Luker Lurking; Booker T. Washington; Nathan the Wise

My earlier post on a counter-canon of Black Americans proves that Ralph Luker is still lurking on this blog. He appears to take my previous post as (among other things) an endorsement of Booker T. Washington over W. E. B. DuBois, and to take this as somehow typical of conservative historians. This is not precisely what I intended, but the fault is mine for being terse and gnomic. Let me expand.

I didn’t entirely care for Eric Holder’s list of famous Black Americans for Black History Month. [ Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till.] There seemed to be a skew toward the (anti-Americanly) radical – W. E. B. DuBois, particularly in his later, Communist phase, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson – and perhaps I read too much into the list, but some of these seemed chosen more for their radicality than for their actual achievements. Paul Robeson, say – would Holder have chosen him if he weren’t a Communist? Yes, I realize he had a very good voice, and he’s a notable figure on the cultural landscape, but somehow I wouldn’t put him on my Great Great Great List. Then there’s the holy victims – (apocryphally) Drew, actually Till. Others are fortune cookie names – Anderson, Parks, Louis, Robinson. I don’t entirely object to the list, but it struck me as repeating a simplified version of black history, where angry victimhood and association with the Democratic party were somewhat stronger than the reality. I wouldn’t want to over-argue this – there are complications to Holder’s list too, and I rather like his choices of Douglass, White, Ellison, and Baldwin. And Morrison is a good writer, no matter her politics. But still.

So, the counter-canon. Some obvious political choices, Black Americans associated at some point in their life with Republican and/or conservative politics – Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, James Meredith (contra Vivian Malone), Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Bayard Rustin, Clarence Thomas. Crispus Attucks, that old symbol of the presence of blacks in the American Revolution. Then, people who I thought complicated the narrative of black history. Gay black men – a category still uncomfortable for standard black histories – Holder mentions James Baldwin, but I thought I’d add Bayard Rustin and Billy Strayhorn. Holder mentioned the usual suspects in the Civil Rights narrative; unaccountably he left out Thurgood Marshall, the hero of the oddly unglamorous NAACP legal efforts to end segregation, so I thought I’d add him. Blacks who decide they’d rather not be black anymore – Anatole Broyard, and of course James Weldon Johnson wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a work that sticks in the mind. Holder mentions the sports heroes, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson; I thought I’d mention the flawed, self-destructive, great black boxer of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Molyneux, subject of an excellent novel (Black Ajax) by George Macdonald Fraser. Holder mentioned Charles Drew, I suspect because his scientific work on blood and his apocryphal death speak more directly to race; I went to that old chestnut (peanut?) George Washington Carver, whose work didn’t bear that relation – also because Carver is associated with 1) Tuskegee; and 2) evangelical Christianity, in ways that might make Holder uncomfortable.

But many of these were also chosen because their achievements were American, not just Black American; because their vision of themselves was larger than their race. Not that they ceased to think of themselves as Black, but they didn’t only think of themselves that way. Holder, mind you, does cover this theme with Ellison – “The Bell and the Jar” – but I thought I’d strengthen it. Attucks, of course; and so in his own way Broyard. Ralphe Bunche, whose diplomatic work had no direct connection to race. Carver. Miles Davis and Billy Strayhorn – these were contra Paul Robeson and Marion Anderson. Why? – because Robeson and Anderson, no matter their talents, I suspect were chosen more for their status as race icons. Frankly, my knowledge is somewhat second hand, since my own preference is for British folk music, but Miles Davis I gather was a musical genius, and Strayhorn not all that far from one; why not celebrate black musicians known (more) purely for their musicianship? Lorraine Hansberry – followed up Raisin in the Sun with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a play largely about non-black characters, a sign that her concerns and her imagination were not bounded by race. Robert Hayden contra Langston Hughes – I find Hayden a much better poet than Hughes, and not bound by crude racialism as Hughes so often was. Hayden wrote “Frederick Douglass”; he also wrote “Those Winter Sundays.” Powell, Rice, and Thomas, of course, have achievements as non-hyphenated Americans, military, diplomatic, scholarly, and judicial.

All this, I should repeat, as a counter-canon to Holder’s – and the counter-canon must be respectful of the canon. I don’t entirely like Holder’s selection procedure, but my counter-canon is meant to supplement Holder’s more than to replace it; to increase the range of Black American figures remembered, not to obliterate his list.

And then Booker T. Washington. What to say? I object more to ignoring him, and his work for Black Americans; I’m not actually inclined to say Yay, Booker; Boo, DuBois. He shouldn’t be forgotten, but neither do I say that his is the one true path. Surely Washington and DuBois were the great complements, both necessary for the liberation of Black Americans?

But more than that: how can one look at Washington’s accommodations and not perceive the strength of character it took to make them? How can you look at the soft voice and think “Uncle Tom”, rather than recognize the iron will that made that voice soft? I am reminded of Gottfried Lessing’s Nathan the Wise - Nathan the Jew, an endlessly patient plaster saint of a man, whose endurance of Christian prejudice eventually redeems the Christian characters. Oh, joy, being effeminately virtuous for other people’s benefit – I’m told various Black Americans have tired of that role too. But there is a bit in the play worth focusing on:

You found me at Darun – the child and you.
You did not know that Christians just before
Had murdered all the Jews that were in Gath –
Men, women, children; knew not that my wife
And sons, seven hopeful sons, were there among them,
And in my brother’s house, where they had fled
For safety, had to perish in the flames. ....
Three days and nights I’d lain
In dust and ashes before God, and wept
When you arrived. Wept? I had wrestled hard
At times with God; had stormed and raved; had cursed
Myself and all the world; had sworn a hate
Against the Christians, unappeasable. ....
Gradually my reason
Returned to me. She spoke with gentle voice:
“And yet God is: e’en this was God’s decree!
Up, then! and practise what you’ve long believed
To practise cannot be more difficult
Than to believe, if you but will. Rise up!”
I stood erect and cried to God: “I will!”

Nathan is not just a plaster saint, but a man who has known unappeasable hate, wrestled hard with God. Who can look at Washington’s life and think he was different? That his soft words were any less hard won than Nathan’s? My God, the man lived in a furnace all his life and burnt himself out for his people; and he is to be without honor in his own country? Not if I can help it.

Last, some poems. First, praise:

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Booker T. Washington”

The word is writ that he who runs may read.

What is the passing breath of earthly fame?

But to snatch glory from the hands of blame--

That is to be, to live, to strive indeed.

A poor Virginia cabin gave the seed,

And from its dark and lowly door there came

A peer of princes in the world's acclaim,

A master spirit for the nation's need.

Strong, silent, purposeful beyond his kind,

The mark of rugged force on brow and lip,

Straight on he goes, nor turns to look behind

Where hot the hounds come baying at his hip;

With one idea foremost in his mind,

Like the keen prow of some on-forging ship.

Later, dispraise:

Dudley Randall, “Booker T. and W. E. B.” (1966)

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,
"It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?"

"I don't agree," said W.E.B.
"If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I'll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain."

"It seems to me," said Booker T.,
"That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house."

"I don't agree," said W.E.B.,
"For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They'll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope's as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you've got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I'll be a man."

"It seems to me," said Booker T.---

"I don't agree,"
Said W.E.B.

And in the middle, an excellent poem by Langston Hughes, quite the equal of anything by Robert Hayden:

Langston Hughes, “The Ballad of Booker T.” (1941)

Booker T.


Was a practical man. 

He said, Till the soil 

And learn from the land.

Let down your bucket 

Where you are. 

Your fate is here 

And not afar.

To help yourself 

And your fellow man, 

Train your head, 

Your heart, and your hand.

For smartness alone's 

Surely not meet- 

If you haven't at the same time 

Got something to eat.

Thus at Tuskegee 

He built a school 

With book-learning there 

And the workman's tool.

He started out 

In a simple way 

For yesterday 

Was not today.

Sometimes he had 

Compromise in his talk 

For a man must crawl 

Before he can walk

And in Alabama in '85 

A joker was lucky 

To be alive.

But Booker T. 

Was nobody's fool:
You may carve a dream 

With an humble tool.

The tallest tower 

Can tumble down 

If it be not rooted 

In solid ground.

So, being a far-seeing 

Practical man, 

He said, Train your head, 

Your heart, and your hand.

Your fate is here 

And not afar, 

So let down your bucket 

Where you are.

Lowbrow Conservatism?

I meant to post something about this yesterday: both Patrick Ruffini and John Derbyshire complain that conservatism is too lowbrow, too gimmicky, too cornpone, too much defined by the likes of Joe the Plumber and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and...shucks, I already done forgot who all else.

As I said, I was going to post about this yesterday. But I had banjo practice, and I had to walk my smellhounds, and I needed to run over to the sewing lady to have her mend a split seam in the seat of my bib overalls that I guess has been there for a while without me even noticing. By the time I got home it was all I could do to lie on the sofa in my underwear, washing down pork rinds with Boone's Wild Cherry and watching my old Dukes of Hazard videos.

So I didn't post, and now Allahpundit at Hot Air has already connected the two columns -- not a surprise, since Allahpundit has been pushing the same critique for a while now. Lots of conservatives have been pushing some version of this critique these days. I'm kind of sick of it.

I'm especially surprised that John Derbyshire would buy into this garbage. For one thing, nobody who's a self-proclaimed Bill O'Reilly junkie has any business calling Rush Limbaugh and his ilk "bloviators" and lowbrow "carny barkers." Compared with Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh is a genteel mixture of Cicero and Voltaire. (Well, maybe not quite.)

To be fair, Derbyshire finds some good in radio talk shows and he does claim to enjoy them ("and their TV equivalents"). But mainly, he complains that they're intellectually limited and they're crowding out the "middlebrow" conservatism we need to be cultivating. The BBC's Radio 4, says Derb, provides a perfect model. I'm not making this up.

I actually wonder if Derbyshire is even listening to conservative talk radio, which he attacks for its "blind loyalty" to George W. Bush. Seriously? I don't listen that often, but that's not what I heard when I did tune in during the last eight years. Except for the War on Terror, most of the talk radio I've listened to kept making the point that Bush was only marginally better than the Democrats.

But this is only an indication that Derbyshire doesn't quite know what he's talking about. What's more important is that he underestimates the intellectual content of conservative talk radio. I grant that Sean Hannity, when I've listened to him, doesn't strike me as having much interesting to say. But what Limbaugh provides is quite often a reprocessing and repackaging of the kind of conservatism one reads in The Weekly Standard or in Derbyshire's own National Review. Very frequently, he'll read or quote from a column by a brainy conservative like Krauthammer or Sowell. He's constantly talking about ideas and principles. Yes, Limbaugh may goof around with his funny songs and his epithets, but he is middlebrow, in intellectual content if not in style.

And it seems to be style, or image, to which Derbyshire and, to an even greater extent, Ruffini object. Ruffini's basic point is that the Right pushes a gimmicky adversarial identity politics intended to trumpet its middle-class bona fides but which is actually useless in appealing to the middle-class. A better approach, Ruffini says, is Newt Gingrich's 80/20 issues. Ruffini links to Newt's "Platform of the American People." That's the way to really reach out to America -- by focusing less on party identity or cultural self-consciousness and more on issues people actually care about.

Newt Gingrich...that name sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before? Wait a sec. Didn't this "Platform of the American People" guy once have something called a "Contract with America"? If I recall correctly (my brain is still addled from the Bud Lite I chugged for breakfast), that was also all about finding issues that appealed to a broad spectrum of Americans and redefining conservatives as the party of good ideas and good government. How did that work out?

Oh yes. It comes back to me. The Democrats and the media destroyed Newt's public image for all time. They stereotyped him and lied about him* and mocked him until most of America had a very negative opinion of him without really knowing why. His party hung onto him as Speaker of the House until long after he had become a liability, but finally they had to dump him. And now Ruffini thinks we need the Politics of Newt?

Joe the Plumber may be a "gimmick," but there's a very good reason conservatives have to keep playing the politics of middle class identity. And I think there's also a reason why Derbyshire sees Limbaugh as less independent and informative than he actually is. In my lifetime, the Left (via the media) has attempted, and usually accomplished, the character assassination of ever major figure who threatened to galvanize the conservative movement.** Only Reagan escaped largely unscathed. Sarah Palin is the latest, and most disgraceful example. I gave a feeling that the immensely talented Bobby Jindal is on deck for more of the same. And this is a problem, because -- listen up, Ruffini -- the conservative message is never going to triumph without someone to deliver it.

I think when Ruffini complains about Joe Wurzelbacher and Derbyshire complains about the radio talkers, they're taking the side of the Left against conservatives' best attempts to fly through the flak being thrown up by a phenomenally biased commentariat. Sure, they're not perfect, but how about a little loyalty within the movement?

