Depressing Poetry for New Year's Eve

Alpheus believes that the best English literature was written between around 1870 and World War I. Much of this literature, although very well written, was deeply pessimistic -- a pessimism justified by the subsequent dégringolade of the Pax Britannica and European civilization in general. In a similar spirit of pessimism (tempered with mild irony) here are two poems from that era, written for two New Year's Eves:

"Now Dreary Dawns the Eastern Light," by A.E. Housman

Now dreary dawns the eastern light,
And fall of eve is drear,
And cold the poor man lies at night,
And so goes out the year.

Little is the luck I've had,
And oh, 'tis comfort small
To think that many another lad
Has had no luck at all.

Hey, this is actually not the most depressing New Year's Eve poem by Housman!

On a slightly more encouraging note, we have:

"The Darkling Thrush (December 31, 1900)," by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Happy New Year! May we discover that blessed hope lurking somewhere, somehow, in A.D. 2009.

On Europe's Military Mission, Should They Choose To Accept It

Saying "Europe needs to do more" is all well and fine, but what precisely are their militaries supposed to do? It's all a little fuzzy. And which Europeans? They're not yet fused, and shan't be for awhile, by the looks of things. Some thoughts.

1) Presumably the anti-American dream is for Europe to be strong enough to tell the Americans to take a hike, and be able to enforce it. But that conflicts with the European dream of not having to spend money for defense. So the Europeans aren't likely to come near to matching American military spending. They are therefore supposed to aim for some sort of second-rate military capability, as opposed to their current third-rate capability.

2) The dream version of this, whether for American or for European interests, I imagine would be the ability to do a weaker version of our Iraq Wars: to be able to project, shall we say, 50K troops to the Persian Gulf (in comparison to the 150K-200K we sent) -- implying a grand total of 150K first-rate soldiers in rotating deployment; naval, air, logistical, intelligence, and satellite support; and sufficient troops remaining at home to deter Russian or Muslim-Littoral mischief-making. But getting from A to B is an enormous challenge -- made all the harder in that our various high-tech advantages are amortized, so to speak, over a larger military; the Europeans would have much higher technology costs relative to their other military costs to be able to attain American levels of technological superiority. If the Europeans were to get their 50K invasion force, I suspect it would only be capable of toppling, say, Syria or Libya. Not Israel -- though I could envisage a European naval interdiction capability that could separate Israel from its American supply-lines, and condemn it to strangulated death. (Assume no nukes in this scenario.)

3) Navies are so horrendously expensive that I can't imagine the Europeans upgrading from their pocket carriers save from dire necessity -- for which, read a massive American redeployment from the Atlantic to the Pacific to face a growing Chinese naval threat.

4) The smaller-dream version is simply getting the West European armies capable of moving into Eastern Europe to defend them against a Russian attack. I don't pretend to have the details at my fingertips, but I suspect the Europeans could spend an extra 1% of GDP on their military for a generation just to be able to do that. Make it 1.5%, and they'll be able to engage in air- and naval- pissing contests with the Russians.

5) For "Europeans," read "British, French, and Germans" -- and especially "Germans," since they're the ones spending the least (relatively and absolutely) on their militaries in the big three. Put this another way: the various small countries (Norway, Netherlands) are concentrating on elite specialties -- mountain troops, paratroops, anti-mine warfare, etc. -- that can be slotted into larger multinational forces. Right now they slot into an American-led coalition; if they're to slot into a European force, the bulk of that force will have to be from the Big Three - they're the only ones with the capability. (Sorry, Italy, you don't make the grade.) And since the Brits and the French already invest in navies and nukes, that really means the Germans need to provide the core of the land and air. ( No worries on that score.) What precisely will convince the Germans to make this effort, and the rest of Europe to trust the Germans to make this effort? Problems, problems.

6) Given the shortage of Europeans willing to fight, and the upcoming shortage of Europeans period, it would make sense for them to invest in cruise missiles, pilotless aircraft, etc. But those are very expensive baubles.

7) The short version is this: telling the Europeans to bulk up their militaries without a sense of what they're aiming to do makes no sense. Figure out the mission first, then bulk up. And if there is no mission, they might as well stay weak.

On NATO

FLG’s anti-NATO diatribes make me continue to think about his repeated point: that NATO is useless and we should dissolve it. I’m rather sympathetic to this line of argument—I may even have endorsed it once on this blog—but I keep going back and forth. I’d like to lay out some of the issues involved, by way of a tentative argument in favor of preserving NATO for now. This is partly to clarify matters in my own head; I trust it will be of some interest to our devoted readers.

1) The issue of the preservation of NATO remains of great importance. Europe and North America together still constitute half or more of the world’s economy, trade, and military power; the question of whether they should be obligated to mutual defense is one of great weight. One shouldn’t treat the matter lightly.

2) A good conservative should be wary of tampering with an institution, for fear that it preserves far more than is apparent to our limited knowledge. One should presume that our interests are bound up in NATO in many small ways that are not immediately obvious.

3) NATO scarcely seems needed for its avowed mission: the collective defense of Europe and North America. (“America” hereafter, as I relegate Canada to its traditional oblivion.) America faces no threat—and neither, by and large, does Europe. The Muslim Mediterranean littoral presents zero military threat to Europe. Russia seemed this summer to present a threat to Eastern Europe—but the collapse of the price of oil seems to reduce that threat. If Russia at the last trough in oil price was defeated by Chechen rebels, and at the peak of the oil price can barely mount an incompetent invasion of Georgia, than it probably poses a minimal threat to European security in the short and medium term—and in the long term, Russia is a dying nation that will pose ever less threat to any of its neighbors, save from the destabilizing consequences of its own demographic weakness. The exception here is the Baltic States: they are so weak and so small that they probably do need a security guarantee from the entire West to deter Russia from armed incursion. On the other hand, the independence of the Baltic States is only marginally an American interest. To preserve NATO essentially to defend the Baltic States from Russia seems disproportionate.

4) NATO also has an unpleasant tendency to expand mindlessly — to wit, the clamor to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia. If we have a marginal interest in guaranteeing the independence of the Baltic States, we have no interest in guaranteeing the independence of Ukraine and Georgia. If no moderate policy is possible—if we cannot maintain NATO at its current size, but must choose between its disbandment and its expansion, the attraction of disbandment grows considerably.

5) FLG (not alone) argues that NATO allows the Europeans to act as irresponsible free-riders, and so should be disbanded to encourage them to take responsibility for their own defense, and to improve their national characters. I am not sure that I agree with his premise. NATO is useless, after all, because Europe faces no military threats to their homelands; since it faces no military threats, they have no need to spend in their self-defense. So far as defensive military spending goes, the Europeans therefore are correct to keep up a barebones military. Their lack of military investment precludes the possibility of military bluster against Russia (more on that later) or of independent military expeditions overseas (more on that later too), save perhaps French expeditions to coastal West Africa, but this is an issue separate from that of NATO. The formal existence of NATO I think has trivial effects on European military policy. Furthermore, should a clear and present danger emerge, I think Europe will re-arm at more or less the same rate, regardless of the existence of NATO.

6) A different line of argument — I think Alpheus argued this a few years ago, and/or Gowanus — is that NATO inhibits the reform of America’s military — preserves serried tanks and fighter jets on the German plain, still vigilant against Soviet attack, calcifies military planning in the Pentagon. The Iraq War has put paid to this: what remained of our European armed forces in 2002 has been halved since then, and the remnant radically restructured. Aside from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, we have land and air forces that have been/are being reconfigured as forward bases for deployment further into Eurasia and Africa. Our Bosnian deployment has ended, and the Kosovo peacekeepers are miniscule. Our armored divisions are becoming Stryker brigades. Our European headquarters is half-deployed in Iraq, half in reserve for future Iraqi deployment. Perhaps NATO inhibited American military reform during the 1990s; I think that will not be the case again.

7) NATO serves unstated purposes. This has always been the case: NATO is meant to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in, was the traditional quip. So NATO serves purposes beyond its stated remit. Perhaps this is hypocritical — perhaps it is Rube Goldberg — but because it is so, NATO should only be dissolved if a substitute institution for these unstated purposes can be secured first.

8) The NATO guarantee secures the democratic political culture and the stability of various European countries. It captures various European security bureaucracies, aligns them with American bureaucracies and interests, and Americanizes them. It prevents a long-term drift of Europe away from the American alliance. It gives the Britons, Poles, Czechs, etc. an anchor to prevent their drift into the hostile, unAmerican political culture in the Franco-German axis.

9) NATO provides an anchor for American air and naval dominance in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Our naval bases and deployments of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean fleets depend on, among other things, our bases in Greenland, Iceland, Britain, the Azores, Spain, and Italy — which in turn depend (to some indeterminable extent) on the NATO alliance. Our dominance of the Mediterranean littoral — a crucial part of our projection of power into the Muslim world — relies upon a Sixth Fleet that in turn relies on this chain of naval bases and allied countries. To the extent that the defense of Israel remains in our interest, that too relies upon this chain of naval power, and the NATO alliance.

