Bill and Hill Need to Chill

Finished the Wilentz book now. It really does manage to snip together every Democratic talking-point for the last twenty years--it rehashes the editorials and op-eds of the New York Times quite professionally, and spares me the bother of ever looking them up again. One cannot but be skeptical of a historical judgment that hews so closely to the old talking points at every point. If I could remember every single Republican talking-point, I suppose I could make a detailed set of counter-arguments ... ideally, though, it would be nice to read a history which deviates from both sides talking-points. I'll make a good-faith proffer of what needs to be done: I think there's a good case to be made that Reagan and Bush Sr. both should have been impeached, and maybe even removed from office, for their roles in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Having said that, can we take it for granted that my skepticism of much of Wilentz's narrative is not just knee-jerk partisanship of my own? But let me put forth one single incident, reasonably inconsequential in itself, on which to hang this general skepticism.

On Inauguration Day, 1997, after he administered the presidential oath of office to Bill Clinton for the second time, Chief Justice WIlliam Rehnquist wished the president "Good luck," unsmilingly and in a tone more ominous than cordial. Was Rehnquist just being his usual adversarial, conservative self? Or did he have something more specific in mind? Over the weeks and months to come, Clinton and his closest supporters would ponder the questions--and, in their darkest moments, conclude that Rehnquist knew very well about at least some of the political misfortunes, then undisclosed, that would befall the White House. Only Clinton's wife immediately put an exact and plausible construction on Rehnquists's remark. [370] .... It would later dawn on the president's supporters that Chief Justice Rehnquist's mind could well have been on Clinton v. Jones when he growled "Good luck" at the swearing in. But Hillary Clinton had gotten the message instantly. "They're going to screw you on the Paula Jones case," she told her husband. [378]

Ooookay. Or maybe Rehnquist was just, you know, wishing Clinton good luck? When I read this, I think it possible that Bill and Hill needed a long rest cure as of 1996, and that having paranoids in the Oval Office was not a good idea for the country. And when Wilentz says this was a "plausible construction"--heck, at that point I start thinking Wilentz might be wrong when he argues that Reagan and Bush should have been impeached. Wilentz loses all credibility as a sober judge of history at this point.

A Spirited Girl

Wilentz, p. 382:

"Monica Lewinsky, a spirited twenty-one year old Californian ..."

"Spirited?" Papa Wilentz, what does that mean?

" ... What began as embracing ended in her performing oral sex.

Oh, Papa Wilentz! Thank you! Whenever I read the adjective "spirited" from now on, I'll know just how interpret it!

Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court. (As that is rather a hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea-pig, head first, and then sat upon it.)

`I'm glad I've seen that done,' thought Alice. `I've so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, "There was some attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court," and I never understood what it meant till now.'

To The Tenure Born

Wilentz, The Age of Reagan:

"[Michael Ledeen,] A former vagabond university teacher." [219]

"[Newt] Gingrich soon abandoned a floundering career as a history professor at West Georgia College in favor of politics." [347]

"[Richard] Armey (a former economics professor who had failed to obtain tenure at North Texas State University)." [352]

This isn't liberalism; this is the self-satisfaction of a tenured Princeton professor, who can imagine no clearer sign of inferiority than an aborted, provincial, gypsy academic career. Speaking on behalf of all gypsy professors, on behalf of all junior profs out in Podunk U, anxiously awaiting tenure ... I recognize Ledeen, Gingrich, and Armey as the avatars of our professional frustrations! Oh ye fiery angels of our race, risen up to frustrate tenured professors from Princeton, a thousand benisons upon ye! And you snooty tenured profs, who look down upon us, the lowly proletariat of the academic world ... tell Brother Wilentz he's letting the cat out of the bag.

On Sympathy In A Historian

Just to follow up on the Wilentz post--sympathy is absolutely essential for a historian, just as it is for a politician. Not sympathy, "I agree with you," but sympathy, "I understand you"--I have opened myself up to learn the way you think; I am willing to be changed by what you tell me; I am not a man who attempts to know an object, but a man who shares knowledge with a subject. Wilentz claims in his introduction to have learned as he wrote--but I find it hard to believe that he opened himself to conservatism and conservatives in any way. The scorn, the hatred, is too overpowering.

Note again: one can sympathize with Hitler. (The usual end-point of such arguments.) One can sympathize with Stalin. You can condemn them fiercely, hate them, loathe them, but still acknowledge their humanity by the basic extension of sympathy. You must love even Hitler and Stalin. It's a hard job sometimes, but it's part of the historian's craft.

Note also that you can fail to be sympathetic by, for example, writing a heavily theoretical work of history that ruthlessly decontextualizes the evidence--turns people's speech and actions into mere evidence--and yokes it to your own theoretical preconceptions. Polemical commonplacing, as Adrian Johns once wrote rather nastily of Elizabeth Eisenstein, re her printing revolution piece. Using history to prove a point of your own is also unsympathetic. Since my own work is rather theoretical, assembling a great many different snippets, I am acutely aware of the temptation to subordinate other people's thoughts to my own. My only defenses are that 1) the ideas first came to me as I read what people wrote; and 2) my grand rhetorical schtick (and previous theoretical schticks that prefigure it) is a way of admiring and enjoying the words of everybody I quote; to argue their autonomy and their dignity, to argue them excellent rhetoricians rather than bad logicians. These aren't perfect defenses by any means. But I am trying to keep my mind and my heart open.

But so, I suppose, was Wilentz, as he failed so badly. So can we all; so do we all. Nothing to do but keep trying and keep failing.

Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan

American political narrative, 1974 to 2001. It does indeed capture the main events, and is a good refresher both for events I'm too young to remember (the 1970s) and events I haven't thought about in twenty years (the 1980s). But this is the Democratic Talking Points version of history--everything the Republicans and conservatives do is minimized, attacked, carped at, both in substance and in tone; if, say, Reagan does anything good, it's because he isn't being conservative. How shall I put it? Let us stipulate Republicans have done Bad Things on occasion. It is unlikely that they could be so unrelievedly awful, mediocre, etc. (I would be similarly dubious of a history that adopted the same tone toward Clinton or Carter.) By way of comparison, Dennis Mack Smith manages a biography of Mussolini that makes clear just how evil, buffoonish, and incompetent he was, yet which still provides some essential respect for the man--taking him seriously, acknowledging his real achievements is pursuit of his aims. If you can do this about Mussolini, it strikes me that you can do it about modern Republicans and conservatives. So, while informative, this is not good history.

