”
Anti-Amtrak conservatives do not like the idea of letting the rail agency off the self-sufficiency hook, but there may be a growing recognition in the wake of Sept. 11 that the United States has to invest more money if it wants better rail service. Amtrak cites figures showing U.S. per capita rail spending at Third World levels; figures from the European Conference of Ministers of Transport and U.S. Congressional Budget Office highlight the stark contrast in priorities: Of Germany’s total transportation capital spending, 21.7 percent goes to rail; France spends 20.7 percent; the United States spends 0.4 percent.
“You get what you pay for,” says Leonard at NARP. “Those countries have paid for an excellent rail system, and we haven’t.”
For every question you can answer on the Net (how do motorcycles work?), there’s always a stumper (how can I synchronize the carburetors in my 1968 twin-engine BMW?). The Web may be an awesome information resource, but most of its data is static and often doesn’t address the specific questions you want answered. However, that’s quickly changing, as information markets — online bazaars in which people can buy or sell expertise in real time — are rolling out.
“Think of eBay, but where the underlying products being traded are pieces of information,” suggests Michael J. Stern, who is president of Adeste.com, one of several information markets preparing imminent debuts. Stern’s idea is to supplement the Web’s vast array of freely available information with an offering of expertise that people are willing to pay for. The information markets will connect experts ranging from tax accountants to dog trainers with people who are willing to pay for their help, and the info market providers will take a cut of the transaction fee.
“We probably won’t ever bother with questions like ‘Where’s the best place to get a steak in Seattle?’” Stern says. “But on the other hand, we do very well with questions like ‘Can I deduct losses from the sale of a publicly traded partnership from capital gains income on my 1040?’ — where the answer depends on the facts and circumstances of the querier’s individual tax return. Plugging these same questions into search engines yields nothing useful.”
“What we’re doing is creating a marketplace for expert advice and services,” says Mark Benning, president of Advoco.com, another information market that’s planning a fourth-quarter launch. The info markets work by encouraging experts to post information about themselves and their areas of specialty, while potential customers post questions they hope to answer. Either party can contact the other and arrange for the expertise to be conveyed for a set price. Some information markets, like Advoco, make the transaction very simple — by charging a customer’s credit card and cutting a check to the expert, minus the info market provider’s commission.
“This is one of the first true examples of a market that wasn’t possible before the Internet,” says Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple and now CEO of Garage.com, a company that brings entrepreneurs and investors together. “It’s not ‘bricks to bits.’ It’s ‘impossible to possible.’”
In 1984, an economist and futurist named Phil Salin created the American Information Exchange (AMIX), a network for the exchange of research, information, contracts and computer code. It was intended to be the world’s first online market for information and expertise, and to enable companies to rely on external sources of information and expertise instead of hiring more employees. AMIX charged participants a monthly fee and an hourly connection rate for its online service, and it took a cut of around 30 percent from each transaction conducted over the system.
The problem was that AMIX pre-dated a widespread network on which it could run. “Much of its energies were soaked up by trying to create an online service from scratch,” says Doc Searls, who did marketing work for AMIX and who is now senior editor of Linux Journal and one of the drafters of the Cluetrain Manifesto. AMIX disappeared shortly after Phil Salin died in 1991.
“The stumbling blocks in AMIX’s days were mountains and now those mountains are gone,” says Searls, who is now on the board of Adeste.com. “Think about it: Phil had to create his own Internet. In hindsight, it couldn’t be done … The time really is now. It wasn’t then, much as we wanted it to be.”
Now that the Internet provides the network infrastructure that AMIX struggled to create, a small new group of companies, including Adeste.com, Advoco.com and Guru.com, is preparing to bring information markets to life. Each company varies in its approach — Adeste.com is concentrating first on areas like academia (students who need tutoring or research help) and technical support for computer products; Advoco is building its site around professional services, parenting and pets; and Guru.com is devoted mainly to the needs of the professional self-employed who work as contractors and freelancers. “We’re going to empower them to run their businesses better,” says Jon Slavet, CEO of Guru.com.
Advoco.com informally launched its site last week but plans to beef it up with more categories by year’s end, while Adeste’s technology will be ready sometime in August and the service will debut soon thereafter. Guru.com is planning to launch in a similar time frame.
Jon Slavet and his brother James, who serves as Guru.com’s president and chief business strategist, got the idea for Guru.com when looking for independent contractors to hire at previous jobs. Finding the right people, said Jon Slavet, “was an incredibly frustrating ad hoc process.”
“There was really no place to go to find the kinds of people we were looking for,” said James Slavet. To find a freelance designer, programmer or other professional, most people rely on word of mouth, mailing lists or occasionally, high-priced headhunters who specialize in freelance projects. Guru.com aims to change that, although James Slavet emphasized that the site is not intended to work like a classifieds site or a temp service. Instead, he says it is meant to foster a kind of online professional culture. The site already offers tips on billing clients, insurance, home office supplies and more and the Slavets says the company will encourage a “guru-to-guru” approach, in which independent professionals — everyone from “programmers to massage therapists” — will be able to find and rely on one another. “We affectionately call it the guru nation,” Slavet said. “Gurus have amazing expertise in specific domains, and allowing gurus to tap into the expertise of other gurus will be very powerful.”
Adeste.com’s approach is to partner with a number of other sites and integrate its information market across the Web. Stern imagines a scenario in which an amateur gardener goes to a Web site specializing in home improvements and posts a question, say about building a flower bed in Northern California’s hard clay soil; the Adeste.com service then posts the question on a site geared specifically toward contractors and a knowledgeable contractor contacts the gardener. Neither party needs to know that Adeste brought them together.
“From a user’s point of view, we have invented the Bat Computer,” says Adeste’s Stern. “You type in a question in a wide range of subject areas, and it walks you through the solution in real time. It responds to your requests for clarification, and it can answer questions which have never been asked before.”
Of course, the success of info markets is predicated on people paying for information — and so far, the Web has not been successful at charging for anything other than physical goods, like books and CDs, that can be delivered to your door.
Proponents of info markets, however, say that the kind of information they offer will make all the difference. People already pay for information and expertise from doctors, lawyers, consultants and others, and the Net simply makes it possible to do this in new ways. In fact, the founders of some incipient information markets say they were motivated by their inability to get certain kinds of information and expertise in any other way.
“The natural mode of behavior is to try to get the free answer first,” Stern says, “but the truth is that the people who are best able to provide good answers are worth money.” How much money depends on what’s being asked, and of whom, of course. Prices will be set by market forces, and may span a range from a few dollars for relatively simple homework help, to hundreds for more high-level commercial expertise.