10) NATO provides a base for power projection abroad. Our deployment in Iraq depends on a resupply chain via our bases in Britain and Germany, overflight privileges, hospitals in Germany, etc. (By the by, there’s the value of NATO for you: the number of wounded American soldiers whose lives were saved because of our hospitals in Germany.) NATO provides the infrastructure for the deployment of American power farther into Eurasia and Africa — and although our European allies can veto such deployments (see the Turkish veto in 2003), NATO’s institutional architecture essentially means that they have to positively veto such deployments rather than positively permit them. Most Europeans opposed the Iraq War; NATO meant that America could use European territory as a base for that war regardless of that opposition. NATO shifts European political inertia significantly to our military advantage.

11) NATO allows for organized military bluster along its perimeter. This is particularly in reference to Russia: if the Russians are not going to invade Europe, they are perfectly willing to bluster and bully their neighbors — spy, use cyberwarfare, cut off oil, send subs and planes scouting into NATO waters and buzzing NATO ships — as a way to maximize their power in Europe. NATO organizes counter-bluster — e.g., preserving Estonia’s political and economic autonomy from Russia rather than its formal independence. Here, I think, is where FLG’s criticism is particularly telling: NATO allows the Europeans to run down their military bluster capabilities, and to depute it to the Americans. They’re not entirely toothless, but largely. It’s possible that abolishing NATO would give the Europeans incentive to improve these capabilities — but this is a narrowly defined advantage.

12) NATO allows for organized offensive military expeditions. This is completely unwarranted by the charter, but it so happens that it does work out that way, and this is a non-trivial advantage. Granted, not much better than trivial — European weeniness makes the NATO deployments against Somali pirates, or against the Taliban, rather pathetic. Still, they’re better than nothing — and there’s no reason to believe that absent NATO you’d get better than nothing. But then, NATO provided a framework for rather effective (largely American) air-strikes in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, to decisive effect. This argues that this offensive capability has real potential value. Granted, the Europeans contribute little to this offensive capability — but again, I don’t think NATO inhibits the development of this capability. To develop real offensive capability, the Europeans would have to invest some percentage points of GDP for a generation into their militaries — and this requires a political decision by a bipartisan majority of the various European countries. So NATO allows for offensive American expeditions with marginal European military support and more significant European political cover. All in all, a plus.

This summarizes what I take to be the various pluses and minuses of NATO. I don’t think NATO is remotely as important as it was during the Cold War, but it still serves American interests. FLG’s counter-argument in essence is one of opportunity costs — particularly, the costs of allowing the Europeans to remain free-riders. Since I’m not sure they’re free-riding, and I’m not sure NATO is that important in their decisionmaking, that tilts the argument in favor of preserving NATO in my mind.

One last thing, though: the inarguable argument in favor of NATO is that it preserves not just allies, but friends. I have not felt the Europeans were our friends since 2003, when the run-up to the Iraq War revealed just how far divorced our hearts were from each other. I have no faith that the Czechs and the Poles will remain pro-American for more than a generation. If the Europeans were our friends, I would favor NATO in all circumstances. Since they are only our allies, the argument for NATO rests purely on American interest. Indeed, the argument for NATO must justify itself against the considerable distaste I feel for many Europeans. I would be happy to be argued out of a belief in the utility of NATO, so I could leave the Europeans to their own devices. Alas, interest seems to argue for a continued intertwining of our affairs.

Article Accepted!

Another article accepted. First one in 18 months, so very nice. Some mildly curious things about the relevant journal -- but of course I cannot give details. I will say that this extends my interdisciplinarity. And the editor said it was "erudite and elegant" -- always good to hear.

Asset Falls, Estate Taxes

Won't the falling price of stocks change the political dynamics of the estate tax? I.e., the fewer people have assets worth a damn, the fewer people will mind if the Democrats raise the estate taxes again.

Best Christmas Gift Ever

Alpheus is spending a traditional Christmas with Arethusa and with Aristotle, whose book The Politics is one of the best books ever written on, um, politics.

Alpheus's favorite gift from Arethusa? The Playmobil airport security set! She found it secondhand (but unopened) for much less than the prices quoted on Amazon.com or ebay. Apparently some little kid didn't want it -- who would have guessed? But I've wanted one ever since I saw this on the internet a few years back.

It was even better because, as Alpheus was preparing to board his flight a couple of days before Christmas, he got to enjoy the spectacle of a Chinese man being hassled by the TSA over a small bottle of hand lotion in his shaving kit. The Chinese guy seemed puzzled and upset. The TSA guy seemed puzzled and upset by the fact that the Chinese guy was puzzled and upset. Voices were raised. Alpheus, waiting in line behind the unhappy traveler, wanted to reassure him that he wasn't being singled out because he was foreign -- it's just the way we do things here in the land of the free -- but frankly, Alpheus thought it best not to get involved. After all, there was no way the guy was getting his lotion back. And Alpheus's previous attempts to personally confront head-on the absurdity of airport security procedures have not ended at all well (though fortunately it's never gone as far as a body cavity search).

Now, Alpheus can recreate this delightful holiday scene. Or, he can reenact the penultimate scene from the movie Twelve Monkeys. It's all good.

(BTW, check out the reviews of this product on Amazon: many are hilarious. And while you're there, buy a copy of Aristotle's Politics! Or, failing that, his Sense and Sensibility, which is the second-best book ever written with that title....)

Merry Christmas

The Annunciation by Henry Tanner (1898)

Phildelphia Museum of Art

Second-Best Solutions

I'm trying to imagine a second-best Middle East -- one where we fall short of the various victories I think we desperately need, but one that provides a sufficient outcome for our interests. It involves a great deal of hope, and it's very largely not within our ability to create. Here's what is needed:

1) Bush has implanted the American military bureaucracy deeply enough into Iraq that Obama acquiesces in a continued American commitment there, thus establishing it on a bipartisan basis. We maintain 40K+ troops for the next several decades, in something approaching peace, and at worst a not terribly murderous dictatorship. (See, South Korea, 1953-1988.) Both American and Iraqi politics provide long-term support for this deployment.

2) Iran gets nuclear weapons, but is deterrable, by the US and Israel. This might mean a regime change in Iran -- say the military takes over, and it looks like a Sh'ia version of Pakistan -- but the Iranians aren't lunatics who start nuclear war to bring on the Mahdi. Nor does Iran sponsor massive terrorism abroad, especially against Israel, with the security of a nuclear deterrent at our back. This is completely not within our control.

3) The US provides a nuclear umbrella to the Sunni Middle East, which reassures them sufficiently that they don't pursue nuclear weapons themselves.

4) The Palestinians remain at low-level war with Israel, but never present an existential danger.

5) We declare victory in Afghanistan and go home by 2012.

6) Pakistan remains a failed state with nuclear weapons on the brink of war with India, but never goes over the edge.

7) American counter-terror reduces Muslim terror permanently to pre-9/11 levels, with no danger of access to WMDs.

8) No major challenge from China or Russia, etc., forces us to abandon our commitments to the Middle East.

In short, there are no major transformations on the scene -- Iran gets nuclear weapons but is contained, as the realists dream -- we maintain troops in Iraq for the long haul, but violence subsists down to annoying levels.

More or less every single one of these conditions has to go right to make for any sort of sustainable cold peace on these lines. And, above all, it depends on Iranian decision-making that is independent of our influence. Given an Obama administration, this may be the best foreign-policy goal we can hope for now. I don't have any great faith that it can be achieved.

Things Withywindle Likes, Part V: "John Riley"

(As I remember the Joan Baez version, which differs slightly from other versions on the web.)
(I sang this song to Goldberry as I was courting her; now I sing it Shirebourn as a lullaby. It makes me want to cry every time I hear it.)

Fair young maid all in her garden,
Strange young man, passer-by
Says fair maid, will you marry me;
This answer was her reply

No kind sir, I cannot marry thee
For I've a love who sails all on the sea
He's been gone for seven years
Still no man will marry me

What if he's in some battle slain
Or drowneded in the deep salt sea
Then I will weep and mourn for him
Still no one will marry me

What if he's found another love
And he and his love both married be?
I'll wish them health and happiness
Still no one will marry me

He picked her up all in his arms
Kisses gave her one two and three
Saying weep no more my own true love
I am your long lost John Riley.

Saying weep no more my own true love
I am your long lost John Riley.

Leon Wiseltier: Stream of Consciousness

Is there no editor at The New Republic? No one to say "Leon, coherence is a literary virtue, and not all the world is as interested in your ramblings as you are."?

Education, Propaganda, Decentralization

MSI's post on Holocaust-Overdose in the classroom leads me to a grand speculation: this all has to do with the decentralization of education in America. That is, in France, that smooth machine of educational indoctrination, everyone learns La Gloire of France: The Early Years in the First Grade; La Gloire of France: The Not So Early Years in the Second Grade, and so on in smooth succession, never repeating, and so inducing the desired result of mindlessly patriotic Frenchmen with a minimum of irritation to the student body. (I realize that this Platonic model of French education deviates considerably from the reality.) In America, on the other hand, there is no co-ordinated system of education, and everyone has to do their propagandizing without any knowledge of whether it's been done before, or whether it will be done again. Therefore, some students will get their PhD in Computer Game Design, never having heard of the Holocaust; others will have gotten a Holocaust module four times in five years, and be driven up the wall. (See: MSI.) This, therefore, is one of the benefits of decentralization in America: because it makes education so incoherent, compared with the smooth, robotic, alien, quintessentially inhuman, indecent, depraved, sheeploving, and unAmerican efficiency of France,* propaganda is by comparison incoherent, repetitive, irritating, and ineffective. American students are thus relatively inoculated against educational propaganda -- this in complement to the benefits of having college students bump in to each other with different propagandas in their brains, and learning to think from sheer startlement. ("You mean you don't think FDR was God? Golly.") Now, the price we pay is that we don't have the efficient system of propaganda I want -- Western Civ, from Aesop's Fables on -- but I suppose the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the whining of frustrated traditionalists.

