After Impartiality, What?

So now we're all debating whether judges should try to be rise above the influence of their personal experiences. The president's nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, didn't seem to think so in her 2001 speech at the UC Berkeley law school:

"While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge [Miriam] Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum's aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society."

After a few more sentences, including one in which Sotomayor raises the possibility that whites and minorities might have "basic differences in logic and reasoning," she concludes:

The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.

So Sotomayor shares the aspiration to impartiality but equates it with "ignoring" or "denying" the obvious. She suspects impartiality may be impossible and its pursuit may therefore have bad effects (in the same way, presumably, that any pursuit of a mirage can have bad effects).

I guess I disagree. I think that most people who truly aspire to impartiality can achieve it. I think written law, proper legal training, and freedom from electoral politics can all help one to master one's tendencies toward bias and favoritism.

But if I'm wrong, and Sotomayor is right, and impartiality is just a pipe dream -- what then? If judges can't be impartial, then why have judges? What makes them special? What gives them the right to sit in judgment over the rest of us if it's not the presumption of their fairness and impartiality?

The whole premise of our legal system was that there could exist a certain class of people who were especially well suited to render reasonably disinterested judgments. If Sotomayor is right, that premise is a failed premise -- and the system therefore needs to change.

If what we really want to trust in (following Sotomayor's lead) is the diverse opinions of the community and its varied forms of experience, then let's abolish the Supreme Court as it now stands and work on strengthening the power of the demos in our judicial system. Ideally, our courts of last appeal should consist of super-juries, Athens-style: large numbers of citizens selected at random from within a given jurisdiction.

Or, if that seems too radical, maybe we could just elect a new Supreme Court every four years: every citizen could vote for one candidate for the high court and the top nine vote-getters would become the Court until the next election. This would allow minority groups like blacks and Hispanics to be reasonably sure of getting at least one representative of their own constituency on the Court, if that's what they want.

Of course, an idea like that sounds crazy. But it's certainly not crazier than discarding the ideological underpinnings of our present system while keeping the system as it is.

Meanwhile, a Reggae Double-Feature

Here and here.

A Good Class

I was prepared and able to fill up more than three hours of class time, including a fair bit of material the students hadn't just read. The students all seemed to have done the reading; many had something to say, a good deal of it useful. A number of classics minors, reading a translation of Petrarch's letters, were able to say that it sounded remarkably like Cicero's letters. A student from a class I taught in the spring sat in on the class, just because he wanted to hear the lecture. All in all, an extraordinarily satisfying session.

On Curdled Ambition

Imagine you are a liberal Richard Posner - a brilliant judge, who is also theoretically committed to the morality of affirmative action policies. Imagine, too, that at the age of fifty or so, at the height of your mental powers, someone else is nominated to the Supreme Court - a lady of a certain ethnic origin - where gender and ancestry, not mind, are taken not just as unfortunate political necessities, but as laudable principles in and of themselves. And you are forced to confront the fact that your ambition, which has made you excellent, is not able to leap over the hurdles of affirmative action - that forcing your brand of social justice on the odd marginal fireman also affects you, excellent, superlative you, as well - that you must lay aside your ambition to foster the career of someone who, however marginally adequate a Justice she will be, will never have the career you would have had - and you must also say that this setting aside of your own ambition is right and proper, a good thing to do.

If you can do this, don't you die inside? - not the whipped cur, the slave happy in his shackles, but the free man, the ambitious man, the self-respecting man?

I hope that some part of you looks at the lady of a certain ethnic origin, smiling on the TV screen, so sure she deserves her happy fate, and says, I hate you. And it is wrong that you are up there, and not me.

On Sotomayor

A new topic! A new topic!

The National Review editorial gets it about right, I think. Her liberalism means that (if confirmed) she will substitute inclination for law; the identity politics idiocy of the left means that we will have a thoroughly mediocre justice to boot. While the former, I suppose, is more dangerous, the latter actually makes me unhappier. (Tonight, anyway.) What to say? It's part of, well, civility, to nominate the best possible candidate for the Supreme Court, someone who, even if you disagree with them, you can respect them. Take Breyer and Ginsburg: I disagree with most of their decisions, but I can respect them, and be grateful to Pres. Clinton for nominating top-drawer liberals. And, gosh, the respect given to me as an American by nominating supremely qualified justices, even if misguided, matters a heck of a lot more to me than the exceedingly faint tribal thrill of having Two Jewish Justices on the Court.

Meanwhile, we're heading for Catholics 6, Jews 2, Protestants 1. What odds on Catholics 9 by 2020?

On Civility

There's a hooraw going on about appropriate civility for conservatives. A few brief thoughts:

1) It's a measure of the weakness of the Republican party, and conservatives, that anyone cares. If Republican politicians were doing anything of note - if conservative ideas had any traction in public opinion - no one would bother about incidentals like this.

2) The reason these incidentals matter in this current state is because a change of public opinion must precede any recapture of political power by Republicans and conservatives, and the words of talk radio hosts, bloggers, etc., will play a significant role (if less significant than they imagine) in capturing or repelling public opinion.

3) Nevertheless, this is ultimately a really boring process debate - people arguing about how points are made, not the points themselves. If bloggers want to be as boring as mainstream journalists, they can concentrate on such issues until the cows come home. Me, I love discussing rhetoric, and I don't care about being boring - but everybody else should find something else to talk about.

3) Some of the debate is people arguing past each other: the value of civility in itself is distinct from the tactical uses of civility.

4) Aside from the point that civility is, well, a civic duty, and one not eliminated by the failure of one's opponents to speak civilly ... the Democrats have regained power by the usual monstrous slanders, but I don't think they generally engaged in trash talk. I don't see why hardball politics should require trash talk. So the argument of tactical necessity fails to convince.

5) I gather the point that excessive concern about vulgarity is prissy. But manliness should not be defined by vulgarity either. Put it another way: in the good old days, Mark Levin would have gotten horsewhipped for talking to a man's wife or daughter that way. If you deserve horsewhipping for saying something, you shouldn't say it.

6) No need to belabor the point. If Levin is a vulgar, offensive ass, say so briefly, and then spend your time making conservative arguments yourself in a civil manner.

7) This whole "who-is-a-proper-conservative?" and "whom-must-we-cast-out-so-as-to-attract-the-voters-again?" debate is repellent - but probably also necessary, since some sense of self-definition and animating ideals is a necessary prerequisite to regaining power. But a little bit goes a long way.

8) And getting back to the tactical uses of civility - Republicans need to regain suburbanites and soccer moms, and to solidify the aspirational family-values sorts who value the aspiration to civility as much as the aspiration to chastity. For all these audiences, trash-talk would seem to be a net minus.

9) When I have listened to talk radio, Rush Limbaugh is a far more genial, far more civil character than is Mark Levin. (Some of my readers, I am sure, will say I am damning with faint praise.) What Would Rush Do? strikes me as a useful guideline for conservative talk-radio etiquette. I think the Rushian Miss Manners says to eschew moments such as "Well I don't know why your husband doesn't put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here."

Memorial Day

From Pericles' Funeral Oration, 430 B.C.:

The Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike that of most Greeks, will be found to be only commensurate with their deserts. And if a test of worth be wanted, it is to be found in their closing scene, and this not only in cases in which it set the final seal upon their merit, but also in those in which it gave the first intimation of their having any. For there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his country's battles should be as a cloak to cover a man's other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual.

But none of these allowed either wealth with its prospect of future enjoyment to unnerve his spirit, or poverty with its hope of a day of freedom and riches to tempt him to shrink from danger. No, holding that vengeance upon their enemies was more to be desired than any personal blessings, and reckoning this to be the most glorious of hazards, they joyfully determined to accept the risk, to make sure of their vengeance, and to let their wishes wait; and while committing to hope the uncertainty of final success, in the business before them they thought fit to act boldly and trust in themselves. Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory.

So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue. And not contented with ideas derived only from words of the advantages which are bound up with the defence of your country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.

For this offering of their lives made in common by them all they each of them individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.

Law, Society, and Democracy

This morning on Meet the Press, I listened to Michele Norris argue that law and the constitution ought to "flow" and change as society evolves. That's a tenable proposition, but it's utterly incompatible with the conclusion Norris was trying to defend, namely that it's good to appoint activist judges who will ignore the literal meaning or actual intent of the Constitution.

If we truly want law to reflect the current state of our society, then law ought to be made by the popular will, not by the edicts of unelected judges drawn from a narrow cadre of highly educated professionals and serving for life. The democratic process is acutely sensitive to shifting social currents. The judicial oligarchy is not. But something tells me Norris would not be in favor of abolishing judicial review and letting legislatures and juries become the ultimate arbiters of what the Constitution means.