Ruffini thinks exalting Joe the Plumber is an example of the Right's lack of confidence. I think being embarrassed about Joe the Plumber, or being concerned that Rush Limbaugh's show isn't more tastefully cerebral, displays an even greater lack of self-confidence. Can't we just stop being ashamed of ourselves and our associations? Liberals don't go around writing columns about how they're ashamed of Al Franken and Bill Maher and the stuff that flourishes on the Daily Kos. And their solidarity is a big part of their strength. Frankly, if conservatives were just a little less apologetic, we'd get more respect, and more people would be willing to self-identify as conservatives.

Alert readers of Athens & Jerusalem will perhaps see that I'm not saying anything here that I didn't already say on this site a long, long time ago. But I feel like after the election of 2008, it needs to be said and heard more than ever, by as many conservatives as possible. Self-criticsm and, more broadly, criticism of one's own side are good things, but we on the Right carry them much too far.

Idle Question: Is Radio Derb the sort of conservative talk radio Derbyshire would like to see? Good luck with that, friend. If you ever got a serious on-air audience, you'd become the national example du jour of all that's racist and creepy in the conservative movement. And I say that as someone who enjoys your show, and your writings.

Know what else I enjoy? NASCAR. Also moonshine. And the way my sister looks in a pair of cutoffs.

Did that last one carry the joke too far? If it makes you feel better, I don't actually have a sister.

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[*The worst, of course, was the lie that Gingrich served his wife with divorce papers in the hospital while she was recovering from cancer surgery. That falsehood is very widely believed to this day. Try Googling "Gingrich," "wife", and "divorce," Apart from the Wikipedia article on Gingrich, most results are web pages repeating the lie.]

[**Some time in the early 2000s, my grandmother and I were listening to the news on my parents' car radio. "They say Bush isn't very bright," she said to me. "Didn't they say that about Eisenhower, too?" I asked. Her eyes widened. "That's right," she said, as if surprised by the memory. "They did."]

Why Not A Shadow Budget?

Why doesn't the minority party in Congress always issue a shadow budget? I know they don't have the endless White House drones to draw it up; I know getting consensus is difficult without the coordinating power on the executive - but on the other hand, they can pretend to be high-minded and eschew pork, since they will have no hope of getting the budget passed. It seems to me this would change the minority position from "no" to "here's what we would do instead," which would play better with the public.

Philip Jose Farmer, Passed Away

Philip Jose Farmer has passed away. I didn't read much of his work, but I read and reread the Riverworld novels many times when I was growing up. I learned a good deal of history from them, and became curious to learn a great deal more. -- My father, Anduin, gave me a biography of Richard Francis Burton, I believe because Burton is a character in the Riverworld books, and I asked my dad about the real Burton. They also had a distant influence on my career in my high school's fencing club - although H. Beam Piper's book had a more direct one - the duel between Burton and Bergerac is a high point in the series. And they were just great fun. Ah, in a world with more time I would reread them at once. At least they're on the upper shelves of Shirebourn's room, for when he gets old enough.

On Bonds

Speaking of private prudence and governmental prudence ... it occurs to me that government bonds, whose role in the rise of liberal democracy is well known, (see Niall Ferguson,) also provide a crucial link connecting private prudence to the government. The exercise of private prudence drives the purchase and sale of government bonds, and thus bends government policy to the will of private prudence. The sale of massive numbers of small bonds democratizes this exercise of private prudence to near universal levels; in effect, virtually every American citizen has a choice of whether or not to buy a small bond, and so they exercise their private prudence on the government continually by such choices; an everyday exercise that is a crucial complement to the exercise of prudence in the voting booth; an institutionalization of the form of prudence that animates a commercial republic. (Similar arguments can be applied to municipal, county, and state bonds.) We become shareholders in the state, and thus chain the state - as much as possible in this world. Rah, bonds.

Interdependent Functions

I found this article fascinating and scary. Wired magazine explains how mortgage investors used David Li's Gaussian copula function to shield themselves from a true appreciation of the riskiness of their positions:

For five years, Li's formula...looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

Li's formula turns out to be much simpler than I would have expected. Too simple, in fact. At the heart of it was a giant lapse in judgment, a willingness to use historical correlations between prices of instruments called credit default swaps (CDS) as a perfect proxy for the correlations between future risks of various kinds of investments. There are a few dubious assumptions here, but the most dubious has to be the assumption that the future of credit markets would look pretty much like the past. After all, human behavior is not only changeable, it's especially subject to change when it begins to suspect that other people have started to figure it out. Quoth Alexander Pope:

[Man's] principle of action once explore,
That instant 'tis his principle no more.
Like following life through creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.

Everybody -- but everybody -- knows this is true in economics. No one can model markets for very long, especially not "with ease," because savvy actors in the markets will start to factor the existence of successful models into their calculations.

So why didn't more investors say, "hey, let's look for ways to exploit the fact that everybody's using Li's formula! then we can make even more money!" Well, based on the article, one part of the problem seems to have been classic bubblethink. A lot of people seem to have sensed that a tower was being built on sand, but didn't want to sell their tenth-floor condo until just before the thing collapsed. Others seem to have swallowed the housing market kool-aid hook, line, and sinker. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

But, as I read the article, I began to intuit another reason at which the article only just hinted -- a reason which seems all too plausible and which frightens the bejezus out of me because of what it implies for the whole future of capitalism and democracy.

The financial markets are mostly dominated by big, rich organizations with lots of employees. Most of these employees can do pretty darn well for themselves provided only that they keep their jobs and continue to draw their base salaries. And maybe that was everybody's foremost motivation: Don't rock the boat, don't look foolish, just do what everybody else is doing. Screw your clients' risk-profit calculations. Focus on your own, which are increasingly weakly correlated with theirs and which you can best optimize by fitting in. If you're a quant, a numbers cruncher, your best strategy is to make the traders happy by feeding them numbers they feel they can use. If you're a trader, your best strategy is not to do anything you can't justify to your bosses and colleagues based on what the numbers crunchers are telling you. Everybody says Li's gamma is a good measurement of risk. That "everybody" is all you need to know, and taking it to heart will probably get you a lot further than individual intitiative.

In other words, maybe the same dynamic that's poisoning academia, journalism, and government is rife on Wall Street. Maybe oligopoly and corporatism really are warping incentives, distorting prices and fatally sabotaging the efficiency of the market. And maybe that's not about to change anytime soon.

Maybe the Marxists were right.

I know I'm not the first person to think this -- I was aware of this critique of Wall Street. But after watching the events of the last six months, and after reading about how David Li's equation spread through the financial community "like a highly infectious thought virus" (to quote the article quoting derivatives babe Janet Tavakoli) the critique takes on a plausibility for me that it never had before.

Abstractart: Some Brief Replies

1. Burkean conservatism understands itself as favoring gradual reform, building upon and made possible by the respectful adaptation of tradition to changing circumstances. I.e., the ideals you share overlap significantly with that of Burkean conservatives. Attacking Burkean conservatives for ideals they do not espouse, while trumpeting your belief in the ideals they do espouse, discredits you.

2. You appear to conflate "utopian ideals" with "optimism" and "expectation of short-term success." There are interesting overlaps here, but to say your peers are pessimistic is not to say they don't possess utopian ideals.

3. The left used to be proud of its utopian beliefs. For the left to deny this history is neither truthful nor dignified. To reject these beliefs as an ideal is to hollow out the left's soul; philosphically, it would make them "me-too" conservatives.

4. To call for the improvement of the world still begs the question of the standard on which that improvement is based - the city of God, the perfected future, or human achievements constructed in secular time.

5. You give the impression of intellectual incoherence by trumpeting various universal ideals while arguing elsewhere against dependence on universal ideals. To say you're not a utopian, but that you support socialism, without lengthy explanation, implies a very Humpty-Dumpty attitude toward the meaning of words. Likewise, to say that perfection is a moving target requires an idiosyncratic definition of perfection.

6. The ideal of stability is not an ideal of perpetuity. Indeed, to pose stability as an ideal is to recognize it is an achievement that must ultimately fail; to acknowledge a world radically divorced from eternity.

7. Your critique of "caution" is a critique of the lower prudence, not the higher one. The secular conservative attitude toward time and experience is linked to the higher prudence - the correct choice of action in a world of contingent particulars. Caution, the recurrence to experience, are parts of the higher prudence, but not the whole.

8. You don't esteem tradition. You make a good case that this is the crucial variable in political disposition.

9. Virtu and fortuna are complements.

10. The metaphor is the message.

Abstractart: Final Warning

Abstractart, you are on the verge of being subject to a blanket deletion from this blog. You seem addicted to mixing up your points with vitriolic (and prolix) polemic that is inappropriate for a guest on this blog. Not your arguments, but your tone, is at issue.

My Major Reaction to Obama's Speech

An almost uncontrollable desire to "mess with" Joe Biden.

This Thing All Things Devours

Following up on Alpheus' last post about different attitudes toward time ...

1) Alan Howe (and Abstractart) correctly note that such labels can often be so much handwaving. I would put it a different way: the discrediting of the Soviet Union abroad, and Great Society liberalism at home, led to the discrediting of explicit utopian language, and a resurgence of prudential, conservative rhetoric. Bush's seizure of Wilsonian language also led Democrats and the left perforce to adopt more conservative rhetoric. One may suspect that the left "truly" retains utopian aspirations - but, in our language, conservative prudentialism is remarkably widespread. Alan Howe thinks there is not much difference between American liberals and conservatives in history; I think their language use differed far more in the past than it does now. Language use does have interestingly subtle effects on beliefs and actions; for the moment, I do think there is less difference between the two camps on this issue than there has been at many moments in the past.

2) Both sides, therefore, claim "long-term prudence" as a virtue they possess, as their opponents do not. The left has not always claimed this as a virtue - and one may suspect like Alpheus and FLG, that by the pattern of their actions they reveal a continuing predilection for the short-term. But the fact that the left now also claims long-term prudence as a virtue is itself a tribute to the power of conservative ideas, and ought to be noted.

3) "Long-term" and "short-term" is for me a slightly distorting way of referring to differing conceptions of the nature of time itself. Stealing from J. G. A. Pocock and Carl Becker - and repeating myself, for long-term readers - there is a distinction between time taken as oriented toward an end-of-days, the City of God or its secularized equivalent, progress, and time merely as an endless succession of moments, with no orientation toward the future or progress, with no intrinsic moral valence assigned to the progress through time. By this analysis, the utopian view assigns value to the perfect future to come; the past is an imperfection we shuck as we approach this heaven on earth. The secular view - Machiavellian, Burkean, by shorthand conservative, although the religious conservative has more in common with his progressive counterpart by this analysis - assigns greater value to the past, not so much as a golden age from which we fall (although that thought is mixed up in there too), but rather as a source of wisdom for how to make actions endure in secular time. By definition, anything new has no proven value at creating stability, binding the discrete moments of secular history; anything that has endured has a presumptive advantage at creating stability, since it has already stood the test of time. The conservative places greater value on binding secular moments of time together than does the progressivist, the utopian, since the utopian is not interested so much in secular time at all as in the end of days, the abolition of time. All this translates into "long-term" and "short-term" - but while I acknowledge the value of this short-hand, I'm a little uncomfortable with it, and would prefer another.

4) As always, the self-understanding of the left vs. the analysis from outside is at issue; as is the question of disposition; and of counterfactuals. None of these are susceptible to an answer that will end debate. I would only say that "Hope and Change," banal and bipartisan as such a slogan is, equally fit for campaigning for high-school president (in my high-school, it was always "Time for a Change!), does register more of the utopian impulse than of the Burkean impulse; its use, its effectiveness, the impulses and the policies it embodies, do seem to me to justify a continuing distinction of our political movements by their attitudes toward time. But I would assign it significant explanatory power, not absolutely determinative power. I suspect Alpehus and FLG would phrase it the same way.

Back(wards) to the Future

Over at FLG's site, FLG and Alan Howe have been having a conversation (relevant posts here, here, here, here, and here) about FLG's idea that liberals and conservatives have different time horizons. Alan protests:

Liberals are also properly called progressives. Their view is long-term by definition. Conservatives are for maintaining tradition. That is often in conflict with long-term views and is inherently backward-looking. It is not that they have a long-term view that things will work out. They more often just resist change.

I'm not very impressed by this argument. It seems to me (and I've said a version of this before) that so-called progressives aren't so much marching forward toward some clearly visualized goal as backing away from the past just as fast as they can. As FLG says, they tend to focus almost exclusively on "the injustice of the present situation," and flee into a future whose outlines are hazy and whose great virtue is that the present's badness will have been put aside.