Taking Notes For Class

Possibly the only thing more boring than grading fifty five-page essays that all say the same thing. Oh, how I want to have a full repertoire of notes for, say, ten to fifteen classes, and never have to do this again!

Rhetoric Everywhere

Moltke: "Strategy is a system of ad hoc expedients; it is more than knowledge, it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of an original idea in accordance with continually changing circumstances."

Modern strategy, from Clausewitz to Moltke, is prudence. Just another place prudence and rhetoric have been hiding.

Elder of Zion, Junior Grade

Joe Klein: McCain hasn't said he was for regime change, but he has rattled sabers noisily, joked about bomb-bomb-bombing Iran and surrounded himself with, and been funded by, Jewish neoconservatives who believe Iran is a threat to Israel's existence.

Withywindle: Jewish, check. Conservative, check, and since I used to be liberalish, I suppose you could say "neo." Believe Iran is a threat to Israel's existence, check. Sent in a contribution to McCain--credit card, not check.

What does one say to the accusation that you are that vile thing, the Unpatriotic, Treacherous, Disloyal Jew? Argue the matter?--"Oh, Mr. Klein, Oh, Mr. Klein, I do love America, really I do, how could you think I didn't? I so want your approval, so want your respect, please, please, take it back." A pathetic waste of breath; if someone wants to believe that, they will. Challenge the man to a duel? Sadly, our mores have changed.

Note that you are among the smeared? Check. Refuse to shake Klein's hand, should it ever become relevant? Check. Note that Klein, as much as Ann Coulter, has disqualified himself from civil society, and now discredits all who associate with him? Check. Note, as a practical matter, that those who nod in agreement to what Klein says have declared themselves my enemies? Check.

Nineteenth-Century Diplomacy

In class, discussions of nineteenth-century diplomacy, illustrated with reference to Kissinger's Diplomacy. Kissinger notes Britain's combination of isolationism and balance-of-power politics, contrasted with Metternich's vision of assertive, consensual maintenance of global order. Britain's point of view, by Kissinger, is in some ways destabilizing--by preserving their ability to act alone, the British make international consensus impossible; "balance of power" also means "waiting until something has gone deeply awry before intervening."

Push this interpretation a little, and note an arc of instability across two great regions of the globe where Britain is the pre-eminent power in the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean and Latin America. Civil wars in Spain, insurrections in Portugal and Italy, Franco-Austrian war in Italy, Egypto-Turkish Wars, Russo-Turkish Wars, and the century of coups and civil wars in Latin America, all under the complaisant eye of Britain. There is, I think, an assumption that all this stuff just happened--whereas Kissinger alerts us to consider that these events were contingent upon Great Britain's avowed and consistent diplomatic strategy. The British exercise of power should alert us to the equally significant moments when it was not exercised: if Britain successfully vetoed France's support of Egypt in 1840 vis-a-vis Turkey, then Britain equally acquiesced in France's expedition to Algeria in 1830, and bears some measure of responsibility for the mass murders that ensued in France's conquest and colonization. The same is true of all the bloody rebellions, wars, coups, etc., in Britain's region of influence--Britain's inactions bear some responsibility here, and the arc of instability may be seen as the consequence of British choice.

This is not to take away primary responsibility from the local actors. Nor is it necessarily to say that Britain made the wrong choice, either in terms of her own interests or the long-term good of the world--a more heavy-handed British presence in the Mediterranean and Latin America might have been worse for all concerned. But it is to highlight the power of British choice in this history, to make clear that Britain did not operate in a "natural" world of instability, but helped generate this instability by its own choices.

There are modern lessons here, of course, whether you take current US policy to be British in some sense or whether you fear that an alternate US policy (isolationist, Obamaish) would be more British, hence have bloody consequences. The lesson I would take most to heart is to say that inaction is also a choice, and that the world of foreigners America acts upon is also a world America has helped create; we are connected and responsible, whatever choices we make.

Close Encounters

I dream about Reihan; Reihan links to my post; how does he know that I wrote about him?

(Ed.: Mutual friends, he's a lurking reader, or ego-googling, choose one.)

I post on Nobody Sasses a Girl with Glasses; Anthony Grafton adds a comment later in the thread. This is terrifying. My purported area of expertise is rather close to Grafton's; in some ways I am trying to be a Grafton Mini-Me; and, sadly, I am not like Grafton a polymath whose intellect is exceeded only by his beard. Everything I have ever said on the web, affecting professional knowledge, I have an awful feeling he could contradict, or expose as shallow. In short, I am a poseur, and the man who can prove it to the world was three (four?) comments away from me on a thread. Does he also lurk on this blog? Aiee!

I must start providing more footnotes for my blog-posts. Grafton has written on the history of the footnote; I'm sure he'd appreciate that.

Yet More on Obama's Peculiarly Irksome Speech

"I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city."

But I do look like Jesse Owens. He outran every German, and Hitler wouldn't shake his hand. Every American cheered his victory. I also look like Joe Louis, who outpunched Max Schmeling. Not here in Berlin, granted, but they knew in Germany when Louis smashed Schmeling. We Americans cheered that victory too. No, that wasn't a speech with words, but those Americans who look like me conveyed an unmistakable message.

More On Obama's Speech

"I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city."

Some people may think that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. But I am the latest in a long tradition of Americans who look like me who have come to Berlin--more than a century ago, for example, W. E. B. DuBois came to the University of Berlin to study. A great many other Americans who look like me who have been honored at home and abroad--Edward Brooke, Ralph Bunche, Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, Bayard Rustin, and Andrew Young, among many others. I am proud to be an American not least because of America's own pride in its long tradition of nurturing and honoring people of all races, a national tradition which is second to none in the world. Anyone who looks at me and does not immediately recognize an American is an ignorant fool.

Strangest Dream

I dreamed a series of alternate-history stories. The book apparently had been commissioned to mock Obama, but the editor was Reihan Salem, so the focus of the stories actually turned toward some combination of Howard Waldrop sensibility, and a desire to mock some of his nearest and dearest. Hence:

It was 1846 and President Obama was in the White House.

In the basement of the Capitol, Congressman Ross Douthat was playing poker. "I sure do admire that President Obama," he said. "Anyone who invents the martini is alright in my book. Somebody pass me another one of those delicious things. One pair."

"The martini is OK," said Congressman Peter Suderman. "I'm more impressed with the fact that he tinkered up the movie camera, and then invented the film genre. What did we do on Saturday nights before he came to town? Two pair."

And so on.