The Founders designed the judicial system as an oligarchy precisely in order to resist social change's transformative effects on the law. When Progressives first started making the argument that law ought to change along with society, they were consistent in pushing for ballot initiatives, referenda, and other procedures to make law accord with the will of the people. But the heirs of those same progressives have been discovering ever since that the will of the people doesn't always match all that closely with how they, the elites, want to see the law change.

So now they prefer to commandeer the most undemocratic part of our government in order to cram their vision of how society should evolve down the actual evolving society's collective throat.

On Rejections for Manuscript Submissions, Crushing and Repeated

I would mind less if the &#^#(@!!! journals sent me reader reports. Hello? You know that I want to make the article better for the next submission? You're aware that etiquette is to give a wee bit of constructive criticism? Not just, Such a lovely yet inadequate article you sent us, thanks for letting us see it, now go away.

On Connoisseurship

(I can never remember how to spell "connoisseur" - always have to look it up.)

Alpheus writing on art inspires me to a sort of monkey-see, monkey-do imitation. Strangely enough, I am also uninspired by modern art - I grew up with the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearby, and I have a very firm sense of what art is supposed to be: Netherlandish, 1400-1600, some mixture of Bosch and Vermeer. Variations on the theme are allowable; the dissolution of form in late Rembrandt looks forward to much modern art; but the Netherlanders would have scoffed at a plain blue painting, and what more needs to be said?

A book (title and author forgotten, alas) I was reading a few years ago, by an intelligent curator who thought the rapid clip with which visitors passed through contemporary art galleries was meaningful, attributed much that's gone wrong with modern art to the rising value given to the head, the decreasing value given to the hand; artistic genius valued, not craft. (A problem more than two centuries old, therefore!) This intellectual shift exacerbated by the technological development of the camera, which ultimately led most artists to abandon the representation of reality. Neither of these developments necessarily leading you to the plain blue canvas purporting to be art, but both prerequisites.

For my own schtick: the decreasing rhetorical nature of art - the abandonment of the address to a mass audience, the satisfaction with an audience of a hermetic elite, the abandonment of public address, the triumph of "art for art's sake," which translates as the solipsistic statement of aesthetic standards, which the audience/public may or may not appreciate, but where such appreciation is an incidental. (See Pollock, Mondrian.) "Art for art's sake" a liberty the artist achieve for which he sacrifices first relevance and then talent. Beauty is only possible when the artist aims his art at all viewers.

There is a line of Frankfurt School criticism which links the decay of modern art to the modern economic system - distorting market pressures distorting aesthetics. I am almost entirely ignorant of the substance of this critique, largely because it is in German that reads as if it were translated from Hungarian, or possibly Basque. With my sunny view of the market, I distrust this critique. Connoisseurship - judgment expressed in dollars and cents - strikes me not only as not harmful to art but also an essential precondition for its excellence. Art aims for universal judgment; that judgment is expressed among other things by dollars and cents; the patron, large and small, who values art enough to pay for it. Corporate dollars vary this process, but don't corrupt it.

Contra FLG, "That his art fetches millions pisses me off," strikes me as a mistaken response. To submit your art to the market is a positive step; the problem is not modern connoisseurship, but the lack of it - the publicly funded museums, the NEA, where the public has no chance to exercise connoisseurship, to reject a work of art for any reason whatsoever. Ground-zero on this subject for me remains Giuliani's inability to cut off city funding for the Brooklyn Museum of Art a decade ago to protest grossly offensive art: not only taxation without representation but also denying the public (via its elected representative) the ability to exercise connoisseurship. More such judgments, irreducibly financial, are what art needs. Solipsistic art, insufficiently redeemed by the connoisseurship of a small circle, can only be saved (if that is possible) by reconnecting to the aesthetic judgments of the people.

American Idol, therefore, is a step in the right direction. Maybe if we can apply it to the art world? ...

Why I May Be a Philistine

With the academic semester over and the summer upon us, Arethusa and I recently treated ourselves to some modern art. Or rather, I treated myself to some modern art: Arethusa was just being a good sport.

I have a strange irony-laden relationship to modern art: I make fun of it, but a lot of it really does appeal to me on an emotional level. I even enjoy the sensation of standing in a big gallery filled with nothing but a few odd abstract shapes, wondering how some visitor from ancient Greece or Rome or Egypt would try to make sense of what this room was for.

Some modern art, though, seems like it's little more than a fraud perpetrated by the artists on whoever is buying the stuff and, by extension, on me, the museum visitor. I've never understood how anyone justifies "paintings" that are just one solid color unrelieved even by any discernible brushstrokes or variations in tone. Give me something to work with! Give me an excuse to think the production of this object required actual talent! For Chrissakes, add a little dab of white somewhere. Tear a hole in the canvas. Give it a title other than "Untitled" or "Painting" or "Blue #4." Do some effing thing....

Yesterday I found myself standing in front of one such painting, a solid rectangle of pure unreflective black without a title. I have no idea what the artist's intention was, other than to pay his bills for absinthe and turtlenecks. I'm sure my response wasn't unique, though. All I could think was: "There's something about this that's so black, it's like 'How much more black could this be?' And the answer is 'None.' None more black...."

Cars and Pollution

1) Most American car companies are now bankrupt and/or under Federal life support.

2) The Federal government is mandate improved gas mileage.

3) How do these two interact? If GM and Chrysler weren't bankrupt, would they have been able to lobby against the mileage rules more effectively? Are foreign car companies (Toyota, Fiat) more amenable to working with government regulation for environmental purposes? Or will the actual implementation of mileage rules be slowed down by car companies answering to distant, foreign bureaucracies?

4) And what if it requires a Federal subsidy to actually get car companies to get up to the proper mileage? Will the voters revolt because it will be subsidies going largely to foreign companies?

5) And what exactly is Michigan going to do when the automobile industry in that state finishes dying?

The Fall of Rome

David Frum has a review of some recent books written about the fall of the Roman Empire. It's a good review of what sound like good books (Although I'm not sure I'd buy the book by Adrian Goldsworthy, since I found one of his books on the Roman army to be rather second-rate Victor Davis Hanson, sufficiently unimpressive that it was Deaccessioned from the Withywindle Library.) Speaking as an occasional reader in the field, I'd like to endorse this analysis by Frum:

The prevailing soft multiculturalism of our times has made the phrase “the fall of Rome” a surprisingly controversial one. It’s much preferred to talk about “transformation” rather than “decline and fall.” In this “transformationist” view, the High Classical period of 200 BCE-250 CE subsides gradually, almost imperceptibly into the “Late Antiquity” of CE 350-700. The barbarians did not invade; they migrated. Rome did not fall; it experienced a “fusion” with the new migrants in a “cross-cultural exchange.”

Indeed, there is a certain amount of this in what I've read lately. I will add, though, as Frum does not, that one can accept both that Rome declined gradually year by year, and catastrophically in sum - and take this as a warning to America that the various small declines in our nation may become cumulatively disastrous. Withywindle applies this lesson particularly to uncontrolled immigration - for if the barbarization of the Roman empire was more the result of gradual migration than of sudden invasion, does this not argue against allowing uncontrolled immigration into America?

Only, of course, for those who still think the history of Rome has any lessons to offer for our current politics. And that small band does not, presumably, include the cadres of the Obamoids, who know nothing of the past save that it was dark, and that one must turn one's back on it and run toward the shining dawn ahead.

And if they did turn back, they would realize that Obama is Elagabalus, Hillary a Zenobia, and Ahmedinejad aspires to play Shapur. But that is a subject for another post.

A New Hope

In the best of the Star Wars movies, as Luke Skywalker rashly departs from Dagobah with his training incomplete, the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobi says sadly to Yoda, "That boy was our last hope."*

"No," replies Yoda. "There is another."

In his deathbed scene in the third movie, Yoda is even more specific. "There is," he rasps, "another Skywalker." At which point Luke and the audience realize that this other Skywalker had been hiding in plain sight, that in the veins of Leia Organa -- perhaps overlooked as being merely the story's obligatory love interest -- flows the blood of a Jedi. Despite the triumphs of feminism in the 20th century, it remains oddly easy for a woman, however great, to seem invisible in the shadow of her man.

Less than an hour ago, I experienced the same thrill of recognition I once felt at the revelation of Princess Leia's true identity. For it turns out -- and we should have seen it all along -- that there is another Blagojevich.

Devotees of this blog -- all eight or nine of you -- will recall my sorrow at the news that former Illinois Governor "Rod" Blagojevich would not be participating in a celebrity reality show (NBC's "I'm a Celebrity...Get me out of Here!") in Costa Rica this summer. I had had such high hopes. And, despite the likelihood of such an outcome from the beginning -- let's face it, the guy is a serious flight risk -- I was crestfallen.

And now...oh, rapture. It looks like Patti Blagojevich is considering taking her husband's place.