* I really don't have anything against the French. Honest Injun.**

** Does anyone say Honest Injun anymore? I bet not.***

*** Alpheus is to blame for these nested notes.****

**** Although more distantly I blame Vladimir Nabokov, who corrupted his mind at an early age. Alpheus, how many lines of Pale Blog can you compose by New Year's?

Kill this Myth

The usually estimable John Hood is keeping alive the myth about railway gauges being based on the width of Roman war chariots. I'd love for it to be true, but it ain't.

And it's not as if there aren't lots of more amazing connections between us moderns and the ancient world. I mean, we're still using the Roman alphabet and calendar, for Chrissakes! Most of our words for high-level concepts are Greek. Circles still have 360 degrees because that made sense to the Sumerians. The day has 24 hours because the Egyptians, or someone before them, thought that made sense. Almost all of our thought and speech and forms of artistic expression have their roots deep, deep in the past. Am I weird for thinking this intellectual heritage is way cooler than some continuity of axle lengths would be?

End of the Semester Highlights

* When I came in to proctor one of my final exams, there were three, count them three, bottles of Mountain Dew on the desk. (It's my staple when I teach.) Some students left a note with it:

To: Professor Withywindle

You are the best professor everrrr!

Love your favorite students in the back row, your "peanut gallery"

(as I sometimes call them)

I burst out laughing - smiled through the final exam, and drank from the first bottle. It really was a sweet thing for them to do. Some students in the front of the class said, "You're being bribed!" "Yes," I said, "very skillfully."

* The university paper asked some students who was their favorite professor this semester. One of mine said "Professor Withywindle, because he's very inspiring." Again, I'm touched.

There's a small bit of boasting involved in mentioning these--can I plead pardonable pride?

Merry Christmas!

Happy Hanukah, and all the rest. I will be on-line intermittently through the New Year.

Fu (UPDATED)

NOTE: When I posted this early this morning during a bout of insomnia, I worded the second paragraph badly, making it sound like the connection between hexagram 24 and the winter solstice was my private conceit. Actually, the text of the I Ching makes the association quite explicit. I've reworded the paragraph so as to clarify this.

The major change I notice in myself as I grow older is a heightened sensitivity to weather and light. This year, the onset of winter has seemed especially dispiriting and I haven't enjoyed watching the days grow shorter and the sunlight weaken. Today, I'm happy to say, marks the turning point. From now on, the darkness will begin to retreat. The sun will rise a little earlier, set a little later, and ascend the sky just a little bit further each day.

Throughout history and across the world, the bottoming-out of the year has had immense importance. In the Roman Empire, the cult of Sol Invictus, grafted onto the existing week-long festival of the Saturnalia, celebrated the rebirth of the apparently dying sun. Personally, this moment of the year always reminds me of the twenty-fourth hexagram of the Chinese mystical text I Ching, the Book of Changes.* This hexagram is named by the Chinese character 復 or fu -- "return."** The name refers explicitly to the "turning point" of the Winter Solstice. The hexagram signifies a gathering of great energies in darkness, a moral renovation, and a preparation for action. From the Wilhelm/Baynes translation:

Return. Success.
Going out and coming in without error.
Friends come without blame.
To and fro goes the way.
On the seventh day comes return.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

Visually, the hexagram (which looks like this) represents the return of light: a bright (and active) "yang" line at the bottom is pushing up against a background of dark (and passive) "yin" lines -- Sol Invictus. According to another interpretation, the pattern of lines in the hexagram signifies "thunder within the earth," and the imminent eruption the life force long concealed. The commentary on this hexagram in the I Ching says, "Things cannot be destroyed once and for all."

A heartening message if there ever was one. It's nice to know that this is finally the darkest day of the year, that brighter and brighter days are ahead, that there is a limit even to seasonal affective disorder. It means, I suppose, that this should be a time for optimism, New Year's resolutions, and renewed purpose.

It furthers one to have somewhere to go.

[*Alpheus's only dalliance with mysticism -- mercifully brief -- was connected with this book. He's not particularly proud of it.]

[**Not to be confused with that other fu ("good fortune") that's associated with the renewal of the Chinese calendar year.]

Claudia Rosett, Plagiarist

Okay, maybe not a plagiarist, exactly...in fact, it looks like she posted twenty full minutes before I did. Great minds and all that. I guess what bothers me is that her version is better than mine, and relies less on the f-word for its humor.

Blagojevich Statement to the Press

Oh God, it was just hilarious, wasn't it? Lets watch it again:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And the best part was the quotation from Kipling's If ! Alert readers of this blog will remember when I referred to that poem in the context of the last amusing press conference given by a governor embroiled in a comical scandal:

For God's sake, it's not like [Eliot Spitzer] fell short of the lofty commandments in Rudyard Kipling's If ("If you can keep your hands off high-priced hookers....")

So needless to say, I was pleased to hear Blagojevich not only mention the poem, but quote like, seven whole lines, astutely stopping before "and yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise" (not that the hairy foreheadless Peter Tork thing is all that good on him, but the guy does look suspiciously young for his age). It was also probably for the best that he didn't quote the part about talking with crowds and keeping your virtue, or walking with kings (read: presidents-elect and their chiefs of staff designate) while keeping the common touch.

But if only, if only he had read the whole thing with that sincere, bizarrely boyish demeanor! Or if only -- a man can dream! -- Blagojevich had, er, adapted Kipling's poem to his own personality and circumstances:

If you've got something, and it's fucking golden,
And some fucker tells you, fuck no, he won't pay
'Cause His Changeness doesn't want to be beholden
Even though He wants to have His fucking way;
And if all they offer is "appreciation,"
When it's worth at least a million fucking bucks
And you'll have to look for other compensation
To stick it to those lousy Hyde Park fucks --

If some fucking doctors want a fucking handout
For their hospital where fucking sick brats go
But they can't shell just fifty fucking grand out
Even though it's like, "hey, who the fuck's to know?" --
If those fuckers at the fucking Chi-town Tribune
Want fucking Wrigley fixed all nice and neat
But won't clean house in their own fucking press room
And put that fuck McCormick on the street --

If some motherfucking federal prosecutor
Is on some fucking quest to bring you down
So he can fuck you like he did with Scooter,
And he has the G-men haul your ass downtown;
If it turns out that they taped those conversations
Where you shouted fucking this and fucking that
And conducted Senate seat negotiations --
If the fucking press is camped out on the mat --

If it looks like your career has fucking died now
And the fucking world is calling for your head
And His Changefulness thinks you should step aside now,
But you decide you'll stay and fight instead,
Then, Blago, you're a credit to your station
And the Sovereign Fucking State of Illinois!
You're a hero to a great and grateful nation --
And you've got a way with words, my fucking boy!

Yes, that would indeed have been nice....

Two final thoughts:

(1) It's much easier to make a line scan when you can just throw in obscenities wherever you want. I'm surprised Homer never used this technique.

(2) Top that, FLG!

The Ongoing Crisis

The deepening of this crisis does further justify a vote against the Republicans this last November. In the last analysis, it doesn't matter how complicit the Democrats were, how far back the crisis was formed, or how stupid Obama's policies will be: the Republicans were in charge, and you ought to get punished for being asleep at the switch. The charge was valid against Clinton re Al Qaeda, and it's valid now re economic collapse. I would still vote for McCain, even in retrospect--but the arguments to vote against the Republicans grow daily.

Aside from punishing Republicans, I still think it's a better idea to vote for McCain. Let me parse this. I suspect Obama may be a better economic manager in the narrow sense than McCain would have been--wrongheaded liberal ideas that will cripple the economy, to be sure, but he does promise a certain steady technocratic managerialism that has its attractions. The trouble is that the economic crisis doesn't look like it's going to be narrowly economic. I can't link everywhere, but an awful lot of people seem to think the economic crisis is going to produce one or more major political crises--and I'm still wary of Obama's instincts. Aside from his see-no-evil attitudes, morally compromising, he does seem slow to react, and I have no sense yet that he'd take any major initiatives to exert American power abroad--do anything to resist a sudden challenge. I have no idea what political crises will actually hit in the next few years, but the economic crisis seems to indicate that they will be doozies. So even though the old fighter pilot was an economic illiterate, I still think he'd have been better confronting the military and political crises that will result from the economic crisis. I hope I'll be proven wrong, though.

The tour of the horizon, incidentally, is remarkably grim. We're going to pay for all the bad loans by deliberate stagflation--massive, erratic taxation--and somewhere down the road we'll have to have another recession to iron out the stagflation. The Euro zone may be about to break in two. Pakistan, and perhaps the rest of the Middle East, is heading toward failed-state bankruptcy quickly. The rest of the world also faces appalling financial strains, most especially including those rather dangerous giants, Russia and China. --oh, and none of the threats we faced earlier have gone away. I don't suppose the entire world is going to go up in flames, but some major part of it may. It's all terrifyingly uncertain.