Obama's Speech

Anything good in it could have been said, and has been said, by President Bush. Where it jars and dismays, it could never have been said by President Bush.

"I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city."--so what? This is good? Bad? Your back-handed acknowledgment that America isn't just ideals, but also an ethno-state? Are you condescending to the Germans too, who for God's sake know there are Black Americans, they've been part of the American Army occupying Germany since 1945! Why, in The Marriage of Maria Braun, the prostitution of German women to black American soldiers after World War II is a symbol of their degradation. Oh, ja, the Germans know black Americans exist, they just don't want to remember what they used to think of them. Or maybe still do.

Here's a photo of a Black American who died in Berlin. Does Obama remember who he is and why he died? Do the Berliners?

Here's what Obama should have said: "Actually, my father's family were Herero who survived the German genocide and migrated to Kenya. A cousin of mine was a Schwarzkommando, however, so my family is also part of the great German enterprise of the past century. Isn't it nice to be a citizen of the world? We are all one glorious rainbow together, gravity's rainbow."

Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West

Long, yet ponderous; good history, but does it deserve the Pulitzer Prize? I skimmed it for you, gentle readers.

Concentrates on British emigration to the Americas in the last few years before the Revolution; draws heavily on a series of reports by British customs officials naming and describing near ten thousand emigrants in some detail. Bailyn teases out a dual emigration. One is of families of farmers and artisans from Yorkshire and Scotland (no one reported from the kingdom of Ireland, so nothing on the Scots-Irish), no impoverished, but fearing destitution as hard times close in, and making a bolt for the American frontier. Another is single young men, very largely from London, indenturing themselves and heading off to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, where they help as (often skilled) construction for ships and houses, iron foundry labor, all sorts of skilled and unskilled labor to help build up the developed parts of the colonies rather than break ground on the frontier. This second migration is news to me: I knew there had been indentured servitude in the seventeenth century, as plantation labor, but thought it had all been replaced by slaves in the eighteenth. The persistence of indenture, and its transformation into semi-skilled labor in the colonial heartland, does change my view of colonial American history considerably.

For modern parallels: modern illegal immigration to the US, especially Mexican? Coyotes organize shipment to the US the same way shipowners organized transport across the Atlantic; the fee you pay to a coyote, enforced by criminal muscle, is something like an indenture payment--although illegality makes this all a more parlous proposition. Then, I have heard from my mom (a Latin American expert) that Mexican migration has now shifted toward skilled labor, with such strong demand from the US that Mexico is losing a lot of its own skilled labor supply, outbid by the US. (The US quasi-recession may be alleviating this affect.) And the demand for labor in the 1770s, especially on the frontier, was a product of land speculation--and what was our housing boom but land speculation?, drawing in millions of illegal immigrants to build the houses and then, um, live in some of them. La plus ca change, etc.

Semi-Disastrous Class

The experiment of assigning the discussion of the book before the essay due date failed miserably. No one did the reading. I limped through a soliloquized discussion. I blame the students. Also myself. Another lesson in humility. Ugh.

On the Consequences of Economic Mismanagement

I remember back to the 1980s, when the New York Times op-ed page shrieked, Deficits! Doom! The End Is Nigh! And, lo, the end is not nigh, and we muddle along. Which isn't to say that years of economic mismanagement can't have catastrophic effects, appearing suddenly, but it seems to me that a sustainedly mediocre outcome is more likely. See Japan, which I thought a few years ago was about to enter a deflationary death-spiral, but apparently has proved that corrupt politics and rigid economic structures can reduce economic growth to near zero for fifteen years--but then economic growth resumes again, and if the Japanese didn't improve their lot for most of a generation, neither did they experience particular hardship. Or see Europe, consistently suffering from more anemic growth than the United States due to their own economic rigidities--but which consistently enacts some economic reform, continues to grow, if at a slow rate, and continues to provide a comfortable life for the majority. Or even consider Argentina, one of the most spectacular cases of economic mismanagement over the last century, which has still provided something like a comfortable life for the millions of upper-class and middle-class Argentinians on the top of the heap, if something a bit more desperate for those below. Mediocrity and lower growth would be the expected rewards of American economic mismanagement, not utter collapse.

There's a dog that hasn't, I think, barked: where are the Americans migrating to Europe to better themselves? That is, there are a large number of American expatriates, working for multinationals and NGOs and oil firms in Saudi Arabia and so on, but why aren't Americans moving to Europe or Japan, to take advantage of the exchange rate to send remittances home in strong Euros that would buy a lot of weak dollars? Where are the equivalents of the English and Irish construction workers who went to West Germany in the eighties and nineties? The Polish plumbers heading to England and France now? The French professionals heading to London, because the market is freer? The continuing brain-drain of European professionals to the United States? I know the EU labor laws now discriminate significantly in favor of fellow-Europeans, and against Americans, but laws can only do so much. It seems to me that we'll know America has really begun to decline when we see large numbers of Americans heading to Europe and Japan (or China!) for better wages. Has this happened yet? I don't think so.

On Making A Home

Daniel Larison writes

My advice, as usual, is for conservatives to go home or make homes of the places where they are, stop the obsession with party politics and policy agendas and start creating the culture and the world they want to have. That is a long, slow work of cultivation, but an absolutely necessary one.

This has something to do with my ambition to go into academia, to make myself a niche there, to change it. It's because academia is my home--one of them anyway--and I want to cultivate it, to make it a better home. And if my goal to change academia has something to do with politics, it is in many ways independent of politics, at least in the crudest partisan sense.

On Cutting Taxes

A little while ago the Power Line people quoted Stephen Moore as saying

"My contacts at the Treasury Department tell me that for the first time in decades, and perhaps ever, the richest 1% of tax filers will have paid more than 40% of the income tax burden. The top 50% will account for 97% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% will have paid just 3%."

This sort of argument is usually followed up by saying that it's perfectly just to cut income rates for the rich, since they pay so much more than the poor. (This doesn't take into account payroll taxes, etc., of course.) But consider a somewhat different startling possibility: Since income taxes are about one half of all federal revenues, the bottom 50% of all taxpayers provide only 1.5% of all federal revenues. One could, therefore, eliminate all income taxes for the poorest half of America, at negligible cost to the government. This, for heaven's sake, is what Republicans ought to propose! Millions will vote for them just from the prospect of being relieved from the aggravation of income taxes. It should be simple: say there's no income tax levied on the first $35K or so of income--$50K--whatever--or for a more complicated jigger, say income tax is levied on all income, but only once you've hit $35K/$50K of income.

Is there anything I'm overlooking here?