“Anybody in the world can provide answers,” says Stern, “but we rely on market forces to attract talent in difficult subject areas and to drive out unqualified participants. If lots of people have questions about the Belousov-Zhabotinskii [chemical] reaction and there’s only one person capable of answering them, the cost of those answers will rise, attracting other respondents to the market.”
Once an info market transaction occurs, the customer will be asked to rank the expert. Just as shoppers on eBay can quickly determine a trader’s reputation based on the feedback from others who have bought goods from them, info market customers will be able to see how valuable other customers have found an expert to be.
“If you go to the yellow pages today, you can see who has the biggest ad, but you really don’t get the power of the community rating those advisors,” says Advoco.com’s Benning. Say you want to change jobs and are looking for a resume writer. You would see a list of advisors, view their profiles and make a decision. If one particular resume writer has been used by a hundred people and has a high rating, says Benning, you can expect they’ll be pretty good. “Each Advoco user will have the opportunity to rate a particular provider on a five-star scale after a transaction is complete, as a way of helping to establish, confirm or dispute that provider’s reputation.”
As Searls puts it, the markets will run by individual supply and individual demand. “I want to know X and I would be glad to buy it from this guy for $50, or that guy for $100, or the other guy for $500, and I can know the value of each of them because their other customers tell me … We don’t need Consumer Reports to tell us who is good and who’s full of crap,” he adds. “We’ve got each other. Those of us with the best goods will be rewarded accordingly. Markets will make reputations and reputations will make markets. Scaling could hardly be more granular, or more tightly coupled to actual worth.”
Ratings systems will also encourage people to complete their transactions at the info markets sites, says Adeste’s Stern. While an expert and a customer could find each other through an info market and carry out their transaction privately to avoid paying the info market’s commission, the expert would miss a chance to be rated. It’s in the expert’s interest to build up business on the site, so that new customers can see that the expert has successfully carried out a number of transactions and has been rated positively.
Whose fault is it if you pay for information and it turns out to be bad advice? Adeste.com, Advoco.com and Guru.com each said they are in the process of putting together procedures for legal questions and the possibility of refunds, but they argue it’s not much of an issue. “Our role is essentially that of the phone company,” says Stern. “If you get bad advise over the phone line, the telephone company isn’t responsible.”
And info markets could broaden the horizons of a lot of experts. “If I’m a nutritionist in Topeka, Kan., today my marketplace is a very limited area,” says Benning. “Information markets make it possible for experts to sell their services anywhere.”
How big is the market? At first, the idea of selling information might conjure up images of “Make money now!” spam or the “Peanuts” character Lucy Van Pelt hawking advice for 5 cents from a sidewalk stand, but proponents argue that the demand is potentially huge, and that the Net is precisely the medium to draw it out.
“I think the most massive market is ultimately the most personal one,” says Searls. “The market for information. The curiosity market. The market for finding stuff out. I think it’s ultimately the biggest market of all, because all of us are in it.”
What may be required to make information markets take off are a few yet-to-be determined kinds of information exchange that lend themselves particularly well to the medium. As an example, Stern points to the role that the buying and selling of Beanie Babies has played in the growth of online auctions. “We don’t know what the equivalent phenomenon will be for us, but there are areas which we expect will drive a lot of interest. You’ll have cornerstone markets like academics and tech support which we expect will be important, and other things will emerge and grow from there.”
Kawasaki anticipates that the cumulative impact of information markets will be immense, and he draws comparisons to the scene in “Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace” in which a giant sea monster that is about to chomp the heroes’ ship is itself eaten by an even bigger monster. “The online market for physical goods is the monster biting the ship,” he says. “The online market for information is the monster biting the first monster.”
Gay pride month is finally over, after a big weekend of partying and parades in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities around the world. Millions of people commemorated the Stonewall rebellion, the shot-heard-’round-the-world brawl in 1969 that catalyzed a movement. We got together and restated positions on everything from hate-crimes to gay marriage, and if dykes on bikes, feather boas and shirtless gym boys are any measure, a good time was had by all.
In the midst of this good-natured celebration of Stonewall, however, a reappraisal of the pride strategy is beginning to emerge. After three decades, the politics of pride is beginning to look a little stale and out of step with the times, and it is becoming clear to both gay people and our straight allies that we need to take a new step forward. With June’s pride celebrations over, that step is to ask what the politics of pride has left undone, and why.
Gay pride has been an enormous success. It’s increasingly safe to come out, we’ve won passage of a few gay-rights laws and it’s becoming politically expedient (at least for Democrats) to support us. But there have been setbacks. Anti-gay legislation like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is the law of the land. Brutal hate crimes like the murder of Matthew Shepard are reminders of what can still happen to any gay person in the country — or even straight people suspected of being gay — if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need to understand why we seem to take a step back for almost every step we take forward.
The usual answer is simply that we’re up against a deep, powerful prejudice. There’s more to it than that: The politics of gay pride is in a rut. It seems unable to appreciate its own success or acknowledge that circumstances have changed. Instead, pride is becoming an end in itself.
Once pride was essential to curing the shame of the closet. Today it is the medication we’re addicted to. Once pride captured the spirit of a revolution. Today it is too often the gay equivalent of pro forma patriotism. Once pride made a compelling moral argument. Today it is becoming the Ten Commandments on every wall. And when pride in the simple courage that it takes to come out of the closet in a hostile world turns into complacence and ideological rigidity, it threatens everything that we’ve won so far.
Recognizing this isn’t easy.
A few years ago, Bruce Bawer, the author of “A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society,” was almost burned at the stake as an allegedly sex-negative, assimilationist conservative by gay activists without much more tolerance for questions than their counterparts on the right. Among other blasphemies, Bawer suggested that stereotypes reinforced by gay publications and events might have the same negative effects as stereotypes promoted by anti-gay conservatives.
Even gay activists as outspoken as Larry Kramer have been charged with neoconservatism for asking forthright questions about the overt sexualization of gay culture. The resulting fury has said less about Bawer and Kramer’s arguments than it did about the touchiness of their attackers.
I’ve been through a limited version of this treatment myself. I recently wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that asked whether gay pride might be easily — and needlessly — misunderstood. In a circulated response, Robin Tyler, executive producer of the Millennium March on Washington for Equality, objected. She insisted that concern about how gay pride is interpreted is of no concern because everybody on the other side is an irredeemable bigot. She bragged, “The Radical Right is in decline … We have the numbers and the commitment not to have to choose ‘which fight,’ but to continue to mobilize on all fronts.” And equating pride with self-esteem, she asked, “How can you have too much self-esteem?”