Does it seem paradoxical to speak of backing away from the past, into the future? It didn't to the ancient Greeks. Their words for "backward" and "behind" (ὀπίσω, ὄπισθεν) also meant "in the future" or "hereafter." They visualized human progress into the future as a backward progress, not because the future was necessarily worse than the past -- though they were inclined to believe that too -- but because we can only see the past: our eyes are always turned toward the past, and the things to come are always, in the nature of things, invisible.

To me, this seems like an insightful way of representing man's movement through time. We can never really be sure of what is ahead of us, and it's progressives' pretensions to certainty that bother conservatives like me. On the Greek view, it seems insane to want to hurry into the future by taking all sorts of big steps in a short period of time. The proper way for a man to walk backwards is slowly, while gathering as many clues as possible from the things he can see and the places he has already been. Baby steps.

If conservatives "more often just resist change," then liberals too often just seek change, without being quite sure what sort of change they're getting. If you see two people walking backwards, one slowly and hesitantly and the other eagerly and rapidly, which one do you suppose is doing more thinking about where he's going?

Let Us Now Praise Famous Black Americans

We, the management at A & J, in our cowardly way, are not enthused by Eric Holder's speech. We, the Withywindle half of the management [ed. The Scrooge half or the Marley half? W. Definitely Marley. I haunt Alpheus on Yom Kippur.] wonder if Holder was aware that his speech was obnoxious, and inappropriate in his position. But on a slightly different note, Let us ponder his canon of noted African colored Negro Black Afro-American people of color African-Americans:

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till.

Much can be said about this list. However, I propose a counter-canon, just for the heck of it. The reader is invited to ponder differences in the list.

Crispus Attucks, Anatole Broyard, Ralphe Bunche, George Washington Carver, Miles Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Thurgood Marshall, James Meredith, Thomas Molyneux, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Bayard Rustin, Billy Strayhorn, Clarence Thomas, Booker T. Washington.

Union Sociology

It's been a truism the last two generations that there is some tension within the Democratic coalition between the unions (white, blue-collar, more interested in economic than social issues, often de facto hostile to the racial integration of the unions) and the coalition of elite liberals and racial minorities. This tension, I think, is disappearing along with the old unions. Private-sector unionization was down to 8%, last I heard; maybe the Employee Forced Choice Act will reverse that number a bit in the short run, but I suspect the long term trend is down to insignificance. (See, UAW, collapse of, along with Detroit.) The unions that flourish lately are among poorer liberals (teachers, government clerks) and racial minorities (hospital workers). Or should I say the tension continues, but the children of the old union members are rarely in unions, and scarcely any of their grandchildren will be. The union-liberal-minority alliance will overlap much more than it used to.

Dear Students

"C plus" really means "F". It means you do not know how to spell, punctuate, or write with proper grammar. Your argumentative skills are also below minimum (Platonic) college standards. Generally you did not understand the assigned question; and if you did, you did not know how to answer it.

The median grade will be "C plus".

Yours, Withywindle

***

PS to Alpheus. It is very difficult to maintain my rarified, self-doubting philosophy of education while actually grading student essays.

Teaching (and Educational Reform) as an Art of Character

Just to put together a few of my obsessions ... teaching is another art of character. The proper teacher is a rhetor who changes his own character as he teaches - teaches by means of his character - rather than a sophist who seeks only to change (inform) his students without opening himself to change. The inculcation of facts is necessary, but not sufficient; the teacher improves his students by letting them improve him, by treating them as people rather than objects. Critiques of education that focus on the shortcomings of the students rather than the shortcomings of the teachers miss the point - and are themselves sophistical in character, for the reformer of education ought also to be a rhetor open to changing his own character. Anyone preaching improvement of the student body without considering his proposed cure as a useful form of self-improvement, ought to be ignored.

Rab Butler's Lessons for Republicans; and Margaret Thatcher's

In 1945, the Tories were overwhelmed by Labor. In 1951, Conservatives won again. Why? Rab Butler and others set up/coordinated with new Conservative think tanks, intellectuals scribbling books, rethinking Conservatism to accommodate the welfare state - indeed, to come up with new ideas of their own. As important as coming up with new ideas was giving the impression to the public that the Conservatives were in tune with the times. All this (sadly) implies that a David Frummish, New Majority - type project, promoting, eager capitulation to the Labor welfare state, is what the Republicans need to win elections in the middle term.

But of course not all Tories were ever on board for Rab Butler's remake of Conservatism. A good half of the party, shall we say, unhappily stomached Rab Butler and the Tory front bench - the Margaret Thatcher half. How were they able to come back? More Tory think-tanks a decade later, Friedmanite, attended by Thatcher, that made the old verities seem new and exciting - that gave the true-believing backbench enough intellectual depth to provide a front bench as well, and eventually staff Thatcher's Cabinet, and undo part of the Labor welfare state. A long-term strategy for Conservatives implied here.

A Conversation

My father-in-law is an economic conservative, a steady Republican voter the last few decades. A slightly compressed version a recent conversation:

****

Me: What do you think of Obama's stimulus package?

Him: A bad idea. It won't work.

Me: Did the Congressional Republicans offer a constructive alternative?

Him: No.

****

Republicans need to work on that second answer.

Presenting: Alpheus's Oscar Picks!!!

Oh, wait. Alpheus doesn't care about the Oscars.

The only movie Alpheus has seen in a theater in the last year was that Swedish vampire thingy. That was pretty good. It should win.

UPDATE: Alpheus just remembered he also saw that new Indiana Jones movie. The one with that kid. Sabrina Le Beauf?

More on Copy-Editors, Journalists, and High-School Teachers

A while ago I mentioned how much I learned from teaching. Let's generalize: when I say that teaching students to be copy editors and journalists is a good idea, I am perhaps really saying that I want to change America's high school teachers and college teachers to value these skills and be able to teach them - and by teaching them, ingrain them in their own daily lives. Changing the teachers matters at least as much as changing the students. Let us be pessimistic: the mass of people will never acquire such skills, but the elite ought to have them. Get the teachers and professors solidly behind this educational program, and they will both constitute a fair part of this elite themselves, and provide a crucial exemplary leaven for the rest of the elite. Let us be optimistic: once the teachers are on board, the mass of the people will move significantly toward this goal.

The same argument applies toward teaching history, literature, civics, and morals properly: it will change the teachers at least as much as the students, and that will be the crucial change.

(But to do this you need to capture the education schools, change the hearts and minds of millions of teachers. How do you get from A to B? There's the trick.)

I say all this assuming that high school teachers (and college professors) are not, as a rule, currently able to teach grammar and writing at a high level, much less practice them. Perhaps I am being uncharitable -- but if they have that ability, they certainly have not exercised it on most of the students they pass on to me at college.

I like to think this is a less utopian goal - not to change every American student, but to focus on changing the cadre of high school teachers (and professors).

We Have A Winner!

Ever since Arethusa displayed exceptionally bad judgment by getting involved with me, I've tended to automatically discount all her ideas.* But I think she's onto something with her idea to christen Obama's economic and social program "The Big Deal." The phrase calls attention not just to the scale of the new administration's spending proposals but also to the ongoing hype that surrounds everything Obama. (It also pleasantly reminds me of Boston's "Big Dig," a project to bury a few miles of Interstate 93 that turned into one of the greatest finanical fiascos in the history of urban planning.)

So I, for one, will now enthusiastically refer to the amalgam of TARP, the Porkulus, TARP II, future Porkuli, TARP III ("Geithner's Revenge"), etc., just as Arethusa suggests. Surely it can't be long before the New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and MSNBC all get on board?

[*Joking!]

On Journalism 2

The decline of journalism, it is argued, is a danger to democracy because without journalists to keep an eye on government, abuses flourish. The most fascinating example given is that without local coverage, local government becomes one long peculation - and what journalists provide is not so much publicity (although that matters) as the wallet to hire a lawyer who can force the local apparatchiks to cough up the relevant documents. ("$500K for 'stationery goods' at Tiffany's?") This makes a certain amount of sense, but what lies behind its assumptions?

1) The growth of power of government, such that it can ignore the wishes of the people for mere information, is what makes journalism necessary. There is a soft libertarian corollary here: weaken the power of government - give it fewer tax dollars to pay with - and the need for journalism lessens in turn. Big government justifies big journalism - hence, curiously, an incentive for journalists to favor big government, as it gives them a necessary function.

2) The growth of power of local government - the bloat of city and county government. Anti-government impulses really need to be focused on local government far more; the failure of the press to cover local government is nothing to the failure of conservatives to oppose local government sufficiently.

3) The drift of interest by elites from local politics to national politics. A digression here: I will assume that local corruption is a constant, as is the necessity to go to law to counter it. (See Peter Linehan, The Ladies of Zamora, about medieval Spain, for a not entirely irrelevant case study.) I will also assume that most people simply assume the existence of graft, endure it, or simply move rather than bother to fight it. Interest in local graft is a function of interest by local elites - whether to get rid of it, or to shuffle the beneficiaries. The Crusading Local Paper of Democratic America was a vehicle for local elites to wrangle about local politics - a vehicle for social mobility, as the editor sought to get himself made mayor, or postmaster, or audition for State Representative. But elites everywhere have shifted from being embedded in the local community to being concerned more and more with national politics - partly a cultural shift, partly a rational response to the shifting of tax dollars from the locality to the state and federal governments. As the local elites lose interest in local politics, so as a natural corollary the local press declines. The sort of person who reads the National section before the Metro section (Guilty!) is the person guilty, by sins of omission, for the decay of local coverage, and the creeping corruption of local politics.

Corollaries, some already mentioned somewhere on the blogosphere, but worth repeating:

1) If bloggers are really going to replace journalists, what they need to do is band together to hire lawyers who can extract information from corrupt aldermen.

2) Gumming up government by lawsuit may be the most effective defense of liberty at the present moment. (Until such time as all decisions are removed from law and put in administrative procedure.) All those lefty lawyers getting in the way of government and business may actually be good things - although a new cadre of righty lawyers getting in the way of government would be even better.

3) Journalists posturing as champions of the people may have numbed the people's ability to champion themselves.

4) Journalists were never anything more than hirelings of the broad political elite; they may have served what they conceived to be the people's interests, but they never (in the political sphere) much engaged the people's interest. The decay of the media is not the fault of the people; it is the fault (if fault it be) of the changing concerns of the elite, and the changing methods of the elite - who have found different hirelings.

Frank Discussions of Race

Jonah Goldberg's column today is even more gratifying than usual as he discusses the absurdity of Attorney General Eric Holder's call for more frank discussion of race in America:

Perhaps Holder envisions a national conversation where the whole country becomes a giant School of Athens, with blacks as Socrates and whites as Plato, eagerly taking instruction on the finer points of racial consciousness. The image that comes to my mind is different. I see Michael Scott, the hyper-vapid boss from NBC’s The Office, hectoring Stanley and Darryl — the show’s two black characters — to make race an issue when it shouldn’t be.

I'm definitely on board with Goldberg's Michael Scott comparison: there are plenty of moronic race fetishists* out there in America. But personally, when I see some Democratic politician like Holder trying to provoke Americans into a candid conversation about race, the figure who comes to my mind is not Michael Scott but Mao Zedong -- demanding that his countrymen "let a hundred flowers bloom."

[*If the New York Post cartoon about Travis the Chimp is racist, then is this blog post by me also racist? After all, it sort of links Obama, a rampaging monkey, and the words of an old hymn quoted by Martin Luther King. Does it matter if Alpheus never came within a mile of racist intent while writing it? Could his racist intent have been unconscious? Could he be a racist without even knowing it? This is the sort of question a frank dicussion of race in America would no doubt help to clear up.]

Proof

I know some of you were doubtful. But behold: our share of the stimulus.

I confess, the stuff about the City Dionysia and Catiline was just Alpheus goofing around. Our lobbyist assured us nobody would actually read the bill, and he was right!

Blessed are they who had not seen, and yet believed.

The really good news? It's not too late for the rest of you to get your share!

It Just Occurred to Alpheus to Wonder....

...why is FLG never "currently listening" to this?

On Journalism I

Much discussion lately of the decline of journalism, reasons and implications. I will note first that the latest issue of The New Republic manages to talk of scandals disgracing the mainstream media without mentioning the names Stephen Glass and Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Really, they need a macro to insert those names whenever this subject comes up; said macro to end with NOSTRA MAXIMA CULPA, or whatever the Latin is. They also manage to start by saying "both the right and the left no longer believe in an impartial media," and end by saying (in so many words) "the left ought to believe that the media is capable of uncovering Republican scandals." Apparently we conservatives are lost causes. (True, true, but it would be nice to be invited to the party.) And by ending with an appeal to the left alone, not to both sides, they undermine their own case for a media aspiring to impartiality; it becomes simply the pathetic claim that "we are too bold lefty muckrakers, uncompromised by our martinis at Georgetown soirees." Eh. The New Republic's shift left on policy issues these last few years doesn't thrill me; but their whining is what has cost them my respect.

