What the Hell - Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel

by Joan Acocella

People can't seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You'd think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It's one of the reasons there are professors and students.

In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literature-notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries- many sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them," he wrote. ''There is no third." A lot of literary people then ran out to learn some Italian, a language for which, previously, many had had scant respect, and a great surge of Dante translations began. In some-Laurence Binyon's (1933-43), Dorothy Sayers's (1949- 62)-the translator even tried to use Dante's rhyme scheme, terza rima (aha bcb cdc, etc.), a device almost impossible to manage in English, because our language, compared with Italian, has so few rhymes. Since then, we have had many kinds of Divine Comedy-lowbrow, highbrow, muscly, refined. The more fastidious ones, the ones that actually try to give equivalents for Dante's words, are in prose, because in prose the translator doesn't have to sacrifice accuracy to such considerations as rhyme and rhythm. As fot verse translations, they may be less accurate, but it can be argued that they are more faithful than prose versions. The Divine Comedy, after all, is a poem, and its meanings are contained as much in sound as in "sense." Verse translations require more courage, and more thinking, because they are generally more interpretive. Within the past year, two more have been published, one by the American poet Mary Jo Bang, the other by the Australian essayist and poet Clive James.

In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to rhyme, in quatrains (in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were no more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance, repetition. He says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar (her book "Reading Dante'' will be out next year), pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine Comedy had to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness of sound, as word after word, line after line, beckoned the next and thus kept the reader moving forward. James says this is what he was intent on, above all.

All is a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dante's text and to incorporate background material.  He didn't want footnotes-nothing should stop the reader. Many things do, though. Here are Dante's famous opening lines:

 Ne! mezzo de! cammin di nostra vita mi
 ritrovai per una selva oscura,
 che la diritta via era smarrita.

 Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura
 esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
 che nel pensier rinova la paura!

And here is James' s rendering:

 At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
 Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
 Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
 I still make shows how hard it is to say
 How harsh and bitter that place felt to me-
 Merely to think of it renews the fear.

"Keening sound"? If ever there was a forced rhyme, this is it. Also, Dante didn't say anything about wailing, only about fear, and the two are different matters.

Soon the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide, Virgil, arrive at the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:

 Per me si va ne la citra dolente,
 per me si vane l'etterno dolore,
 per me si va tra la perduta gente.

 Giustizia mosse ii mio alto fattore;
 fecemi la divina podestate,
 la somma sap'ienza e 'I primo amore.

 Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
 se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
  Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

James translates this as:

 To enter the lost city, go through me.
 Through me you go to meet a suffering
 unceasing and eternal. You will be
 with people who, through me, lost everything.

 My maker, moved by justice, lives above.
 Through him, the holy power, I was made -
 made by the height of wisdom and first love,
 whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.

 From now on, every day feels like your last
 Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.
 Your future now is to regret the past.
 Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.

This shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James has lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion about what the gate is telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think that we have a choice about whether or not to enter. We don't, and that is what makes going to Hell a serious business.

From what I can tell, these two problems, awkwardness and inaccuracy, are due to exactly the thing that sounded so nice when James told us about it in the introduction, his intention to capture the phonetic richness of Dante's lines.

Worse are the demands made by the internal echoes. In the Hell-gate inscription, there's almost no word that isn't singing a duet, or more. We have "through me" I "through me"; "suffering" I "unceasing'' I "everything''; "me" I "me'' I "meet" I "be" I "people''; "maker'' I "moved" I "made"; "him" I "holy." And that's just in the first six lines. The technique asks a great deal: that the translator obey, simultaneously, the summons both of English-language sounds and of Dante's meaning.

Still, the freedoms James takes allow him to get off some beautiful phrases. When the pilgrim realizes that his guide is Virgil, his idol, he says to him, "Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte I che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?" James turns this into "Are you Virgil? Are you the spring, the well, I The fountain and the river in full Bow I Of eloquence that sings like a seashell I Remembering the sea and the rainbow?" I love that seashell, and the rainbow. Neither is in Dante. James is a poet, doing a poet's work. Also, however interested he is in being fancy, he can be plain as well, sometimes poignantly so.

See the last line of the Hell-gate inscription: "Forget your hopes. They are what brought you here." The second sentence is not in the original poem, but it is wonderful, both sarcastic and sad. James is also a premier practitioner of the high-low style that became so popular in the nineteen-twenties, notably via Eliot and Pound, which is to say, in part, via Dante. He can be colloquial. Of the she wolf that blocks the pilgrim's path, Virgil says, "In a bad mood it can kill, I And it's never in a good mood." (This could be from "The Sopranos.") James likes, iconoclastically, to do this sort of thing with the grandees, like Francesca da Rimini, who says to the pilgrim, ''What you would have us say I Let's hear about." It's all rich and strange.

Mary Jo Bang, a poet and a professor of English at Washington University, in St. Louis, has much the same purpose: to convey Dante's internal music. Unlike James, she has made some major sacrifices to this end. In her Inferno (Graywolf), the only canticle she has taken on so far, she does not use end rhyme, and she does not hold herself to any regular metre. (James used iambic pentameter.) But, having cast off those restraints, she adopts another one.

James was trying, he said, to be true to Dante. Bang is trying to be true to contemporary life, to the "post-9/11, Internet- ubiquitous present." As this implies, she aims to be faithful to something else as well: undergraduates. She writes, "I will be most happy if this postmodern, irttertextual, slightly slant translation lures readers to a poetic text that might seem otherwise archaic and off-putting'' -especially, I presume, to nineteen- year-olds. On the surface, this appears to be a laudable purpose, but whenever you hear those words "true to contemporary life," run for cover.

The trouble starts on the first page. The pilgrim speaks of his relief upon issuing from the dark wood. He says that he felt like a person who, almost drowned at sea, arrives, panting, on the shore. Bang places him, instead, at the edge of a swimming pool. But these two things-the ocean and the neighborhood pool-are nowhere near the same, and every nineteen-year-old knows what the ocean is. Other anachronisms create worse problems. Bang, in her lines, includes references to Freud, Mayakovsky, Colbert, you name it. She picks up swatches of verse from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. But, if readers get into the swing of these, what are they going to do when they encounter the Roman Catholic theology that is the spine of the Divine Comedy, and which Bang says, in her introduction, that she will honor? ("God has to look down from Heaven; Satan has to sit at the center of Hell.") Wouldn't it be better if she let the reader know that there are old things as well as new things-that there is such a thing as history? She is not unaware of this, as her learned footnotes demonstrate. Why is she keeping it from her readers? If they knew it, they might find out who Mayakovsky is, which I doubt that they have done.

Oddly, given Bang's stated aims, she's happy to court obscurity. She says that the she-wolf that detains the pilgrim outside the wood has a "bitch-kitty" face; Virgil tells the pilgrim to climb the "meringue-pie mountain" that lies ahead. "Bitch-kitty" gets an explanatory footnote: Bang says it's something that she found in the Dictionary of American Slang. My edition of that book says "bitch kitty'' was a phrase of the nineteen-thirties and forties. (Roughly, it meant a "humdinger.") Did Bang expect today's readers to know it? Not really, it seems. She says that she wants these oddities to be fleeting pleasures for us. To me, they're not pleasures, but just oddities, something like finding a Tootsie Roll in the meat loaf.

Translators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring a solo show about the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games. As of last week, their company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, "Inferno" (Doubleday).

In many ways, the new book is like Brown's 2003 blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code." Here, as there, we have Brown's beloved "symbologist," Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker of Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking woman-this one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q of 208-while people shoot at them. All this transpires in exotic climes-Florence, Venice, and Istanbul-upon which, even as the two are fleeing a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: "The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolo Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti." Or: "No trip to the piazza was complete without sipping an espresso at Caffe Rivoire."

As we saw in "The Da Vinci Code," there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that Brown doesn't like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He's also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman's black arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike ''The Da Vinci Code" and Brown's "Angels and Demons" (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western world's most famous eschatological thriller, Dante's Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by the sequence of events in Dante's poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever he feels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying things like "I am life" and "I am death." Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly. The book's villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dante's death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, "The path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that."

