Why Children's Books are Better Than Books by Future Presidential Science Advisors

The whole Right Blogosphere seems to be mocking the fact that Obama science czar John Holdren once proposed giving trees legal standing to file lawsuits:

Giving “natural objects” -- like trees -- standing to sue in a court of law would have a “most salubrious” effect on the environment, Holdren wrote the 1970s.

“One change in (legal) notions that would have a most salubrious effect on the quality of the environment has been proposed by law professor Christopher D. Stone in his celebrated monograph, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’” Holdren said in a 1977 book that he co-wrote with Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich.

“In that tightly reasoned essay, Stone points out the obvious advantages of giving natural objects standing, just as such inanimate objects as corporations, trusts, and ships are now held to have legal rights and duties,” Holdren added.

Um...okay. As a classicist I'm probably more open to this idea than most. In ancient Athens, both animals and inanimate objects could be tried for murder in the Court of the Archon Basileus. So maybe we should let trees bring suits against people who violate their arboreal rights. As a juror, I'd definitely award damages to The Giving Tree if she sued that greedy bastard who kept taking parts of her to build houses and boats. (Discussion Question for the Children: What is this book printed on and where does it come from? Now, don't you feel terrible, you thoughtless little monster?)*

But I do see one small problem. In the cases of "corporations, trusts, and ships" only certain designated people have the right to sue on behalf of the fictional person. Who'll have that right in the case of trees? Just anyone?** Can I represent the oak in my neighbor's backyard if I notice he isn't aggressively fighting the borers? Or, as Arethusa puts it: if a tree sues in the forest, and there's nobody around to hear its testimony, does it still have a case?

It seems to be the idea endorsed by Holdren only makes sense if the trees have some legally constituted representative. But who? I don't trust the Sierra Club, dryads never existed, and I'm pretty sure all the Ents are extinct. So I guess there's no one to speak for the trees.

OR IS THERE?


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[*Confession: That book made me cry.]

[**Actually, there's precedent for this in ancient Athens too: any citizen could prosecute another for damaging olive trees sacred to Athena. But these trees belonged to the goddess and/or the city as a whole.]

Health Insurance and the Free Market

Stephen Carter says we should be happy about the profitability of insurance companies -- and he's absolutely right. The profits of the insurance companies are the clearest sign that there's room for the free market either to expand services or to cut costs. It gives the lie to the idea that government needs to replace insurers in order to provide cheaper, better health care. It's when something isn't profitable, like providing national defense or caring for the homeless, that the state has to step in.

Of course, high profits may also signal barriers to entry in the insurance market, barriers which it is the government's business to tear down. In a world of truly benevolent and disinterested government, this wouldn't be too difficult since some of the barriers were erected by government in the first place. It is simply crazy, for example, that we still deny consumers the right to purchase health insurance across state lines. This is so individual states can regulate the policies insurers must offer, imposing all sorts of mandates. They could impose mandates on their citizens instead -- forcing everyone to carry a certain minimal amount of health insurance, as states do in the case of auto policies. But then voters would confront something like the true cost-benefit relationship that prevails in health care: they might then hold politicians accountable when they try to insist the voters buy too many things they don't want.

Kristol on Stewart on Health Care

Bill Kristol was on Jon Stewart a couple of days ago and discussed health care, among other things. Stewart seemed to think that the existence of military health care justifies the so-called public option in the Democrats' plan. Two observations:

(1) Oddly, Kristol seemed to admit that armed forces provide superior care. I suppose that when it comes to most injuries sustained in the line of duty, they probably do: they ought to be experts in treating war wounds and providing rehabilitation. But Kristol was remiss in not mentioning the serious problems with army medical services, like the not-so-long-ago scandals at Walter Reed. I've talked to a few people who have served as doctors in the armed forces or worked at VA hospitals, and without exception they've been quite critical of the standard of care. I'm sure someone who cared to search old episodes of The Daily Show could find examples of Stewart feigning outrage over the Walter Reed scandals.

Kristol also dropped the ball by not pointing out that four months ago the Obama administration floated a plan to charge veterans' private health insurance plans for their service-related injuries. Arethusa reminds me that Stewart uncharacteristically stepped up to plate and criticized Obama (though in a characteristically mild way: it was "the government's" plan) for this very bad idea. The administration's push for temporary cost savings at the price of the eventual denial of private insurance coverage to military personnel is a good illustration of why we should think twice before we trust their judgment on health care issues.

(2) Having somehow gotten Kristol to concede that the armed forces provide great health care, Stewart asked Kristol whether soldiers deserve better government care than other citizens. Kristol said yes, which raised angry murmurs from Stewart's audience of trained seals. Stewart faked horror.

But Kristol was right: members of the armed forces risk life and limb for the sake of the body politic. Although they enter the services young and in excellent health, their risk for disabling or life-threatening injury can be high. Of course they deserve a better health care system than the rest of us. I have trouble understanding how anyone can disagree.

Kristol ought to have pointed out that any system of health care will involve rationing, and any public health care plan will involve government rationing. From the moment the state gets involved in funding medical services, it will inevitably have to mandate more public support for some patients than for others. The notion behind the Daily Show audience's outrage, namely that everyone deserves the same level of government support for his medical care, is simply not translatable into public policy.

Amasa Delano Obama

From Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno:

How can I be killed now at the ends of the earth
by this insane Spaniard?
Who could want to murder Amasa Delano?
My conscience is clean. God is good.

Just a literary reference for a continuing critique of Obama's foreign policy: that it incarnates a continuing American strain of self-righteous naivete, a failure to believe in one's own sinfulness, and hence an inability to conceive of the sinfulness of others. Obama's wide-eyed ingenuousness provokes the thought, but Lowell (and Melville in the original) did think of it as an American trait, not a specifically liberal one; it is bipartisan, and afflicted Bush's foreign policy as well.

This is a completely unoriginal post; I just enjoy quoting Lowell's play.

I'll be away for a few days, visiting relatives. Alpheus will keep you entertained with 1) higgledy-piggledy verse in Latin; 2) limericks in Greek; and 3) adaptations of Juvenal - Alphine Juvenalia - keyed to the Obama administration.

Tax the Divorced!

I have no idea whether this study is any good. (As usual, the press doesn't report the sort of information that would let us judge for ourselves.) But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the results reflect the general population:

A Chicago study involving 8,652 people aged 51 to 61 found divorced people have 20% more chronic illnesses such as cancer than those who never marry.

Wow. 20% more chronic illnesses. And chronic means expensive! Do these study results suggest that divorce is a "lifestyle choice" that puts a disproportionate strain on the health care system? Should we add divorce to the list of "risky behaviors" we blame for driving up our medical costs?

Conspiracy Theory

Over the White House, black helicopters circle, with a loud whup-whup of their rotors. If anyone were to look closely at them, the would notice that the American flags on their sides are hastily painted; underneath them, the UN flags are faintly visible. The American flags are wrong: the order of red and white stripes has been reversed, and there are too many stars. The logo on most of the helicopters is USAF, but a few read NAUAF.