More Thoughts on Education

Some of my previous thoughts on education, strangely enough, probably carried the implicit idea that college students should be educated to be capable of becoming college professors. (Not entirely, I hope, but I'm sure the idea lurks out there.) I'd like to put it a different way: aside from basic knowledge of history, literature, morals, yadda-yadda, a college graduate ought to be capable of becoming 1) a journalist; and 2) a copy-editor. That is, in reverse order, stone-cold knowledge of the English language, plus the ability to do research, synthesize facts, and write a coherent narrative about any topic under the sun (if not with the full knowledge of a specialist) seem to be reasonable skills to have when you graduate from college. The follow-up question: how many copy-editors and journalists already have these skills before they enter college? Are these actually skills that can be, and should be, taught in high school? But the main thesis I want to present is that the skills needed to be a copy-editor and a journalist are reasonable proxies for the goal of a liberal-arts education.

More Thoughts On The World Economy

* Google "capital outflows" and "China"; China appears to be leaking private capital, and the Chinese government is selling US Treasury Bonds in response. Not yet fatal leakage - but this would seem to be another crisis looming - the point where China has to sell its foreign assets, to support its currency, economy, etc., even if it would rather maintain its investments in US Treasury bonds. I gather the business pages twigged onto this a while before I did, but better late than never. I will add that however much we don't know about our own economy (i.e., multi-trillion dollar investments in worthless real estate), I suspect the Chinese government is even less well informed about its own economy - not enough markets, not enough rule of law, not enough information-collecting administration - and is making economic policy even more blind than we are. Ticklish.

* Where do Chinese millionaires park their money abroad? For maximum irony, in US Treasury bonds, which would mean that the crisis is simply reshuffling Chinese assets abroad from the government to their investor classes.

* If China is selling US Treasury bonds, who's buying?

* China had been investing in Latin America and Africa, beginning to make a strategic play for their resources. Is that on hold?

* What happens to Africa in a world recession/depression? Does less demand for oil, etc., mean there are fewer ethnic cleansings to clear the resource-lands of competing nations? Or does less money mean the incentive for killing other people, to monopolize what little money is left, go up?

* How does "stimulus" translate into Chinese? As "aircraft carrier"?

* Is our military recruitment improving as the economy tanks?

* Do the Saudis have less money to fund Wahabi mosques abroad? Or no such luck?

"Keep away! The sow is mine!"

So Nancy Pelosi, an "ardent practicing Catholic," is going to have an audience with the Pope.

What will that be like? Personally, I like to imagine Benedict spritzing Aunt Nancy with holy water and shouting "the power of Christ compels you!" while her spinning head spews pea soup in all directions.

Then again, that's also how I imagined Pelosi's January meeting with Obama to discuss the stimulus package would go. So we'll just have to wait and see.

No Such Benefit?!?!?

Sometimes the Science Times takes a break from hyping sexy but dubious research...and actually reports on less exciting but more important and better substantiated non-results. It turns out that there's still no solid evidence for the value of vitamin supplements:

The latest news came last week after researchers in the Women’s Health Initiative study tracked eight years of multivitamin use among more than 161,000 older women. Despite earlier findings suggesting that multivitamins might lower the risk for heart disease and certain cancers, the study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, found no such benefit.

Last year, a study that tracked almost 15,000 male physicians for a decade reported no differences in cancer or heart disease rates among those using vitamins E and C compared with those taking a placebo. And in October, a study of 35,000 men dashed hopes that high doses of vitamin E and selenium could lower the risk of prostate cancer.

Of course, consumers are regularly subjected to conflicting reports and claims about the benefits of vitamins, and they seem undeterred by the news — to the dismay of some experts.

“I’m puzzled why the public in general ignores the results of well-done trials,” said Dr. Eric Klein, national study coordinator for the prostate cancer trial and chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. “The public’s belief in the benefits of vitamins and nutrients is not supported by the available scientific data.”

I'm puzzled by Dr. Klein's puzzlement. We all know confirmation bias exists; we all know people want to hope there are simple things -- other than exercise, please! -- that they can do to significantly improve their health. And research showing the absence of correlations is just so...boring.

Why do I need a bunch of dull, pointy-headed scientists telling me that all is not gold that glitters? Why can't I spend my days reading about cats that predict when somebody's going to die or how you can catch obesity from your fat friends, even over the telephone?* Why can't I enjoy feeling bad for the poor polar bears who are drowning because of global warming?** Why can't I cluck my tongue over the possibility that vaccines that are causing autism?***

I think I'll continue to take my Vitajex****, thank you very much.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[*Both of these widely-reported stories came from the same shameful issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.]

[**It was really just four, and a severe storm seems to have been involved.]

[***No real evidence for this either -- just the opposite -- but, hey, what good have vaccines ever done for us anyway? We got rid of DDT on similarly flimsy evidence, and no harm done.]

[****For the complete, very funny, Vitajex sequence from A Face in the Crowd, skip to 2:00 in this clip.]

Schadenfreude Turning Into Horrified Alarm

Apparently Eastern Europe is going bankrupt, and Western Europe, as the main creditor, is about to take a major blow. Japan's economy just dipped 3% in one quarter, and Russia's industrial production is down 20%. China is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in, um, a fortune cookie, and Venezuela looks more and more like it will turn into a Communist dictatorship. Oh, and Mexico's descent into a failed narcostate seems to be accelerating by the day. Meanwhile, the US has just mortgaged itself to the gills for the next few decades, and will have no spare cash for itself, much less for desperate foreign countries. Yes, yes, the world looked worse in 1942 - or 1948 - or maybe even 1962 or 1982 - but the plummet into looming disaster has been remarkably swift.

Just for the record, I will repeat: I totally did not expect any of this would happen. All this "history helps you see what's coming" stuff they tell you - didn't help me, that's for sure.

Captain Clouseau, Meet Captain Bean

British and French Nuclear Subs Collide. (Hat-tip FLG.) One can but imagine:

British First Mate: Which direction do we go, Captain Bean?

[Captain Bean has a spider in his shirt. He windmills his arms as he tries to extract it.]

British First Mate: Are you sure, sir? There's a French submarine directly ahead of us.

[The spider touches an open electrical wire. As it fries to death, Bean's head spasms upward and downward.]

British First Mate: You're the captain, Captain Bean. Full ahead!

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

Captain Clouseau: Wair is my braykfast? I jetteesoned eet out the left tohrpeedo tuube, so eet should be beehind zat squid. First Mate! Straight ahead, beehind ze squid.

French First Mate: Zat is not a squid, Capitaine Cousteau; zat is a submarine Britannique.

Captain Clouseau: Eet ees a squid, I tell you, and who eez zis Cousteau? I am Clouseau.

French First Mate: Cousteau, Clouseau, you are ze capitaine. Straight ahead! Avec! Avec!

Athens & Jerusalem Presents: The Presidents' Day Presidents Quiz...About Presidents!

How much do you know about the presidents of the U.S.? And how much do you know that isn't really worth knowing? Test your knowledge by answering the following questions! No Googling!

1.) Who is the earliest president whose voice has been preserved in a recording?

2.) Who was the last president, before George W. Bush, to win the presidency while losing the popular vote?

3.) What president was in the habit of ringing a bell to summon staff to the Oval Office, and then hiding under his desk to observe their bewilderment?

4.) Which president was the subject of a front-page story in the Washington Post headlined "President Attacked by Rabbit"?

5.) Which president was known as "the human iceberg" for his extreme formality of demeanor?

6.) Whose presidency (with the exception of George Washington's) saw the most new states admitted to the Union?

7.) Under whose presidency did the federal budget first exceed $1 billion?

8.) Who was the only president to have seen combat during World War I?

9.) Of which president is TV evangelist Pat Robertson, himself a 1988 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, a direct lineal descendant?

10.) Which future president's father's corpse was stolen by grave robbers and sold to a medical school -- only to be accidentally discovered there by one of his sons (a brother of the future president)?

Gstream of Consciousness

Well, la grande saison has apparently begun in Gstaad. So that's one mystery solved.

I'm afraid I won't be able to make it this year, which is a pity because apparently snow conditions are the best in half a century (due to global warming, no doubt). Fortunately, one doesn't have to physically travel to Gstaad, because here's Taki Theodoracopulos to...well, I'm not sure what he's talking about, actually. But it's somehow related to "the season," and Gstaad, and a lot of rich people I don't know, and women Taki would like to have sex with, and men he'd like to beat up, and, er...something about Guelphs and Ghibellines that maybe Jeff from Quid Plura would understand (?)....

I can only assume Taki was trying to capture the vertiginous feel of Gstaad's social whirl. Then again, could Taki have been tipsy -- methismenos, as the Greeks say? Crazy me krasi? If so, it can only have been the finest champagne.

(P.S. You know what breaks my heart? I can create the post label "Taki" but not "Taki!!!" And it seems clear to me that the man deserves at least one exclamation point.)

Coraline The Mother: The Democrat Metaphor

"Come vote for our party, little Coraline. We want to be your mother. We will feed you good things and let you do fun things and we will love you forever and ever. All you have to is let us sew government bureaucracies on your eyes and eat out your innards with new taxes. And then you will never be free of us, little Coraline, but we'll love you so."

Coraline, The Movie

It's good. Not perfect, but very good. It makes a number of changes from the book: Americanizes our heroine, adds details to her characterization, adds some characters, shifts some plot elements, partly to re-establish classical unities, partly to provide for a more punchy climax. But all of this is respectful to the original, and a remarkable amount of Gaiman's dialogue and spirit survives - it is a very adult horror story. (More respectful than the movie Stardust was to Gaiman's original, although that was also rather good.) Two bits of dialog preserved that are symptomatic of respect for the book: "The beldam." And: "Everybody likes games." Many of the visuals are inspired. I didn't see it in 3-D, so can't comment on that. It is a cool, reserved movie - like Gattaca - but not without emotional pull, and memorable. I would be glad to see it again.

For Valentine's Day

I've always been partial to the love story of Elizabeth Barrett. At the age of thirty-eight, she was an accomplished poet, but she was also more or less of a recluse, and her health was fragile. For perhaps five years -- perpetually ill and stricken by a durable grief for the death of her brother -- she had hardly left her bedroom. It seemed unlikely that she would have many more years left, and she brooded on a life full of a few sharp sorrows and many vague disappointments.

It was then that Robert Browning, whose own poems Barrett had praised, sought her out in her pathetic isolation. He was six years younger than she and of a different, more active temperament. He was, of course, a poet himself, and he had loved Barrett's poems. And soon, in the course of his increasing intimacy with Elizabeth, he claimed he loved her too. He informed her of this in a telegram -- thanks, new technology! -- early in 1845.

Elizabeth had her doubts. He was younger, better looking, more worldly, more financially secure. It was not obvious to her what she had to offer him ("What can I give thee back, O liberal / and princely giver?") and she suspected their love was doomed to disappointment. So many of Barrett's Sonnets from the Portuguese are poems of mistrust in the reality Browning's love, and forebodings of despair:

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems! where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch too poor
For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps...as thou must sing...alone, aloof.

Geez. Barrett did not, apparently, make it easy for Browning to love her. Nor did her father, who thought the romance ridiculous and did not believe Elizabeth should marry at all. At last, however, Robert's faith and tireless resolution -- evinced by the sheet number of letters he wrote to Elizabeth -- prevailed. In early autumn of 1846, when Barrett was forty, the couple were married in secret. Fearing the anger of Elizabeth's father, they fled across the Channel, across France, and into the warmth of the Mediterranean sun.

It must have been either that climate, or Robert's love, or both, that altered Elizabeth's supposedly sickly constitution. By the spring of 1847 she was off laudanum, in good color, and climbing mountains. "You are not improved," a friend remarked to her, "you are transformed!"

Barrett thought so, too. Amid all the sometimes tedious tears and dolors and self-questioning of the Sonnets from the Portuguese -- finally published from Italy in 1850, not long after Elizabeth had given birth to a son -- the ones that stand out are the one she wrote after she truly believed in the possibility of a new life.

I thought how once Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wish’d-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue
I saw in gradual vision through my tears
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years –
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
"Guess now who holds thee?" – "Death," I said. But there
The silver answer rang – "Not Death, but Love!"

Do we still believe in the transformative power of love? I can't help thinking that modern counselors would have suggested to Browning that Elizabeth was too much of a "project," too unworkable, too difficult. Kingsley Amis, writing in Lucky Jim, expressed the more contemporary certainty that it's "no use trying to save those who fundamentally would rather not be saved. To go on trying would be not merely be to yield to pity and sentimentality, but wrong and, to pursue it to its conclusion, inhumane." I am not sure most of us have much confidence, nowadays, in the ability of love to refashion, and liberate, the imprisoned soul.