The hellfire material makes the book colorful and creepy. It also sounds notes of conspiracy. (The villain, with his "Transhumanist philosophy," has many followers.) Religion and paranoia have a lot in common: above all, the belief that something big is going on out there and also that everything means something else. Further, both religion and paranoia are short on empirical evidence, so that greater faith is required. Finally, the conviction that everything refers to something else generates codes and symbols, which is what generates Robert Langdon. As a symbologist, he can read these runes. Often, the clue they give him does not point him to what he's looking for but rather to something that will offer a further clue, which will get him a little closer to what he's looking for, and so on, as in a treasure hunt.

That process is the plot, or at least the skeleton of it. It is then fleshed out with a million details: dreams, murders, priceless paintings. There is a yacht lurking off the Adriatic coast, where, for vast fees, sinister, tight-lipped men arrange for governments to change, wars to be hushed up, and the like. Meanwhile, we are given lessons in how to do ancient mosaics and how to make a death mask. We are introduced to products galore: Plume Paris glasses, Volvo motors, Juicy Couture sweatsuits, even a "Swedish Sectra Tiger XS personal voice-encrypting phone, which had been redirected through four untraceable routers." Page after page, things keep coming at you. People who sit down to read "Inferno" should bring a notepad.

The book has almost no psychology, because one of Brown's favorite plot devices is to reveal, mid-novel, that a character presented all along as a friend is in fact an enemy (see Leigh Teabing in "The Da Vinci Code"), or vice versa. To do that-and it's always pretty exciting- Brown can't give his characters much texture; if he did, they would be too hard to flip. Of course, without texture they don't have anything interesting to say, except maybe "Stop the plane there." The dialogue is dead. As for the rest of the writing, it is not dead or alive. It has no distinction whatsoever. Because "Inferno" transpires in so many glamorous places, Brown may rise to the grandiose. In Hagia Sophia, he speaks of the "staggering force of its enormity," and barely a page passes without italics. But this is to relieve the general coldness.

No, Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated than usual, because although Langdon, with his trusted Brooks, is looking for something, he's not quite sure what it is. Meanwhile, from one side he's being chased by the storm troopers-black-clad thugs, with umlauts over their names-and from the other by Vayentha, the lady with the Swedish Sectra Tiger XS. There's also a reconnaissance drone buzzing through the sky, telling them where to find Langdon.

Too bad for them, because our hero knows more secret tunnels than you can shake a stick at. At one point, it takes Brown twenty pages to get Langdon and Brooks, in Florence, up and down the Palazzo Vecchio's hidden passages: through the corridor behind the Armenia panel in the Hall of Geographical Maps, into the cupboard in the Architectural Models room, down the Duke of Athens stairway, and so on.

Never does the story slow down, though. Brown gives us extremely short chapters (often just two or three pages) and constant cross-cutting. He also adores cliffhangers. One of the storm troopers calls his superior: "'It's Bruder,' he said. 'I think fve got an ID on the person helping Langdon.' Who is it?' his boss replied. Bruder exhaled slowly. 'You're not going to believe this.' " Cut to Vayentha, who thinks she's been fired for failing to kill Langdon and is revving her motorcycle disconsolately. She's not the person helping Langdon, though. She's something else, which you have to figure out.

The book ends weakly, because Langdon-and Brown, too, clearly actually sympathizes with the villain, or at least with his motives. And those who are familiar with Brown's previous books will not be surprised that the boy doesn't get the girl. Brooks clearly wishes it were otherwise. ''You'll know where to find me," she says, as she and Langdon part, and then she kisses him on the lips. He gives her a big hug and puts her on the plane. In "The Da Vinci Code," Langdon's companion, Sophie Neveu, turned out to be a descendant of Jesus, and this made the question of a romance between them a tricky business. Brooks is free, though. Maybe Langdon is gay.

For all its absurdities, Brown's book is a comfort, because it proves that the Divine Comedy is still alive in our culture. The same is true, on a higher level, of the James and the Bang translations. Take James. He probably gave us more oddities-outrages, even than he would have with a less famous text. Surely he knew the number and the excellence of his predecessors. But he is seventy-three and ailing, so, if he said to himself, 'What the hell, let's just do it," you can see why. As for Bang, she's not seventy-three (she's sixtyseven), but if she has taught the Divine Comedy she has unquestionably faced a lot of young people saying, "What?" "What?" You can't blame her for trying to do something about that. At least she cares. All of us should worry about her students, though. They’re going to go off thinking that Dante wrote about meringue-pie mountains, and this is wrong. Furthermore, there is no reason that they couldn't have faced the mountain without the pie, and the fourteenth century without the twenty-first.

Thankfully, because the original text survives· more faithful translations will keep coming. Indeed, they have. The edition by Jean and Robert Hollander (2000-07) is both accurate and beautiful. I don't think any general reader, or any student of Mary Jo Bang's, needs more than this. But if Bang-and James, and even Brown-disagrees, so be it. As long as Dante is here, and the text is available, why shouldn't they have some fun?

Prison Of The Mind – A Chinese poet’s memoir of incarceration

by Ian Buruma

Spending time in jail is no fun anywhere, but each society has its own cultural refinements of misery. The sadistic imagination of Chinese prison authorities, though hardly unique, is often remarkable. But so is that of the inmates themselves, who form their own hierarchies, their own prisons within prisons.

At the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau Investigation Center, for example, also known as the Song Mountain Investigation Center, the cell bosses devised an exotic menu of torments.

A few samples:

 SICHUAN-STYLE SMOKED DUCK: The enforcer burns the inmate's pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.

Or:

 NOODLES IN A CLEAR BROTH: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.

Or:

 TURTLE SHELL AND PORK SKIN SOUP: The enforcer smacks the inmate's knee caps until they are bruised and swollen like turtle shells. Walking is impossible.

There are other tortures, too, meted out in a more improvised manner. Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, "For a Song and a Hundred Songs" (translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang; New Harvest), describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. The cell boss spikes the woodcutter's broth with a laxative, and then refuses to let him use the communal toilet bucket, with the result that the desperate man shits all over a fellow-inmate. As a punishment for this disgusting transgression, his face is smashed into a basin. The guards, assuming that he has tried to commit suicide, a prison offense, then work him over with a stun baton.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study the country’s prison system, and ended up writing "Democracy in America." Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, from 1990 to 1994, as. a "counterrevolutionary" inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist, including the impact of revolutionary rhetoric, forced denunciations and public confessions, and, as times have changed since Mao's misrule, criminal forms of capitalism. He ends his account by saying that "China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty."

Liao was incarcerated for writing a poem, "Massacre"-a long stream of- consciousness memorial to the thousands of people who were killed on June 4, 1989, when the pro-democracy movement was crushed throughout China. The poem, in its English translation by Michael Day, begins as follows:

 And another sort of massacre takes place at utopia's core The Prime Minister catches cold, the people must cough; martial law declared again and again.  The toothless machinery of the state rolls towards those who have the courage to resist the sickness.

Liao was not a political activist, or, strictly speaking, a dissident, and his resistance had a spontaneous quality. Politics didn't interest him much, even during the nineteen-eighties, when many young Chinese thought of little else. He led a rather dissolute life, wandering from place to place as a "well-dressed hypocrite, a poet who portrayed himself as a positive role model but all the while breathed in women like I was breathing air, seeking shelter and warmth in random sex." Like many Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Liao was more or less self-educated in literature, although he received a grounding in the Chinese classics from his father, a schoolteacher. His memoir is sprinkled with the names of Western writers- Orwell, Kundera, Proust-some of whose works penetrated even the prison walls in Chongqing. Among them, amazingly, was Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." In Liao's words, "On the page was an imaginary prison, while all around me was the real thing."