Down below, in the Oval Office, the whup-whup of the rotors is very loud. BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA is yelling into a telephone, but he cannot be heard, until:

OBAMA: -move those helicopters right now, I can't hear myself think. (Looks up, startled, as the whup-whup diminishes; smiles.) That's better. Tell those idiots to keep their distance. (Puts down phone.) Where was I?

HILLARY CLINTON: The birth certificate, Mr. President.

OBAMA: Oh, yes. That's a double-blind. It's true the real Barack was born in Kenya, but I actually was born -- that's "born" in quotation marks, of course - at the lab in Hawaii. We didn't want people to look too closely at that birth certificate, so we set up this Kenya ruse. It's been working like a charm.

CLINTON: So where is the real Barack?

OBAMA: Spare parts. (Grins; there is something inhuman in the smile.) But he's nearly used up, and there isn't nearly enough of him for the clones. Which is the reason for the health care initiative, of course. That's my story. What about the rest of you?

ERIC HOLDER: I was bred for the Dr. No operation, of course, before that Double-Oh, wrecked it. Then I was seconded to Operation Albion; I was meant to be a Law Lord for - well, they shelved Operation Albion, and replaced it with the Brussels Initiative, which is working well enough. So I was at loose ends, and they switched me to the American department to forward the destruction of the Constitution and its replacement by International Law. In my spare time I impede tort reform, but that's more an avocation than a conspiracy per se.

OBAMA: Thank you, Eric. Rahm, how about you?

RAHM EMMANUEL: As you know, I officially represent the Zionist Conspiracy. Actually, I'm a double-agent; my true masters are the American Ballet Company, which plans to require ballet in all elementary school and high school physical education classes in the country. Since this requires a pirouette around the Eighth Amendment, we felt we needed to take over another conspiracy to forward our agenda.

HOLDER: Huh - who's running the Palestinians?

EMMANUEL: The Dodgeball Association, curse their rotten hearts.

OBAMA: Now, now, no need to get personal. Tim, how about you?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I'm an elf.

EMMANUEL: We know that. That wasn't the question.

GEITHNER: No, no - I represent Sidhe Enterprises, Inc. and LLC. The Faerie Court grew weary of the forest when Gloriana died, and we decided to shift into banking. We have done very well since then. I represent our Goldman Sachs affiliate. We have no goal for world-domination, precisely, but we love playing with power. And we like silver. And it is so amusing when the quants try to figure out our "investment strategies"! They look for formulas, when it is all spellcraft. And the occasional blood sacrifice, such as Lehman.

HOLDER: Wait - was Madoff an elf?

GEITHNER: Poor Bernie. He meant to send the money to the Bahamas, but it went to Brigadoon by accident. It'll be back in a hundred years, but you can't explain that to the newspapers.

EMMANUEL: You ought to disguise yourself better. You look too much like an elf.

GEITHNER: Elementary misdirection. Any group of people where no-one looks like an elf certainly includes one elf in disguise.

EMMANUEL: (Scornfully.) Like the Steelers?

GEITHNER: (Smiles.)

OBAMA: Very interesting. Bob, how about you?

ROBERT GATES: I represent the permanent bureaucracy. We don't have plans for world domination as such; we just want to be sure we're the one's carrying out those plans. Now, Bill Gates actually is my brother, and I have tried to aid the triumph of Microsoft worldwide by the adroit use of defense procurement contracts, but Microsoft serves our interests quite well. All those handy bugs in the code. Did you know that those Chinese hackers actually downloaded Vista from our Pentagon systems? We expect their military efforts have been retarded for four years by allowing them that little escapade.

OBAMA: Hmm - is there a representative of the Chinese conspiracy here?

GEITHNER: Me again, sir. They think I'm their agent.

GATES: Don't blab.

GEITHNER: Wouldn't dream of it. We of the Sidhe are eager to extend our power in China; we will make adroit use of your Vista trick.

OBAMA: And you, Hillary?

(Time freezes. The only people in the room who still appear to breathe are OBAMA and CLINTON.)

CLINTON: I am Lilith. I am Circe, Morgana Le Fay, the White Witch, the Other Mother. I am ancient of days and ever-thirsty. I came so close to triumph, to the time of devouring, to satiation, and you stopped me. How? Who are you really?

OBAMA: You do not want to know.

(Time unfreezes.)

CLINTON: Bill and I are in it for ourselves. He had his turn, and I wanted mine. I still want it, Mr. President, as you know.

OBAMA: Yes. And it's safer having you in this office than out. Now then, are we finished? Good, I have plans to seize the gold supplies from Fort Knox tomorrow. We need a distraction. Ah ... (In a dulcet voice with odd harmonics.) Joseph!

JOSEPH BIDEN; (Waking from a trance he has been in the entire time.) Sorry, boss, I was just thinking about my grades in law school. They were so good!

OBAMA: Yes, Joe, they were. Can you call up the Journal for a friendly chat about our European policy? I want an article in the papers tomorrow.

BIDEN: Gotcha, boss. Anything I should say in particular?

OBAMA: Use your discretion. Just be sure not to mention how fragile the pound is - Gordon Brown told me this morning that the British economy could fall over if anyone blew hard.

BIDEN: That's a hell of a phrase! OK, I won't mention that.

OBAMA: Or that bit Silvio told us about his threesome with Sarkozy and Angela.

BIDEN: Definitely off the record.

OBAMA: And- (The whup-whip of the helicopters gets louder.) Dammit. (He strides to the window and yanks it open. He takes from his pocket a peculiar gun with a grip meant for an inhuman hand. He fires it; a beam of purple lightning scorches the air. There is an enormous explosion, and the sound of falling metal. The remaining whup-whup beats a hasty retreat. Softly:) The Roswell cache has so many good uses.

BIDEN: Wow. (Pause.) I didn't know you could have a concealed weapons permit for the White House. Can I have one too? I'd love to bring my BB gun to work, shoved down my trouser-legs or something.

OBAMA: Of course, Joe. You'd better run along to that interview now.

BIDEN: Sure, boss. Wow, my own BB gun in the White House! (Leaves room.)

OBAMA: (To GATES:) Tell the pilots' families that they died in Iraq. Insert a file that they died heroically in a secret mission in Afghanistan, in case any one gets nosy. And tell the engineers over at the Base to put mufflers on those damn helicopters.

Hobbes' Behemoth

[I said something really stupid, and an anonymous commenter very politely corrected my whopping error. My thanks to the commenter, for the correction and the politeness. I'm taking down the post.]

Withywindle's Fortune Cookie From Last Night

Be indifferent to snide remarks.