On A Good Life

I have a loving family and good friends; a wife I love and who loves me; a baby son who smiles at me; successful publication as a fiction author and a historian; the sheer joy of writing for a living; the knowledge that I have on occasion taught classes well; professional mentors, agents, and editors who have helped me and treated me with kindness and respect; readers who have liked my books; the knowledge that I have been of service to my family and friends on occasion; an easy life, far from the horrors of war; consumerist joy in a wide variety of foods and gadgets (air conditioning, a laptop, and CDs are high on the goody list); access to culture--museums, theatre, concerts, movies; a good place to live in my native city, which I love; an excellent education; the chance to spend years of my life with my nose in a book; the chance to have traveled fairly widely in my life; technology at my fingertips that allows me to e-mail, telephone, and blog; no fear of starvation or even hunger, in my luftmensch life; citizenship in the best and greatest nation that ever was, shared with a people I love; the satisfaction that my nation has undertaken my preferred policies much of the time; liberty as my birthright, and the knowledge that I have been given every opportunity to live my life as I would, to my fullest satisfaction.

I am blessed. It is a good life, a wonderful life, a joyful life, one for which I am grateful, to God, and to everyone who has shared it with me and helped make it a good life. Including the readers of this blog.

On Economics

An anonymous commenter provides the usual set of accusations against the Republicans on the economy. So, what does one say about that? Particularly since I am not an Economics PhD (though my mom is!), and I don't ultimately care about economics that much--My Eyes Glaze Over, and I care more about fighting necessary wars to defend Western Civilization. (That is to say, if Obama were gung-ho for the war and McCain agin it, I'd be voting for Obama, never mind the damage to the economy.) But some things to say about the economy, I suppose.

* A great deal of economic performance is autonomous from political stewardship--neither blame nor credit entirely accrues to any political party for its stewardship of the economy. Furthermore, there is bipartisan consensus on much of the economy--Alan Greenspan nominated by Reagan and Clinton alike; deregulation pursued by Carter and Reagan alike. Finally, the career bureaucrats running the Treasury, the Fed, the SEC, are often administering in a non-partisan fashion, uninterested in and immune to the political game. Political administrations have important marginal effects on economic growth, but (save for Communist expropriation of the means of the production, and the like) not determinative ones.

* I would expect the Bush budget deficit to have some effects in terms of crowding out private investment, weakening the dollar, etc. -- but I don't believe that the deficit is either proportionately as great as the Reagan deficit, nor as large (proportionately) as that of various other OECD countries. Whatever negative effects the deficit has on the economy should also be measured against the positive effects of releasing a trillion dollars into the private sector of the American economy - a non-trivial positive whose effects we will be benefitting from for decades to come. I'm willing to grant the possibility of a net negative effect from running a largish budget deficit--but I haven't yet seen a sober estimate of that net effect, as opposed to a BAD REPUBLICANS DO BAD THINGS! estimate.

* I would also expect spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, however just and necessary those wars, to have some adverse effect on the economy--spending and borrowing alike putting pressure on the economy, a la the effects of the Vietnam War. (And putting downward pressure on the dollar--is the current collapse in the dollar the equivalent of the US being forced off the gold standard?) But one of the critiques of the Iraq War is that we've been fighting on the cheap, not doing enough, not truly shifting to a wartime economy, which would seem to me to indicate that we can't have been spending or borrowing that much for the war. I'd like to get a sense of how expensive our current wars are, absolutely and relatively, compared to the Vietnam War, to get a sense of the relative impact. But in any case, the political critique from the left isn't usually "we shouldn't have spent the money at all," but "we should have spent the money in other ways" -- indicating some alternate government program unfunded due to the Iraq War rather than money released to the private sector. This brings in a whole new slew of opportunity costs and benefits -- benefits foregone due to lack of domestic government investment; costs foregone due to lack of domestic government mucking around. And, of course, military spending does also boost parts of the domestic economy -- and (pre-emptive) defense against enemy attacks also saves us untold trillions. (The destruction of the WTC was a $100 billion immediate cost; imagine the cost of a nuke in lower Manhattan.) So here, too, some complicated estimate is in order.

* Regulatory policy. There are two aspects to this, Enron-era and housing-crunch era. The assumption here is that tighter, smarter regulatory policy could somehow have averted particular economic collapses -- also that the motivation of Republican policy is crony corruption at least as much as it is a (imputedly misguided) belief in free markets. I'm not sure any set of regulations can prevent all swindles, speculations, etc. -- but even if regulatory policy could have been improved to prevent such abuses, what of the possible cost in terms of lowered economic growth due to inhibitory regulations (Stephen Bainbridge blogs about this a lot)? And what of the benefits built from bubbles? - the massive amount of housing built for Americans in the last decade? A good deal of modern British history is about the troubles that proceed from an inability to build enough housing -- aren't there advantages to having a lot of housing on the market? Again, a complicated judgment is in order.

* Oil price. Some double assumption here, that foregoing foreign wars would lower the price of oil, and that tighter regulation at home would prevent "gouging" and "speculation." As for the former: yes, anxiety about Iraq and Iran presents problems. The counter-factual of Iraqi or Iranian domination of the entire Middle East presents alternate problems. Growing Chinese and Indian demand matter; so too do political troubles in Nigeria, production problems in Russia and Venezuela, and let us not forget, an opportunistic OPEC cartel, led by our dear friends the Saudis, who would have tried to distort the market to their advantage in all situations. As for gouging and speculation--I'm not sure they exist, and I'm not sure what the US government can do other than confiscate profits from oil companies, distributors et al -- which strikes me as both immoral and counterproductive, and likely to do its bit to tank the economy. But in all cases, Americans didn't much change their behavior until oil went near $4 a barrel. I am doubtless insufficiently sympathetic, but this indicates to me that oil price wasn't that serious a problem until recently. (To the extent that oil price is a function of the dollar collapse, we should reassign the blame to that category of economic management.)

* Wage stagnation. As various people have noted, this doesn't take sufficiently into account people getting richer as they get older, poor immigrants driving down the wage statistics, and improved quality of goods due to technological innovation. I.e., most Americans are a lot better off in their everyday than they were in 1975, and if the statistics don't reveal this, something is wrong with the statistics. All that said, wage growth for tens of millions of Americans has slowed dramatically over the last generation--and I'm even willing to grant that not just globalization and economic modernization but also the free-market model pioneered by Republicans has something to do with the fact. Generally I think the free-market model is wildly successful and ought to be kept--but I'm willing to tinker, and look for ways to kick-start wage growth for pinched Americans. I doubt most Democratic solutions are the way to go, but open-minded brainstorming seems in order.