But reading the Sonnets, one often feels that Elizabeth Barrett was among the unsaveables. And she was saved, by love. She died in 1861, in Robert's arms in the Florence of Petrarch (the sonneteer, and poet of love) and of Dante (the poet of new life). She is buried there in the English cemetery. She had lived longer than expected, had seen her fame in her native land continue to grow, and had almost become poet laureate of England. (Tennyson, more readily quotable by corrupt Illinois governors, got it instead.) Mostly, though, she had become happy.

"My future will not copy fair my past"---
I wrote that once; and thinking at my side
My ministering life-angel justified
The word by his appealing look upcast
To the white throne of God, I turned at last,
And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied
To angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried
By natural ills, received the comfort fast,
While budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim's staff
Gave out green leaves with morning dews impearled.
I seek no copy now of life's first half:
Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future's epigraph,
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!

We're romantics here, at Athens & Jerusalem, after all.

On Coraline

I just read the book, preparing to see the movie. It is a creepily effective little tale. Many of Gaiman's usual themes, but well done.

On Alternatives To The Stimulus

What should the conservative alternative to the stimulus be? Why, like the Democrats, doing everything we always wanted to do and justifying it as needed to get through economic hard times! (See, Bush Tax Cuts of 2001.) So, I have some thoughts - I don't know if they're particularly conservative, but they're mine. I know they're not particularly well-informed, because they're mine.

1. Accountability. Part of why the stimulus is so expensive is because there is massive fog to obscure accountability. We should follow the original policy of separating out all the toxic housing loans and having them taken over by some government holding company. This will let the banks have better balances, and function again, and allow us to know precisely which individuals took out stupid loans, and which banks made stupid loans, allowing accountability. If the government requires bank management and stockholders to lose equity as the price of that support, that's accountability too. Once the toxic loans are separated, our elected leaders can decide precisely how much support to give homeowners -- and be held accountable for that choice. All this ought to increase information transparency about the economy, increase confidence and decrease fear (FLG!), and make a smaller stimulus package necessary to get rid of fear.

(Spinning off the vast amount of real estate is a problem. At what rate do you do it? Should the government spin off housing to local governments? But cross that bridge when we come to it. One principle, though: priority is to unload the real estate, not to preserve housing prices.)

2. Lowering stakes. Really we should turf out millions of would-be homeowners, to hold them accountable, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. So convert their loans into percentage ownership of houses, and make it possible for them to sell out and recover some of their equity. (Shouldn't this be standard anyway?) Some sort of insurance for capital loss in housing might also help - increased tax breaks for capital loss in real estate for homeowners, plus perhaps an insurance plan like for farmers - a guarantee of 70% of the average price of your house over the last five years when you sell, perhaps? Whatever the arrangement, the compensation of homeowners should not take the form of keeping real estate prices up. As per Spengler and Steve Sailer, what we want is Affordable Family Formation - cheap real estate so that young families can afford to raise children.

3. Short-term stimulus. The point here seems to be to throw away money so as counter deflation/amortize it into long-term inflation. The general principle of "find stuff that is shovel-ready, and don't just label Democratic pork as 'shovel-ready,'" seems good. Goldberry suggests concentrating on deferred maintenance of highways, bridges, etc.; this seems good to me, since there ought to be fewer bureaucratic hurdles than for initiating new projects. Note, of course, that anything the government can spend money is narrowly focused on a few sectors - construction, bureaucracy, etc. - and that most people can't be stimulated directly. The options for getting to everyone else seem to be immediate tax rebates (Republican) and increased welfare payments (Democratic). I suppose I favor more of the former in the mix, but either way its just burning money, and we want to limit both as much as possible. Oh, and keep the Democrats from (re)building permanent welfare bureaucracies from the stimulus, as they seem like they want to do.

4. Long-term stimulus. I would favor energy infrastructure, information infrastructure, and skilled blue collar human capital. That is, build nuclear reactors and gas pipelines, add some more oil terminals (preferably away from the hurricane zones), more terminals to liquefy natural gas, maybe even a continued subsidy for ethanol and alternative energy research and production. But energy production and distribution strikes me as a good long-term investment. Ditto digging holes and putting more fiber optics in them - subsidize municipal bonds for that, I guess, so all our cities can be even more wired. And if we're training people, I suggest all those non-portable jobs where I'd just as soon there was more supply - plumber (Joe!), electrician, washing-machine repairman, etc., etc. Figure that people with college degrees can take care of themselves; provide good skills for those without.

5. Plan for the worst. What if the Japanese lost decade wasn't a bad policy choice, but the best possible solution after their bubble deflated? Maybe 0-1% growth for the next decade is the best alternative available, and we should plan how to go through it properly, pay off our debts in the least painful and unjust way possible, and prepare for the decade following.

Not that any of this is going to happen. But if anybody asks you what the Conservative Stimulus would like like -- these are Withywindle's first thoughts. Open for advice, correction, etc.; as I say, I'm not remotely an economist.

Peer Reviewing

Just got asked, for the first time ever, to be an outside reader for a journal! Whee! Another professional milestone. Sadly, the recommendation will be Reject. I am trying to figure out the politest way of saying "You need to read Withywindle; he's already dealt with the subject."

Proud to be American

As befits a toiler in the intellectual vineyards of antiquity, I'm a little behind the cultural curve. So I only just found out about Stephen Fowler of ABC's Wife Swap. I would have thought that, by agreeing to participate on Wife Swap, one thereby forfeited the right to look down on anyone -- including other Wife Swap participants -- ever again for the rest of time. But Mr. Fowler, formerly of the United Kingdom and now of the United States, had a different take on things. And now the country to which he immigrated, and which he seems to despise, is a little more United as men and women from all walks of life are coming together to hate Stephen Fowler so very, very much. Thanks, douchebag!

There's so much I could say about Mr. Fowler and his only-tolerable-by-comparison wife Renee Stephens.* I'm tempted to say, of course, that normal Americans finally got a glimpse of what "sophisticated" liberal, coastal elites really think about them. But that would be unfair, since most members of those elites whom I've met aren't anywhere near as a bad as the odious Mr. Fowler. (My first reaction, on watching the YouTube videos of this ass: Let's sacrifice him to our god!) And besides, a lot of my observations would be too obvious to make anyway.**

But I do want to comment on the exchange between Renee Stephens and her "temporary husband" Alan Long (himself no paragon) in which she denied being a "proud American." Since I don't want to watch the videos again, I'll just have to quote Ms. Stephens's first letter of apology on her own blog (I got it from Gawker), which makes pretty much the same points as she did in her face-off with Long:

Regarding the proud to be an American conversation. That was highly edited. For the record, I am proud of things that I have done, not things over which I had no control. I was extremely fortunate to be born American, but I didn't chose it, it's just how it happened. I do, however, greatly respect and identify with many American values, and love the way of life. I have lived in many countries and I chose to live in the US because I think it's the best place in the world for me to live. I LOVE living here. The opportunities here are amazing. The culture respects finding and pursuing your dreams, which to me is one of the most rewarding things in life. And free speech has it's upside too, most of the time!

My husband feels the same way about wanting to live in the US. That's why he chose to become an American citizen.

The gist seems to be that one shouldn't be a "proud American" since one shouldn't be proud of things over which one has no control.

Well, that seems to make sense but, upon further reflection, that's rather an odd way of looking at pride, isn't it? People are proud of things over which they have no control all the time -- looks and intelligence, for example, natural athletic prowess, or a great singing voice. True, one can screw up any of these advantages, but not screwing them up hardly seems like a sufficient basis for pride.

And then, as Aristotle remarks somewhere, there's such a thing as pride in something simply because it is one's own. Consider: would Ms. Stephens have balked inwardly if one of her trendy friends in Frisco had said, for example, "I'm proud to be a gay man?"*** What about someone who was proud of her Native American (i.e., American Indian) heritage?

Or, to make the point even more clearly, is one proud of the accomplishments of one's friends and family only because of the fact that one helped make them possible -- or because one chose one's friends or spouse so astutely? If I say to a student who has succeeded in a difficult endeavor, "I'm proud of you," am I really claiming some sort of credit? I never thought so.

So what's stopping Renee Stephens from saying she's a proud American? To be proud is often as simple as being pleased to recognize something or someone as connected to oneself, as part of one's own identity. When I say (and I would, if asked) that I'm a proud American, or that I'm proud to be American, I only mean that I'm not ashamed -- in fact, I'm happy -- to identify myself as a citizen of this Republic. Had I been born in some other nation, I could have been proud to be a Russian, a Persian, a Vietnamese. But I wasn't. And, unlike some Americans, I'm okay with that.

In an ideal would, everyone would be proud of their nationality. Granted, there are nations, and moments, that make that more difficult. 1945 was a year in which it was hard to be a proud German, or a proud Japanese, because there were real reasons to feel shame for the despicable recent actions of those two countries. I am not proud of everything that America has done. But on balance, and at present, I don't see any reason to be ashamed of America.

I think that's probably where I and Renee Stephens might differ. It's certainly where Michelle Obama and I apparently differed until about a year ago. Mrs. Obama was much more forthright than Ms. Stephens in her implication that she hadn't been proud of America because she was actually unhappy with America. Ms. Stephens uses what seem to me to be weasel words, suggesting that she is happy with America, just not proud of it because, well, she's didn't produce it herself. And she "LOVE[S] living here!" She loves "the way of life."

Does she love America, even if she's not a "proud American"? Who can say, really?

[*She kept her own name, but since her husband's name is Stephen it reminds me of the way in which the ancient Romans used to identify who a woman's husband was. Julius Caesar's wife Calpurnia would be Calpurnia Julii (Julius's Calpurnia), and I keep wanting to see Renee Stephens as "Renee Stephen's"]

[**Maybe just one? Okay. Wasn't it perfect that he's an environmentalist venture capitalist and she's some sort of new-agey weight loss guru? He's fighting problems that probably don't exist, and she's promising to fix the hitherto unfixable with Jedi mind tricks. All the scams of our age rolled into one smug little dyad.]

[***I'm assuming here that Fowler and Stephens actually have friends.]

Bilingualism

Economics to Sociology. Hat-tip to Bruinen.

Deep Thoughts About Conservatism

Strangely enough, few and far between. Not all that much has actually happened the last few months, and my views don't change all that rapidly. (Sometimes I discover viewlets lurking in odd corners of my soul, but they're not changes, just previously unarticulated.) And as noted before, Judging Obama a fortnight in seems premature. So then, what?

1) The decision by the Bush administration not to separate out the bad loans (as they said they would when they first asked Congress for money) into some sort of government bank, and relieve the banks of their toxic debt, remains inexplicable to me. Ditto the Obama administration's perseverance in that policy. Why don't they? Why isn't it even discussed? It seemed a sensible idea. Would the mere act of creating transparency about the bad loans send the financial system into a tailspin? What is going on?

I have a theory. Steve Sailer, corroborated by the Wall Street Journal, does seem to have established that this is indeed the Diversity Recession - that affirmative action policies by the government pressured the banks 1) to make imprudent housing loans to blacks and Hispanics, and 2) to lower lending standards period, so that more blacks and Hispanics would get housing loans. The collapse of the stock market, the recession, and the more than a trillion dollars in government spending to save everything from collapse can be attributed in good measure to affirmative action policies. And nobody in the political elite wants to admit it, and they're trying to fudge desperately. Separating out the toxic loans would allow for an accounting -- including precisely how many bad loans were made to blacks and Hispanics. And the politics of that disclosure are more toxic than the loans - hence the choice instead to burden the taxpayer with unfocused government support of banks, and a preference to inflate down the value of the toxic loans - an arbitrary tax, maximally damaging to the economy, but politically convenient.

By the by, when ever anybody says "What does affirmative action cost you?", we now have an answer. It's cost the nation's taxpayers several trillion dollars in collapsed stock prices, inflation, and government spending, all of which will constitute (if there is indeed a bailout of homeowners) a massive net transfer of wealth from white Americans to black and Hispanic Americans. Really, there should be massive anger at what affirmative action has cost this country. I feel some anger myself.

The responsibility for this debacle I take to be that of the left and the Democrats first -- but the Republican elites, by their endorsement and cover-up of Democratic affirmative-action policies, now share responsibility and blame. And, I suppose, the people of America writ large. After all, we voted for the bums.

2) For the premature judgment of Obama? Obama seems to be Winning Ugly in his first few political brawls. As I recollect matters, Bush muscled through his initial tax cut in much the same way. Since Bush had less strength in the Senate, I think the comparison favors Bush on points.