I believe it was Tennyson** who wrote (in "Locksley Hall") "as the husband is, the wife is." And that certainly applies here. Like the man she married based on his ability to impersonate Elvis Presley***, Patti Blagojevich is one tough cookie with well-maintained hair. And, like her spouse, Patti has a way with words. Some of her more quotable apothegms include: "Hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive]! [expletive] them!" and "Fire all those [expletive] people, get 'em the [expletive] out of there!"

I just hope when she delivers her final decision to the producers of "I'm a Celebrity...Get me out of Here!", she doesn't say -- as the FBI claims she once said -- "Maybe we can't do this now: fire those [expletive]s!" Well, she's not likely to say that second part in any event. It wouldn't make sense, given the new context. But I hope she doesn't say the first part either. Instead, I hope she slaps on some suntan lotion, parks the kids with grandma, and heads down to Costa Rica to kick a little [very mild expletive].

And let's make no mistake. If Patti decides to do this, she will kick mild expletive. I mean, look at the other contestants: Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt? That guy who played Richie Valens a million years ago? Sanjaya?! (No, really.) Stephen Baldwin, for God's sake?!?!? Tell me Stephen Baldwin stands a chance against the woman who bore two children to Milorad Blagojevich. Can you tell me that? Huh?

You cannot.

Okay, maybe Spider Salley and some female wrestler I've never heard of will be slightly tougher opponents for the Bride of Blago. They're probably in good shape and used to fierce competition. But do they have Patti's determination, her iron will, her desperate need for the $80,000 cash prize to cover mounting legal fees?

From where I sit, I honestly can't see why Patti Blagojevich would turn this gig down. Sure, the media have been rough on her. They've called her "Lady Macbeth" -- what do you want to bet that Rod knows that play by heart? -- and something that sort of rhymes with Blagojevich. And no doubt certain detractors will mock her if she goes on "I'm a Celebrity...". But she shouldn't fear. She should hold her head high. Like Cleopatra in a famous ode of Horace**** she should "neither tremble womanishly at the sight of battle" (nec muliebriter expavit ensem) nor "be led as a humble woman in another's proud triumph" (deduci superbo, non humilis mulier, triumpho). If, you ask me, it's Stephen Baldwin who should worry about being dragged in triumph behind Patti's chariot. (Don't worry, she won't hurt him. He'll just have to pony up a little something for Rod's defense fund.)

Yes, with any luck we'll soon see a new Blagojevich take center stage. And as we anticipate this joyous television event, we (and all those Costa Rica-bound Z-listers) should remember well the famous words of Kipling***** -- need I even quote them?:

Man may stumble in his progress, Man may fail to reach his aim
Man may even be arrested and impeached. But all the same
There is yet another Blago and, despite her sweet facade,
The Patti of the species is more deadly than the Rod...!

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

*No, I don't know what it is with all the Star Wars and Star Trek references on this blog lately. Just bear with us.

**A poet quoted by Blagojevich in the context of his recent scandals.

***A singer quoted by Blagojevich in the context of his recent scandals.

****A poet referenced by Blagojevich in the context of his recent scandals.

*****A poet quoted by Blagojevich in the context of his recent scandals.

European Economy Down The Toilet - Schadenfreude Post

So sayeth the Telegraph:

Germany's economy shrank by 3.8pc in the first three months of the year - a record contraction that is almost double the fall of Britain's gross domestic product in the first quarter. The figures sparked attacks on Germany's government, which has repeatedly shown reluctance to bail out either its economy or financial system.

In figures described by economists as "disastrous", Eurostat also reported that Italy shrank by 2.4pc, Austria and the Netherlands by 2.8pc, Spain by 1.8pc and France by 1.2pc. The statistics underline the fact that although Britain's financial system was badly hit in the early months of the crisis, the UK's economy has not fared as badly as its continental rivals, contracting by 1.9pc in the first quarter.

Note that if Germany does as badly for the rest of the year, admittedly an unlikely prospect, its economy will shrink by 15.2%! Ouch.

It does look more and more likely that the Euro will crack before this crisis ends. And major recession/depression in Europe also suggests major upheaval in Russia, as its major export market collapses.

No particularly intelligent thoughts; just sharing.

Star Trek Spoiler

Following up on the Psychotic Orphan Lad analysis - the Star Trek redo turns both Spock and Kirk into Psychotic Orphan Lads.

There are reasons, by the by, to have a dim view of the whole Psychotic Orphan Lad phenomenon. It seeks to explain, and explain away, both dynamic evil and dynamic good. What makes a villain? Family trauma and dysfunction! But what makes a hero? Equally, family trauma and dysfunction. Normal people, everyday people, the reader or the viewer - why, they could never be villains, because their home life growing up was A-OK. Or if they are villains, it's not their fault, it's mommy and daddy's fault. And who could expect the normal member of the audience to be heroic either? If your parents weren't killed before your eyes, what on earth would possess you to make an effort to do good in the world? What can you expect of people who aren't Psychotic Orphan Lads, save indifference, inertia, mediocrity that does not aspire to virtue, and sees in itself no danger of vice.

LOLDowds #1

Because I just keep getting more and more childish....



Um, no.

The Gods Smile On Alpheus

She's a plagiarist!

Alpheus, surely a commemorative verse is in order?

On Marriage

Charles Murray writes:

Today, the illegitimacy ratio for non-Latino whites is 28 percent. How do the classes break down now? As it happens, I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring that question. I’m not done, and want to save that discussion for a formal presentation in any case, but here are some tentative estimates: The illegitimacy ratio for the white underclass is probably now in the region of 70 percent. I think that the proportion for the white working class may be above 40 percent. The white middle class is approaching 20 percent—a scarily high figure when you think about all the ways that the middle class has been the spine of the nation.

The white overclass? They’re still living in the 1950s—their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent tops.

In other words, marriage among poor white Americans has half-collapsed in my lifetime, and will probably complete its collapse before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Marriage and the two-parent family have ceased, or soon will have ceased, to be social norms among poor/working class Americans of any race; they are becoming markers of membership in the elite. A few thoughts:

* Some people of my acquaintance - liberal/left - refused to get married because it endorsed an oppressive institution, blah, blah, blah. This always partook of preening affectation; at this date, the ratio of slumming to moral protest has risen extraordinarily. I suspect the refusal to marry on principles will decline, if it has not already, as marriage, devoid of all moral power and claims, becomes ever more clearly the alligator shirt of the new overclass.

* All things considered, much as I dislike and oppose gay marriage, the collapse of real marriage matters more - and I am not, ultimately, convinced that there is more than a weak correlation between the rise of the one and the collapse of the other. I know this is a hypocritical talking point of the left, but it's true: pro-marriage social conservatives need to focus on getting straights to marry.

* The first political campaign for "family values" has failed, along with the traditional family. Social conservatives - Republicans - will have to modify their rhetoric to campaign among people for whom an intact family is more a matter of aspiration than achievement. To a striking extent, this has already happened. I remember a New Republic article from 2000, analyzing Bush's victory over McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary, and noting how many voters who had scraped out of the trailer parks by their fingernails preferred Bush to McCain because 1) they understood a brush with alcoholism, and turning yourself around by dependence on the Good Book; and 2) McCain's uncontrolled personal life, exemplified by his divorce, represented the trailer-park life they wanted to leave behind, even if they hadn't already; Bush's good family life was a powerful and appealing model. And then there is (of course) the whole Palin family drama, where Palin's attempt to preach chastity to her children, while failing miserably at getting them to do what she told them to do, struck a resonating chord among Republicans (and perhaps some Independents.) The shift from Bush to Palin, from successful role model to struggling role model, reflects a change among Republicans in particular and Americans in general. So Republicans are adjusting, if not necessarily rapidly enough.

* But note this assumes there are still people who aspire to intact families. More and more Americans, I fear, will no longer even have that aspiration. I am not sure how this decay can be reversed - short of unlikely exercises of brute force.

* The culture of much of white America is becoming something like the culture of black America's talented tenth - striving, aspirational, but always aware of the brother, the friend, the cousin, who has fallen into the underclass. A certain streak of fatalistic permissiveness, aspiration all too understanding of those who fail in their aspiration, follows - shall we say that the Oprahfication of American has many meanings?

* I wonder what percentage of children are not only born in a two-parent family, but stay in it through adulthood, without their parents divorcing? Presumably that's an even lower figure - how much lower?

Sawbones

Goldberry and I saw Star Trek. Goldberry noticed that the foofaraw they came up to explain how McCoy got the nicknames "Bones" means that the writers, or perhaps more likely the audience, have forgotten that "Bones" is short for "Sawbones," that wonderfully brutal sobriquet for "Doctor." A pity; the language is poorer for that loss of that word, and the culture poorer for the loss of the instant knowledge of its meaning.

