While Manny Ramirez rarely offers explanations for his slovenly, erratic behavior out in left field, Gov. Youbetcha treats us to such baffling, inane assertions as not quitting her job would be “a quitter’s way out” and continuing to serve the people of Alaska would amount to “the worthless, easy path.”
And I’m not so sure Rick Sanchez’s suggestion is so daft after all—the legendarily fecund Sarah might be with child once again. And, indeed, I think we should start speculating about the name of the latest addition to the Palin brood. “Grendol” Palin, “Kitt” Palin” or, my favorite, “Palin” Palin?
The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate today—has been mocked out of meaning.
To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.
Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked through the night to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty and Freedom
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.
Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”
This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.
Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.
Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”
“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”
For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.
But Jefferson’s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.
The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.
Philosophical purist that he was, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”
If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!
Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.
The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”
For the edification of libertarians prone to vulgar individualism, the Declaration of Independence is at once a statement of individual and national sovereignty.
And, notwithstanding the claims of the “multicultural noise machine,” the Declaration was as monocultural as its author.
Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.
A version of this column was first published by VDARE.COM.
The news of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation has media outlets clamoring for a saucy reason why. HuffPo offers a tabloid explanation via a link to CNN’s typically daft Rick Sanchez, while Politico wonders if repeated ethics inquiries are to blame for Palin’s departure.
The news comes on the heels of a devastating hit-piece from Vanity Fair that charted her unusual behavior from her nomination as John McCain’s VP candidate to her return to Alaska as Governor in the election’s aftermath.
The reaction on both sides is predictable. Palin’s admirers on the Right will classify the numerous ethics investigations aimed at her as superfluous and politically-motivated and suggest that the inequitable treatment she has received in the media—which can be traced all the way back to the beginning of the campaign—has unfairly distracted her from her job as Governor and that she is to be applauded for stepping down. Her detractors on the Left will claim that she is either abandoning her post to plan for a run in the 2012 Presidential election or leaving due to dropping approval ratings and lower oil revenues.
The truth about Palin’s political career is that rarely has her behavior, professionally or personally, followed any discernible line of logic. From suggesting that war with Russia may be prudent in the aftermath of the invasion of Georgia, to flying across the country with a full-term baby while leaking amniotic fluid so that it could be “born in the 49th state,” Palin has colorfully and fatuously kept people searching for an understandable explanation to her erratic behavior.
But too often the absence of an explanation is a defining characteristic of the behavior of the politically and socially dense. A famous baseball adage that explains the ridiculous behavior of an lackadaisical player is to define the player as “Manny being Manny,” in reference to Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez, known for his unconventional and stolid playing habits. At first people wondered whether Ramirez was a lazy player, or a selfish player, or simply untalented at basic aspects of the game. Eventually, when little could be reasoned from his behavior, it became sufficient to simply describe it as “Manny being Manny.”
Sarah picks a fight with Letterman over a late-night joke and only grudgingly accepts an apology after several attempts by the talk-show host. Sarah conducts the business of her state with little-to-no knowledge of current events. Sarah watches a Saturday Night Live skit about herself with the volume turned off because “it’s funnier that way.” Sarah preaches about small-town America while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on outfits. Sarah resigns with no logical explanation without finishing one term as Governor.
Probably just Sarah being Sarah.
Well, since she’s resigning as governor of Alaska, perhaps she could relocate to South Carolina and contest the 2010 race? After the Vanity Fair hit-piece and the interview with Runner’s World I wouldn’t have expected her to withdraw from the fight to establish herself as a public figure. Nevertheless, in the wake of the whole Mark Sanford fiasco I think many people are going to be a lot more cautious about giving pols a benefit of the doubt when it comes to erratic or confusing behavior. I’m sure there’s more to come….
Poor Michael Jackson. His last words were: ‘Take me to the children’s ward.’ But it was nice of the jockeys in Santa Anita to wear a black mourning band in honour of a man who rode more three-year-old winners than anyone. Mind you, I thought the great Paul Johnson was the best when I happened to tell him over the telephone of Jackson’s untimely death: ‘Was he a member of the Beatles?’ Er, well no, dear Paul, but he was in the same undignified business.
It has been said that you only ever meet the world once, in childhood. All the rest is memory. Jackson, I suppose, wished to remain a child, although from what I’ve read, his childhood was ghastly. (I never saw him perform and found him so repellent I avoided looking at his picture.) Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, said that the ‘kindly mirrors of future times will reflect ordinary objects’. Nostalgia combines both memory and the kindly mirrors of future times. Hence it’s my favourite. Give me nostalgia any time any day or night. I’m a sucker for it and always will be. The ghost of Harry Lime, Graham Greene’s infamous anti-hero, inspires me to see a drizzle-in-lamp-light Vienna, yet the times I’ve been to the Austrian capital it’s always been sunny and hot. But I saw The Third Man when I was 12 years old and Vienna has been dark and drizzly ever since. Ditto the Wehrmacht uniform. I saw it as a child being worn by tall, blond German officers who were billeted in our house in Kolonaki. It has remained in my mind as the perfect military ensemble. And speaking of the Wehrmacht, if I couldn’t have been a German officer in Paris 1940, being an expatriate American there would have suited me fine.
My buddy Charlie Glass has written Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation 1940–44, as good a read as you can find, especially if you like this sort of thing, which I do. Glass does not hint, suggest or preach. He has done his homework and Americans speak for themselves. I am old enough to have had many friends who spent the war years in Paris under German occupation, and now I read what I always knew to be true: for many, Paris 1940 to 1944 was a non-stop party. Another friend, Andrei Navrozov, has already reviewed the book in the pages of Chronicles, a political monthly I write a column for, and has raved about it. He mentions an instance where the all-conquering German army showed more tact than many Americans did once inside Germany four years later. A German officer is driven up to the Shakespeare and Company bookshop attracted by a copy of Finnegans Wake in the window. The owner, Sylvia Beach, refuses to sell it to him. “You don’t understand that anyhow. You don’t know Joyce.” “But we admire Joyce very much in Germany,” says the gentle officer. He then piles furiously into the military car, surrounded by helmeted troops, and is driven away. He returns in a few days only to be refused again. Glass makes no comment about this. Just the facts. I loved them.
When Patton’s Third Army occupied Bavaria, the Yanks went ape, looting a Schoenburg castle. An aunt of the mother of my children went to see the great man and—to her delight—was ushered in immediately. He was courteous and soft-spoken and told her no one would ever loot her property again—“as long as I’m in command here.” No one did. My father named a ship after General Patton, and a lucky one it was, too, and when I met his son, a one-star general up in Hue in 1972, I told him about it. ‘Give my regards to your father,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know why a Greek national did what Uncle Sam should have.’ Or words to that effect.
Patton admired the Wehrmacht because of its fighting spirit and gallantry. Antony Beevor’s book on D-Day confirms what I’ve always insisted. No one fought better than the Germans going in and on the way back. Not even the Russkies. And speaking of Germans, something disgraceful took place at Blenheim Palace last Saturday night. It was a beautiful evening, and there were 800 guests for Marina Livanos’s wedding to Andreas Martinos. Marina’s father, George, I have always referred to as the Rommel of Greek shipowners, a comparison he has repeatedly asked me not to repeat. But I will because Rommel, along with Manteuffel, Rundstedt, Guderian and Kleist, is my favourite field marshal. So there we were, in the garden about to go inside for dinner, the champagne flowing and our spirits very high. That is when my good friend Leopold Bismarck made his entrance accompanied by wild applause. Bismarck smiled and waved back to the wildly cheering throngs. He joined me and others, not realising that behind him were the newlyweds, making their first appearance. When I told Bolle about it he seemed to doubt me. I suppose it’s normal for him to be cheered, being a Bismarck and all that. But I didn’t see any French people clapping. Anyway, it was a great party in a great English palace and I had the greatest hangover ever the next day.
Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica.
The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term.
Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the “coup” and demanded Zelaya’s immediate return.
The hypocrisy here is astounding.
Chavez was imprisoned for his bloody coup attempt in Venezuela in 1992. And to have Fidel Castro’s dictatorship of half a century denouncing a glitch in the democratic process of a Western Hemisphere republic is beyond parody.
What percentage of the 200 member nations of that septic tank of anti-Americanism, the United Nations, are democracies? How many leaders of its member states came to power through free and fair elections?
And what happened to the idea of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere republics? At this writing, Honduras is not buckling.
“We have established a democratic government, and we will not cede to pressure from anyone. We are a sovereign country,” said Roberto Micheletti, who was named caretaker president to serve out Zelaya’s term, which ends this year.
Unlike Tehran, where hundreds of thousands protested the election, the streets of Tegucigalpa have remained calm. No one has been shot, beaten with clubs or run down by thugs on motorcycles.
Just whose side is Barack on in Latin America?
Though elected as a center-right candidate, Zelaya has moved into the orbit of Chavez, whose idea it was to change the Honduran constitution to get Zelaya another term. Hugo even provided the ballots. In Latin America, term limits have been written into constitutions to prevent a return to the time of the dictators and presidents-for-life. The folks who put Zelaya aboard that plane are friends of the United States.
Why are Obama and Hillary Clinton meddling in the affairs of a friendly country, to dump over a friendly government, to reinstate a friend of Hugo’s, whose goal is to bring Honduras into his anti-American “Bolivarian Revolution”?
Like Barack’s strange behavior in Trinidad, where he grinned away as Chavez handed him an anti-American tract, then listened for an hour to Daniel Ortega berate us for cruelty to Castro’s Cuba, without protest or retort, Obama is coming off as one who shares the international left’s view of the United States.
There is another issue raised by Obama’s denunciation of our friends in Honduras. Does he put ideology ahead of U.S. national interests? Does he prefer hostile democracies to friendly autocrats?
What comes first with Obama?
“He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB,” FDR said of one Latin dictator. What FDR meant was that, in those grave times when Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Japanese militarists ruled most of Eurasia, America must take her friends where she could find them.
In World War II, we welcomed the alliance with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and the neutrality of the autocrats of Madrid and Lisbon. We partnered with Stalin. Gen. Eisenhower cut a deal with Vichy’s Adm. Darlan to get GIs safely ashore in North Africa.
From 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian ruler of South Korea who sent 50,000 troops to fight beside ours in Vietnam. Was he not a better friend than Olof Palme of Sweden, Pierre Trudeau of Canada and Willy Brandt of Germany, who burnished their democratic credentials by scoring points off the United States?
For most Cold War presidents, U.S. national interests always trumped democratist ideology. Ike preferred the Shah to the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. Richard Nixon preferred Gen. Pinochet to the elected Salvador Allende.
Even George Bush, who had pushed for Palestinian elections and insisted on Hamas’ inclusion, perhaps because he thought they would lose, did a somersault when Hamas won.
How to explain the universality of the attacks on Honduras—when few United Nations members outside the West condemned Tehran and Hugo Chavez rushed to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—other than the fact that this “coup” removed an adversary of the United States?
Anti-Americans stand by their own, no matter how they came to power, or retain power. Only in the West do we seem always prepared to abandon our flawed friends who do not measure up.
This is a formula for eventually not having any friends.
That Obama finds himself in camp with Castro’s Cuba, Ortega’s Nicaragua and Chavez, who is openly threatening Honduras, should tell him something about where his ideology is taking him, and us.
One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international left.
Wonkette, if you have the good fortune of not knowing, is a left-liberal site that manages to consider itself cheeky and iconoclastic while endorsing only the most exquisitely conventional, establishment-approved opinions. If you’re not located somewhere along that fantastic spectrum of genius that ranges from Chuck Schumer to Arlen Specter, Wonkette will expose you to the world as the misanthropic imbecile you obviously are.
In order to remain as predictable as possible, Wonkette’s writers have decided they really don’t like Rep. Michele Bachmann, member of Congress from Minnesota. Of all the geniuses in Congress, they select for special ridicule one of the tiny handful who actually ask an interesting question now and again. By “interesting” I mean the kind of question no one at Newsweek, MSNBC, or, for that matter, Wonkette itself, would think to ask. That’s not because these questions are stupid; it’s because they’re not designed to flatter our overlords, portray them as indispensable, or show them the kind of reverence that Pravda once displayed for the Politburo.
Thus, for example, when 60 Minutes interviewed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke several months ago, the questions were on the order of “What are the dangers now? What keeps you up at night?” Now there are some classic Wonkette questions. Instead of asking how this guy could have been so wrong about practically everything he’s said since 2006—e.g., there’s no housing bubble, lending standards are sound, the housing bust should be over by December 2008—the establishment left wants to know what is troubling our great overlord, and how he intends to use his potions and incantations to slay the evils that afflict us.
But back to Rep. Bachmann. One reason Wonkette doesn’t like her is that she once asked Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner where he got the constitutional authority to do the things he’s doing. You might think so-called “progressives” would be interested in that question. Once upon a time, progressives grew suspicious when government officials shoveled money to the richest people in the country, and had enough common sense not to accept the official rationales at face value. Surely this is an area in which the real left and the real right might join in happy concord, no? I mean, the left coined the phrase question authority, right?
As it turns out, they really meant question authority except the Treasury secretary in a Democratic administration, or the Fed chairman, or the Washington Post, or the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, or the regulatory establishment, or Paul Krugman, or the SEC, or the medical establishment, or the central bank, or the Officially Approved Version of American History you were taught in fourth grade. These are wonderful people and institutions, citizen. They exist to protect you. Yes, yes, question authority and all that, but none of that applies to people and institutions that exist for your own good. You would have to be deranged and anti-social to oppose them. Why, you’re not deranged and anti-social, are you?
Listen to Geithner’s answers for yourself. You can learn a lot about the Wonkette people by grasping that they consider these to be good answers, indeed so good that only a blockhead would be unsatisfied by them. Bachmann is asking where in the Constitution the authority comes from for the Treasury and the Fed to be taking over companies and engaging in the bailouts. Geithner replies that they are acting in accordance with legislation passed by Congress. Exactly how smart do you need to be to recognize that that is not even close to an answer to the question? Geithner then says something about “the laws of the land”—again, perfectly irrelevant. Where in the Constitution does this authority come from? An answer to that question is not even attempted.
So the Treasury secretary has no idea where the authority comes from to bail out some of the most reckless, idiotic, parasitic parties on Wall Street, and Wonkette thinks the person to condemn here is not the Treasury secretary himself but the member of Congress who corners him? Can you imagine the contempt in which a genuine progressive like Robert La Follette would have held these establishment hangers-on?
Wonkette also doesn’t like Rep. Bachmann because she’s interested in the Austrian School of economics, a subject about which they’ve collectively read half an entry at Wikipedia. That the Austrians predicted the current crisis at a time when Wonkette’s heroes were calling for the very policies that brought on the collapse (and yes, that includes Paul Krugman, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) impresses them not a whit. The Austrians, who constitute the oldest continuously existing school of economic thought in the world, are out of favor with the establishment, whose boots it refuses to lick, and that’s pretty much all Wonkette needs to know.
Even worse, and according to the article her worst offense, is that Rep. Bachmann has been learning this material recently, and other people have been glad that a member of Congress is showing interest in business cycle theory—a subject that is probably not at the very top of the reading lists of Chris Dodd or John McCain. Now you can understand Wonkette’s ridicule, right? She has attended lectures on the subject and read books. (What is that in your hand, citizen? A book?) We can’t have that—the most urgent need right now is for American congressmen to keep their present level of knowledge right where it is.
In particular, Rep. Bachmann has been reading my book Meltdown
Now we really can’t have that. Why, this is an unapproved opinion! And since no one at Wonkette is familiar with Austrian business cycle theory, which pinpoints the roots of the boom-bust business cycle outside the boundaries of the free market, it can’t possibly amount to much. If it did, they’d already know about it. QED.
Perhaps indicative of the intelligence of Wonkette readers are the comments that follow. One chap writes, “Is Austrian Economic theory the one where they march in wearing brownshirts and take all the businesses from the Jews? Laissez-faire, uber alles!” In case you think that’s a moronic remark that no conscious person would utter, or a stupid and blockheaded smear of an entire country, recall that people who live in Austria are Officially Designated Oppressors who can be smeared and insulted in perpetuity, without provoking the sensitivity sessions, candlelight vigils, and all-around tears and sorrow that accompany insults to other groups. Wonkette, natch, will decide for us which groups belong to which categories.
Piling on a bit, if I may, consider that the greatest of the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises, was a Jew who was forced to flee Nazi-controlled Europe, arriving in the United States in 1940 almost empty-handed and not speaking a word of English. The Nazis, who destroyed his library and papers, detested him because his message of freedom and the international division of labor was rather at odds with the autarkic, controlled economy of National Socialism. So the least we might say is that our friend’s Nazi joke doesn’t really work. He doesn’t strike me as the thirsting-for-knowledge sort, though, so I rather doubt he’ll one day come upon the truth and feel embarrassed.
The George W. Bush years were such an ordeal that I actually remember thinking that the left wasn’t all bad. With a few honorable exceptions, though, they are what they have always been: anti-intellectual apologists for the status quo masquerading as “agents of change.” They claim to be antiwar but make excuses for people who vote the funds for war. They claim to oppose the neoconservatives but happily applaud when their cult leader surrounds himself with them, and seem untroubled when Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol declares, in response to the president’s policy on Afghanistan, “All hail Obama!” And they’re all tears and pity for average Americans, while at the same time demonizing people who think there might be something a teensy weensy bit not-progressive about creating trillions of dollars and throwing it at the financial elite.
The Wonkette kids are like the popular group in high school that wanted to belong to the fashionable causes, since that’s what the other popular kids did, but made sure they weren’t too ostentatious in their devotion to those causes. We can’t be too different, you understand. Just cool. Just different enough to be able to sneer at the rest of mankind and its stupid, unenlightened opinions, but not so different that we won’t get invited to cocktail parties at the homes of people who matter.
Now imagine those people running a website, and you’ve got Wonkette.
The recent crises in Iran and Honduras have produced plenty of rhetoric in Washington, very little of it constructive or relevant to actual US interests. Official statements do remind us of the vision of history held by the governing classes and diffused among the population at large.
Commenting on the post-election riots in Iran last week, Sen. John McCain said that the US must be on “the right side of history” in doing something (what, exactly?) for “human rights and values”. McCain mentioned the Prague Spring and the Greek War of Independence as precedents justifying his demand for a more confrontational line.
Meanwhile, in response to the Honduran army’s removal of that country’s leader Manuel Zelaya, President Obama was quick to warn,
“We do not want to go back to a dark past…We always want to stand with democracy.”
In the worldview of people from Obama to McCain, history is a glorious march forward, a progressive arc into the radiant future demanded by reason and built by individuals like protestors and human rights activists (according to left-liberals) or corporate titans, consumers and the men and women of the US armed forces (according to right-liberals). The dark ages have ways of reappearing in other countries to temporarily impede the forces of progress, but the dialectic must inexorably advance, whether by trade talks and dialogue, or sanctions and bombardment. It’s just a matter of time, you see, before they’ll be drinking Pepsi and enjoying fabulous parades and “reproductive rights”. They’ll eventually evolve to our more enlightened state, the thinking goes, and we’ll help them along the way.
The historicism implicit in the mindset of our elites derives from Left-Hegelianism and a debased, secularized imitation of Christian eschatology, topped off with a liberal-democratic endgame articulated by Francis Fukuyama. What has come to be generally known as Whig history and its theory of progress are rarely if ever challenged in mainstream society. After all, before the financial crisis the supply of credit was supposed to be practically unlimited, and economic expansion was guaranteed by its own logic.
Here’s an idea: perhaps the administration could formulate a ground-breaking new doctrine of benign intervention in which the democratic revolution, since its legitimacy is obvious to all, would be consolidated and protected. That way, the advance of history in “developing” nations like Afghanistan would never be in doubt.
While a little McCain goes quite a long way, he made one other telling statement regarding Iran:
“America’s position in the world is one of moral leadership,” the senator said. “It’s not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America’s conscience.”
It is indeed all about us. A way of thought that places at the center of existence man and his process of becoming, the movement toward sacrosanct liberation and equality he has divined by his own reason and will, is truly a function of cosmic narcissism.
Heather Mac Donald expresses some frustration at Mark Sanford’s antics the past week. Here’s what he told the Associated Press:
In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die “knowing that I had met my soul mate.” He also said he had “crossed the lines” with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage, but not as far as he did with his mistress.
Sanford insisted his relationship with Maria Belen Chapur, whom he met at an open air dance spot in Uruguay eight years ago, was more than just sex.
“This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” he said. “A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”
This is just too much information, and is unbecoming. We’ve all had difficult break ups. It’s distressing, and one isn’t always in one’s right mind, but if you have a job or classes life continues. If Sanford keeps talking up Maria Belen Chapur as his “soul mate” in the public record he’s undermining any reasonable chance of reconciliation with his wife. But you don’t always do the reasonable thing after a difficult break up.
As the blogosphere has taught us, the “Green Revolution” is all about democracy and human rights and was fomented, no doubt, after the Iranian people began reading up on Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, and Catholic Social Teaching. Problem is, the Greens’ Great Leader isn’t exactly ideal in the global-friendship-of-the-peoples department—after the Iran-Iraq war, it seems, he ordered the murder of 5000 political dissidents. While the beltway sees a new dawn for American influence in the Middle East, for me the whole thing’s beginning to look like a replay of the 2004 Orange “Revolution”: Western journalists think it’s all about them and fawn over a leader they know nothing about. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon learn that the Green and Orange charades were funded by the same people.
[Hat tip: Stacy at maxkeiser.com]
Kevin Gutzman alludes to genetic evidence pointing to a strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’ children. Why strong likelihood as opposed to 100% certainty? The genetic test in question focused on the Y chromosome, which is passed exclusively through males, and Jefferson naturally shared his Y chromosome with his brother. So it is certain that some of the descendants of Sally Hemings derive from the Jefferson lineage, but not necessarily Thomas Jefferson. But there’s a way to establish full certainty: obtain a sample of Thomas Jefferson and Randolph Jefferson’s genetic material from the family burial ground. Genetic material has been obtained from 40,000 year old Neandertal finds, so I presume that men buried ~200 years ago would be a relatively easier. The goal would be to compare the total Y sequence of the Jeffersons and the Hemings who are presumably descended from them. For “government work” brothers do share identical Y chromosomes passed down from their fathers, but, every human has a unique suite of new mutations which are distinctive. So there should be identifying genetic mutations on the Y chromosome which can be used to separate the putative descendants of Thomas and Randolph Jefferson.
On a broader note, this principle means that many people do in fact have good evidence of their descent from one particular man centuries in the past, Lord Somerled. We also now have circumstantial evidence now in relation to the putative descendants of Genghis Khan and Muhammad (through Ali and Fatima). One point to keep in mind in relation to the lines of Hemings who were eliminated from descent from the Jeffersons: a fraction of individuals in any given patrilineage are often of another paternity. So there might have been an interruption of the line. In rare surnames there is often a pattern whereby ~50% of the men are descendants from the same man (what one would expect), but ~50% are descendants of hundreds of other men. This is evidence of the “interruption” process over the generations.
Jacko was the King of Celebrity Eugenics.
The late Michael Jackson was a strange individual, but his various obsessions, such as weight loss, whitening his skin, and expensively designing his children, were hardly unique to him.
They are shared by more than few of his legion of female fans. To become a superstar, you have to embody some of the inner fixations of either the male or female publics. And in popular music in recent decades, the biggest names have had largely feminine audiences because male tastes have fragmented into multitudinous narrow genres, such as, say, Melodic Death Metal.
First, Jackson’s apparent anorexia (the 5’-10” entertainer is said to have weighed only 112 pounds when he died) helped make him such an astonishing dancer: he could induce the illusion that he was somehow exempt from the pull of gravity that all flesh is heir to. (In this 2003 interview, you can watch Jackson, in his mid-40s and ghastly-looking, climb a tall tree on his Neverland estate as effortlessly as any adolescent.)
Weightlessness is an enduring feminine fantasy. Michael of 2Blowhards has pointed out that the stick-figure female models in fashion magazines aren’t just a gay fashion designers’ plot against real women:
Similarly, during the Olympics, women love watching gymnastics and figure skating far more than the less high-flying sports. Indeed, in Jackson’s fantasy, he was Peter Pan, the flying boy from Neverland who never grew up. During Jackson’s youth in the 1970s, Peter Pan was played on endless theatrical tours by Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby.
Second, Jackson was not the only star to practice Celebrity Eugenics.
Paparazzi site TMZ claims that Jackson’s white-looking children are not only genetically not his, they’re not even his ex-wife Debbie Rowe’s either. (She denies this.) This really shouldn’t be surprising because the former Mrs. Jackson doesn’t particularly embody the physical traits, other than skin color, that the perfectionist pop star craved.
Instead, all three kids were supposedly conceived in a test tube. The two older kids’ biological father is, according to Us magazine, Jackson’s dermatologist Arnold Klein, with eggs from an unidentified donor implanted in Rowe, who was Klein’s nurse.
Now, you might assume that being Michael Jackson’s Dermatologist would rank you on the Genetic Desirability Scale above only being Michael Jackson’s Cardiologist, but celebrities are not necessarily the best judges of who embodies good traits.
For instance, whom did lesbian rock singer Melissa Etheridge and her then-girlfriend Julie Cypher choose to be the sperm donor dad for Cypher’s two kids? David Crosby of the The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Granted, there is some evidence that musical talent is partly heritable. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists 80 different Bachs who were distinguished musicians between approximately 1550 and 1850. According to Paul Johnson’s book Creators
Still, David Crosby doesn’t exactly resemble Johann Sebastian Bach in personal character. He only lived long enough to be the sperm donor because he had gotten a liver transplant after years of substance abuse.
Another lesbian star, Jodie Foster, is reported to have been more careful in her hunt for a donor dad.
You likely haven’t heard about this. That’s because—although America’s libel laws are less harsh than Britain’s—celebrities’ publicists keep our media under stricter control by practicing “access journalism:” Unless your magazine give me veto power over what you write about my client, none of my other clients will ever sit for a photo cover shoot for your magazine again. Hence, Fleet Street makes for livelier reading about show biz figures such as Foster, whose lesbianism wasn’t even mentioned in American newspapers until recently.
Yet, the more interesting story about Foster is one that was widely reported in Britain in the 1990s, but covered in America only by the National Enquirer: Jodie searched strenuously to find the perfect sperm donor, finally settling on a tall, dark, and handsome scientist with a 160 IQ.
That’s very much in character for the owner of Egg Pictures. Foster, a former child prodigy who learned to read at 18-months, seems to see herself as a sort of One Woman Master Race. (The two-time Oscar-winner spent years trying to talk the movie industry into making for her a biopic about Hitler’s pal Leni Riefenstahl, the directrix of “Triumph of the Will,” a propaganda documentary glorifying the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hollywood wasn’t enthusiastic about Foster’s Big Idea.)
Finally, although Jackson’s whitening of his skin under Dr. Klein’s care seems bizarre to Americans, bleaching is common among Third World women. CNN reported in 2007:
Lighter-skinned women are typically viewed by other women as being prettier. In contrast, as Mae West said of Cary Grant, men are supposed to be “tall, dark, and handsome.”
Nineteenth Century European writers called women “the fair sex” not because women are inherently more unbiased (a glance at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s losing opinion in the Ricci case would undermine that theory). Instead, as documented by anthropologist Peter Frost in his 2005 book Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice
This small sex difference is no longer consciously noticeable in our multiracial world, but it still has subconscious power. Thus, Hollywood movies almost always cast love scenes so that the woman is fairer than the man. That’s why black leading men, such as Will Smith, Denzel Washington, and Eddie Murphy, can become huge stars, but black leading ladies are both rarer and fairer.
Therefore, my best guess about why Michael Jackson so abused his poor skin is: He wanted to look pretty.
Tomorrow (July 1), the assembly of non-Left creative types living in NYC known as “The Manhattan Project” will be holding its monthly debate at Lolita Bar, right in the heart of the Lower East Side. And this one’s gonna be a humdinger! “Is America Economically Doomed?” is the question for the evening. Arguing “No, we’re all gonna be just fine,” will be Bryan Harris, political journalist and author of a book on gay marriage. Arguing “Yes! Quick go convert your backyard lawnmower into a personal helicopter from which you can ambush S&M Goth dudes on go-carts who’re hoarding all the precious, precious gasoline in this toxic wasteland that once was known as America!” will be yours truly.
The festivities begin at 8 PM. The gracious Todd Seavey will host. Don’t miss it!
Jack Hunter and I have a new podcast up on the Mark Sanford scandal and what it means for the future of the GOP, “Big Government Republicans,” and the Ron Paul movement.
Hear it all here.
A recent syndicated column by Thomas Sowell “Republicans in the Wilderness” includes useful advice but also misleading conclusions. According to Sowell, while “Republican moderates” Bob Dole and John McCain “lost disastrously to Democrats,” Republicans who have stood their ground, like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, have been more successful politically. Victorious Republicans have understood that “far more Americans describe themselves as ‘conservatives’ than as ‘liberals,’” and dynamic conservative Republican leaders have therefore “come up with alternatives to the Democrats’ many solutions rather than simply be nay-sayers.”
Although Sowell’s advice to the GOP, to paint in sharp pastels rather than in shades of gray, is certainly welcome, it nonetheless includes unwarranted assumptions. The recently conducted Gallup Poll about ideological values is mostly meaningless. Although 40 percent of Americans polled claim to be “conservative,” 21 percent “liberal,” and 55 percent “moderate,” it is hard to tell what “conservative” means here. Twenty-two percent of registered Democrats consider their politics to be “conservative,” while a Marist poll in 2007 suggested that a significant percentage of Hillary Clinton’s base characterized itself as “conservative.” Is a “conservative” perchance someone who would permit second-term abortion but gets queasy about abortions in the last trimester? Perhaps it’s someone who advocates gay marriage but opposes the kind of group marriages that is now legal in Holland.
The reference points in the survey, “conservative” and “liberal,” have become so vague that it may be time to discard them. Personally I would divide ideological camps along more relevant lines, namely between those who favor our current centralized public administration and the present judicial control of society in the name of selective and often newly discovered “rights” and those who hold to a more traditional view of constitutional government. As a decentralist, I stand with libertarians, communitarians, and religious traditionalists against Sean Hannity, Bill Maher, and other advocates of the current American managerial regime, with its neo-Wilsonian, conversionary impulse.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, “liberals” were generally people who voted Democratic and favored a larger welfare state. But on social and cultural questions, they were generally to the right of what are now called “conservatives,” mostly because they were living in a more culturally traditional age. I couldn’t imagine any liberal in my youth favoring gay marriage, affirmative action for minorities, or governmental actions to remove gender distinctions from the workplace, except when employers are being pressured by government administration to hire more women. In fact it was the “liberals,” and not the free-market Republicans, who insisted on the single-family wage in order to keep women at home with their kids.