I wonder if drug consumption will go down in the recession?

On Black Politicians

Barack Obama is half Kenyan, half WASP. Eric Holder is of Caribbean descent. Susan Rice is of half-Caribbean descent.

There's been some tension among blacks for awhile, where the descendants of American slaves resent the rise of immigrant blacks--Caribbean, now African--who, among other things, scoop up a lot of the affirmative action gravy. See this article, for example. And now look at the Triumph of Black America, as embodied by the President and his Cabinet: one half Caribbean, one sixth African, one sixth white, one sixth (in the narrow sense) African-American. Small data set, I know; still, significant. When they finish staffing the Obama administration, it would be interesting to find out what proportion of the blacks are of biracial or immigrant background. A nickel says it's a lot.

UPDATE: Ron Kirk will be U. S. Trade Representative--he appears to be African American, narrowly defined.

On Learning About The Holocaust

MSI writes:

I don't know about Holocaust saturation of Skokie in the pre-Nazi march days, but having gone to school several decades after, I consumed (and was fed) so much information about the Holocaust that by the seventh grade, when the official Holocaust Unit was taught and everyone was pulled out of regular classes to contemplate nothing but Auschwitz for a week, I had read enough Holocaust fiction to be able to crank out a melodramatic five-page essay contextualizing the famous photo of the deportation boy in approximately 30 minutes. .... Eventually, I reached the point of Holocaust Exhaustion, at which I decided that American Jewish obsession with the Holocaust might be leading to a kind of pathological quest for victimhood.

And in comments, Phoebe adds:

You're right to notice that Jewish identity today is quite Israel-Holocaust-centric. I think this is pretty commonly accepted--the only thing I'd add is the obsession with preventing intermarriage, one which is often articulated as being about the Holocaust, but which is also self-sustaining in its own way.

So, I am inspired to navel-gaze--how much of my own Jewish identity is centered on the Holocaust? When did I learn about the Holocaust? How much in school?

I should say at once I believe my experience is wholly unrepresentative of most anyone who isn't me. For example, being a history-loving child of a history professor, when I asked about the Holocaust at age 6, my dad got me a short book on the subject written for young adults. So I basically knew what the Holocaust was from that point on. (Goldberry is horrified at this.) I fancy this helped form my less than sunny worldview, but I don't think I got obsessive nightmares about the subject. (I had nightmares about nuclear war as a child. Also Cthulhoid demons whose tentacles rose from Riverside Park to my bedroom window.) It obviously got entangled with my view of Israel--that it was entirely reasonable for Israel to fear that its neighbors intended genocide--but it's one thing to cheer Israel on in its conflicts with its neighbors, another to say it was central to my identity.

But here we get to another atypicality: I don't think I had any connection with "the Jewish community" when I was growing up, and rather little with other Jewish kids until I hit 7th grade, since I was in an Episcopal elementary school. I had a rather strong sense of being Jewish--not least because I was in an Episcopal elementary school--and virtually no knowledge of Judaism or Jewish culture. I don't think I ever set foot in a temple, only attended two Passover seders, did light Hanukah candles regularly with my great-aunt and uncle, played with dreidels and got chocolate gelt, and acquired an early taste for gefilte fish. (And tongue; but my dad swears that tongue was also a Gentile delicacy when he was growing up, and shouldn't count as a Jewish-culinary-signifier.) If you asked me what Jews were like, I'd have said "my extended family"--where I think they had a strong sense of being Jewish, but minimal religious observance (light Reform to atheist, no Conservative or Orthodox). We had a Christmas tree because of my German Jewish grandmother; my mom's relatives were happy enough to come celebrate Christmas with us. So far as "preventing intermarriage" goes, virtually my entire extended family has out-married--my mom, her brother, her cousin; my dad's uncle, his mother, his uncle's; the only one who actually married a nice Jewish girl is my dad--who's only half-Jewish himself, so go figure. In my family, Jews married Methodists. Again, this doesn't mean my family or I didn't have a strong sense of Jewish identity, but for me it was familial rather than communal. My image of a good Jewish man--of a good man--is my mother's father, whom I will always love and respect.

I don't think my extended family ever talked much about the Holocaust. (I talked about it with my dad, but as part of our discussions of history, which isn't quite the same thing.) About getting out of Europe in time; near rescues, and relatives who couldn't get out--but that was background noise. One aunt was a regular supporter of Israel, but more loudly so when my mom was young than when I was. I suppose background noise matters a lot, but the center of my family's emotional life was in America, not in Auschwitz or in Israel.

So, then, school. I don't remember much of anything about the Holocaust. We did read The Diary of Anne Frank in 7th grade--but after that, I'm drawing a blank. Ditto about Jews, period. My high school put on Fiddler on the Roof--there's a window into the old world for you!--but I can't recollect any history or English class dealing much with Jews in Europe or America. There must have been, say when we were studying immigration or World War II, but it hasn't stuck. (Gowanus, do you remember differently?) This in a school somewhere north of a sixth Jewish, possibly a lot north, in New York City, so it's not as if vast ignorance of things Jewish is likely. I do wonder if this is a generational difference (heaven help us) between me and MSI & Phoebe. Did Let's Think About The Holocaust Days only start in the 1990s? Were they around earlier? I dunno -- all I can say is, I don't remember much about the Holocaust in my own curricula.

Then culture at large. I think the first Holocaust memoir I read was Art Spiegalman's Maus, largely because I was a comic book fan. That was, what, 1986 or so? When I was in high school, anyway. I read Night on my own in college, Survival in Auschwitz in grad school. (Spiegelman's is still the most affecting one I've read.) Certainly by the time of the Spielberg movie, I was aware of a certain Holocaust-buzz. I think I got an acute sense of overload when I was a fiction intern for Tikkun, back around, oh, 1994-95, reading a submission pile with--as I thought to myself--more stories about Auschwitz survivors than there were Auschwitz survivors. So I'll buy a certain Holocaust overload by the mid-1990s--I'd even be willing to say it was around earlier, but I don't think I encountered it.

And I am a comic-book fan, so much of my knowledge of things Jewish actually came through reading X-Men comics. Which were, of course, then more about mutants being Jew-signifiers than gay-signifiers, as they seem to be now. But, in 1981, the arch-villain Magneto revealed that he was an Auschwitz-survivor--and a year later, you had a story about Charles Xavier and Magneto, set in Israel in 1961, with more Holocaust references. I learned to say "Oy Vey" from Hank McCoy, the Beast. The Jewish character I read about most as I grew up was Kitty Pride--who didn't attend temple either, but always wore a Jewish star (as I did not). Phoebe, take note: ask a lot of American guys my generation what a Jewish girl looks like, and they'll tell you "Kitty Pryde". To me, Kitty Pryde was more important than Magneto--but both of them were routes to learning about Jewish identity and Jewish history.

And what of the Holocaust compared with the rest of Jewish faith and history? I suppose I know extraordinarily little about shtetl life, Judaism, etc., always did--although so did, say, a lot of Reform Jews in Germany in the 1930s. What I knew about East European Jewry growing up is that they used Singer sewing machines--my mom had a sewing machine then, and somehow the topic came up. What I do know about European Jewry is the refugees, above all the professors--the friend of the family who came to Christmas every year--the German Jews who knew everything about everything, not least Christianity and the broad sweep of Western Civilization. (Not that different from the Americans I knew--professors all!--but super-professors.) What is the life of European Jewry to me? An old man with a ramrod posture, talking of his youth in the Berlin gymnasium; an old woman looking behind the Christmas tree to make sure my sister and I had put as many ornaments on the back of the tree as on the front. And I knew they had fled Europe because of Hitler--were lucky to have escaped the Holocaust--but their lives meant more to me than the Holocaust did. Perhaps I cherished their lives more because I knew how lucky they were to escape--but the lives were the center, the Holocaust the shadow in the background.

Senator Bloomberg?

Why not? He's a real pol, unlike Princess Carrie, and he might even be a good senator. It also means he'd be unlikely to run for governor in 2010, so Patterson would be happy.

I wonder how much money Bloomberg has lost in the last year.

Grimness

Go read the latest Spengler column. Highlights:

As I commented in the late autumn, the world is not flat, but flattened (see Asia Times Online, October 28, 2008), leaving the economies of the largest Muslim countries in ruins. It is hard to forecast the political fallout, for when each available choice leads to a failed state, it is a matter of indifference which one you adopt. As state finances crumble, states will become less important, and freebooters will seize the stage. Think of the Mumbai terrorists as a political cognate of the Somali pirates, and the character of a Middle East made up of failed states comes into focus.

....

A final note: several readers have asked me to comment on the terror attack on Mumbai in November. I will do so with great caution, given the absence of accurate information. I have good reason to believe that the Indian authorities lied about the attack. India claimed that 10 shooters were involved, because nine were killed and one captured. The actual number is closer to 30, I am reliably informed, not counting support personnel in Mumbai who arranged safe houses with extra ammunition and explosives months in advance of the attack. It was not a suicide attack at all, but a new kind of urban terror assault, in which the participants had a reasonable expectation of survival, and the majority did in fact survive. That is an important wrinkle, for a better class of combatant can be recruited for missions in which survival is at least possible.