Alpheus Bugged

At the Washington Times, Scott Galupo shakes his head over the fact that so many conservatives are responding to the statism of the Obama administration by reading Atlas Shrugged. Galupo calls the renewed conservative embrace of Rand an "irritable mental gesture" and characterizes it as indulgence in a "revenge fantasy." I think he's right.

Of course, I'm an anti-Randian from way back. I was introduced to Rand the way many teenagers are, via one of the Ayn Rand Institute's essay contests. I forget how much prize money he Ayn Rand Institute was offering in those days, but it seemed like a pretty sweet little sum considering all you had to do was read a novel and write a short essay. The expenses of college loomed on the horizon, so for reasons of self-interest of which Ms. Rand would no doubt have approved, I plunged into The Fountainhead.

I got through the book, but I never wrote the essay. With the idealism of youth, I didn't think I could pretend to approve of something I found so absurd and obnoxious. If there had been an Anti-Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest, I would have been ready to slide something into the mail. But there wasn't. There still isn't. My only essay to date on the subject of Ayn Rand was written without any prospect of remuneration (or readership).

And now Ayn Rand has come surging back to popularity on the libertarian Right, but her work is permeated with profoundly anti-conservative and un-libertarian elements. Many people have noticed them; the amazing thing is that anyone fails to notice them.

It's true, Rand's outlook is radically individualist. But she's also a de facto promoter of the doctrine of the Superman. Her heroes are really gods: brilliant, beautiful, masterful, and utterly unfettered by convention or contingency. In a recent, generally appreciative symposium on Rand at NRO, Leo Grin pointed out as much:

At base, Rand’s fiction is the stuff of fantasy and myth, in the best sense. Howard Roark and John Galt fill outsized roles once occupied by the likes of Achilles and Odysseus, Arthur and Lancelot. Impossibly brave and resourceful, towering in their loves and hates, they stand as sterling exemplars of treasured traits. The need for such larger-than-life heroes is evergreen.

I'm not about to deny that we need heroes. But Rand's Übermenschen -- creations like John Galt, Howard Roark, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart -- lack the flaws and limitations of the heroes of conventional myth. What would Achilles be without his Achilles heel? What would Odysseus be without his sufferings and sorrows? What would Lancelot and Arthur be without the collision between their love for one another and their love for the same woman? What would any of these characters be without the tragic fates that overtake nearly every mythic hero in the end? (See, in this connection, Withywindle's post "On Suffering Supermen.")

Rand surely understood that her heroes were not like those of traditional myths. After all, what was the title of her most famous novel? I don't mean to belabor the point, but traditional myth did not envision an Atlas who could shrug. In the traditional interpretation of the Atlas myth Atlas, like Prometheus, is seen as representing Man. His effort to sustain the weight of the sky represents Man's struggle to bear up under the burden of life. Rand's Atlas, on the other hand, is not Man but Superman, and he doesn't need to care whether or not the heavens fall.

Rand can believe in the Superman in large part because her philosophy of Objectivism exaggerates the potential of unaided human reason and the individual will. In Rand's universe, the person freed of mystical illusions feels no inner conflicts and experiences no debilitating failures of cognition or depletion of ego-energy. Rand simply did not perceive the tragic nature of life and the inescapable limits within which even the best of us are confined. Rand wants us to believe that there can be men and women who can become whatever they want to be.

Oh, not everyone of course. Not those "looters" and parasites, who try to drag everyone down because they're unable to accomplish anything on their own. But maybe you, reader! Maybe you! Maybe if you too could shrug off the weight of social obligation and your pity for your fellow man, you could at last transcend the pathetic limitations you see in other people. Good luck with that.

Of course if that doesn't work out, and you fail to become a Superman (probably the looters managed to sabotage you) you can still salve your ego by identifying with a Superman. This is a natural human tendency anyway: to lose the pains of being a Self through devotion to an all-virtuous, all-powerful Other. In Rand-world, this tendency has an intellectual justification. After all, if John Galt and Dagny Taggart are so amazing, then why shouldn't they rule? Why shouldn't they gratify their wildest dreams of power, their artistic instincts, and their desire for pleasure -- all while restraining the parasites and looters (how you hate them!) and regulating society according to Objectivist principles. Wouldn't that be better for everyone? If nothing should stand in the way of Objective Reason and the Superman, why shouldn't Objective Reason and the Superman prevail not only in business and art but in politics too?

In other words, Rand's basic attitude leads, despite all her lip service to libertarianism, to exactly the kind of thinking that encourages people to exalt Stalins and Hitlers -- and thus, as Whittaker Chambers clearly perceived, to the collectivist horrors of the twentieth century that Rand, ironically, abhorred. Of course, not all Supermen are Stalin or Hitler, but they are all dangerous to liberty. Has it occurred to the libertarians excitedly turning the pages of Atlas Shrugged that Barack Obama may appear to his intoxicated supporters in much the same way as Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden appear to them?

I've known lots of collecivist-minded liberals who are or were devotees of Rand. They just read her a bit differently. For them, it's conservatives and even libertarians who are weak-minded mystics, allowing the crummy bourgeois masses to flourish at the expense of those great-souled ones striving to manifest their excellence in a world of reduced NEA funding and Jesus fish. Don't the laws of the free market and the ambient pressure of hordes of inferior "sheeple" handicap genius just as effectually as any positive constraints? Put a sympathetic Superman in charge! Put a committee of Supermen in charge! The world will be remade! We will all become better!

Personally, I think libertarians might want to start looking around for an alternative oracle. Maybe they should consider Rand's less heroically-minded predecessor, Isabel Paterson. At a minimum, I hope they're familiar not only with Whittaker Chambers's famous review of Atlas Shrugged but with libertarian sage Murray Rothbard's eloquent critiques of Randism.

Come to think of it, Rothbard's "Mozart was a Red," a very funny one-act play which portrays a thinly-disguised Rand holding intellectual court in an atmosphere reminiscent of the nuttier Roman emperors, is a nice antidote to any kind of tendency toward hero-worship. Actually, any cursory examination of Rand's years as the leader of her own cult reveals all too clearly what usually happens when human beings start being treated as superhuman.

There once was a woman from Frisco.... (UPDATED)

Jim Treacher and Hot Air have pioneered the Pelosiku, the haiku on the subject of Nancy Pelosi's recent discomfiture. Naturally, I was inspired to add my own examples of the form:

Watch her eyes closely.
She hiding something, unless
It's just the Botox.

*

Pelosi melts down:
All the news that's fit to print
On page A-20.

*

Is Nancy lying?
"Enhanced interrogation"
Might reveal the truth.

UPDATE: When I posted this, I didn't have four more lines of a limerick to go with the title. Now I do:

There once was a lady from Frisco
Whose claims were as slipp'ry as Crisco
Or paraffin wax
But when faced with the facts
She reeled like a drunk at a disco.

On the Dechristianizing Middle East

Ethan Bronner in the New York Times has an article on the dwindling number of Christians in the Middle East, which includes this fascinating statistic:

A region that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping.

20%? Wow! That is stunning. And then I try to think about what this number means. What is meant by the Middle East? - is it everything from Pakistan to Morocco, or something smaller? A quick Google-search finds a figure for the Ottoman Empire a century ago as being 20% Christian, and the article basically talks about Ottoman countries - including Egypt, then technically under Ottoman suzerainty. Does "the region" include the Ottoman Empire before the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, when it still had a stretch of the largely Christian South Balkans? At any rate, we don't seem to be talking about the pied noir flight from Algeria.

20%? -- A century ago there were millions of Christians in what is today Turkey; now there are 150,000.

And suddenly it all clicks into place. Bronner, in an appalling sleight of hand - I can't tell if its ignorance, a lamentable desire to "focus" the article, or malicious dissimulation - hasn't mentioned the Armenian genocide, the expulsions and massacres of the Greeks, the flight of Turks from the Balkans to Turkey. The "deChristianization" of the Middle East obscures the violent, bloody birth of the Turkish nation from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Now, obviously Muslim sentiment and Turkish nationalism worked together - but they were not identical, witness the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Kurds butchered by the Turks in those years as well. Bronner even adds that in Turkey Violence against Christians has risen. - compared with when? Not 1916! And it is violence against remnant Armenians and Greeks at least as much as it is violence against Christians. The silence of the article on this point distorts the history appallingly.

Likewise, discussing Egypt, Bronner states And in Egypt, where 10 percent of the country is Coptic Christian, the prevalent religious discourse has drifted from what was considered to be a moderate Egyptian Islam toward a far less tolerant Saudi-branded Islam. Set aside for the moment the claim (which you can find Googling) that the Egyptian government is deliberately undercounting the Copts, and that they may still be near a fifth of the country. There is no mention that the flight of Christians from Egypt in the last century was also a flight of Greeks and Italians (especially from Alexandria); that Egyptian nationalism, as well as Islam, plays a role in all this. (Or that such nationalism also factors in the pressure against the Copts.) Again, a significant distortion.