The single-family-wage was for decades the big economic issues for such certified “liberals” as Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR’s treasurer Frances Perkins. Although arguably such a measure would empower the government to entangle itself in other commercial transactions and to engage in more radical social engineering, the fact that “liberals” once favored what is now anathema to the feminists indicates how fluid “liberalism” has become. Needless to say, if the term is applied to those who called themselves “liberal” in the nineteenth century, one could find absolutely no connection between the past and present usages.
Another problem that Sowell does not consider is that some groups, like blacks and Hispanics, usually give “conservative” answers to social questions but then vote for candidates on the left. My eldest daughter has had a black friend since her college days at Michigan who sounds like Jerry Falwell but votes like Barney Frank. My daughter’s friend believes without evidence that the GOP is conspiring to strip blacks of civil rights. Moreover, she has often heard this view expressed by other black Fundamentalists, who attend her church. How does it benefit the GOP if such people define themselves as “conservative”? This identification will not translate into changed voting habits, no matter how energetically GOP politicians grovel before minority audiences.
Sowell furnishes an example of where the GOP should be distancing itself from the Dems for the sake of electoral support. Unfortunately he furnishes the worst conceivable example. Apparently President Obama is not controlling “Iran as a terrorist nation” and unless he starts taking stronger action against its wicked government, someone’s grand-daughters may have “to live under sharia law.” I couldn’t imagine myself voting for the GOP because it’s intent on getting us more deeply embroiled in Iran, in order to prevent someone’s grand-daughter from living under sharia law. It was precisely the meddlesome, missionary foreign policy of Obama’s predecessor, and the egregious rhetorical habits that W picked up from neoconservative advisors, that turned his administration into a cosmic laughing stock.
The present administration is doing the right thing in addressing the instabilities in Iran, by escalating its admonitions cautiously and by avoiding the appearance of undue American influence in creating opposition to the current Iranian government. The neocon-GOP alternative, which seems to lack a fan base outside of FOX-news stalwarts and those polled by the New York Post, is to inflict our “democratic” missionizing on the rest of humanity.
What happens, however, if our grandstanding does not bring about the change in the Iranian government desired by Sowell? Do we then move armies out of Iraq and Afghanistan, whither President Bush sent them, and redeploy them in Iran? And if we do not intend to apply military force, and an unfriendly government remains in power in Iran, what do we do then that is different from what Obama is likely to do, namely, combine stern language with economic sanctions. While there are multiple things the administration has done that should concern us, how it has handled the Iranian government is not one of these failings. And it is unlikely that a return to the missionary, saber-rattling policies popular at the Hoover Institute, the institution at which Sowell hangs out, will result in a flood of GOP voters.
Speaking on FOX News the same day Sanford dropped his bombshell, former Bush adviser Karl Rove said: “With all due respect to Governor Sanford, I’ve never thought he was a particularly strong candidate. If you looked just beneath the surface in South Carolina, for example, there were a lot of strong conservatives who were very upset with his performance in office… it’s a sign of the lack of popularity that he’s got in the state that the immediate response of a lot of political leaders in the state was he’s got to go, and he’s got to go right now.”
That one of Bush’s most prominent advisers would say that Sanford was unpopular amongst “strong conservatives” in SC is a pretty good indication of what Rove considers “conservative”—big spending, big government GOP hacks who dominate not only this state’s legislature but wrecked the last Republican presidency. Sanford is indeed unpopular amongst such “conservatives” and for good reason—he isn’t one of them.
There was always good reason to doubt whether Mark Sanford was the right man to lead the Ron Paul revolution in 2012. Many Paulistas were talking up this prospect because Sanford was apparently more “mainstream” and “legitimate” than the Good Doctor, yet held almost all of his views. But this pretty much means he was a guy who said a lot of libertarian-sounding things, and did some libertarian deeds, while staying on reasonably good terms with the GOP establishment. And though “Big Government Republicans” might rejoice at Sanford’s demise, let’s not forget that the governor ultimately endorsed John McCain for president—even if he couldn’t find much of anything good to say about him—and on FOX News he announced that he defers to Newt Gingrich on major foreign policy decisions…
I also doubt Sanford would have actually brought more people to the liberty movement than Dr. Paul would have. Sanford’s certainly a handsome man, but he’s rather uninspiring, and sometimes rambling, as a speaker; he lacks Paul’s peculiar kind of charisma (avuncular charm) and hasn’t immersed himself in economics and political philosophy quite the way Paul has.
Sanford earned everyone’s respect vetoing hundreds of state bills and rejecting Obama’s “stimulus” money. But whether he had the right stuff—and, quite frankly, whether he was really radical enough—to take over the Paul movement remains to be seen.
(Also, I’m tolerant of quirkiness; however, stories (perhaps apocryphal) of the governor forcing his staff to use both sides of post-it notes and his “hobby” of drilling holes in his backyard with a hydraulic excavator, into which neighbours sometimes fell (!), would have raised a lot of eyebrows.)
All this being said, I don’t think Sanford’s momentary infidelity should disqualify him from political leadership. As Paul Gottfried and I joked yesterday over the phone, if Stanford were our president and he stopped engaging in insane wars and various “diversity” and “economic stimulus” programs, and stopped taking our money to fund such nonesense, then we wouldn’t give a fig if every Sunday morning he had to shuttle various mistresses out the backdoor of the White House or was being linked in the tabloids to Lindsey Lohan. That scene from Franςois Mitterand’s funeral, in which the president’s widow walked hand-in-hand with his mistress, might be a bit too laissez-faire and, well, French for us, Anglo-Saxon roundheads; however, the American political system would be much improved if we all stopped thinking of politicians as celebrated representatives of our most cherished moral virtues, and instead as inherently suspect creatures whom we trust about as far as we can throw.
There are, of course, times when it’s right and meet to attack politicians for hanky-panky, such as when Paul Wolfowitz got his new girlfriend a six-figure salary at the World Bank, or when Bill Clinton messed around with a government intern in the oval office and then lied about it under oath; however, I’m generally of the mind to tell my national leaders: “Go screw around with whomever, just get out of my life.”
The Sanford scandal is also highly instructive for what it reveals about how the GOP establishment operates. As Jim points out, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has been one of the big winners—after taking over Sanford’s post with the Governors Association, he now has to field questions about his presidential prospects: “[Oh gee, well, my word!] I can’t just say flatly ‘no’”... Barbour, of course, has the “moral” cred to appeal to the Religious Right as well as the beltway connections to assure everyone in power that nothing in Washington will really change. Ever. The neocons, in turn, can stop fretting over whether they should try to co-opt Sanford, or else reject him as a dangerous anti-government extremist, and instead just wash their hands of him and move on to the rehabilitations of multi-divorcees Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.
A recent blog in the WaPost from Chris Cillizza, which Jim also brought to my attention, indicates that a certain other South Carolina politician might benefit from Sanford’s demise:
Dispirited Republicans looking for national leaders amid a wash of scandals that have dominated national news over the last fortnight got a bit of good news on Sunday with an inspired performance on ‘Meet the Press’ by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R).
Graham, who spent the 2008 election cycle as Sen. John McCain’s loyal sidekick, appeared alongside former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner in advance of 2012, and managed to stand out. [...]
Asked about Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair, Graham, who is close to the governor, said that he was ‘disappointed’ in his friend’s behavior and praised Obama as one of the better role models in the entire country for the idea of being a good parent, a good father.’
Ridding oneself of a political rival while seeming polite and upstanding in the process—Gutsy! Kissing up to Obama in order to get a liberal reporter to label you a “national leader”—Priceless!!
I guess Graham should be given some credit for not throwing Sanford completely under the bus. But then, this is one guy who definitely doesn’t want to encourage reporters to inquire too closely into politicians’ private lives…
The left wing president of Honduras has been ousted and President Obama has shown “deep concern.” Venezuela and Bolivia have condemned the coup. “The West,” such as it is, has condemned it. Hugo Chavez has been making some rumblings about military action. The reaction is about what would be expected, the usual song and dance about democratic norms and the furrowed brows of the Great and the Good that result when the gun that lies behind all political power is briefly viewed from behind the curtain.
However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, there is more here than just another military coup in Latin America. Jose Manuel Zelaya was executing a fairly blatant power grab. He was opposed by both the courts and the congress, and the constitutionally designated second in command took power, pledging to hold the regularly scheduled elections. The country is not in chaos and the new regime seems fairly united. From where I sit now in this extremely early stage, it looks less like a coup and an attempt to set up a junta than it does like a law enforcement action.
We can expect the usual moans about democracy and the military staying out of politics. The discomfort with the situation in Honduras is an outgrowth of the usual clichés that allow the velvet glove to slip over the mailed fist of managed democracy. Perhaps I am just cynical, but as we have seen in the advanced democracies of Europe, referendums and elections are only respected when hoi polloi reach the correct decision as defined by the political class. When they don’t, the vox populi is gleefully ignored or openly scorned, the chosen representatives are banned or marginalized, and sometimes the voters are openly insulted. Even if there is a formal choice, it is one increasingly meaningless, as the media (sometimes run or funded by the state) manipulates the facts to benefit chosen candidates, legal obstacles mysteriously appear against certain parties and movements, and mass immigration and the welfare system create an ever growing class of state dependents on income transfers, special privileges, and general government meddling. The term democracy, used the way it is today, is not a system of government distinguished by popular elections, certain constitutional or human rights, and representative governments. It is a system of left wing orthodoxies holding together and granting legitimacy to a huge redistributive state apparatus. It is hard not to be cynical when the likes of Chavez, Castro, and Clinton all join forces to bemoan its fall.
While the democracy regime is a huge topic in its own right, let’s look at the limited example of Honduras. If we accept for the moment the claim of the new government that they were protecting the constitution, what was the politically correct alternative they should have taken? More petitions? Protests ? Judicial verdicts that the president would ignore? Democratic means hold no answers when the supposedly democratic regime can ignore any check from within the system. The military therefore had to take action from outside the system to protect the constitution. However, the international norm, and certainly the norm in the United States, is for the constitution to be treated as the “goddamned piece of paper” that serves as the window dressing for the people who think there is any limit on the power of the state. For my own part, I see no reason why a leader who breaks the law should be protected from consequences because of the mystical power conferred by conning his way into office, particularly considering that he seems to have little support for his actions now.
This obviously has theoretical implications for us. Our own military takes an oath to no leader, but to the Constitution. It is no stretch to imagine that American military officers hold their oath to the Constitution more sacred than most politicians. The danger from a politicized and alienated military in America has been the subject of an award winning essay within the military, alluded to in best selling books, and even a facebook group with thousands of members where military members are taking pledges not to enforce certain hypothetical laws. At the same time, since Washington put on his spectacles at Newburgh, Americans are rightly uncomfortable with the military in any kind of a political rule. That said, the ideal of the neutral, professional military Samuel Huntington described in the “Soldier and the State” seems to require a responsible ruling class or at least a ruling class not actively at war with its own country, something missing in much of the Western world. If such a regime were to take power in America and was fortified in office through “democratic” means, how could republican government be restored except by action on the Honduran model?
The march of the Left through Latin America has hit an unexpected roadblock. In the past, the United States was all too willing to violate the independence of our southern neighbors to beat down Communist insurgency (and to be fair, make the world safe for United Fruit). It will be interesting to see if President Obama and his Secretary of State renew the American tradition of interventionism and political pressure, this time to force the return of the “democratic” leader, regardless of the seeming wishes of the Honduran people. If they do, it will reveal the threat that the Honduran precedent poses to the lie that freedom and modern “democracy” are the same thing.
Steve Sailer analyzes the Supreme Court’s verdict—for Ricci, against Sotomayor.
The Takimag discussion of the case can be read here and here.
People often ask me how I can write about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln or the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution or the South. Hasn’t it all been said? Isn’t there already a mountain of books about them?
They are right to think that a great amount of ink has been spilled on these topics. Where a layman’s intuition fails him, however, is in telling him that these subjects must have been, or can ever be, exhausted.
Consider the current state of Thomas Jefferson scholarship.
In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
The first person publicly to assert that Jefferson had children by one of his slaves was James Callender. This hired-gun journalist leveled this charge to besmirch Jefferson’s reputation at the dawn of the 19th century. While Jefferson’s partisan opponents snickered or sneered, this allegation had little contemporary political effect. (Instead, Callender himself became the target of obloquy that is still heaped upon him today.)
In fact, exceedingly little attention was paid to such issues in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth. Only coincidentally with the Civil Rights Movement did scholars begin to investigate the history of slavery in America. One of the great fruits of American historiography is the increasingly full picture of slave society bequeathed us by scholars as diverse as Kenneth Stampp 
Still, even as the tide of slavery scholarship swelled, the image of the Master of Monticello remained essentially unblemished. From their high positions at the University of Virginia, historians Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson—authors respectively of the leading multi-volume
Gordon-Reed’s 1997 book asked why that should be. Marshalling long-standing oral traditions in black families connected to Monticello, traditions that included but certainly were not limited to claims of descent from the penman of the Declaration of Independence, Gordon-Reed asked how the matter would be treated if those traditions had been preserved by white people instead of by black. Notably, she made no assertions. She simply asked the question. As a historian of Jeffersonian Virginia not fixated on sex, slavery, or the Hemings question, I found her book persuasive. Jefferson, it seemed, had fathered children by Hemings.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was not merely a work of historiography, however: it also instantly became an artifact of American social and intellectual history. Virtually immediately, Gordon-Reed found herself under attack. Her book suffered comparisons to that 1970s psychohistory, comparisons it in no sense deserved. Psychohistory, a trendy approach in the days of “Boogie Oogie Oogie” and “Saturday Night Fever,” pet rocks and 8-tracks, and ex-seg committee chairmen and Cabinet secretaries, featured in the hands of the inexpert a heaping helping of speculation about its subjects’ thoughts and psyches. Gordon-Reed’s book, on the other hand, dared simply to ask the right questions and to interrogate the subject of Jefferson historians’ approach to their materials as a scholar might have evaluated the work of virtually any other group of historians.
She did not call reflexive incredulity toward the Jefferson-Hemings story a vestige of white supremacy. She didn’t have to.
Note that I am not saying that serious scholars could not disagree with her implication. Some did. Among them were leading lights such as the late Lance Banning, Forrest McDonald, and Alf Mapp. In general, however, the historical profession found her book devastating — not of Jefferson, but of the Malone/Peterson approach.
Among those who resist the idea that Jefferson fathered slave children are some of his white descendants. Seldom has the question been publicly discussed that one or more of them did not turn up to dispute what came to be seen as the Gordon-Reed thesis.
And then, the year after the book’s publication, Nature published results of genetic testing dispositively proving that at least one Hemings descendant descended from a male Jefferson. It also proved that at least one family’s oral history of being descended from Jefferson was almost certainly mistaken. Ha! Said the opponents, this didn’t prove that Jefferson sired children by Hemings. It only proved that oral history couldn’t be trusted! Some of them trotted out other Jefferson males as likely candidates for the role of father of Hemings offspring.
They were right that the DNA evidence did not perfectly prove that the black families’ oral history of being descended from Jefferson must be true. I note, however, that there is more proof that Jefferson is the ancestor of certain black Americans now living than there is that the person I understand to have been my great-grandfather had anything to do with events leading to me.
There is, in fact, virtually no one living or in history, virtually no one, for whose ancestry we have more evidence than we do for the descendants of Eston Hemings, whom some now call Eston Hemings Jefferson. Certainly not John Kennedy. Or Julius Caesar. Or Queen Elizabeth I. Quite probably not you.
Most leading Jefferson scholars fell into line. Joseph Ellis, who had denied that Jefferson had fathered Hemings offspring, now hopped on board. Andrew Burstein
Gordon-Reed’s new book on the Hemings family has won two of this year’s major prizes, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. As the review in the latest issue of The Journal of Southern History aptly notes, there is a growing desperation in the arguments of those who deny that Jefferson does indeed have black descendants.
Why are they so desperate? And come to think of it, why did Gordon-Reed’s book win these major prizes? As the same review notes, this new Gordon-Reed tome was in serious need of an editor; it could well have packed more punch into far fewer pages. So, if not the craftsmanship, what makes it so notable? Book prizes, like most publication decisions and awards in the field of history, are highly political. To some extent, they are concerned with rewarding authors of books that contribute to the construction of what one historian/activist called a “usable past.” (Thus, for example, I knew as soon as I saw Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution
More recent scholars have dethroned that old marble man. Ellis, in saying that he had changed his mind about the Hemings question, added that he hoped that knowing Jefferson had behaved this way would help persuade senators to acquit Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. This seemed to be a non sequitur to me, but in Ellis’s mind the two subjects were closely linked.
Having noticed the political goings-on in the historical profession, some members of the white Jefferson family have pointed to an academic cabal intent on tearing Jefferson down for contemporary purposes. If his personal probity is called into question, they say, it becomes that much easier to flout his limited-government principles. Note that Jefferson’s personality and sex life are the prime concerns of contemporary Jefferson scholars. Long gone are the days when attention to his advocacy of peace, limited government, states’ rights, and citizen involvement in decision-making lay at the heart of prize-winning books. Gordon-Reed, Burstein, and Ellis are typical of contemporary Jefferson chroniclers.
How might public awareness of Jefferson’s siring slave offspring affect today’s political debates? While scholars long have known that slave-owners, indeed men of the slave-owning class, commonly had sex with slaves, that knowledge seems not to have made much of an impact on the populace at large. If it had, the reasoning goes, perhaps contemporary proposals of compensatory measures would be more popular. So, this fact about Thomas Jefferson and the stories of his slaves’ relationships with him certainly could help to make a “usable past” for those with contemporary ideological and political fish to fry.
Gordon-Reed, from all appearances, is not one of them. She does not say that Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings was tantamount to rape, although she might have. (The Journal of Southern History review, in evaluating the onset of the Hemings relationship, rightly calls Jefferson “creepy.”) Instead, she endeavors to situate the two of them in their environment and to imagine a relationship consistent with everything she knows about them. This, too, marks her as an excellent historian.
How much effect should recognition that Jefferson quite likely behaved this way have? While Jefferson remains a popular personage with Americans today, his political philosophy is essentially defunct. States’ rights? Almost entirely local self-government? Highly limited federal spending? Strenuous endeavor to avoid war? No entangling alliances? Anger at federal judicial usurpation? They are nearly as dead as Jefferson’s seemingly comfortable acceptance of the idea that, as a slave-owner, he had a certain droit de seigneur. There’s really not much of a Jefferson legacy to fight over, intensely lamentable though that fact may be.
As I said, I am persuaded. The far more interesting issue, though, is what so many people are so excited about.
Rolling though picture-perfect hills and fields of maize and barley towards Wembury House, Devon, for the annual Hanbury cricket match. At times it’s a scene from a ‘50s film of a long-ago England, beautiful, tranquil and law-abiding, with glimpses of broad greens, riverside walks and winding country lanes. But then comes the announcement in an English I can hardly comprehend, however hard I try, apologizing about a diversion because of hay on the tracks. “Hay on the tracks?” I ask incredulously.
The bucolic view of beeches and oaks, as well as the armour of decorum, is suddenly replaced by the uniquely British subculture of ritual drunkenness and violence, as yobs and hurried couples carrying screaming, snotty children pile into the first-class carriage filling it to the brim. They, too, have been diverted. They lie down in the corridors, stand menacingly over one’s seat, curse out loud as the train lurches and leans at a donkey’s pace. Welcome to England 2009, and the Great Western railroad, whatever the misnomer.
Mind you, once in Plymouth, after close to six hours of suffering—the regular journey should be three hours 20 minutes—two large cars are waiting for us and we’re whisked to Wembury House where the festivities have already begun. Tim and Emma Hanbury have hosted the cricket fixture for years, but this time, instead of 20-odd free-loaders, there are more than a hundred of us. It is billed as a “Midsummer’s Night Dream,” the gardens, where the tent is already up, stretching to a large wall in the distance where hay bales have been put up as seats around a bonfire. The main event is the cricket match between the Hanbury team, and that of Ben Elliot, substituting for Zac Goldsmith.
Instead of hitting the sack early in preparation for the game and Saturday night’s bash, we begin to drink as if prohibition is coming the next day. There are some very pretty young women, Georgie Wells, Georgie Rylance, the actress, whose father is a high court judge, our host’s two daughters, Marina and Rosie Hanbury, and others whose surnames I never caught because young people today don’t use them. Alice, Willa, Violet and one we christened Uma as in Thurman, as she was a lookalike. (The Uma lookalike, incidentally, was still there on Monday afternoon, along with three other lost young souls, although the invitation was meant to end after Sunday’s lunch.)
Now let’s get something clear. I don’t know what it is that makes me go nuts the night before a party, but obviously there is some pent-up fury that masks years of angst, except I can’t remember those years. I don’t smash crockery over the empty absurdity of man’s fate, I simply get hog-whimpering blind drunk, and fall madly in love with any girl in front of me. And that night the place was spilling over with them. Even more inspiring than the girls was the music. Tom Naylor-Leyland is a brilliant pianist of country and rhythm and blues. He plays and sings like the pro that he is, and is a hell of a wicket-keeper to boot. The evening finished around 7.30 in the morning and at 11 both Harry Worcester and Timmy were in my room ordering me to the cricket pitch. No thanks to me, we had 197 runs by lunchtime, and we would have had fewer without the hangover. After a liquid lunch we fielded like heroes, and Xan Somerset, aged 13, almost got a hat trick for one wide ball. Then it was party time.
Things got out of control straight off the bat. With excuses to Joseph Moncure March, “Blurred faces swam together locked,/ Red hungry lips, closed eyes,/ Rocked./ White slender throats curved back beneath, attacking mouths that chocked their breath./ They murmured:/ They gasped:/ They lurched and pawed, and grasped.” A priest-like boy and a girl-like nun lay deep on cushion, locked as one. And all this was before dinner was served: 150 bottles of vodka were consumed that night, more than 55 magnums of red wine and I was too shy to ask my host about the amount of white wine and champagne.
The announcement of the wedding came almost as an afterthought, following the cricket scores. Timmy, who mumbles his words like no other, said something about his daughter Rosie expecting twin boys and that she will marry David sometime this summer. I happened to be sitting next to David, whose full name is David Rocksavage, Marquess of Cholmondeley, pronounced Chumley for any foreign-born Spectator readers. David is the person who walks backwards in front of the Queen during the Opening of Parliament, but last Saturday night he was one of the few who walked straight.
The announcement caught me by surprise. It was as if my little girl had got engaged, so happy was I. The Hanburys went on Bushido for their honeymoon 29 years ago, a smaller, more beautiful Bushido, and I joined them on it in Greece. I am close to them and their three children, and now I had an even better reason for celebrating.
At one in the afternoon the next day, in brilliant sunshine, I was still swilling from a wine bottle, glassy-eyed, unfeeling, a headachey mumble replacing speech once in a while. A friend dragged me away and as I headed for a taxi I could see the pretty girls still dancing, Tom’s music still ringing in my ears. It was a weekend I wouldn’t have missed for anything.
Richard writes of the Mark Sanford business, “This whole saga strikes me as exceedingly odd: first, Sanford refuses Obama’s stimulus money, then he’s forced to take the moolah by the state’s Supreme Court, then he disappears… Am I the only one here who suspects that there might be a whole lot more to this scandal?”
I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but any compelling one has to start with the question: Cui bono? Obama had Sanford decisively beaten in the stimulus fight. The president’s inner circle, no doubt, regards an anti-government Southern white guy as a perfect foil for Obama in 2012. So, who really gains from Sanford’s apparent implosion? I’d say two groups.
First, the Republican establishment in South Carolina and beyond. Notice that Sanford’s enemies in the party were some of the first to jump on the story of his disappearance and some of the loudest voices calling for his resignation when he returned. Defenders of the GOP status quo outside Carolina have benefited as well: Sanford’s successor as chairman of the Republican Governors Association is Haley Barbour, a classic K Street Republican and former RNC chairman.
Second, the kind of people who supported the foreign policy preferred by such noted family men as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Sanford, with his opposition to preemptive war and skepticism about “regime change,” was the strongest non-neocon candidate thought to be taking a look at the Republican race. He’s a governor rather than a congressman, and he’s harder for the mainstream Right to marginalize than Ron Paul.
So, what did the country clubbers and the laptop bombadiers know and when did they know it? Conspiring minds want to know…
The small TV in my home office is tuned to a classic-movie channel which just now began showing My Fair Lady, a rather elaborate morality tale whose plot and characters are fixed in the rigidities of the old-fashioned British class system.
It occurs to me—as Eliza howls her wretched cockney at ‘Enry ‘Iggins—that decades of affluence, various aspects of modernity and, above all, the Welfare State have utterly changed the nature of poverty in the West.
Democratization of education means that those at the bottom of the ladder bear the stigma not merely of ignorance, but indeed of ineradicable stupidity. This same force, meanwhile, enables the “meritocrats” (a term with which David Brooks is unstintingly enamored) to congratulate themselves not merely on having the good fortune to afford first-class schooling, but to enjoy the pleasant conceit that no one beneath their strata is capable even of comprehending the sublime abstractions entertained in those meritocratic minds.
As self-centered and arrogant as Professor Higgins was—and My Fair Lady is set in an era when eugenics was all the rage—he was an examplar of empathetic humility compared to some of our 21st-century meritocrats.
There is something Newtonian in the equal-and-opposite impact wrought by these same forces in regard to the culture and worldview of the poor. Television is a big part of this, I think, and especially the fantastic selection of entertainment afforded by cable TV (and DVDs, etc.).
Television has always functioned as something of a funhouse mirror in which the viewer perceives a reflection of reality warped by the conventions of the medium. (Cf. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, et al.) With the advent of the 100-plus-channels of cable, however, every viewer selects his own funhouse mirror, offering him just such distortions as suit his taste.
My Fair Lady, I suspect, is not being viewed by a very significant percentage of America’s cable-subscribing poor. The cultures of olden times and distant places don’t seem to hold much interest for them. I live 70-odd miles from the splendid museums of Washington, D.C. Among the poorer denizens of this community, I’d bet that they’d far rather drive to Hershey, Pa., and pay a hefty fee for a day of riding roller coasters, rather than drive down to D.C. and see the exhibits—free to all—at the Smithsonian complex.
Well, I’ve merely scratched the surface. The social problems that perplexed Professor Higgins and his contemporaries—George Bernard Shaw penned Pygmalion in 1912—have been “solved” in such a manner as to utterly transform society, while human nature remains what it ever was. We have undergone a revolution that has changed manners, customs, beliefs and attitudes. I am far from certain that these changes amount to “progress.”
5 am. It is still night outdoors, but I hear the early birds whistling.
I could wrestle with the bedding some more, or I could give in, get up, and go out.
No contest.
I clatter out the gravel driveway and glide left into a dark street. Shadows are smudged by the cast off from a single street lamp and the traffic lights burning softly at the intersection.
I pause under the glowing red, a man-made star hanging by its cables, the fixture bobs mildly in place.
I wait in the stillness for the red lights to flood to amber and then to green. And I slide off, toward nowhere in particular.
Out of the gloam comes a three quarter ton pickup truck barreling at me, a flashing green light pulsing from his dashboard. What?
Next a minivan, also flaring dashboard bubble lights.
I hear no sounds, no sirens. And above the noise of my car’s engine I only hear the birds.
I rumble along a flat, windy road heading south to the ocean. The road cuts through a forest thickly populated with short hardy trees shoving their way up and out of a sandy earth. I pass mansions with one, maybe two, lights on.
The sky is changing from coal to cobalt.
I park at the beach. My footsteps fall heavily into the deep sand making it slow going from the dunes to the shore.
I scout for fancy jetsam.
I find:
A clear plastic wine goblet missing its base, the label from a bottle of water. Cocktail napkins and two magazines.
I stop moving and listen to the water licking its way back into the currents, sucking itself back out to sea. A tease.
5:30 am the sky is opalescent, with pinks and blues mingling and I head homeward. I avoid hitting a deer, by inches. I am congratulating my good luck when I see a low squat box zoom into the road ahead of me. It is a Mini Cooper. It is navy blue. It hurtled in reverse down a dirt driveway, and spilled into my path.
I know this car. At least, I know the owner. And I have to wonder where is he coming from? Where is he headed? Has he seen me?
And, oh, he dates that sexy physical therapist. But she doesn’t live anywhere near here, right? Oh dear!
As I puzzle the ramifications the Mini pulls ahead, seeming to flatten itself forward into the macadam. I apply some pressure to my accelerator. He is obviously trying to get away. I want to be absolutely sure this is who I think it is.
He surges and darts left, in the direction of his home. I catch sight of his hat. He never goes anywhere without that hat. Yup, it’s M.
There are no secrets in tiny town.
6 am I’m home and I’m back in bed. The birds are booming. I hear the neighbor yelling at his dog. And now it’s time to go to sleep.
The fascinating news that the ageing William F. Buckley, beset by bladder problems, developed the habit of opening the door of his moving limousine and urinating into passing traffic—revealed by his son, Christopher Buckley in Losing Mum and Pup
CB himself—whose father certainly presented him with much more distressing problems at the terrible end—seems to think WFB was just importing the manly casualness of his much-publicized yachting days. He writes jovially to WFB’s possible victims:
In fact, of course, WFB’s behavior was insanitary, disgusting, offensive and sociopathically irresponsible. Equally, CB’s account of the youthful WFB’s flying a private plane from Boston back to Yale despite never having soloed, and losing his way in the dark, glosses over (“derring-do”) the reality that innocents on the ground could have been killed.
We do learn, however, that CB refused to sail any more with WFB in 1997, after he had insisted on taking CB and others out on overnight excursion although Long Island Sound was wracked by a rising near-hurricane. CB suggests he was thinking of his own, potentially fatherless children. He does not mention the Coast Guard, whom his mother, Pat, had already contacted and who would have been required to attempt a rescue.
CB is aware that he was born into privilege. He repeatedly notes that the weird coldness and selfishness with which both of his parents apparently treated their only child—WFB got bored at CB’s Yale graduation ceremony and made the family party leave for lunch, with no word to CB, abandoned to celebrate alone in a diner—does not constitute tragedy by the standards of the world. And he does not, really, dwell on it.
Regardless of his parent’s behavior, however, being WFB’s son came with a real cost. I became aware of this at the first dinner I had at Buckley’s house, in 1978. On leaving, I said politely to CB, then in his mid 20s, that I was sorry not to have had a chance to talk to him. I was taken aback when he instantly broke into a grin of unmistakable relief. Outside on the pavement of East 73rd Street, Barbara Amiel, my fellow guest and colleague from Canadian journalism, whooped sardonically. But it cannot have been easy to have your home invaded so often by strangers, particularly given the surprisingly trivial talk and constant flattery that WFB required.