Well, how about when it leads to conceit, overconfidence and solipsism?
Tyler’s statements are an extreme example, but this is where overuse of the pride slogan is headed. And although it’s frightening to think that anybody in a position of leadership in gay politics could actually believe that we are gloriously advancing on all fronts against an enemy whose tactics we can ignore, we can take some comfort in the fact that questions about the pride strategy are becoming more widespread, and harder to dismiss.
Today the questions are less about what other people will think of us — does whipping the slave boys down Main Street send the right message? — than what we think of ourselves. Do constant exhortations to gay pride encourage us to become self-absorbed?
As Dan Savage has recently argued, pride wasn’t counted as one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing. “The fwap of rainbow windsocks is making us dull and slow,” he writes. “Thirty years after the antidote arrived, gays and lesbians stand in renewed danger of being poisoned. The poison threatening us now isn’t shame, however, it’s pride … we’ll never be truly whole until gay people are neither crippled by shame nor addicted to pride.”
Raising questions about whether pride is still effective is emphatically not to say that gay people need to tone down, fit in and ask bigots for acceptance. Most gay people, after years of pressure not to “flaunt it,” are rightly leery of any suggestion that we should “assimilate.” But we can’t rule out consideration of a more sophisticated approach that allows us to become even more forceful and assertive about the need for equality.
In the reevaluation that this requires, we need to admit that pride isn’t always helpful anymore. In some cases, in fact, it simply gets in the way. Like fabulous versions of Soviet parades to commemorate the October revolution, pride celebrations prop up the memory of a victory that, while no less important, is less and less relevant.
I started to understand the problem with pride through a conversation in an airport. The last flight of the night to my destination, Atlanta, had been canceled, and while I was in line for a hotel voucher, a straight guy named Will struck up a conversation with me.
For every gay person, daily life means coming out to strangers if you’re not going to lie or go to absurd lengths to avoid the subject. So when my conversation with Will turned to why I was going to Atlanta — my boyfriend lived there at the time — I told him.
For a second, Will looked like he was afraid I would kiss him right there on the moving sidewalk. He thought he had been talking to just another ordinary guy in his mid-20s, not somebody gay. And to make matters worse for poor Will, he had even asked me to dinner at the airport restaurant.
To his credit, Will recovered quickly, and he asked if I’d mind answering some questions about what it’s like to be gay. I didn’t mind, but I was caught off guard by what he asked over the next hour. He was polite, curious and candid, but his questions were surprisingly negative. One of them was, “Why would anybody be proud to be gay?”
I don’t know if Will — a recent college graduate, a friendly enough guy and kind of a dude — had ever seen a pride parade, but he had certainly heard all the politically correct explanations about gay pride and they made no impression on him. Or rather, they made the wrong impression. He continued to think that for some reason, gay pride meant that gay people are strangely proud of something alien and bizarre, like an illness or a bad habit.
Will was not a fire-breathing homophobic lunatic, he was just a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. Lots of talk about pride — the cornerstone of gay politics — hadn’t changed what he thought he already knew. But a more direct approach, highlighting the discrimination that gay people still face, did.
The fact is that the concept of pride remains useful, but it’s crucial to ask who it’s useful for. It’s useful to us to help counteract the shame of the closet, and it’s a nice pat on the back for being honest about who we are. But people like Will — and there are millions of them, and they can vote — don’t get it. Talk to anti-gay conservatives (as I make a point of doing, if for no other reason than a kind of clinical curiosity), and over and over again what you’ll find is that they misinterpret the idea of gay pride.
At first it’s easy to think, “Well, fuck them if they’re not comfortable with out-and-proud sexuality.” This is dangerous and unnecessary. It’s true that we’ll never reach the rabid anti-gay kooks, but writing off average people like Will assures that millions who might be persuaded to help us — or who at least might be vaccinated against inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric — will remain obstacles to overcome. These are basically well-intentioned people who are doing what’s “right” based on the wrong premise. Shake up that premise and it gives them pause. It even, occasionally, changes their minds.
Pride can’t do this because it doesn’t take into account their false assumptions about us. The problem with pride is not that it’s too in-your-face, but that it’s not in-your-face enough. It doesn’t state clearly what the gay-rights movement is really all about: equal legal and social treatment for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. The “gay pride” slogan doesn’t reach people who don’t already know the facts of sexual orientation. In fact, the rallying cry of pride may even have helped provoke the backlash against us.
The language of gay pride reinforces the idea that gay people are fundamentally different — an impression to avoid if we can, given the way anti-gay conservatives portray our human rights as “special rights.” In everyday speech, people use the word “pride” to talk about things they believe are special, extraordinary and exclusive. Talking too much about pride, therefore, can be counterproductive. Gay people base our claim to civil rights on the fact that our sexual orientation and our relationships are no different — no more worthy of shame or pride — than anyone else’s.
Endless declarations about pride also reinforce negative stereotypes. Talking too much about pride can give the impression that we have something to prove, and that we still can’t quite put the shame of the closet behind us. As Savage says, “Surrounding oneself with constant reminders to feel prideful is to constantly be reminded of shame … American gays and lesbians act like cancer patients who, having been cured, remind themselves that they aren’t sick anymore by dropping by the hospital every once in a while for a little chemotherapy.”
The good news is that more and more of us are putting the shame of the closet behind us — but this means that pride-based celebrations have less and less to offer. It’s not that we’re “unproud” of what’s been accomplished, and we’re grateful to those who blazed the trail. We owe them, but we also recognize that their efforts have paid off. We don’t question our basic self-worth anymore.
Yet pride-based activism, with its constant doses of self-esteem, implies that the problem is never getting any better, and that we’re all going to need pride pep talks and a rainbow-colored I.V. drip for the rest of our lives. That’s not just depressing, it’s not true. We’re OK. Let’s talk about something else.
What might a movement more focused on equality than pride look like? Well, nobody at the time knew exactly what Stonewall would lead to either, but a shift to a strategy that emphasizes equality instead of pride could be just as significant.
Gay equality — which wouldn’t be a bad replacement for the “gay pride” slogan — would be more open to people who are “not proud,” whether they are simply gay people who are over the need for self-esteem therapy, or straight people who support gay rights but see little point in participating in typical pride celebrations today.
As it is, lots of us continue to show up every year at pride celebrations out of habit. We usually have a good time, but we have only a vague idea of why we’re there anymore. Showing support and being counted is all well and good, but take away the party — we might even go so far as to call gay pride month “gay party month” — and there wouldn’t be much left.