Governor's Island

At Goldberry's suggestion, we went with Shirebourn to Governor's Island - for those of you who don't know New York, it's a small island just south of Manhattan, with wonderful views of the Statue of Liberty, Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island; it was run by the Army and then the Coast Guard until 1996, moldered for a bit, and now is being turned into a park. Goldberry and I went a few years ago, when it was still moldering; now it's spruced up with many visitors. A wonderful place! Sea breezes, the views, grassy lawns for Shirebourn to wander, over-priced snacks (but I do like me a kielbasa by the sea), and we could see all sorts of tandem-bikes for families in use, which we can use when Shirebourn gets older. For those of you who are young and single: aside from the picnicking families, there were a fair number of young ladies sunbathing and young men biking. Goldberry wondered if Governor's Island would become a pick-up place for the young and underdressed.

On John Lukacs

I just finished his (first) autobiography - more quickly toward the end, since teaching history in America just isn't as interesting as surviving Budapest during World War II. Lukacs presents himself as a happy reactionary, whose fundamental mental outlook has hardly changed since 1946 or so; if true, this makes him much less interesting. He also presents himself as something of an autodidact - I don't think he ever even attended graduate school, just slipped into college teaching after World War II on the strength of a BA from Hungary - self-satisfiedly contemptuous of most of the historical profession. This does make me think less of him: the discipline is a friendly conversation that has generated enormous knowledge, and to reject it as much as he does (not totally, but sufficiently) cannot help his historical understanding. I very much enjoyed his Five Days in May, but I confess I now trust it less, having read his attitudes toward other historians.

Birtherism

It appears that the Obama birth certificate controversy refuses to die. If anything, it seems to have gotten a new lease on life in recent weeks. It seems clear to me that the so-called birthers aren't thinking clearly and that they'd do better to direct their anti-Obama impulses to some more fruitful end -- like, oh, I don't know, opposing the president's awful legislative agenda.

Almost as annoying as the birthers, though, are the many folks on the Left who are using the birthers as an opportunity to cluck their tongues over the looniness of the Right. Liz Cheney is now being accused of "defending" the birthers for explaining -- correctly, in my view -- the sentiment behind the phenomenon.

Yes, some fairly prominent conservatives have flirted with the birth certificate controversy. But let's think back a few years. Claims that George W. Bush wasn't a legitimate president weren't exactly unheard-of on the Left.

All the evidence that ever became available suggested that the right guy won the recount in Florida in 2000 and 2001, and no real evidence of any suppression of the black vote in that election was ever produced, but a lot of Democrats just couldn't bring themselves to believe that according to the rules, this was our president. Instead of making up facts, the more sober souls preferred to play "if only": if only senior citizens hadn't been confused by the butterfly ballot; if only Ralph Nader hadn't been running; if only George Bush had started drinking again and vomited all over himself in the middle of one of the presidential debates....

And, then, in 2004, CBS trotted out forged documents to "prove" that Bush had gotten special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, and refused to back down for days after it was clear to everyone that the documents couldn't possibly date from an era before Microsoft Word. A whole lot of Democrats had access to the evidence and refused to believe what was plain. And to this day, it's not uncommon to meet liberals who are convinced the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans were discredited (though they can never explain how).

While we're at it, let's not forget that the 9/11 "truthers" came mainly from the political Left. And every other liberal I talk to seems to think Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I've argued before on this blog that conservatives need to increase their ratio of tu quoques to mea culpas. Personally, I thought Liz Cheney's reaction to Larry King and James Carville was exactly the approach conservatives ought to take. Yes, the birthers are nuts. But the paranoid style in American politics isn't limited to a certain region of the ideological spectrum. It's not only elephants who are wearing tinfoil hats. It's just that they tend to get noticed more.

Obama Mau-Maus Cambridge Cops

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

I am not surprised by Pres. Obama's words, but I find them disgusting. Doubtless an issue where I will preach to the choir, and not convince the unconvinced, but his attitude toward race, and toward Americans, remains disqualifying toward any office in the land, and now disgraces the Presidency. I will translate them:

I mean, if I was trying to jigger into -- well, I guess this is my house now, so -- (laughter) -- it probably wouldn't happen. (Chuckling.) But let's say my old house in Chicago -- (laughter) -- here I'd get shot.

I'm still a whining racial grievance monger.

(Laughter.) But so far, so good. They're -- they're -- they're reporting. The police are doing what they should. There's a call. They go investigate. What happens?

Now, I've -- I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

I haven't read the police report, and I don't intend to.

And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately. That's just a fact.

I am not interested in other facts that relate to this fact.

As you know, Lynn, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society.

These facts, they do not mean what I think they mean.

I don't really like white Americans. I will never give them the benefit of the doubt. I will lecture them, hector them, and never understand that I have acted unpresidentially, and without the charitable love that an American ought to bear for his fellow citizens.

That doesn't lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that's been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us.

I am a monstrously self-obsessed racial grievance monger and I always will be.

And that's why I think the more that we're working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we're eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody's going to be.

Al Qaeda, please recruit light-skinned black men as operatives. I can assure you that at the very least no one in White House security will stop them.

In a just world, Pres. Obama's popularity would plummet below 50% immediately, never to recover, and all his political initiatives to wreck the country would fail, as his fellow Democrats ran in terror from anything associated with him. But sadly, it probably isn't a just world.

If I Ran The Zoo

If I ran the zoo, and wanted to pass universal health care, I'm not sure that I'd behave so differently from Pres. Obama, or think that I'd done so badly so far. Politics = sausage-making, the center of the Democratic party apparently desires a bureaucratic monstrosity of a bill with oogobs of perks for the boys, and we still seem on track for a universal health-care bill, oy, by year's end. So criticism of his tactics ought to be moderate as yet. That said ... I would still try to accomplish somewhat less, in hopes of achieving more. Audace, audace, toujours audace, and all that, but some sense of limits seems in order. How to limit? I dunno, how about just making public health care universal for everyone born in 1992 and afterward, allowing voluntary buy-in to the program for people born earlier, and letting it creep over America year by year? Just as a random suggestion; I'm sure there are others way to make things more moderate.

I'm struck about how much easier it is to cut taxes than to attempt to remold a sixth of the economy. I suppose it would be easier for the Democrats if they simply added a health-care benefit to the existing system, and left everything else as it was. It's a tribute, I suppose, to their sense of responsibility - if not the correctness of their views - that they think they really need to redo the entire health care system, not just add treats, which adds enormously to the difficulty of their tax. But I suppose by September they'll have wrestled their sense of responsibility to the ground and consensed on Treats for Everybody! And thus proved themselves part of an ever-more deeprooted bipartisan American tradition.

Miscellaneous III

* The New York Times has sold WQXR. This is terribly sad: part of my childhood, one of things that gave solidity to the world, was these words (from memory): These are the classical radio stations of the New York Times, WQXR-FM and WQXR-AM, bringing you the news every hour, on the hour. Alas, alas.