Years later, when I was at Forbes Magazine in New York, I exercised editorial privilege, on an impulse of altruism, to insist that a picture of the recent publicity event for CB’s novel Thank You for Smoking
Conservatives often complain that CB does not have his father’s political interests. But these would have been absolutely incompatible with the career in society journalism that he has made.
(I told my Forbes story to Pat and Bill Buckley at a lunch at their house in Stamford to which Pat had kindly invited me. I thought at the time that WFB was oddly uninterested. I read now that his jealousy of CB’s humorous novels was one of their numerous points of friction).
One other memory of that 1978 dinner: I was impressed to see that WFB and CB greeted each other by unselfconsciously kissing on the mouth. I had never seen American fathers and sons do this, although it is (or was) common in the North of England, where I was born. It was obvious then that they loved each other. And it is obvious now that Losing Mum And Pup, its ruthlessness notwithstanding, is a work of love.
Like Chris Buckley, I am a now-orphaned Baby Boomer. Like him, I had to give the order to take my comatose mother off life support. I found his book skilful and moving. I believe it could very well be helpful and comforting the many millions with elderly parents, who, as he notes, are inexorably moving toward what must be regarded as one of the more serious of life’s passages.
But at the same time, Losing Mum And Pup also makes clear the personal failings that made Buckley such a disaster for the American Conservative Movement and (particularly interesting to me) to the cause of patriotic immigration reform, which he encouraged some of us to champion in National Review before stabbing us in the back and handing the magazine over to hostile neoconservatives and GOP publicists.
Reading CB’s book, I was grimly amused to see how many of the traits I cited in my obituary for WFB—apparently causing great offense to his surviving courtiers at National Review—are confirmed here.
Financial insecurity—CB notes that his parents were not “rich rich” and even claims that WFB’s patrimony was squandered in the stock market in the 1950s, after which he supported his plutocratic lifestyle entirely through journalism.
As a journalist, I find this incredible. But National Review certainly subsidized WFB to a scandalous extent and I have often wondered if money played a role in some of his editorial decisions. Thus patriotic immigration reform was always opposed by Dusty Rhodes, the former Goldman Sachs executive whom WFB, with his snobbish weakness for the wealthy, installed in a vague (probably power-balancing) role at NR.
Alcohol and drugs—CB reports that both of his parents drank heavily—news to me in the case of Pat—and he provides excruciating details of WFB’s massive use of uppers (Ritalin “from his private stash”—legal?) and downers (Stilnox).
At the end, WFB paid a cruel price for this habit. But my own hypothesis is that it accounted for his extraordinary personality change, from the legendarily brilliant rebel who challenged John Lindsay in the 1965 New York Mayor’s race to the exhausted, vacuous, vain volcano I saw in 1978, and was finally betrayed by in 1998. By the 1980s, WFB was quite incapable of fulfilling the leadership role he still insisted upon. And it was the conservative movement, and America, that paid the truly cruel price. Like WFB himself, it turned out that the conservative movement was to have no “second act,” n Scott Fitzgerald’s famous phrase, after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. WFB simply did not have the energy or the courage to adapt to the next generation of issues. And he was not prepared to tolerate those who did.
Ego and Vanity—CB says frankly that WFB “certainly did like praise. Not unusual in writers, but Pup had developed certain—shall we say—Conradian aspects in his declining years”. (This is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s famous remark, “I don’t want criticism, I want praise.)
CB reveals that WFB, like many writers, had programmed Google to send alerts when his name was mentioned. But, unlike many writers,WFB was able to require his son to read them to him:
(They’re all the same, by the way).
CB also recounts his shock at hearing that in June 2007 WFB intended to skip the funeral of his own sister, CB’s aunt, to go to Washington to accept an award:
(It was actually the American Hungarian Federation’s Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.)
CB’s diagnosis: his father missed “the roar of the crowd.” This also illuminates Larry Auster’s quip in his savage obituary for WFB: “The man has basically been the recipient of a rolling memorial service for the last 20 years, even while he was alive.” Ironically, on CB’s own account, it was the strain of this last ceremony that broke WFB’s health and sent him into terminal decline.
CB says, applying to himself the frankness with which describes his parents, that making audiences laugh is “my one talent.” This is true. He is a gifted humorist, but not a political thinker. Losing Mom and Pup is completely devoid of political ideas, although full of politicians. John McCain is criticized, but simply because he failed to offer his condolences on WFB’s death from the presidential campaign trail—a personal gesture which, CB is no doubt right to observe, his own former employer George H.W. Bush would not have failed to make.
Similarly, CB describes WFB’s peculiar attachment to Henry Kissinger through the détente years as simply a matter of long-standing personal friendship. Yet all by itself, WFB’s behavior during this period discredits the claim, repeated here credulously by his son, that he was father of the modern conservative movement and even the progenitor of Ronald Reagan. To the contrary, Reagan rose to power precisely in opposition to Kissinger’s détente policy and above all to his sell-out of the Panama Canal—which Buckley, breaking ranks with the Right, notoriously supported. (“If Bill had opposed the Panama Canal treaty, he wouldn’t even have gotten on NPR,” William A. Rusher, National Review’s long-time publisher and a shrewd Buckleyologist, explained to me at the time. Rusher, passionately involved in every major conservative battle from the Draft Goldwater movement to the nomination of Ronald Reagan—when WFB, according to Rick Brookhiser in his just-released Right Time, Right Place
Yet CB is delighted to relate that Kissinger delivered eulogies at both of his parents’ memorial services, not the least element in what he obviously regards as great social triumphs. And the fact is that his personal explanation of his father’s support for Kissinger in the détente years is probably right.
Last year, CB garnered great publicity for announcing that he would vote for Obama, neatly maneuvering the flat-footed Dusty Rhodes and Rich Lowry into appearing to force him out of National Review so that he could go off in triumph to be a columnist Tina Brown’s fashionable Daily Beast. Just because you have no political ideas doesn’t mean that you can’t be politic.
There is nothing surprising in this. A monarch butterfly is not going to stay around in winter, even a nuclear winter created by the Bush catastrophe that its father must in part be blamed for. The irony is that WFB, who had already undercut NR editors by bailing out on the Iraq War, would have been perfectly capable of doing the same thing. Son and father were more alike that has been generally assumed.
But at least CB has never pretended to be serious. Nor (as far as I know) has he urinated on passing motorists—or on his country.
This article was originally published at VDARE.com.
While I’ve already posted my own initial reaction to Gov. Mark Sanford’s admission of infidelity, it might be of interest to Takimag readers the reaction of South Carolinians at large.
The three primary reaction categories are:
1. Sanford is a lying scumbag who should resign.
2. Sanford is a good man who made a mistake, but should still resign to heal his marriage.
3. Sanford’s private life has nothing to do with his principles, he should remain in office and still run for president.
In our current WTMA text poll (1250 AM WTMA is the premiere talk radio station in Charleston, SC, where I’m employed) we’re asking “Should Sanford Resign?”
The results as of now: 70% “No.” 30% “Yes.” This is by no means scientific, but the phone calls we receive reflect similar results.
I mention this for two reasons. First, we’ve been interviewed by a few national outlets, and one particular interviewer, a Los Angeles morning talk host, kept bringing up red state “evangelicals” and their attitude toward Sanford’s indiscretions. Yet, amongst Christian conservatives, there’s been a lot more “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” than outright moral condemnation.
Also, this enduring support (quite surprising, actually) for Sanford is due in large part to the grassroots popularity in this state for his particular Republican brand – strict fiscal conservatism that is markedly different and more “extreme” than most other conventional, “conservative” Republicans.
Even with his admission of infidelity, there is still more rage amongst rank-and-file Republican voters against our big spending, GOP-dominated state legislature than our cheating governor.
It will be interesting to see what developments unfold this week. It will also be interesting to see what the future holds politically for Sanford, who though badly damaged, his career may not be as “over” as some might think.
And as I’ve noted a few times on the air, Sanford will only be 55 in 2014 - the next time the still, extremely unpopular Sen. Lindsey Graham is up for reelection.
Obama is a heavy-duty planner; a command and control kind of guy. He aims to replace cumbersome, heavily regulated medicine—the kind Americans have now—with Kafkaesque, centrally controlled care. He’ll start small—a modest healthcare expansion totaling $2 trillion—and will proceed from there.
During the recent ABC News Health Care infomercial, put on for the Big Man’s benefit, the president smirked: “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?”
The market place, of course, doesn’t conceive of separate spheres, neatly carved-up by statists. The laws of supply and demand don’t answer to Barry the Bolshevik. Private practitioners and providers, in extant and nascent markets for medicine, must know that if The Man and his Machine bring in a “public option,” offering coverage to whomever wants it, the market place will change.
To fit his fanciful confabulations, Obama has insisted that “because the public plan will have lower administrative costs, ‘we can keep them [private insurance companies] honest.’”
This is instructive. Ever wonder why the president is so confident that the “public option” will be cheaper? Here’s why: a “public plan” is a subsidized plan in which prices are artificially fixed below market level. As sure as night follows day, overconsumption and shortages always ensue.
If he is as smart as he thinks he is, even the smarmy president must knows that, to compete with the state, private plans and insurers cannot offer services below their real cost for long. Private practitioners who sell their wares at a loss—are who not “too big to fail” and have yet to slip between the sheets with the derriere doctor-in-chief—will be waylaid.
Conversely, because it enjoys a monopoly over force, the government is immune to bankruptcy. It covers its shortfalls by direct and indirect theft: by taxing the people, or flooding the country’s financial arteries with toxic fiat currency.
Other than to indenture doctors, the overall effect of forcing professionals to provide healthcare below market prices will be to decrease the supply and quality of providers and products.
Obama’s supporters dislike the socialism sobriquet, but socialized medicine by stealth is what we’ll end-up with. Moreover, and for the sake of semantic veracity, let us, at the very least, name the beast rising out of this sea of statism: the “public option” is really “tax-financed healthcare.”
“Tax-financed healthcare” is a gulag for doctors and patients alike. “Minimum standard of care for all” is how the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons describes the mission of the Japanese “tax-financed healthcare.” There, capped care is killing cancer patients, because they can see only one specialist who diagnoses and supervises treatment. “The average physician’s income in Japan is about half as much as in the U.S.”
“The consequent impossibility of centralized economic calculation means that central planners necessarily lack the knowledge needed for the efficient allocation of resources,” explains Ronald Hamowy in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. “In a capitalist system, it is the rivalrous entrepreneurial activity of markets that generate prices. Such rivalrous entrepreneurial activity is, by definition, ruled out in a centrally planned [system].”
Immune to insolvency, government programs, funded indefinitely and coercively by taxpayers, squander rather than conserve precious resources, human and material.
If you think the misallocation of bailout billions has been criminal, wait until Obama’s politburo of proctologists attempts to figure out how many Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners to purchase for The Plan. Courtesy of bureaucratic calculus, the waiting time for an MRI scan in British Columbia, Canada, runs into weeks and even months; not ideal if you have a malignancy.
Yes, the hubris. Where the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics failed, the “United Socialist States of America” will prevail. Duly, B. Hussein insists that, “If we are smart, we should be able to design a system in which people still have choices of doctors and choices of plans that make sure that necessary treatment is provided but we don’t have a huge amount of waste in the system.”
The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk,” in the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner’s rendering.
This means one thing: moral hazard. Writes libertarian economist Walter Block: “The greater the protection from the random expenses of sickness, the greater the potential over-consumption of the item in question.”
We currently labor under “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Yet the fewer the intermediaries interfering with the primary, patient-doctor relationship, the better the patient’s prognosis. The president’s prescription for too little freedom, however, is even less of the same!
Misguided government policies have already dealt vicious body blows to our economy, but that hasn’t stopped politicians this week from launching two new kicks to the groin: a national health insurance plan and a carbon emissions regulation system called “cap and trade.” Even if these plans could achieve their desired ends, which is highly unlikely, I would have hoped Washington would refrain from throwing more monkey wrenches into the economy until it shows some signs of resurgence. The last thing we need right now is to further encumber our economy with higher taxes and additional regulations.
The meteoric rise in health care costs, which has become an unending nightmare for U.S. businesses and consumers, is not an accident. This painful condition has arisen from excess government involvement in the system, tax provisions that encourage the over-utilization of health insurance, and government support of an out-of-control malpractice industry. Rather than allowing more bad policy to drive health care costs further upward, we should be looking at ways to allow market forces to reign them back in.
If left alone, the free market drives quality up and costs down. Government programs produce the opposite result. Despite the president’s claim that a federal plan will bring costs down, there is no historical precedent for such faith.
Simply providing more widespread health insurance, as the Obama plan offers, is not a solution. In fact, it will aggravate the problem. Since consumers no longer pay for routine medical expenses out of pocket, comprehensive health insurance creates a moral hazard for both patients and doctors. To maximize the value of the health insurance “benefit,” most workers opt for low deductibles and co-pays. Therefore, doctors learn that their patients are not concerned with the cost of care, and so they are free to bill insurance companies at the maximum allowable rates.
Given our current tax code, the simplest way to bring down medical costs would be to fully tax health care benefits as wages and simultaneously increase the personal deduction by an amount significant enough to neutralize the effect of the tax increase. This would do two things. First, the uninsured would get a huge pay increase, enabling them to buy reasonably priced catastrophic policies. Second, those currently insured could opt out of expensive employer-provided plans, trading premiums for extra wages, then buy a more economical plan. The savings would go right into their pockets.
The bottom line is that aggregate medical costs will never come down unless services are rationed more wisely. Rather than being used as a pre-payment plan for routine care, insurance should only cover unpredictable, catastrophic costs.
As a comparison, homeowners often carry fire insurance, but seldom maintenance insurance. You buy fire insurance to guard against a catastrophic loss, which is a low probability but high cost event. As a result, fire insurance is relatively affordable, since premiums paid by all those homeowners whose houses do not burn down more than pay for the losses on those few whose houses do.
On the other hand, no one carries home maintenance insurance to pay for a clogged drain or broken garage door. If insurance paid for the plumber visit every time a toilet overflowed, we would now have a plumbing crisis, and Congress would be looking to reign in runaway plumbing bills with “national plumbing insurance.”
In his press conference, President Obama claimed that government insurance would not drive private providers out of business. This is absurd. As the government provider will not have to produce a profit or accurately account for its contingent liabilities, it will provide insurance on an actuarially unsound basis. With taxpayer subsidies, the government provider can run losses indefinitely. If private insurers did this, they would either be shut down or go bankrupt. Therefore, the cost of government provided health insurance will not be confined to the premiums paid, but will include the taxpayers’ bill to continually bail out the government provider.
When Medicare was first proposed back in 1966, it cost $3 billion per year, and the projection was for inflation-adjusted annual costs to rise to $12 billion by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $107 billion, and the 2009 estimate is a staggering $408 billion! So much for government estimates on health care.
As if this were not bad enough, today the House votes on “cap and trade” legislation. Disguised as an environmental bill, this proposal would merely be another gigantic tax. The lion’s share of the new revenue is already committed to politically connected special interests that will reap windfalls at everyone else’s expense. To make matters worse, the bill before Congress amounts to a blank slate, with the EPA empowered to draft the details in any manner they see fit. If Congress is going to shoot the economy in the knee, they should at least be required to pull the trigger themselves.
“Cap and trade” will do nothing to reduce pollution, yet it will drive up production costs throughout the economy – rendering us even less globally competitive that we are today. In addition to the huge cost of paying the tax, its enforcement involves the creation of an entire new bureaucracy, the costs of which will be borne by American consumers in the form of higher prices.
Years of reckless borrowing and spending have left us in a gigantic hole. Getting out of it requires that we make the most effective use of all available resources. We need labor and capital to operate as efficiently as possible so we can save and produce our way back to prosperity. Unfortunately, national health insurance and “cap and trade” are two steps in the wrong direction. Rather than getting us out of this hole, they will merely cave in the walls around us.
It has to be said that punching Perez Hilton is something that has crossed my mind more than once. I find this blogger about celebrities who has become a celebrity (although Z list as yet) in his own right insufferably annoying. Sorry. But there it is. It’s not particularly rational nor even an honorable thought, but the man just manages to trigger every aggressive switch I have.
The reason I have to reveal these personal failings is that someone has, indeed, just gone and punched Hilton: not on my behalf you understand, but for their own reasons. The basic background is that at some awards ceremony somewhere (not important which one, Perez Hilton is the type that’d turn up to the opening of an envelope), Hilton got into a shouting match with Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas. In the course of which Hilton screamed “Fucking Faggot” and was rewarded with a quite beautiful shiner.
There are, of course, things to enjoy here: the open homosexual using an (ahem) “heteronormative” insult, the black eye from the Black Eyed Pea entourage, the point that I no longer have to harbor fantasies of exerting myself as I can simply watch the film of the event. There are also further, less enjoyable points. Suit has, we are told, been filed, police are involved and a court case in the offing. Now it is true that the State claims a monopoly on the legitimate deployment of violence and for good reason. It is also true that Hilton is, as is any and every individual purely by the fact of their being such an individual, worthy of the full protection that the law provides.
However, then we come to Hilton’s own statement on the entire matter. At this point I’m afraid an entirely different set of feelings kick in. It’s a horrible, to me at least, rambling self-justification. He wanders from being oppressed because he cannot legally marry the sexual partner of his choice to insisting that he used the vilest epithet he could but that no one should have done anything about it. Or something, I defy anyone to parse it properly. He finishes with this:
“And I look forward to standing up for my rights in a Toronto courtroom shortly, as I fully intend to seek every lawful remedy against the man that attacked me.”
No, that’s not how backstage insults and punches are meant to end. It’s not about his rights under the law, it’s not about dragging people through a courtroom, it’s about, or should be, being an adult. About something much more important than what the legislature has said is right or wrong, it’s about manners, the very oil that makes us all rub along together in civilization.
Hilton screamed sexual epithets and got bopped for his troubles. That’s the way that it sometimes works, that you’re forcibly reminded of the social conventions under which we all live. The correct response to such episodes is not to take legal action, it is to do what your Mother always told you. Apologize, make amends and promise not to do it again. “Dreadfully sorry, don’t know what came over me, I do apologize” would fit the bill. Once Hilton had done that and so had his assailant then the entire matter would be closed: along with providing a suitable lesson in comportment for the younger generation.
That it is going to court, that men apparently no longer have the manners that maketh them, has my own fist twitching in the air again, I’m afraid. Excuse me if I go off to see the action once again, replay that little YouTube movie…..
That a man whose entire career had been defined by his staunch fidelity to the American taxpayer would throw it all away by committing infidelity seemed like a fate fit for some other politician. In his political life, Sanford had never been a scumbag like Eliot Spitzer, a hack with something to hide like Larry Craig, or even remotely in the same universe as the modern standard bearer for secret sexual affairs, Bill Clinton. Lying seemed a natural fit for all these men. It was not a surprise that these elected officials, whose only guiding principle at the political level seemed to be self-empowerment, would be just as selfish in their personal lives.
But Sanford was a surprise. Here was a Republican who could have easily taken the same career path of most Republicans, but instead spent much of his time fighting his own party, taking the GOP to task at both the state and national level for betraying its conservative principles. Sanford took the hard road, standing up for limited government when no one else would. He was decidedly an unconventional Republican for all the right reasons. And yet last week, by his own actions, Sanford ended up in the same sort of tawdry, sleazy, and politically predictable place typically reserved for less sincere, less principled and simply, lesser men.
But sadly now, the conservative hero that could have been probably never will be. And more sadly, due entirely to his own actions, it’s almost as if he never was.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall.
And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading.
In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov. Schwarzenegger pleaded with the overtaxed Californians not to make their state “the poster child for dysfunction.”
As The Economist writes, “On May 18th, they did exactly that.”
Arnold went to the White House for U.S. loan guarantees for new state bonds. But with the president’s approval rating wilting because of a belief he is spending too much, the Obama-ites slammed the door.
In Sacramento, a Republican blocking force is resisting any new tax revenue. And with the state under a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, yet facing a $24 billion deficit this July, a chainsaw is about to be taken to state government.
Some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation’s best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement.
The 10 campuses of the University of California face cuts that may result in 50,000 fewer students and 5,000 fewer teachers.
What makes her fiscal crisis relevant to us all is not only that California is our most populous state, with one in eight Americans living there, but California has a gross domestic product larger than Canada’s.
Moreover, the demography of California today is the demography of America tomorrow, just as the social and fiscal policies of California in the last decade mirror those of the U.S. government today.
One-third of all U.S. wage-earners today have been amnestied from paying U.S. income taxes, as the top 1 percent haul fully 40 percent of that huge load. So, too, in California, the well-to-do and the wealthy are hammered, which is why many have quietly closed their businesses, packed and gone back over the mountains whence their fathers came.
Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end, and national health insurance.
California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation’s lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.
Demographically, California is where America will be in 2040.
White folks, who are leaving California as they did in the millions in the 1990s, are below half the population. Hispanics, their numbers surging due to legal and illegal immigration, are well over a third of the population. The African-American share of California’s population is also falling, as the Asian share is rising, again from immigration.
Los Angeles, which is what most large American cities will look like, is the most diverse city on earth. Has diversity been a strength?
In the prisons and jails, and among the scores of thousands in street gangs and the underclass, a black-brown civil war is underway.
In October 2006, the Financial Times reported the findings of the famed author of “Bowling Alone” on what diversity has wrought:
“A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbor to the mayor.”
“In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,” said Putnam. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”
“Professor Putnam,” said the Financial Times, “found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried California nine times. But the state is now a fiefdom of liberalism. John McCain’s share of the vote was smaller than Barry Goldwater’s. California today believes in Big Government, open borders, diversity, multiculturalism and the politics of compassion. But what liberalism has wrought in California, its native-born are fleeing.
Still, where California is at, America is headed.
Californians who are running away from the communities and towns in which they were raised have Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Nevada to head to. But when all of America arrives at where California is at today, where do the Americans run to?
The latest of the Hollywood madams has just offered/accepted a plea bargain for the heinous crime of matching up willing buyers and willing sellers of the same product. It’s not going to make much difference to how much sex gets bought and sold of course, there’ll be someone along in a moment to fill the niche, just as Michelle Braun herself filled the one left by Heidi Fleiss.
But beyond my headscratching at the law being so down on a simple free market there are two more points that puzzle me:
FBI agents conducted a two year undercover operation to trap Miss Braun, who apparently filled in the void left for high class call girls after the arrest and jailing of the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss in 1997.
Seriously? The country is fighting two hot wars and at least claims to be fighting two others as well, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. And someone, somewhere, seriously thought that limited Federal law enforcement resources would be best deployed to capture the female version of a pimp? Forgive me if I consider this bizzare: even the authorities admit she was paying her taxes on time.
But what really gets me is this, that at least some of the girls she was finding work for were porn stars. So I’m not even sure what crime was being committed. Is it really true that someone can be paid to have sex in front of a camera but it’s illegal if there is no camera? For most certainly such “actresses” have agents who arrange their roles, they travel to them, but no one goes around arresting them, do they? In fact, didn’t the Supreme Court rule that it was protected free speech?
No, I understand all of those who are repulsed by prostitution, by the whole sex industry, those who regard them all as repugnant transactions. But can it really be true that if only a film crew had accompanied these women as they kept their assignations, then there’s no offence committed? Is the law really that much of an ass?
Now that Iran’s expulsion of foreign journalists has deprived the world of detailed news coverage of the present turmoil in that nation, we have been forced to rely on the gritty sights and sounds of violence and bloodshed communicated by brave Iranians with cell phone cameras, who courageously photograph and record the murderous tactics of riot police and revolutionary guardsmen on the ground. Amidst this flood of heart-breaking images, there are a few moments that will haunt me forever. Watching the news last night, I heard the desperate cries of a young, terrified Iranian woman who was pleading with the world to do something to stop this oppression.
I have often admired the honesty and conviction of Ron Paul, who has become the most famous spokesperson for the Alternative Right in recent years. Yet I must take issue with his recent refusal to join the House of Representatives in condemning the crackdown in Iran. To be sure, I applaud the moral reasoning behind his view that America has often been selective in condemning the repression in a hostile nation (Iran) while ignoring it altogether in a friendly one (Saudi Arabia). It should also be recognized that Dr. Paul has always opposed the attempts of governments to crush the “democratic aspirations” of peoples everywhere. Yet I cannot support his position that Congress lacks the “constitutional authority” to sit in judgment of actions taken by foreign governments “of which “we are not representatives.” This position is so extreme that it is hard to imagine any crisis overseas which would justify the official condemnation of a tyranny by the government of the United States, at least in Dr. Paul’s view.
Perhaps paleos who have recently gone on record opposing “interference” and “intervention” in Iran need to define exactly what they mean by these terms. Do interference and intervention refer to the unlikely act of sending in the Marines, or do these words also include any moral support for embattled democratic forces in Iran? While I support paleos who condemn military intervention in Iran in light of the sorry history of past interventions in the Middle East, I fail to see why democratic governments should hold their rhetorical fire against the mullahs. Surely we are not condemned to the dualistic and extreme choice between outright military intervention and eerie silence, which offers no hope to human beings like the frightened Iranian woman I mentioned earlier.
Lest anyone accuse me of being a neoconservative mole, it is worth recalling that a great hero of conservatives everywhere understood the difference between recklessly intrusive acts and prudent interference. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was hardly a supporter of US-sponsored democratic revolution by gunpoint throughout the world. Yet he famously pleaded with the West to interfere with the internal affairs of the Soviet state.
On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs. The Communist leaders say, “Don’t interfere in our internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet.” But I tell you: Interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.
It is of course false to suggest that this great conservative was seeking an all-out war between America and Russia as the price of such interference. The choice was not between invasion and inaction. Solzhenitsyn vigorously supported the efforts of the West to shine the spotlight on tyranny and impose further sanctions on the USSR. A clear and vigorous condemnation of what is happening in Iran does not count as unwarranted interference, unless one is a member of the ruling theocracy there. Obama and many others have used the argument that speaking out in favor of the protesters will play into the hands of the mullahs, who can then associate their enemies in the streets with Yankee intrusiveness. No doubt the Soviets conveniently portrayed dissidents like Solzhenitsyn as dupes of America, just as the mullahs in Tehran misrepresent the demonstrators as lapdogs of Anglo-American imperialism. Yet this self-serving propaganda should not deter governments from condemning this decaying, desperate theocracy. Even if western regimes did not interfere in these affairs, they would still be accused of meddling. To date, the mullahs and Ahmadinejad see little difference between the hawkish Bush and the dovish Obama anyway. Obama’s hope that lack of tough talk will encourage the mullahs to dialogue with the administration over their production of nukes is an illusory hope if there ever was one. Isn’t it more likely that the mullahs will sense weakness instead?
Solzhenitsyn cursed America and Britain whenever these nations appeased the Soviets, a sad process that began with Yalta. Will the survivors of the protests in Iran also curse the West if there is a lack of clear and straightforward support for them, all at a time which could well be the defining moment for the history of modern Iran?
The High Life in Europe, circa 33,000 BC:
BERLIN (AP) — A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.
A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.
Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old.
“It’s unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world,” Conard told The Associated Press this week. His findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.
The reassembled instrument was too fragile to be played, but Conard worked with another academic to make a copy of it from the same type of bone and to play it and produce recordings of songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” […]
Together, the flute and the figure — found in the same layer of sediment — suggest that modern humans had established an advanced culture in Europe 35,000 years ago, said Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who didn’t participate in Conard’s study.
Roebroeks said it’s difficult to say how cognitively and socially advanced these people were. But the physical trappings of their lives — including musical instruments, personal decorations and figurative art — match the objects we associate with modern human behavior, Roebroeks said.
“It shows that from the moment that modern humans enter Europe ... it is as modern in terms of material culture as it can get,” Roebroeks told The AP. He agreed with Conard’s assertion that the flute appears to be the earliest known musical instrument in the world.
Neanderthals also lived in Europe around the time the flute and sculpture were made, and frequented the Hohle Fels cave. Both Conard and Roebroeks believe, however, that layered deposits left by both species over thousands of years suggest the artifacts were crafted by early modern humans.
“The material record is so completely different from what happened in these hundreds of thousands of years before with the Neanderthals,” Roebroeks said. “I would put my money on modern humans having created and played these flutes.”
Endless disaster has long been the result of endless U.S. interventionism. Texas Congressman Ron Paul was laughed at by Rudy Giuliani and others in the last election for daring to suggest that the U.S. helping to overthrow the government of Iran to install the Shah in 1953 was the first in a sequence of interventions that has helped lead to our current dilemmas in the Middle East. Watching the events that have unfolded in Iran in the last week, most reporters and pundits have brought up U.S. intervention in Iran in 1953, not because Ron Paul did, but because the CIA, historians and foreign policy analysts everywhere have, while politicians looking to score political points with tough talk continue to ignore the dangerous complexities of the very foreign policy they promote.
How Multiculturalism Killed the Counter Culture
When I was eleven in 1970, Alvin Toffler published a book entitled Future Shock
Yet, looking back, 1970 seems to be right about when the rate of transformation started to slow down.
The late 1960s remain the fastest-changing period in my lifetime. For example, I was recently telling my son about the worldwide demonstrations in 1968, when he asked, “Did feminism play a big role in 1968?”
“Oh, no,” I corrected. “Nobody cared about feminism in 1968. Feminism was 1969, not 1968.” On further reflection, I helpfully added, “Environmentalism, however, was 1970, not 1969.”
At that point, it struck me how bizarre it must seem by today’s slow-motion standards to assign huge historical movements to a single year with such confidence. For a child of the 1960s, however, it seems natural.
We’re still living in the shadow of the Sixties as the rate of cultural change (outside communication technology) has slowed considerably.
For instance, everybody admits today that romantic comedy movies have gotten boring. But it’s not just because they all star Matthew McConaughey. The tedium of today’s romantic comedies stems in part from the fact that middle class social norms for dating and mating haven’t changed much in recent decades, after the sharp shock imposed by the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1964. Last winter’s He’s Just Not That Into You had to derive much of what few new laughs it managed to muster up from the complaints of young women about having to monitor all the different devices and services that guys aren’t calling them on. Everything else about modern romance had been hashed over endlessly in previous films.
In the arts, perhaps the most important change since the 1960s is the decline in what had then been the greatest engine of artistic change: the generation gap.
Generational conflict over aesthetic styles is most common in a relatively ethnically homogenous society, such as 19th Century Paris, rather than in a multicultural city, such as Ottoman Istanbul.
In Paris, it became standard practice for each new cohort of painters to position themselves as the rivals and inevitable successors to the older, established artists. In the 20th Century, young artists began to issue manifestos denouncing their obsolete elders and explaining why only their new breakthrough (Futurism! Vorticism! Dada!) could meet the urgent needs of today. The generation gap appealed to bourgeois young people up through the 1960s and 1970s because, after all, what other dimensions did they have to distinguish themselves upon?