There’s no reason why we can’t have a party — and do we know how to throw one — but it’s a PR disaster if a party is the main way in which we as a group bring ourselves to the attention of society every year. The focus on gay pride ends where a focus on equality would begin. Pride has become an event in June, and a mantra the rest of the year. Equality is a cause.
A focus on gay equality could also change our thinking.
It would move us beyond the oddly passive “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” aspect of current pride celebrations. The fact is that we want people to do a lot more than get used to us. We want them to help us get the equality we deserve. Current pride celebrations are, at best, a roundabout way of motivating anybody to do that.
Finally, a new slogan like “gay equality” would help to make absolutely clear what we’re after: legal and social equality.
When our message to the rest of society is “gay pride,” people who aren’t already on our side can comfortably ignore it and continue to think, “Who cares if the queers are proud?” If the focus instead were on “gay equality,” these same people would be forced to argue that we either already have equality or don’t need it. Those are arguments they cannot win, and often don’t even feel comfortable making.
Pride helped get us where we are today. We’re in a better position than ever to put tough questions to the people who aren’t on our side yet, and to set the terms of this debate. But whether we are proud has become politically irrelevant, and this is no cause for alarm. The fact that we’re outgrowing the need for pride is the biggest testament to its success.
Forget No. 2 pencils and Scantron ovals: Some educators are beginning to use computers to grade essays. Already a system called E-rater evaluates every essay
written as part of the Graduate Management Admission Test (
href="http://www.gmat.org/gmat_frames.html">GMAT) — or about 800,000
compositions crafted by 400,000 business school applicants this year.
And some professors, bogged down by the volume of student papers they must
read, eagerly anticipate computerized readers that can help them slog
through the volume of words that comes across their desks each semester.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the load associated with
essay grading, and lecturers are gradually shifting the focus of their
assessment to multiple-choice questions,” says Chris Janeke, a senior psychology lecturer at
the University of South Africa, a 120,000-student university experimenting
with a computerized grading system called the
Intelligent Essay Assessor.
Software “offers the possibility of automatizing at least some aspects of essay grading and may present a technological solution to our logistic problems.”
But hold on: If a student writes an essay that is graded by a computer, has it really been “read” at all? Well, sort of. A machine obviously can’t
comprehend a student’s argument — but it can determine whether a
composition addresses a specific question, and it can judge an essay’s structure. Electronic grading systems analyze hundreds of sample answers to a specific question (something
like “Should a government be able to censor the media?”), then compare the content and semantic structure of the students’ answers to the sample essays.
If this sounds like a lifeless way to examine a student’s thoughtful writing, it is. But it’s actually little different from the decades-old system that depends on people to grade the essay portion of standardized tests. Human graders, too, are required to read sample essays and judge student responses based on qualities prescribed by the testing service.
“The procedures are actually identical,” says Fred McHale, vice president for assessment and research at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which
developed E-rater. “Once the scoring rubrics are created by expert readers
from the sample responses, those samples are used to train human readers –
or programmed into E-rater.” (GMAT essays have been submitted electronically since 1997, so neither people nor software has to read
handwriting.)
Every electronically graded essay still gets a second read by a real live human. Still, the notion that computers play any part in evaluating student
essays hasn’t gone down well with everyone in the academic community. “I think it’s silly,” says Dennis Baron, head of the English Department at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with an edge of derision. Computerized grading undermines the very purpose of essays, he adds. “Like
the teacher says, ‘I’m not just talking to hear myself talk.’ We don’t ask students to write just to have them jump through a hoop.”
Writing for a computerized audience is, to some critics’ thinking, an absurd waste of time that can only warp the educational process. (ETS is also considering making E-rater available to score practice essays for students preparing to take the GMAT.) “Even before this, the pressure was there to teach to the test,” says Baron. If students know their essays are being graded by a machine that can parse
semantics and syntax, they “will learn to write for the formula.”
Critics have long lodged similar complaints against all standardized testing, arguing that the tests measure students’ ability to take tests, not their ability to learn and produce ideas. Some also maintain that the tests often include subtle racial, class or gender
href="http://www.collegeboard.org/sat/html/students/mofaq013.html">biases — benefiting students who are white, middle-class and male.
But could we use technology to eliminate bias from the grading process, and to promote fairness and consistency? “In essence [the technology] is doing what a person is trained to do when they’re doing holistic grading,” says Darrell Laham, chief scientist for Knowledge Analysis Technologies, which developed the
href="http://www.knowledge-technologies.com/IEA-info.html">Intelligent
Essay Assessor. “You see samples of
what an excellent essay is supposed to look like, or a medium essay, or a very bad essay. With a person, their criteria may shift a little bit.” The
software, on the other hand, is 100 percent consistent: “You give it the same set of parameters, and it will always give the same results.”
But Monty Neill, executive director of
href="http://www.fairtest.org">FairTest — an advocacy group that fights for fairness in standardized
testing — says the software’s lack of bias doesn’t mean electronic grading will be free of prejudice: It all depends on how the software is programmed. “If you’re looking for things that are not really relevant but are associated with a particular demographic group, then certainly that would reinforce a bias,” he says.
A question assuming knowledge of stock dividends, for example, could penalize test-takers whose
family never owned securities. But Neill agrees that a computerized grading system, properly programmed, could eliminate other forms of bias. “You might have someone who identifies black writing as automatically bad,
whereas a machine might not,” he says.
Laham says the best way to escape grading bias is to choose the model essays with care: “The underlying comparison set of essays should represent the population that the grades are meant to represent.” To be fair to the test-takers, he says, his Intelligent Essay Assessor is designed to know
its limits and not give a student a poor mark when the software can’t “read” an essay, for stylistic or other reasons. “What the technology will do when it sees an essay that is completely unlike what it has seen before is to flag it and tell a teacher to look at it … It won’t be able to grade it, but it will know it can’t grade it.”
E-rater examines 50 linguistic features, including transitional phrases,
vocabulary and the ratio of complement clauses to the total number of
sentences. “For each essay, about eight to 12 of the features turn out to be
particularly predictive and explain why an essay should get a certain
score,” says Jill Bustein, a developmental scientist who invented the
E-rater prototype and led the ETS development team.
E-rater is surprisingly consistent with human graders. The E-rater scores
agree with scores given by a human grader about 90 percent of the time –
or as often as a second human reader would, according to ETS statistics.
And when a second human grader does score a disputed essay, he or she agrees with
E-rater about 97 percent of the time. In other words, the electronic
graders seem to do the job about as well as their human counterparts.