The entirely political nature of the statistics on which estimates of population are made might be worth a sentence or two. The numbers of Palestinian Muslims may well be overstated. Lebanon famously hasn't dared have a census in something more than half a century. In Iraq, Sunni Arabs, no more than a fifth of the country, were delusionally convinced ca. 2004, and perhaps still, that they were a majority of the country. Any religious census in the region ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

The point of all this? I suppose to repeat the usual lessons - that you can't trust the New York Times, that you can't trust newspapers period. To preen as a history professor, pointing out all the misleading simplifications of laymen. But putting all that to one side, I do wonder at the process that made it impossible to mention "Turkish and Egyptian nationalism," "Turkish genocide," and "dubious censuses" in one brief paragraph.

Faces on Vases

Ancient Greek vase paintings often depict men as black or red and women as white (see the difference between Dionysus and Ariadne here, for example, or the difference here between Athena and Poseidon). The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that Greek men spent more time outdoors and thus became darker from the sun. But the third illusion on this page (h/t Jonah Goldberg at The Corner) makes me think that something more fundamental and interesting was going on.

No More School! No More Books! No More Students' Dirty Looks!

At least until the summer class starts.

The Alamo

Is it still taught in American schools as a heroic moment? Was it ever so taught in the North? Idly thinking about the subject, it occurs to me that while my parents got me a history book as a young 'un that glorified the heroes of the Alamo, against the Enemy Mexicans (liberal parents; Upper West Side bookstore; could this happen nowadays?), I'm not sure the Alamo figured much in elementary school or high school history classes. But did it ever in the North? While I'd like to say that not teaching the Alamo in history as heroic and historic is PC, liberal creep, etc., it's also possible that the Alamo was never a national memory, and always a Texan/Southern one -- that my New Yorker's knowledge of the Alamo was an accident of my parents' book-buying habits. Do the gentle readers of the blog have any memories of their history education with which to enlighten Withywindle?

The Harried Lives of Administrative Assistants in History Departments

I forward a note I just received:

Dear Faculty,

I can *NOT* accept faxed copies of your grade rosters.

I can *NOT* enter the grades for you.

You may *NOT* submit partial rosters.

You may *NOT* be late submitting rosters.

Please make sure in advance that all details pertaining to students with
disabilities are resolved well BEFORE the scheduled exam.

*FINALLY:* Please check your mail boxes, voice mails and emails. Students are frantically trying to reach (some) of you.

I write this with a smile on my face as I know that many of you will
assist me in following these instructions.

THANKS!

Negativity

Alan Howe thinks Bill Kristol's column in today's Washington Post is full of bad advice. I beg to differ. I'm actually thrilled to see so many Republicans -- from Kristol to Pat Buchanan to my co-blogger -- talking about the political advantages of vigorous opposition to Obama's programs.

"Going negative" has a bad name in politics, but it's undeserved. The real danger is "looking negative," i.e. allowing oneself to be cast as a defeatist or do-nothing. But the Republicans' image, frankly, can't get much worse. More importantly, the Republican party no longer holds center stage. The spotlight is on Obama, his administration, and his policies.

The sharper Democrats and their allies in the media don't want this to be the case. Our President of Hope and Change, the man with the supposedly optimistic vision of Love and Brotherhood and Pastel Unicorns, is still trying to run against George Bush (and now, even more absurdly, against Rush Limbaugh). The real Hope at the center of Barack Obama's political calculations is the hope that George Bush can become the next Herbert Hoover, a figure whom the Democrats can blame for everything that's wrong with the country from now until at least 2024. Who knows? It may work. Then again, it may not. And it's even less likely to work if Republicans push back hard -- something they did not not do in the wake of Hoover's defeat.

Barack Obama has, by his own admission, ascended to the presidency at a moment of national crisis. He and his advisors believe that this crisis offers a marvelous opportunity for "remaking America." But there are lots of reasons for believing that this process of remaking will not be quite as easy as they'd like.

The economy may be trending upward now, but so are the the price indices. A lot of the country's idled industrial capacity will not be back on line any time soon. Service jobs will continue to move overseas. Even in a "recovered" economy, I expect wages to stagnate for most Americans. And over everything hangs the great structural defect of the American economy: its reliance on public and private deficit spending. In the long run, the economic outlook is fairly bleak. Retrenchment will be necessary. At some point, Obama won't be able to keep borrowing and raising taxes. What will he do?*

Meanwhile, Obama wants government health care. He wants to restructure what's left of the economy around "clean jobs." He wants to make nicey-nice with terrorists. These are all bad ideas, and I'm betting even a lot of people who voted for Obama have a nagging suspicion that they're bad ideas. On health care especially, Republicans will be able to get a lot of mileage just by quoting true accounts of fiascos in Britain and Canada and pointing out that health care means rationing. Who's going to be the one denied the life-saving medical procedure? It's you, elderly voter! Health care may seem expensive now, but under ObamaCare you won't be able to buy the chance to see your grandchildren finish college...not at any price!**

Of course the media will shriek about such "scare tactics." Let them. Republicans will be telling the truth, and the truth, though by turns neglected, denied, and excluded from polite society, nevertheless retains a certain rude power.

At their heart, the Democrats' political calculations are too clever by half. In the final analysis, Obama and his allies rely on the presumption that America's problems really aren't as serious as they pretend. They can bash George Bush with the aid of a friendly media, overstate how bad things are, and promise to make things better ("Hope," "Change"). Then, having taken power, they can count on the fundamental soundness of the American economy not only to reassert itself but to sustain the even heavier burden of debt, taxes, and a negative current account balance that Obama's policies are going to impose.

This is something else that Franklin Roosevelt was able to get away with back in the 1930s: the acute pain of the Great Depression masked the fact that America's economic fundamentals were actually pretty robust in those days.

Most of the time, when a patient is sick, he or she will get better no matter what the doctor does. In fact, most of the time a doctor can prescribe something that actually harms the patient and the patient will still get better. That's how bloodletting remained so popular: most patients subjected to the treatment recovered their health. Post hoc, ergo....

But how healthy is Dr. Obama's patient? Not as healthy as he seems to believe. Republicans know it, and they should say it. Sooner or later the patient will know it too. If he doesn't already.

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

[*One possibility, as crazy as this sounds, is for Obama to call for a restructuring or cancellation of personal debt -- mortgages, credit cards, student loans -- far more radical than anything he's suggested so far. This might be welcomed with open arms by many Americans, and might be a huge political boost for Obama. If Obama proposes this, I actually urge Republicans to moderate their tone and tout a doomed "alternative proposal" while waiting for the disastrous economic consequences of such a move.]

[**Obama & Co. will try to obscure the identity of the victims of rationing. Conservatives should loudly and incessantly demand the details.]

Alternative Media: A Response to Alpheus

I am less sure that the media is the central problem Republicans/conservatives face - our problems I take to be more 1) demographic; and 2) a (hopefully temporary) defection of the moneyed elites. Nor am I sanguine that an effective counter to the liberal media can be created - I am afraid that conservative political victories will have to be made in the face of media hostility for a very long time to come. I also recollect 3) the failure of the New York Sun, which tried very hard to establish itself as a conservative newspaper in New York, and ultimately closed up shop. So any suggestions I would offer would be based on the assumption that anything one tries will fail. Nevertheless:

The Metro paper in New York, and I believe elsewhere, is free - subsisting on advertizements - and actually has a remarkably conservative editorial line, if you look closely, and a fairly conservative collection of op-edders. So the Metro is doing something right, and probably should be imitated. So, in addition to following the Metro business model, I would say that our putative conservative millionaires - who absolutely must never expect a return for their money - ought to subsidize a host of small newspapers, each of which concentrated on local government, especially on investigating the everyday frauds of government officials and elected representatives. Our millionaires also should remember to hire the lawyers necessary to pursue law suits to extract information from secretive elected officials. The focus should be good government, not partisan politics - it will catch a lot of corrupt Democrats, and it it catches corrupt Republicans, so much the better. This, as much as anything, ought to create a local constituency for each paper. Now, this is not fail-safe: lots of people don't care about local politics either, and the Sun did a fair amount of this. But the Sun was distracted by national and international politics, to speak nothing of arts -- an unwavering focus on local politics might succeed better. It would at least provide a niche. Ideally, this would also provide training for a host of conservative journalists in the fine art of investigative reporting.

These many local papers - perhaps standardized in format, franchiseable - could then also co-hire a few national reporters (promoted from the mass of local investigative reporters) and op-edders - either a softly, softly mix of conservatives and liberals, or a thorough conservative stable - and add this to the local news at a minimum of expense. But the vibrant base should be local news; the gravy should be the national and international news.