* Most other "economic" critiques are more in the nature of a debate over trade-offs--we ought to spend more on health care, the environment, etc., and it's worth the costs (to the rich). These strike me as different issues. Some of these critiques assume economic benefit as well--that government-run health care will also be better for the economy. I'm dubious of these claims -- but these issues strike me as essentially belonging to something other than pure economic management.

Max Hastings, Retribution

As I expected, a very well-written book. Not, I think, quite as good as Armageddon--that gave the impression of profound knowledge, whereas this seems like a pendant book written at the urging of Hastings' agent, to cash in on the success of Armageddon. I think Hastings swotted up on the Pacific War--he says he relies very largely on secondary sources--so this is, yes, a good swot. The general technique is to mix the experiences of a few individuals with overall narration, ending each chapter with summary judgments. The experiences do make for good overall oral history, history of everyday life at war, military history; the judgments are sharp, usually persuasive. Details:

1) Hastings is quite good at showing how here, as in Europe, "overwhelming Allied superiority" translates to "miserably tough firefights on the ground, and if you're unlucky enough to be in combat, your chances of getting wounded or dead are damn high." He credits some of this to the ferocity and tenacity of Japanese defense, but some to the realities of (modern) warfare. Yes, it was a lot better to be an American or a British soldier than a Japanese or Chinese one, but not a picnic.

3) The British fought the Burma campaign to re-establish the prestige of the dying British Empire. MacArthur abused his status as American national icon to force an unnecessary invasion of the Philippines, which culminated in the block-by-block devastation of Manila, where more than 100K Filipinos were killed by deliberate Japanese torture & brutality and necessary American artillery-fire. The Australians had half-withdrawn from the war due to internal political debates, and were sent to "mop up" Japanese in their near-abroad in the South Pacific partly to save face with the Allies and partly to re-establish authority in their own mini-empire. It was obviously unnecessary at the time, wildly popular, a petty and humiliating war. Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung were both incapable of fighting the Japanese, and used the last year of the war to position themselves for the ensuing civil war. Both were loathsome dictators, although the Communists were at this point treating the peasants significantly better, with great consequence for that later Civil War. The American support of Chiang was massive, and delusional. The Russians invaded Manchuria to establish domination after the war, and for the chance to rape (economically and literally) the province. The American Navy, Air Force, and Army each tried to conduct a separate war in the Pacific so as to justify their postwar goals of bureaucratic aggrandizement--and each service tried to keep out the British, so as to promote American influence in the Pacific in general. The motivations of the Allies in general were to fight the Japanese in pursuit of their own post-war objectives; much of the fighting was unnecessary for the strict, strategic purpose of defeating Japan. (Save for the question of Japanese morale; more on that later.)

4) All these murderous follies on the part of the Allies pale in comparison to the mass-murderous brutality of the Japanese nation, army, and officer corps--who cannot be disentangled from each other practically or morally--who initiated a war of mass conquest, who fought it with a psychopathic love of rape, torture, and casual murder, who butchered at least 15M civilians across Asia, perhaps many, many more, and who, in 1944, continued a war that was obviously lost, due to an equally psychopathic honor code, a bottom-line demand to keep Korea and Manchuria subject to the horrors of Japanese rule, and a disassociation from reality--who, therefore, condemned soldiers and civilians of all nationalities, but especially the Japanese, to a year of needless death, since they left only exterminating war, necessary and just, as a way to defeat them. The title of the book is Retribution, and the moral: however many Japanese deaths were unnecessary to defeat Japan in that final year, all were just, the retribution paid to a murderous nation.

5) The American submarine corps brought Japan to its knees--destroyed its ability to produce military materiel, had brought it much of the way to starvation by summer 1945. The Air Force burned Japan's cities largely because it had the B-29, and wanted to use it somehow; they did help reduce Japan's morale--and this was, sotto voce, the terrorizing goal of America's political leadership--but the industrial effect was negligible, since hardly any raw material imports were reaching Japan by 1945, and the factories were already useless. Once Okinawa was taken, the Air Force was in a position to destroy Japan's transportation links, and bring Japan even more quickly to starvation--but that, not industrial destruction, was the only really "strategic" goal the Air Force could achieve.

5) Even atom bombed twice, and invaded by Russia, the Japanese almost kept fighting. One cannot calculate things precisely, but all the devastation wreaked on the Japanese in the previous year--the soldiers dead abroad, the civilians firebombed at home, the hunger brought by submarines--had some effect on the final decision to surrender at last. One cannot say that the Allies could have foregone any measure of war with the assurance the Japanese would still surrender.

6) Japan's ferocious resistance was not, in some senses, insane. Britain could never have devoted the resources to reconquer Japan; the United States possessed the resources, but its population was increasingly impatient to end the war in 1945, and its leadership horrified at the potential number of casualities an invasion needed. But the propriety of the atom bombing--which Hastings in general endorses--should not be measured against the alternative of an invasion of the Home Islands. It should be measured, rather, against the literal starvation of Japan--and against American acquiescence in a Russian invasion of northern Japan (a real option--I had not known), where the Americans would have let the Russian pay the butcher's bill, as they had against the Nazis, and reward the Russians with the territory and the rape of however much of Japan the Russians reached before the Japanese finally collapsed. The atom bombing prevented not the invasion of Kyushu, but the starvation of Japan and the conquest of half Japan by the USSR.

7) I wish the book had had a chapter on Korea--its experience of the last year of war, the experience of Koreans as soldiers in the Japanese army, as slave labor in Japan, as comfort women, as helots in their homeland. A necessary part of the story, I think--particularly because the Japanese insisted so strongly on keeping Korea within their Empire, and because it shows what the Empire was like even after the initial conquest.

On Obama Raising $52 Million In June

A fair number of conservative pundits, bloggers, etc., speculated that because he hadn't released his numbers early, it would be a much lower number--$30 million or so. This was part of a grand thesis--"He's moved to the center too fast, alienated the netroots, made a big mistake by forswearing in public financing, it'll all end in tears!" Forsooth, for a day or two I vaguely hoped some such scenario might be in the offing. Nope.

A moral: conservatives really, really hope Obama Will Lose The Election, because they're not sure McCain can win it. Boys, I think this is whistling Dixie. I don't think Obama, the Democrats, and their organization are superhuman and invincible--I think Obama has weaknesses, and will make mistakes--but he's not going to make unforced errors, he's not going to do the job for Republicans. They have to win the election--with less money, less enthusiasm, horrible headwinds of popular loathing for the party. They have to work, and stop dreaming.