While strident and self-interested, this kind of generational conflict produced a lot of interesting art. In 2000’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present
Boredom is most apparent precisely where the generation gap yawned widest in 1970: pop music. The top-rated television show of this decade, American Idol, is aimed simultaneously at adolescents and their moms, a marketing target that would have been impractical four decades ago.
Similarly, when my sons were younger, I enrolled them multiple times in LA guitar teacher John Mizenko’s Join the Band program. In each session, the instructor would team his students up into about a dozen groups—each with two guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer—and teach them to play three songs. After eight weeks, the ad hoc bands would perform for their parents and siblings at a rock club like the Knitting Factory on Sunset Blvd. Each group would typically play two fairly recent songs (Green Day being the most popular), and one classic for the dads in the audience, such as “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath or The Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law.”
While innovation was the hallmark of popular music from, say, the invention of ragtime in the 1890s, most major styles of pop music in today’s America have changed only marginally from about 1979, when the first hip-hop hit, The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” reached the Top 40. In an earlier, more creative era, rap would have been a passing novelty, but instead it has engulfed black music like an Ice Age glacier. The Sugarhill Gang’s lyrics might sound dorky now—“Me, my crew, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet”—but the group actually coined the line, “Throw your hands up in the air, and wave them around like you just don’t care,” which has been repeated ad nauseam by hip-hop artists for the past three decades.
Although increasing ethnic diversity is widely assumed to make the arts more “vibrant,” the triumph of the ideology of multiculturalism appears to have instead helped cause pop music to stagnate stylistically.
There’s a fundamental connection between the growth of ethnic pride and the decline of generational rebellion, because to rebel against your forefathers is to rebel against your race. Thus, for a group of young black musicians to issue a manifesto pointing out that 30 years of rap is plenty would be racial treason. Although long exhausted musically, hip-hop has become so emotionally entwined with African-American identity that we’re all stuck with it.
Whites can’t speak (or even think) in those terms, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to feel parallel emotions. At my kids’ “Join the Band” concerts, looking around at the all-white audience of doting parents who’d paid to have their kids learn to play “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, I realized I was a little like an Irish-American dad who had enrolled his daughters in an Irish step dancing class to instill some ethnic tradition. As a generic white guy, The Ramones, along with the rest of electric guitar rock, is turning out to be part of my family’s ethnic heritage.
Now that he’s admitted to having an affair, I guess plans for a Mark Sanford Revolution in 2012 need to be put on hold… This whole saga strikes me as exceedingly odd: first, Sanford refuses Obama’s stimulus money, then he’s forced to take the moolah by the state’s Supreme Court, then he disappears… And upon his return, he claims to have been on a hiking trip—before changing his story two days later, informing us that he partook in a weekend assignation with his Argentine mistress. Am I the only one here who suspects that there might be a whole lot more to this scandal?
UPDATE: Jim Antle writes about the Sanford fallout at The Guardian.
Sanford caught the attention of economic conservatives like the Club for Growth, who lacked a consistent champion in the 2008 Republican primaries. He was also admired by many Ron Paul Republicans, who wanted a candidate who was for smaller government on civil liberties and foreign policy too but hoped for someone more mainstream – and perhaps more electable – than Dr Paul himself.
But there was always concern that Sanford might be a little too strange for the national spotlight. There were the long, thoughtful pauses before answering questions. The mangling of simple sports metaphors. The need to be alone. And most potentially damaging, his habit of digging holes on his property, which once led to the accidental drowning death of an eight-year-old.
With the revelation of his long-distance affair, it turned out we didn’t know the half of it. Mark Sanford will not be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. There may not be a strong, mainstream contender who will stand against big-government liberalism at home and belligerent neoconservatism abroad. And that’s how this private tragedy became a public one too.
Well, going to Argentina without telling anyone is a bit weird. A politician having an affair, not so weird. No, not John Ensign, Mark Sanford:
The married father of four emotionally apologized to his wife, staff and others at a news conference after returning Wednesday from a trip to Argentina that followed a dayslong absence. He staff had said the Republican was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
Sanford says he met the woman about eight years ago and it became romantic about a year ago. He says his wife and family have known about it for the past five months.
I guess we can at least be rest-assured that several of the sons of Mitt Romney are robust enough that there is going to be a natural deterrent against their father having a midlife life crisis that leads to extra-marital adventure.
Mark Shea has taken umbrage at my remarks on the Narcissism Revolution taking place in the conservative blogosphere, and I’d like to reply… but I’m not sure what to say exactly. Shea doesn’t so much respond to my critique as,
1) Assert his grand magnanimity: the great Shea will deign to answer “some guy named Richard Spencer”; though curiously, later in the same blog, he indicates that he’s quite familiar with Taki’s Magazine.
2) Completely misstate my argument: Shea writes that I called him narcissistic for writing the following passage,
The only problem is that I never referred to this passage in my piece—indeed, these lines don’t appear anywhere in the blog I linked to! Where did they come from? I’ve no idea. Perhaps Shea could enlighten me. I would remind him that there’s a difference between changing one’s position and doing a little post facto redaction. And it’d probably be ethical for him to alert his readers to the fact that he’s doing the latter and not the former.
3) For no apparent reason allude to the specter of the New Atheists and the cold, dog-eat-dog universe of Might Makes Right: Shea seems to think that a harsh Nietzscheanism lies at the heart of the discourse of Christopher Hitchens and much of America’s elite… Clearly, On the Genealogy of Morals
4) Assert that all believers in higher powers should work together to combat said New Atheist specter.
5) Spencer’s original critique safely averted, quote at length from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Q.E.D.!
Why don’t we return to what I actually argued.
The “Narcissism Revolution” refers to the fact that when so many “conservative” bloggers and journalists, Shea being one, saw photos of Iranians taking to the streets and waving green flags in the air, they thought to themselves, without much hesitation, 1) This is good! 2) This is pro-American!! 3) The ideological origins of this must lie in Catholic teachings and the “American Values” of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King!!!
I reached these conclusions after reading passages such as this one (which Shea actually did write!):
And this,
Oh, and this,
And don’t forget this,
Now Shea tells me that what he’s really saying is that there’s common cause between the Green protestors, MLK, and Mark Shea because they all believe in a higher being (even if it’s not the same one exactly.) Well, I’ve been reading a lot about the goings on in Iran, and yet I haven’t come across any statements from Mir-Hossein Mousavi in which he’s claimed that he’s leading a revolt again the dangers of atheism and Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene
We still don’t know what the “Green” protesters who’ve taken to the streets over the past ten days actually want in terms of government and political representation. And we’re not brought any closer to understanding by reading Mark Shea and much of the rest of the “conservative” blogosphere.
P.S. As I said, this whole notion of “believers”—Christians, Muslims, Sun God devotees et al.—uniting together vis-à-vis wicked atheists is completely irrelevant to the discussion of the Iranian Reovlution, but since Shea brought it up…
What I find most striking about this idea is how recent its vintage is. Charlemagne didn’t exactly go on a peaceful “listening tour” through pagan Europe, nor were the Habsburg much impressed by the fervent belief of my Protestant Saxon ancestors. If only Christopher Hitchens had been alive in 17th Century, then Christendom might have united and the Thirty Years’ War been avoided…
With regard to Karen de Coster’s treatment of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin, a Takimag reader, who’s well connected with the conservative movement, sent me the following,
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.”
—Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism
When he was 16, Bill McCain told his mother, “You won’t ever have to worry about me again.” He left the family farm in rural Randolph County, Alabama, and moved 40 miles away to West Point, Georgia, where he went to work on the night shift in a cotton mill.
You’ve heard of people who worked their way through college? My father worked his way through high school. Most of his cotton-mill pay went for room and board and books—in those days, public-school students in Georgia had to buy their own textbooks—at the school where he became a football star.
Football was the cause of my father’s decision to relocate to Georgia. His gridiron ability already had gained him notice in Randolph County, but he was sufficiently shrewd to recognize that West Point had a better coach and that he would stand a better chance of attracting the notice of college scouts if he played on a championship squad.
Five-foot-eight and lean, Bill McCain was not a big man, but he was smart, fast and tough. In 1940, the era of football behemoths—pumped up by weightlifting regimens, protein supplements and steroids—was still at least three decades in the future. Back in the day, plenty of college football teams had “watch-pocket guards,” wiry linemen under six feet tall who made up in quick, hard-hitting tenacity what they lacked in sheer bulk.
Dad played end, on both offense and defense. Naturally, his boyhood hero was Don Hutson, the All-America end who led the University of Alabama to a national championship still recalled in the Crimson Tide fight song with the lyrics, “remember the Rose Bowl we’ll win.” Bill McCain had listened to the 1935 New Year’s Day radio broadcast as Hutson—destined to become a Hall of Famer for the Green Bay Packers—caught six passes for 165 yards and two touchdowns in Pasadena to lead the Tide to a 29-13 victory over Stanford. Yet it was the fellow who described himself as “the other end” on that championship squad—a tough farm boy from Fordyce, Arkansas, named Paul “Bear” Bryant—who ultimately became synonymous with Alabama football legend.
The Gridiron Gospel
Fundamentalist Christianity is widely considered the dominant religion of the South, but certainly football ranks at least a close second. On autumn Saturdays in the Bible Belt, true believers gather at temples like Tuscaloosa’s Bryant-Denny Stadium in numbers that far exceed the congregation of even the largest mega-church.
It was during the Great Depression that the gridiron gospel gained its hold on Southern souls. Once I asked my Aunt Lera Mae—Dad’s older sister—about the impact of the Depression. “Well, we never really noticed,” she replied. “Times was always hard on the farm.” Lera Mae hastened to add that they’d never gone hungry, as more than 100 acres of red clay upland provided plenty of vegetables and feed for their livestock. Yet the Southern economy had never fully recovered from the devastation of the Civil War, and cash was always hard to come by. My grandfather made some money trading mules and horses, but when the bottom fell out of the cotton market after World War I, my ancestors could not escape the financial ruin that became nearly universal in the rural South.
Widespread poverty in the Cotton States preceded the Great Depression by a decade and had a profound impact on my father’s generation. The culture in which Dad grew up was chronicled in a 1989 book by University of Alabama historian Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites
.
Of course, “poor white” has always had pejorative connotations. My folks were not as poor as some others, but in the ubiquitous poverty of early 20th-century Alabama, there was a sort of democracy of hardship in which no sin was as egregious as “putting on airs” of superiority. Arrogance and ostentation were scorned, a cordial down-to-earth style of courtesy was esteemed, and yet a stubborn, stoic pride was the unshakeable rock upon which this culture was founded.
“Boy, hold your head up high,” my parents and grandparents repeatedly told me. “There ain’t nobody better than you.” For decades, every Southern boy was drilled in that catechism. We were raised on such incitements to determined persistence as “You can do anything if you set your mind to it,” and “Can’t never could.”
Shadows of the Past
We needed no Horatio Alger novels, for our own parents personified the ethos of hard work and persistence they preached. After moving to Georgia at age 16, my Dad not only earned his own keep and made the football team at West Point High, he was named to the “All-Valley” team, accumulating a fine academic record as well, and was recruited by several colleges.
History intervened, however. In 1942, Uncle Sam decided Bill McCain’s abilities could be best put to use in the Army, where he served in a forward reconnaissance unit in France. He was wounded by German shrapnel in 1944—“A million-dollar wound, Mac,” the medic at the field hospital told him—and finished the war as the personal driver for a colonel in occupied France. Discharged with the rank of staff sergeant, the G.I. Bill put him through the University of Alabama, where he married my mother, another Randolph County girl.
After Dad graduated, they moved to Atlanta. Mom worked as a secretary and bookkeeper, first for Merganthaler Linotype and later for RCA Records, while Dad worked a year on the railroad before hiring on at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta, where he stayed for the next 37 years. The hard-working spirit of their Alabama youth kept both my parents busy in various small entrepreneurial ventures over the years. They sold Watkins Products door-to-door—poor folks in Austell, Georgia, always knew me as the son of “The Watkins Man”—and dabbled in real estate development and other enterprises. The summer I was 12, I recall going door to door in Cobb County, handing out fliers for a garbage-hauling business my father had started, having purchased a big truck and hired two fellows to run the route.
My two brothers and I grew up in a handsome brick home on a large tree-shaded lot in Lithia Springs—now a booming Atlanta suburb, but then still a relatively sleepy small town—where our middle-class status was always haunted by the shadow of our parents’ childhood poverty. We were constantly reminded of how fortunate we were, a message reinforced by frequent visits “down home” to Randolph County, where my father’s mother still lived in a four-room farmhouse, hoed her own garden, and drew her water from a well. By the early 1970s, with her health beginning to decline, Maw McCain consented to let her children pay to install plumbing at the home place. For most of my childhood, however, there was not even an outhouse at Maw McCain’s, where one attended to calls of nature at a designated area behind the dilapidated old barn.
Catechism in Cleats
Nearly all the teachers, ministers, Scout leaders, and other adults who influenced my youth came from similar backgrounds, if not indeed from poverty so dire as to make Maw McCain seem an aristocrat by comparison. The catechism of our parents’ rural roots was constantly reinforced in school and church. So while we grew up in the radical Sixties and the swinging Seventies, we could not escape a full-immersion baptism in the folkways of Depression-era rural life.
Nowhere, however, were the lessons of that poor-but-proud culture taught more rigorously than on the football field. I never played football in high school—as a trombonist of some skill, I proudly performed in the Douglas County High Marching Tiger Band—but from ages nine to 14, I was a first-team lineman for the Sweetwater Valley Red Raiders, competing in the Cobb County youth league.
Go ahead and laugh at “midget” football, but 40 years ago, it was taken quite seriously by our coaches. Most of these coaches were veterans of World War II or the Korean War who saw nothing wrong with drilling youth football players as if they were Marine recruits at Parris Island en route to combat assignments in Vietnam.
That attitude was shared by our parents. My father offered me some advice from his own career. The key to winning as a lineman, Dad said, was the first play from scrimmage. Come to the line with the determination to fire off as soon as the ball was snapped and hit the other guy as hard as you can. “Line up and look him in the eye and say, ‘I’m going to beat you today,’ and then knock him on his butt. Hit him as hard as you can, then come back on the next play and do it again. Just keep at it until you’ve got him beat.”
My most memorable season was in 1970, when Sweetwater Valley’s 75-pound team was coached by a guy named Chuck Starnes. We placed second in our league that year and the Red Raiders were invited to compete in a post-season tournament in Panama City, Florida. It was during that late-November trip, at age 11, that I first kissed a girl, a cheerleader named Darlene Goza with the most adorably dimpled chin you ever saw.
We won our first tournament game in Florida with ease, advancing to the championship game against a team from Bessemer, Alabama. Those Bessemer boys were huge and, though I managed to hold my own at right guard, our opponents fielded an aggressive 5-4-2 defensive formation that stymied our offense, while our defense could not contain their running backs.
Tears in the Huddle
Our quarterback was Tim Crunk, who eventually went on to be starting quarterback for South Cobb High. He played college ball and eventually became a coach and school administrator in Cobb County. Tim had a blond crew-cut and a foghorn voice, and anything he lacked in native athleticism was more than compensated by his devotion to winning.
Tim Crunk could not stand to lose and I will never forget the November day in 1970 when Bessemer was beating us in the championship game in that Panama City tournament. We fell behind by two touchdowns early, then got a stern chewing-out by our coaches at halftime, and returned for the second half determined to make up the deficit. Alas, victory was not to be ours that day and, as the clock ticked down in the fourth quarter, the inevitability of defeat was apparent.
After another Bessemer touchdown and the ensuing kickoff, the Red Raiders huddled up, waiting for Crunk to come in and call the first play of what looked to be our final series on offense. Tim ran in from the sidelines and when I looked up, tears were streaming down his face from eyes reddened by shame and rage. He managed to choke out the call, and we went to the line rattled by what we had seen.
Tim Crunk was a tough kid and no crybaby, but the experience of being beaten in this game—the pinnacle of his football career to date – had stirred in him emotions too powerful for an 11-year-old to restrain. When we returned to the huddle for the second play of the series, Tim’s tears were still flowing and now others were crying, too, including halfback Mike Stone.
Our center, Royce McAllister, was probably the toughest player I ever knew. McAllister tried to console Tim and Mike but, as he did so, I noticed that Royce’s eyes were also beginning to brim with tears. And so it went, as we played out the clock that day in Florida.
Did I cry? I honestly don’t remember if I did, but I will never forget the mortification I felt at seeing Tim Crunk reduced to tears by the shame of defeat.
The Same Game
Nearly four decades later, that scene is etched in my mind, emblematic of the fierce desire for victory that is the spirit of champions. What distinguishes the champion—not merely in football or other athletic endeavors, but in every walk of life—is the reckless commitment to expend every possible effort to attain victory.
My own twin sons are now 16, and work various jobs to earn their own tuition at the small private school they attend. On Father’s Day, I found myself thinking of my late father, who left the family farm and worked his way through at West Point High.
Whatever the future may hold for my sons, I hope they never forget what I learned from the old man, No. 27. Success in any endeavor starts with the resolute determination to succeed. No matter how formidable the competition, hold your head up high. They’re no better than you, and victory begins with the decision to rule out the possibility of defeat. “Can’t never could.”
That attitude took my father from a farm in Alabama to a brick home in the suburbs of Atlanta. It took me from Georgia to Washington, where now I find myself in daily competition no less formidable than those big boys from Bessemer, even if the sport is a bit more refined. Really, though, it’s still the same game, and the formula for winning has never changed.
I’m going to beat you today.
Count on it, buddy. I didn’t come this far to start losing now.
I agree with Razib’s basic observation concerning the ridiculous national coverage of my state’s “missing” governor, but would add that it’s hard for non-South Carolinians to grasp the rage so many politicians here, particularly Republicans, have for Mark Sanford. That’s all this is. Sanford overturned the corrupt, big spending apple cart down here - and rightfully so - and they don’t like it. Our Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is gunning for Sanford’s position, said on CNN “the governor might be abducted on the Appalachian trail.” Really? This is a classic case of any-stick-will-do-to-beat-a-dog and as dumb as this whole controversy is, expect Sanford’s enemies to keep swatting like crazy with this non-story.
Mark Sanford went hiking without telling the powers that be. It seems that a public person can’t have a private life. I understand the objections, but it all seems a bit overwrought. Sanford is a governor of a moderate sized state. There are plenty of disincentives toward public service, but this is getting ridiculous.
I’ve come to admire Michele Bachmann, especially since she nailed Timothy Geithner to the wall while repeatedly asking him what provision in the Constitution gave the Treasury Department the authority to manage markets and the financial services industry. On that note, I found this story to be delightful. Try to not laugh at the last paragraph.
Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann says she’s so worried that information from next year’s national census will be abused that she will refuse to fill out anything more than the number of people in her household.
In an interview Wednesday morning with The Washington Times’s ‘America’s Morning News,’ Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, said the questions have become “very intricate, very personal” and she also fears ACORN, the community organizing group that came under fire for its voter registration efforts last year, will be part of the Census Bureau’s door-to-door information collection efforts.
‘I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home,” she said. “We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.’
Shelly Lowe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Census Bureau, said Mrs. Bachmann is ‘misreading’ the law.
This is a plucky move by Bachmann. The census is a critical pet project for the Obama administration, and forcing people to accept it at face value, without reservation, is important for maintaining eternal citizen obedience to this invasive and unconstitutional endeavor.
Now, before you write me and say, “Ms. DeCoster, those Republicans .... where were they when? ..... how can you? ... don’t you know that?...” forget it, don’t write me and bring that up. I know all that and have written about it elsewhere. Yes, I know that most of the Republicrats didn’t give a tinker’s damn about reckless assaults on liberty while their guy was heading up the plunder party. But Michele Bachmann, like a few others in Congress, has received an education in liberty courtesy of the Ron Paul Revolution. Moreover, educating (and radicalizing) those who have the political power to screw up our lives has been a big part of the Revolution’s success.
We should be delighted each time Republicans sound like libertarians and we should welcome these pivotal moments. We have to keep on pushing the enlightenment process forward. Understand that the election of an arrogant, power-hungry Marxist (who happens to be a Democrat, thereby pissing off the Republicans) is a significant opportunity for us to move in and educate angry conservatives, especially those who are seated closer to the margins. The fact that the Republicans are sounding like classical liberals or libertarians so that they have ammunition to counter the Obama strategy is not a bad thing.
Look at Ron Paul’s HR 1207 bill, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. He started with no co-sponsors, the list built slowly, and then it picked up steam until over half of the House of Representatives came to co-sponsor it. Michele Bachmann was an early supporter of that bill, and she has been marvelous on many occasions. I am hoping that she, and others like her, will continue to move forward on many issues critical to the anti-state movement. If we can capitalize on Republican resentment over the Obama regime and its war on freedom and free markets, we need to do it, and as often as we can. Along the way, we should welcome those Republicans who are having a change of heart and supporting Ron Paul’s ideas and his vision. We should even welcome Rush Limbaugh’s occasional lapse into quasi-libertarian belligerence, if it serves to spark further skepticism from his android listeners.
Be mindful that Bachmann is actually intelligent, unlike Sarah Palin, who is a trained monkey and came out of nowhere, thanks to her gender, sprightly sparkle, and the problems with McCain’s uninspiring, snooze-a-rama campaign. Bachmann is also articulate and pretty—which is never detrimental to a woman in politics—and comes across as steady and confident. The attribute of hers that gives me hope is her tendency to reveal recurring signs of un-Republican-like behavior. Questioning the constitutionality of the census and making Timothy Geithner stutter like a pickled parrot are just a couple of strong points in her favor.
Actions in Bachmann’s favor are that she voted against the Wall Street bailouts, opposed the auto industry bailout, questioned Bush’s plan to increase troops in Iraq, opposed greater subsidization of student loans, opposed light bulb tyranny, correctly blamed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for their part in the economic meltdown, opposes a one-world currency, has spoken out against mandatory government service, and isn’t fooled by the political agenda of the global warming alarmists. Bachmann also understands how Warren G. Harding’s lack of economic intervention in the 1920-21 Depression allowed the economy to rebound quickly (she’s been paying attention to Tom Woods). She has even spoken about the roles of Hoover, FDR, and the Smoot-Hawley tariff in magnifying the Great Depression, in spite of mixing up some of those facts along the way.
Without question, there are many concerns swirling around Bachmann, such as the fact that she comes from a Christian fundamentalist background and has, in spurts, shown support for the Iraq war and large-scale aggression in the Middle East. She also speaks too much about “anti-Americanism.” However, along those same lines, when Bachmann went on MSNBC’s Hardball and said that members of Congress should be “investigated” for anti-American views, perhaps the response from her five democratic colleagues in the Minnesota House delegation was even worse than her own conduct. Those democrats issued a statement that said, “For Michele Bachmann to go on national television and say that members of Congress should be investigated for ‘anti-American views’ calls into her judgment and her ability to work in a bipartisan way to put the interests of our country first in this time of crisis” [emphasis mine]. To the contrary, her ability to remain independent, and her refusal to follow behind the (bi-)partisan pack, is one of Michele’s great strengths.
Sure, Bachmann’s fundamentalism might presents some problems, and it’s unlikely to change; however, considering we’re facing Obama fast-paced socialization of the country, we should welcome combatants like Michele Bachmann who are willing to step up and challenge the regime on some pivotal issues.
Bachmann regularly attends Ron Paul’s Washington lunches where a small, informal group gathers to hear a variety of radical speakers—such as Tom Woods and James Bovard—who are hand-selected by Ron Paul. She’s read Meltdown
I’d like to see Bachmann continue along her path, learning from Ron Paul and finding her rebel roots. And she appears to be educable! Which is more than you can say for most everyone else in Congress. And she’s not afraid to stand in the firing line on her own. Let’s watch this lady carefully over the next couple of years. There may be many more bright moments.
Ron Paul, who’s long been a man on a lone crusade, needs all the assistance he can get on the House floor. With all the controversy being created by the hubristic Thief-in-Chief, there’s a bustling market for rebellion, and Ron Paul’s Revolution is just now rolling into prime time.
Given its monopoly of guns, bet on the Iranian regime. But, in the long run, the ayatollahs have to see the handwriting on the wall.
Let us assume what they insist upon—that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election; that, even if fraud occurred, it did not decide the outcome. As Ayatollah Khamenei said to loud laughter in his Friday sermon declaring the election valid, “Perhaps 100,000, or 500,000, but how can anyone tamper with 11 million votes?”
Still, the ayatollah and Ahmadinejad must hear the roar of the rapids ahead. Millions of Iranians, perhaps a majority of the professional class and educated young, who shouted, “Death to the Dictatorship,” oppose or detest them. How can the regime maintain its present domestic course or foreign policy with its people so visibly divided?
Where do the ayatollah and Ahmadinejad go from here?
If they adopt a harder line, defy Barack Obama and refuse to negotiate their nuclear program, they can continue to enrich uranium, as harsher sanctions are imposed. But to what end adding 1,000 more kilograms?
If they do not intend to build a bomb, why enrich more? And if they do intend to build a bomb, what exactly would that achieve?
For an Iranian bomb would trigger a regional arms race with Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia seeking nuclear weapons. Israel would put its nuclear arsenal on a hair trigger. America would retarget missiles on Tehran. And if a terrorist anywhere detonated a nuclear bomb, Iran would risk annihilation, for everyone would assume Tehran was behind it.
Rather than make Iran more secure, an Iranian bomb would seem to permanently isolate her and possibly subject her to pre-emptive attack.
And how can the Iranians survive continued isolation?
According to U.S. sources, Iran produced 6 million barrels of crude a day in 1974 under the shah. She has not been able to match that since the revolution. War, limited investment, sanctions and a high rate of natural decline of mature oil fields, estimated at 8 percent onshore and 11 percent offshore, are the causes. A 2007 National Academy of Sciences study reported that if the decline rates continue, Iran’s exports, which in 2007 averaged 2.4 million barrels per day, could decrease to zero by 2015.
You cannot make up for oil and gas exports with carpets and pistachio nuts.
If Tehran cannot effect a lifting of sanctions and new investments in oil and gas production, she is headed for an economic crisis that will cause an exodus of her brightest young and quadrennial reruns of the 2009 election.
And there are not only deep divisions in Iran between modernists and religious traditionalists, the affluent and the poor, but among ethnic groups. Half of Iran’s population is Arab, Kurd, Azeri or Baluchi. In the Kurdish northwest and Baluchi south, secessionists have launched attacks the ayatollah blames on the United States and Israel.
As they look about the region, how can the ayatollahs be optimistic?
Syria, their major ally, wants to deal with the Americans to retrieve the Golan. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are hostile, with the latter having uncovered a Hezbollah plot against President Hosni Mubarak.
Hamas is laser-focused on Gaza, the West Bank and a Palestinian state, and showing interest in working with the Obama administration.
Where is the Islamic revolution going? Where is the state in the Muslim world that has embraced Islamism and created a successful nation?
Sudan? Taliban Afghanistan? Somalia is now in final passage from warlordism to Islamism. Does anyone believe the Al-Shahab will create a successful nation?
As for the ayatollahs, after 30 years, they are deep in crisis—and what have they produced that the world admires?
Even if the “green revolution” in Iran triggers revolts in the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, can Iran believe Sunni revolutionary regimes will follow the lead of a Shia Islamic state? How long did it take Mao’s China to renounce its elder brother in the faith, Khrushchev’s Russia?
When one looks at the Asian tigers—South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia—or at the China or India of recent decades, one sees nations that impress the world with their progress.
Iran under the mullahs has gone sideways or backward. Now, with this suspect election and millions having shown their revulsion of the regime, the legitimacy and integrity of the ayatollahs have been called into question.
Obama offers the regime a way out.
They may exercise their right to peaceful nuclear power, have sanctions lifted and receive security guarantees, if they can prove they have no nuclear weapons program and will cease subverting through their Hezbollah-Hamas proxies the peace process Obama is pursuing between Israel and Palestine.
If Iran refuses Obama’s offer, she will start down a road at the end of which are severe sanctions, escalation and a war that Obama does not want and Iran cannot want—for the winner will not be Iran.
I lamented here that the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, __ U.S. __, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 171 L. Ed. 2d 637 (2008), seemed about to be “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause—that is, enforced against the states. Since then, however, comes news that a New Jersey appellate court has now found the Second Circuit’s decision not to “incorporate” more persuasive. Mayhap sanity will reign.
Maybe, on the other hand, the Supreme Court will have to take up the issue. It generally dislikes conflict among circuits, as has now developed between the Second and Ninth. That would give some enterprising originalist an opportunity to level a blast at the Incorporation Doctrine generally. (It would also provide phony “originalist” Antonin Scalia an opportunity to explain that he doesn’t want to refight the incorporation battle.)
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Under Consideration: Banquo’s Ghosts
You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a plot to kill an Iranian physicist before he can cook up a nuke for the mullahs. The problem is, where do you get your hero these days? Back in the day, when Clancy was keeping Reagan awake way past 9 pm with Hunt for Red October, it was easy to make US agents like Jack Ryan look good; after all, they were going up against the dregs of the poor old USSR.
It’s not anywhere near as easy to convince readers nowadays that our spooks are superhuman, not after Iraq and especially not where Iran is concerned. The grim fact is that Iran has outplayed us since I was a kid. I mean that literally. Some of my earliest and nastiest memories are from the hostage crisis in 1979, scared blindfolded hostages, then the wreckage of Desert Storm, a greasy mullah holding up the roasted arm of a dead American solder. From Carter to Bush Junior, it’s been one embarrassment after another at the hands of those sneaky Persians.
So Lowry and Korman have changed with the times. Their patriotic agent characters, Banquo and his lieutenant Wallets, are sort of tired and weak in this book, bummed about the way Iraq turned out. When you meet Banquo, he’s looking over a lot of high-tech surveillance of Nasrullah, the Hezbollah leader—except Banquo realizes the guy wearing the chemically-dyed turban may be a body double, or a nobody. Banquo is bummed, realizing all the satellites in the world won’t make up for the fact we’ve got no humint worth mentioning in the Middle East: “‘We’re losing,’ Banquo whispered to the walls.”
Yes, Banquo’s world, Tom Clancy’s world, is going to Hades. The CIA isn’t what it used to be, thanks to all this new touchy-feely crap:
Minivans! Diaper-changing tables! Car pools! With friends like that, it stands to reason that poor Banquo can’t count on the usual allies to take on the Iranians.
But the biggest blow to Tom Clancy’s world is pretty clear, as this book admits in a weird, very interesting way. We’re in Banquo’s office, while the depressed old agent thinks about why “we’re losing.” He settles on a poster:
A couple of years back one of Banquo’s staff hung a framed replica of Fox Mulder’s famous alien saucer poster on the wall. ... Except this poster showed Saddam’s noble profile superimposed over a mushroom cloud. The caption stayed the same though, a comment on the Agency’s egregiously wrong ‘slam dunk’ insistence that Iraq had WMD’s when none could be found:
“I Want to Believe.”