Figuring out ways to combine this effort with establishing local news stations, network or cable, and the Web, blogs, etc., also seems a good idea, but I am short on the technical savvy to make detailed recommendations.

I don't say this is a panacaea, and, I repeat, this tactic could fail too. But this would be my first suggestion of a way to go.

Talk About Suffering: The Mix Tape

Speaking of suffering and religion ... links to some songs I like.

The John Renbourn Group, Talk About Suffering

Bob Dylan, Man Gave Names to all the Animals

The Byrds, The Christian Life

Joan Baez, The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Joan Baez, Little Moses

Johnny Cash, It Was Jesus

Johnny Cash, Redemption

Steeleye Span, Gaudete

And, lacking Youtube links, a recommendation for: John Renbourn, "Traveller's Prayer"; Silly Sisters, "The Seven Joys of Mary"; Peter Bellamy, "Recessional"; Peter Bellamy, "Death is not the End"; Swan Arcade, "The Wayworn Traveller"; and The Young Tradition, "Come Ye That Fear The Lord".

On Suffering Supermen

I've just finished the fourth of Dorothy Dunnett's books in The Lymond Chronicles - superior historical fiction set in Europe of the 1500s, with our hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond, a super-intelligent, infinitely witty and cultivated superman, made tolerable only by the way he suffers - staking himself as he manipulates others (rhetoric!), the sword-edge of his wit turned as sharply against himself as anyone else.

Thinking about this, I've been pondering various truisms - that to be human is to suffer, to know pain, and therefore that this soft and decadent lot of modern Americans, Europeans, etc., are essentially inhuman - they knoweth not what it is to die of fever at five, broken leg at fifteen, childbirth at twenty-five, broken heart at thirty-five, old age at forty-five. The old have some vague reintegration into humanity, as they approach death - but no one under sixty or seventy pays attention to the old; they pretend until then that they are still superhuman, inhuman, invulnerable youth. Unable to suffer, we are inhuman monsters.

Add another truism: our fixation with zombies, vampires, monsters of one sort or another is a recognition of our own inhumanity. The old version of this is that Body Snatchers are Metaphors for Conformism, etc.; I would say rather it is our recognition that, painless Eloi, we recognize that we have ceased to be suffering humans. The zombie is a particularly apt metaphor: living dead, hungering only for flesh, a parody of the passion for anything beyond the flesh. Robots, computers, androids, what have you; it's not a fear of what is to come, but a hidden recognition of what we already are.

(Exaggerated fixation on bodily suffering also reflects this; see Quentin Tarantino, Gibson's Passion of the Christ (somewhat bloody even by the standards of medieval iconography). Also the fixation on the sufferings of peoples outside of Utopia - Holocaust obsession, obsession about Palestinians, the Suffering Nation of the Week.)

And so, speaking of suffering supermen, the popularity of comic book superheros. They are an optimistic variant of this trope: the monsters exist, but they are still human, still suffer (at the very least the Rejection of Being Different). Superheros are wish fulfillment, not in their fantastic powers, but in their suffering humanity; Peter Parker, not Spiderman, is the fantasy figure. It is the happy ending, the redemption through suffering - not quite a Christly Passion (of which all tales of suffering are imitations, saith Northrop Frye), to redeem us of our sins, but a passion that redeems us of our inhuman monstrosity, and makes us at least human again. A lowered aim that registers how far we have fallen.

But only a madman would choose to be genuinely human again - premodern, without medicine, dentistry, hygiene. Indeed, it would take another form of inhumanity to be so saintly. It is very human to seek painless monstrosity, and so we are stuck - not in a paradox, (an overused word in this form of analysis,) but in an irony. At the very least, the vague knowledge that we have lost something, become monsters, ought to become human once more, is a basis for hope. If the suffering superhero is a comforting myth, it is a comfort with a shadow of self-knowledge.

Republican Tactics

I think there is going to be a massive bout of inflation coming. If the Republican party agreed with me, they would start targeting everyone on a fixed income - retirees especially - and start making the case now that Democratic policies are going to reduce their income sharply.

The Laughter of the Great

I know it's probably just me, but every time I see some version of this:...


...I think of this:

Hello to Arms, Farewell to Dinner

How did I feel after reading Sally Quinn's Washington Post column on Michelle Obama's "toned and muscular, burnished and beautiful" arm?

Actually, a lot like Sally Quinn felt after choking down a communion wafer at Tim Russert's funeral....

How to Defeat the Media? (UPDATED)

As I've remarked before, I think the Federalism Amendment is exactly the kind of idea America needs. But all I can think of, as I read Professor Barnett's ten proposed "articles of amendment," is how easy it will be for the media to raise specious objections. No income tax? Your grandmother will lose her prescription drug benefits and DIE! No unfunded mandates? Unsafe drinking water! Judicial originalism? I can see Matt Lauer now, earnestly asking some half-wit über-lefty commentator whether that could possibly result in the sudden reintroduction of slavery. "Matt," the über-lefty will sigh, shaking his pointy head, "we don't really know...."

It will actually be much worse than that. The problem with having ten articles of amendment, each one fairly significant, is that collectively they present a huge target for the flak thrown up by a hostile press. And my fear is that it won't be too hard for the press to create just enough doubt in the minds of just enough Americans to derail a nascent federalist movement. Maybe there's only a minuscule of any particular person taking seriously any particular objection to Barnett's proposals, but with dozens upon dozens of doomsday scenarios being hyped, day after day, by the Democrats and their TV allies, there's an excellent chance of their being able to generate sufficient anxiety among the electorate to forestall Barnett's project indefinitely.

In a moment of whimsy, I once used the analogy of the Death Star from Star Wars to describe Big Government. In its original context, the analogy meant that the power possessed by the enemies of conservatism was so great that conservative movement can't hope for any significant victories on any front until the Left's super-weapon, the almighty State, is weakened or destroyed. Unfortunately, there's also another way in which the analogy applies. Like the Death Star, Big Government is heavily shielded and armed against any large-scale assault. And the mainstream media (MSM) are the ones providing those defenses. Professor Barnett's Federalism Amendment is exactly the king of big offensive that Big Government and the media are well-prepared to deal with by playing on the doubts and fears -- and, ironically, the conservative temperament -- of ordinary Americans.

At this point, unfortunately, the analogy breaks down, because I have no idea how the a "small, one-man fighter" could destroy the Death Star either. In real life, equivalents of the Death Star don't usually have that tiny but crucial point of total vulnerability. Or, if they do, it's awfully hard to identify.

What I do want to suggest is something else I've alluded to here before: the first step in any successful conservative crusade will have to be a systematic campaign to discredit the media in the eyes of as many Americans as possible. Distrust of the media is already high, but it ought to be much higher. In fact, a majority of Americans have to be encouraged to adopt the posture of savvy skepticism now shared only by committed conservatives. They need to be made to understand that the major networks and in the major newspapers are, in essence, little more than propaganda aimed at deceiving them; that they present a picture of the world in which the truth can only be read between the lines, if at all.

To achieve this kind of awareness on the part of the American public will take some doing. If a trusted big-name conservative would dedicate himself to taking on the media in a sustained and meaningful way, that would be a huge help. In last year's election, I had vain hopes that McCain might be frustrated and angry enough about his treatment by the press to take up the cause. But he didn't. And I'm not sure who there is now who could take his place. Conservatives are just going to have to deal with the fact that most of our politicians are more interested in winning the next election than in advancing a long-term strategy for conservative renewal.

So what then? I offer two suggestions:

* * *

(1) We conservatives might want to consider organizing some kind of effort to spread an anti-MSM message in an "alternative media" format using new technologies. We have a wonderfully well developed "Right Blogosphere" vivisecting the media's biased narratives and devising counterattacks on a daily basis. But we're simply never going to convince large numbers of Americans to put in the time and effort to read the likes of Michelle Malkin and Power Line and Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media when they could be keeping up with friends on Facebook and watching funny YouTube videos.

If we're going to change Americans' relationship to the MSM, we would have to do it while demanding relatively little of their time and even less of their effort. We would need to formulate our our message succinctly and distribute it in such a way as to allow people whose minds aren't automatically closed against us to absorb it in just a few minutes a day. In addition -- and this is critical -- we would need to drive home our anti-media message day after day after day, because it's very hard to change minds by fits and starts, even if you're preaching the unvarnished truth.

