I saw Jobs just once, last year, at the first iPad unveiling, in San Francisco. A mass of tech journalists surged into the auditorium while, over the P.A. system, Bob Dylan sang “How does it feel?” The live-bloggers flipped open their laptops. Joshua Topolsky, who was then the head of Engadget, told me that this was bigger than the iPhone. “In a way, I would almost hate to be Apple right now,” he said.
Jobs was talking to Al Gore in the front row — Gore appeared to be, amazingly, chewing gum. Then the show began, and Steve went onstage, looking thin but fit, like some kind of aging vegan long-distance runner. He told us that so many millions of iPods had been sold and so many million people had visited the retail stores, with their blue-shirted Geniuses waiting to help you. He said it was kind of incredible, and it was — I found myself applauding joyfully and unjournalistically. And then came the announcement: “And we call it — the iPad.”
Immediately afterward, the carping began. Meh, the iPad wasn’t magical at all, it was just a big iPhone, the journalists said. One expert called it “D.O.A.”—disappointing on arrival. But it was a smash; people immediately began figuring out new ways to use this brilliant, slip-sliding rectangle of private joy.
When he was young, Jobs looked remarkably like James Taylor. When he was older and sick, his blue jeans hung off his body. Even so, I thought that he, like a true marathoner, was going to make it — make it to the iPhone 5, to the iPad 3. Instead, he died, too weak at the end, according to the Times, to walk up the stairs of his house.
But Jobs lived to see the Beatles on iTunes, to see Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, not muff the latest iPhone announcement, and then he left us on our own. He died absolutely the king of the world of talking to people who aren’t in the same room with you and of book reading when you don’t have a real book and of movie editing and of e-mail and of music distribution — the king of the world of making good things flow better. You have to love him.
(2011)
War
Why I’m a Pacifist
Six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Abraham Kaufman, the executive secretary of the War Resisters League, stood up in the auditorium of the Union Methodist Church in Manhattan and said something that was difficult to say. Kaufman, a man of thirty-three, who had put himself through City College at night and had worked Sundays selling magazines and candy in a subway station, insisted that we needed peace now — and that to get peace now, we needed to negotiate with Hitler. “This tremendous war can be ended by just one small spark of truth and sanity,” he said.
To those who argued that you couldn’t negotiate with Hitler, Kaufman replied that the Allies were already negotiating with Hitler, and with Japan, too — over prisoners of war, for example, and the sending of food to Greece. It was important to confer right away, Kaufman believed, before either side had lost. Our aim should be what Woodrow Wilson had hoped for at the end of the First World War: a peace without victory. “We ask for peace now,” Kaufman said, “while there is still a world to discuss aims, not when it is too late.”
What explained Kaufman’s urgency? It was simple: he didn’t want any more people to suffer and die. Civilian massacres and military horrors were reported daily, and Kaufman feared that the war would prove to be, as he’d written to the New York Times two years earlier, “so disastrous as to make the 1917 adventure seem quite mild.” He understood exactly what was at stake. In his view, a negotiated peace with Hitler was, paradoxically, the best chance the Allies had of protecting the world from Hitler’s last-ditch, exterminative frenzy.
Kaufman was one of a surprisingly vocal group of World War II pacifists — absolute pacifists, who were opposed to any war service. They weren’t, all of them, against personal or familial self-defense, or against law enforcement. But they did hold that war was, in the words of the British pacifist and parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby, “a monster born of hypocrisy, fed on falsehood, fattened on humbug, kept alive by superstition, directed to the death and torture of millions, succeeding in no high purpose, degrading to humanity, endangering civilization and bringing forth in its travail a hideous brood of strife, conflict and war, more war.” Along with Kaufman and Ponsonby — and thousands of conscientious objectors who spent time in jail, in rural work camps, in hospitals, or in controlled starvation studies — the ranks of wartime pacifists included Vera Brittain, Rabbi Abraham Cronbach, Dorothy Day, and Jessie Wallace Hughan.
I admire these people. They believed in acts of mercy rather than in fist-shaking vows of retribution. They kept their minds on who was actually in trouble. They suffered, some in small ways, some in large, for what they did and said. They were, I think, beautiful examples of what it means to be human. I don’t expect you to agree, necessarily, that they were right in their principled opposition to that enormous war — the war that Hitler began — but I do think you will want to take their position seriously, and see for yourself whether there was some wisdom in it.
Praising pacifists — using the P-word in any positive way, but especially in connection with the Second World War — embarrasses some people, and it makes some people angry. I found this out in 2008, when I published a book about the beginnings of the war. Human Smoke was a mosaic of contradictory fragments and moments in time, composed largely of quotations; it made no direct arguments on behalf of any single interpretation of World War II. But in an afterword, I dedicated the book to the memory of Clarence Pickett — a Quaker relief worker — and other British and American pacifists, because I was moved by what they’d tried to do. “They tried to save Jewish refugees,” I wrote, “feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.”
They were what? In a review in the Nation, Katha Pollitt said she pored over my book obsessively, for hours at a time — and she hated it. “By the time I finished,” she wrote, “I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Pollitt’s displeasure hurt, as bad reviews from thoughtful readers generally do. But I still think the pacifists of World War II were right. In fact, the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic — they were psychologically acute realists.
Who was in trouble in Europe? Jews were, of course. Hitler had, from the very beginning of his political career, fantasized publicly about killing Jews. They must go, he said, they must be wiped out — he said so in the 1920s, he said so in the 1930s, he said so throughout the war (when they were in fact being wiped out), and in his bunker in 1945, with a cyanide pill and a pistol in front of him, his hands shaking from Parkinson’s, he closed his last will and testament with a final paranoid expostulation, condemning “the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.”