* I finished Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles. They are very fine historical romances - and they demand a great deal of the reader. I am weary after 3,000 pages of detailed historical settings, psychological subtlety, and close plotting. Very much worth it, but not a light undertaking.

* And to relax, started the historian John Lukacs' autobiography. We share prejudices; hence I enjoy it. He lived through WWII in Budapest; some hair-raising anecdotes.

* In the wider world, it's interesting to see how America's constitutional architecture whittles down the Obama program, even absent an opposition party capable of opposition.

A&J Stimulus Update!!!!1!

FLG wonders when he's getting his share of the Athens and Jerusalem stimulus check.

Well, see, it's like this. As FLG probably knows, only a small proportion of the total stimulus approved by Congress back in February has actually been spent, and most of that represents transfers from the federal government to the states. Even some Democrats aren't happy with the slow disbursement process. Less widely reported is why the delays are taking place.

What FLG probably doesn't know is that the mechanism for issuing the stimulus checks turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Withywindle and I have been required to provide detailed budgets, "statements of purpose," a whole slew of notarized affidavits, complete medical records and rather substantial donations to Obama-Biden 2012 and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We've also been asked to pass security clearances, learn something called the "Stimulus Song" and "draw Tippy."

Bureaucracy. You know how it is. Being patriotic citizens, and also desperately greedy for that sweet stimulus green, Withywindle and I have been good sports about the whole thing.

What Withy and I didn't expect was being asked to meet personally with Joe Biden. I hardly need to remind our readers that Joe Biden is the man in charge of making sure all the stimulus money is well spent. This is because "nobody messes with Joe." It would be very unjust to assume that "nobody messes with Joe" is Obama's private code for "Joe is most plausible possible scapegoat for when a whole ton of money gets wasted in hilarious ways."

Anyway, in his role as Guardian of the Stimulus, Biden somehow found our web site number and sent us an email requesting a meeting. Legal considerations prevent us from releasing the email, but I think I can safely remark that Joe Biden sure likes emoticons and exclamation points. (Withywindle and I spent a long time trying to figure out why Biden's strings of exclamation points were occasionally interspersed with lower-case "L"s.)

Let me tell you this: when the vice-president of the United States sends you an email with subject line "$$$$4$$$$$!!!!l!!" you sure as heck write him back. Then you get on a plane to Washington and, because the conversation on the plane somehow turned to turned to the relative merits of logic and rhetoric, you take separate cabs to the Old Executive Office Building. There, you find yourself in the presence of a man who's a heartbeat away from the highest office on earth. You can't stop staring at his hair plugs, and, once the awkward pleasantries are over, the conversation goes something like this:

Joe: Guys, I looked at your web page.

(Alpheus and Withywindle exchange worried glances.)

Joe: It seems like you don't like President Obama very much.

Alpheus: (hurriedly) It's not that we don't like him....

Joe: And you make it seem like you think I'm some sort of huge joke.

Alpheus: (beginning to sweat) Sir, I wouldn't say that....

Joe: (alarmingly lucid) What would you say?

Withywindle: We do have a difference of a opinion on some of the policies your administration is pursuing. But I can promise you, sir --

Joe: Listen, I think I have a much higher IQ than either of you guys. I had a full academic scholarship and graduated top of my class in law school! My ancestors worked in the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania for twelve hours, and then they would come up and play football for four hours. It wasn't that they weren't smart. They just didn't have a platform on which to stand.

Withywindle: (uneasy) Mr. Vice President, nobody's attacked your intelligence. (Alpheus fails to stifle a giggle. Withywindle kicks him under the table.) Or your forebears'.

Joe: Let's put it this way, gentlemen. In baseball there's a thing called a strike zone. It goes from two feet above the shortstop's head to the buckle on the third baseman's belt. Now I think you guys may be way outside the strike zone.

Withywindle: Meaning...?

Joe: Meaning that if you do that four times I walk.

Alpheus: (confused) Unless you swing.

Joe: (stern) Hey. Hey. No one has ever said that. (to aide:) Is anyone saying that? Sure, I could have any woman I wanted. With this smile? These teeth? This job? Any woman. But I don't. I don't because I love Jill.

Alpheus: (sensing an opportunity) And we love America, Mr. Vice-President. If you read our blog, we really love America. And we really respect y-- we respect President Obama. We want to use those stimulus dollars to create jobs that will boost the whole economy.

Withywindle: And this money isn't all for us. Some of it's for our readers. And families. And the intern we're going to hire.

Alpheus: And all the people we buy things from. Many of them are children!

Joe: Children?

Alpheus: Sure. Children in places like Malaysia and the Philippines. I mean, we don't buy directly from them of course. They're employed by American corporations that have outsourced manufacturing jobs. But they benefit from the stimulus too.

Joe: Malaysia? Is that near Eurasia?

Withywindle: It's in Eurasia.

Alpheus: I think they're an American ally. Their flag looks a lot like ours. (to Withywindle:) Didn't Obama send their prime minister some DVDs?

Joe: I don't think I've ever been to Malaysia. (to aide:) Have I ever been to Malaysia? (aide shrugs) I don't think I've been there. But your guys' web site doesn't have anything to do with Malaysia, does it? You call yourselves --?

Withywindle: Athens and Jerusalem.

Joe: Athens and Jerusalem. I've been to those places. Funny story: I got arrested in Athens 229 years ago. I was there at Ohio University and there were these two co-eds: talk about cute --!

Alpheus: (interrupting) Sir, I think you mean Athens, Ohio...we're referring to Athens, Greece. Tertullian, one of the Christian fathers --

Joe: Oh, Greece. Yeah. Love the Greeks. And I'm a father myself. You know, I once said that nothing except the blind forces of nature moves in this world which is not Greek in origin.

Alpheus: But...I thought that was Henry Maine.

Joe: Henry, Maine? No, that was in Washington, D.C. But I've been to Maine. You know they were the first state to meet their highway funding deadline under the stimulus bill? It's past the deadline and a lot of states still haven't spent that money.

Withywindle: Speaking of the stimulus bill, Mr. Vice President....

Anyway, to make a very long story short, we eventually convinced Joe Biden that we weren't trying to mess with him, and that our portion of the stimulus money would be well spent, and that we'd "tone it down a notch" (whatever that means) in time for the next election cycle. If we understood Biden correctly, we should be getting our first stimulus payment anytime between six months from now -- maybe a little slower, since Biden, as a key player U.S. foreign policy, may have to deal with an Iranian nuclear test around that time -- and 2016.

So, to FLG, please try to be patient. Rome, Ohio, wasn't built in a day. Also, the government has a lot on its plate right now: nationalizing the auto industry, investigating the Bush administration for trying to kill Osama bin Laden, nationalizing health care, trying to destroy democracy in Costa Rica, nationalizing the housing industry, trying to forestall democracy in Iran, nationalizing the banks....

In the meantime, maybe we could offer FLG some tasty, tasty ham? Or a *very* post-dated check signed "Alpheus and Withywindle"?