In an earlier era, the sort of project I'm describing would have been impossible. Now, however, we have email and text messaging and Twitter and internet feeds. So there's hope. And here, finally, is the meat of my first suggestion:

I think some conservative benefactor, or maybe the Republican party (but maybe not) should fund a small group of very smart people who would work full-time to identify ways in which major media outlets could be shown to have betrayed their audience through misinformation or omission. The existence of the Right Blogosphere and organizations like the Media Research Center would greatly facilitate this work: for the most part, the process of identifying compelling stories of media malpractice would consist merely of scouring internet sites that already exist.

Then, each and every day, very short but eye-catching summaries -- little more than headlines, really -- of one or two of the most arresting stories would be emailed or texted to the people on the group's mailing list (about whom I'll say more in a moment). The summaries would be accompanied by links to longer, fully detailed versions. Both the summaries and links would also be available as feeds. The longer versions could be prepared by the group tasked identifying the stories, but in many cases it would probably be sufficent to link to some of the excellent content already generated by the Right Blogosophere.

The specific nature of the MSM failures identified would vary: they might be national or international, political or cultural. But the consistent theme of every story would be the MSM's unwillingness or inability to act as objective guardians of the public interest. Electing specific candidates or advancing specific legislation would be entirely secondary in the selection and presentation of stories: the single aim in selecting and presenting stories would be to reveal the perfidy of the media. Needless to say, "media" would for these purposes include every important outlet misinforming large numbers of the American people. Jon Stewart would be just as much of a target as CBS, although obviously stories about Stewart would have to be handled differently.

Well, what about the crucial part: the audience for this steady stream of anti-media critique? The mailing list would of course include interested people who were already informed and committed conservatives, but the intent would be to interest, and therefore reach, all those people not generally used to thinking critically about the MSM's narratives. Once the process for identifying and distributing stories of media outrages was up and running, committed conservatives would encourage one another to get friends and acquaintances of theirs who weren't MSM-savvy to receive the emails. (In some cases, they might want to do this by actually subscribing their friends and at the same time generating an email asking them to give the service a try.) They could also make the feeds from the service available on their Facebook pages, blogs, etc.

Ideally, the outcome would be a steady drumbeat of anti-MSM talking points available to conservatives to use in conversation and debate. More importantly, a growing number of more apolitical citizens would be directly exposed, in the most passive way possible, to evidence of the MSM's biases. The process of really eroding the MSM's credibility could begin.

Anyway, that's suggestion #1. It would require (a) money, (b) a few clever and hard-working people, and (c) the ears of a few prominent conservative opinion-makers. Actually, I'm pretty sure that if (a) and (b) could be worked out, (c) would be sure to follow.

UPDATE: There are a couple of other elements of this suggestion that should be made explicit. First, the stories presented by this "media critique feed" I'm proposing should all be current, so as to better interest people; there's no use in pointing out that the media mishandled this or that topic a week ago. Second, the once-daily emails and text messages should be timed to arrived during normal working hours, when normal people crave a little distraction. The whole point is to make people who don't care that much about politics want to look at the feed.

* * *

(2) I mentioned above that a crusade against the media would ideally be led by a respected conservative politician. But as I also said, the incentives for prominent conservative politicians are to work with the media in the short term so as to strengthen their election prospects and the chances of getting important legislation passed. It's a problem.

But what if it were possible to change those incentives? Again, I don't think Professor Barnett is going to be able to succeed with the full gamut of federalism amendments he's working on, even though I wholeheartedly support his aims and wish him all the luck in the world. Why not narrow the focus for now and push hard on the one amendment that could shift the incentives for Republican politicians and the Republican party generally -- namely the term limits amendment?

If term limits were enacted and politicians therefore couldn't continue to look forward to indefinite re-election, the Republican party would have to start thinking differently. Because the power of incumbency would be so radically diminished, winning the next election -- i.e., creating more incumbents -- wouldn't be nearly as important. Instead, it would make sense for the party to worry about building their base and their brand over the long term. Meanwhile, under term limits, the group of men and women running for national office would include more people of conviction and fewer folks whose dream in life is to hold down a cozy seat in Congress for thirty years. So the candidates and elected officials would also be more inclined to take the fight to the media in a sustained fashion.

Another way of putting this is that term limits would be of immense value to conservatives in gaining full control of the Republican party. That, in turn, would give conservatives a more reliable position from which to attack the media and, ultimately, Big Government. (Of course, if the happy day ever arrives when Big Government is defeated, it will be time to dismantle the conservative coalition as the interests of various constituencies -- cultural conservatives, libertarians, etc. -- finally start to diverge. But I'm afraid that's a long way off, so we should be unified for now.)

Anyway, that's suggestion #2, and it's the end of my very short list in a rather long post. I'd love to hear other ideas, though. I'd be interested to know if readers (a) accept my thesis about the need to begin any conservative crusade by weakening the media and (b) if there are other suggestions out there for anti-media strategies. These years in exile should be spent sharpening our weapons and our wills!

Priorities

Arethusa: My Kindle is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Alpheus: ...

Arethusa: I mean, it's the best inanimate object that's ever happened to me.

Alpheus: Nice save, dear.

The Ways of Violence

For no very good reason, the shooting at Wesleyan University this spring reminded me of strange events at that same university nineteen years ago. I think I recall them chiefly thanks to a rather breathless write-up in the New York Times, which in those days I had just begun to think I ought to read. The prose in the Times was more engaging back then:

As a leader of the student protests that gripped Wesleyan University this spring, Nicholas B. Haddad cultivated an image as an angry young man with vague Middle-Eastern roots who knew well the ways of violence.

He regaled friends with tales of his exploits as a teen-age foot soldier in the Lebanese civil war, how he knew the suicide-terrorist who bombed the United States Marine barracks there in 1983, and how his mother had been kidnapped and assassinated in the Sudan. When the office of Wesleyan's president was firebombed on April 7, Mr. Haddad said openly that he was a prime suspect.

But in the two weeks since Mr. Haddad was found dead in a Hartford park, shot through the head in a car packed with a small arsenal of guns, the cloak of deceit that covered him in life has begun to unravel, only to leave an even greater mystery about who the 21-year-old student really was.

Here on the Wesleyan campus, where many students and professors are still shaken by the vandalism and destruction of this spring's unrest, people who considered Mr. Haddad their friend say they were stunned to meet his mother at his funeral, alive and well, and to see him buried not in some exotic foreign locale but 25 miles away in Willimantic, where his father and grandfather are also buried.

On Spanish

Speaking of Spanish ... it is Withywindle's best foreign language. WIthywindle speaketh not much of Spanish, since his command of the language has atrophied badly, but he has a great affection for the language from the days when he kept up with it, and for Spanish Literature of the Golden Age, the Generation of 1898, and modern Spanish literature. My appreciation of Spanish is entirely retrograde and romantic: I hear the language, inflected with Arabic, and the harsh sound whispers to me of the arid plain. I love the uncompromising love of battle and of honor - the ironic gaze on that same uncompromising love - the philosophical dreaminess - the sudden earthiness - the pure beauty of a language whose sounds I love all the more for not entirely understanding what every word means. Pedro Calderon de la Barca is a wonderful playwright and poet; I courted Goldberry with Federico Garcia Lorca's "Luna, Luna" - and Lorca's plays are (consciously intended to be, and succeed in the aspiration to be) as powerful as Greek tragedy; Camilo Jose Cela's La Colmena is a wonderful modern novel; Antonio Buero Vallejo's El Concierto de San Ovidio, a moving and dramatic meditation on blindness; El Cid a great medieval epic; Don Jorge Manrique's lament for his father a moving aristocratic lament; and Don Quixote - in addition to everything else, Alonso Quijana is a man who can not say (as Sancho Panza can) that he is a viejo cristiano; a presumed converso gone mad and determined to be a parfit Christian knight; a fool finally aware of his folly, and unwilling to give up his mad nobility, even at the price of his life - and so, in the end, a better man than the sordidly sane of Spain. That speaks to Withywindle.

You could learn Spanish so as to speak to our gastarbeiter, but you would far better learn it to read a glorious literature.

An Apologia for Inflating Grades

My worst students tend to drop out of the class part way through. It's not entirely crazy to think the remaining students ought to average around a B.

Pass the Mayo

In a gesture toward multiculturalism, we at Athens and Jerusalem would like to join the president in wishing our readers a very happy "Five of Four:

Obama joked that it was "Cinco de Cuatro," botching a play on the Spanish word for "four" when he meant to say "Cuatro de Mayo," or the Fourth of May. He tried again, but he still did not get it right.

Also, we wish you a very happy "Seven of Nine" (whose marital difficulties played a role in clearing the way for Obama's rise to greatness).

Inconsistencies

* I have said it's necessary for conservatives to condemn people like Ann Coulter. I have written things on this blog more extreme than anything Coulter ever said. Ergo, it's necessary for conservatives to condemn me. Assuming I ever end up in a position of influence.