Unlike his friend Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize-winning critic and a writer with strong political convictions, Liao never wished to stick his neck out. He describes himself as an artist who simply wanted to be free to write in anyway he liked. As recently as 2011, he told the journalist Ian Johnson, "I don't want to break their laws. I am not interested in them and wish they weren't interested in me." But, in 1989, he put himself "on a self-destructive path" by performing his poem in bars and dance clubs, howling and chanting in the traditional manner of Chinese mourning. A recording of the poem was distributed informally, and a film, entitled "Requiem," was made of his recitation by a group of sympathetic artists and friends. None, according to Liao, could be classified as "dissidents" or "democracy fighters." But they were all arrested, their work confiscated, and thus "the Public Security Bureau destroyed a vibrant underground literary community in Sichuan."

Liao's time in prison didn't turn him into an activist, either. He was approached at one point by a fellow- "89er," who planned to start an organization of political prisoners. Liao refused to take part, and explained the reason for his having written "Massacre" in the first place. He "was compelled to protest," he said, because "the state ideology conflicted violently with the poet's right of free expression." To this, he added in his memoir, "I never intended to be a hero, but in a country where insanity ruled, I had to take a stand. 'Massacre' was my art and my art was my protest." Several famous dissidents have written vividly about their prison experiences. Wei Jingsheng' s "The Courage to Stand Alone'' is an account of eighteen years spent in prisons after he helped lead the Democracy Wall movement, in the nineteen-seventies. Harry Wu's "Bitter Winds" describes his ordeal in forced-labor camps in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Their heroic stories bear a strong political message of standing up to dictatorship. Liao is a literary man, and this actually makes his prison memoir even more compelling. For one thing, he is ruthlessly candid about his weaknesses, and his fears. There is nothing especially heroic about him. Watching the guards in combat training on his first day in prison, he "shuddered like a nervous rat." Forced to sing songs over and over again with a parched throat in the freezing cold to entertain the guards, he is beaten with an electric baton. When he cannot go on any longer, he is stripped and wrestled to the ground: "I could feel the baton on my butthole, but I refused to surrender. The tip of the baton entered me. I screamed and then whimpered in pain like a dog." Liao tried to commit suicide twice, once by bashing his head against the wall. This elicited ridicule from his cellmates, who accused him of playacting, something they thought typical of a bookish poet. If he had really wanted to smash his skull, he should have made sure to use the wall edge.

Liao describes very precisely what it is like to be in constant fear, to live in a cramped cell with so many other men that there is barely room to lie down, and to be starved of proper food, and sex. One ravenous inmate caught a rat, skinned it alive, and ate it raw. Another stuffed his mouth from a bucket of slop. Sex goes on, but in a debased form. A prisoner almost burned his bed down by masturbating to a cigarette lighter that, when lit, showed a picture of a naked woman. And one man got carried away with lust at the sight of a soap-opera star on TV. Liao saw men crowd around a window, the cell boss hoisted onto the shoulders of his slaves, as they jacked off while trying to catch a glimpse of a female outside. A young man was raped by the cell boss, fell in love with him, and was dismissed with a smack in the face when the boss became impotent.

One of the less creditable reasons we read prison memoirs such as this one with horrified fascination is that the torments of others can have a lurid pornographic appeal. But what makes Liao’ s work so riveting is his gift for observation. Despite his own suffering, he is endlessly curious about others, their characters, their stories, and how they cope with the' terrors of prison life. His encounters with other prisoners are skillfully transformed into short stories. Since some of these men are facing execution, the stories are often about dealing with imminent death. A heroin smuggler nicknamed Dead Chang wants to borrow Liao's atlas in preparation for his next life as a wandering ghost. Dead Chang got lost too many times in his present life, and wishes to visit his favorite haunts after he is dispatched with a bullet to the neck. Being told by this condemned man that they might meet again in the next world, Liao finds that his "limbs were quivering." Dead Chang asks him whether he is O.K., and "let out a sinister laugh. The deep crease between his eyebrows seemed to have opened up like a mouth, ready to swallow me."

Some of the prisoners were featured in another remarkable book by Liao, first published in Taiwan as ''Interviews with People from the Bottom Rungs of Society'' (2001), and in the U.S. as "The Corpse Walker'' (2008). Among them is an illiterate peasant who declared his native village to be an independent monarchy, with himself as the emperor. For this act of counterrevolutionary subversion, he was locked up for life. What fascinates Liao about this "peasant emperor'' is that his fantasies are derived from Chinese classics. One of his claims is that a yellow ribbon bearing his imperial name was discovered inside a fish. When Liao points out that this ruse was used by a peasant rebel two thousand years ago to trick people into following him, the emperor tells him to shut up: "It's awfully rude of you to talk to Your Majesty this way. Your Majesty knows that you are a journalist in disguise and have been sent from the hostile kingdom of China. You have attempted to conspire with the prison authorities to lure me into giving you incriminating evidence."

Literature can serve as an escape, as when Liao drifts into memories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years ofSolitude." He identifies in particular with one of the characters, Colonel Buendia, who loses his mind after being tied to a chestnut tree for many years. Like the Colonel, Liao retreats into his own mind. At other times, literary works illustrate the most primitive aspects of prison existence. Liao recalls Milan Kundera's definition, in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," of totalitarian kitsch as "the absolute denial of shit." Liao writes that he cannot raise human feces to a higher level of metaphor: "In this ordinary memoir of mine, shit is shit. I keep mentioning it because I almost drowned in it." This is quite literally true; as a newcomer in a cell, or if he had lost favor with one of the cell bosses, he would have to sleep with his face next to the toilet bucket.

And yet he can't resist using shit metaphorically, as in his statement that he is living "in the shitty pigsty called China." Sickness, too, is elevated to metaphor: “If China were a patient suffering from colon cancer, the city of Chongqing would be the filthy terminus of the colon, a diseased anus." Prison is frequently described in his book as a prison within the giant prison of a diseased Chinese society, a grotesque mirror of the political institutions and rhetoric of the People's Republic of China.

The language of Maoism, now almost as ingrained in Chinese life as Confucian maxims once were, and often used in a similar way, crops up again and again in prison conversations. Inmates sometimes use Mao’s dictums sarcastically, as when the unfortunate woodcutter, after having imbibed the laxative, is prevented from getting to the toilet bucket: 'Without discipline and rules," they taunt him, "revolution will not succeed." Sometimes Mao is quoted in earnest. A cell boss who is sympathetic to Liao warns him against cultivating the friendship of a fellow-intellectual: "Don't be too bookish .... Remember what Chairman Mao said about class struggles-never let your guard down against your class enemy."

Quite apart from Maoist sentiments, it is the Chinese system of government that is replicated inside the prison. This owes something to Leninist Party organization, but a great deal to more traditional practices as well. When Liao first enters the Song Mountain Investigation Center, his cell boss explains how things work. He likens the cell hierarchy to the Politburo and the Central Military Commission, whose members are above the common people. They can do anything they please. But, to maintain order, they must impose absolute unity in the cell. The first sign of rebellion will be crushed without mercy. However, the boss says, echoing centuries of Confucian doctrine, the rulers cannot be too harsh: 'We need to let the people beneath us feel that we are like their parents." When Liao objects, quoting Chairman Mao's saying that the people are the parents of the Party, the boss shows a better understanding of Chinese reality: 'That's goddamned nonsense! If a thief here wishes to have a nice filling meal, it's up to me to decide."

Not surprisingly, the prison authorities also model their methods on common practices in the People's Republic. The use of political campaigns, for example. Inmates at the Investigation Center were forced to take part in an annual campaign called "Confess Your Own Crimes and Report on Others." Formal rallies were held in the courtyard, just as in Maoist times, with much chanting of political slogans and long speeches made by police and prison officials. Many hours were devoted to writing confessions and denunciations. Cell bosses were encouraged to pick the juiciest items from their menu of torments for those whose keenness to confess or tell on others was judged to be inadequate.