Computerized grading could cut student fees by $5 to $10 per test, according to ETS; readers who score the GMATs currently earn $23.75 per hour. And at Knowledge Analysis Technologies, Laham argues that essay-grading software can improve education by helping to eliminate multiple-choice
testing. His company’s Web site says: “Students need many more
opportunities to put their knowledge into words and find out how well
they’ve done and how to do better”; and Laham asserts that student writing,
even when written for a computerized reader, demonstrates “a much deeper level of learning” than multiple-choice exams do.
But he is conscious of his product’s limitations. “When you start getting
into the creativity types of things, that’s not really our focus,” says
Laham. “This technology is not appropriate for looking at term papers where
every student is writing on a unique topic. We see it as a way to provide
students with the opportunity to write and revise their writing and to get
immediate feedback that they simply can’t have right now. A person can’t
always look at what a student produces.”
University of Illinois professor Baron still criticizes the system, however, saying he’s gotten surprisingly good grades after
submitting essays that were completely off-topic to a demonstration of the
Intelligent Essay Assessor that is
href="http://lsa.colorado.edu"> available online. “If you don’t care
about what might be in the text that doesn’t match your template, then I
suppose you can go ahead and use it,” he says. “But it seems to me that
it’s also an insult to the writer. You’re asking these test-takers to write
connected prose, but you’re having it graded by an entity that has no sense
of what’s good about connected prose and how to evaluate it.” (Laham defended the product, saying that the version of IEA currently online does not yet have the system’s full battery of validity checks.)
Meanwhile, won’t students rebel against computerized readers?
Test-takers haven’t been troubled by the electronic grading of GMATs, says
McHale. “We were expecting more negative reaction, but we’ve had minimal
complaints, and just a single response of ‘I don’t want a computer grading
my essay,’ which someone wrote in one of their essays.” Part of the reason
for the subdued response may be that a person still reads each submission
– a procedure that McHale expects to continue. “For the large-scale,
high-stakes kind of testing that we do, I don’t see a human reader being
taken out of the loop,” he said. “The small discrepancies that we do see
could be very creative responses that we really do want to allow in the
testing.”
So far, there’s no plan to employ E-rater as a judge of literary merit or
creative writing, but ETS is researching the possibility of computerized
grading for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and the
Graduate Record Examinations. The GMAT was the first to employ the
software because the test had already phased out handwritten essays in
favor of keyboarded essays.
While it’s unlikely that computerized grading will ever replace the careful
eye of a teacher, technology proponents like Laham say it can be a great
addition to the current academic system. “The reality is that teachers can’t
read enough to provide the student with enough feedback,” says Laham.
So instead of comparing the software to a human reader — where it can’t help
but appear a poor substitute — Laham argues critics should view electronic grading as a great benefit to students who want to write more than their teachers can read.
Dismissing the technology’s detractors, Laham says, “There aren’t as
many of the critics as there are teachers who want this system.”
With NATO warplanes making good on a long-standing threat to stop Serbian attacks in Kosovo, what makes Serbia so determined to hold the small province, where 90 percent of residents are ethnically Albanian, not Serbian?
It’s “the Kosovo myth,” says Tomislav Longinovic, a leading expatriate Serbian scholar and an associate professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin, where he is writing a new book called “Borderline People: Imagining ‘The Serbs.’” At the heart of the current conflict, he says, is a fervently patriotic version of the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottoman Turks defeated Serbian Prince Lazar and his allies in 1389. The defeat at Kosovo meant hundreds of years of Ottoman servitude for the Serbs, but it has taken on mythic proportions as the battle that ultimately halted the expansion of the Ottomans and Islam into Europe.
If this sounds like ancient history, it was, and maybe still would be if it were not for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In 1989, Milosevic stirred up nationalist passions based on the 600-year-old Kosovo myth to cement his hold on power while Eastern European communism crumbled. “The popular political imagination has substituted the Albanians for the Ottomans who defeated the Serbian army in 1389,” Longinovic says. “The Serbs have shown readiness not only to fight their neighbors to the death, but to take on the entire world community as well.”
But the current conflicts shouldn’t be seen as a hopeless case of “bloodthirsty barbarians fighting it out in the Balkans,” the Serbian scholar insists. The Kosovo myth has been cynically exploited to release deadly nationalist passions against the Serbs’ neighbors in the region, but it may also make victims of the ordinary Serbs who live under Milosevic’s rule and oppose his designs on Kosovo, but who will bear the brunt of NATO attacks.
Longinovic talked to Salon about the ancient history of the current conflict.
What is the Kosovo myth?
Any understanding of the current civil war in former Yugoslavia has to start with an understanding of the Kosovo myth and the way it is periodically resurrected by nationalist politicians and intellectuals. The myth is central to the Serbian perception of national destiny, and the crucial feature is defeat at the hands of Asian invaders. This was seen as a fight between Christianity and Islam, which elevated Serbia from its real position as a minute agrarian Balkan state to a leading defender of Europe and the Christian faith.
Ever since 1389, the Kosovo myth has been so charged with a mixture of patriotism and hatred of those who caused “the fall” — Turks, domestic converts to Islam and Serbian traitors to the national or nationalist cause — that every political manipulation of the myth is able to instantly unite the people behind any leader who is unscrupulous enough to tap into it.
It’s also important to remember that Kosovo has tremendous significance because there are more than 1,300 religious objects housed there, dating from the 11th century through the 17th century, making it the Serbian or [Eastern] Orthodox Jerusalem. This is something you never hear about in the mainstream media. The Serbs who are left there — 10 percent or less of the population of Kosovo — are basically people who cannot afford to move out, poor peasants, or those old monks and nuns who mind the 1,300 religious objects. There really isn’t any sort of vital interest there, yet it has tremendous symbolic value.
What role is the Kosovo myth playing in the current conflict?
On June 28, 1989, Slobodan Milosevic delivered a speech in front of more than a million Serbs to commemorate the battle of Kosovo exactly 600 years before. This speech in Kosovo marked the end of the common Yugoslav idea, and after it, Milosevic became firmly entrenched as the only Serbian leader who could appeal to the masses. He created the contemporary impression of a seamless, uninterrupted identity of the Serbian people found in the Kosovo myth.
But a lot more has led to the current crisis.
Well, Tito died in 1980, and then the first Albanian riots, demanding republic status within Yugoslavia, started right away in 1981. This was the first trigger. At that time in 1981, I was serving my military service in Nis, which now is the center for military operations in Kosovo. I was working in a recruit center, and I was given the job of testing the new incoming recruits. A large number of them were Albanians who had been participating in these demonstrations, and for the first time in my life, this dream that I had of Yugoslavia as a stable country came apart — when I saw the misery of these people. I witnessed several beatings of Albanian demonstrators by the military police, and that sobered me up about where I was living. I think this heavy-handed response to the Albanians, which continues today, was really the trigger that started the breakup of Yugoslavia.