The Post-Cronkite Era

Things have been slow around here this weekend: Withywindle and I are both fatigued from our last epic struggle on the question of rhetoric vs. reason.

To fill the void, an old video from JibJab, with relevance to the passing of Walter Cronkite. I don't really mourn the day when a few news desks could control what America thought about major events (with disastrous results, in my opinion, when Cronkite decided to convince the nation that Vietnam was a lost cause) but the rise of competition in TV news has had its downside....

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Breakfast Song

My mommy, she made coffee; my grandmommy, she did too.
We ain't paid no coffee tax since 1792.

Liberal Taqiyya

Maureen Dowd yesterday was Ann Coulter without the charm. Like Coulter, Dowd has one major virtue: a willingness to say in print what other people only think. In this most recent column, that includes Sotomayor is being dishonest to the judiciary committee, and a good thing too!

The judge’s full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable was more than necessary and somewhat disappointing. But, as any clever job applicant knows, you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions — even though that’s why the president wants her.

Well, she is replacing David Souter, the last Supreme Court nominee to be so misleading in his testimony to the committee.

Why is it that so many liberals take lying by political figures for granted? Whenever there's an election, and I point out to liberals that their candidate has taken this or that position they disagree with, the usual response is some version of "Oh, well, he has to say that to get elected. I don't think he really believes it." This applies especially to "social issues." Most liberals of my acquaintance, for example, seem to assume that Obama isn't really against gay marriage and isn't, in fact, a genuine Christian.

By contrast, conservatives of my acquaintance always complain when they think their guys are lying or massaging the truth -- and almost never excuse a position they disagree with as justifiable pandering. This applies only to public figures, though: most conservatives professionals whom I know believe that it's acceptable and often desirable to conceal conservative views in private life because the consequences of honesty can be so dire.

Of course, I can't prove my observation has any general validity, though I notice the same pattern when public issues are debated on TV and in the papers. I think I'm describing a real phenomenon, which isn't hard to explain. A lot of leftism is simple elitism: We're better than They, so it's okay to lie to Them. If We didn't, Our doctrines would be less likely to prevail. and They're too stupid or evil to engage in rational debate, or They'd already belong to Us.

Call it "liberal taqiyya," though in a way that's unfair to the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya -- justifiable lying -- which most theologians of Islam interpret primarily in terms of protecting the faithful against persecution. In fact, what conservatives do by keeping silent for the sake of their careers is more like taqiyya in the true sense. There is, however, a more radical school of thought, based on the ideas that (1) all Muslims are at war with all unbelievers and (2) "war is deceit", which holds that lying in order to advance Islam is always justified. It's this version of taqiyya that the American Left seems to have embraced.

Citizen Kane 3000

If I were a movie studio executive, I would green-light this so fast.....

Love, Actually

Let me reformulate what I've been saying on this rhetoric/reason schtick. I do not believe, nor should I believe, in anything anyone tells me unless I believe they love me, or that we share a love for something else. The Laws of Thermodynamics will never tell me they love me, and I will not and cannot believe they are true unless someone whispers sweet nothings in my words first - tells me, for example, how much he loves the search for truth, why he loves the scientific methods that produce those laws, convinces me to care for them too, convinces me that he is sincere in what he tells me of them. I.e., rhetoric is the essential tool to convince me that he loves me. Now, we can bat back and forth endlessly the distinction between "true in itself" and "truth I believe". The latter I take to be the only relevant truth.

When I say science is sophistic, I mean that it disguises the statements of love embedded in its structure. I can also say that it attempts to dispense with the statements of love - which, if not sophistic, is still insufficient for belief. The pebble-filled bucket is not magic, merely loveless, and therefore incredible.

Truth, that is, is really troth.

When I distinguish rhetoric from sophistry, it is the distinction between the genuine statement of love, and the false statement of love.

Love is what brings us out of our Descartian shells, makes us into relational, Heideggerian beings; love turns a separate I regarding a Thou into an I conjoined with Thou, no longer ourselves but become our relationship.

Love depends on language, words. Language persuades us to love; language changes us from selves to mutualities, from loveless to loving and beloved.

Rhetoric is the art of love.

On the Education of the Passions

This is something that lurks behind what I'm interested in, and I think there's a whole other scholarly literature out there of which my ignorance is even more profound. But let us say that a good deal of (political) philosophy seems to turn on what you consider to be a ruling passion - Hobbesian fear, Smithian self-love - and other philosophies (natural law) argue for passions both natural and therefore correct/well-ordered. Much else turns on the proper objects of love - God, nation, family, virtue, honor - and therefore a great deal turns on how to educate the passions - how to control fear and self-love, how to inspire particular sorts of love. Education of the passions is the counterpart of the education of character - your passions are your character. Some debates are between the passionate and those who would deny the passions - where futile denial and successful denial present differing horrors. (See endless dull perorations in Star Trek.) While I have expressed the conservative variant of this critique on a number of occasions, and do generally believe it, I note that both conservatives and liberals express variants of it, identifying themselves with the properly passionate, and their opponents with the coldbloodedly inhuman. So it should be taken with a grain of salt. Another debate, perhaps less straw-mannish, grants passions their place, but differs on the method of education, and the precise objects of education. For a first generalization: one line of division is between "Deweyans" who think of passions/character as inborn and individual, and who think education should be devoted to drawing forth these diverse and individual passions, and - conservatives, shall we say? - who prize particular passions and objects of passions, wish every child/person to possess them, and educate passions for shared virtues/objects rather than to polish individual passions. A rather profound debate, but one that consensually acknowledges the value of the education of the passions.

This all tangentially related to Robert Stacy McCain's post a few days ago on meritocracy, where he talks about the obnoxious temperament of the meritocrats. (And by-the-by raises as a corollary the idea that meritocracy would be far more tolerable if the meritocrats were less full of themselves.) "Temperament," I think, is another way of talking about character and passions. One critique of the meritocrats is that they are not judged by the education of their passions - all facts, no virtue. Another would be that they have the wrong passions knocked into them - a passion for "social justice" and the like, which seems to be an updated version of Lady Bountiful self-importance, but at least has the saving grace of being a passion, and one that aims to be unselfish. Anyway, I think you can fold in the meritocracy debate into the education of the passions debate.

On Writing Encyclopedia Articles

Reading three books is a reasonable basis for writing several hundred words.

A Food Mystery, or, Is Alpheus Going to Die?

Two days ago, I cooked a rather complex dish -- orange chicken -- that I've had great success with before. Yesterday evening, Arethusa and I ate some of it. I was disappointed by the flavor: it should have been sweet, but instead I found it quite bitter. In fact, a bitter aftertaste lingered in the back of my mouth long after I was finished eating.