3) What should conservatives do in the Age of Rampant Democrats? Some garden-tending, to while away the time. Consider: after their defeat in the English Civil War, conservatives invented 1) modern fishing, with Izaak Walton and The Compleat Angler, and 2) English folk-dancing, with John Playford and The Compleat Dancing Master. Not bad. Winston Churchill, turfed out of office after World War II, spent more time writing his memoirs of the war than leading the Conservative Opposition. (To the frustration of his party lieutenants.) But Labor wasn't going to fall anytime soon, and now we have several dem thick Churchill books from the late 1940s. But Jonathan Swift wrote savage satires, somewhat of man, but even more so of the Whigs, permanently the party of government; hence our modern-day Swifts, like Alpheus, are not wasting their time by skewering our Latter-Day Whigs; one day, after all, his blog-posts will be read in English literature classes on "The Age of Blogs."

4) Replying to Alpheus, on why academics and journalists think alike: add to the analysis national mobility, where a professor in Podunk U, and a journalist at the Podunk Times, always have an eye for Harvard and the New York Times as career destinations; their socialization is in a national profession, not a local institution. Compare: the institutional loyalties and cubbyholes of Cambridge and Oxford preserved intellectual pluralism in early modern England, against the purging efforts of several monarchs. Podunk-loyal professors would vary more in their thought.

5) More thoughts you want? I wait upon events; so should you. I think much the same as I did a few years ago; I am merely resigned to having people I disagree with, often strongly, have their hands on the levers of power for the next few years. Give me time, and I'm sure something will outrage me.

Profiles in Democracy (UPDATED)

"I do not blame the persons who have reopened the case of the Mytilenians, nor do I approve the protests which we have heard against important questions being frequently debated. I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usually goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind. As for the argument that speech ought not to be the exponent of action, the man who uses it must be either senseless or personally interested: senseless if he believes it is possible to deal with the future through any other medium; interested if wishing to carry a disgraceful measure and doubting his ability to speak well in a bad cause, he thinks to frighten opponents and hearers by a well-aimed calumny."
--Diodotus the son of Eucrates. Speech before the Assembly at Athens (Summer, 427 B.C.)

"We've had a good debate, but the time for talking is over. Folks here in Fort Myers and across America need help, and the time for action is now. The Americans I've met understand that even with this plan, our recovery will likely be measured in years, not weeks or months - but what they don't have patience for is more waiting on folks in Washington to get this done."
--Barack Obama the son of Barack Obama. Speech in Ft. Myers, Florida (February 10, A.D. 2009)

UPDATE: Thomas Sowell offers an explanation for the haste:

The great sense of urgency of the Obama administration to get legislation to authorize slow-moving spending projects may seem inconsistent. But the urgency is real, even if the reasons given are not. The worse-case scenario for the administration would be to have the economy begin to recover on its own before this massive spending bill is passed, reducing their chances of creating the kind of politically directed economy they want.

Why The Elites Think Alike

For years, I was puzzled by the surprising extent to which the journalistic and academic elites seem to march in intellectual lockstep. Why, I used to wonder, do so many of these highly intelligent and ambitious people think alike? Specifically, why do so many of them share a particular leftish world view seemingly unconnected to their areas of professional competence?

The answer given by many members of the elites is that they're all so smart that they just tend to get the right answers. Thus, one popular explanation among left-leaning academics for the dearth of conservatives in academia is that a person intelligent enough to make it in academia probably wouldn't be so dull-witted as to embrace a conservative world-view. There's a superficial plausibility to such an explanation. Truth is singular; error is multifarious. If everyone agrees, isn't it likely that they're agreeing on the Truth, with a capital T?

Personally, though, I'm pretty sure that such an explanation doesn't hold water. The most impressive people I went to grad school with were actually closet conservatives (two of these have quickly ended up with tenure track jobs at absolutely top-tier schools: easily the best career outcomes of anyone from my cohort) and wherever I look it seems like the most talented professors tend to be either conservative or the political equivalent of freethinkers. But such folks remain a small minority, and they're generally quiet about their political beliefs. (I should say that many folks in academia with conservative leanings simply "pass" and are assumed to be liberal; since I'm a fellow conservative, I recognize them, and they recognize me. Conservatives in the media and academia often joke that they have their own signals by which they know one another, much as gays in heterosexual society did a generation or more ago. In my experience, there's a lot of truth to this.)

Anyway, I think there's a much more interesting explanation for why the information elites think alike. It's that conformism facilitates access to these groups. Someone who either naturally has or somehow acquires the habits of personality characteristic of a particular group dramatically increases his or her chances of successful membership in that group. I've posted before about the idea that the best way to maintain in-group solidarity is for members of a group to hold vehement beliefs at variance with the perceived norms of the larger society, and I've also noted the fact that academia (and I think this also goes for journalism and the arts) is a class distinguished by a whole way of life, unlike medicine or law or engineering. People are either born to this class or they take on its political beliefs in the same way that they adopt its tastes and styles.

But why should academia and journalism and the information elites be special? Why don't doctors and engineers form their own little classes with a shared culture? The most likely answer, I think, is that among the information elites your job performance and advancement is measured to such a large extent by the judgment of other members of your class. And this is for two reasons. First, journalists and academics have a very hard time striking out on their own: unless independently wealthy, they usually have to belong to a large organization and to a rather closely-knit body of professionals. A doctor or lawyer who's good at what he or she does has far more options than an equally competent opinion columnist or historian. Second, it's much harder to measure excellence in media or academia by objective standards, so the crucial standard ends up being the regard of your colleagues. (See this comment on an earlier post from David at Photon Courier.) In academia, the closest thing to an objective standard we have is student evaluations, a famously tricky measure, and even these don't matter nearly as much as how well or poorly your colleagues think of you. It's much easier to discriminate between different degrees of talent in doctors and engineers. By their works you shall know them, and the quality of their works tends to have a direct impact on the people who pay them. If Professor Fustian has published a very bad article on Hazlitt in the Journal of Obscure British Literature (JOBL), it doesn't have nearly the same impact on his standing and compensation as it does when Dr. Misfeasance goes and amputates a healthy limb.

I should probably stress that I'm not saying people in media and higher education are just talentless hacks who've gotten where they are only by virtue of whom they know. There are other standards -- serious standards -- that have to be met. But lots of people who meet these standards don't succeed in academia or journalism. In fact, I would guess that these professions have an unusually high rate of dropouts and failures. It's not at all uncommon for talented scholars to utterly fail to make it, while apparent mediocrities secure themselves decent careers.

I'm also not saying that there aren't such things as academics and journalists who really excel by virtue of brilliance or energy or some other personal excellence. Alpheus envies these people, and sort of wishes they'd go away so that he could feel better about himself. But exist they do. As I said above, however, such folks are exactly the people who tend to depart from the ideologies and habits of their profession. Take my own little region of academia, Classics. Quick: name a famous living classicist.

Did you say Donald Kagan? Victor Davis Hanson? Peter Green? They're all conservatives, rather alienated from their profession for that very reason, and yet I think they've won the most public recognition of any classicists still drawing breath.*

Fame, of course, is not a perfect criterion of greatness. In fact, one could argue that being an outlier in your profession increases the chances you'll be known outside it. Nevertheless, I repeat my contention that an unusually high proportion of the exceptional people in academia are eccentrics who lack the standard-issue set of academic values. And again, it seems to me that this is best explained by the fact that the standard-issue set of academic values is precisely a substitute for genius, an alternative path to success.

As Elwood Dowd says in Harvey, you have to be either oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. For the majority in academia and journalism, who aren't oh-so-smart, the standard-issue set of academic values is a way of getting ahead by being agreeable instead. Not that all these folks consciously chose the leftish prejudices that have assisted their advancement, but they gained a considerable advantage by virtue of possessing these values.

Some readers probably will object at this point that I haven't even tried to answer the really interesting question, namely: why a leftish value set? Why not a rightish one? I have an answer to this**, but it's a subject for another post.

[*Other possibilities: Erich Segal, who's famous not for his work on Greek tragedy, but for writing his own tragedy of a different sort; Martha Nussbaum, a public intellectual who admittedly is a more conventional liberal academic. Am I missing someone? Mary Beard? Mary Lefkowitz?]

[**One of the nice things about a blog is that one can always have an answer to everything. In the real world, people want to smack you if you pull this crap. And properly so.]

Jonathan Rose Article

The latest Perspectives magazine (distributed by the AHA) has a good article by Jonathan Rose on how they redid the Drew University History PhD program - "Rethinking Graduate Education in History," 47: 2 (February 2009), pp. 35-37. Not online or I'd link to it. The topic headings are: 1. Small is Beautiful. 2. Small is Innovative. 3. End the Exploitation of Teaching Assistants, 4. Don't Let Them Take Forever. 5. Do Away With Examinations. 6. Involve Other Departments. 7. Serve Other Programs. 8. Play Only to Your Strengths. 9. Train Your Students to be Public Intellectuals.

On Etiquette

Specifically to Abstractart, but of general application:

1. You seem more interested in venting old anger than in conversing with us.

2. Strangely enough, we too oppose ill-thought out wars with vague excuses, done for the sole purpose of killing swarthy foreigners. Even more strangely, we don't think that criticism applies to any recent events, and aren't likely to be convinced otherwise just by you saying so.

3. We will delete all further comments that do not assume a minimum of good faith on our part, and on the part of conservatives generally.

4. Because it is tedious to fight old wars endlessly, and all your comments are doing are setting up the old wars again.

5. It is an exercise to the commenter to figure out how to dissent with what we say in a friendly enough fashion that they will not get deleted. We assure you that it is possible.

6. Doubtless this means nasty things will get said about the left on this blog, and the frustrated commentator will be deleted from time to time. Alas, for the injustice of the world. But it is our blog.

Pal Joey

I just saw Pal Joey at the Roundabout. What an oddly bleak musical. No uplift, no romantic conclusion, just a slice of life about a loser and his ladies. Not even really memorable music -- although "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" ain't bad. Surely most musicals in 1940 weren't this astringent? Not likable, but memorable.

Lives of the Great

There are lots of stories of Winston Churchill's wit and kindness, and lots of Orson Welles clips on YouTube ("ahhhh...the...French champagne...!"). But this, I think, is my favorite in both categories. Part of the fun is the sheer oddity of imagining these two guys knowing each other. Of course, once you think about it, they had some things in common. Especially their fondness for the French champagne.*



[*Churchill once asked his friend Frederick Lindemann, one of the geniuses behind the development of radar, to compute how many boxcars full of champagne Churchill had downed in his life. "Only part of one," replied the scientist. "So little time," Churchill murmured.]

Dreadful Truths

Alpheus is a composite of several real conservative classicists. Details of his life, his writing style, and his sense of humor, have been altered to protect the innocent. It's like what they do in the New Yorker.

Withywindle only reads blog comments. That way, you know what was said in the original blog-post, but you don't have to waste time reading them.

On Expense

Abstractart refers to the "waste" of money in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put aside for the moment that this assumes the point at issue: I must confess that I find repellent the entire rhetorical tack of opposing wars on the ground of cost. I know, I know - it's useful to persuade those people who care more about expense than the moral and strategic arguments, and indeed opportunity cost is indeed an issue of significant moral and strategic weight. I know all that with my head ... and that you can cite expense as a reason for opposition, and have other, more worthy reasons as well ... yet my heart cannot but feel contempt for the bean-counters who would weigh pennies, either with our security or other people's liberty. I am reminded once again of Philip Larkin's "Homage to a Government":

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

The argument bears a remarkable resemblance to a Carlylean Pig-Philosophy - no fighting, please, we need the money to live a little bit longer, stuffing our gullets, eating and excreting, and what else are we living for? Then, too, there is the implication that it would be fine and dandy to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., if it could be done on the cheap. Yes, the anti-war argument of cost can be made somewhat better than this - but not, I think, by much. All in all, I think I prefer the pure folly of the moral argument against our wars.

On Political Consequences

This to follow up on my previous post against Stuttaford. I imagine Labor will get turfed out of office at the next election, simply because they've been in power for so long, and times will be bad. I imagine the French conservatives are likely to be tossed out too. Everywhere, the in party will be tossed out regardless of affiliation, save where the ins are unusually charismatic and effective, and the outs unusually repellent and ineffective. America will be an interestingly marginal case come 2012, since the economic collapse preceded Obama's inauguration by so little time; it's uncertain whether Americans will regard the Democrats as responsible for the bad times.

All this against Stuttaford's simpleminded screed against Labor - and against all simpleminded screeds, left and right, attempting to say The Other Party is at fault. It's not just that Stuttaford is wrong -- the entire political class of the West was in favor of spending too much money -- indeed, the entire population of the West was in favor of spending too much money -- but also that his screed is largely pointless. The people will vote against the in-party because they're the in-party, not on ideological grounds. Which strikes me as healthy voting behavior, all in all.

Great News, America!

Readers of Athens & Jerusalem might expect Withywindle and me to be against the stimulus package. After all, it's almost pure pork, and it's being rammed through the Congress with unseemly haste and minimal real debate. It's the ultimate in Big Government, which Withywindle and I have generally opposed.