On Bailing Out Detroit

Could the government just take over the pension liabilities for the Big Three, for all workers retired up to, oh, last December 31? I know there's all sorts of moral hazard involved, but wouldn't this be better than just throwing money at the car companies? I confess that I feel the slightest unease about the idea that what the Big Three really need to do is go to Chapter 11 so as to shuck their pension requirements. May be true, but it's a little unpleasant. Even granting the retirees were selfish, short-sighted SOBs.

On Mock-Job Interviews

Dear Withywindle,

It was a good mock-interview, and some of your answers on teaching were very good indeed. However:

1) You must explain your research more clearly.

2) You must answer questions directly.

3) You should make more eye-contact with the interviewers.

Best wishes,
Your Mock-Interviewers

************************

To whom I am quite grateful for devoting more than an hour of their time to me.

************************

Shirebourn has an upset tummy. Much time with him; less time on the blogosphere.

On Preachiness

The Day the Earth Stood Still? Sci-fi classic? C'mon, the original was a yawner too -- War Bad, Peace Good, Earthlings. It's not like we're spoiling Hamlet here.

The trouble with global warming, of course, is that it's an Evil Abstraction against which we must Preach--which, as a general rule, is like watching ice melt. I'm sure there'll be a good Global Warming movie some day--but I'd bet the number is pretty darn small, just like movies Against War are generally dreadful. Where's the drama? You need a good villain--Nazis, say. Casablanca preaches against Nazis, and that's OK, because Nazis are human beings, hence interesting villains. The interesting drama in Casablanca, in any case, is internal to Rick--if he were just a Nazi-fighter, full stop, it would be a dull movie. As it is, it is a movie that makes WIthywindle want to sing the Marseillaise, and this is a sign of Great Art. Sublimation isn't bad either--you can be pro-Commie, and make Spartacus, or anti-Commie, and make On The Waterfront, and it's entertaining because in neither case are you watching a movie about, you know, Commies. Or if you're afraid of nuclear war--well, nuclear war is boring. Godzilla! Let's watch a lizard destroy Tokyo--much better than watching The Day After. Even Pilgrim's Progress is part-way toward being a fantasy novel.

Lionel Trilling had something to say about letting your political commitments get ahead of your artistic ones--it's why the liberal imagination is dead. (I paraphrase and distort, but Lionel is dead too, so he can't correct me.) But I will add that one wants genuine arguments between human characters to make for gripping literature, and even gripping cinema; and if you start off by saying I'm Making A Global Warming Movie, odds are you aren't going to give your global warming skeptics, your corporate businessmen, etc., very good arguments.

Frankly, Waterworld probably was the best framework--pity it was so dreadfully executed. What we really needed was Mad Max on Waterskis. Some day we'll get it, I suppose.

Celluloid Dreams

So they've just released a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still with an anti-global warming agenda. And apparently it sucks. This is nothing new: every anti-global warming movie ever made has been painfully bad.

But something tells me the Hollywood brain trust is getting closer to the mark. As someone who cares deeply about the planet and hates the idea of respect for art, I'm 100% behind the idea of reprocessing a beloved classic into a soulless piece anti-global warming propaganda. Just because this one is falling flat on its face doesn't mean the next anti-warming updated classic won't be boffo at the box office.

So, in an effort to encourage Tinseltown and the environmental lobby not to give up too soon, I'd like to offer some ideas for their next project. I'd pay good money to see any of the Oscar-caliber green remakes I'm about to describe.

Casablanca. Rick Blaine (Keanu Reeves) is a nightclub owner who makes it his business to steer clear of politics until his old girlfriend Ilse (Drew Barrymore) shows up as the wife of a renowned advocate for reduced carbon emissions. Rick is finally compelled by own his conscience and his love for Ilse to begin using cleaner technology in the nightclub's kitchen. A highlight of this remake is a version of the song "As Time Goes By" rewritten to reflect the movie's pro-environment message.*

On the Waterfront. In this version, Terry Malloy (played by Keanu Reeves) is a failed prizefighter forced to decide whether or not to stand up to the corrupt bosses who are running the dockworkers' union. In the end his moral quandary unexpectedly resolves itself when a hurricane, probably caused by global warming, obliterates the waterfront.

The Good Earth. Chinese peasants Wang (Keanu Reeves) and O-lan (Charlize Theron) stuggle heroically to survive amid drought, poverty, war and locusts -- all rendered with breathtaking CGI effects. At the end of the movie, one of their sons gets an education and informs them that global warming is the real cause of all their problems.

Ordinary People. As the Jarrett family struggles to deal with the recent death of their eldest son in a glacier collapse, young Conrad (Keanu Reeves) despairs of the planet's fate and attempts suicide. As his father (Sean Penn) struggles to hold the family together, Conrad's bitter and narcissistic mother Beth (Angelina Jolie) refuses to accept that anthropogenic global warming is really happening.

It's A Wonderful Life. George Bailey (Keanu Reeves) spends his life fighting global warming at the expense of living out his youthful dreams. Feeling dejected one snowy Christmas night, he tries to kill himself and is rescued by the intervention of the angel Clarence (played in a delightful cameo by Al Gore) who shows him what the town of Bedford Falls would be like if George had never been born. It would be two tenths of a degree warmer. And everyone would be dead.

[*"Greenhouse gases grow, / Filling up the skies / Glaciers start to melt / Ocean levels rise. / When it's too hot... / The ecosystem dies... / That no one can denyyyy...."]

Political Science Fiction

A brief shout-out for Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which is as thoughtful an exploration of what an anarchist society would look like, limitations as well as successes, as I fancy I will ever read. Wry looks at capitalist and communist societies/governments to boot. This from before LeGuin got boringly preachy. I should reread it--it's only been, what, fifteen or twenty years since last I cracked it open?

Extremists

One of the neater feats of conceptual trickery accomplished by the political left over the last forty or fifty years has been the redefinition of "extremism" so that it refers to ends and not, as it once did and properly should, to means. The touchstone for extremism, and for all the opprobrium that attaches to that word, should be the question, "How far are you willing to go to advance your political vision?"

Check an old dictionary. My 1982 American Heritage says an extremist is "a person who advocates or resorts to extreme measures, esp. in politics." Compare the Wikipedia article on "Extremism": "Extremism is a term used to describe the actions or ideologies of individuals or groups outside the perceived political center of a society...." Most of the article is concerned with ideology, and it goes so far as to say that "The word 'violence' cannot be regarded as 'value-neutral'. Ideology and 'methodology' often become inextricably linked under the single term 'extremism'." (The whole article is packed with sneer quotes like these, giving the impression that "extremism" can't possibly have a meaningful referent.)

It's crazy that a person who is willing to go outside the normal political process in order to, say, increase funding for schools is seen as much less of an extremist than someone who's willing to work within the political process to, say, abolish affirmative action. The latter may be the more controversial view, but the former is certainly the more extraordinary process -- and it's process on which all of us American small-d democrats are supposed to agree.

In my world, unconstitutional acts in support of policies of which I wholeheartedly approve is extremist -- they flouting of the rules by which society purports to operate. Political violence or the threat of violence is extremist, no matter how laudable its goals -- and an extremist should be willing to acknowledge as much. Barry Goldwater understood this when he said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." (Incidentally, if those lines sound less shocking now than they did then, it's because we've gotten used to hearing "extremist" applied to ideas or attitudes with which the speaker simply disagrees strongly.* Back then, there was some troubled uncertainty about what Goldwater meant.)

Take the recent Proposition 8 vote in California. I support gay marriage. Had I lived in California, I would have voted against the proposition. But it seems to me that there was nothing extremist about the proponents of the procedurally straightforward ballot measure. By contrast, the gay marriage advocates who had used the courts to institute a change in the marriage law unconstitutionally and without democratic consent were in fact extremists. The folks who are now threatening Mormons and attacking old ladies carrying styrofoam crosses are, of course, to my way of thinking, even more extremist. And they would be extremist even if they were advocating a ten cent per hour increase in the minimum wage. But you could make the case (though I wouldn't) that their extremism is warranted by the magnitude of the injustice they face. The attack on Harper's Ferry was extremist, but -- in my opinion -- justifiable.

The erosion in the proper meaning of the word extremist is another of many examples of the decline both in our ability to describe politics objectively and in our readiness to recognize the importance of distinguishing means from ends. For my part I resolve to be rigorous in my future use of "extremism" and "extremist." I may even become a fanatic about it.

[*As always, Whit Stillman provides the reductio ad absurdum. From Barcelona:

Fred (Chris Eigemann): You promised not to repeat to Montserrat what I said about Ted.

Marta (Mira Sorvino): That he wants to marry her? Oh, I had to tell her. She already suspected something like that. She was worried about getting involved with an extremist.

Fred: Extremist?

Marta: It's fascist for a boy to immediately talk of marrying a woman he likes.

Fred: (slowly) I don't think Ted is a fascist of the marrying kind.

"Fascist," of course, is another word that's been stripped of its proper meaning through its abuse by the political left.]

Aristophanes and Political Theory

A few weeks ago, FLG published the Georgetown U. political theory reading list. At the time, I remarked that the list contained some classical texts that didn't really have much to say about political theory; on the other hand, I thought Cicero was badly underrepresented.

This morning, as I was groggily pouring myself coffee, it occurred me that there's another ancient writer to whom modern students of politics really ought to pay more attention. Why on earth don't they read more Aristophanes?