This tactic, too, is a toxic combination of tradition and modern innovation. Ritual confession was always part of Confucian justice. Being forced to report on others, though hardly unknown in the past, is a totalitarian refinement designed to break all trust among people, so that their only loyalty will be to the Party. Liao writes that confess-and-report campaigns were so rough that several people died under torture. When things threatened to get seriously out of hand, however, the authorities would call a halt to the proceedings, and, in the usual Maoist fashion, turn the tables on the perpetrators by starting another campaign, this time one called "Crack Down on Prison Bullies." The very people who had been encouraged to "break'' recalcitrant prisoners were now broken in turn.

But, of course, China has moved on since Mao's decades of terror. When Liao was in prison, China's door had already been open to business with the capitalist world for more than ten years. Economic reforms began in the early nineteen-eighties, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In 1992, Deng called for even faster economic growth. As a result, in Liao’s words, "prison personnel never missed a beat and were quick to take advantage of the free labor to fatten their wallets."

Free labor is a polite phrase for slavery.

Each prisoner was required to spend at least ten hours a day putting together medicine packets, while being subjected to political exhortations from loudspeakers - the usual Chinese Communist mixture of ideological bullying and economic exploitation. Liao remarks that this type of repetitive manual work had already been abandoned by local factories. But prison authorities could make tidy profits by whipping the incarcerated slaves into reaching quotas of up to three thousand packets a day. Inmates who tried to escape or who resisted the prison regimen would be beaten up or thrown into "dark cells" that were just big enough to crawl into and lie down. "After a year or so," Liao writes, "the dark-cell-dweller's skin turned pale, his bones fragile, and his hair white as frost. The skin became so transparent that one could see the blue veins."

Liao mentions a few moments of respite. There were instances of kindness from cell bosses who favored him, sometimes for being a poet; respect for the written word is not dead in China. A Buddhist monk taught him to play the flute. And, once in a while, conditions improved a little because of foreign pressure on China to do .better on human rights. This should make those of us who had given up all hope of influencing official Chinese behavior from the outside a little less cynical.

Meanwhile, Liao tried to keep his memories of what he had heard and seen in prison by scribbling tiny notes in a copy of the classic Chinese novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms." On January 31, 1994, he was freed. But, in his account, his release was only the beginning of a different type of ordeal, perhaps more bitter in its way. Troublemakers and dissidents are rarely popular in oppressive societies. They cause problems for others by provoking reprisals, and they make the majority of people who refuse to rebel feel uneasy about their conformity. Liao dreaded going home for the New Year and other family celebrations, because he knew that he would be criticized. His wife decided to divorce him-perhaps not surprising, as Liao never claims to have been a devoted husband. Worse was his abandonment by old friends. After four years of jail, he writes, "I was no more than a pile of dog shit to my fellow writers." This rejection might suggest a peculiarly Chinese form of callousness, but it actually has more to do with how China is now run. After the failed rebellion of 1989, the Communist government made a clever deal with the educated classes: if members of the urban elite would stay out of politics, they would have the freedom to enrich themselves. "Our whole country was suddenly busy making money, which was a corrosive acid that dissolved political dissent," Liao writes. "The same people who used to march fearlessly in the street for democracy now have become 'apolitical' in the current era of rampant materialism- Communist style." Several of his former artistic comrades had become businessmen.

In such circumstances, the normal human tendency to shun troublemakers is strengthened by the irrepressible consciousness of having made a shabby deal. Liao's keenest readers, as is so often the case with people living under dictatorship, were the officials who were paid to censor his words. Reduced to life as an educated vagabond, sometimes playing his flute in the streets to survive, and terrified of being sent to jail again, Liao managed to cross the border into Vietnam; from there, he made his way to Germany, where he now lives. And so it is that this immensely gifted Chinese writer performs his poetic acts of mourning for the entertainment of audiences in Berlin and New York-an exotic "dissident'' abroad, his voice to be heard everywhere except where it is most needed.

CHAOS - the origin of myth

According to the early Greek poet Hesiod, the first event to occur in the cosmos was the birth, or "coming-into-being," of Chaos. After Chaos followed Gaia (earth), Tartarus (cosmic prison), and Eros (erotic love).

These beings were the Primordial Four-the first four entities identified. Everything that came into the world thereafter derived ultimately from one or more of the Primordial Four. Chaos did not signify a state of utter disorder, as the word now implies; rather it was "bounded space," as in a chasm.

Indeed, the words "chaos" and "chasm" are etymologically related. In the logic of the myth Chaos offered room in which the world could develop. Chaos had a dual nature: it was not only a physical thing but also a personality, a living being out of which two other cosmic entities, Darkness and Night, emerged, which in turn produced other elements of the cosmos.

Like Darkness and Night, the descendants of Chaos were mostly intangible elements such as Death, Sleep, and Discord.

In the first century CE the Roman poet Ovid presented a different mythic cosmogony, in which the world initially consisted of shapeless matter, Chaos, within which reigned confusion and discord. Opposites warred with each other: heat with cold, wet with dry, hard with soft, heavy with light. Nature or some god liberated these elements, brining order to the universe. In Ovid's version, Chaos was truly characterized by a state of "utter disorder."

Many cosmogonic myths tell of an initial being or substance that contains within itself many of the eventual constituents of the cosmos. Examples are Tiamat (Mesopotamia) and Ginnungagap (Scandinavia).

by William Hansen

30-Second Mythology

6 Fundraising Habits to Develop Before 2014

by Pamela Barden

I hate to mention it, but July is just a few days away. That means half of 2013 is gone, and we'll all be focusing on calendar year-end giving before we know it. (My apologies to those of you with a June 30 fiscal year-end; you probably were hoping for a few weeks respite before having to think about another year-end.)

Dec. 31 is one of the unavoidable events every year, but for many nonprofits it's also the close of the most important giving season. Take a look at these six ideas, and see if there are any you need to add or recommit to. If you get started now, you can go into 2014 with some new habits as well as (we hope) the glow from a great year-end giving season.

July: Measure what matters

If you aren't looking at the volume of new donor acquisition, lapsed donor renewal and current donor retention, do it. Today. And at least once a month for the rest of your fundraising life. Once you know how these key areas are performing, you can put your energies into fixing what is broken instead of chasing after every new idea that you read or hear about.

 August: Find new ways to be creative

Are you struggling to say the same thing over and over again? Set aside time every month to look at what other nonprofits are mailing, e-mailing, and posting on their websites and in social media. Be on the lookout for great ideas that can inspire your own next great idea. Feeling totally uninspired today as I prepared to write copy, I checked out the Who's Mailing What! archive as well as recent samples that came into my mailbox and inbox. Suddenly I was no longer alone in my search for creative stimulation.

September: Think like a new donor

Getting a first donation is just the beginning. What are new donors expecting from you next? How quickly are you thanking them? What are they receiving from you (by mail, e-mail, phone, etc.) that reaffirms the wisdom they showed by making that first gift? Yes, overall attrition rates in our industry are awful. But that's no excuse. Before the surge of new donors at year-end, make sure you have your great welcome process fully operational.

October: Don't give up without a fight

Reactivating lapsed donors is tough, but year-end is an ideal time to invite them back. Put a strategy in writing, indicating every effort you could make to bring donors back on board. Of course, we all have limited time (and budgets), so choose the ones that look like the best options. Then make them happen.

November: Try something new — but stick with what works, too

Is there something missing from your fundraising program that you think might revitalize it? Choose something new, and work toward testing it as soon as possible. (It may not be until after Jan. 1 due to workload, but if you don't start planning now, it might not even happen then.) At the same time, make sure your plan for December and beyond includes solid, proven (at your organization) fundraising methods. Chasing the newest idea helps stave off your boredom, but it might not resonate with your donors.

December: Resolve to make every communication in 2014 matter to your donors

Chances are, many of your donors enjoy hearing from you as long as what you say is interesting (to them). If there are communications in your fundraising program that meet an internal need but not a donor need, maybe it's time to get the entire organization to agree to let go. At least try. You might not win the battle today, but perhaps you will plant a seed that leads to the desired results some time in the new year.

It's easy to let our own boredom — or our own comfort zone — drive our decision making in fundraising. At least it is for this old dog. For the rest of the year, try to have puppy-like tenacity to sniff out ways to make your fundraising program even better — for your donors and for your organization.