It might be worth keeping in mind that Kerry didn't lose the election in 2004 either. He wasn't a weak candidate--he raised gobs of money, got enormous voter turnout, and ran a damn close race in both the popular and electoral vote. Bush won, by outcampaigning him. That's the way to do it.

PS. I also note that talking about Obama's hypothetical weakness is also done in hopes of setting going a self-fulfilling prophecy, and even to get the Obama-Stumblebum Meme out in the public, even if unfounded, for some long-term effect. But I think that whatever good this does is far outweighed by the Fooling Yourself Effect.

Teaching Opportunity

Monday we discuss Nationalism, 1815-1848, and various revolutions, including the birth of Belgium in 1830. "So," I will say to the students, "have you noticed that Belgium may be about to break apart, not least due to the strains of nationalism?" Ah, Teachable Moments!

Obama: Not a Muslim, But a Philistine

And a professional one to boot.

Speaking of funny, this is a hoot.

Goldberry in Geek Heaven

It turns out one can download apps for the IPod. Many, many apps. A fair number of them involve physically shaking the IPod.

Conservative Consistency

Phoebe ponders what she takes to be divergent elements within American conservatism:

One direction, the populist direction, entails conservatives embracing relativism as one would expect to see it on the left, and saying that sure, high-quality food; birth control; college; tolerance of homosexuality; and delayed marriage are fine for elites (a group that, needless to say, includes most conservative or liberal commentators), but these things are not objectively better, so the government should not push the values of the elite on the masses. The other direction, the 'elitist' one, would involve a more uniform embrace of the idea that one thing can be better than another, even if the 'better' thing is one particular to the upper classes. .... Conservatism as it currently exists in the U.S. is a hodge-podge of these two ideals, of (feigned) scorn for anything intelligent and of appreciation for the finer things, be they food items, books, or... you name it. The inability of these two strands to coalesce into something coherent is most readily seen in the conservative critique of higher education. Half the time it's a tragedy that American teens are watching junk on TV and not reading Plato, while the other half of the time, college is a waste and 99% of our youth would be better off with a few weeks of vocational training and a gentle push to the nearest plumbing job.

I disagree with a great many of the particulars of this post, but I’d like to concentrate for a moment on this purported tension between populism and elitism in conservative thought. (Did MSI write a similar post a while back? Ah, well, consider this a vague footnote.) I think the most important thing to dispute here is that populism = relativism. There are American conservatives (MSI!) who argue that the effects of moral breakdown are worse on the masses than on the elites; this is very different from saying, as latter-day Tories of some sort, that the masses and the elites each possess a self-sufficient and appropriate system of morality, each relatively valid within their subculture. The vast majority of conservatives, to the best of my knowledge, take the virtue-critique to be universal in scope—that the elites are equally vicious in their embrace of divorce and bastardy—but acknowledge that, practically, the elites are better able to buffer themselves from practical consequences for their vice. I don’t see any serious intellectual contradiction in this point.

The populist-elitist tension, it seems to me, focuses not so much on a split between objectivity and relativism, as a split as to which group of people is best qualified to judge the standard of virtue, the many or the few. The existence of a standard of virtue, of excellence, is not in doubt, so I do not think relativism is particularly at issue here. There is a tension, to be sure, in the question of who judges, the many or the few. There is a quick-and-dirty shorthand in modern American conservatism: the many judge in the political sphere, the few in the cultural sphere; the few defer to the many in politics, the many to the few in culture. Culture, if you like, is one of the many spheres where the majority delegate judgment and autonomy to the localities. Just as states enact varying laws to fit their varying customs and morals, where federalism is not equivalent to relativism, so the delegation of judgment about culture to the cultural elite is merely a deference to greater local knowledge, not the disavowal of any absolute standard of judgment.

But if this tension is real, it is also partly because it reflects a quick-and-dirty analysis, not a more thoughtful one. The deference paid to elites is not simply because they are locally knowledgeable, or because they are an elite. It is elites’ knowledge of tradition—the knowledge of the arguments, wisdom, and judgments of truth of the dead—that provides their authority. They represent not an elite, but a vast majority, the dead, who (even with the population boom) far outnumber the living. The elites’ authority comes from the many whom they speak for. This, of course, is why the modern elite that disavows the authority of the dead has no particular authority: they speak only for themselves, a small minority, with no numbers behind them. Conservatism respects those elites who are speakers-for-the-dead; it scorns those elites who claim the same authority, but speak only for themselves. And elite authority remains crucially dependant on the judgment of the masses, who must recognize the voices of the dead in the words of the elite. Unrelativistic populism provides an underlying logic for the edifice of much of modern American conservative thought.

As for the conservative critique of education, this also can be aligned without much effort. College education can be superfluous for many, and college education ought to be revamped about a better curriculum for everyone who decides to matriculate. Perhaps more to the point, the thesis is that primary and high-school education ought to be overhauled, so that basic literacy, math, civics, American history, and some smattering of Western Civ are already in place by the end of twelfth grade, leaving whoever is so inclined to go straight to the workforce at that point. But this, I think, is not really a philosophical dispute; it’s a matter of pedagogical tinkering. Yes, pedagogy can reflect deep philosophical differences—but it can also reflect ideological consensus, and smaller conflicts about what means best conduce to shared ends. The different conservative critiques of education, I think, are more in the nature of a smaller conflict over means than a larger conflict over ends.

French Revolution, Napoleon, and Other Teaching Notes

* The students hadn't really read the Robespierre speech, but when I read key extracts, they were willing to get something of a political conversation going. They didn't know what a democracy was. "51% of the people can vote to kill the other 49%," I said. Some laughter.

* In discussing Terror, one of the students made reference to Bush, Guantanamo, etc. "Hundreds have been guillotined in Cleveland and Detroit?" I asked. But otherwise I let him make his analogy, with minimal pushback. Oh, teacherly etiquette is so difficult--but I hope I managed to interject a small note of skepticism without imposing my own views.

* Diary of a Napoleonic Soldier teaches well. Lot's of good discussion. And one student made a connection between Napoleon's Concordat with the Pope (in the textbook) and the religious faith of Jacob Walter, which helps him endure the 1812 invasion of Russia--that the Concordat helped Napoleon, because it helped him enlist (or keep from deserting) religious soldiers like Walter. Yes! An insight gained by putting two texts together! -- one which hadn't occurred to me, I should add. Very satisfying.