- – - – - – - – - -
What did you learn about Kosovo when you were young?
I was born in Belgrade in 1955 and ethnically my background is Serbian … When I was young, I remember as a boy sitting with my grandfather who, after a few shots of slivovice (plum brandy), would start reciting poems about heroes of old. I would get very emotional about this as a child. It stood for the tremendous sacrifice that the nation had to endure under Turkish domination for the sake of Europe and the West.
But growing up I never in my mind connected those Turks that were described as the bad guys in the epic poetry with the actual Muslims around me. While growing up, our Communist education meant we did not know what ethnicity anyone belonged to. We all spoke the same language, we all looked the same, so there were no visible markers or identities to speak of. Only now when I try to recall a name — I left in ’82 — I think, “Oh, that person must have been a Muslim, or that person must have been a Croat.” But at that time I had no idea — we were all friends.
Do you have a sense of what other Serbs think of Milosevic and what is happening in Kosovo now?
The Kosovo myth was a part of the national imagination up until the mid-’90s or so, but after the Bosnian war there has been such a level of disillusionment and depression in Serbia that less and less people will be swayed to believe in any part of the Kosovo myth. It really is a question of those Serbs who live in Kosovo, which is such a tiny minority.
I have a mother and father and relatives living there [in Serbia] who are anti-Milosevic. I don’t know a person who is for him when I go there. Everybody despises the man and they see the game that he is playing basically by signing all these agreements with the West after threats … he is just buying himself another two or three years of time as ruler.
Then how does Milosevic stay in power?
Although he’s a malignant person, he is incredibly cunning and smart as far as his own power is concerned. You cannot really call him a nationalist, because you always think that nationalists will care for the nation that they are part of. That’s absolutely not the case with Milosevic. He just knows how to stay in power. He controls almost all media outlets and manipulates public opinion almost at will, in the style of old totalitarian dictators. The only way that rural Serbs have of finding out what goes on around them is through state-run radio and television. So, they keep voting for Milosevic and his party, since they represent themselves as defenders of Serbian national interests.
There were tremendous demonstrations in Belgrade during ’96, and this was the first signal to me that if the West really wanted Milosevic out they would have supported these demonstrations in some material way, they would stand behind them. Instead there were statements of support but there was nothing concretely done. Now people have to devote considerable energy just to daily survival, finding food, finding a light bulb or something like that that was a normal thing in the past [Yugoslavia is under economic sanctions imposed during the Bosnian war], so they don’t have any energy for political engagement, especially after the failure of the 1996 demonstrations.
To what extent do you think that the Serbs have been wronged?
One issue is how did Kosovo become so predominantly Albanian, which is not really discussed. The Ottomans had a policy of population transfers in which they would never allow too many of the indigenous communities living next to each other, which really created a tension between the communities there. Then during the Second World War was the worst legacy, and the closest to us, which was that Albanians were allied with fascist Italy, and in Kosovo they carried out ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. This is when the majority of the Serbs were expelled or murdered.
The Serbs have also been wronged by the media, which is notorious for its selective reporting. In 1995 when there was a two-week campaign by NATO against the Bosnian Serbs … I think many [of the Serbs in Yugoslavia] at that time thought that maybe it was justified because of the atrocities that the Bosnian Serbs committed. But of course at the same time there were all these atrocities committed by the Croats and the Muslims that were sort of covered up, but nobody really wanted to talk about that then.
There were also massacres of Serbian civilians in Kosovo during the summer and fall of ’98, but no major interest in the West to learn more about them. There is a feeling that the Serbs deserve to be punished for all their past transgressions in Bosnia and Croatia and that their lives are worth less than the lives of other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.
Are NATO and the West being hypocritical?
There is clearly a double standard if you compare the situation in Kosovo to the situation of the Kurds in Turkey, for example, or in the case of Israel and its gross abuses against the Palestinians. There is no threat of bombing Istanbul or any part of Turkey, and [the West] is not threatening to bomb Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, obviously. Somehow the Albanians at this point have been chosen as a “pet nation.”
- – - – - – - – - -
How do you think typical Serbs view the confrontation with NATO now?
I see anguish among the urban elites because they feel that they are a part of the West, yet they read the news in which they’re always called bloodthirsty barbarians and they cannot reconcile the two. There’s a lot of anguish there, especially among the young.
I think there has been a frame of looking at the Balkans in particular and maybe at Eastern Europe in general through a certain prism that “others” them — makes them into something different, more prone to violence and so on. There have been a few excellent studies about it. The most prominent is one by Larry Wolf, who wrote “Inventing Eastern Europe,” in which he talks about how the West European Enlightenment invented the whole notion of Eastern Europe because of different cultural standards and different languages that were incomprehensible to the Enlightenment West Europeans, mainly the British and the French and to some extent Germans. The Serbs have the disadvantage of being perceived within this Balkanist, East Europeanist discourse as miniature Russians, because of their Orthodox religion and use of the Cyrillic alphabet and so-called traditional friendship with Russia.
I don’t think that if you go to Belgrade or to Serbia you would find that sentiment among the general population, especially among the young. Young Serbs are completely Western, as Western as they can be. They look like people on the streets of Milwaukee or Chicago, and they actually would welcome being integrated into Western Europe.
What do you think should happen?
This is going to sound completely utopian, because it’s not going to happen, but the only way to deal with the post-Communist transition in Russia and Eastern Europe was through some sort of Marshall Plan that would not be carried out by the local corrupt elites like it happened in Russia … but implemented by well-meaning people on the ground like the Peace Corps or people in NGOs [non-government organizations] in the West who would go and work with the local population in implementing some sort of economic reforms and change. I believe that if that was the case, the ethnic tensions would immediately go down.
Ethnic tensions flourish in times of economic crisis, and we see that throughout this century. When people don’t have resources, they clam in, and they withdraw into some sort of imaginary core of who they are or what their collective identity is and it just takes an irresponsible leader like Milosevic or Tudjman [the president of Croatia] to stir up the hatred and nationalism. And so I would start with that, with some sort of massive economic aid, and then working slowly on building confidence measures and so on.
Is it too late for this?
I think it’s definitely too late for Kosovo. I don’t think it can happen now that the hatred between the communities is at such a high level at this point.