Leadership – by Jackie Robinson

“I’m not concerned with you liking or disliking me.  All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”  - Jackie Robinson

A Leader is persistent and optimistic.
A Leader carries himself with grace.
A Leader has a vision – and never wavers from it.
A Leader prepares for almost anything.
A Leader has inner strength.
A Leader understands actions speak louder than words.
A Leader settles only for success.
A Leader inspires others to achieve.

How to Be Like Jackie Robinson - Life Lessons from Baseball's Greatest Hero
 by Pat Williams with Mike Sielski

A TIME FOR CHOOSING - The Future of the Republic Party

The Future of the Republican Party
by Robert Costa
For much of the year, Mitt Romney and his advisers spoke about the presidential campaign as a referendum on President Barack Obama's economic record. "Our view is that this is a very simple election," a senior Romney strategist told U.S. News & World Report in June. "It's a referendum on Obama's handling of the economy. " 1 As a Harvard Business School graduate and a former private-equity executive at Bain Capital, Romney was comfortable making a numbers-driven case against the president.

Initially, he wasn't looking to lead a movement; he aspired to be an even tempered alternative to a likable Democratic incumbent. "Don't forget, [Obama] has been president for three and a half years, and talk is cheap," Romney told a Cincinnati crowd in the early summer, at the peak of his push to frame the race as a clinical review. "If you want to see the results of his economic policy, look around Ohio, look around the country."2 "The conventional wisdom about this presidential election ... is that it represented a competition between two competing paradigms," says Nate Silver, the New York Times election analyst. "Mitt Romney, this theory held, would seek to make the election a referendum on President Obama's performance-hoping that voters' dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in general, and the economy in particular, would lead them to vote him out of office, almost regardless of what the alternative was."3 Romney's approach was partly a product of his experience in the Republican presidential primaries, where he outpaced conservative crusaders such as former Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, and Tea Party star Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. During those contests, his reputation as a competent manager was critical, and his aides predicted that he could sweep into office with a similar general election campaign.

That strategy changed in August when Romney tapped Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, to be the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee. Quite suddenly, the Romney campaign's message shifted from a near-constant focus on economic matters to a broader and fiercer debate about a choice between "two futures," as Ryan often described it in his speeches. "The election is now a choice, not a referendum; a contest between two clearly and sharply different policy visions and views on the role of government," wrote Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, soon after the Ryan pick.4 David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, agreed, noting that with one decision, Romney put conservatism on the ballot.5 No longer was the election about the politics of economic data; it was about the size and scope of government.

Many conservative leaders publicly applauded the selection, because Ryan is a rising star. "It was foremost a shrewd acknowledgment on Mr. Romney's part that his path to the White House is going to take more than pointing out the obvious," wrote Kim Strassel in the Wall Street journal.6 But privately, the reaction was far more mixed. Romney had abruptly injected a full dose of conservative ideology into a campaign that had been studiously avoiding ideology. In the political press, there were whispers about whether Romney could pull it off "American politics is littered with bold and improbable decisions that don't work out very well," wrote Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast. "With this one, the chances of failure look pretty good. Mitt Romney has now tied his presidential fortunes to Paul Ryan's budget plan. He may say he doesn't endorse all the plan's specifics, but as a matter of political reality, he already has. "7 Soon after, the questions began to mount: With Ryan at his side, would Romney be able to both excite the base and woo the suburban moderates? Would he be able to balance his appeal as a northeastern businessman with Ryan's fiscal bravado? At first blush, the juxtaposition of an experienced former governor with a young and dynamic legislator made for compelling political theater, but its political viability was a variable that weighed upon Romney's advisers.

Months later, it's evident that Romney struggled to make the Ryan pick an election-defining moment. Romney and Ryan enjoyed a personal rapport, but they rarely managed to present a coherent message about what they represented. At times, both candidates were quite vocal about being a "choice" ticket, but in other instances, they ducked ideology and reverted back to Romney's earlier, simpler theme about an economic "referendum." Less than three weeks after the Ryan selection, Romney barely touched upon conservative ideology in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. In short, the campaign never found its political footing. On the stump, Romney and Ryan largely avoided making major blunders, but they had difficulties communicating a vision. Whereas Obama ran a full throated and consistent campaign for expanding the federal government, Romney unsuccessfully strove to be simultaneously an ideological conservative to his base and a centrist to undecided voters.  Ryan's selection and its influence on the campaign remains a prism for interpreting Romney's defeat and thinking about the GOP's future.

At the time of the pick, it was an understandable maneuver to balance the ticket, but later, it became indicative of an uneasy strategy. The pair hoped to build a coalition among the GOP's various wings, but, ultimately, they failed to weave a thread through those groups. The challenge for the Republican Party in the second Obama term is figuring out how to succeed where Romney and Ryan could not. How does the party increase its ranks and raise its poll numbers while sustaining its core principles? In making its case to the country, does it need to focus more on the Obama record and less on ideology? Or does it need to explain, more coherently and in greater detail, the ideological "choice," the core difference between present-day Democrats and Republicans? Can the party eventually find the equilibrium that Romney and Ryan sought? As Republicans grapple with these questions and plot a renewal, they will have to make decisions in three distinct areas: policy, demographics, and leadership. When Romney picked Ryan, he looked out at the field of Veep contenders and tried to pick the person who could attract the most support. According to Romney's advisers, those three areas were also top considerations. Indeed, Romney's vice presidential calculus, calibrating and strategizing about how best to move forward, is akin to what the Republican Party will be doing in the two years before the 2014 midterms.

It is again, as Ronald Reagan said in 1964, a time for choosing for the party and the conservative movement. The corning debates within the party about its platform, its constituencies, and its leading figures, both in Washington and in the states, will say much about its potential success. The debates will sometimes be heated, but they are critical, since the takeaway from the Romney-Ryan experience is that the party is in flux. It wants to blend its Tea Party vigor (represented by the Ryan pick) with more traditional values (represented by the Romney nomination), but it is unsure of how to do this.

THE POLICY WARS

Throughout the 2012 general election campaign, Ryan frequently spoke about the looming fiscal crisis. He proclaimed the values of the budget he had authored in the lower chamber as evidence of Republican seriousness about the larger spending issues of our time. Even in the swing state of Florida, which is home to millions of retirees, Ryan campaigned hard on the theme of reforming Medicaid and Medicare through policies, including what he calls "premium support," that would encourage more individual control of health-care spending. Part of the larger Romney-Ryan ambition was to lead a legislative charge to overhaul these federal programs, and Romney told his advisers that he admired Ryan's ability to boldly take on the biggest and often most politically complicated problems. But although conservative intellectuals celebrated the tenaciousness of Romney and Ryan on entitlement reform, many retirees were less appreciative. When Ryan spoke to the AARP in late September, he was booed when he talked about tackling the entitlement issue. On Election Day, Romney and Ryan lost Florida after months of leading the president in Florida polls.

The Romney-Ryan entitlement endeavor was a key part of the campaign's policy strategy, which looked to the intellectual and legislative leadership of Ryan and his allies in the House as inspiration for the party at large. On other issues, such as foreign policy and taxes, Romney and Ryan held traditional Republican positions (a strong, well-funded military; lowering tax rates), but the campaign's platform generally mirrored the move by House Republicans in 2011-2012 to shift the party to the right. Now, as Ryan returns to the chairmanship of the Budget Committee, he will be in a position to continue the House-driven molding of national Republican policy, but the stakes and the composition of the debate have changed. The coming policy wars are likely to be less about how Ryan is positioning the party to take on entitlements and more about whether the party even wants to lead its policy agenda with the issue, and whether on other issues, such as taxes and foreign policy, we will begin to see a drift back toward the center.

"The test will be whether Mr. Ryan . . . can make the transition from House budget philosopher to governing heavyweight who can help negotiate a bipartisan deal and sell it to his colleagues," wrote Jennifer Steinhauer, a New York Times reporter, in late November. But Ryan will not be the only force in the debate about the direction of policy. As an influential congressman fresh off the GOP ticket, he'll be a player, but the party is no longer subject to the leadership of the presidential candidate.