So for the good of the firm and reasons of professional grit, the senior and only partner of Banquo and Duncan had left it there.
To hang forever as a warning.
I was amazed to read that bit in a novel by the editor of a neocon outpost like National Review. It’s about as close to admitting, “We messed up,” as these guys are ever going to come. And it helps to explain the big plot twist in the novel. Since the neocons and the CIA are so bummed, depressed, and discredited, you can’t just find a Jack Ryan and put him on the bad guys’ trail. You need to find a new kind of hero. And that’s where these two co-author dudes really outdid themselves. See, they need someone to kill that pesky Iranian physicist, but their boys are weak, car-pooling losers. Where’s the energy, the drive, these days? Why, across the aisle, among those damn lefties and peaceniks. They’re the ones on the attack. So Banquo recruits an antiwar Lefty, a Brit reporter named Peter Johnson, who took Saddam’s money and spends most of his time telling TV audiences that Iran is harmless, and only wants nukes for peaceful energy.
It’s pretty clear, if you’re an old CNN fan like me, than this Johnson character is a pretty obvious take on Peter Arnett, the reporter who got fired after the first Iraq war. Johnson character is a drunk, a slob, an all-around mess, and an America-hater from way back—all the stuff the Pentagon said about Arnett.
But Johnson is only a leftie on the surface. Inside, he’s sick of himself, ashamed of having served the forces of evil all his life. And just in case you were in any doubt that they really are the forces of evil, there’s a long scene at a snooty Manhattan dinner party where the reader meets Johnson’s lefty boss, Josephine Parker von Hildebrand. Josephine is just about the evilest witch-queen since Snow White: “Josephine had practically every desirable personal characteristic, except wisdom and mercy.” Gee, that sounds like she actually isn’t a nice person at all! Well, this isn’t one of those subtle type novels. If it had a soundtrack, it’d be heavy on the Count Dracula organ notes every time Josephine appears.
The scene at her snooty dinner party is maybe the worst in the novel. Basically, all the cool lefties at the party turn into rabid Jew-hating Nazis after their second glass of wine. It’s the old line that anybody who ever criticizes Israel can’t really mean what they say; they must be secret Nazis just waiting for some pretext to spew up their hate. Even Johnson, the peacenik, is outraged at what he hears: “But of all the Jew-haters he despised—more than any neo-Nazi skinhead—were the pointy-headed intellectuals, the sophisticated, sleight-of-hand Jew-haters, the let’s-adopt-the-Saudi-peace-plan, and gosh-aren’t-these-people-awfully-pushy-and-greedy-for-such-a-little-country? Jew-haters.” Right. Meaning, anybody who ever quibbled with any Israeli policy. Ever. Well, that settles that. To show you how evil these non-neocons truly are, they start talking like little Hitlers. Now, I can’t speak from personal experience here—contrary to what you might expect, I don’t get invited to all that many cool Manhattan parties—but it’s a little hard to believe that this New York leftist magazine is secretly staffed by a bunch of Hitlerites.
But that’s what it comes to, for the hardcore neocon propagandist: if you ever disagree with Israel, if you ever try to say that maybe blasting Gaza wasn’t the smartest idea, then it’s the express bus to Swastika-ville. You’re a Nazi, and that’s that.
The Jew-hatery gets so bad that poor drunken Johnson is about to punch one of the Israel-bashers, when he’s held back by Banquo’s mysterious second-in-command, Wallets. Banquo & co. want Johnson to stay in place, pretend to be a good lefty, and use his connections to the evil Katrina. See, long ago at Oxford, Johnson used to be married to this bitch, and he’s still her boy, forced to write politically-correct articles even when he knows he’s lying.
Naturally, Johnson turns out to be totally ready to betray all his buddies on the left. That’s another cute little twist Lowry and Korman have come up with in this novel: every time you meet a leftist or Iranian, they say something anti-leftist or anti-Iranian. It’s like the authors think all their opponents are just faking it, just to be pains in the ass, and with a little blackmail and a chance at redemption, they’d love to see the light and put Bush back in office.
Johnson’s redemption, with the help of Banquo’s Lieutenant Wallets, is a classic spy-novel version of Rocky. First, the hero hits rock bottom, which in this case means Johnson gets humiliated on the street by three black kids who slash his pants, steal his wallet and leave him standing there feeling raped. Out of nowhere comes this suave killer, Wallets, and before you can say “Chuck Norris,” he stomps the three muggers, makes the last one standing hand Johnson’s credit cards back (and apologize), and then gives the muggers his business card, in case they mend their ways and choose to get serious and professional about beating people up.
It’s a very weird scene, but if you grew up reading this kind of stuff, it’ll seem pretty familiar. Anybody besides me remember a 1970s spy novel called The Spike
Anyway, Wallets turns into a real man, but along the way he makes sure to bitch-slap the Brit around. So when Johnson complains that he’s fifty, too old to learn spycraft, Wallets gives him the open hand: “Wallets held up a stern hand. Then said sarcastically, ‘We never mention a lady’s age.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d say that’s enough for today. Thank you, Peter. You can let yourself out.’”
Oooooh, burn! “...a lady’s age….”! And in case you were in danger of missing the burn, they put “lady” in italics! And then the crusher, “You can let yourself out.”!
Of course, Johnson goes to Iran, gets tortured, redeems himself, wins the respect of the real men like Banquo and Wallets, but it’s like that’s not enough for the guys who wrote this novel. So they tack on one corny cliffhanger after another.
First a team of Iranian agents tries to smuggle toxic slime into NYC (as if anybody’d even notice!) and then Johnson’s daughter, the one person he truly loves, etc., gets kidnapped—you know, just like Clancy did in Patriot Games. She’s OK, don’t worry, but the last little slap in the testicles for poor Johnson is that just as he’s making dinner for his rescued daughter, she tells him, “Daddy, I have a date”... and guess who the lucky man is? None other than Wallets, the real man who called her dad a “lady” and whipped him into shape before sending him to certain death.
So although Lowry and Korman have figured out that the usual pool of Jack Ryans is dried up and discredited after Iraq, they haven’t figured out much else. They know enough to make an outsider, a leftist, their new hero, but they never figure out what to do with him, besides make him the worst, most unconvincing action hero since Dice Clay as Ford Fairlane. And even when he’s done his bit against the mullahs, they can’t help giving him that one last knee in the balls.
It’s not a bad way to look at how the neocons operate: so damn arrogant and stone-deaf that even when they know they’re totally wrong, they can’t help welcoming outsiders to their little club with a friendly knee to the balls.
Does absence make the heart grow fonder? I’m not so sure. I’ve been away from London for one year, and was dreading the return. The grey sky, the Dickensian streets, the fat-bellied lager louts, the knife culture, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, the coarsest of the coarse Alan Sugar in the House of Lords: a good place to miss, I told myself.
Well, it didn’t last long, my dread of the return. Nicky Haslam in cabaret was a real treat, and Lord Charles Churchill’s idea to turn Nicky into a Cole Porter performer at Bellamy’s was an inspired one. John Standing singing Noël Coward was as brilliant as it gets, and Nicky Haslam crooning Cole Porter was first class. For one brief moment I thought of also going public — I am a stand-up comedian and Nick Scott accompanies me on the piano — but at my advanced age I thought better of it.
The mood kept improving. Last Sunday, on a beautiful sunny day, friends and I drove to Oxfordshire, to Tusmore Park, Wafic and Rosemary Said’s Palladian beauty, where one of Britain’s nicest and most generous couples were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. The magical setting, the 200 guests, the delicious food and superb wines combined to remind me that only in Europe can real fun be had in a refined environment. Mind you, the upper-class English help. No matter how grand the occasion, there is always time for schoolboy jokes. That’s the difference with America. Our American cousins somehow think it’s immature to act immature and, in places like Washington DC, it is absolutely verboten. Maybe one day they’ll get it. Where Americans gauge puerile behaviour unacceptably post-graduate, the English rejoice in juvenility as an integral part of their fun. Policemen’s helmets remain for the taking.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. Pug’s Club is to be congratulated for our first knight: Sir Christopher Lee. After 88 years and 250 films, the morons who decide such things finally got around to it. But what about Jeremy Lloyd and many others who deserve the honours handed out to crooks and lawyers by Blair and Brown? Is it possible for a man who gave sugar a bad name to go to the Lords, appointed by an unelected Prime Minister who has handed power over to an unelected man who has twice been forced out of the Cabinet for shady dealings? The mind boggles. Alan Sugar is a disgusting vulgarian who scowls at people who are needy and cannot scowl back, a bully and coward because only cowards bully those under them. Stephen Glover got it exactly right when he said Sugar and that other clown, the cook Gordon Ramsay, inspire him to emigrate to New Zealand. Except that New Zealand is a wonderful place. I’d emigrate to Afghanistan if it was guaranteed that I’d never hear their names again.
Never mind. There are worse things than Sugar and Ramsay but I cannot think of them right now. Perhaps the dwarfish Polly Toynbee deciding who should be prime minister, but that’s just very funny — almost as funny as if Toynbee ran off with Gaddafi who pretends he likes virgins. Yes, it’s good to be back in dear old London, although nothing has changed as far as crime is concerned. Politicians keep lying about crime in Britain, as they lie about everything else. The fatal stabbing of an innocent 16-year-old by three subhuman thugs who postured threateningly in court is a perfect example. The three killers are all sons of African immigrants, their sink-estate patois and arrogance indicative of this government’s total failure in rooting out the causes of crime. What is ironic is that in a best-selling tabloid decrying the murder of the innocent 16-year-old, the following story was about the evils of the BNP.
Perhaps because I’ve been away for a year, I have missed something. Has the BNP been killing innocent 16-year-olds? Is that why moronic columnists are pushing the alarm bells against the party? I have not as yet met one person who is poor and struggling who has not expressed contempt for open borders and unlimited immigration. Things the BNP stands for, along with some other not so nice things. I’ve said it before and will say it until this column is terminated. Politicians will treat the electorate with contempt until we throw them out of office the moment they go back on their word. Cameron is wet and an absolute whore who speaks with a forked tongue. Will he or won’t he hold a referendum no matter what the rest of the European lemmings do? Will he totally stop immigration from Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh? If any of you are waiting for a straight answer, do please join me next week in Alan Sugar’s house, where he’s conducting a seminar on old-fashioned manners and how properly to address a duke and duchess.
Harry Browne, the former Libertarian Party candidate for president, used to say: “the government is great at breaking your leg, handing you a crutch, and saying ‘You see, without me you couldn’t walk.’” That maxim is clearly illustrated by the financial industry regulatory reforms proposed this week by the Obama Administration.
In seeking to undo the damage inflicted over the past decade by misguided government policies, the new regulatory regime would ensure that the problems underlying our financial system will only get worse. As was the case with the deeply flawed Sarbanes-Oxley legislation of 2002, or the misguided provisions of the Patriot Act of 2001, such as the torturous anti-money laundering requirements, the move will further burden the financial services industry with unnecessary regulation that will drive up costs, lower quality, and shelter the biggest and least innovative companies. Ultimately, the structure will put the entire U.S. financial industry at a global competitive disadvantage.
The underlying problem is that the excessive risk taking which brought about the crisis was not market-driven, but a direct consequence of government interference with risk-inhibiting market forces. Rather than learning from its mistakes and allowing market forces to once again control risks and efficiently allocate resources, the government is merely repeating its mistakes on a grander scale – thereby sowing the seeds for an even greater crisis in the future.
As is typical of government attempts to control economic outcomes, Obama’s plans focuses on the symptoms of the disease and not the cause. The American financial system imploded for two reasons: cheap money and moral hazard – both of which were supplied by the government. Under the proposed new regulatory structures, these toxic ingredients will be combined in ever-increasing quantities.
The proposals most notably involve extra regulatory oversight of financial entities that the government deems “too big to fail.” This implies that it is desirable to have such entities in the first place, and that the government will continue to back those large organizations that fall under its protection. These “too big to fail” firms will enjoy a competitive advantage over smaller firms in attracting capital, as lenders will perceive zero risk in extending them credit. This will cause these firms to grow even larger, producing even greater systemic risks and larger losses when the next round of bailouts arrives. Meanwhile, smaller firms which seek to expand, and which propose no systemic risks, will face greater challenges as higher capital costs render them less competitive.
If the government did not provide these bailouts or guarantees, then the market itself would ensure organizations did not grow beyond their ability to attract capital. It is only when market discipline is overcome by government guarantees that systemic risks arise.
Obama proposes to entrust the critical job of “systemic risk regulator” to the Federal Reserve, the very organization that has proven most adept at creating systemic risk. This is like making Keith Richards the head of the DEA.
Given the Federal Reserve’s disastrous monetary policy over the past decade, any attempt to expand the Fed’s role should be vigorously opposed. Through decades of short-sighted interest rate decisions, the Fed has proven time and again that it is only able to close the barn door after the entire herd has escaped. If setting interest rates had been left to the free market, none of the excesses we have seen in the credit market would have been remotely possible.
The perverse result will be that our government and the Fed gain more power as a direct result of their own incompetence. Such was also the case with Freddie and Fannie, which should have been allowed to fail, but were nationalized instead, leaving them in a position to do even more damage. The new round of regulations ignores them completely. Along those lines, ratings agencies such as Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s that completely missed the mark were also spared. Perhaps this special treatment is a way of ensuring that Treasury debt maintains its bogus AAA rating.
Unfortunately, despite their intent, my guess is that the new regulations will most severely impact smaller firms, like my own, that never engaged in reckless behavior. This will further reward those “too big to fail” firms, whose economies of scale and cozy relationships with regulators leave them better positioned than their smaller rivals to absorb the costs of the added red tape.
With the transition now fully under way, I propose we end the pretense and rename our country: “The United Socialist States of America.” In fact, given all the czars already in Washington, we might as well go with the Russian theme completely: appoint a Politburo, move into dilapidated housing blocks, and parade our missiles in the streets. On the bright side, there’s always the borscht.
In his statement on the House floor last week opposing the resolution condemning Iran, Ron Paul said “I have admired President Obama’s cautious approach to the situation in Iran and I would have preferred that we in the House had acted similarly.”
I agree. Obama’s cautious and dare I say “conservative” approach on the recent developments in Iran, is one of the few good things I can say about our president.
Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski agreed on CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria today, and in an interesting analysis, put Obama’s critics on this issue in the same boat with Iranian regime hardliners, who he refers to as “Iranian neocons:”
Brzezinski: “those who are supporting the regime, who in many respects are like our neocons, they are very similar to our neocons. They’re Manichean. They look at the world as divided into good and evil and many of them see America as the personification of evil.”
Zakaria: “Has Obama struck the right tone?”
Brzezinski: “Obama’s offering moral sympathy. He’s identifying himself morally, historically with what is happening in Iran. But he’s not engaging himself politically. He’s not interfering, because that could turn badly and it could be exploited by the neocons in Iran to crush the revolution, to wipe it out.
I don’t know if the revolution will prevail, it may take time. The longer it lasts, the better are its chances. But we don’t want to escalate into a total showdown, because if there’s a total showdown now, the chances are the worst elements – the Iranian neocons – will prevail.”
What do you think makes the perfect gift for Father’s Day? How about DNA results?
My own father, he who was married to my mother while I was conceived, likes to suggest that he and I are not related. Whether or not he is also implying that my mom is a ho, is another story.
In times of stress, for example, when I would ask dad to bail me out of my gambling debts, he’d say, “why should I support you? You don’t look anything like me!”
Before the advances in understanding of DNA the issue of illegitimacy was a deep sea to swim in. Most of the time my father and I got along really well, and that’s when it was a delight to believe I was genetically affiliated. Conversely, when we squabbled and I could only see him as King Crab, I relished the alternatives.
We went through a phase when he took to calling me ‘the little bastard’, and I prayed to God I was.
Still, I always knew it would be best of all to have verification, whatever the outcome.
Beautiful modern age we live in, all things have become possible. And, lo, in Salt Lake City there is a lab that, for a measly $500, will untangle your double helix and provide definitive proof of who is, and who is not, your daddy.
I ordered a gift certificate from the lab, to cover one paternity test.
A pal noted, ‘$500 for the DNA test. $50 for FedEx. Finding out you’re not an Oxenberg- priceless.’ Ha ha ha. Well, better not repeat that.
Today I phoned daddy-O to tell him to expect a gift certificate in the mail. And, to wish him a ‘Happy Father’s Day!’
What a relief. The demonstrations in the Islamic Republic, pursuant to the disputed election, have failed to cue the staple presidential speech we’d become accustomed to from George Bush.
Barack Obama spared the country a lecture about the all-American duty to crusade for democracy and against tyrants and terrorists.
Instead, the president confined himself to diplomatic, obligatory statements: He was “deeply troubled by the violence” perpetrated against supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, by the government and its military and paramilitary forces (the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij).
Despite the divisions between the two countries, Obama rededicated the U.S. to “tough, direct dialogue” with Iran. Ultimately it was up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s leaders would be. “We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.”
How refreshing. Unless the world bowed to America, Bush and his warbots saw no basis for diplomacy. The neoconservatives believe America has national interests; other nations merely manage varying degrees of success in aligning their interests with ours.
Contrast Obama’s political detachment with Bush’s delirium at getting news, in early in 2008, of Kosovo’s defiant declaration of independence. Our Imam practically danced in the streets in celebration. He was joined (in spirit, at least) by the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army. Orthodox Christian Serbs, on the other hand, took to the streets to protest the actions of the Albanian Muslims and express rage at US meddling, past and present.
In the dying days of the Bush administration, the Georgians attacked the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and the neighboring Abkhazia. Some say they were abetted militarily by Americans and Israelis. The Russian Bear rose on its hind legs, agitated, first by the neoconservatives’ insistence on bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and then by the same clique’s constant crowing, “We are all Georgians Now.”
Those were tense times. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili took to channeling Ahmed Chalabi, the man who fed a willing administration phony intel on Iraq so as to fire-up the War Party. In fairness to that phony, neoconservatives need no force-feeding when it comes to creative ploys for war. Ditto their ideological handymen.
No prompting required, Krauthammer, Kristol and company rushed to resuscitate Cold War II. These days, Mona (Charin), Mark (Steyn) and McMussolini, respectively, have denounced Obama’s “foreign policy as social work,” “impotence as moral virtue,” and “tepid” responses. Understandably, many diasporic Iranians share their convictions.
Americans are still suffering from a Bush foreign-policy hangover. Obama refocused a drunk-on-democracy country, by reminding it that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised. Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States; that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.”
In other words, thumping majorities in the Middle East do not necessarily coincide with American national interests. This simple thing Bush failed to grasp.
America’s former Majnun-in-Chief had cheered Iraqis as they turned out en masse for shari’a law; and he blithely egged on “the great people of Egypt” to replace Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party with the banned Muslim Brotherhood. When Bush’s agitation for democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority gave us Hamas – a rib in the ribcage of the Muslim Brotherhood – he grew disoriented, but continued to insist that the “yes” to Hamas was merely a yen for healthcare and other welfare.
As Dr. Johnson said, “There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” Iran’s leading reformist, the mullahs-approved Mousavi, backs Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and has said he would not suspend uranium enrichment. Most Iranians concur. Like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mousavi doesn’t recognize Israel. Since the Holocaust appears to have become a centerpiece ─ and a precondition for diplomacy ─ in neoconservative talking points, they might be interested in this tidbit: on Holocaust denial, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad are on the same pseudo-scientific page.
While neoconservatives and neoliberals declared that the elections in Iran had been rigged, the president noted cautiously that he could not “state definitively one way or another …,” because, “We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there; we did not have international observers on hand.”
Ahead of Iran’s presidential elections, a poll, the culmination of a collaboration between “Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion,” and “The American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation,” disputed “that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation.”
Conducted three weeks before the vote, this nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians, “showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin ─ greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election” ─ report the authors, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, in a Washington Post editorial.
Moreover, “Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll,” write Ballen and Doherty, “found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups. The only demographic groups in which [this] survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians.”
It is possible that the vote in Iran is the product of widespread fraud. Real or not, this is none of the United States’ business. This country has been pulverized economically and constitutionally. American livelihoods and liberties have been put into peril. In case the advocates of a muscular response have failed to notice, we’re pinned down like butterflies by our own tyrants.
It will be Twitterized!
Leave it to the neocons, their congressional allies, and much of the “conservative” blogosphere to make Barack Obama look like an elder statesman of Burkean inclinations.
As the newly color-coded “Green Revolution” unfolds on Twitter and other hipster-powered social networks, The Messiah has been rather circumspect in his public statements: saying that he thinks the Iranian people’s “voices should be heard” is as far as he’ll go. Obama wants to wait and see, and no matter what happens, he’ll meet with the Iranian president, whoever he might be, in the coming months. (Joe Biden stated unequivocally, “The decision has been made to talk.”) This policy of Splendid Wishy-Washiness with regard to the election is, without question, wise when an outside power is unstable and no one’s certain where the chips might fall.
The Republicans, of course, have recognized this deficit in obnoxious global-democracy happytalk, and have stepped up to fill the void. This is their moment! Since 9/11, you can always count on them to do Stephen Colbert impressions and put forth various windy resolutions in Congress whenever an international crisis of some sort occurs.
Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, Va), who’s making a bid to be the next Newt, led the way:
And later,
John McCain declared he’s certain the election, in which evil Ahmadinejad won almost two thirds of the vote, was a “sham” and, more ominously, announced, “I hope that we will act.” (Thankfully “act” only means, at least for the time being, “not talk to evil Ahmadinejad.”)
The blogosphere has been far worse. If Republicans are saying, “We’re all Iranians now!” then the bloggers are writing, “The Iranians are all Americans now!” It’s the Narcissism Revolution, and everything that happens in Tehran is, pretty much, all about us.
Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the most prominent in this regard. Sully has, of course, partaken in multiple “casual encounters” with various political movements in public blog posts over the past decade. At the beginning of the century, he was “warblogging,” spouting off all kinds of nonsense about “Munich” and—in 2001!—demanding that we consider nuking Iraq before it was too late! By the 2006 midterms, he’d switched to bashing the GOP and had gone quasi-antiwar—how conveeenient. And last year, Sully, much like Brüno, fell in love with Ron Paul, for a bit, and then abandoned him to follow Jesus Christ Superstar and launch a new career as a White House shill. Now on The Daily Dish, Sullivan’s quoting from various revolutionary “tweets” from Tehran—this vicarious Iranian liberal nationalism being his most pathetic political infatuation to date. The Twitter Revolution, according to Sully, will be a “game changer,” as a liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East will set off a domino effect of progressive change that will transform the hearts and minds … Wait, haven’t we heard this before?
Even some in the Religious Right are falling in love with themselves all over again with this Green Revolution thing. Take this from Catholic author Mark Shea:
It is beyond ironic that the country most identified in our minds as one of the major fomenters of Islamic nutjobbery should suddenly reveal a gigantic population of people who seem to have grokked [apparently this word means “understand, like, deeply”] the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Speaking of which, what also stuns me is how deeply in tune the Greens seem to be with ideas which are now quite despised here in the West by our elites, namely, the truth that, as JFK put it, ‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.’ Our elites, all agog for the New Atheism, sneer at such stuff as incipient “theocracy” even as the marchers in Iran call upon God to overturn the tyranny of the regime. It’s the other side of the coin that secularists never take sufficient stock of: the fact that faith in God doesn’t *just* inspire monstrous deeds. It can also fire incredible heroism and pull down despots.
The Greens in Iran are acting on ideas that are stunningly American (and, of course, deeply Catholic [of course!]). It is Augustine who tells us that an unjust law is no law at all. It is St. Thomas who says that a people have the right to overthrow a tyrant since raw power is not the same as authority from God. And it is the American Founders who insist that precisely *because* man has rights that come from God, not the state, that the state which tramples those rights is rightfully overthrown. How strange it is to hear Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar!” in support of the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and St. Thomas.
As evidence of this rapturous state of affairs, Shea shows us a YouTube video that looks a lot like all those horrible black-and-white “B-list Celebrities ♥ Obama” ditties we were bombarded with last spring. In this dispatch from the barricades, a collection of diverse, attractive Iranians hold up signs above the soft sounds of emo-rock guitar.
The translation is as follows: Sign 1) Defending civil rights; 2 Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation; 3) Nationalizing oil income; 4) Reducing tension in international affairs; 5) Free access to information; 6) Supporting single mothers; 7) Knock down violence against women; 8) Education for all; 9) Increasing public safety; 10) Ethnic and religious minority rights; 11) Supporting NGOs; 12) Public involvement; 13) We have come for change; 14) Change for Iran.
Shea might like to imagine some long thread of continuity stretching from Augustine to Jefferson to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King. And if these figures differ wildly in their conceptions of political sovereignty and the role and scope of the state, this is secondary to the fact that they all believed deeply in “American Values”—some Fuzzy Navel of natural rights, soft egalitarianism, and “democracy,” with Augustine’s City of God as a rough draft for the 1964 Civil Right Act. Shea might be interested to learn that, with the possible exceptions of numbers 4 and 9, the Fourteen Points in the video are actually derived from a way of thinking that long predates the 2008 election and the rise of Obama—it’s called Leftism, which, by the way, Shea’s Church opposed rather vigorously until the second half of the twentieth century.
But topping them all is Jonah Goldberg, whose recent piece in NRO indicates that he’s now occupying a realm beyond self-parody: “Do it, President Obama, please. Take the side of democracy.”
My favorite part of the oration is Goldberg’s discussion of the liberals’ tragically losing their way—that is, not bombing and “democraticizing” enough people!
During the Bush years, what was best about liberalism had bled away. One of the worst things about the Republican Party has always been its Kissingerian realpolitik, the “it’s just business” approach to world affairs that amounted to a willful blindness to our ideals beyond our own borders. The Democratic party may not have always gotten the policies right, but it had a firm grasp of the principle.
In the 1990s, liberals championed ‘nation building,’ and many conservatives chuckled at the naïveté of it. Then came Iraq, and Republicans out of necessity embraced what liberals once believed out of conviction. The result? Liberals ran from their principles, found their inner Kissingers and championed a cold realism whose chill emanated from the corpse of their ideals.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the blog comes when Goldberg lets slip the fantastical desire lying just behind his words, and one, I imagine, that’s shared by most third-generation neocons—they just want to be loved:
Hate to break it to Jonah, but they don’t like you, they really don’t like you.
And there’s actually little definitive evidence that the election this past week was actually stolen or that it marked a definitive repudiation of President Bugaboo. Yes, the large turnout, especially among the young, would seem to point to support for a “reform candidate,” and, yes, Ahmadenjehad’s margin of victory is rather incredible; however, as the Washington Post reports, a “nationwide public opinion survey [pdf] of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin—greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.” At the very least, the idea that we’re witnessing some national awakening to liberal democracy is clearly overdone.
And who is this Mr. Democracy, the man all these Persian admirers of Martin Luther King are cheering for? I admit, I’d never heard of Mir-Hossein Mousavi until this week. But according to his wikipedia page, he’s been an editor of the Islamic Republic Party’s official newspaper and a member of the High Council of Cultural Revolution. He served as prime minister of Iran under the Ayatollahs from 1981-89, during the infancy of Iran’s nuclear program. He’s also made no indication whatsoever that he wants to reverse Iran’s development of nuclear power and weapons so as to live in harmony with the peace-loving United States and Israel.
Put another way, if poor Mousavi gets elected, the neocons might decide that they need to bomb Iran anyway!
And even if the Narcissists tell us that Our Man in Tehran is but an unlikely, perhaps unwilling, “repository for the Iranian people’s hopes,” the simpler explanation is that the people in the streets are marching for … Mousavi—a reform-minded, slightly more liberal candidate who’d retain Iran’s independence, nuclear policy, and position towards the Great Satans.
Tehran certainly is a more modern, secular, multicultural place than one might imagine from watching FOX News—with its urban centers, its non-Muslim, Persian, and Zoroastrian traditions still in effect, and its girls who seductively push us their hajibs to display their bangs. I’ve heard that in parts of the capital, the atmosphere’s almost parisien. But then does any of this mean that Iranians will like America any more than, say, the Parisians? I think not.
I expect a rather rude awakening for many a beltway journalist and blogger when some 32-character “tweets” much like the following start coming over the wire:
Aktar213: OMG! Americans think we do this because we love them and their “freedom”
Fereshteh345: LOLROTF!!!
&Atoosa:Sullivan & Goldberg are such tools!!!!!!
The Iranians have surely got their own version of dumbed-down, sassy blogspeak, but the sentiments would be much the same.
The name “Paul Erdos” sent the search engines buzzing yesterday and I have to admit that it caused a little wry amusement around my way. The cause was this slightly obscure joke in the web comic XKCD. Slightly obscure to non-mathematicians that is. For Paul Erdos is rightly famous amongst that select breed.
Erdos was an Hungarian emigree mathematician who was famous for co-operating with all and sundry on any number of mathematical problems. Someone would explain a problem from just about any area of science, Erdos would elucidate the maths of it, provide a solution and then, usually at least, leave the original questioner to write up the solution as a proper paper. He co-operated in this manner with so many people that there’s an almost parlour game (perhaps that should be faculty room game) of working out what one’s Erdos number is. If you co-authored a paper with the Great Man himself then your Erdos number is 1. If you’ve written one with someone whose number is 1, then yours is 2, if with someone with a 2 then 3 and so on. If you think this sounds a little like the Kevin Bacon game then that’s no surprise, for it’s based upon the same sort of idea. In fact, there is an arcane variation of both, where you calculate the Erdos/Bacon number, looking at who has authored a maths paper and who has been in a movie. Apparently the winner of this is Brian Greene.
But recently, following a spate of mathematical films such as “Good Will Hunting”, an elite group of people have emerged, namely those who have appeared in films and written mathematical papers, and therefore qualify for Erdos-Bacon numbers. For a long time, the physicist Brian Greene had a clear lead with score of 5. He appeared in “Frequency” with John Di Benedetto, who was in ““Sleepers” with Kevin Bacon. And he wrote a paper with Shing-Tung Yau, who wrote a paper with Ronald Graham, who wrote a paper with Erdos. This gives a combined number of 2 + 3 = 5.
That isn’t what caused my mild amusement though. It was that upon being presented with this, to non-mathematicians, obscure joke, thousands of people (if not tens of thousands, at least, the sort of number required to get Google Trends to note what is happening) decided to hunt around and try to understand the joke.
Which is a little bit odd, for of course a joke that needs explaining is no longer funny, is it?