* I preach virtu and virtue, inconsistently. (I could try to say "Virtu for national survival; virtue for everything else"; but that still smacks of the arbitrary.) Eager commenters could easily quote Withywindle to Withywindle, with devastating effect.

Just sayin'.

This is Wisdom

In the course of responding to complaints that he posts too many pictures of hot babes, R.S. McCain has some major truths to offer about what's wrong with the Republican party. Nicely written, too. A small but by no means sufficient sample:

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that conservatives take pride in their independence and individuality. They don't want to be seen as part of an amorphous blob, which is why the right doesn't have anything remotely like DailyKos, with umpteen-thousand diarists and 700 comments on every post.

Well, OK, fine. I don't go for the blob mentality, either. But this same individualistic pride leads to two harmful and interrelated tendencies on the Right:

* The Praise Deficit -- The Left is never afraid to praise its leaders and heroes, but many on the Right seem to feel they are somehow diminished if they praise others. Every once in a while, it would be nice if some conservative columnist would devote 700 words to pointing out what a tremendous thing Rush Limbaugh has accomplished. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the man single-handedly created talk radio as we know it today. If many columns like that have been written, I haven't seen them, and there ought to be more of them. People who are out there doing good work need to be celebrated, and held up as role models for others to emulate, and we on the Right don't do this -- at least until these great people die.

* The Criticism Surplus -- As soon as anyone has any meaningful success as a conservative, a flock of Republican ravens sets upon them, denigrating everything they say or do. The same people who feel themselves diminished if they praise others tend to feel that they can build themselves up by tearing other people down. Has Ann Coulter said some things I wish she hadn't said? Yes. But is she also a powerful conservative voice who regularly fills auditoriums on university campuses, exposing untold thousands of students to a message they never hear in their classrooms? Hell, yes. But oh, don't the likes of Megan McCain and Kathleen Parker love to take cheap shots at Coulter!

John Edwards: Another Great Rude Awakening

It seems that John Edwards, last seen trying to hide from the press by bracing himself against the door of a hotel bathroom, now faces some legal troubles connected to his affair with "videographer" Rielle Hunter:*

The two-time Democratic presidential candidate acknowledged Sunday that investigators are assessing how he spent his campaign funds -- a subject that could carry his extramarital affair from the tabloids to the courtroom. Edwards' political action committee paid more than $100,000 for video production to the firm of the woman with whom Edwards had an affair.

And it's not just campaign funds that are at issue. The Times says "a range of other fundraising organizations" controlled by Edwards -- including a "poverty center" -- are also being investigated for payments to Hunter's company.

I've never liked Edwards, but I also never dreamed he was this dumb. He's a multimillionaire, for goodness' sake. He has lots of rich friends (one of whom already is known to have paid money to Ms. Hunter on Edwards' behalf). Why does he need to dip into funds from poverty centers and PACs for a paltry $100,000 to buy off the mother of his child?** It makes so little sense, I'm inclined to believe it can't be true.

Then again, I've been burned by that sort of logic before where Edwards is concerned. The thing that used to hold me back from 100% certainty that the guy was a sleazeball was that he looked and sounded way too much like a phony to actually be one; at the very least, I told myself, he couldn't possibly be quite as insincere as he seemed.

Live and learn, as they say.

-------------------------------------------------------
[*I'm so proud of linking to both the National Enquirer and the New York Times in one sentence.]

[**Excuse me: alleged mother of his child.]

Psychotic Orphan Lad

Peter Suderman astutely notes that Anyone reasonably well-versed in comic-book lore will instantly recognize the classic “superhero model” of self-discovery: Watch your parents die, find a mission in life, learn about yourself! It is true: Psychotic Orphan Lad is the basic template, along with Psychotic Orphan Lass, and the Psychotic Orphan League. Now that I know this basic truth, I want to ring the changes in the blogging community. To wit:

Daniel Larison: America itself is the Psychotic Orphan Lad - parricidally bereft of religion and tradition, an amnesiac monster lashing out at the world.

Withywindle: Feature, not bug.

Alpheus: "I'll get my revenge," said Rod Blagojevich. "I'll get all those frikkin fraggers. I'll track them down and tie them up, and then I'll recite frikkin poetry at them, until they frikkin well know a frikkin dactyl from a frikkin spondee, and then I'll frikkin blow their frikkin heads off."

FLG: Twenty Years Ago: Young George Town watched his father rocking back and forth on the easy chair. "Those bastards," said Commander Maurice "Mo" Town. "Those goddam gutless NATO bastards. They knew those frikkin pirates had me captured, and they left me to die. They were waiting for orders, and the orders never came from Brussels. I trusted them. I trusted Hans and Pierre and Algernon and Ezio with my life, but they just watched and waited. If it hadn't been for that robot sharpshooter, I'd be a dead man. NATO! They all should die, die!" Tears trickled down Mo Town's cheeks. George Town watched his father becoming a broken man.

Now: George Town emerged from the Brussels cellar. The encounter with the turnips had not been as satisfying as he had hoped. But something was wrong ... Zombies. Zombies everywhere in the streets of Brussels. Should I be worried? George Town asked himself. No - he saw a Walloon zombie eviscerate a Flemish zombie, and he knew that they would be busy with each other for a while. I wonder if it was that meteor shower everyone was talking about? George wondered. Then he remembered. NATO zombies. An entire headquarters of them. Unsuspecting. The world would be grateful if he got rid of them. George grinned, and took out his father's saber, the one he had snuck past Belgian customs. He looked at the distant profile of the NATO headquarters, lit by the setting sun. "This is your last fiscal year, you shambling horrors," he said. He laughed long and loud, and the nearby zombies swerved to avoid him.

MSI: "My parents were killed by a criminal," said Bob. "Now I seek revenge." He twirled his gun.

"That was in Second Life," said Bill. "Your parents are fine. I saw them yesterday. Put that gun away."

"First Life!" screamed Bob. "First Life. My real life. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" He shot Bill in the stomach.

"I'm dying," said Bill. "Call a doctor."

Bob went to the computer and started typing. "Your First Life self will live. I'll be him too. Why ... everyone I kill in this shadow world gives me their self. I can be them all. All." He giggled dreamily, and slipped another bullet into his gun. Fragmentary Luddite thoughts slipped through Bill's brain as he bled.

Phoebe: It had not received the attention of the Dreyfuss Affair. Lieutenant Elie Halevy was not on the general staff; he was an artillery officer in the Lille garrison; it was a question of peculation, not treason. Still, half a dozen officers Francais et chretien had sworn to the guilt of Halevy, to preserve the position of Lieutenant Pierre Devot, Comte de Morbihan. And Halevy had been degraded, the epaulets torn from his shoulder, his sword broken; evicted from the army he loved. The year in an army jail was as nothing in comparison; his death soon after his release was of a broken heart.

His daughter planned her revenge. Her father, scion of a textile manufacturer, left a sizable inheritance. She learned to fence - her father's old teacher was sympathetic to the intense girl, perhaps guessed at what she aimed, facilitated her extraordinary desire. Gymnastic exercises, horseback riding, pistol, swimming - all those she mastered. Then, too, the feminine arts - conversation and coquettery, fashion and allure, silence and the well-phrased word that commanded men who thought themselves commanders. And particular arts - to disguise herself, to pass, to enter the society of her father's enemies. She became Marie-Claire Limoges; the exquisite partisan of monarchy, mob, whatever might mangle the Republic; benefactress of the Action Francaise; hostess of a dozen soirees a month, where officers of the French army would come for relaxation, enjoyment, all the pleasures of La Belle France.

And sometimes, as they walked home on the cobblestones of Paris, they would hear footsteps behind them -- the tap tap tap of the best boots in Paris. (Revenge, she thought, could always be combined with proper footwear.) They: the officers who had condemned her father to disgrace and death. They would turn, see her, la Scaramouche Juive, and there would be a duel - one she always won. And as each bleeding body cooled on the pavement, she smiled, one death closer to the one she was saving for last - Pierre Devot, now a major. They knew each other well - very well indeed. Devot thought they would know each other intimately, very soon. But, no, he would hear different words from those he expected, before he breathed his last:

My name is Deborah Halevy. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

It would be very sweet.

Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s

* France had relatively low unemployment during the Great Depression because so many Frenchmen had been killed during World War I.

* Weber talks about how wonderfully the British recovered from the Great Depression as compared to the French. This particular historian of Britain, reading that statement, shudders with horror at the thought of how bad things were in France if they made Britain look good by comparison.

* The French of the day condemned America for endless conformity, squashing out of local custom, market standardization, etc. La plus ca change, etc. - but it also reminds me that nowadays American conservatives condemn Europeans for hyperrationalization, squeezing out of individuality, etc. Clearly, condemning Someone Else for not being properly individual, local, various, diverse, is a recurring theme, which should make one cautious about believing any such accusation.