For instance, House Speaker John Boehner, who has led the Republican conference since 2007, said in a speech after the election that he is willing to make concessions on tax revenue. This is evidence of an almost immediate change in the policy talks within the party. Romney and Ryan were wary of ever discussing a Republican agreement about revenue increases, but Boehner interpreted the election as a clue to the future. "That is the will of the people, and we answer to them," Boehner said at a Capitol news conference. "For purposes of forging a bipartisan agreement that begins to solve the problem, we're willing to accept new revenue, under the right conditions. "9 "Not since the 1970s have Republicans been so weak on the tax issue," says David Weigel, a Slate writer. "Like Romney said, in his way, they're victims of their own success. They've lowered rates to the extent that voters don't fret about them. So they're no longer talking about the Dec. 31 deadline for the tax rates as a Masada, a full-bore defense of the old rates. They're talking about what they can get if they accede to the Democrats."10 The famous tax "pledge" many Republican lawmakers have made, working with anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, now seems to be less of an issue. Before the election, breaking the Norquist pledge could be a perilous political move. Now, in the post-Romney era, many Republicans see moving toward more revenue options as living within the new political reality. They are quickly realizing, as Lloyd Grove wrote in the Daily Beast, that the "grubby business of entitlement reform,"11 which they had hoped would be the central project of 2013, would have to be temporarily shelved as they look to protect the tax rates established a decade ago.

Beyond the initial policy battles over tax rates and revenue, Republicans will also have to face daunting questions on a variety of other fronts.

Social conservatism remains an important part of the national Republican platform, but some leading conservatives are asking whether the GOP approach to gay marriage, abortion, and drugs fits the times. "The speed with which civil unions and same-sex marriage have become debatable topics and even mainstream policies is astonishing," wrote George F. Will in the Washington Post after the Romney defeat. "As is conservatives' failure to recognize this: They need not endorse such policies, but neither need they despise those, such as young people, who favor them."12 The GOP Senate candidacies of Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, which were both seriously hurt by the candidates' comments about rape, did not help the Romney-Ryan cause, and they damaged the Republican objective of using social issues, especially family values and life issues, to win over select groups of undecided voters. Look for the debate about social conservatism in the coming months and years to be just as volatile and unpredictable as the debate over tax revenues.

Republicans are not likely to abandon their conservative positions on the key social issues, just as they won't abandon their wish for lower tax rates, but there will be ample debate in the halls of Congress and in statehouses about how best to hold onto Republican principles while appealing to the Obama generation.

Immigration, too, will find itself back in the center of the Republican debates. "For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: border fence plus amnesty," argues Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. "Yes, amnesty.

Use the word. Shock and awe-full legal normalization Gust short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement. " 13 The position on the opposite side of the argument, against amnesty, is just as robust as Krauthammer's. "Having suffered not one but several humiliating defeats on Tuesday, Republicans are in danger of embracing 'comprehensive' immigration reform-which is to say, amnesty-out of panic," wrote the editors of National Review, a few days after Krauthammer's column was published. "The GOP does need to do better among Hispanics and other voters, but this is not the way to achieve that-and, more important, it is bad policy. " 14 On foreign policy, the path ahead is murkier, especially because Romney's defeat is not blamed on his positions, but rather on his critique of the Obama administration's handling of foreign crises, especially the attack on American diplomatic officials in Libya. There is discussion among pundits about whether Republicans need to move closer to Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas congressman and presidential candidate. Speaking on Fox News after the election, Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and a supporter of President George W. Bush's foreign policy, predicted that future Republican leaders would pay greater attention to the Ron Paul wing of the party. 'Tm not a fan of Ron Paul," Kristol said. "But I do think, analytically, that Rand Paul [Republican senator from Kentucky and Ron Paul's son] could be a formidable presence in the Republican Party over the next three or four years."15 But it will be domestic policy where the party will see the greatest tension.

Overall, there will undoubtedly be tensions. While the Ron Paul faction is ascending on foreign policy, the GOP establishment in Congress and in the party ranks remains mostly committed to the Reagan approach of fostering American strength in the world and a strong military. To at least some extent, this will be challenged. And on social issues, the party doesn't seem ready, for the moment, to jettison its traditional positions on marriage and abortion. But these positions will also be questioned. As conservative intellectual Reihan Salam said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in mid-November, the party desperately wants to reformulate its methods. "[That] doesn't entail jettisoning social conservatism and cultural populism, but rather reframing them in the interests of making them relevant to the lived experience of middle America," he said.16 Ramesh Ponnuru, a National Review editor, concurs. "The Iraq War, the financial crisis, and other issues specific to the late Bush years obviously did play a huge role" in the Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008, he writes.

"But it's also true that Republicans weren't even arguing that they had a domestic agenda that would yield any direct benefits for most voters, and that has to have hurt them."17 The same was true in 2012.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC DEBACLE

The Republicans' demographic problem, exposed by the 2012 exit polls, is hardly a surprise to party grandees. "The numbers tell a clear story; the demographics of America are changing in a way that is deadly for the Republican Party as it exists today. A GOP ice age is on the way," wrote Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican consultant, in 2009.18 Though policy debates will form the center of the Republican transition from the Romney campaign to the future, finding a way to reconcile the party's policies with the country's changing demographics will be another challenge. There is a growing concern within the party that the older white voters who helped elect Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to the White House over the past three decades can no longer form an electoral majority, so the party must find a way to reach out to minority voters, young voters, and other Americans who have not traditionally identified themselves as conservatives or Republicans.

According to NBC News, party leaders are citing demographics as the reason for Romney's defeat in behind-the-scenes conversations with donors and strategists. "This RNC report of exit-poll data, which NBC News has obtained and which RNC Chair Reince Priebus presented to GOP senators on Wednesday, states that 'demographic change' in the United States 'is real,"' reported NBC's Mark Murray. "It notes that the white share of the electorate has declined from 81 percent in 2000 to 72 percent in 2008. And it points out that '3 in 10 voters will be minorities in 2016."'19 But most politicos do not think this challenge is insurmountable.

"While demographic and population trends are clearly working against Republicans-Texas as a swing state in 2020, anyone?-the party is not that far, electorally speaking, from creating a credible path back to 270 electoral votes," says the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza. "Find a way to make the industrial Midwest-Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and even Pennsylvania-competitive again and the map suddenly doesn't look so bad for the GOP."20 That said, Hispanics are going to see a great deal of outreach from Republicans in the next year, and the immigration-policy debate will be part of that effort. Republicans are very worried that states such as Florida and Texas, which have large blocs of Hispanic voters, may be lost to the party permanently unless a fresh message can be offered. Still, "outreach is not done in a single awkward lunge," says Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter. "It will involve more than endorsing comprehensive immigration legislation, though that is necessary. Hispanic voters have a series of concerns typical of a poorer but economically mobile community: working schools, college access, health care, a working safety net. " 21 The same strategy is also likely to apply to Roman Catholic voters. This group, like Hispanics, gave the president strong support, and Republicans are eager to bring them back into the GOP fold. Catholics represent "more than a quarter of the electorate," according to CNN, and have backed Obama for two straight cycles. 22 But while Republican leaders feel the demographic problem keenly, they also understand that demographics alone can't take all the blame for Romney's loss. The shift away from the GOP among certain groups is seen as a symptom of the larger policy and leadership problems in the party. "It's clear that with our losses in the presidential race and a number of key Senate races, we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party," said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the outgoing chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a post-election statement.