Granted, his jokes about erections and anal sex aren't to everyone's taste, and the humor that isn't about bodily functions is often obscure, but the guy seldom failed to take on the very biggest questions about politics and society, and he says interesting things in arresting ways.

For example, his Assemblywomen, or Ekklesiazusai, must be one of the most mordant critiques of socialism ever written. It's also, though more obliquely, a critique of democracy. By disguising themselves and arriving at a meeting of the Assembly before the apathetic men, a conspiracy of women manages to seize power in the state. The ladies then proceed to institute a communist form of government. But not only is wealth to be redistributed: other unfairnesses of life are to be redressed as well: the young and beautiful will be forced to sleep with the old and ugly. Just before the inevitable happy ending, however, it becomes apparent that the women's scheme is doomed: many citizens refuse to surrender all their property until they can assure themselves that others are doing the same -- which they can't.

This is just one example; I mention it because it's the most undeservedly obscure of Aristophanes' plays. Most of the other comedies are just as interesting from the standpoint of political theory. The Knights is one long critique of democracy's tendency to produce pandering demagogues. The Clouds is about the contrast between popular expectations of the benefits from higher education and what the effects of higher education actually turn out to be. The Birds is about how power and politics corrupt. And so on.

Virtually every one of the comedies poses a conventional problem of political theory in a fresh and arresting way. It's really only Aristophanes' two most famous plays, Lysistrata and the Frogs, and a third less famous one, the Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria, that steer away from any very sharp political critique. All three were written during very bad times for Athens, when the audience might not have welcomed anything too harsh or controversial.

I admit that I'm skeptical of modern comedians who comment on politics. I think Jon Stewart is basically an American Goebbels who warps the intelligence of most of those who watch him (which is not to say that he isn't funny). If I had lived in Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C., I might well have loathed Aristophanes' aristocratic political tendencies, his unfair caricatures of popular politicians, and his simplistic distortions of the pressing problems facing the democracy. But with the passage of time, the loss of the plays' immediate relevance means that they've become great starting points for discussions of broader issues. Someone really ought to teach a course on Aristophanes as a political and social theorist.

Submitted for Your Consideration.

On the right: Rod Serling, who used television to bring nightmares into America's living rooms.

On the left: Rod Blagojevich, who used the Illinois governor's office to bring holiday joy to journalists and Republicans everywhere.

2 rods = 33 feet = 1/2 chain

Whora pro Nobis

When I saw this headline on Drudge, I thought some prelate was explaining that men can have erotic inclinations toward the Virgin Mary (as I think one of Umberto Eco's characters says in The Name of the Rose).

"A Fifty Share Easy"

Tonight British TV will televise a man's assisted suicide.

Once again, Paddy Chayefsky, writer of the movie Network, was prescient:

Howard Beale: I'm going to kill myself...I'm going to blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o'clock news.

Max: You'd get a hell of a rating, I'll guarantee you that. A fifty share easy...We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Oh hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week.

Howard Beale: Terrorist of the Week.

Max: I love it! Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups. The Death Hour! A great Sunday night show for the whole family. We'll wipe fuckin' Disney right off the air.

You can see the delightful dialogue in this clip starting at 2:21.

Gormenghast

This post isn't about global warming either.

I've finished rereading the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy, Titus Groan. Just to recollect: a Dickensian fantasy set in the vast castle of Gomenghast, animated by endless ritual which the Earls of Groan, and all their servants, must endlessly repeat. Apparently Mervyn Peake, the author, grew up in Imperial Peking, and some reference to the Forbidden City and the rituals of the Manchu emperors was intended, although it's an Anglicized version thereof.

What I am particularly impressed by this time around is the spiritual weight of the enactment of ritual--ritual necessary to keep Gormenghast continuing, but soul-deadening, such that half the characters are effectively insane in their attempts to live with the wearying routine. And I don't think this is just a commentary on imperial China. Unlike Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast takes place in a godless world--the ritual gives meaning to the lives of the characters, sustains them as much as it bears them down. This is, I think, a metaphor for the secular world, where human beings provide meaning for their own lives, individually and collectively--a burden as much as a freedom, a soul-killing weight. I think now of Richard Trexler's Public Life in Renaissance Florence, where the citizens shaped much of their lives, including their friendships, around the civic ritual, around representing the city. The life of a secular citizen is soul-killing unless you are great-souled--which is why, just as in Gormenghast, there is so much escape nowadays into hedonism, irresponsibility, madnesses of one sort or another. And a politician who is at all conscientious--a Bush rather than a Blagojevich--is weighed down by the burden of conforming his every word and deed to the responsibility of civic ritual, to providing historical meaning for all his constituents--divine responsibility on human shoulders.

I'm rather grateful that Obama smokes. A politician needs some release from these burdens, and this one won't harm anyone else. But do keep in mind that Obama's way of dealing with his responsibilities may well kill him; a very great sacrifice to make for one's country.

Frost/Nixon

This post is not about global warming.

I just saw Frost/Nixon, the movie about the 1977 interview--an interview so famous that I never heard about it until this movie came out. Ah, well, I was five at the time, and my family didn't have TV then anyway. So, a decent movie, although an awful lot of it is about Nixon putting up a wall of fog in his interview, and that isn't really dramatic material. Idly Googling the original play, I find out that it's clearly intended for a British audience, who knows who David Frost is--again, I did not--an icon of the shallow celebrity, perpetually smiling, famous for being famous, a social climber, etc. Juxtaposing Nixon with Frost is meant to illuminate Frost's character--Nixon as a dark mirror of Frost--and thus tell the British more about themselves. Nixon is a sort of spiritual wallpaper for this task.

But some interesting things to follow up. The author of the play is Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen--where Michael Sheen, who plays Frost here, played Tony Blair--and also a play about the Blair/Brown meeting at Granta where they decided who would be PM, and who Chancellor of the Exchequer. I wonder, therefore, if there is a more topical target intended with Frost/Nixon Tony Blair, after all, is popularly portrayed as as Frost-like character--all glib surface and charm, a social climber, a shallow celebrity, etc.--and some of that came through in The Queen. So, if Nixon = Frost, and Frost = Blair, doesn't Nixon = Blair -- a comparison British lefties who oppose(d) the Iraq War would eat up? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I have a vague feeling the play was actually aimed at Smiling Tony.

The Global Warming Debate: Part I of MMDCLXXIV

The latest debate over climate change here at Athens and Jerusalem ended with Gowanus offering Withywindle and me a list of links to information that might cure us of our hopeless delusions. In an attempt to be conscientious, I've looked at them. I've even skimmed this article (large download) by Alan J. Thorpe defending the value of global climate modeling.

I've come away from these admittedly cursory investigations still feeling unconvinced. So what to do? Well, maybe it's worth really going at this issue with hammer and tongs. After all, the planet is supposedly at stake: flooding coastal cities, inland drought, polar bears resorting to "cannibalism" (they're not really, though) etc., etc.

So this will be the first of a planned series of posts dealing, as much as possible, with the global warming controversy. In this post, I'm just going to try to lay out as what I see as the basic position of the people who believe anthropogenic global warming. Commenters can correct me on any details I've gotten wrong or omitted, and we'll move on.*

At bottom, the theory behind anthropogenic global warming (AGW, as I'm now going to call it) rests on the following three uncontested propositions: (1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas; (2) all else being equal, increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases should cause warming; (3) CO2 has dramatically increased in recent decades (from about 280 parts per million to 387 ppm), almost certainly as a result of human activity.

But to get from these three propositions to predictions of environmental catastrophe, the AGW theory needs to leap two hurdles -- namely, the objections that (1) given the tiny concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, even dramatically increased concentrations may not have a significant impact on global temperatures and (2) there may be feedback mechanisms in the global climate which correct for any greenhouse effect produced by rising concentrations of CO2.

To get past these objections, believers in AGW offer the following evidence-based arguments:

First, they point out that the rise in CO2 concentrations has occurred during a period of time in which global surface temperature has also been increasing. The rise in global surface temperatures has been accompanied by a decrease in temperatures in the upper atmosphere, which one would expect if greenhouse gases were trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, at the surface of the earth, and in the land and seas.

Second, they argue that CO2 concentrations have historically tracked global temperatures quite closely.

Third, they have contended that the current global temperature average is high not merely by the standards of the last century or so, but by comparison with estimated temperatures from the last few hundred thousand years of earth's history.

Fourth, some claim that satellite measurements of radiative forcing at the boundary between the upper lower atmosphere verify computer models of the size of the greenhouse effect.**

Have I missed anything so far?


[*If those commenters don't have a Google/Blogger account, they can just click the Name/URL radio button and enter a name of their choosing. That way, they don't have to post anonymously and then sign their name at the bottom of the post, for God's sake. :-)]

[**This is the argument about which I'm having the most trouble finding good information. It was easy, for example, to turn up abstracts of two papers (here and here) from different annual meetings of the Conference on Climate Variability and Change but both papers were withdrawn instead of being presented.]

More Whee!

The folks at Secular Right can close up shop. We have an answer. There is a God.