There is no real claim that the Serbs can make on this region through population anymore. It is obviously Albanian now. The only thing is maybe to grant some sort of cultural autonomy to the Serbs to visit those monuments and churches and monasteries, which are not just Serbian, they’re part of the world and European heritage. Those are ancient objects that really speak of the past for the whole continent, and they shouldn’t be allowed to just be abandoned. They should be put under the protection of UNESCO or some other world body that will take care of them and the monks and the nuns that are still there.
What do you think will happen?
There is going to be more and more foreign involvement, and eventually I think there are going to be international troops on the ground, and it will become a protectorate like Bosnia. I think soon this will sort of prove to be the training grounds for the new enlarged NATO. The Poles, the Hungarians and the Czechs will have to sort of prove themselves as being truly Western by participating in Kosovo peacekeeping operations.
There also may be the possibility of some sort of partitioning of Kosovo, a Serbian and Albanian part. Right now as we speak I think there are Serbian operations in the north of Kosovo and it looks like the West is looking the other way, so there may have been some secret clauses in the previous Dayton agreement in 1995. You never really know what happens behind closed doors.
If you look five to 15 years down the line, here’s another really scary scenario: With Russia going down the tubes — an economic basket case with Yeltsin an alcoholic president, half-dead, being dragged around — there is a real potential for native homegrown fascism in Russia using the aggressive posturing by NATO and the West — including in Kosovo, the westernmost point of Eastern Orthodox culture and Christianity — as a focus. With the nuclear weapons that Russia still possesses, this is a really scary scenario, and I hope it doesn’t come to that.
With NATO warplanes making good on a long-standing threat to stop Serbian attacks in Kosovo, what makes Serbia so determined to hold the small province, where 90 percent of residents are ethnically Albanian, not Serbian?
It’s “the Kosovo myth,” says Tomislav Longinovic, a leading expatriate Serbian scholar and an associate professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin, where he is writing a new book called “Borderline People: Imagining ‘The Serbs.’” At the heart of the current conflict, he says, is a fervently patriotic version of the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottoman Turks defeated Serbian Prince Lazar and his allies in 1389. The defeat at Kosovo meant hundreds of years of Ottoman servitude for the Serbs, but it has taken on mythic proportions as the battle that ultimately halted the expansion of the Ottomans and Islam into Europe.
If this sounds like ancient history, it was, and maybe still would be if it were not for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In 1989, Milosevic stirred up nationalist passions based on the 600-year-old Kosovo myth to cement his hold on power while Eastern European communism crumbled. “The popular political imagination has substituted the Albanians for the Ottomans who defeated the Serbian army in 1389,” Longinovic says. “The Serbs have shown readiness not only to fight their neighbors to the death, but to take on the entire world community as well.”
But the current conflicts shouldn’t be seen as a hopeless case of “bloodthirsty barbarians fighting it out in the Balkans,” the Serbian scholar insists. The Kosovo myth has been cynically exploited to release deadly nationalist passions against the Serbs’ neighbors in the region, but it may also make victims of the ordinary Serbs who live under Milosevic’s rule and oppose his designs on Kosovo, but who will bear the brunt of NATO attacks.
Longinovic talked to Salon about the ancient history of the current conflict.
What is the Kosovo myth?
Any understanding of the current civil war in former Yugoslavia has to start with an understanding of the Kosovo myth and the way it is periodically resurrected by nationalist politicians and intellectuals. The myth is central to the Serbian perception of national destiny, and the crucial feature is defeat at the hands of Asian invaders. This was seen as a fight between Christianity and Islam, which elevated Serbia from its real position as a minute agrarian Balkan state to a leading defender of Europe and the Christian faith.
Ever since 1389, the Kosovo myth has been so charged with a mixture of patriotism and hatred of those who caused “the fall” — Turks, domestic converts to Islam and Serbian traitors to the national or nationalist cause — that every political manipulation of the myth is able to instantly unite the people behind any leader who is unscrupulous enough to tap into it.
It’s also important to remember that Kosovo has tremendous significance because there are more than 1,300 religious objects housed there, dating from the 11th century through the 17th century, making it the Serbian or [Eastern] Orthodox Jerusalem. This is something you never hear about in the mainstream media. The Serbs who are left there — 10 percent or less of the population of Kosovo — are basically people who cannot afford to move out, poor peasants, or those old monks and nuns who mind the 1,300 religious objects. There really isn’t any sort of vital interest there, yet it has tremendous symbolic value.
What role is the Kosovo myth playing in the current conflict?
On June 28, 1989, Slobodan Milosevic delivered a speech in front of more than a million Serbs to commemorate the battle of Kosovo exactly 600 years before. This speech in Kosovo marked the end of the common Yugoslav idea, and after it, Milosevic became firmly entrenched as the only Serbian leader who could appeal to the masses. He created the contemporary impression of a seamless, uninterrupted identity of the Serbian people found in the Kosovo myth.
But a lot more has led to the current crisis.
Well, Tito died in 1980, and then the first Albanian riots, demanding republic status within Yugoslavia, started right away in 1981. This was the first trigger. At that time in 1981, I was serving my military service in Nis, which now is the center for military operations in Kosovo. I was working in a recruit center, and I was given the job of testing the new incoming recruits. A large number of them were Albanians who had been participating in these demonstrations, and for the first time in my life, this dream that I had of Yugoslavia as a stable country came apart — when I saw the misery of these people. I witnessed several beatings of Albanian demonstrators by the military police, and that sobered me up about where I was living. I think this heavy-handed response to the Albanians, which continues today, was really the trigger that started the breakup of Yugoslavia.
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What did you learn about Kosovo when you were young?
I was born in Belgrade in 1955 and ethnically my background is Serbian … When I was young, I remember as a boy sitting with my grandfather who, after a few shots of slivovice (plum brandy), would start reciting poems about heroes of old. I would get very emotional about this as a child. It stood for the tremendous sacrifice that the nation had to endure under Turkish domination for the sake of Europe and the West.
But growing up I never in my mind connected those Turks that were described as the bad guys in the epic poetry with the actual Muslims around me. While growing up, our Communist education meant we did not know what ethnicity anyone belonged to. We all spoke the same language, we all looked the same, so there were no visible markers or identities to speak of. Only now when I try to recall a name — I left in ’82 — I think, “Oh, that person must have been a Muslim, or that person must have been a Croat.” But at that time I had no idea — we were all friends.
Do you have a sense of what other Serbs think of Milosevic and what is happening in Kosovo now?
The Kosovo myth was a part of the national imagination up until the mid-’90s or so, but after the Bosnian war there has been such a level of disillusionment and depression in Serbia that less and less people will be swayed to believe in any part of the Kosovo myth. It really is a question of those Serbs who live in Kosovo, which is such a tiny minority.