"While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all comers of our GOP lost. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead."23 Putting a Hispanic or another minority politician on the ticket next time, adds Ross Douthat of the New York Times, won't solve anything unless Republicans understand the political and economic reasons for the Romney defeat. "Both shifts, demographic and economic, must be addressed if Republicans are to find a way back to the majority," he says. "But the temptation for the party's elites will be to fasten on the demographic explanation, because playing identity politics seems far less painful than overhauling the Republican economic message. "24 Nonetheless, something must be done to address the Republicans' demographic debacle. Romney won white evangelical voters in strong numbers, and he won churchgoing Catholics easily, too. But growing numbers of secular, younger, and minority voters are staying away from the GOP. "A version of his coalition in Virginia-a combination of minorities, women and younger adults-also helped Mr. Obama win Colorado, Nevada [and] Florida," reports Michael Shear of the New York Times.25 Addressing demographics will be partly a matter of policy, partly a matter of politics. Republicans were out-campaigned by the Obama team when it came to organizing among African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Finding a way to win over these voters will take time, but it will almost certainly be a major part of the Republican rehabilitation between now and the next presidential campaign. The party sees that Romney's model was not sufficient this time, and will be even less so four years from now.

THE LEADERSHIP VACUUM

Yet before the horse race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination begins in earnest around late 2014, the party will have to fill the leadership vacuum left by the Romney defeat. Who will step up and become a new national leader for a party in the wilderness? That is a critical question as the party moves forward. The early favorites for the 2016 GOP nomination, such as Florida senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, will continue to be described as leading figures. Rubio is considered to be a potential point person on immigration reform, and many Republicans admire Christie as a moderate and a tough executive. But beyond the pull of certain personalities, the real leadership debate will be between the Tea Party wing of the party and the more centrist leadership on Capitol Hill. On policy and on demographics, as previously discussed, Republicans are adjusting to the election by changing their tone and approach. The same can be said for how Republicans on Capitol Hill are adjusting in terms of leadership. Though the top tier of Republican House and Senate leaders remains unchanged, there are signs that the party is having internal debates about the tone and style of its leadership.

Speaker Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Whip Kevin McCarthy all kept their spots on the Republican leadership team following the election, but the House GOP's fourth leadership spot-conference chairman-saw a fight for the party's future. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Representative Tom Price of Georgia ran against each other for the position and, although the vote tally has not been made public, McMorris Rodgers won. Price, a former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, had the support of Ryan and other Tea Party Republicans but was unable to beat McMorris Rodgers, a Boehner ally and one of the House GOP's leading women. "Price, for instance, tied for most conservative House member ... while McMorris Rodgers ranked 117," according to National Journal's 2011 ratings.26 The early message was that House Republicans did not want to present an all-male leadership team to the country mere days after losing among women. It was also a sign that though Ryan and his conservative allies remain the driving force on public policy, they don't hold total control.

On the other side of the Capitol, Senator-Elect Ted Cruz of Texas, a Hispanic Republican and Tea Party favorite, was named vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, an even-tempered Republican who is popular with policy wonks and donors, was also named vice chairman. Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, a low-key midwesterner, was elected NRSC chairman. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a soft-spoken conservative, kept his position as minority leader, even though Republicans had a net loss of two Senate seats in 2012. Moran, Cruz, and Portman will be major players in the coming year as the GOP tries to win back seats in the 2014 cycle and build toward a potential majority. Several Democratic senators will be up for reelection in 2014, and Republicans are already strategizing about how to win back the upper chamber. These three new members of the Senate leadership will be parts of the puzzle, but look for Ryan, Rubio, and other legislators who are not part of the official leadership structure to continue to influence the party's direction from various media and other platforms.

For the moment, there is no obvious party leader, either in the presidential discussion or inside the Beltway. "The party finds itself in the unenviable position of having to reinvent itself-something most top GOP strategists and lawmakers agree needs to be done-without an obvious standard-bearer to carry that message on a daily basis," says Aaron Blake in the Washington Post. "That could be less than ideal for a party in need of cohesion, leadership and a steady hand. "27 At a GOP post-election gubernatorial retreat in Las Vegas, former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour said that the party should take its time in settling on a new spokesman post-Romney. He said there are too many potential stars to rush to judgment about the future of the party. "We've got to give our political organization a very serious proctology exam," Barbour said.  "We need to look everywhere."28

CONCLUSION

When Mitt Romney won the nomination, he first tried to run his campaign as a referendum on Obama. Then, when he began to slide in the national polls, he decided to switch to what pundits described as a "choice" campaign, which put ideology and bold ideas on the ballot, and not just an argument about a sagging economy and failed stewardship in the Oval Office. Paul Ryan, as the vice presidential pick, was the keystone to that strategy. In some ways, Romney did manage to elevate the discussion on entitlements, but he was not able to successfully build a national majority with his policies or his appeals to various demographic groups. In the wake of Romney's defeat, the party is beginning to review his decisions and outlook and to ask itself questions about where to go on those three issues-policy, demographics, and leadership. As the 2012 political season closes, the answers are unclear, but the debate has begun.

Already there are brewing discussions in Congress and in the states about who should lead, what the party should run on, and how it will survive in a changing electoral landscape. These are serious questions, and the post-Romney period will be "a time for choosing" about how the party needs to evolve.

When Romney tapped Ryan, he had a certain rationale: He wanted to frame the election as an ideological choice. He knew he needed to be more than an alternative to a Democratic incumbent who wasn't shy about his desire to expand the federal government. Romney lost, but the Republican Party will need to address considerations akin to the ones Romney faced in the course of his veep search. The party needs new faces and new ideas, but deciding which faces, and which ideas, will be complicated. As Obama is inaugurated and pushes his second-term agenda, Republicans will need to do more than elevate one politician or another into the void.

Before they choose their next nominee, Republicans have to decide, once again, who they are.

NOTES

1. Kenneth T. Walsh, "Team Romney: Election a Referendum on The Economy," U.S. News & World Report, accessed December 20, 2012, www.usnews.com/news/blogs/Ken-Walshs-Washington/2012/06/ 15/ team-romney-election-a-referendum-on-the-economy.

2. Christina Bellatoni and Terence Burlij, "Romney Bus Tour Begins after Day of Economic Debate," PBS.org,June 15, 2012.

3. Nate Silver, "Referendum or Choice, Which Candidate Will Show Fighting Spirit?," New York Times, October 22, 2012.

4. Ben Smith, "Ryan Pick Means a New Campaign for Romney," BuzzFeed, August 10, 2012.

5. David Frum, "Why Ryan?," Daily Beast, August 11, 2012, www.thedailybeast .com/articles/2012/08/11/paul-ryan.htrnl.

6. Kimberly A. Strassel, "Why Romney Chose Ryan," Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2012.

7. Peter Beinart, "Mitt Romney's Pick of Paul Ryan: Bold Doesn't Always Work," Daily Beast, August 13, 2012.

8.Jennifer Steinhauer, "Back on Hill, Ryan Remains a Fiscal Force," New York Times, November 18, 2012.

9. John A. Boehner, "Speaker Boehner Calls for Bipartisan Action to Avert the Fiscal Cliff," Office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, November 7, 2012, accessed December 20, 2012, www.speaker.gov/speech/full-text-speaker -boehner-calls-bipartisan-action-avert-fiscal-cliff.

10. David Weigel, "Tax Hike Nation," Slate, November 16, 2012.

11. Lloyd Grove, "Grover Norquist Sees the Fiscal Cliff and Guns It," Daily Beast, November 16, 2012, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/16/grover -norquist-sees-the-fiscal-cliff-and-guns-it.htrnl.

12. George F. Will, "A Reformed Republican Party," Washington Post, November 16, 2012.

13. Charles Krauthammer, "The Way Forward," Washington Post, November 9, 2012.

14. "The Amnesty Delusion," National Review, November 12, 2012.

15. William Kristol, Fox News Sunday interview, Fox News, November 11, 2012.

16. Reihan Salam, remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, November 16, 2012.

17. Ramesh Ponnuru, "The Party's Problem," National Review, November 14, 2012.

18. Mike Murphy, "For Republicans, the Ice Age Cometh," Time, June 22, 2009.

19. A Time for Choosing 175 19. Mark Murray, "RNC Report Suggest Other Reasons Why Romney Lost," NBC News, November 16, 2012.