I recently read The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914, a cultural history somewhat in the tradition of Tony Judt’s Postwar. Rather than focusing on the economic data from the first age of globalization, or the Byzantine aspects of diplomatic history which presaged the Great War, The Vertigo Years surveys the terrain of intellect and art, from Cubism to Freudianism. Even obscure social phenomena such the renewed enthusiasm for dueling get significant treatment. Of course the Scramble for Africa and the flexing of military muscle in the interests of colonial expansion does loom large in the background.
But did the quest for empire matter at the end of the day? Britain and France were imperial nations par excellence, had been, and would continue to be for several decades. Other nations such as the Netherlands and Portugal had relatively modest possessions. Germany and Italy famously attempted to cobble together colonies out of the leavings of what other powers had neglected. And finally Switzerland, Sweden and other assorted nations remained out of the game. But did it matter? Does the current prosperity of the French state (or lack of) as opposed to the German state have any roots in the fact that Germany’s colonial experience was truncated and marginal at best? My friend John Derbyshire has observed that with the fall of the British Empire Britain itself went into decline. From this some might suggest that the rise of Britain, and in particular England, tracked the rise of its Empire. But in Farewell to Alms Greg Clark suggests that the roots of the economic take-off of the 19th century can be discerned in the 17th and perhaps even earlier. The Netherlands had a long and relatively sucessful history of empire in the Indies, and the VOC was in many ways the model for the modern corporation. Belgium, a creation of the 19th century, had a short and rather ill-starred experience with empire. And yet there is little difference between the two today economically.
I suspect that colonial empires loom large because they feed the vanity of great men. How many people remember today the supposed economic benefits which would accrue from the British acquisition of Burma? Pragmatic men, such as Otto von Bismarck were suspicious of the colonial project. The “resource curse” is well known in economics today, windfall wealth that is unearned tends to eat at the heart of a society. If Greg Clark is right the origins of the Industrial Revolution in Britain lay not in the raw materials and luxury goods which were secured via colonialism, but through the gains of productivity generated by the human capital of the British people themselves. Perhaps greatness did not come to Britain because of empire, but the empire was an effect of its greatness.
68 years ago, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, a group of Soviet scholars and scientists journeyed to Samarkand, Uzbekistan on an archaeological expedition. Their mission? Open the tomb of the legendary Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane. A Turco-Mongol warlord (also known as Timur) who claimed descent from Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and his armies rampaged through a good portion of 14th-century Eurasia and established an empire that stretched from the peaks of the Caucasus to the plains of India.
The project to open up Timur’s burial place in the massive, blue-domed Gur-e-Emir mausoleum was allegedly sanctioned by Stalin himself. Two witnesses to the effort, a cameraman and a son of one of the scholars, related their accounts to the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in a 2004 article. The team in Samarkand had already excavated several royal graves, and by June 19th, it was time to unseal Tamerlane’s. At this point the cameraman to the expedition was approached by three Uzbek elders who advised him leave the tomb in peace, for if it was disturbed, catastrophic war would be visited on those responsible. They also showed him this warning written in an old thick Persian text, supposedly from the 16th century, that detailed the lives and legends of the Timurid dynasty.
The cameraman then tells us of Tamerlane’s excavation:
“We had hardly opened the top of the sarcophagus…when the air began to smell of something dizzying. And the other opened graves didn’t have any kind of smell whatsoever. Somehow I felt uncomfortable. And then all of the sudden the lights went out. In the preceding three weeks of the dig there hadn’t been anything like it”.
The lights flashed back on for no explicable reason three hours later. The expedition then took Tamerlane’s remains for study, and the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov was even able to reconstruct a likeness of the conqueror by examining his skull. Timur’s skeleton was reinterred in December 1942. Exactly why is unknown, but Russian journalists have speculated that Stalin ordered the body reburied to undo the alleged curse. Months later in early 1943, Soviet forces did prevail in the urban hell of Stalingrad.
So scientists opened Tamerlane’s tomb on June 19th, 1941. The Wehrmacht had, of course, been preparing logistically and manning positions months before June 1941 for war with Russia. Recent history has its share of “legends” such as this. Yet it is still a rather fascinating confluence of events that archaeologists set upon the supposedly cursed tomb of a great Eurasian warlord a mere two days before Hitler loosed his forces against the Soviet Union and began a military cataclysm of unprecedented scale. If superstitions hold any validity, let’s hope that Uzbek President Islam Karimov continues to refrain from poking around Timur’s resting place.
Conservatives seemed to have finally learned their lesson on supporting big government Republicanism at home. But few seem willing to reject the other half of that “toxic mixture” of big government abroad, or what Joe Scarborough calls “Wilsonian globalism,” as demonstrated by the Right’s recent rhetoric on the ongoing developments in Iran.
Conservative talk radio and many Republican pundits and politicians seem to be wondering the same thing - why won’t Obama speak out in support of the Iranian masses protesting the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg writes “Do it, President Obama, please. Take the side of democracy.” But this type of thinking reflects the same sort of reckless, “cowboy diplomacy” that got us bogged down in Iraq in the first place.
On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I—who had seen off Napoleon—his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace.
For hours, the czar stood at the end of the square as the crowd shouted for a constitution or for Nicholas’ brother Constantine to take the throne. Shots were exchanged.
As darkness fell, a czarist general rode up to Nicholas and said, “Sire, clean the square with gunfire—or abdicate.”
The cannons belched—and Nicholas reigned for 30 years.
Most autocratic regimes face such moments.
After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, East German workers rebelled, and were crushed. Rather than let the Hungarian Revolution triumph, in November 1956 Nikita Khrushchev ordered in the tanks. In August 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent in tanks again to crush Prague Spring. In 1981, Moscow ordered Gen. Jaruzelski to smash Solidarity. Those communists did not shrink from massacre to keep what they worshipped: power.
In June 1989, Beijing, rather than let hundreds of thousands of dissidents occupy Tiananmen Square, waited for nightfall and sent in tanks and rural troops, avoiding the fate of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
Authoritarian rulers who recoil at bloodshed to preserve their power have not fared well.
Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, “The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.”
To which Napoleon is said to have replied, “What an idiot.”
The Shah refused to use his army on the rebels and lost his throne. Mikhail Gorbachev refused to use the army to save Moscow’s allies in Eastern Europe and lost the Soviet Empire.
Though Gorbachev is hailed in the West for not being a Khrushchev, no true authoritarian would regard him as a great statesman.
Tehran appears to be facing its Tiananmen moment.
Hundreds of thousands are still demonstrating against Friday’s election and the regime that validated it. They are now being joined by crowds in cities where Baluchi, Arabs, Kurds and Azeris outnumber Persians, thus imperiling the unity of this diverse nation.
It is hard to believe that this theocratic regime, backed by the Revolutionary Guard and clerics, will not do whatever is necessary to preserve its power and national unity.
This is another reason President Obama is right not to declare that the United States is on the side of the demonstrators in Tehran or the other cities—and against the regime.
Should this end in bloodshed, Obama would be blamed for having instigated it, and then abandoned the demonstrators, as Ike’s U.S. Information Agency was blamed for having urged the Hungarians to rise and then left them to their fate.
When Vice President Nixon went to the bridge at Andau to welcome the Hungarian patriots fleeing the bloodbath, many cursed America for having misled them into believing we would be at their side.
If Obama cannot assist the demonstrators, why declare we are with them? That would call into question the nationalist credentials of the protesters by tying them to a power not universally loved in Iran. It would play into the hand of the regime by confirming charges that the crowds are “rent-a-mobs” like the ones Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA used to dump over the regime of Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953.
Moreover, the alternative to the Ayatollah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a republic that will renounce Islamism and Iran’s nuclear program. It is ex-Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani, and ex-Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, all of whom trace their roots to the Revolution of 1979 and none of whom bears any great love of Uncle Sam.
It is Ayatollah Khomeini’s boys versus Ayatollah Khamenei’s boys. As Obama observed, in policy terms, there is no great difference.
For six days, the world has watched riveted as hundreds of thousands of Iranians peacefully protested what they believe was a stolen election, challenging the ayatollah who validated it just hours after the polls closed. For six days, the regime, born of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been leaking legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of its own people, the Islamic world, the whole world.
Why interfere? Why turn a widening confrontation between the Ayatollah Khamenei and the people into a spat between the president of the United States and the president of Iran?
It is impossible to believe a denunciation of the regime by Obama will cause it to stay its hand if it believes its power is imperiled. But it is certain that if Obama denounces Tehran, those demonstrators will be portrayed as dupes and agents of America before and after they meet their fate.
If standing up and denouncing the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad from 7,000 miles away is moral heroism, it is moral heroism at other people’s expense.
I found Dr. Grant Havers’ rumination on the relationship between paleoconservatism and Protestantism of interest, though the broad points were not surprising to me. James Kalb at the Traditionalism FAQ notes that “Protestantism often has an uneasy relation to traditionalism,” before adding that “Nonetheless, it is not monolithic and one should distinguish cases.” This is clear from the fact that Mr. Kalb brackets out Anglicanism into its own section from Protestantism more broadly. There are obviously substantive grounds to do this, but it emphasizes that within Protestantism there is a great deal of variation. Though David Hacket Fisher’s thesis in Albion’s Seed is couched in an integrative cultural fashion, it is clear that the “Cavalier” Anglicanism is a distinct Protestant tradition from that of “Puritan” New England. Though I believe that the argument that the Radical Reformation was likely the root of much which is unpalatable, and to be fair, praiseworthy, of the modern world is a strong one, on occasion it seems to me that its opponents claim too much. Years ago I read Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History (thanks to pointer from Lew Rockwell’s site). An interesting narrative, but it seemed that the author felt that the Reformation was a disaster both because it destroyed the cosmopolitan liberal international order of the medieval world, and, because it ushered in the liberal international order of the modern world!
In any case, instead of offering more opinions on ground well trod, I thought it would be interesting to look at differences between Catholics and Protestants in nations which have a long history of each faction. The World Values Survey has large sample sizes for the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Hungary. These are nations which have a long tradition of both Catholicism and Protestantism, and these confessions do not align with particular ethnic boundaries (both French and German Swiss are Catholic and Protestant). Though there are many variables, I thought it would be informative to look at political self-identification as well as opinions in regards to abortion, a topic where one would assume there might be some difference. In both of these situations individuals could respond on a point scale, so I collapsed them into more compact categories. So for political orientation you see quintiles along Left-Right axis (e.g., Left = 1 and 2, Right = 9 and 10, Center = 5, and so on). For abortion I simply split it between those who leaned toward the practice being unjustifiable and those leaned toward it being justifiable.
Notes:
1) Dutch Protestantism has suffered a much greater defection rate than Catholicism. There are now more Dutch who identify as Catholics than Protestants, though the category of “Nones” is predominantly Protestant in origin and my personal experience is that these individuals may lack positive religious sentiments, but retain an anti-Catholic stance.
2) Swiss Catholics tend to be more concentrated in rural areas than Swiss Protestants (e.g., the Forest Cantons).
3) Hungarian Protestantism is geographically concentrated in the east of the country.
4) The data is from WVS wave 5, so from 2005.
This weekend, I’ll be driving down to DC to attend The American Cause’s latest conference, Building a New Majority. (You can register here.) And I hear a few other Takimag contributors will be there as well. We’re going to discuss how the GOP might take back the country—which, to be honest, strikes me as a rather horrifying proposition after experiencing the Bush years! But, of course, TAC wants to recast the GOP as a Buchanaite party, as guest list attests: Tom Tancredo, Phyllis Schlafly, Terry Jeffrey, Ward Connerly, Peter Brimelow, among others, are featured speakers.
I read Paul Gottfried’s recent reflections on the historical memory of the paleoconservative movement just after reading two recent studies of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin which devote particular attention to his critique of modern Christianity: Jeffrey Herndon’s Eric Voegelin And The Problem Of Christian Political Order and John J. Ranieri’s Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. While Voegelin never called himself a conservative, paleo or otherwise, it struck me that his understanding of western Christianity, particularly his unbridled detestation of the Protestant tradition (which Herndon and Ranieri admirably document), is a high-octane intellectualized version of a tendency which I find all too common in my limited experience with the paleoconservative movement. Voegelin’s contention that most of modernity’s problems—libertinism, totalitarianism, etc.—can be laid at the door of the Reformation and the Enlightenment (which echoes Protestantism, in his view) is not substantively different from the anti-modern worldviews of paleos with traditional Catholic or Orthodox inclinations (many of whom Voegelin taught and influenced in postwar America). Just recently a contributor to this site similarly blamed Anglo-Saxons for all the horrors of American modernity, ranging from the ugliness of shopping malls to the rhetorical excesses of Bush the Younger’s 2nd inaugural address. Another contributor a few weeks back condemned the Enlightenment for liberating modern man from the authority of nature and tradition while unleashing the desire for consumption and mastery of the planet, all of which threaten civilization as we know it.
As a Protestant Christian, I must grudgingly admit that my brothers and sisters in faith have not done their job in preserving conservative order (or what I awkwardly prefer to call “bourgeois Christian liberal democracy”). In The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard rightly observed that as early as the 1950s there were hardly any prominent Protestant leaders to be seen on the American Right. And, despite the cultural Marxist undertones in his studies of the American Protestant mind, Richard Hofstadter had a point when he long ago faulted Protestants for practicing an “anti-intellectualism” which left a void in conservatism that was later filled by noxious factions (although I profoundly disagree with Hofstadter’s paranoid dismissal of American Protestantism as fascism cloaked in red, white, and blue). The failure of Protestants to defend their traditions on viable intellectual grounds has indeed led to a spiritual void or “deformation”, to invoke the terms of James Kurth, and thereby contributed to the decline of the very order that their forefathers worked to create.
I fail to see, however, any wisdom in conservative efforts to scapegoat Protestantism as the main source of all that ails the present age. While not all paleos have been as extreme as Voegelin in claiming that Lutheran and Calvinist “gnosticism” is a dress rehearsal for Hitler and Stalin, I have yet to encounter more than a handful of paleos who believe that the Reformation was a good thing. It is far more common in my experience to find paleos who wish that the American founding had been a little more Catholic, or who support John Courtney Murray’s contention that America would be far better off if the Founders had read more Aquinas and less Locke. (For the record, I’ll take church-state separation over the ancien regime any day.) It is one thing to bash Protestants for failing to defend their own traditions; it is quite another thing to bash those traditions as unworthy of defense in the first place.
What Paul describes as a traditionalist prejudice of many paleos rings all too true in my experience:
Many of the paleos I’ve listened to show an otherworldly side, when they’re not bashing each other in geriatric rage. They glorify Catholic monastic ideals or invoke the memories of Christian crusades. They complain ceaselessly about modern life and insist that we return to scholastic precepts and medieval models of social organization. But such advice cannot possibly resonate in the current climate of debate, and it is foolish to castigate those young people who wish to have impact on the present age for not following someone else’s nostalgic reveries.
The constant decrying of Protestant modernity has been arguably very successful in driving Protestants out of the paleo camp and into the hands of neoconservatives, whose rhetoric about America’s chosenness resonates with many Protestants. What Sam Francis once described as over-the-top Catholicism among paleos is simply a gift to movement conservatives. It is also a very strange thing to call oneself a conservative if one is uncomfortable with the conservatism (that is, the older Protestantism) of one’s nation. What exactly, then, is one trying to conserve in America?
We are all entitled our memories, but Charles Coulombe’s reminiscences about the American conservative movement are very different from mine. Although his recollections are not incorrect, they are excessively selective. Charles is looking from the perspective of the late 1970s back to the 1950s and trying to freeze the postwar conservative movement at a point at which it would coincide with his traditionalist Catholic inclinations. But the 1950s constituted only a single decade in the conservative movement, and it was not a particularly typical one. My own memories reach back further since I am older than Charles; and I have also researched several books on the subject under discussion. The conservatism of the 1950s was heavily influenced and disproportionately populated by Irish Catholics and by Jews and Protestants who ran to embrace the Catholic Church. It was also shaped by militant anti-Communism, and it featured European émigrés, who often combined Catholic beliefs with anti-Communist enthusiasm. (Patrick Allitt has produced an informative book
In these characteristics, the conservative movement of the 1950s was a cultural and sociological anomaly. Catholic political influence in the next generation would be felt mostly on the political left, as it had been during the New Deal. The small-town, heartland Protestants who had dominated the American Right before the 1950s would not resume the cultural leadership they had enjoyed before. Instead there would be new powerbrokers taking over the movement, swaggering Machiavellian princes who espoused leftist views but wrapped them in American nationalist rhetoric. The neoconservatives would thereafter achieve such a formidable lock-hold on the respectable American Right that no other group would ever be in a position to challenge them.
Charles’s favorite thinkers are better than those who are currently running the conservative movement but not exactly exponents of his Catholic monarchical stance. Pat Buchanan has made a reputation as an economic nationalist and as a (somewhat inconsistent) defender of the Republican Party and GOP presidential candidates. He is also surviving and flourishing in the present media environment, a fact that indicates that the conservative present may not be entirely distinct from the conservative past. And regarding Charles’s other hero Russell Kirk, I can’t possibly imagine that one would find much political theory or political direction from reading his works. On this point, although perhaps on nothing else, I agree with David Frum, that Russell was first and always a literary figure; and as far as I could tell from having known him, he would not have defined himself in any other way.
I likewise agree with my colleague Wes McDonald, who has written an intellectual biography
I must also challenge Charles’s distinctions between the old and new paleoconservatives, and I do so with considerable authority. Although his commentary does not mention me, I have acquired the reputation, at least in the New York Times and in ISI publications, of being America’s leading paleoconservative thinker. I feel in no way slighted because Charles does not list me as such. There is no reason he should. Everyone who goes by this name has developed his own “paleoconservatism” and the meanings of the operative term do not necessarily overlap. Journalists of course knew what “paleoconservative” meant when I invented that designation twenty years ago. But things have changed since then. We now have two groups that claim the term “conservative”: an establishment power structure dominated by neocon opinions and lubricated with neocon money; and those people on the right who have been kept out of the country club but who also don’t get along well with each other. Most of those who have been excluded and who are beyond a certain age have fought themselves into stupefaction, without gaining ground. Most of the younger people in this camp of the marginalized are therefore unimpressed by those who have preceded them, and they are searching for new ways to get their views noticed, while reassessing the inspired texts of the older generation.
In this contest of the generations, I stand entirely on the side of those with a future. My generation of rightists has wasted its chance for success. We can only point to humiliations, continued marginalization, and internecine strife as our war record. Nor have we provided much assistance to each other, unlike our enemies, who like the ancient Spartans as described by Xenophon, “suffer and rejoice together.” Most of my generation of paleos has done little to establish a sense of community. The more fortunate ones have husbanded their resources while doing next to nothing for their allies.
That the young are still groping for a way out of the wilderness is to their credit. It is also the privilege of youth to be looking for new paths, and especially given the failures of their quarrelsome elders. Charles has noticed the obvious here, that the “new paleos” have little to feel happy about as they view their country and most of the Western world in the grasp of cultural gravediggers and a reckless political class. Does he dispute the justification for this pessimism or the justification for the young paleos’ unwillingness to pretend that the solution for Obama is electing more GOP politicians? As for his censures about their sexual morals, which Charles may fear do not quite meet the standard of Trappist monks, I don’t see the licentiousness here that he does. None of the young paleos, to my knowledge, is leading a life of wine and roses. For one thing, they don’t have the disposable income for fun and games that their neoconservative enemies are being showered with. Moreover, compared to the philandering Catholic monarchist Charles Maurras, who spent most of his adult life tumbling from one mistress to the next, the “new paleos” seem to be models of Puritan sobriety.
Let me stir the pot further by drawing another distinction, between those who want to be political activists and those who do not. Many of the paleos I’ve listened to show an otherworldly side, when they’re not bashing each other in geriatric rage. They glorify Catholic monastic ideals or invoke the memories of Christian crusades. They complain ceaselessly about modern life and insist that we return to scholastic precepts and medieval models of social organization. But such advice cannot possibly resonate in the current climate of debate, and it is foolish to castigate those young people who wish to have impact on the present age for not following someone else’s nostalgic reveries.
What Charles’s dirge seems convey is that things were much better in the 1950s. He is urging us to look back to that decade for our conservative benchmark. But my book Conservatism in America
The conservative worldview that conservative theorists patched together during the postwar years was always an improvisation. It was put together out of the overlapping concerns of those who founded NR and who were trying to mix their anti-Communism with something else. The something else was often a food additive, which in my youth I mistook for nourishment. The results of the cooking were not always impressive, even when doused in snappy journalism and laced with references to European thinkers.
And I can easily think of at least a dozen works by American rightists in the last thirty years that are as substantive as anything that came from movement conservative icons fifty years ago. As Richard Spencer has noted more than once, the “conservative classics” may not be as timeless as paleos have allowed themselves to believe. Just so! I for one would not be able to reread The Road to Serfdom or most of the get-the-Commies polemics of the 1950s without sinking into instant lethargy. What makes treats like Nisbet’s Quest for Community, Buckley’s Up From Liberalism, George Carey’s and Forrest McDonald’s explorations of the Constitution, and Kirk’s more spirited biographical sketches so noteworthy are their marked superiority over the more typical products of the postwar conservative movement, namely windy Cold War invectives and free market pep talks. (I do not list Murray Rothbard’s brilliant economic
The very first time I walked into the Spectator office was in 1975, taken there for the summer party by Simon Courtauld, the then managing editor, i.e., he dealt with the business side of the oldest English speaking magazine in the world. Mind you, as I was about to find out, Simon had very little to do. The Spectator was selling 6000 copies and had no advertising whatsoever.
Simon introduced me to the editor, Alexander Chancellor, who was friendly and quite drunk, dishevelled and quite handsome. As I was to discover, everyone working for the Speccie back then was an old Etonian, except for Simon, who—horrors of horrors—had gone to Winchester. Oh yes, there was also Claire Asquith, Lady Claire, in fact, who worked downstairs with Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the literary editor. Wheatie, as he was called, was known as the rigid man. The moment he had one too many he became rigid, like a German officer being inspected by the Kaiser, and then was known to pass out in a rigid state. Wheatcroft was very handsome, a woman chaser, and we became fast friends. Ditto with Chancellor. A secret womanizer. But more about this later.
My love affair with the Spectator was more of what the French call a “coup de foudre,” than a gradual affection. It was instant and obsessive. I loved its snobbishness, its literacy, its lack of fear to offend the lower classes, its independence, and, of course, its sense of humour. It was relaxed and anything went. As long as one wasn’t vulgar, or, far worse, common. This is the place for me, I told myself, but how? I had never written proper English before, just dispatches for Bill Buckley’s National Review from Vietnam and the Middle East, and for UPI, covering riots and fires in Athens.
Then lightning struck. I went to Turin to buy a car for my soon to be wife, and stayed with the owner of Fiat Gianni Agnelli, who gave me a friendly price. “Drive it slowly for the first thousand miles,” said Gianni, “it’s a fast creature, but vulnerable, like a virgin, it needs gentleness while you’re breaking it in.” I followed his words to the letter, but got bored on the way to Paris and in order to alleviate the boredom I decided to write an article for the Speccie in my head about how one recognises Englishmen abroad circa 1976.
It was easy. They wore tweeds, checked their bill in dark French nightclubs and argued when overcharged, danced in a spastic manner, were always sunburnt around their elbows and knees, and wore shoes with laces at the beach. (Remember, this was the ‘70s.) I had Regine, then queen of the night in Paris and Monte Carlo, saying how much she loved “ze Englis, and Englis writers like Emingway and Fizgerald.” I memorised it, and when I finally got to Paris, sat down and typed it. Then I flew to London and rang Chancellor: “Can we have a drink?” “Well, I have to meet the most boring of men, an MP, why don’t you come along?” The boring one is now a Lord so I won’t embarrass him, but he sure was boring. Alexander took my copy, and said he’d call me. But he never did. Simon Courtauld did. “Why don’t you try a bi-weekly column, and try to keep it light and funny?” It was the start of a 33 year love affair, six editors, seven owners, and over 1700 columns.
What were some of the highlights throughout the years? Too many to list but a few come to mind. Alexander Chancellor, a married man falling in love with a book reviewer, Mary Furness, Suzy Chancellor slapping Mary in public and the Spectator losing its editor while he took a six week sabbatical in Cairo in order to recover from the ordeal. Yours truly getting busted at Heathrow for having cocaine in my pocket, ringing the Speccie in order to resign, and having Claire Asquith ask me whether I’d be filing copy from jail. Peregrine Worsthorne ringing the editor, Charles Moore, demanding he sack me, and Charles telling him that if “Taki were our religious correspondent, I’d sack him on the spot. In view of the fact he’s our high life writer, we expect him to be high at times.” Dominic Lawson receiving a call from the Israeli ambassador the first day as editor and being told in no uncertain terms he should fire me because I’m anti-Semitic. “He’s anti-Zionist,” said Dominic, “and his column is brilliant, and he’s staying. Finally, Frank Johnson warned by Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York, to fire me because I had insulted the Puerto Rican community, and Frank telling the dago mayor he was thinking of naming me ambassador to the island.
What is the point of all this? Dunno, as they say, except that Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is to “portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times.” Looking back at the last thirty-three wonderful years the reflection gets kinder and kinder.
I’m very happy to announce that Steve Sailer will now be writing a weekly column for Takimag in which he’ll be set loose to explore his various interests in pop culture, genetics, economics, sports, economics, immigration, race, and politics. So, all Sailer-holics are advised to stop by Takimag every Wednesday to get their fill of Sailer-ism
With Larry David back in the news this week for starring in (perhaps unsurprisingly) the latest Woody Allen movie, Whatever Works, it’s worth reviewing David’s misunderstood accomplishments.
David, of course, was the co-creator of Seinfeld. Jason Alexander initially modeled his performance as George Costanza on Woody Allen, but then switched to playing David.
And he’s the star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which David plays a semi-retired TV writer named Larry David whose numerous abortive projects include devising a sit-com to get Alexander out of his post-Seinfeld career slump by having him play an actor in a post-hit show slump who now can’t get work because nobody can picture him as any other character.
Most of what you hear about Seinfeld—for example, that it’s “a show about nothing” in which the characters just sit around waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant—stems less from what you’ve seen for years on the screen than from David and Seinfeld’s self-mythologizing (especially their Season Four, in which George dreams up a sit-com in which nothing happens). Alexander, for instance, has marveled at how the most intensely plotted half-hour show in TV history is routinely described as being about “nothing.”
In truth, by borrowing from British high comedy—creating impolite characters whose obsession with rules of polite conduct (curiously similar to what Camille Paglia calls the “lunatic certitude” seen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) to generate complex farce plots worthy of Fawlty Towers—Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld kept alive the American sit-com for an extra decade after its traditional form as a launching pad for Jewish-American one-liners had exhausted itself.
The first hugely successful sit-com, I Love Lucy, highlighted anarchic physical comedy against a backdrop of Fifties social decorum, but the basic template for the sit-com emerged out of the writers’ room of Sid Caesar’s sketch comedy, Your Show of Shows. Caesar employed Carl Reiner (creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Mel Brooks (Get Smart), and Larry Gelbart (MASH). (It’s widely believed that the young Woody Allen was also in the room, but he didn’t actually work for Caesar until later.) This confluence of talent has been fictionalized repeatedly, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, the 1982 film My Favorite Year with Peter O’Toole portraying guest star Errol Flynn, and Simon’s play Laughter on the 23rd Floor
Although the best sit-coms devised by these gag-men had their own brilliant idiosyncrasies, the generic American sit-com of the 1960s-1980s that emerged from this crucible can be seen in perhaps its purest form in Simon’s 1960s plays: mildly sentimental plots serve as a platform for characters to insult each other before reconciling.
In contrast, the British are generally much better than Americans at plot-driven farces.
Perhaps the difference stems from the value placed on decorum. For the sons and grandsons of Russian Jewish immigrants, the natural reaction to difficult social situations was humorously expressed hostility. In British and Anglo-American cultures that traditionally valued maintaining a stiff upper lip, however, it was natural to extract humor out of formal social situations that are collapsing into chaos while the mortified participants try to retain their genteel dignity.
Thus, in laidback contemporary America, movie comedies are most often set during weddings, the one day when strict manners are supposed to prevail.
The oddest feature of Seinfeld was the characters’ absolute mania about manners in a modern America where agreed-upon feudal-derived codes of conduct had long before faded away. On Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, both the main characters and the miscellaneous people they encounter hold fierce but random views about proper behavior, seldom motivated by predictable factors.
Etiquette has traditionally been rooted in ethics and in class, but neither played much role in Seinfeld. In the show’s curiously classless world, without children or serious careers, a George Costanza could not only afford an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side but also a car. Similarly, while the Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm is, theoretically, enormously rich from Seinfeld royalties, he lives only moderately better than Costanza, making do without a personal assistant or servants to handle for him the errands that so vex him.
And as David pounded home in his notoriously uncomfortable script for Seinfeld’s final episode (in which Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are sent to prison for treating a crime victim as a source of observational humor rather than as a fellow human in need), morality meant little to the characters.
David’s characters assert sharp but arbitrary opinions on appropriate behavior. In the unpredictability of their views on decorum, in their bizarre do-it-yourself theories of deportment, they can only be compared to Lewis Carroll’s menagerie. In Sexual Personae
Paglia describes Carroll’s Alice as if she were a character out of David’s imagination: “In her firm sense of appropriate behavior, she is twin to that snappish menagerie of potentates, human and animal, who chide her for transgressions of mysterious local codes of conduct. …”
George Costanza/Larry David are similarly both aggrieved proponents and victimized critics of unwritten rules that turn out to be known only to some of the characters. On Curb Your Enthusiasm, David’s irked wife points out, after their house is toilet-papered on Halloween by teenage girls whom Larry didn’t give candy to because they were over the age cutoff for proper trick-or-treaters:
It’s important to note that the very conservative Carroll was not a satirist of social conventions. According to Paglia, “His comedy arises from a natively English love of formality and ceremony.”
Conversely, after generations of increasingly successful critiques of starchy Anglo-American manners (more than a few of which were launched by Jewish comedians), David misses the old days when everybody knew the rules. So, he has to make up an imaginary America where everybody cares once again about propriety.
According to Larry David’s way of thinking, we’ve ended up with a culture so lacking in concern for good manners that, well, it’s just not funny anymore.
My main man on YouTube, “Remy,” is representin’ Arlington, Virginia, y’all. (And his tax day video might be, like, conservative-libertarian, and stuff.)
Anyway, if you want to learn why The Old Dominion became a Blue State last year, this is a good place to start.
I can’t believe I lived in this place for over a year!
British elections are known, just like American ones, for the boring consistency with which the two main parties dominate the results. Sure, there’s the occasional socialist from Vermont, perhaps a Liberal Democrat wins a seat in some strange part of England. But we know in our heart of hearts that it’s always going to be either the Republicans (on my side of the pond, Conservatives) or the Democrats (Labour) that’s actually going to gain the power.