Until now, that is.

Let me explain. To do this, I need to step back for a moment. Our regular readers (all twelve of you) know that Withy and I never stop looking for ways to make Athens and Jerusalem better and, more importantly, profitable. Not all of our efforts have panned out. The Spambot project, for example, was sidelined by a series of technical glitches, and Blogger apparently won't allow us to create little pop ups telling people they've won prizes and now will they please enter their credit card numbers so we can verify their identity.

But Rome wasn't built in a day. And at last, it seems, our perseverance is finally about to pay off.

About ten months ago, I managed to persuade Withywindle that Shirebourn didn't actually need a college fund and that we ought to invest in a Washington lobbyist. I made up my end by agreeing to contribute the $500 a month I normally spend on Old Crow and Dungeons & Dragons miniatures. Also, I sold grades to students. And defrauded elderly pensioners. And faked voter registrations for ACORN. But it was all in a good cause.

Anyway, Withywindle and I have been running up credit card debt while our lobbyist made the rounds in Washington, working to persuade our demented overlords elected representatives that Athens & Jerusalem was vital to the health of the American economy. And we got lucky. It seems that "at no time in American history" (our lobbyist's words) has it been easier to convince congresspeople to squander money. Pondering that fact made us smile.

Now, with the apparent defection of a handful of RINOs to support the stimulus bill -- thank you, Susan Snowe Specter! -- its passage seems assured. And I can safely announce that we here at A&J have our own line item, somehow overlooked even by the bill's critics. I'm guessing this is because it was too small to bother with. Our tiny share of the stimulus is only 35 million dollars (only about .004% of the total or so*).

And so begins the golden age. Shirebourn will get to go to college, after all, and I can give up my life of crime and complete my drunken recreation of the Battle of Helm's Deep. Mostly though, the $35,000,000 for Athens & Jerusalem will benefit America. Because the ripples from this stimulus payment will yield jobs throughout the economy. This money will, for example, enable us finally consider making the move to Wordpress, thus creating, we estimate, more than 7,000 jobs for hardworking Americans and/or itinerant undocumented residents of the United States. At least another 14,000 estimated jobs will be created by my plans to buy myself a solid gold cocktail shaker studded with Sri Lankan sapphires and a bathrobe made from real Siberian tiger skin. Meanwhile, we're thinking of hiring an intern. That alone should create, oh, say 2,500 new jobs or so.

In the short term, of course, some of these jobs may be created in places like Sri Lanka and Siberia. We may even outsource the intern job to Bombay. But eventually the dollars we spend will inevitably be recycled back into the U.S. economy in the form of much-needed foreign investments in sophisticated mortgage-backed securities. (This is assuming, of course, that they don't pass into the hands of the People's Bank of China, which will seal them for an indefinite period in a secret vault deep beneath Nine-Glories Mountain.)

As for our readers, you will all receive between $20,000 and $95,000 apiece, depending on whether we're actually on your blogroll and how often you link to us. Readers without blogs will be eligible for a Certificate of Appreciation and a gift basket containing cheese, crackers, smoked sausage, miscellaneous Obama memorabilia, and lots of fake plastic grass. Share the wealth is our motto -- just like it's Uncle Sam's.

Let me say once again how happy I am to be able to report this wonderful news to our readers. Assuming some America-hating obstructionists like Mitch McConnell don't screw things up at the last minute, you can look forward to big, expensive changes here at Athens & Jerusalem. And our country can look forward to a bright new dawn of renewed, expensive optimism and a revived, expensive economy. Also a gigantic millstone of debt clapped onto the necks of future generations and an era of Government So Big That The Word "Big" Doesn't Even Begin To Describe It Anymore...but for the moment let's accentuate the positives, shall we? I bet Siberian tiger fur feels really, really nice.

[*Seriously, though, isn't that just un-freaking believable? I had to keep doing the math over and over to make sure I was getting it right.]

Andrew Stuttaford, Always Wrong

Once again, Andrew Stuttaford proves himself the weakest link on NRO. I even mistrust his movie reviews, on general principles. Here we have a column about how everything wrong with the UK economy is Labor's fault; everything would have been just ducky if Thatcher were now in the thirtieth year of her prime ministry. Come on. Yes, things might be marginally better in the UK under a Tory government; yes, Labor has been drifting from the Thatcherite consensus the last few years -- but not that far. Britain's having troubles because they depend heavily on their financial sector - and Britain has geared its economic policy to the financial sector since the 1980s, the 1930s, or the 1690s, depending on how you measure things. The commitment to finance is about as ingrained a national economic policy as Britain has, and in a year when the banks are imploding, Britain can't help but suffer. I'm perfectly willing to read measured critiques of Labor, but Stuttaford writes nonsense on stilts.

If You Think the Word is thing...

Okay, I'm taking a page from FLG's book and posting about my language pet peeves -- specifically, my peeviest pet of all.

On NRO's The Corner, Stephern Spruiell quoted a Fox News anchor quoting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as saying, "if this group of 17 bipartisan senators think they're going to change the bill substantially, they've got another thing coming." This apparently touched off a storm of emails about whether the correct expression is "another thing coming" or "another think coming."

Look, Judas Priest, an apparent majority of my fellow Americans, and a majority of Google hits notwithstanding, another thing coming is wrong. I vow to go to my grave saying think.

It's not just that the authorities agree on think as being the older and more correct version of the expression.* It's that another think coming is quaint, colloquial, and clever. It takes the verb think in the if-clause (which the classically-educated and snooty call a protasis) and deliberately misuses it as noun in the then-clause (or, the apodosis). It's one of those fun and delightful idioms in which English abounds.

By contrast, another thing coming has nothing clever about it. It sounds vague ("what thing is coming?") and, to my ears, is almost vulgar in its inarticulateness.** The vagueness also makes it seem more angry and menacing than another think coming, which suggests the speaker is merely amused by the wrongness of the person or persons to whom he's referring.

So. So there. I'm going off to breathe into a paper bag.

[*Granted, it seems a little odd that an unvoiced consonant ending (-nk) should become corrupted into an voiced consonant ending (-ng) before another unvoiced consonant (c-). But, trying both expressions on the tongue, it seems that the contrast between voiced and unvoiced makes thing coming easier to say than think coming, which requires special effort not to turn into thinkoming. Sorry. Ancient learning ancient Greek requires you to think about things like this.]

[**Let's remember the (supposed) words of Dan Quayle: "Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."]

Full Disclosure

A slight change in our format now allows you to know up front whether a post is by me (Alpheus -- but, ah!...you already saw that!) or by Withywindle. This is something that Withy, perhaps worried that people might think he was the author of my poorly proofread, profanity-laced bloviations about "reason" and "science," asked for a long time ago.

It's occurred to me more than once that it might be fun to have a day (April 1st?) where each of us posts as a caricature of the other. But would we still be on speaking terms afterward?

Wetweat! Wetweat!

Withywindle, weading on the web, would wike to weitewate that Afghanistan is worthless in itself, and only worth fighting for insofar as 1) it aids our prestige; and 2) it aids our policy toward Pakistan and Iran. Certainly it would be extraordinarily foolish (MR. PRESIDENT!) to forfeit victory in Iraq - which has oil and strategic location - to pursue a useless victory in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, our enemies - Russia, Iran, (sotto voce) Pakistan - are going bankrupt even faster than we are. If we stick it out a year or two, the Taliban may lose most of its support from its foreign patrons, so maybe we should stay around a bit longer. And does world economic collapse reduce the demand for drugs? If so, another financial advantage to us.

But generally: Kabul is not worth the bones of a Canadian grenadier, much less an American marine.

Why Couldn't He Have Looked Like Jane Fonda?

Over at Patum Peperium, Mrs. P. suggests a physical resemblance between Barack Obama and Dick Van Dyke (scroll down to the bottom to see photos). She may be onto something.

But I'm convinced that the actor Obama really evokes, not only physically but in his whole demeanor -- and in his politics! -- is Henry Fonda. In fact, I think movie roles like Fonda's laid some of the groundwork for the Cult of Obama. Fonda played a U.S. president at least twice, most notably in Fail Safe, and he made a career out of appearing in roles where he was the Voice of Liberal Reason standing up to the irrational prejudice of men like Ed Begley, Sr., in Twelve Angry Men. Those of us who grew up watching movies and TV have actually been programmed to think that men who look like Fonda are decent and sane, while guys who look like Begley are ignorant, angry bigots.

Of course, as we learn in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, in which Fonda plays Secretary of State nominee Robert Leffingwell, apparently decent and sane liberalism can sometimes mask a history of dangerous flirtations with the Far Left. I'm not sure why I mention this....*

The two photos below only show the men's faces, but their body types are similar too.

Juror #8:


President #44:



[*Seriously, though, if you've never seen Advise and Consent, rent it now -- it's the most unfairly neglected film about American politics, probably because the conservatives are the good guys and so-called liberals are the ones trying to use a man's gay past to destroy him. This is the same reason they'll probably never make a big-budget movie of the Hiss-Chambers case, which seems to have influenced Advise and Consent.]

The Audacity of Culpability

I have to give Obama points for repeatedly admitting, in a very direct language, to having "screwed up" in backing the Daschle nomination. (He was especially emphatic on CNN.) Too often politicians refuse to admit error, or only pretend to do so while in fact shirking blame onto someone else.* Of course, Obama had the distinct advantage of knowing that the press wouldn't use his admission to pillory him; a Republican president could have no such confidence -- in fact he could be pretty certain such a confession would turn into a gleeful media feeding frenzy. Still, many other politicians who have also been darlings of the media have had trouble admitting they were wrong about anything, no matter how outrageous their lapses in judgment. Obama's mea culpas (meae culpae?) were classy and refreshing. And, having said what he's said, the president makes it a little more costly for him to make a similar error in the future.

In an ideal world, Obama's admission of error on Daschle would be followed by the words, "And I was wrong about Geithner, too: I've asked for his resignation." But this is not, alas, an ideal world. We take what we can get.

[*You know the kind of thing: "I was wrong to trust people who did not have my interests at heart...", "in my haste to save our great country, I failed exercise caution...", etc. The equivalent of telling a job interviewer that your major vice is a compulsion to just give and give and give.]

Lessons

What can we learn from the Christian Bale meltdown (HUGE CONTENT WARNING)?

(1) David Mamet's dialogue is truer to life than I ever imagined.

(2) Bale should never again be cast as the lead in any movie with a name like Equilibrium.

(3) All that stuff they told Alpheus in Sunday School about a gentle answer turning away wrath? Big F---ing Lie.

On Being An Auto-Didact

We all are self-directed in our reading to some extent, if we have any spark of intellectual curiosity and individuality. The criticism of the auto-didact is of having no sense (or interest) in the tradition that has spoken before him on the issue, of entering into meaningful conversation with them, and no sense of proportion - no sense of the (un-)importance of what he's read in comparison with everything else on God's green earth; a man of parochial knowledge unaware that his parish is not the universe. (See Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, on the point of an education in the liberal arts - a sense of proportion.) Proportion and knowledge of tradition intertwined, of course; you know how to keep your own importance, and the importance of your own ideas, in perspective, when you know how often they've been articulated and refuted before.

As scholars, we have a somewhat skewed point of view on this subject. We are highly aware of the traditions and the proportions within our particular fields - and, famously, comically liable to forget the nature of the world outside our specialties, to impute far too much importance to our niches. Our failings mirror those of the auto-didact; we both depart from a sense of proportion.

I am an embarrassed meditator on this subject since I combine some traits of auto-didact and scholar. My ambitions involve the attempt at grand syntheses across a great many fields about which I know little or nothing. I depend on the rejections for my articles to tell me which half-dozen major authorities in the field I am utterly ignorant of. And even when I do get accepted for publication, I am aware that knowledge of - for idle example - the rhetorical aspects of many thinkers and writers, is not a substitute for general knowledge of any one of them. My scholarly strategy is to put a veneer of professional scholarly knowledge upon auto-didactic reading.

Imagine, dear reader, that this affects my blogging too. Note, for example, that I have blogged endlessly about Gadamer, barely having read any scholarly literature on him - and that I had never even heard of "moral realism" until Andrew mentioned it. I just looked it up on the net. Ah, fond dreams of universal knowledge!

Attitude supposedly makes the difference. I am aware of my limitations, I know my ignorance, my search for new points of view marks me off from the auto-didact, blah, blah, blah. But time is limited, my interests are not overwhelmingly broad, I rather think I shall never know much more about moral realism than the name. (Though I suppose knowing the name is a step up in the world; see, conversations on the blogosphere improve the mind!) So, I suppose the FDA - Folly & Didacticism Administration - enjoins that I acknowledge that I too am something of a scholarly auto-didact; reader, beware.