I tried to figure out what I had done wrong with the recipe, but nothing seemed to explain the unpleasant taste. Arethusa said she hadn't noticed anything unusual; I was surprised but ascribed this either to a desire to spare my feelings or to her taste buds not being very delicate.

Later, I noticed the same bitterness, and especially the same bitter aftertaste, filling the back of my mouth after everything I ate. At first I ignored it, figuring it must be the aftereffects of the orange chicken.

By this evening, though, I was becoming alarmed. I turned to the internet for a quickie diagnosis, prepared for liver failure, or a brain tumor, or God knows what. (To Arethusa's credit, it never occurred to me that she might have poisoned me.)

On the world wide web, I found the answer to the mystery...sort of. It turns out I'm not alone. Around noon yesterday, I had snacked on some pine nuts. And, since last winter, symptoms identical to mine have been affecting people who eat pine nuts imported from China:

Those who found out about pine mouth via the internet were the lucky ones.

Others sought medical help and were sent for blood tests or liver scans, while some approached their dentist to see if mercury was leaking from their fillings [a broken filling had actually become Alpheus's favored hypothesis].

Home remedies recommended by sufferers include drinking liquid aloe vera and taking activated charcoal tablets (charcoal is often used as a detox in cases of drug overdose).

So what's actually happening here? And should we be worried?

Well, should we? It turns out nobody really knows. On the one hand, it's not like China has a great record in the food safety department recently. On the other hand, no actual contamination of the pine nuts has been identified. So on the whole things are looking up.

But -- and this is my justification for blogging about this -- the bitter taste I'm experiencing right now is pretty disgusting. I love pine nuts, but I think it's going to be a while before I eat them again. At a minimum, I'd advise anyone who reads this to check the source of the nuts they eat. Apparently, "pine nut mouth" can last up to two weeks.

It looks like I'm in for yucky days ahead. On the bright side, maybe I'll lose a couple of pounds.

The Shepherds Have Not Read Gadamer

I can't help but wonder what Withywindle thinks about this. Is it legitimate for shepherds to use pebbles in a bucket to keep track of their sheep? Or are they engaging in sophistries?

A sample:

Mark’s face turns stern. “Now,” he cries, “now you see the danger of the road you walk! Once you say that some people’s pebbles are magical and some are not, your pride will consume you! You will think yourself superior to all others, and so fall! Many throughout history have tortured and murdered because they thought their own pebbles supreme!” A tinge of condescension enters Mark’s voice. “Worshipping a level of pebbles as ‘magical’ implies that there’s an absolute pebble level in a Supreme Bucket. Nobody believes in a Supreme Bucket these days.”

“One,” I say. “Sheep are not absolute pebbles. Two, I don’t think my bucket actually contains the sheep. Three, I don’t worship my bucket level as perfect – I adjust it sometimes – and I do that because I care about the sheep.”

“Besides,” says Autrey, “someone who believes that possessing absolute pebbles would license torture and murder, is making a mistake that has nothing to do with buckets. You’re solving the wrong problem.”

Read the whole thing...unless you were already bored by this debate months ago.

You Heard It Here First

Hot Air asks, "Who Would Want to Squeeze David Brooks's thigh?"

Devotees of A&J will remember that we answered that question here months ago.

Since we can post again

Just a brief web-link, to the silliness in Albany. It seems the Democrats control the State Senate again, our long local nightmare is over, darn it, and treason prospers remarkably well.

Test

Little Do They Know

I saw this on Drudge:

The Karimojong [a people of Eastern Uganda] blame the spell of calamities like drought and disease to the "angry gods". Little do they know that their area is suffering the consequences of a larger problem, climate change.

I was reminded, as I so often am, of the words of Steve Martin as Theodoric of York:

"You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach."

World's Tallest Female Econoblogger?

It's like a challenge or something. Like I have to start wearing lingerie,* put on high heels,** take a class in economics,*** and start blogging.**** All at the same time.*****

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* - Done that. College, Halloween party.

** - Done that. Ditto.

*** - Done that. Freshman year.

**** - Done that. Here.

***** - Sadly, no. But soon! You will know when I have added "World's Tallest Female Econoblogger" to the masthead of A & J. Plus beefcake pics of Peter Suderman.

On Wilentz's Lincoln

Sean Wilentz has a long book review up on a variety of recent Lincoln books, encapsulating his own view of Lincoln. It's worth reading - and worth keeping in mind Wilentz's Democratic proclivities (scroll down through the posts), past and present, and his specifically Clintonian, anti-Obama commitments. Wilentz argues for a very political Lincoln, not a saint or a rhetorician or a man of letters - The historical Lincoln disappears and a wishful fantasy takes his place, symbolizing a politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal - a politics constructed out of words, just words. Exit Obama, bleeding from a gut-wound. Overall, I tend to agree with Wilentz on the importance of politics, although I worry that too great an appreciation of hard-nosedness leads you to a perverse love of hardnosedness for its own sake - eventually, a love of brutality for its own sake that gets you, as Orwell noted, to the Stalin-worshippers among the intelligentsia. (Wilentz praises Obama for being an adept practitioner of Chicago machine politics.) So Wilentz's Lincoln may be a bit too Clintonian. He's also a man rather indebted to Andy Jackson - not surprising, given Wilentz's own interest, surely not false, but I suspect Wilentz of being unable to admire a Republican except as a Democrat in disguise.

Wilentz also, of course, is a cheerleader for Jacksonian radical white democracy - a cheerleader in the sense that while he doesn't admire the racialism as such, he thinks that to condemn Jacksonianism from modern racial points of view is to chuck out a vital democratic and radical part of the American heritage. To speak nothing of the gross ahistoricity in condemning Americans of the 1830s or 1860s for not being paragons of the 2000s. Hence the most savage fire in his review is reserved for the racial myopics - and in particular Henry Louis Gates, who appears to have committed gross historical malpractice in his Lincoln on Race & Slavery. If you read any part of this review, read the destruction of Gates. A sample:

Along with his co-editor, Donald Yacovone, Gates has chosen seventy writings by Lincoln on the subjects of slavery and race, and reprinted either their key passages or the entire document. Thanks to the Internet, this compilation could not have taken up too much time or energy: if you go to the online edition of Lincoln's collected works and enter the word "slavery" into the site's simple search engine, all but a few of the book's documents instantly appear, in chronological order, along with a few dozen more, all ready for downloading. Gates and Yacovone do provide headnotes, which the printed and online full editions of the collected works lack--a useful service, even though the information provided is not entirely accurate.

It just gets better from there.

Wilentz's refers to the anti-political, pure-essence left as latter-day Mugwumps - he can think of no worse epithet than to associate them with goo-goo Republicans. Of course, conservatives have a long standing tradition of criticizing the left as Gnostics, eschaton-immanentizers, tying their ideology and their anti-political stance together. Wilentz clearly wants to avoid making that connection (Does he know the critique exists? It's possible not.), and "Mugwumpery" is a useful rhetorical device to avoid it. The logic of his critique, however, indicates him as a possible successor to Eugene Genovese, another historian of the left poised to head right. You heard it here first.