Even when this doesn’t hold, like when Ross Perot nearly broke through, we know that next election it’ll all return to the status quo ante. There just doesn’t seem to be any way for a political organisation to stay viable long enough, to keep the activists engaged between elections, so that a partial breakthrough or a partial success can be built upon two or four years later (with the exception of the Celtic parties in Wales and Scotland, something of a special case).
Until this election just gone past in the UK, that is. I’m a member of a smaller party called UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). Our defining policy is that we simply don’t want to be part of this federal European superstate that is being built, what you would probably know as the European Union. It’s not that we’re “Little Englanders” as the pejoratives have it, rather that we’re Great Britons. We have the fifth (or depending upon how you measure it, sixth) largest economy in the world, we’ve a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, we’ve connections and contacts all over the world. We’ve cousins and relatives all around, our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II is also the head of state of some 18 or so other nations, ranging from tiny Grenada to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. We just don’t need to shelter under some umbrella of European countries, most of which would impose social democracy upon us in a heartbeat.
We’re all in favour of trading with our neighbours, of course, but also of trading freely with the rest of the big wide world. We’ll co-operate with anyone, anywhere, when we both desire to and think that it’ll be in our interest. We just don’t think that full blown political union with 26 other European countries is needed to enable this. I should also add that we’re not anti-Europe (I myself live in Portugal which would be a strange thing for someone uncomfortable with foreign climes to do) nor are we xenophobic. We just don’t like the extant and proposed political structure.
Having given the party advertisement (and don’t worry about my hitting you up for contributions, as in the U.S., non-citizens cannot donate to campaigns) now for the boasting. UKIP was set up in 1993 and was very definitely seen as a minority affair. In 1999 we won three seats in the European Parliament. There are two reason as to why the EU Parliament, rather than the Westminster one. Firstly, we’re seen as a single issue party (rightly or wrongly) and it tends to be the European elections when our issue gets aired. The second is that the electoral system is different. Westminster elects as you do to Congress, one congresscritter per district. In the European ones, the country is divided into regions and then each party runs a list of candidates for the region. For example, in the SE region of England there are 10 seats and 15 parties put up candidates for them. The more votes each party had the more of their list of 10 candidates got elected. You can see how this worked out here. The net effect is to make it a great deal easier for the so called “minor” parties to win seats.
However, it’s not quite right to think of UKIP as a minor party any more. In 1999 we won those three seats, in 2004 (elections are every 5 years) we won 12. That was our breakthrough, our Ross Perot moment. Back in January this year we were entirely written off. The Times (the London one) said that we had “imploded” and the feeling was pretty general. We were on 7% in the polls, as against the 16% and a bit we had had in 2004. The only people who didn’t feel this way were us, those inside the party. We know that for most of the time we fight like cats in a sack but come election time we’re a great deal more disciplined. We started our campaign with the belief that we could maintain our position as the third party, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, the position we had gained in 2004.
There was one little wrinkle of the way the UK works that bolstered this. In an election campaign the BBC promises to give equal time to the three parties that came top the last time the same election was held. So we were going to be there at the top table with Labour and the Conservatives. And this indeed did have an effect.
The end result was that we not just came third, we came second, beating the ruling Labour Party into third place. Not bad for a so called “fringe party,” eh?
It wasn’t just the BBC effect, of course. Some say it was the way in which the troughing of Westminster politicians was revealed, we benefitted from a “none of the above” feeling. But our own suspicion, the reactions we were getting while actively campaigning, was that most share our desire to leave, or at least radically change our relationship with, the European Union. So much so that we think our vote would have been higher if there hadn’t been the “expenses scandal” that so dominated the campaign.
My own role was working in the press office, preparing releases and so on. The usual sort of humdrum stuff that is the meat and drink of any political campaign. The interesting part was when I was ghosting newspaper articles: I’ve been a 42-year-old party leader with a passion for sea angling, a 62-year-old ex-telecomms salesman, and even an Argentine/Spanish female accountant. PJ O’Rourke was right when he said that trying to copy the writing style of others teaches you more about your own style than anything else can. As a purely personal point, I think the 1,000 word piece I did on politics as our female accountant for the Daily Sport was the high point. A Thousand words is rather more than they usually have in the entire paper! (think the sadly departed Weekly World News without the intellectual content, combined with the Sport‘s advertising slogan “More nipples than any other daily paper!”) Happy days, happy memories!
Of course we’re proud of what we achieved, we raised our vote, won an extra seat and kept the flag of euroscepticism flying. But what has been rather overlooked so far is what we managed in the larger scheme of things. As I say above, there have been insurgent campaigns in both American and British national politics, but they’ve never lasted to the next electoral cycle. That’s what we’ve managed, we’ve been able to keep the party alive and together over three electoral cycles. We’re now an inescapable part of the electoral landscape, and it’s the first time anyone has done that in either country since the emergence of the Labour Party in Britain in the early 20th century.
I can’t claim all the credit for this, of course, in fact am too English to be comfortable claiming any. But I’m damned proud to have taken part, both chuffed and puffed that we managed to do what has been so often threatened but not achieved for over a century, we broke the mold of politics.
When abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered by pro-life activist Scott Roeder and neo-Nazi James von Brunn shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, according to liberal pundits, such acts of right-wing violence were not just isolated incidents, but inspired and even encouraged by the broader conservative movement. Citing Bill O’Reilly, FOX News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and even the Republican Party, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote “respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism. (It’s) a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.”
According to liberals like Krugman, irresponsible rhetoric by conservatives is what “wound up” vicious murderers like Roeder, Brunn and even Timothy McVeigh. The extent to which conservative views influenced the minds of such men is speculative. It’s also completely irrelevant.
To the scientifically trained my experience is that Freud, along with Marx, is the byword for all that was wrong with attempts by those in domains which were manifestly non-scientific to accrue to themselves the prestige of natural science. Richard rightly alludes to the fact that this goes back, at least in the case of working natural scientists, to the criticisms of Karl Popper. The fruits of Freudianism in an immediate scientific sense were minimal I would judge.
But in hindsight I would admit that most working scientists presume Freud to be a false idol without having read the man’s work, or even the criticisms of Popper himself. Some would argue that the dominant framework within modern cognitive psychology owes as much, or more, to Freud as it does to the Behaviorist paradigm which it overturned. Additionally, most working natural scientists know little about Popper aside from the idea of falsifiability, and are unaware that his ideas are considered old-fashioned within philosophy of science itself. Nor would working scientists care much, as philosophy of science has little to do operationally with the day to day of science as a practice (I would judge that most scientists have a world-view in line with a naive logical positivism, without having ever heard of logical positivism or knowing that the movement has little influence in philosophy of science today).
For myself, I generally repeated the platitudes about the falsity of Freud and the importance of Popper’s insight for years without examining the ideas in their original form (as opposed to third hand allusions to the principle of falsifiability in barely read introductions to phylogenetic papers where results and discussion were of more interest and philosophical issues were ignored). Reading some of the original material gives one a more nuanced perception, as opposed to the black and white cut-outs which populate the historical mythology of science.
In any case, these two posts from a friend who is a practicing cognitive psychologist made me go back and read some Freud, In Defense of Freud and Freud as Literature; Freud as Science.
Psychoanalytic historians of the future will have to make sense of the schizophrenic behavior of democracies that want to export their ideals to distant lands while they tighten and squeeze civil liberties at home. The latest dreary news to come out of Canada’s notorious human rights commissions is that the latter want to further increase their powers over freedom of speech. While Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan to build a decent democratic regime (or at least one infinitely more humane than what the Taliban has to offer), the apparatchiks back home are moving to increase statist intrusions into what liberals used to call the private realm of life.
At present, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) already gives its tribunals the power to punish anyone who “likely” exposes a person to “hatred or contempt,” as the judges define these practices. In short, all they need prove is that your comments, blogs, or e-mails might cause a person to feel harshly towards another person. To date, only individuals with politically incorrect views have been brought before these kangaroo courts. Needless to say, the CHRC would shut down Takimag in an instant if it had a chance!
Despite considerable public criticism of this nonsense, the guardians of the CHRC want to strip Canada’s Criminal Code of any free speech defenses, and thereby add to its surveillance powers. Under the present Code, those who are accused of a “hate crime” can defend themselves on the grounds that they were either telling the truth or sincerely believed that they were doing so. If the CHRC has its way, the truth will no longer be enough to defend a citizen against its authority, as long as that truth is deemed “hateful.” Some of Canada’s top schools are already garnering the dubious distinction of being havens for the suppression of academic freedom, and this proposed measure will only add fuel to the fire. (Anybody who writes or teaches on Islam from a critical perspective in Canadian universities should take special note of this ominous development.)
It would be comforting to believe that evil triumphs when good (that is, conservative) men and women do nothing. To date, however, conservative governments in Canada have not only tolerated but even expanded the powers of these commissions, in the vain hope of winning votes from leftists. If politicos on the Right refuse to strip these commissions of their powers, who will do so? To be sure, the Canadian Left—which generally supports the CHRC—would predictably accuse, in good Stalinist fashion, the Right of protecting the freedoms of alleged xenophobes and fascists if these tribunals were demolished. It may come as a surprise to the so-called conservatives who want to protect the CHRC, but the voters who support these star chambers are unlikely to vote Tory anyway.
In short, what has the Right got to lose? Restore liberty to Canada, and tear down this tyranny now!
National Review has a new “editor at large,” Kathryn Jean Lopez, who this fall will be leaving her New York position at NRO to go to DC to do … well, I’m not sure exactly what. (At any rate, her strange plea in her farewell blog for book deals and speaking engagements seems to suggest that she’ll be taking a salary hit.)
At NR, the “editor at large” designation has often been a nice way of saying “You’re Purged!” It certainly was like that for John O’Sullivan, whose NR editorship (1988-98) appears as a Golden Age in comparison with what we have now. Can you imagine Peter Brimelow or Steve Sailer contributing to the current magazine?
Still, K-Lo is such a conventional, confused movement conservative—a pro-war pro-lifer who loves Mitt Romney—and such a hokey romanticizer of official “conservatism”—she thinks Sarah Palin successfully channels the spirit of William F. Buckley and that George W. Bush should spend more time with America’s inner-city youth, weaning them off dangerous pop culture—that it’s hard to imagine her getting fired for ideological reasons. Sure, K-Lo’s posting are cringe inducing, but then no more cringe-inducing now then they were six years ago. Rich Lowry, who’s somehow found himself as editor-owner of the dead-tree edition, will be taking over K-Lo’s post at NRO. The Internetz is where it’s at.
In politics, words are often elusive things. Definitions change from speaker to speaker and writer to writer and age to age. Well do I remember, in the palmy days of the 1970s and 80s, mainstream columnists talking about “conservatives in the Kremlin.” This was a phrase that meant something to a degree, but was also an oblique slap at others who claimed that label. The fall of the Soviet Union put all of our political adjectives into a state of considerable flux, revealing just how much opposition to or softness on Communism had determined our political landscape.
Which brings us to A.D. 2009, where, with the election of Barack Obama, those who call themselves “Conservative” are extremely fragmented—whether they consider the new President of the Republic to be the anti-Christ, or just a darker Mayor Daley, such folk have only their dislike of their new ruler in common. In this bright, shining, new 21st century, just what does “cnservative” mean, anyway? As everyone knows, there is a deep division between the “Neo-“ and “Paleo” Conservatives: the former considering the latter hopeless Romantics, and being considered as monopolist warmongers in return. But it is a major division within Paleoconnery itself that concerns us at the moment.
Of course, we have to define Paleocon before we do anything else. Some writers have suggested a recent origin for it as a response to neoconnery, dating origin as recently as 1992. But for this article, we will give it an earlier origin. One might say that its roots lie in the ‘20s and ‘30s, as thinkers of a certain mold attempted not merely to oppose tendencies they disliked in American life (such as the New Deal) but to define what was best in America itself—indeed, in the human experience. One might look at such different folk as Alfred Jay Nock, T.S. Eliot, H.L. Mencken, the Southern Agrarians, Ross Hoffman, and John Flynn as among the first of what we would now call the Paleocons.
With the demise of Taft Republicanism in the ‘50s, figures such as Russell Kirk and the protean William F. Buckley attempted to give “conservatism” a coherence which, given the diversity of its pioneers, was not so easy a task as one might think. Southern Agrarians; Burkeans like Kirk himself, Catholics of the Triumph school; proto-Libertarians; and a number of other groups clustered under the “conservative” tent. But what they had in common, back then, was a desire to see America as an integral part of Western/European civilization, and for many, to see our founding mythos of the Revolution as one of a series of essentially “conservative” upheavals, like the Glorious Revolution. People of this stripe were keen to draw a distinction between such events and the French, Russian, and subsequent Revolutions.
In addition to anti-Communism, another defining force for Conservatives was opposition to the societal changes emerging in the 1960s and gaining institutionalization in the following decade. Thus emerged what has been known ever after as “social conservatism.” Although a new phenomenon in themselves, antipathy to these changes was rooted in the basic principles espoused at that time by conservatives in general. The emergence of the neocons, the failed promise of the Reagan years, and the afore-mentioned fall of the Soviet Union produced the ideological landscape we have today.
With such a spotted past, paleoism, a loose federation of varying schools of thought, has of course had its divisions from the beginning—so much so that calling it a “movement” is a bit of a misnomer. Centering around whatever ideology a given writer or thinker espouses, some of these divisions have been—and remain—rather bitter. But there is another, overarching one, one that requires some examination. That is—generational.
Older Paleocons, such as the late Russell Kirk and Pat Buchanan, as noted, try to see the United States and their institutions and culture within the wider parameters of the West. For such folk, all that has happened to the soul of the country in the past five decades is a horrible aberration, akin to drawing a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa. They would “conserve” what was best of the country they knew, and bring the purified nation forward to deal with the problems facing American and the World.
But many younger Paleos (sounds odd, doesn’t it?) disagree. For them, the loathsome state of affairs in which we find ourselves is no aberration, but the logical development of seeds present in the republic since its founding. While their nostra for healing the national ills may range from Catholic Monarchy to Libertarianism to the breakup of the country into smaller units, they agree that the present system is a hopelessly corrupt old structure lurching towards its well-deserved ruin. Some would welcome this event, in hopes that new and better things will rise from the ashes. They do not wish to conserve any thing, but to reconstruct the ruins.
Now, there are important reasons why each side should espouse the views they do, but, in this writer’s humble opinion, they have more to do with experience than ideology. It is very difficult to explain one generation to another, but I feel, given my own age, uniquely qualified to try.
Let us start with the older folk. A man like Pat Buchanan, for example, grew up at a time when, as a Catholic, loyalty to his religion and to American institutions went hand in hand. Although he had doctrinal differences with his neighbors, there was a general consensus on moral issues (yes, of course, there was hypocrisy; just as we of today are not always Inclusive, Sharing, and Accepting). From that moral consensus (and lack of sophisticate home entertainment centers) arose a wealth of neighborhood organizations: veterans groups, fraternal societies, school athletic teams, and on and on. The churches too were far more important in the social life of communities.
Indeed, for perhaps the majority of people, one’s immediate community played a bigger role than it does today. And here, in 20-20 hindsight, one’s mind may turn into an absolute cornucopia of Norman Rockwell scenes: kids trick-or-treating; school Christmas pageants, Fourth of July fireworks, parades, and barbecues; women in dresses, men is suits, and everyone in hats. I am just old enough to remember this kind of thing; I can imagine what a hold it would have on someone formed in that atmosphere. Consciously or otherwise, this would inevitably be the ideal such a man would want to conserve or recapture.
Now, though, let us turn our attention someone born in—say—978, the year I started College. Depending upon where in the country he was raised, his schooling would have been suffused with the trip that boomer-educators have stuffed into the system. His teenagerhood would have primarily involved the Clinton years. What would his experience of the institutions of Church, State, and Community have been? Would not his instinctive reactions be one of deep loathing? Regardless of how well-educated or self-taught he might be in the works of the Western Canon, would not his own experiences constantly war with what he read? This, too, is something I have experienced.
The kind of man we are describing, if possessed of the ideals propounded by one or another of the paleocon schools of thought, and living in an environment utterly dominated by the opposite spectrum, could not possibly think of conserving anything! Return to the Constitution? You mean the document that guarantees a woman the right to murder her child, and will no doubt shortly Gay marriage? “Um,” one might reply, “but that’s an aberration—“ “No,” retorts the angry young person, “that is the decision of the one body mentioned in the Constitution to decide what these things mean.” “Well,” one might begin again, “that isn’t the Constitution, that’s Marbury vs. Madison, and—“ The young person cuts one off with “whatever, everyone has accepted that the Supreme Court makes these decisions for the greater part of our history. The Court is the Constitution, and it’s rotten!”
For this reason, younger Paleocons are often willing to go, theoretically, where the older ones fear to tread. For the latter, many ideas, from anarchy to monarchy to theocracy to authoritarianism and other forms of governance, were simply impossible to consider, precisely because they clash with the Constitution. But the young ones have no problem contemplating these ideas. Moreover, thanks to the Internet’s ability to make allied foreign thinkers of the past and present immediately accessible, even the shibboleth of “Un-American” impresses few of the young.
Although their responses to the problems we face differ wildly, many of the younger set of paleocons are not, therefore, “conservatives” at all. What might we call them? Restorationists? Reconstructionists? That last might be better, although it is often used by various Jewish, skinhead, Calvinist, and neo-pagan groups (for a dizzying array of reasons.) At any rate, it is closer to what such people would like to accomplish—the remaking of the country along very different lines to what we know now.
Of course, an obvious riposte to the younger enthusiasts is that that every generation wants to remake the world when they start out, and few do. Moreover, in holding views so far from the mainstream, are they not courting irrelevance? But, in the world of ideas, immediate gratification is rarely an option, and Voltaire and Rousseau shook—and continue to shale—the world long after their deaths. There may well be, as these lines are being written, young thinkers begetting ideas that will one day push the world in as positive a direction as the Enlightenment writers pushed us this way.
There is another phenomenon at work here. I am, myself, a Catholic Monarchist at base; Robespierre was not. Yet he was more a man of the Ancien Regime than I could ever be, just I am much more a man of the Revolution. The reason, of course, lies in the periods of our upbringing, and the influences of the culture around us. So, too, with younger paleocons. Older folks will notice that quite a number of them are, shall we say, sexually more laissez-faire than their stated principles would permit; also that, even if they are diehard anti-immigration stalwarts, they do tend to be more globally aware than their elders: these and a number of other such things are testimonies to just how much a part of the current culture the younger folk are, no matter how much they may condemn it. By the same token, of course, the young see ideological blindspots in the older generation, compromises so venerable with their own ideals that the older folk are utterly unaware. The result, on either side, is often a sneering mental reference to hypocrisy.
In either case, the reaction is both justified and unfair. Justified, because, as that great American, Allen Ginzburg, once remarked “everyone’s lies about everyone else are absolutely true;” that is, both sets of complaints are quite true. On the other, it is unfair, because it is hard to see how, given their respective periods of upbringing, either side could behave differently.
What then, in the words of Lenin, is to be done? Why should anything be done at all? Paleocons of all stripes need to realize that there is much to be learned from one another—something all the more important in that we are run today by a set of people who have their own utopian agenda, quite as irrelevant to the needs and wishes of most of the country as anything anyone could dream up. Both generations must understand that each has a reason for being as they are. Young paleos ought to see that men like Pat look back to a past that was not merely, in many ways, better than the present; it was also tangible, real, as opposed to theoretical. Old paleos must understand that—as the new Chief of State proves—we are not going back. What are needed are thinkers and men of action who will use the best of the past and the present to play an effective role in the fight for the shape of the future.
Although I certainly don’t want to cramp Keith Preston’s style or libertarian persuasion, his polemic today is so full of factual errors and fallacious comparisons that I feel obliged to respond. For the record, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not a socialist, as Preston would learn from reading Eberhard Straub’s study Kaiser Wilhelm II in der Politik seiner Zeit (2008). The last German emperor ruled over a highly decentralized federal state, in which most internal governance took place in the constituent administrations of the Empire, which were a collection of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities. The total tax burden for German citizens in 1900 was somewhere below 7 percent for those who were employed, which was the lowest tax rate in Europe at the time. Although the German working class was the most literate and enjoyed the highest living standard in the world, the German welfare state had hardly taken off in 1900, if one discounts modest workers’ pensions and something like medical insurance. Wilhelm described himself as a “Volkskaiser” and oozed sympathy for the German Arbeiterschaft, but he did not place his country on the road to Obamaism. And one suspects that at least some of his rhetoric about standing up for the workers was related to his concern that the Socialist Party of Germany, which was theoretically Marxist and which by 1914 had become the largest party in the Reichstag, would not become a true revolutionary force. By the way, I have never encountered the statement ascribed to Wilhelm, that he would support American socialists if they became Prussian militarists. It sounds like something The Weekly Standard would manufacture to kill two birds with one stone, by beating up on the Krauts for the umpteenth time while linking socialism to evil reactionaries.
I’m also disappointed that Preston has fallen for another neocon trick, previewed by S.M. Lipset and Arthur Schlesinger, assigning everyone who doesn’t fit the ideological grid to an axis of anti-democratic evil. Socialists and traditional Tories are not the same simply because neither would accept Preston’s anarcho-capitalist worldview or because neither group would arrive at the eighteenth-century liberal views embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The hierarchical, status-based universe of traditional conservatism has nothing to do with the socialist Left, except that neither would likely embrace market economics, albeit for different reasons. Traditional conservatives look back to a pre-capitalist, agrarian past, while the Left wants to build on capitalism while moving beyond it into a more egalitarian future. I’ve no idea how the two positions are similar, except that neither would appeal to Preston.
It is also never fully explained how the founders of the American republic were more leftist than the socialists. Perhaps Preston, echoing Murray Rothbard, wants to tell us that the American regime “conceived in liberty” was truly a novelty in the eighteenth century. I’ve no doubt that it seemed so to our founders, as I am reminded each time I look at our fiat money. But would this perception prove that the American republic was more “leftist” than socialist states in the twentieth century? There is no evidence this is the case. The work of Christian merchants and slaveholders, who were interested in protecting their property and controlling popular passions, the American founding document by modern standards was not leftist in any sense. Needless to say, this modest, clearly framed document had to be vigorously reinterpreted and steadily modified to make it into what it has become, under philosopher-kings. But that is a wholly different story.
I evaluate Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy (if we can call it that) in today’s Human Events.
The Obama policy of extending an open hand to Iran is working and ought not be abandoned because of the grim events in Tehran.
For the Iranian theocracy has just administered a body blow to its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people and the world.
Before Saturday, the regime could credibly posture as defender of the nation, defiant in the face of the threats from Israel, faithful to the cause of the Palestinians, standing firm for Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear power.
Today, the regime, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is under a cloud of suspicion that they are but another gang of corrupt politicians who brazenly stole a presidential election to keep themselves and their clerical cronies in power.
What should we do now? Wait for the dust to settle.
No U.S. denunciation of what took place in Iran is as credible as the reports and pictures coming out of Iran. Those reports, those pictures are stripping the mullahs of the only asset they seemed to possess—that, even if fanatics, they were principled, honest men.
Like Hamas, it was said of them that at least they were not corrupt, that at least they did not cheat the people.
No more. Today, in the streets of Tehran and other cities, they call to mind “Comrade Bob” Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will never recapture that revolutionary purity he once seemed to possess as the man of the people who was elected president in the upset of 2005. Today, he appears, as the New York Times puts it, “as the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution.”
There are other reasons Obama should not heed the war hawks howling for confrontation now.
When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way. That is a rule of politics Lyndon Johnson once put into the most pungent of terms. U.S. fulminations will change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran’s affairs and portray the candidate robbed in this election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as a poodle of the Americans.
When Nikita Khrushchev bathed the Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike did not break relations. Khrushchev was at Camp David three years later. When Deng Xiaoping and Co. ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square, George Bush I did not break relations. When Moscow ordered Warsaw to crush Solidarity, Ronald Reagan did not let that act of repression deter him from seeking direct talks to reduce nuclear weapons.
Again, let us wait for the dust to settle.
By now, even Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei must recognize that the Iranian revolution is losing the Iranian people. This is the third of four straight presidential elections where the turnout has been huge and the candidate who promised reconciliation with the West and an easing of social strictures won a landslide among the student young. Those are the future leaders of Iran.
Which way the regime will now go is difficult to predict.
After Tienanmen Square, the Chinese rulers who ordered in the tanks sought to reconnect with the disillusioned young by opening up to the West and building a neo-capitalist economy.
Iran, in economic straits with U.S. sanctions biting, its oil and gas reserves dwindling, could try the same route. Seize the opposition’s best issues by seeking accommodation with America.
More likely, the regime, backed by the hard-line military, will try to reconnect with the masses and regain its reputation as defender of Islam and the nation, by defying the Americans, denouncing Israel and pressing forward with Iran’s nuclear program.
The dilemma for America is that the theocracy defines itself and grounds its claim to leadership through its unyielding resistance to the Great Satan—the United States—and to Israel.
Nevertheless, Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran on its national day, his admission that the United States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his assurances that we recognize Iran’s right to nuclear power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument—that America is out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran’s defense.
With the mask of patriotism and the legacy of true revolution lost through this election fraud, Iran’s regime stands exposed as just another dictatorship covering up a refusal to yield power and privilege with a pack of lies about protecting the nation.
Saturday’s election not only revealed the character of the Iranian regime. It also revealed that time is on our side. If the people of Iran can defy this regime, it is no threat to us.
As with the other revolutionary and totalitarian regimes, from the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, to the People’s Republic of Mao, to the revolutionary Cuba of Fidel, America outlasts them all.
And the ayatollahs, too.
Recent dialogue between Kevin R.C. Gutzman, Christian Kopff and Tom Piatak concerning the tension between classical liberal-libertarians and traditionalist conservatives reminded me of an observation from my Portuguese “national-anarchist” colleague Flavio Goncalves concerning the clarion call issued by Chuck Norris a while back: “Seems like the US Right is as revolutionary as the South American Left? Your country confuses me.”
It does indeed seem that most of the serious dissidents in America are on the Right nowadays, and I think this can be understood in terms of America’s unique political heritage. American rightists typically regard themselves as upholders and defenders of American traditions, while American liberals tend to admire the socialism and cultural leftism of the European elites. However, the republican political philosophy derived from the thought of Locke, Montesquieu and Jefferson that found its expression in such definitive American documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and of which modern neo-classical liberalism and libertarianism are outgrowths, is historically located to the left of European socialism.
A variety of thinkers from all over the spectrum have recognized this. For instance, Russell Kirk somewhat famously remarked that conservatives and socialists had more in common with one another that either had with libertarians. Murray Rothbard observed that “conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.” Seymour Martin Lipset affirmed Rothbard’s thesis:
Given that the national conservative tradition in many other countries was statist, the socialists arose within this value system and were much more legitimate than they could be in America…Until the depression of the 1930s and the introduction of welfare objectives by President Roosevelt and the New Deal, the AFL was against minimum wage legislation and old age pensions. The position taken by (Samuel) Gompers and others was, what the state gives, the state can take away; the workers can depend only on themselves and their own institutions…Hence, the socialists in America were operating against the fact that there was no legitimate tradition of state intervention, of welfarism. In Europe, there was a legitimate conservative tradition of statism and welfarism. I would suggest that the appropriate American radicalism, therefore, is much more anarchist than socialist.
Back in 1912, when the German Social Democrats won 112 seats in the Reichstag and one-third of the vote, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote a letter to a friend in which he said that he really welcomed the rise of the socialists because their statist positions were much to be preferred to the liberal bourgeoisie, whose antistatism he did not like. The Kaiser went on to say that, if the socialists would only drop antipatriotism and antimilitarism, he could be one of them. The socialists wanted a strong Prussian-German state which was welfare oriented, and the Kaiser also wanted a strong state. It was the pacifism and the internationalism of the socialists that bothered him, not their socialism. In the American context, the “conservative” in recent decades has come to connote an extreme form of liberalism; that is, antistatism. In its purest forms, I think of Robert Nozick philosophically, of Milton Friedman economically, and of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater politically.
Thomas Sowell has provided some interesting insights into what separates the Left and Right in contemporary American discourse. Both Left and Right are derivatives of eighteenth century radicalism, with the Left being a descendent of the French Revolution and the Right being a descendent of the American Revolution. What separates the legacies of these two revolutions is not their radicalism or departure from throne-and-altar traditionalism, but their differing views on human nature, the nature of human society, and the nature of politics. Both revolutions did much to undermine traditional systems of privileged hierarchy. After all, how “traditional” were the American revolutionaries who abolished the monarchy, disestablished the Church, constitutionally prohibited the issuance of titles of nobility, constitutionally required a republican form of government for the individual states and added a bill of rights as a postscript to the nation’s charter document? One can point to the Protestant influences on the American founding that coincide with the Enlightenment influences, but how “traditional” is Protestantism itself? Is not Protestantism the product of a rebellion against established religious authorities that serves as a kind of prelude to a latter rebellion to established political authorities?
I would maintain that what separates the modern Right and Left is not traditionalism versus radicalism, but meritocracy versus egalitarianism. For the modern Left, equality is considered to be a value in its own right, irrespective of merit, whether individual or collective in nature. The radical provisions of the U.S. Constitution, for instance, aimed at eliminating systems of artificial privilege. No longer would heads of state, clerics, or aristocrats receive their position simply by virtue of inheritance, patronage or nepotism, but by virtue of individual ability and achievement. No longer would an institution such as the Church sustain itself through political privilege, but through the soundness of its own internal dynamics. To be sure, these ideals have been applied inconsistently throughout American history, and all societies are a synthesis of varying cultural and ideological currents. For instance, it is clear that nepotism remains to some degree. How else could the likes of George W. Bush ever become head of state?
Yet, for the Left, equality overrides merit. With regards to race, gender or social relations, for example, it is not sufficient to simply remove barriers designed to keep ethnic minorities, women or homosexuals down regardless of their individual abilities or potential contributions to society. Instead, equality must be granted regardless of any previous individual or collective achievement to the point of lowering academic or professional standards for the sake of achieving such equality. This kind of egalitarian absolutism is also apparent with regards to issues like the use of women in military combat or the adoption of children by same-sex couples. The Left often frames these issues not in terms of whether the use of female soldiers is best in terms of military standards (perhaps it is) or what is best for the children involved or whether the parenting skills of same-sex couples is on par with those of heterosexual couples (perhaps they are), but in terms of whether women should simply have the “right” to a military career or whether same-sex couples should simply have “equal rights” to adopt children, apparently with such concerns as military efficiency, child welfare and parental competence being dismissed as irrelevant.