I have a mother and father and relatives living there [in Serbia] who are anti-Milosevic. I don’t know a person who is for him when I go there. Everybody despises the man and they see the game that he is playing basically by signing all these agreements with the West after threats … he is just buying himself another two or three years of time as ruler.
Then how does Milosevic stay in power?
Although he’s a malignant person, he is incredibly cunning and smart as far as his own power is concerned. You cannot really call him a nationalist, because you always think that nationalists will care for the nation that they are part of. That’s absolutely not the case with Milosevic. He just knows how to stay in power. He controls almost all media outlets and manipulates public opinion almost at will, in the style of old totalitarian dictators. The only way that rural Serbs have of finding out what goes on around them is through state-run radio and television. So, they keep voting for Milosevic and his party, since they represent themselves as defenders of Serbian national interests.
There were tremendous demonstrations in Belgrade during ’96, and this was the first signal to me that if the West really wanted Milosevic out they would have supported these demonstrations in some material way, they would stand behind them. Instead there were statements of support but there was nothing concretely done. Now people have to devote considerable energy just to daily survival, finding food, finding a light bulb or something like that that was a normal thing in the past [Yugoslavia is under economic sanctions imposed during the Bosnian war], so they don’t have any energy for political engagement, especially after the failure of the 1996 demonstrations.
To what extent do you think that the Serbs have been wronged?
One issue is how did Kosovo become so predominantly Albanian, which is not really discussed. The Ottomans had a policy of population transfers in which they would never allow too many of the indigenous communities living next to each other, which really created a tension between the communities there. Then during the Second World War was the worst legacy, and the closest to us, which was that Albanians were allied with fascist Italy, and in Kosovo they carried out ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. This is when the majority of the Serbs were expelled or murdered.
The Serbs have also been wronged by the media, which is notorious for its selective reporting. In 1995 when there was a two-week campaign by NATO against the Bosnian Serbs … I think many [of the Serbs in Yugoslavia] at that time thought that maybe it was justified because of the atrocities that the Bosnian Serbs committed. But of course at the same time there were all these atrocities committed by the Croats and the Muslims that were sort of covered up, but nobody really wanted to talk about that then.
There were also massacres of Serbian civilians in Kosovo during the summer and fall of ’98, but no major interest in the West to learn more about them. There is a feeling that the Serbs deserve to be punished for all their past transgressions in Bosnia and Croatia and that their lives are worth less than the lives of other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.
Are NATO and the West being hypocritical?
There is clearly a double standard if you compare the situation in Kosovo to the situation of the Kurds in Turkey, for example, or in the case of Israel and its gross abuses against the Palestinians. There is no threat of bombing Istanbul or any part of Turkey, and [the West] is not threatening to bomb Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, obviously. Somehow the Albanians at this point have been chosen as a “pet nation.”
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How do you think typical Serbs view the confrontation with NATO now?
I see anguish among the urban elites because they feel that they are a part of the West, yet they read the news in which they’re always called bloodthirsty barbarians and they cannot reconcile the two. There’s a lot of anguish there, especially among the young.
I think there has been a frame of looking at the Balkans in particular and maybe at Eastern Europe in general through a certain prism that “others” them — makes them into something different, more prone to violence and so on. There have been a few excellent studies about it. The most prominent is one by Larry Wolf, who wrote “Inventing Eastern Europe,” in which he talks about how the West European Enlightenment invented the whole notion of Eastern Europe because of different cultural standards and different languages that were incomprehensible to the Enlightenment West Europeans, mainly the British and the French and to some extent Germans. The Serbs have the disadvantage of being perceived within this Balkanist, East Europeanist discourse as miniature Russians, because of their Orthodox religion and use of the Cyrillic alphabet and so-called traditional friendship with Russia.
I don’t think that if you go to Belgrade or to Serbia you would find that sentiment among the general population, especially among the young. Young Serbs are completely Western, as Western as they can be. They look like people on the streets of Milwaukee or Chicago, and they actually would welcome being integrated into Western Europe.
What do you think should happen?
This is going to sound completely utopian, because it’s not going to happen, but the only way to deal with the post-Communist transition in Russia and Eastern Europe was through some sort of Marshall Plan that would not be carried out by the local corrupt elites like it happened in Russia … but implemented by well-meaning people on the ground like the Peace Corps or people in NGOs [non-government organizations] in the West who would go and work with the local population in implementing some sort of economic reforms and change. I believe that if that was the case, the ethnic tensions would immediately go down.
Ethnic tensions flourish in times of economic crisis, and we see that throughout this century. When people don’t have resources, they clam in, and they withdraw into some sort of imaginary core of who they are or what their collective identity is and it just takes an irresponsible leader like Milosevic or Tudjman [the president of Croatia] to stir up the hatred and nationalism. And so I would start with that, with some sort of massive economic aid, and then working slowly on building confidence measures and so on.
Is it too late for this?
I think it’s definitely too late for Kosovo. I don’t think it can happen now that the hatred between the communities is at such a high level at this point.
There is no real claim that the Serbs can make on this region through population anymore. It is obviously Albanian now. The only thing is maybe to grant some sort of cultural autonomy to the Serbs to visit those monuments and churches and monasteries, which are not just Serbian, they’re part of the world and European heritage. Those are ancient objects that really speak of the past for the whole continent, and they shouldn’t be allowed to just be abandoned. They should be put under the protection of UNESCO or some other world body that will take care of them and the monks and the nuns that are still there.
What do you think will happen?
There is going to be more and more foreign involvement, and eventually I think there are going to be international troops on the ground, and it will become a protectorate like Bosnia. I think soon this will sort of prove to be the training grounds for the new enlarged NATO. The Poles, the Hungarians and the Czechs will have to sort of prove themselves as being truly Western by participating in Kosovo peacekeeping operations.
There also may be the possibility of some sort of partitioning of Kosovo, a Serbian and Albanian part. Right now as we speak I think there are Serbian operations in the north of Kosovo and it looks like the West is looking the other way, so there may have been some secret clauses in the previous Dayton agreement in 1995. You never really know what happens behind closed doors.
If you look five to 15 years down the line, here’s another really scary scenario: With Russia going down the tubes — an economic basket case with Yeltsin an alcoholic president, half-dead, being dragged around — there is a real potential for native homegrown fascism in Russia using the aggressive posturing by NATO and the West — including in Kosovo, the westernmost point of Eastern Orthodox culture and Christianity — as a focus. With the nuclear weapons that Russia still possesses, this is a really scary scenario, and I hope it doesn’t come to that.