The review also has lengthy information about Lincoln, and books on Lincoln; always worth reading in its own right. But Wilentz is worth some discussion in his own right.

Knowledge of War

I read Barack Obama's 1983 article in the Columbia student newspaper with great interest. My first reaction was to wonder (not for the first time) whether good writing necessarily implies clear thinking. For an undergraduate, Obama writes pretty well (though the article needed more proofreading than it got*). But his ideas are nothing special. In fact, the whole essay is really just a series of unexplored assumptions, some of which stand up poorly in the face of history.

I hardly need to mention that it was Ronald Reagan, not the antiwar and nuclear freeze groups with whom young Obama sympathizes, who was right about how to achieve substantial arms reductions. The idea that the Soviets would be more willing to abandon the arms race if they found it less profitable to continue building their nuclear arsenal was never particularly dumb or counterintuitive, but in the early '80s much of the left treated it as unworthy of serious discussion. I wonder if Obama would be willing to admit today that it was Reagan, and not his detractors, who had the best solution to the nightmare of Mutually Assured Destruction?

Obama also takes it for granted that people's willingness to risk war automatically diminishes as they become more aware of the suffering and ugliness that war entails. At least this point of view is more generous than more recent critiques of the neocons: the "chickenhawk" argument held that supporters of the Iraq War wanted to send others to fight while being too cowardly to face the pains and dangers of war themselves. Charging people with naïvité is less offensive than charging them with a cynical selfishness and disregard for their fellow men.

Still, I think the assumption that experience of war and pacifism go hand in hand deserves more careful consideration than it's gotten. For much of history, and throughout much of the world, virtually every man of a certain age had a pretty good idea of what war meant. On the whole, I don't think it made them less prone to engage in it.

Granted, many of the societies I'm thinking of knew nothing but war, and many decisions to go to war reflected the interest of a sovereign rather than the wishes of his people. But even the assemblies of the Greek states were, by our standards, surprisingly eager to undertake hostilities. The Athenians, dying in droves, dragged out the Peloponnesian War to the bitter end and were ready to resume hostilities at the drop of a hat ten years later. Without broad popular support from the men who had to do the fighting, Rome could never have waged some of its wars so fiercely and relentlessly.

I think it's true that people who have it good -- prosperous burghers, people who see in war only the destruction of their livelihoods -- are much more hesitant to go to war and are probably even more hesitant if they don't underestimate war's awfulness. On the other hand, it's possible that the experience of war inures some folks to its rigors and horrors. Death and bloodshed aren't equally terrifying to everyone, and I suspect there are may be more people than we realize who thrive in war but wilt in peace. Among soldiers, most seem to be Shermans ("There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.") but there are some Pattons too ("God help me, I do love it so."). More importantly, Sherman's grasp of the inherent dreadfulness of war didn't make him any less fierce in waging it. The direct experience of war creates surprisingy few actual pacifists. I don't have much doubt that a President McCain would be more willing to go to war than President Obama.

I'm not saying any of this to minimize how terrible war is. I only want to question the assumption that willingness to wage war is necessarily a product of insensitivity or lack of awareness. Besides, reliance on that supposition should prompt a counterargument: if you're against military action in a particular case, have you considered the costs of peace? Television gave us a pretty good idea of the carnage of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but it hasn't done as good a job of making people aware of the evils against which those wars were directed. Admittedly, it would have been hard to foresee the scope of the genocides in Southeast Asia, but I'm not sure why it's been so easy for us to forget the terrible things Saddam Hussein did before the U.S. finally decided to take him down. Whenever I heard the claim that no one who hadn't actually served in uniform could legitimately voice support for the Iraq War, I was tempted to respond that by that logic nobody who hadn't lived under a murdering dictator could legitimately speak in opposition to it.

I really don't want to be too hard on the twenty-one year old Obama. His article is probably more reflective than the one most of his peers would have written on the same topic. Obama poses important questions: Is the nuclear freeze movement just a fad? Is it possible to talk about arms control without reference to political and economic contexts?

In the end, though, I think it's probably too optimistic -- and too simplistic -- to say that greater understanding of war necessarily makes us less willing to engage in it. The world is more complicated, and tragic, than that.

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*Also, nobody should ever use the word "enchance," especially right after "in order to."

Bad Ideas

Alpheus: Hey, we could have our own little Michael Jackson memorial service right here. We could light candles, and play his albums --

Arethusa: Can we take Demerol and invite the neighborhood children over for tickle fights?

Alpheus: Um, sure....

On Vetoes

Because peer review is a peculiar beast, I have been reading Antonio Negri's Insurgencies - florid, turgid, yet occasionally insightful. He makes me mull the connection between states rights/nullification, gun rights, and jury nullification. All have to do with the ability to veto government by withdrawing from it - the first as a state, the second individually, the third as a jury. It seems to me that, having crushed states rights during the Civil War, gun rights and jury nullification become more important as the last bulwarks of vetoing liberty against government - that the increased emphasis on gun rights and jury nullification is a natural result of the collapse of states rights.

Melancholy Conservatives

John Derbyshire proclaims himself a pessimist conservative; Irving Kristol says he is an optimist conservative. The pessimist looks back to a golden age; the optimist forward to one. I plump for the melancholy conservative - one who sees no golden age before or behind, who thinks he can make the present sparkle golden for a while, but knows time takes away, with youth, life, and joy, all golden ages too. Shine, perishing Republic, forsooth.

Melancholy Baby

I've started playing Shirebourn the album Peter, Paul, and Mommy, my favorite album when I was very young. As I listen, I realize that it has remarkably melancholy lyrics, and my youthful love for it tells you a great deal about Withywindle. Consider:

Do you ask why i'm sighing, my son?
You shall inherit what mankind has done.
In a world filled with sorrow and woe
If you ask me why this is so, i really don't know.

And:

I have a song to sing, O! (Sing me your song, O!)
It is sung to the moon by a love-lorn loon
Who fled from the mocking throng-o
It's the song of a merry man moping mum
Whose soul was sad and whose glance was glum
Who sipped no sup and who craved no crumb
As he sighed for the love of a lady.

And:

Go no more a-hunting, a-hunting, a-hunting
Go no more a-hunting,
but that's in animal Make-Believe Town.

And:

And it came to pass on a Christmas evening
While all the doors were shuttered tight
Outside standing, a lonely boy-child
Cold and shivering in the night.

And:

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. Oh!

The sort of young 'un who likes lyrics like that is likely to grow up to like poems like this:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Or hymns like this:

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Operetta like this:

Let us dry the ready tear,
Though the hours are surely creeping
Little need for woeful weeping,
Till the sad sundown is near.
All must sip the cup of sorrow--
I to-day and thou to-morrow;
This the close of every song--
Ding dong! Ding dong!
What, though solemn shadows fall,
Sooner, later, over all?
Sing a merry madrigal--
A madrigal!