To frame the debate in terms of tradition versus radicalism would seem to be setting up a false dichotomy. Edmund Burke, the fierce critic of the French Revolution considered by many to be the godfather of modern conservatism, was actually on the left-wing of the British politics of his time. For instance, he favored the independence of Ireland and the American colonies and even defended India against imperial interests. A deep dig into Burke’s writings reveals him to have been something of a philosophical anarchist. His opposition to the French Revolution was not simply because it was a revolution or because it was radical, but because of the specific content of the ideology of the revolutionaries who aimed to level and reconstruct French society along prescriptive lines. The American Revolution was carried out by those with an appreciation for the limits of politics and the limitations imposed by human nature, while the French Revolution was the prototype for the modern totalitarian revolutions carried out by the Bolsheviks, Nazis (whom Alain De Benoist has characterized as “Brown Jacobins”), Maoists , Kim Il-Sung and the Khmer Rouge.
One can certainly reject the hyper-egalitarianism championed by the Left and still favor far-reaching political or social change. It would be hard to mistake Ernst Junger for an egalitarian, yet he was contemptuous of the Wilhelmine German military’s practice of selecting officers on the basis of their class position, family status or political patronage rather than on their combat experience. He preferred a military hierarchy ordered on the basis of merit rather than ascribed status. Junger’s Weimar-era writings are filled with a loathing for the social democratic regime, yet he called for an elitist worker-soldier “conservative revolution” rather than a return to the monarchy.
Nor does political radicalism imply the abandonment of historic traditions. I, for one, advocate many things that are quite radical by conventional standards. Yet I am extremely uncomfortable with left-wing pet projects such as the elimination of “offensive” symbols like the Confederate flag; the alteration of the calendar along PC lines (C.E. and B.C.E instead of A.D. and B.C); the attacks on traditional holidays like Christmas or Columbus Day; a rigidly secular interpretation of the First Amendment (and I’m an atheist!); and the attempted reconstruction of language along egalitarian lines (making words like “crippled” or “retarded” into swear words or the mandatory gender neutralization of pronouns). All of these things seem like a rookie league version of Rosseauan/Jacobin/Pol Potian “year zero” cultural destructionism. Nor do I wish to do away with baseball, Fourth of July fireworks displays, Civil War re-enactors or the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I am also somewhat appalled that one can receive a high school diploma or even a university degree without ever having taken a single course on the history of Western philosophy. It is not uncommon to find undergraduates who have never heard of Aristotle. If they have, they are most likely to simply dismiss him as a sexist and defender of slavery. I’ve met graduate level sociology students who can tell you all about “the social construction of gender” but have no idea who Pareto was.
The principal evil of the Cultural Marxism of present day liberalism is its fanatical egalitarianism. Unlike historic Marxists, who simply sought equality of wealth, cultural Marxists seek equality of everything, including not only class, race, or gender, but sexuality, age, looks, weight, ability, intelligence, handicap, competence, health, behavior or even species. I’ve heard leftists engage in serious discussion about the evils of “accentism.” Such equality does not exist in nature. It can only be imposed artificially, which in turn requires tyranny of the most extreme sort. The end result can only be universal enslavement in the name of universal equality. For this reason, the egalitarian Left is a profoundly reactionary outlook, as it seeks a de facto return to the societies organized on the basis of static caste systems and ascribed status that existed prior to the meritocratic revolution initiated by the Anglo-American Enlightenment.
Perhaps just as dreadful is the anti-intellectualism of Political Correctness. In many liberal and no-so-liberal circles, the mere pointing out of facts like, for instance, the extraordinarily high numbers of homicides perpetrated by African-Americans is considered a moral and ideological offense. If one of the most eminent scientists of our time, Dr. James Watson, is not immune from the sanctions imposed by the arbiters of political correctness, then who would be? Are such things not a grotesque betrayal of the intellectual, scientific and political revolution manifested in Jeffersonian ideals? Is not Political Correctness simply an effort to bring back heresy trials and inquisitors under the guise of a secularized, egalitarian, fake humanitarian ideology? The American radical tradition represents a vital “left-conservative” heritage that elevates meritocracy over both an emphasis on ascribed status from the traditional Right and egalitarianism from the Left. It is a tradition worth defending.
First off, I’m appalled that Stacy would slander Sigmund Freud’s name by comparing this fascinating man to the hapless, dishonest shill for the investment banking industry Tim Geithner. (I’d also add that Freud’s Bildung and adherence to the social mores of the Wiener haute bourgeoisie place him well to the right of most in the contemporary conservative movement, not to mention Timbabwe.)
Though psychoanalysis is certainly deserving of severe critique, I don’t think its failures have much to do with the “ascertaining and application of facts”; and interestingly, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Sigi’s patients actually got better under his care. It is true, however, that psychoanalysis fails the Popperian test of “falsifiability”: that is, the problem is not that one can’t prove that Freudianism is a science but that one can’t prove that it isn’t one. If that last sentence is too confusing by half, think about it this way: if someone ever says, “That Oedipal Complex thing is bunk” the Freudian can shoot back, “You just think that because you’re suffering from it! Stop resisting!” (Ditto for Marxism, as critics can be dismissed easily by alerting them to the fact that they’re all trapped in their own means-of-production-owning bourgeois ideology.)
This being said, Freudianism is part of an important stream of German philosophy and has been a wildly productive theory for scientists, artists, sociologists, writers and more—despite, or perhaps because, it’s so wrong. This is more than one can say for the “science” of Intelligent Design, the godly, anti-racists alternative to Darwinism currently embraced by “conservatives.” J.M. Keynes, on the other hand, was (like Freud) quite wrong, but then (unlike Freud) his theories have generated poverty, misery, and, worst of all, Paul Krugman.
I’d also add that one central aspect of the “Austrian School of Economics,” which Stacy references as a real science, is the degree to which the “ascertaining and application of facts” is de-emphasized vis-à-vis its logical method and a priori assumptions. Indeed, “Austrians” are always pointing out how facts deceive. In America’s Great Depression, Murray Rothbard demonstrates that if you simply look at the prices of goods and services over the course of the 1920s, you’d believe that there was hardly any inflation at all, nor any signs of unsustainable growth. But to the contrary, there was actually massive inflation of the money supply, as well bank-driven credit creation, but these developments were masked by the tremendous gains in productivity across the decade—and thus imperceptible if one were only looking at “the facts.” (Similarly, one could look at the current CPI index (which is flat) and have no inking of the inflationary disaster we’re about to experience.) In turn, Keynesians often have facts on their side, as they can point to, for instance, some formerly out-of-work chap who now has a new job in a state-sponsored “green” industry and say, “See, our programs are working!” The real task, of course, is to discern the invisible cost of this or that project, which is often obscured by latest GDP and employment stats.
Facts are sometimes overrated. Let’s no forget that Copernicus’s heliocentric theory wasn’t any more accurate at predicting the location of planets than was Ptolemy’s systems of epicycles, and it was considered a great affront to “common sense” when it was first introduced. If De revolutionibus orbium coelestium were published today, might Copernicus, too, be lumped in with the “culture of death”?
The situation in Iran is beginning to look a lot like a redux of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution from a few years back: A big bad dictator (Putin/Ahmadinejad) rigs the election and prevents the rise of a “democratic reformer” (Viktor Yushchenko/Mir-Hossein Mousavi). Supporters of the candidates-done-wrong take to the streets, prompting American pundits and politicians from both parties (enter Joe Biden and Mitt Romney) to express their sympathy. Though we might not get a George Soros-orchestrated and funded “revolution” in Tehran, there’s no doubt that Washington will continue to make the internal affairs of Iran its business.
There is a difference, of course. While the neocons joined the crowd in treating the ascension of Yushchenko as some great geostrategic victory for “The West,” with the latest election in Iran, they’ve actually been leaning toward taking the side of evil old Ahmadinejad. Daniel Pipes said he’d vote for the man if he could, as Mahmoud cuts a much scarier, more Hitler-esque figure than most anyone else, which is best suited for Pipes’s war-mongering purposes. Max Boot has seconded Pipes at Commentary—“the Worse the Better”!
But the neocons’ colleagues, especially the lefty ones, are much subtler—and will, most likely, be much more effective. As Saifedean Ammous writes, Dennis Ross, Obama’s special adviser on Iran, wants to play nice with the Iranians, then feign outrage over the fact that they don’t do what we want, and then bomb the hell out of them. Rarely, does one see such Machiavellian plan put out in the open like this.
The newly released book by Dennis Ross, reads like a how-to manual for launching a war on Iran, marketing the war successfully, and making sure the Iranians cop all the blame for it. Ross will have none of Bush’s incompetent warmongering on flimsy pretenses of democracy and WMD’s; when Ross launches his illegal war on Iran, it will be stage-managed to within an inch of its life.
‘Tougher policies – either militarily or meaningful containment—will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,’ writes Ross.
Note that there is no way to read this sentence but to see that the goal is to attack Iran. America trying to diplomatically resolve its differences with Iran is not a goal in itself; it is merely a means to more easily sell war and sanctions.
And, then, of course, we get the special Dennis Ross brand of peacemaking-as-warmongering—Ross’s signature dish: derailing negotiations while making it appear to be the other party’s fault.
“Such an approach may build pressures within Iran not to forgo the opportunity that has been presented, while also ensuring that the onus is put on Iran for creating a crisis and also for making conflict more likely.”
The goal, of course, is not just to bring about a military conflict, but also to make sure that it appears that it was the Iranians who brought about this conflict.
Ross seems to be gearing up for a reprise of the “generous offer” ruse he and his allies used to great effect after the breakdown of the Camp David Summit in July of 2000. One can almost already hear Ross self-righteously crowing, “You know, the Iranians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity…”
My wife worked for many years in the health field, including a stint in a hospital physical therapy unit and a few years as a home-health assistant. One of the things she would tell you is that if your back hurts, surgery won’t fix it. Over and over again, she treated people who had undergone back surgery yet who continued to suffer chronic pain.
Maybe the science of orthopedic surgery has advanced in the past decade. Maybe not. Ask around among your friends and see if any of them have undergone surgery for a ruptured disc, et cetera, and what you’re likely to get is a tale of woe. Few of these tales of woe, however, will be as sad as the story recounted by blogger Carol at No Sheeples Here about the death of 1950s matinee idol Jeff Chandler:
Shortly after completing his role in Merrill’s Marauders in 1961, he injured his back while playing baseball with U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers who served as extras in that movie. Chandler had surgery for a spinal disc herniation on May 13, 1961. There were severe complications following surgery. An artery was damaged and Chandler hemorrhaged. In a seven-and-a-half-hour emergency operation over-and-above the original surgery, he was given 55 pints of blood. Another operation followed where he received an additional 20 pints of blood. He died on June 17, 1961 at the age of 42. His death was deemed malpractice.
The more you know about actual science, the less impressed you are with the claims of capital-S “Science,” by which term I mean to denote the pseudo-religious belief system that atrributes to mankind an impossible perfection of knowledge.
Actual science involves the ascertaining and application of facts, with the knowledge that there are more facts in the universe than any person can ever possibly know. The pseudo-religion of Science, by contrast, involves the belief that “experts” already know all the important facts, and that much of what we normally call “common sense” is contradicted by the facts most recently discovered by these experts, who constitute the high priesthood of the cult of Science.
The authority of the priestly caste of experts is beyond question, and any ordinary person disposed to skepticism of the claims of Science—“Hmmm, that doesn’t match up with what I know from common sense”—is denounced as “unscientific,” un-science being heresy to the belief system. The actual scientist may generally be distinguished from the fraudulent expert of Science by the ferocity with which the latter insists that his own theories are beyond dispute. The fraud fears facts that contradict his theory, since his reputation as an expert is the primary source of his authority, whereas the actual scientist is always pleased to encounter some fact that he has not hitherto taken into consideration.
Of course, the bogus expertise of the high priesthood of Science is a lucrative thing. Fortune and fame await the man who can convince others that he is the pre-eminent expert in some important field of inquiry. Consider the case of Alfred Kinsey, an obscure entomologist who cleverly foresaw the advantages to becoming the world’s foremost “scientific” authority on sex. Or think of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese physician who re-invented himself as master of the new “science” of psychotherapy. To this day, long after actual science has debunked the mystic voodoo of Freudianism, one still hears otherwise intelligent people discuss Freudian conceptions as if describing real phenomena.
In few fields have the experts of Science wreaked so much havoc as in the field of economics. Friedrich Hayek, an actual scientist of economics, almost surely had John Maynard Keynes in mind when he described as “second-hand dealers in ideas” the intellectuals who promoted socialsm in the mid-20th century:
The typical intellectual . . . need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.
Whatever his deficiencies as an economist, Keynes was a master at presenting himself as an expert, and getting others to treat him as an authority whose opinion must be respected. In this, if in nothing else, members of the priestly caste of Science are truly expert—that is, they are experts at convincing others of their expertise.
Think about how, when Timothy Geithner’s nomination as Treasury secretary was before the Senate, we were told that Geithner—who couldn’t even correctly calculate his own income tax—was nonetheless the only man in the country who could save our economic fortunes. Even Republicans praised Geithner, with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calling him “a person of great integrity.”
Last week, financial analyst James Quinn portrayed Geithner, President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as the Larry, Curly and Moe of an economic slapstick routine that would be hysterically funny, if only the consequences weren’t so predictably tragic. When the chairwoman of the FDIC is reduced to literally knocking on wood against the prospects of a tsunami of foreclosures and bank failures, we ought to be skeptical of the economic voodoo being practiced by the experts of Science.
My own skepticism toward such expertise is most likely due to my having spent more than two decades in the newspaper business, journalism being its own sort of cult, with experts who denounce as heretical all those who doubt that mastery of the AP Stylebook is synonymous with omniscience. The newspaper business is nowadays dying a slow and painful death at the hands of its own priestly caste.
We should hardly be surprised that the journalistic priesthood sings the praises of the economic priesthood, even as Dr. Larry, Dr. Curly and Dr. Moe proceed to administer to the American economy the kind of Science that the surgeons provided to the late Jeff Chandler.
Twenty-two years ago, June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan made a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall in which he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Within a year, the wall that symbolized repression and tyranny did in fact come crashing down. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, there is something else that should likewise have been toppled: the U.S. empire of troops and bases that encircles the globe.
Mr. Obama, Tear down this empire.
The kingdom of Alexander the Great reached to the borders of India. The Roman Empire controlled Western Europe and the Hellenized states that bordered the Mediterranean. The Mongol Empire stretched from Southeast Asia to Europe. The Byzantine Empire lasted over a thousand years. The Ottoman Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf in the east to Hungary in the northwest; and from Egypt in the south to the Caucasus in the north. At the height of its dominion, the British Empire included almost a quarter of the world’s population.
Nothing, however, compares to the U.S. global empire. It is an empire that would make Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent, Emperor Justinian, and King George V proud. What makes U.S. hegemony unique is that it consists, not of control over great landmasses or population centers, but of a global presence unlike that of any other country in history.
Sure, Donald Rumsfeld maintained: “We don’t seek empires. We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.” Right. Just like Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Just like the war in Iraq was supposed to be a cakewalk. Just like Bush told us, “we don’t torture.” Some neocons are a bit more honest, like CFR Senior Fellow Max Boot, who rejects the term “imperialism,” but insists that the United States “should definitely embrace the practice.”
Those who believe that it is in the national interest of the United States to intervene in conflicts around the globe, attempt to control foreign governments, and spread our political and economic systems to other countries by force argue that we are not an empire because we haven’t annexed any country’s soil in over a hundred years. But America’s unprecedented global presence of troops, bases, and ships clearly says otherwise.
The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable. The Department of Defense’s “Base Structure Report” states that the Department’s physical assets consist of “more than 545,700 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,400 sites, on approximately 40 million acres.” There are 268 sites in Germany alone. The 316,238 buildings occupied by the DOD comprise over 2.2 billion square feet with a value of over $455 billion. The DOD manages almost 30 million acres of land worldwide. There are over 700 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in 63 countries. The United States has official commitments to provide security to over 35 countries.
In addition to the 1.1 million U.S. military personnel stationed in the United States and its territories, there are almost 300,000 U.S. troops in foreign countries—not even counting the over 200,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. With its geographic command centers (NORTHCOM, CENTCOM, etc.) that cover the globe, the United States apparently views the whole earth as its territory. According to the DOD’s quarterly report titled “Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country,” there are U.S. troops stationed in 146 countries and 12 territories in every corner of the globe. This means that U.S. troops occupy about 75 percent of the world’s countries.
Although President Obama has talked about removing thousands of U.S. troops from Iraq, it should come as no surprise that the United States will have its forces in Iraq for many years to come. There are 82,460 U.S. soldiers in Europe to face a non-existent Soviet Union. There are still 33,286 troops in Japan—almost seventy years after World War II. But even where the United States did not fight a war, there are large numbers of U.S. troops to be found. There are 1,220 U.S. soldiers stationed in Spain and 9,426 soldiers stationed in the United Kingdom. What are 41 U.S. soldiers doing soaking up the sun in the Bahamas? What strategic interest is there in the United States having soldiers in places like Australia and New Zealand? The United States has troops in places most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map—like Tunisia and Cameroon. And in addition to military personnel, the Department of Defense employs 700,000 civilians worldwide, including thousands of foreign nationals.
The DOD’s personnel, bases, weapons, and equipment come with a heavy price.
According to economist and historian Robert Higgs, real U.S. defense spending is around $1 trillion. This accounts for over half of the world’s military-related spending. The United States is also the world’s chief arms dealer, as the residents of Gaza recently discovered.
But instead of all of this being an example of imperialism, empire, and foreign policy on steroids, we are told by neoconservative intellectuals that the United States is merely exercising “benevolent hegemony,” that America “has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century,” and that the invasion of Iraq was “the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.”
With troops in about 100 countries and territories, the U.S. empire was firmly in place soon after World War II. But the “Good War” was not the beginning. Between the two world wars, U.S. troops were sent to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Russia, Panama, Honduras, Yugoslavia, Guatemala, Turkey, and China. But World War I was not the beginning either. Before the “Great War,” U.S. troops were sent to Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, and Mexico. And although we might begin the U.S. empire with the seizure from Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam during the Spanish-American War of 1898, we can actually go back a few years earlier to U.S. intervention in Hawaii before we deposed the monarch and annexed the territory.
U.S. foreign policy can only be described as aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and meddling. Its fruits are the destabilization and overthrow of governments, the destruction of industry and infrastructure, the backing of military coups, death squads, and drug traffickers, imperialism under the guise of humanitarianism, support for corrupt and tyrannical governments, brutal sanctions and embargoes, and failed attempts to police the world. U.S. foreign policy results in nothing but discord, strife, hatred, and terrorism toward the United States. U.S. foreign policy is also very arrogant. What would Americans think if some country—any country—stated its intention to construct a naval base in Key West, Florida? They would be outraged. So why the double standard? Does might make right? What gives the United States the right to encircle the world with bases?
Mr. Obama, Tear down this empire.
It is not enough for the president just to close down the Guantánamo prison in Cuba. The Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which the United States has occupied for over 100 years, should be closed as well. The problem with the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission is that military base realignment and closure recommendations are all in the United States. All Status of Forces Agreements should be rescinded, all foreign bases closed, and all troops brought home. Yes, it’s a radical proposal, but only because America has long ago rejected the Founding Fathers foreign policy of nonintervention.
Now, we know that one man shouldn’t have so much power over so much. But the Congress that hasn’t issued a declaration of war since World War II—while funding several major wars and scores of other military interventions since then—isn’t going to do anything to significantly change U.S. foreign policy. And historically, it has been the executive branch that drives U.S. foreign policy anyway.
And to ensure that no future president again expands the U.S. empire, we need, not a renewal of the War Powers Act, but something with some real teeth, like Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler’s (1881–1940) proposed peace amendment. This amendment would prohibit the removal of the Army from within the continental limits of the United States, the Navy from steaming more than 500 miles from the coast, and the Air Force from flying more than 750 miles from American soil. This “would be absolute guarantee to the women of America that their loved ones never would be sent overseas to be needlessly shot down in European or Asiatic or African wars that are no concern of our people.”
Butler reasoned that because of “our geographical position, it is all but impossible for any foreign power to muster, transport and land sufficient troops on our shores for a successful invasion.” In this he was merely echoing Thomas Jefferson, who recognized that geography was one of the great advantages of the United States: “At such a distance from Europe and with such an ocean between us, we hope to meddle little in its quarrels or combinations. Its peace and its commerce are what we shall court.”
But even without the advantage of geography, a policy of nonintervention is sufficient, as Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) has pointed out: “Countries like Switzerland and Sweden who promote neutrality and non-intervention have benefited for the most part by remaining secure and free of war over the centuries.”
A policy of nonintervention doesn’t mean that the United States should refuse to issue visas, trade, extradite criminals, allow travel abroad, or allow immigration. As Jefferson said in his first inaugural address: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”
Mr. Obama, if you welcome change and openness, there is one sign the United States can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. President Obama, if you seek peace, if you seek relief from bloated military budgets for the United States and the rest of the world, close down the overseas military bases. Mr. Obama, bring the troops home. Mr. Obama, tear down this empire!
Overnight these Hamptons which I inhabit have morphed into their familiar paradise. A multiplicity of greens, with tree limbs upholstered softly in fuzzy mosses. From my backyard I see fields of downy shrubs enrobed by tall golden ferns which blur into a horizon of sun light. Sights more ravishing than I can even remember.
Winds are mere playful breezes, and should it rain even the rain drops are soft and warm, a perfect percussion. Sublime. People have popped out of nowhere, and house lights blaze as they reel in the dusk of evening. Everything so inviting, welcoming.
Yet the beauty holds no contest to the inimitable perversities of my human nature, and I draw the shades.
Ensnaring my laptop I retreat to bed; and then I give in—so sweet—to the quicksand-seduction of online gambling. In particular, backgammon.
You don’t even need a friend in the world and still you’ll always get a game
The site kicks you off with 300 points. Highest stake is 200 points per game with a 40 point pot. There are many smaller pots to choose from. Here I am a shame-faced chicken and I always go for the smallest risks.
Some foes have scores up in the tens of thousands. I’m no mathematician, but at approximately 15 minutes a game, that’s a fairly macho quantity of hours, uh, ‘flight time’.
The other evening, instead of accomplishing something productive, I started to play backgammon. I crashed from a high of just over 2 thousand points and tumbled almost without cessation to somewhere in the 13 hundreds.
Hours were sopped up by the half-dozen before I dragged my eyes away to take a quick read on if it was day or night. Meanwhile nothing else got done. I’d not showered, nor left the house.
Then it was dawn and I was having trouble clearly seeing the computer screen. I could hardly even glide my now sticky stubborn mouse. Opponents wrote me glib jibes telling me I was an ‘idiot’ for my molasses-slow moves. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t. It took falling asleep for me to quit the game.
Yesterday I logged on to find out I had in fact made it back up to just under 16 hundred. The only thing I’d known for sure was that I could no longer see. Curiously this had no impact on my skill level.
Whatever. I fell in lock-step with my addiction. Played for hours. Until I was interrupted by the familiar noise of those blasted birds. Dawn again! The sun is rising on another glorious day. I know I should go engage. Can’t give in so slavishly to my socio-agoraphobic urges.
Except that I can. Easily I conjure a vivid scape of the highway and the back roads all clogged, bumper to bumper. I shudder and snuggle tighter with my laptop. It’s back to the game for me.
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American Roman Catholics observe the Feast of Corpus Christi today. In June 1791, just six months before his death, Mozart wrote a motet for this feast. It is among the most exquisite and beautiful pieces of music ever written, no less moving and powerful because it is less than four minutes long. A fine recording of Ave Verum Corpus may be heard here. Enjoy.
I greatly appreciate Tom Piatak’s gentle attempt at mediating between two of his favorite commentators. Moreover, there is nothing in his statements about Scott Richert I could possibly disagree with. Scott and his wife Amy are exemplary parents, and I applaud their godliness and energy in trying to raise seven children, and especially in our morally decayed American society. Nor would I ever attribute to Scott the slightest sympathy for the pro-choice movement or the socially radical feminists behind it. And in no way do I consider him to be front-man for GOP party hacks, who can’t wait to give evidence of their “moderateness” by reaching out to the media.
Where I differ from Scott are on two points. First, I do not see any moral parity between the mass-murderer George Tiller and the outraged Christian who took his life. One was a thoroughly evil person engaged in infanticide for fun and profit. The other was someone who stopped Tiller’s rampage by drastic means. While relatively little good can come out of this violent act, it was morally defensible. What Tiller did was not. Note this is not an attempt to whitewash the obvious political recklessness of what the killer did. It will no doubt be turned into grist for the mills of our cultural Marxist regime, which will go after people like John Zmirak, Tom Piatak, and Scott, all of whom have been vocal opponents of abortion. But there is no moral parity between Tiller and his slayer, given the kind of services Tiller was “providing.” Nor will Scott gain friends on the cultural left by forcing comparisons between the two killers’ actions.
Second, Scott’s attempt to prove his case by citing the bible and medieval philosophy is less than convincing. I simply don’t see how Aquinas’s view of tyrannicide, which is borrowed from Aristotle, can provide sufficient guidance for dealing with the evils of the modern managerial regime. The reason is not that classical and medieval analyses of government are wrong. They are simply outdated and do not take into account political developments that have occurred in the late modern era.
Scott also quotes biblical passages, especially Romans III, in order to buttress his positions and the effect is far from compelling. Paul’s epistle does not show that Tiller’s killer acted wickedly “because good cannot come out of evil.” The cited reference, which is a leitmotiv in Romans, pertains to actions taken without or without faith (pistis). The previous discussion is to whether one could fulfill the Law of circumcision merely by performing that commandment and whether someone who was not circumcised in his flesh (akrobustos en sarki) could nonetheless observe that commandment “in his heart.” Section III ends by reminding the reader: “therefore through the works of the law no human body is justified in His presence. Affirmation of the Law is affirmation of error (dia gar nomou epignosis hamartias).
As a devout Catholic, Scott may not read these passages in the same way as the Protestant Reformers. As he might know, they were pivotal texts for Luther. But the passages in question should not be pulled in to attack Tiller’s assassin. Taken in context they have a very different meaning.
What are the limited lessons learned so far from “the shooting of a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by an elderly anti-Semitic pamphleteer who published tirades against Jews?
Remember when the Department of Homeland Security, headed by Janet Napolitano, issued, back in April, a nine-page document titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”? As potential security risks, the report also listed veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Everyone was up in arms about the slight this was to army men. But when it came to defending other patriots maligned therein—immigration restrictionists, Second Amendment defenders, limited government crusaders, and tax protesters—mum was the word.
As a member of the undefended faction, I confess to growing as sick-and-tired of the odes to the military in militarized America, as I have of the constant fretting over the toll stratospheric state debt will take on “our children.” (What about all us stiffed working stiffs?) About the country’s under-educated, over-indulged, hyper-sexed, super-confident kids I don’t care. (I’m confident the homeschooled among them will survive this road to serfdom.)
The military is certainly no more deserving than the rest of us—except of that extra bit of scrutiny, if we are to heed the government’s own warnings.
The attacker at the Holocaust Museum was, indeed, a former military man, although Napolitano was off by a few decades: James W. von Brunn was drafted to fight in World War II. On the wrong side, as he would no doubt argue.
Since the government has confused me so about army men, I’ve settled on this simple formula: I’ll salute the “Ramoses and Compeans of this great nation, who stand on this country’s soil and defend its borders. With Janet Napolitano’s blessing, I’ll remain suspicious of the soldiers who’ve been snookered into fighting phantoms in far-flung destinations, like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The more obvious moral of the von Brunn attack relates to media coverage. If you’re a white supremacist caught in the act, intrepid, mainstream journalism will not rest until it has dug-up, divulged and dissected everything about you.
Scarcely had the cowardly attack taken place than the mug of the hater was plastered on every TV station across the country. (I can’t tell you what the Jihadi du jour looks like.) Ditto details of von Brunn’s dysfunctional biography and ideology.
In no time the usually lackadaisical liberal media expertly knitted together von Brunn’s years in irons, unsavory associations, and the ins-and-outs of his holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic belief system. Still, the “parrot press” could not quite settle on whether this old, evil individual was a “lone wolf” or a mastermind of a conspiracy rivaling al Qaida.
Lengthy talking points accompanied the non-stop, hours-on-end, worldwide, breaking news-less reporting. Summoned to argue on CNN for laws prohibiting hate speech was playwright Janet Langhart Cohen, the wife of former defense secretary William Cohen. She had been staging a presumably kosher production at the Museum.
Langhart Cohen was not alone in calling for “the kind of laws they have in Europe.” We are too tolerant of hate speech, chimed Mark W. Smith, a conservative columnist and lawyer. As though outlawing offensive speech can void the human heart of hatred. (So much for the recrudescence of a worthwhile conservatism.)
Suffice it to say that no one will forget James W. von Brunn any time soon.
On the other hand, does anyone (besides Robert Spencer and “Pamela Geller) know who Wael W. Kalash is?
I didn’t think so. If you’re a swarthy supremacist, driven by devotion to a vampiric prophet and his deity, you can count on the “discretion” of those whose job description is vigilant indiscretion.
Thus, when Kalash—a repeat offender—would take up his regular post at the University Village bus stop, on Stinchcomb Drive near Buckeye Village, in Ohio, he did so with impunity and always off camera.
As was his wont, Kalash would then terrify female students by shouting and gesticulating, “F*** you American slut.”
When Kalash’s menacing, University Village vigils culminated in the stabbing of a young female student, CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS were missing in action.
After all, this was but a “random event,” perpetrated by a “disturbed” individual, who, following his mission, just happened to, willy-nilly, escape into the Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab mosque. That was the line the boys in blue were sticking to.
According to Robert Spencer of “Jihad Watch,” however, this very mosque was spiritual home to numerous “Muslims behaving badly.” And in particular, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, alias Carlos Bledsoe, of the hybrid identity (American Muslim). Earlier this month, Muhammad murdered an American soldier and injured another in an attack on a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Alas, you really have to dig to get at this stuff.
“Crony capitalism” is a term often applied to foreign nations where government interference circumvents market forces. The practice is widely associated with tin-pot dictators and second-rate economies. In such a system, support for the ruling regime is the best and only path to economic success. Who you know supersedes what you know, and favoritism trumps the rule of law. Unfortunately, this week’s events demonstrate that the phrase now more aptly describes our own country.
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Chrysler’s secured creditors based on the government’s argument that the needs of other stakeholders outweighed those of a few creditors. In this case, the Administration concluded the interests of the United Auto Workers outweighed the interests of the Indiana teachers and firemen whose pension fund sued to block the restructuring. Given the enormous financial support that the UAW poured into the Obama campaign, such partiality is hardly surprising.
When making their investment in Chrysler just a few months ago, the Indiana pension fund agreed to commit capital because of the specific assurance