Qualms

Jay Nordlinger, covering the Davos World Economic Forum for National Review Online, remarks on an odd event at this year's forum: a "Refugee Run." Here's the email Nordlinger received:

Invitation to an event you will never forget: EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A REFUGEE IN DAVOS!

During this year’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, we would like to invite you to an experience unlike any other on the agenda: an opportunity to step into the world of conflict and experience life as a refugee.

Just five minutes’ walk from the Congress Centre [the main building in town], you can enter a simulated environment that will thrust you into a war zone. You will meet a rebel attack, navigate a mine field and battle life in a refugee camp. (Spoiler alert: No harm will come to you!)

A debrief will follow in which you will discuss your experience.

Nordlinger asks, "Shouldn’t the powers of sympathy preclude the necessity for such a 'run'?"

My own first instinct was to think that this thing must be some sort of ironic satire. Surely that "spoiler alert" gives the whole thing away -- reveals how impossible it is for the world's most powerful and well-heeled elites to actually step into the shoes of refugees*, how huge the gulf that divides the Davos attendees from the displaced people of Darfur or Somalia or the Congo?

But no: a little googling, and I discover this thing is real. It's actually being done in partnership with the of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Here's one of the flyers. And here's development economist William Easterly of Aid Watch reacting with the same skepticism I felt:

Of course, I understand that there were good intentions here, that you really want rich people to have a consciousness of tragedies elsewhere in the world, and mobilize help for the victims. However, I think a Refugee Theme Park crosses a line that should not be crossed. Sensationalizing and dehumanizing and patronizing results in bad aid policy – if you have little respect for the dignity of individuals you are trying to help, you are not going to give THEM much say in what THEY want and need, and how you can help THEM help themselves?

Some commenters on Easterly's blog, though, accuse Easterly of being the one who's sensationalizing and patronizing, guilty of moral posturing about the dubious ethics of the event. Some others either felt that the simulation was likely to be valuable or, having actually participated in it, had good things to say:

Having now participated in the Refugee Run, along with others who before doing so had little interest in refugees and little knowledge about how devastating a refugee's life is, I can tell you this run completely changed our perceptions and moved us toward concrete action on their behalf. You see, it has taken people from inactivity and made them activists, it has taken people from cold disengagement to warmly integrate the trials of the homeless into their secure world in order to make a positive difference, and it has taken the needs of the refugees previously considered irrelevant and made them relevant. This is not a bad thing, not exploitation, but a good and necessary step in the right direction, even though it is still not enough.

And this commenter is not alone. Other comments on Easterly's site and the brief comments quoted here (admittedly the web site of the organizers of the Refugee Run) suggest that, for some significant number of people, the "refugee run" was a step in the direction of greater engagement with the problem of refugees. And it's hard to argue with that.

So I guess I'm ambivalent. It's not unreasonable that what seems superfluous or even obnoxious to some is actually eye-opening to others. On the other hand, it's hard for me to entirely shake the idea that there's something inappropriate for people with multiple homes and servants to spend an afternoon pretending to be victims of war or famine. I feel the same way about those exhibits at children's museums where you navigate an artificial environment in a wheelchair. If there are moral problems inherent in telling jokes about people of lower status, there may also be moral problems with acting out the lives of folks you wouldn't actually be willing to trade places with.

Do those problems go away if the role player is fully conscious of the limitations of his attempt to understand someone else? If some people approach something like the Refugee Run in a spirit of moral tourism, does that matter if other people genuinely gain awareness and become more active in trying to help real-life refugees? I simply don't know.

[*A bad metaphor, I admit, given that shoes would be luxuries to many of the world's refugees.]

Recommended Reading

At Overcoming Bias, über-rationalist and transhumanist Eliezer Yudkowsky is serializing a science fiction story of his own composition. I've found Yudkowsky's previous efforts at fiction kind of annoying, and the title, "Three Worlds Collide," seemed unpromising. But I started perusing the first chapter, and it drew me in -- well-paced, morally serious, and funny without the excessive dorkiness that often mars amateur sci-fi. Oh, and way smart (with Yudkowsky this goes without saying).

Highly recommended, especially since it deals mainly with big issues of morality and rationality that we've batted around here at A&J from time to time. I'd love to know what Withywindle and some of our regulars think of it.

The Limits of Acceptable Humor

I haven't watched Saturday Night Live in years, and I actually don't think it's been really funny since before I started watching it in the first place. But today, Allahpundit at Hot Air takes note of a segment on last night's show where they make fun of New York Governor David Paterson. I didn't find it funny. What I quite figure out is whether or not I'm justified in being offended by the numerous jokes about Paterson's impaired vision.

I like tasteless humor as much as the next person. Well, a lot more that the next person, actually. But jokes about blindness make me uncomfortable. In general, I don't like humor that seems to rest on the presumption of fundamental inequality between human beings. If you're going to laugh at someone's flaws, laugh at the flaws of the powerful: laugh at sleazy lawyers, bimbo beauty queens, lecherous politicians, vacuous Hollywood types. The world offers plenty of material for comedy without us having to ridicule people who are already on the lower rungs of society.

Now, of course you could argue that Paterson is powerful: he's a governor, after all. You could argue that SNL is making fun of Paterson, who just happens to be blind, not mocking the blind in general. But blindness is a permanent condition, a part of someone's identity. It's not the same as laughing at someone's lack of self-awareness or foolishness or even clumsiness, especially when the person being mocked is otherwise successful or secure.*

Before I go any further, let me say that I don't want to come off as holier-than-thou. Believe me, I've laughed at plenty of things I have no right to laugh at. I've enjoyed plenty of episodes of South Park and Family Guy. I know the major Helen Keller jokes.** My first reaction to hearing about the death of Rosa Parks was to say it was a shame that they'd probably force her to ride in the back of the hearse. Believe me, I've got a lot to answer for.

And I even wonder whether the distinction I'm drawing is to some extent artificial. If I say, you can mock people's flaws, but not the ones that are essential, irremediable parts of themselves, well, isn't that a lot broader than it seems? What about people who are genuinely dumb? Alcoholics? People with physical ailments? Fat people? People with speech impediments? It's awfully hard to know where to draw the line.

Likewise, if I say, you have greater leeway to mock people of higher status, that may be slippery too. I'm sure Michael Jackson is hurt and angry about all the jokes concerning his disastrous plastic surgeries. No doubt that Miss Teen South Carolina who botched the answer about kids' geography education is going to feel horrible shame about it for the rest of her life. (Confession: I watched it like three times.) High status people have feelings too. There are lawyers who are offended by lawyer jokes, and blondes who get really upset about blonde jokes.

This raises the question of whether one thinks we shouldn't mock certain people because we don't want to hurt their feelings or because to mock them somehow wrong even apart from their feelings. Because if we're just trying to spare people's feelings, then it's probably fairly safe to make fun of blind people on a TV show they're unlikely to watch. (I guess we can make fun of deaf people on the radio. But not vice versa.) We could also, by the same logic, probably make fun of people with low IQs because they frequently never appreciate how slow they are. We could make fun of anyone for anything behind their backs.

But I guess I tend to think that the traditional limits on certain kinds of humor aren't just to spare people's feelings. It's no longer considered okay to tell racist jokes when there are no blacks around. And the more I think about it, I'm not even sure limits on humor are mainly to spare people's feelings. Analyzing my own ideas of what's okay and what's not, I think the real issue (for me at least) is what kind of messages we're sending to one another about the kind of society we want to create.

My instinct tells me that lawyers and blondes should get over it, because society still treats lawyers and blondes pretty well and there's no real danger that jokes about lawyers and blondes are going to change that. But jokes about blindness or other handicaps affect how we see people with those handicaps. If we can mock blindness but not, say, ethnicity, doesn't that suggest a certain status hierarchy? (Arethusa has already commented on this. In fact, rereading her post, I see that it was inspired by a previous occasion on which SNL made fun of David Paterson. Wow. Is this going to be a running thing? Are they that hard up for material?) It seems to me as if restrictions on humor are really all about an effort -- however sporadic -- to keep it from becoming too acceptable to look down on our fellow human beings.

And if that's true, it suggests ways to resolve the slipperiness I mentioned above. Jokes about people doing or saying dumb things are okay; jokes about people of conspicuously limited intelligence (the mentally handicapped) aren't. Jokes about being drunk are okay. Jokes about alcoholics aren't. Jokes about gaining weight are okay. Jokes about fat people aren't. All these groups of people are in some way already marginalized, and we don't need to increase that marginalization with jokes at their expense. By the same logic, jokes about a blind governor's cocaine use are okay, but jokes in which he goes from being a particular human being to being a generic blind person are pretty iffy.

In a way, this all goes back to a discussion on an recent post about how we need to love people as people, and not see them through the lens of an abstraction. Likewise for disdain or derision or contempt. As I think about what bothers me about making fun of Governor Paterson's blindness, I guess it seems to me that the danger is that certain jokes will encourage us to look down on certain classes of human beings because it becomes a little easier to see them as something other than human beings. And if a joke runs a serious risk of doing that, then maybe it's going too far.

[*It's also not the same as when someone laughs at their own disabilities. That's why one of the funniest blindness jokes in history may be Horatio Nelson's spyglass stunt with his missing eye at Copenhagen in 1801. (Unfortunately, the link tells you what Nelson actually said. In the usual version of the story he merely says, "I don't see a signal," which is way funnier.) Paterson with the binoculars in the SNL sketch seemed like a cheap knockoff.]

[**though in my opinion the funniest one is "Why was Helen Keller such a bad driver?" Answer: "She was a woman." Discuss.]

Sour Grapes

I don't know why I continue to expect any fair-minded coverage of anything from the New York Times. I really don't know why I still read it, except that everybody else does.

Today's piece on the provincial elections in Iraq tries to turn a triumph of democracy and civic engagement into a moment at once elegiac, dread-laden, and illustrative of American failures in Mesopotamia. The whole piece is so clearly focused on downplaying the high turnout and peaceful voting, the growing support for secular and centrist candidates and the eclipse of extremists, that it's hard to quote just one or two "worst" paragraphs:

American helicopters and drones may be in the sky, but Iraqi boots are on the ground. The Americans are already worried about securing the road to Kuwait because soon they will have to start hauling out much of the infrastructure they have built on bases across Iraq. The end of an era comes not in a single moment, but looking back it has become evident that the mood has changed, power has shifted, the world is not the same....

If the New York Times were covering the defeat of Sauron, and if Aragorn and Gandalf were Republicans, the headline would read: ELVES QUIETLY DEPART MIDDLE EARTH AS THIRD AGE DRAWS TO A CLOSE.

President Obama has made it plain that Iraq is not his war; he wants to focus on Afghanistan. In an economic crisis, there is simply not enough money for the country to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day in Iraq....

And everything -- everything -- we've spent on Iraq doesn't even come close to what Obama wants to spend on the gargantuan boondoggle that is the stimulus package. The Iraq War liberated a nation. We'll have to see how the stimulus does at resuscitating the economy.

This is not to suggest that the war is over. In two provinces, Nineveh and Diyala, counterinsurgency operations are still under way, and the military is tracking signs of activity by Sunni extremist groups in the troubled areas surrounding Baghdad. For now, the rest of the country is mostly calm. The provincial elections will test political stability: whether Iraqis can begin to resolve still festering sectarian and ethnic tensions through the ballot box....

Well, no, the war isn't over, but counterinsurgency operations in only two provinces plus keeping an eye on some extremist groups sounds pretty darn good. At this point, Iraq may be more stable than Pakistan. It's not time to pop the champagne corks, but two years ago almost no one believed things would be going this well today.

The outlook of Iraqi citizens has changed as well. They are more confident that their problems are their own, and that the Americans cannot fix them and often have only made matters worse.

Yeah, how we've failed. Murderous tyrant gone; functioning democracy; unprecedented economic growth; confident Iraqis assuming the burdens of citizenship. Tsk tsk tsk.

I keep coming back to the fact that what's happening in Iraq now is what we -- and by "we" I mean those us who didn't want to see the U.S. lose and tens of thousands more Iraqis perish* -- always hoped for. It took a lot longer to arrive and cost a lot more than people hoped. But it wasn't long ago that most Democrats and not a few Republicans were loudly claiming that there was no way we could get here. Yet we have, thanks to General Petraeus** and a lot of brave U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens. Thanks also to the unwavering determination of the Bush administration. No thanks to the New York Times, which has spent most of the last few years declaring defeat and egging on the insurgency.

The Times wants to present today's Iraqi elections as somehow bittersweet. I suspect what's really going on at the New York Times is sour grapes.

[*Yeah, that's right. If the shoe fits....]

[**Or, "General Betray Us" to the people at MoveOn.org who get special deals on advertising from the New York Times.]