And fantasy like this:

Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways - food and cheer above hoarded gold - it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell.

(That from the movie version, which stuck in my head more as a child than the book version.)

We'll see if we can make Shirebourn a melancholy baby too.

On The End of My Summer Class

A rather good experience. Some teeth-pulling necessary to get students to participate, but they all did the readings, all could discuss, all did discuss. I was able to get some nifty long readings in, because of the double-length summer class structure. I have learned the dangers of playing movies with Deadly Hums in the background. I don't know that the students fell in love with the subject matter, but they engaged with it, and a few of them even enjoyed the class. This is about all you can expect from teaching a class, and I am very satisfied.

On Adam Smith

So, as I said earlier, Conor Friedersdorf and Robert Stacy McCain need to have an Adam Smith reading group. Why? Because, read The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations together, and you have the philosophical argument that justifies the free-market economy not (as later Smithians, Ricardo et al, would do) by liberal principles (not alone, anyway), but as the essential prop for individual virtue and civil society, both dependent on the restraint of the state from interference in economic matters. Friedersdorf and his ilk (tarring broadly) seem to conceive of virtue and community as opposed to the operation of the market, which they take as some sort of soulless modernity; McCain, quoting Austrian economists like Lehar and Schnitzler, in essence accepts the liberal view of the free market, married with some philosophical incoherence to his own traditionalizing social views. Read Smith, and you allow for the possibility of sweet mutual support between market and virtue - which is, after all, the underpinning for a rather wide range of Anglo-American politics and political theory these last few centuries. Now, I perfectly understand there have been the odd criticisms of Smith since 1776 - most cogently, that the free market, particularly in its modern corporatist guise, has done anything but promote virtue, civil society, and community - but contemplating the original thesis before going on to the critiques surely would be useful here.

Note that this also speaks to FLG's "The truth is that virtue may be a luxury good from an economic perspective." Sayeth Smith, virtue is the sine qua non of the free market, and vice versa; hence anything but a luxury good.

I would say the Friedersdorfs, Crunchy Cons, what have you, seem to have read communitarians, virtue philosophers, etc., from the continental European tradition; the village they want to create is some sort of idealized French village, with home-made bread, modern plumbing, and strict subtext controls whenever the village bard starts warbling of the estaminets of Antwerp. They seem not to consider that the Anglo-American tradition is saturated in the market, liberty, and a brutal indifference to the joys of home-made bread; Orwell's beloved working-class and our Jeffersonian and Lincolnian yeomen form a social and cultural tradition quite as different from the European continent's as their political tradition, a tradition happy with canned beans, corn syrup, Coca Cola, and all the consumables of capitalism. Their program, therefore, reads less as a revolt against modernity than as a revolt against Anglo-American tradition. And, forsooth, it has a touch of the old anti-Protestant polemic; there's a Catholic tinge to these unmarkety communitarians. McCain's defense of the market is as much Anglo-American Protestant as liberal Austrian.

McCain, by the way, also knows his Schmitt: he knows the difference between friends and enemies. And while I sympathize with Friedersdorf's critique of, say, Levin, I do think he could Schmittianize himself a touch without undue harm.

My sympathies, I should say openly, are more with McCain than the Friedersdorfers, the Drehers. What sort of odd epicures think the soul acquires better food from whole grains than from liberty? How can one trust the judgment of men whose philosophical taste prefers the sugared blandishments of the village, orderly in its chains, to the strong wine of freedom?

Diversity vs. Statism

The Left talks a lot about the value of social and cultural diversity. The Left also, by and large, wants a strong state, with lots of regulation from the center and redistribution of wealth. I'm fine with the social and cultural diversity, but I can't see how that's supposed to be compatible with the regulation and redistribution.

If you're going to shuffle wealth around, if you're going to make rules for everyone to live their lives by, then it seems to me you need a degree of social and cultural uniformity that modern America just doesn't possess. After all, if you're going to redistribute wealth, you not only need a broad consensus on the justice of the redistribution scheme but also a strong feeling of kinship between the folks being taxed and the folks receiving benefits. Otherwise, you get resentment and interest-group politics as everyone competes either to be relieved of their burdens or to sluice government largess in the direction of themselves.

Likewise with regulation. People who all live alike and think alike will be much more comfortable conforming to the same rules than people who live and think very differently from one another. If you have a wide range of lifestyles and cultures crammed together in a society with lots of rules, there are going to be lots of fights over what those rules should look like.

For years, American advocates of socialism and the welfare state pointed to the success of that model in the Scandinavian countries. (Jay Nordlinger of NRO has a few remarks on this phenomenon in his latest Impromptus.) But the Scandinavian countries are historically idiosyncratic, not least in having highly concentrated populations and very little cultural or racial diversity. In recent years, as Scandinavia has experienced unprecedented levels of immigration, the "Scandinavian model" has come under dramatically increasing stress.

One can think of social diversity as varying along a continuum with a family at one end and an empire at the other. Members of a family are generally quite happy to pool resources and subject one another to lots of scrutiny. After all, they identify strongly with one another. Inhabitants of an empire, however committed the majority of them may be to the preservation of the empire or the ideals on which the empire is founded, just don't feel the same common identity. It's a fact of life. When people don't know one another personally, they're going to feel more identification with people who live, dress, look, talk, and worship like themselves.* I don't think that needs to be an obstacle to shared citizenship. But it does mean that as diversity of all kinds increases, away from the family and toward the empire, the possibility of successful socialism shrinks.

America is an empire -- a stew of ethnicities, regions, lifestyles, religions, and subcultures. I rather like this about America. I think there's something glorious about our diversity -- a diversity in which, ideally, everyone could find a place. But that diversity does not go well with a strong centralized state, because a strong centralized state means that the benevolent injunction to "live and let live" doesn't really apply. Under a strong centralized state, everyone is up in everyone else's business. Everyone is, in effect, trying to tell everyone else how to live. That's the antithesis of diversity.

There is an exception to this general principle, I guess. An empire can have a strong centralized state if that strong centralized state is some kind of despotism, if everyone is subjected to the same iron rule so that there's not much possibility of different groups struggling against one another. An emperor (or the equivalent) can unite an empire under a strong, intrusive state. But is this what we want?

Conservatives tend to be bad at exploiting the tensions within liberalism. In part, this is because there are so many tensions -- or rather, factions -- within conservatism. Some conservatives aren't enthusiastic about diversity, be it racial, linguistic, cultural or whatever. Maybe they're so unenthusiastic about it that they don't want to use it as a rallying cry for an attack on statism. Personally, though, I'd love to see prominent conservatives forcefully point out that real diversity and statism just can't coexist. Without tyranny, that is.
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*I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be as true of me as it is of other people. But in my case there's a confounding factor, which is that I hate pretty much everybody.