Because the same day that brings us a shiny new political scandal -- with a none-too-bright governor screaming self-incriminating obscenities into the FBI's tape recorders and calling the president-elect something that rhymes with "other sucker" -- also gives us Iowahawk's parody of Timothy Egan's obnoxious New York Times op-ed:

With a résumé full of failing failure, you now think you have the "chops" to join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell, William Shakespeare, and award-winning New York Times Guest Columnist Timothy Egan? Think again, toilet-man. You're forgetting the one thing that Twain, Orwell, the Bard and I share that you'll never ever have: a degree in journalism.

To coin a phrase, read the whole thing.

Whee!

David Axelrod says Obama talked to Blagojevich about potential Senate replacements. Now Obama's people say Axelrod "misspoke."

I still think this probably won't go anywhere. Unless Obama did speak to Axelrod, was offered a corrupt bargain, and didn't notify law enforcement. And even then, nobody would be able to prove it. Unless somebody has a record of Axelrod's phone conversations....

Fitzsmas

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081209/ap_on_re_us/blagojevich_corruption_probe

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiring to get financial benefits through his authority to appoint a U.S. senator to fill the vacancy left by Barack Obama's election as president. ....

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in a statement that "the breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering."

"They allege that Blagojevich put a for sale sign on the naming of a United States senator," Fitzgerald said."

Today in History

Should we celebrate today because it's the 400th anniversary of Milton's birth? Or because it's the 40th anniversary of the invention of the mouse?

I'm pretty sure I know what the editors of the Oxford Children's Dictionary think. It's been widely remarked that they've just decided to cut from their l'il lexicon words associated with religion (like "sin," "saint," and "devil"), history ("monarch," "empire") and nature ("magpie," "primrose," "heather") in order to make room for words associated with information technology ("MP3 player," "chatroom") and other facets of modern life ("bungee jumping," "biodegradable," "dyslexic"). If anything, England probably needs a bit more Milton.*

Here at Athens & Jerusalem, though, I'm pretty sure we can celebrate both prominent Puritan poets and indispensable input interfaces. Milton was a man who had a strong belief in the harmony of Athens (the Classical tradition) and Jerusalem (the Judeo-Christian tradition). Now Milton, the Classical tradition, and Christianity are all on one side of the great divide between Traditional or High Culture and Popular Culture, with which technology, chief disseminator of popular culture, is usually associated. As readers of this blog probably know or have intuited, I believe that the culture of technology and the culture of, well, Culture, can co-exist, and that their apparent opposition is only a historical accident.

Of course, if I'm wrong, we're all screwed.


[*I would quote Wordsworth's famous sonnet that begins "Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour." But it has the word "altar" in the third line, and that word has been cut from the Oxford Children's Dictionary. I don't want to befuddle our younger readers.**]

[**In all seriousness though: when I was in seventh or eighth grade, there was a girl in one of my social studies classes who asked the teacher to explain what an altar was. It was an awkward moment, and the teacher couldn't conceal her shock. I'm guessing that sort of thing is a lot more common today.***]

[***I know, footnotes within footnotes is so David Wallace.****]

[****The recently deceased writer, not the CFO of Dunder Mifflin. See: high and low culture! How delightfully postmodern!]

Centrifugal Forces

So The New York Times, like every other newspaper in America, is in financial trouble.

The great irony is as follows: From the 1940s until very recently, a few big media companies dominated the American public discourse to an extraordinary degree. They used much of their power to undermine the common basis of American identity. Now, they're dying -- destroyed not only by technological innovation but by Americans' eagerness to fragment themselves into communities that can still feel like communities, or to indulge in a detached irony that palliates feelings of alienation. Why should liberals read The Times, or any of its subsidiaries, when they have Jon Stewart and The Huffington Post? Why should conservatives read the Times at all?

When trahison des clercs goes far enough, the clercs may find themselves with nothing to do.

Worst Thing to Appear in the New York Times since the General "Betray Us" Ad

Wow. Maureen Dowd is off today, but I almost wish she weren't. This guy careens all over the map of Obnoxiousland from Mean Spirited and Downright Nasty clear across to Stupid and Won't Shut Up.

Criticizing Egan's fallacies would be like shooting fish in a barrel (the barrel of the gun itself, that is). And I don't have time. As it is, I have to choose between Ann Coulter's Guilty and The Winemaker's Daughter (2 stars on Amazon with four reviews!) for my evening's reading pleasure.

Just kidding. I'd never read either. (If anyone cares, I'm reading this.)

Gergen

If, like me, you find David Gergen tedious and totally unedifying, you must watch this clip.

Unfortunately for me, I watched it in a coffee shop where I'm using the free WiFi. Trying to keep your mouth closed while laughing uncontrollably is not a good idea. I think my fellow patrons now believe I'm touched in the head, and quite possibly dangerous.

Infrastructure

To be fair to Obama, I'm generally supportive of the economic initiatives he's laid out -- apart from the electronic medical records. In general, investment in infrastructure seems like a fine idea, especially in a time of recession. As Keynesianism goes, it strikes me as a more productive use of government funds than gimongous bailouts to mismanaged corporate behemoths. Repairing school building and making public offices more energy-efficient are probably boondoggles, but at least they're simple, straightforward boondoggles instead of vast new entitlements that will create new special interest groups and that can never, ever be eradicated.

But I found myself wondering where the left's more innovative initiatives went. What happened to modernizing the electrical grid and encouraging public transportation? These always seemed to me like good liberal proposals. Have they now gone by the board? Is Obama trying to lead with the safest and least controversial agenda items possible?

More broadband? Meh. In practice, it probably just means more self-important blogs, YouTube videos and internet porn.

(Go on, click on that last one. You know you want to....)

1984 2.0

From Politico's glowing description of Obama's economic agenda:

The president-elect is bringing new elements of his domestic agenda into his economic recovery plan, committing to a path toward giving every American access to an electronic medical record as part of an “economic recovery plan ... that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives.”

Translation: the man who wouldn't release his medical records wants yours to be easily accessible by just about every doctor, nurse, insurance company employee and public bureaucrat in the country. "Giving every American access to an electronic medical record" is Newspeak for "lots of other people will be able to know exactly what your various doctors thought was wrong with you." (Whether you, the patient, will in fact be allowed to see this record is less clear.)

Sure, it probably will save lives. It will also open the door to wonderful new opportunities to invade people's privacy. Imagine! If such a system for sharing medical records electronically had been in place two months ago, we might have heard all about Joe the Plumber's impacted colon and what that might suggest about his "lifestyle."

Hoovervilles

When my dad was young, you could see the nearest Hooverville in what is now lower Riverside Park - just a few blocks away from the homes of the solid middle class. I could always see them in my mind's eye, ghostly images on the trees and playing fields. Somehow, however, they've never been at the top of my nightmare list -- radioactive, desolated Manhattan usually is. But these days, those ghostly images seem the teeniest bit more solid. Interesting times we're heading for.

The Picture of Little S.P. in a Prospect of Flowers

See with what simplicity
This nymph begins her golden days....

Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born?*
I have no particular reason for posting this, and I know it doesn't even make sense so long after the election. I just think it's an exceptionally beautiful photo. (The green of Alaska's pines goes nicely with our marble background.) And I'm fascinated by the fact that Palin -- Heath in this photo, of course -- seems to have worn the same basic style of eyeglass frames for her entire life.

[*Or would it better to cite Ashberry's take-off of Marvell's poem: "I cannot escape the picture / Of my small self in that bank of flowers: / My head among the blazing phlox / Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. / I had a hard stare, accepting / Everything, taking nothing..."?]

Toys of our Times

When I heard there were Lego-style terrorists, my first thought was to thank god for the heroic diligence of the Playmobil TSA. Otherwise, this place might be in serious danger.

Climate at the Movies

It occurred to me this morning that while the ice-age alarmism of the 1970s never achieved the pop culture saturation of global warming, it did result in better cinema.

Global warming has given us the unwatchable Waterworld (with Kevin Costner) and The Day After Tomorrow (with Dennis Quaid), and the hilariously named An Inconvenient Truth (featuring serial fabricator Al Gore). Global cooling, on the other hand, gave us Robert Altman's most underrated film: Quintet, starring Paul Newman. It's not for all tastes, but it's head and shoulders above the other three movies I've named. (I really should have mentioned it in connection with Newman's death a few months ago.)

Today's Quiz

Question: Who were the Huguenots?

Answer: The Huguenots were French prostitutes.

Correction: Protestants. Protestants. Oy.

How Did I Miss This?

So it turns out that the president of Harvard is named Faust? And she has a Ph.D.? So, she's Dr. Faust?

Marlowe's Faust sought to "level at the end of every art." Goethe's Faust desired to learn the innermost secrets of the universe. I am therefore quite sad to report that the modern Faust has, alas, a doctorate in nothing loftier (or more Satanic) than American Civ.

Equality of Desire; A Commentary

Continuing my ruminations on MSI's post--sorry, MSI!--and reinventing various philosophical wheels as I go--I want to focus on just one sentence:

But the problem seems to be this childish view that anything that other people have is by right something she should be able to have, too.

There's a whole course of political philosophy packed into that sentence (which is why MSI should be let into all reputable grad schools, and a few disreputable ones as well), but I want to unpack that word "have". I think first off there is a debate between whether "have" is "need" or "desire." To speak of needs is to join the Evil Platonic German School of Philosophy (TM) - that all human beings have needs that can be determined by a wise man surpassing in reason, that these needs are universals common to all men, interchangeable among all men, that there is a moral imperative to provide an equal sufficiency of these needs, perhaps even an equal maximum of these needs, and that the wise man can override an individual's desires so as to satisfy his true needs. The horror! The horror! But then there is "desire"--the Good Aristotelian Anglo-American School of Philosophy (TM)--where each individual determines his own desires, each desire itself unique and, indeed, characterizing that individual; the moral imperative is to allow equal opportunity to satisfy one's individual desires--the pursuit of happiness, forsooth--and that the individual pursuit of desire will conduce to the benefit of society.