Burmese Campaign, 1944-1945

I've started Max Hasting's Retribution, about the last year of the Pacific War. It includes an early chapter on the Burmese campaign of 1944-45, with the tart analysis that 1) it did nothing to bring about the defeat of Japan; 2) it was intended to restore Britain's prestige, and hence preserve the British Empire; 3) perceptive observers at the time could already tell that the British Empire's days were coming to a rapid end; and 4) the campaign, if heroic, killed hundreds of thousands (of all nations) for no good reason. (He has a similar analysis of MacArthur's campaign to retake the Philippines.)

Not having read to the end of the book ... it seems to me one could dispute the narrative in broad strokes. So: the prestige accruing to the British meant that they didn't, in point of fact, collapse quite so disastrously as the French and the Dutch after the war--that if the French collapsed after Dien Bien Phu, the British won their counterinsurgency in Malaya, where the prestige won in the Burma campaign played a definite role in providing the British the morale to tough out that campaign, and perhaps a role in intimidating the Russians, Chinese, etc., from challenging the British too strongly in Malaya. Let us also note that the decision of various former members of the British Empire to stay in the sterling area for some decades after World War II--crucially, India and Malaya--provided crucial support for the sterling vs. the dollar, kept the fall of the sterling from crumpling into total devaluation vis-a-vis the dollar, and provided the economic underpinnings for Britain's mummery of Imperial power through 1968. (This may not have been a good thing for Britain, but it was an important thing.) Let us argue also that the prestige lent Britain by the Burma campaign played a subtle, but continuing, role in the decision of various former colonies to stay in the sterling area. The dead in the Burma campaign, therefore, bought Britain a more favorable currency exchange rate with the dollar over the next quarter century.

It would be nice to think this thesis is true. It is sweet and proper to die for one's country's currency exchange rate may lack total heroic resonance, but it sounds better than It is sweet and proper to die for one's country's vain dreams.

The Best Advertizing Jingle Ever

I know this from a Clancy Brothers album. Occasionally they decide they really need to sing an Ulster song.

William Bloat
by Raymond Calvert

In a mean abode on the Shankill Road
Lived a man named William Bloat
And he had a wife, the bane of his life
Who always got his goat
And one day at dawn, with her nightdress on
He slit her bloody throat

Now, he was glad he had done what he had
As she lay there stiff and still
'Til suddenly awe of the angry law
Filled his soul with an awful chill
And to finish the fun so well begun
He decided himself to kill

Then he took the sheet from his wifes cold feet
And he twisted it into a rope
And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf
'Twas an easy end, let's hope
With his dying breath and he facing death
He solemnly cursed the Pope

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginning
He went to hell, but his wife got well
And she's still alive and sinning
For the razor blade was German-made
But the rope was Belfast linen

The Worst Song Ever

Goldberry introduced me to the rhapsodizings of Melanie a while ago. I generally hated said rhapsodizings. As I think about it, it is possible that they include, against stiff competition, the Worst Song Ever. The music is pretty wretched, but the lyrics are really the song's claim to fame. The bold-faced line is the Worst Line Ever. I present:

I Don't Eat Animals

I was just thinking about the way it's supposed to be,
I'll eat the plants and the fruit from the trees,
And I'll live on vegetables and I'll grow on seeds,
But I don't eat animals and they don't eat me,
Oh no, I don't eat animals 'cause I love them, you see,
I don't eat animals, I want nothing dead in me.

I don't eat white flour, white sugar makes you rot,
Oh, white could be beautiful but mostly it's not.
A little bit of whole meal, some raisins and cheese,
But I don't eat animals and they don't eat me.
Oh no, I don't eat animals 'cause I love them, you see,
I don't eat animals, I want nothing dead in me.

A little bit of whole meal, some raisins and cheese,
I'll eat the plants and the fruit from the trees,
And I'll live on vegetables and I'll grow on seeds,
But I won't eat animals and they won't eat me,
Oh no, I'll live on life, I want nothing dead in me,
You know I'll become life and my life will become me,
You know I'll live on life and my life will live on me.

Merry-Go-Round Starts Again

First jobs for the 2009 year have appeared on H-Net. I plan to apply to Prominent College and Eminent University. All this with a sort of bleak despair hovering in the background--if I didn't get interviews last year, I'm not sure that this year will be that much better. Pluses: more teaching experience, perhaps another book accepted (I hope to hear in late summer). Minuses: Why hasn't this fellow gotten a tenure-track job yet? Is there something wrong with him? Mm, put that application in the reject pile.

Silliest Historical Statement I Ever Made

Back in college, on a different electronic format:

"Ethiopia adopted Christianity in 300 BC."

This, I think, is a mental lapse that as closely approaches sublimity as I will ever achieve.

Thinking McCain was in the Air Force is a mere bagatelle by comparison.

(Googling, I have just discovered that a bagatelle has nothing to do with a baguette. I am disappointed.)

PS. Not away for a few days after all. Sore throat. Staying home.

On Biased Simplifications

I taught the first part of the French Revolution today. There is too much to cover, even in the textbook version. I hit the highlights, perforce—and my highlights do have a certain conservative tinge to them. (I.e., I mention the bloodthirstiness of the Paris mob.) With the best will in the world, I can tell I’m skewing the history a bit, simply be abbreviating it. On the other hand, another way to make sense of what goes on is quick and dirty socio-economic analysis—here’s what the aristocrats do, here’s what the bourgeoisie does, the peasantry, the urban poor. The poor man’s Marxism—because it’s a compact way to make sense of an overwhelming number of events, and there’s even some truth to it as a mode of analysis. But I wince at what I do.

Off again for another few days.

Spengler, Addendum

The Spengler column I mentioned below is good on what is wrong with much of the modern left--that their sense of grace and crusade has abstracted from a sense of specific grace in America, gone gnostic and left the love of corporeal America behind. But it also identifies what is wrong with (much of) the paleocon right--they too want to normalize America as a nation not remotely chosen, without crusade, simply a nation among other nations, with a narrow sense of interest and no sense of mission in the world. Not all paleocons are quite this way: you can want to be a City on the Hill, isolationist but still an exemplar to mankind. But the internal emphasis of most paleocons on ethnic exclusivity, an unwillingness to let anyone else become American, undercuts even that sense of mission. The America Spengler identifies--almost-chosen, given a mission in this world, not an ordinary nation--the one I love and am a part of--faces enemies both on the right and the left.