20. Chris Cillizza, "Future for Republicans Is Not So Bad," Washington Post, November 18, 2012 .

21. Michael Gerson, "Shifting Demographics Will Force GOP's Hand," Washington Post, November 18, 2012.

22. Dan Gilgoff, "6 Ways Religious Demographics Could Determine Tuesday's Winner," CNN.com, November 6, 2012.

23. Michael Cooper, "G.O.P. Factions Grapple over Meaning of Loss," New York Times, November 7, 2012, accessed December 20, 2012, www.nytimes .com/2012/ 11 /08/ us/ politics/ obama-victory-causes-republican-soul-searching .html.

24. Ross Douthat, "The Demographic Excuse," New York Times, November 10, 2012.

25. Michael Shear, "Demographic Shift Brings New Worry for Republicans," New York Times, November 7, 2012.

26. Michael Catalini, "McMorris Rodgers vs. Price: Leadership Race a Study in Contrasts," National]ournal, November 12, 2012.

27. Aaron Blake, "The Republican Party's Leadership Vacuum," Washington Post, November 16, 2012.

28. Karen Tumulty and Dan Eggen, "GOP Governors Back Away from Romney's Remarks," Washington Post, November 15, 2012.

BARACK OBAMA AND THE NEW AMERICA

The 2012 Election and the Changing Face of Politics

Edited by Larry Sabata

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

ISBN 978-1-4422-2263-2

ISBN 978-1-4422-2264-9

ISBN 978-1-4422-2265-6

Think back over the past twenty years. Americans have endured three recessions, the last one being the worst since the Great Depression; the devastating, life-changing attacks on September 11, 2001; two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former having become the longest conflict in U.S. history; and many disturbing acts of domestic terrorism, from the Oklahoma City bombing to mass killings at high schools, colleges, churches, theaters, and even a congressional town meeting. The national debt has grown massive and our spending obligations are crushing, yet the gap between rich and poor has grown, and the future for the nation's middle class as well as young people seeking educational and employment opportunities appears dimmer.

Yet the country has just reelected its third consecutive president, Barack Obama, after the two-term presidencies ofBill Clinton and George W. Bush.

That hasn't happened since the White House tenures of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe between 1801 and 1825.

It may be that Americans recognize the world's sole superpower will face great challenges regardless of who is in power. Voters also understand that in most cases presidents can't prevent bad things from happening and should be held accountable mainly for how they confront their tests and trials.

That helps to explain the reelection of President Obama in difficult economic times. While there has been disappointment, even among some of Obama's most fervent supporters, that more progress has not been made in returning the nation to prosperity, people understood that he inherited a mess and four years was a short time. Voters also judged his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, wanting in critical respects.

The 2012 election was a highly competitive and hard-fought one, but the result was decisive, especially in the Electoral College. This book is a first look at this remarkable election-how it happened, what the voting patterns were, and why the electorate made the choices it did.

Some of the country's best academics and political analysts have come together to offer their viewpoints in this volume:

• After another closely contested presidential race, Americans are perhaps more divided than ever; Professor Alan Abramowitz of Emory University looks at these widening gaps in American life, partisan and otherwise, and how they manifested themselves this cycle.

• Professor James E. Campbell of the University at Buffalo-SUNY examines the fundamentals of this election-the economy, the president's approval rating, and other factors-and how they helped determine the outcome.

• Rhodes Cook, publisher of the widely respected Rhodes Cook Letter on politics and former writer for Congressional Quarterly, breaks down the presidential nominating process and ponders the future of the American political convention.

• Former Federal Elections Commission chairman Michael Toner and his colleague Karen Trainer write on the impact of the federal elections laws on this election, with a particular focus on outside group spending.

• Through mediums old (television) and new (social media), voters were inundated with political messaging throughout the election cycle. Media expert Diana Owen of Georgetown University looks at how the press covered the race.

• My superb colleagues at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Geoffrey Skelley and Kyle Kondik, analyze 2012's down-ticket contests for the Senate and governorships (Skelley) and the House of Representatives (Kondik).

• We are pleased to feature three of the brightest new stars in political journalism in this volume: Nate Cohn of The New Republic, Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect, and Robert Costa of National Review. Cohn does a deep dive into the exit polls to examine the demographics of Election 2012, while Bouie and Costa look forward to the futures of, respectively, the Democratic and Republican parties.

• After every presidential election, some are quick to say that the election signals a major change in American politics. Sean Trende, an analyst at RealClearPolitics, examines 2012's significance and what, if anything, its results might tell us about upcoming contests.

• Finally, Professor Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida finishes with some concluding thoughts about the future of the permanent American political campaign.

This volume could not have readied so quickly after the election without the hard work of the contributors, but also the professional staff of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Those who helped keep the book on track include Center staffers Kondik and Skelley as well as Tim Robinson, Ken Stroupe, and Mary D. Brown.

We'd also like to thank Rowman and Littlefield for joining us in this endeavor; Senior Executive Editor Jonathan Sisk, Assistant Editor Benjamin Verdi, Marketing Manager Deborah Orgel Hudson, and Senior Production Editor Julia Loy were all invaluable in producing and polishing the book.

We hope our readers find the book helpful as they put the 2012 election into perspective. The contributors make clear how the face of American politics is changing, but in the end politics is shaped by the people who care to participate. The most useful participants are those who have taken the time to understand why we have arrived at our current juncture as a nation-and this volume may assist you on that path.

Larry J. Sabato Director, University of Virginia Center for Politics Charlottesville, Virginia January 2013

CHP "Women in Law Enforcement Seminar" 6/27/2013 in Los Angeles

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is hosting a "Women in Law Enforcement Seminar" to reach out to women who are interested in diversity, challenges, and opportunities. The CHP invites you to attend this seminar to learn how to become a part of their professional organization. This seminar will provide information on how to apply to the CHP, challenges that women face in law enforcement, and motivational tools to initiate and complete the hiring process.

The CHP Southern Division Recruitment Unit is seeking motivated women who will be committed to carrying out the Department's mission of providing Safety, Service, and Security to the citizens of California, and in making a difference in our communities.

Date: Thursday, June 27, 2013
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Los Angeles Regional Traffic Management Center
2901 West Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90041

To RSVP, or for additional information, please contact the CHP, Southern Division Recruitment Unit, at 818-240-8200, or email Recruitment Officer Kerri Rivas at 501recruitment@chp.ca.gov

Executive Board opening - East Valley Police Activity League Supporters (PALS)

Here’s a unique opportunity to make a difference in your Community! The East Valley Police Activity League Supporters (PALS) is currently considering candidates for a coveted Executive Board position to spearhead the membership efforts on behalf of the organization. This is a VOLUNTEER opportunity, but it comes with great satisfaction as you make a positive impact and further the collaborative relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department’s North Hollywood Division and the Community at large.

PALS provides financial support for the LAPD’s Youth Programs, the Officers, programs co-sponsored by LAPD and the Community, and the Station itself. This organization steps in to supplement what is NOT provided for within the City of Los Angeles’ budget. A few examples of our support include: the purchase of uniform items for LAPD’s Youth Programs members, the purchase of supplemental gear and equipment for the Officers, improvements to the station, support for additional training fees for the Officers, funding for special events benefiting the Community and LAPD and much, much more! We are a 501 © (3) and our supporters are business owners and other stakeholders who are predominantly located within the area surrounding North Hollywood (North Hollywood, Studio City, Valley Glen and Sun Valley). This encompasses the area LAPD's North Hollywood Division is responsible for “serving and protecting”! What PALS provides greatly enhances the overall partnership between law enforcement and the Community.

You will work closely with LAPD’s Command Staff and all of the outstanding Officers who work specifically within the Community Relations Unit of LAPD. Terrific Executive Board members already established – this is the ONLY open position within the Executive Board. Responsibilities will be focused on the growth of the general membership of the organization in addition to community outreach.

Qualified candidates will have some related experience combined with strong organizational skills, a very positive attitude, a high level of professionalism and energy and a commitment to Public Safety. All final candidates must be able to pass a criminal background check as per LAPD policy for all volunteers.



Interested parties should submit resume to:
Jean Sinatra, Vice President – PALS – LAPD’s North Hollywood Division
contact: jeansinatra@earthlink.net