Now, I think MSI is critiquing the idea that there should be equality of desire. This is interesting--not just the idea of equal satisfaction of desire, or of infinite satisfaction of desire, but the idea of an interchangeability of desire that derives from saying one has a right to what someone else desires. For the point of desire originally is that it is individual, that your own character is shaped by what you desire; to desire what someone else desires, much less to think you should have that as a right, is to sacrifice your individuality. Now, there are variations on a theme. Religion, for one: that earthly desires eventually pall (Everyman), and the rightly ordered soul eventually turns to a love of God--who is himself sufficiently infinite, the corollary would follow, that all can love God and remain individual in their desires. Then there is the critique of consumerism, which I think is cognate to MSI's argument: that if at first we measure our desires in money, as the interchangeable unit that allows society to function, soon we begin to conceive of our desires in terms of money, or of consumer goods, and so lose our individuality as we desire nothing more than money and its creations. On somewhat smaller level, the critique of sexual promiscuity, equally anonymizing since it substitutes a desire for an interchangeable pleasure for the desire for an individual person. Envy, by the by, would then be the relevant sin of interchangeable desire, and jealousy an excess of individual desire.

MSI calls the desire for what other people desire "childish", and I do think it does correlate with immaturity. Desire makes us into individuals, into adults--rather, the accretion of individual desires makes us more and more ourselves, less and less alike from other people. Children have had fewer opportunities to choose their desires (choice is character), are unformed and alike. Adults who lack individuality--desiring what everyone else wants, desiring only money or consumer goods or interchangeable sensual pleasures--are in some sense overgrown children--save, of course, for the fact that they had the opportunity to become adults, individuals, and they can be critiqued for choosing to make themselves lesser than they were capable of being.

And then there is the question of "right." Here I think MSI is channeling Arendt. To desire something is half the equation; to acquire it the other--to achieve the object of one's desire by one's own efforts, the effort itself, inescapably unique, completing the formation of character initiated by the individual desire. To say one's desires are a right is to say they will be given to you by others, not by your own actions; one is liberated from desire, rather than freeing oneself from it. Even without saying that the conception of right smuggles in the concept of need again in new clothing--which it well may--it vitiates the virtues of desire.

And then we return to Kuczynski and her desire for a baby, which I do continue to want to defend. It is the object of the desire that makes the difference. The desire to have a baby may be a universal--indeed, the effort to buy a baby can touch that desire with the anonymizing effects of consumerism. But desire for a baby leads to, well, a baby--an individual, and love for that individual which must make the lover more individual, more an adult. Can the desire for a baby be entirely ignorant of how one can improve one's character by love of a baby? It seems to me that Kuczynski, by what she desires, is a child seeking to become an adult; that her childishness is to some extent redeemed by the promise that having a baby will make her a different, better person. And perhaps the extremity of her desire for a baby is a sublimated expression of a child desperately wishing to become an adult, to become a better person, and groping for that improvement as best she can.

The Most Beautiful Sentence in the English Language....

It's not something from Shakespeare or Keats. It's five words that one can occasionally read in, of all places, The New York Times. In fact, they appear at the end of, for example, this Thomas Friedman column.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

(Too snarky?)

On Staying Up Late Reading A Book For Class When You Should Be Going To Bed Because You Have To Take Shirebourn To A Doctor Early Tomorrow Morning

Probably a bad idea. Oh, I will pay.

Nothing wrong with Shirebourn--just going to an eye doctor to see how his eyes are, on general principles. After all, I wear glasses--no harm checking his vision early.

"Russia is the Mitochondria of Europe"

One of my students wrote that on an essay. I have no idea what this means.

David Gregory?

I mean, David Gregory? Are they kidding? Granted, Russert was always going to be a tough act to follow, but....

And which Gregory will show up on Sunday mornings? The giggling drunk? The aggrieved drama queen? The comical dancer? The partisan hack?

Please let it be the giggling drunk.

BoBo Babbitry

Miss Self-Important writes about Ms. Kuczynski’s article about surrogate motherhood, and ends with this critique:

Her wealth works here to helpfully delude her into believing there are no limitations on her desires that can't be overcome with enough money, whereas poorer people might have to accept their infertility and settle for adoption or childlessness. But the problem seems to be this childish view that anything that other people have is by right something she should be able to have, too. It might be true that the desire for children runs deeper than other desires, but there are many deep desires that will never be realized by many people--finding love, having a happy marriage, watching your children grow up into good people, etc.--and it's not clear that society owes you these things just because you want them very much, which might be what's so off-putting about Kuczynski's attitude towards her surrogate pregnancy.

I am not sure this critique is correct—and this is because I am not sure MSI is approaching the genre of the article correctly. If it were a tract of political theory, this would be an appropriate mode of criticism. It purports, however, to be an essay, a mere description of Kuczynski’s self, her feelings and desires, without an avowed aim either to justify them or to claim they have universal, prescriptive validity. If this is so, then critique of “society owes you these things” is inappropriate, since Kuczynski is merely expressing her desires, not arguing for societal principles. But of course the essay has also been the vehicle of coded political argument since Montaigne invented the genre, and Kuczynski’s “I want” implies a certain political, theoretical point of view. Yet, while I think MSI has some warrant to use this approach, I think it is more appropriate to be cautious of such a reading, and to take the article as an expression of character rather than as a political tract. This still allows us to critique her character—indeed, the essay genre invites such criticism—but puts the political theory off to one side.

So, Kuczynski’s character is somewhat foolish—a technophile, a believer in happy endings, a self-satisfied Babbitt who can navel-gaze endlessly without achieving any real self-knowledge. She is, in other words, an American—isn’t this the keystone of the American character for some two centuries now? Didn’t Hawthorne critique this type in “The Celestial Railroad”? She is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, the hero of endless science fiction adventure tales, Melville’s and Warren’s Amasa Delano in their versions of Benito Cereno. The happy fool, sure that science and the goodness of man will satisfy all our desires.

I have mixed feelings about the critique of such fools. I first encountered it as a left critique of the middle-class, especially of middle-class America—Babbitt, forsooth—a condescension that implies or explicitly states that Authentic Experience is that of the poor, the unhappy, the marginalized, that true virtue lies either in being one of these wretches, or in acting the part of a sympathetic tribune of the alienated, a self-loathing member of the middle class, superior to your family and friends because you have made yourself a Knowing Revolutionary. I don’t much care for this disdainful attitude, and I don’t think it does justice to the many virtues of homo babbitus, Suburban Man, the American yeoman of the modern day. But there’s also a conservative version of this critique—one that takes David Brooks’ Bourgeois Bohemian (BoBo) as the true Babbitt of the modern day, the old smugness and self-assurance decked up in liberal attitudes, and criticizes the Bobo Babbitt for soullessness, lack of religion, shallow technophilia, all associated with mindless liberal politics and cultural totems. Jonathan Swift was already attacking the Moderns in these terms in the early 1700s; Hawthorne, as I said, has “The Celestial Railroad”; it’s a staple of modern conservative discourse. If you like, it’s as American as Babbitry—the Puritan ghost in the machine, the publication of The Scarlet Letter in Unitarian New England, the evocation of Augustinian pessimism, the prophetic reminder that science soothes but cannot save. This critique is as contemptuous of the happy fool as is the left critique; the Knowing Preacher substitutes for the Knowing Revolutionary. I'm sorry to say that I’ve done this myself, and doubtless will again, indulged in a mode all too susceptible to its own foolish self-congratulation.

And that is the nub: to criticize the fool is itself a form of folly, since it assumes you have some wisdom yourself. The Jane Austen Dictum applies here as well: we are all fools, and we ought to critique our own folly as we critique others. Is Kuczynski a fool? She is a fool who beyond all measure wanted a child, and she was blessed both to be given this desire and to be granted it. May all we Americans—we fools who believe in hope, progress, and satisfied desire—continue to be so blessed, with grace beyond what we can ever hope to merit.

An Environmental Manifesto

1. To save our natural resources, all illegal immigrants will be deported forthwith from the country.

2. A well regulated Game Wardenry, being necessary to the preservation of the Environment, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

3. All environmental offenses will be Chapter 7 offenses under the United Nations; enforcement of UN environmental law will be permanently delegated to the United States armed forces.

4. Judaeo-Christian thought having provided the most welcoming matrix for environmentalism over the years, Bible ethics will be taught in all public schools.

5. All government transfer payments will be subject to environmental cost-benefit analysis; no such payment will be made that has a net negative environment impact.

6. Military expenditures that preserve the security of the environmentally-friendly countries of the First World will be counted as carbon credits for all relevant treaties.

7. Environmentally wasteful forms of birth control and abortion will be prohibited; environmentally friendly abstinence will be enforced instead by law.

8. All eco-trips will be prohibited as environmentally wasteful, but eco-travelers can pay equivalent money for a very nice copy of the BBC Earth documentary.