Gnostic note: I am, idolatrously, defining America much as the Catholic Church defines Christ--both divine and human, where to slip off into a definition exclusively divine (gnostic liberal) or exclusively human (paleocon) is soul-killing heresy.

Government Service

David Foster has an interesting post, with equally interesting comments, on engineers choosing (defense) government work less frequently nowadays. The posts include a fascinating point, made I think repeatedly: that some engineers choose to work for the government because, although the pay is lower--perhaps because the pay is lower--they get promoted more quickly, to positions of responsibility, in which they can use their brains in more interesting ways at a young age.

I'd love to generalize this. Why do people go into government service? I think the normal thought is, depending on the area government, that power, ambition, and job security map most of the motivations. But for a fair number of areas, government must offer a greater amount of responsibility and intellectual challenge at an early age than does the private sector. Examples: not just engineering but also army service (a private, a sergeant, or a lieutenant in Iraq has an extraordinary amount of responsibility--"nation building" forsooth!), a judge, a statistician in the Department of Agriculture (a cousin of mine), a prosecutor, FBI, CIA, Foreign Service.

Again, I want to specify: my thesis is that it's not just that there's the challenge of intellectual responsibility, which I suppose applies to most skilled jobs, but that you get to exercise it sooner in your career in the public sector (for a wide range of jobs) than in the private sector. For me, at any rate, this is an illuminating insight into the complex of motivations for government service.

PS. The comments also include a fascinating discussion on systems engineering, and whether the skills can be taught in school, or only acquired through experience.

Spengler Column Worth Reading

Spengler Column Worth Reading

First Day of Class

First day of class on my summer course. After most of a year away from teaching, I had butterflies about the 3 1/2 hour session--but I was able to keep talking (!) long enough to fill the time, with a prolonged survey of early modern Europe. So I feel more confident that I can fill the time. Ideally, when the students have done reading (as they couldn't for the first day of class), they'll be more discussion. Anyway, bored the students may be, but at least they'll leave class with every minute filled!

One Small Blessing About McCain -- PAY NO ATTENTION!

UPDATE: This post is a would-be profundity destroyed by the terrible fact (mentioned in comments--thank you, Anonymous) that McCain was a naval aviator, not in the Air Force. I'm not deleting it only because it serves as an object lesson in blogging stupidity.
******
So far as I can tell, his time in the Air Force didn't make him an Air Force thinker--someone who thinks that Strategic Bombing is the answer for all questions. To wit, his call for a larger army in Iraq, from very early on. This is a dog that didn't bark in the night, and perhaps worth examining. I think being a fighter pilot, not a theorist, and getting out of the Air Force relatively young, must explain something. But your friends tend to influence you -- does he have friends in the high Air Force brass? Am I wrong in thinking he isn't an Air Force parrot? Someone ought to look this up, do the hard work of finding out the facts, and mention me appreciatively in a footnote.

On the Importance of Sarkozy

Recently, Sarkozy has announced the re-integration of the French military into NATO; increased spending to refurbish the French military; opening a French military base in Abu Dhabi; oriented French policy (by a crucial margin) toward a more confrontational approach with the various Muslim baddies in the world, domestic and foreign; praised America to the skies; and remained a fervent French and European patriot. He is engaged in a delicate dance: reorienting French policy toward a minimally rational posture of defense of Europe against Islamist assault, articulating this defense as an extension of the traditional French posture as champion of secular Europe, a defense of Europe rather than a European tail wagging an American dog, and soothing American sensibilities as he strengthens French-led Europe. He is trying to play a latter-day de Gaulle--aligning France (and Europe) with the ultimate interests of the West, but casting it in terms of French (European) interest and pride, rather than subservience to the Anglo-Saxons. Sarkozy makes possible the survival of the united West by showing an image of a Europe that is prickly in its self-assurance and self-interest, based on the essential European foundation-stone of France, very different in its ideological complexion from America, but ultimately an effective ally in our struggle against Islam. I don't know that Sarkozy can succeed, but I wish him and his like-minded Europeans well.

PS. Off for another few days. Happy July 4, all!

PPS. Our first post on this blog was June 24, 2007; we're now a year old!

On Not Appreciating Obama's Charisma

Throughout the 1990s, Alpheus would descant to me on how he didn't understand Bill Clinton's appeal. I would give him chapter and verse, and he would say, yes, he understood with his head, but not with his heart; Clinton left him cold, and all the explanations in the world couldn't quite get him to truly get the appeal.

Now I understand where Alpheus was coming from. I've seen Obama on TV, and he does give a nice speech, but he just leaves me cold. With any bad luck he'll win the presidency, millions will adore him, and I'll never quite understand it. His ideals aren't mine (save in the most banal and general sense), his personality doesn't thrill me, I just don't connect. Doubtless this is a limitation on my part--I won't properly understand all my fellow Americans who do thrill to Obamania, won't properly be able to understand the political scene, lacking full comprehension of his appeal. It would be nice to have the aesthetics of Obamania at my fingertips, but I don't think I'm going to acquire any great new appreciation for him.

Ah, well. At least I know some of my limitations.

On the Breaking of Empires

It is generally in the interest of the United States to bust up all rival empires, while maintaining its own empire; hence we have benefitted from busting up the British, French, German, and Russian empires, on the high road to hyperpower. A reason, beyond the mere urge to crop the tall flowers: empires anneal the nations within by contrast to an other without; empires are inherently expansionist as a means of defusing inner centrifugal tendencies, hence dangerous to their neighbors. The ideology of empire makes it dangerous.

This is why we need to bust up Pakistan and Iran. Both are, in non-trivial senses, collections of nations bound together by a religious identity, functionally imperial, which needs to expand to justify its existence. (Iran: see Persians, Kurds, Azeri Turks, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmens. Pakistan: Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baluchi, Muhajir.) Yes Muslim nations with nuclear weapons are generally dangerous -- but Muslim empires, who must legitimate themselves by some variant of jihad, are doubly so. Bust them up, and they lose some of the ideological dynamic that makes them dangerous. Bust them up, and you make it harder for each fragment to afford a nuclear program.

Mind you, adopting such a policy openly would not be considered friendly. We should cloak our policy -- but pursue it nonetheless.

Some of this policy is generalizable: busting up Saudi Arabia into a Sh'ia and a Sunni part would probably have pleasant effects on busting the OPEC cartel, and diminishing the funding for Wahabi terror worldwide. Stripping China of Tibet, Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia is a pleasant fantasia; so too the busting up of the Javanese Empire; and making sure Europe doesn't really become a union. But none of these are such imperial powderkegs as Pakistan and Iran. Them first.