Huh

Huh.

Maybe the News Today is Just That Creepy?

Does Fox News Special Report anchor Bret Baier remind anyone else of Rod Serling?

Then again, maybe everyone with that haircut reminds me of Rod Serling.

Humanitiesdämmerung

In a recent post, Withywindle wonders whether how much downsizing we'll see among faculty ranks if higher education begins to be restricted to students who can really benefit from the kind of training that colleges and universities are supposed to offer. This is not an idle question. At some point, the higher education bubble -- driven, like the housing bubble, by cheap government-backed debt, as one of the commenters on Withy's post points out -- is going to pop.

But what will the world look like, after that bubble bursts? Will more students decide to acquire less costly versions of the traditional B.A. credential -- opting for cheaper and less prestigious institutions and three-year degrees? Will they migrate away from the humanities and toward more practical majors (as they've been doing for a while now)? Is there any chance they'll start to pass up higher education altogether?

I think the last option is the least likely. Since employers are often prevented, thanks to judicial activism, from basing employment and promotion on mental aptitude tests, something like college is more or less indispensable as a measure of employability for salaried jobs. A lot of businesses are going to keep looking for college degrees as a way to exclude undesirables.

Besides, college is valuable in other ways: in an economy increasingly based on personal connections and corporatism, college is a good place to meet people who can help you up the economic and social ladder. The middle class is collapsing, and even if students fully understand the amount of debt they're saddling themselves with -- and the years of experience and earnings they're foregoing -- they may still be willing to roll the dice on a shot at membership in the elites: think of the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, hoping to be among the lucky few who will find jobs in Californ-eye-ay.

So I suspect we'll start to see some combination of the first two effects I mentioned in the second paragraph. Non-prestigious four-year colleges will survive only by cutting costs, and the subjects and courses that don't lead directly to some kind of gainful employment are going to be in even bigger trouble than they already are.

And, in the case of the humanities, the bloodletting that's going to take place is going to be, at least in part, their own damn fault. Departments in fields like classics, English, and history have grown and survived by pandering to students who didn't really want to be taught according to what the aforementioned commenter, HUM III, aptly calls "the liberal educational ideal." Courses and curricula have been designed, and professors have been hired and promoted, based on their ability to attract students who were never really going to understand, let alone embrace, what the humanities are all about.

But the strategy of the lowest common denominator was a doomed strategy. The most undemanding courses and the hippest professors are not, in the end, going to save the humanities: a major like "communications" can dumb itself down more than classics ever can, and a hip young prof teaching filmmaking or journalism will be at least as hip as the hippest of history instructors. And, once the higher-ed bubble bursts and economic necessity really starts to bite, communications and filmmaking and journalism -- not to mention engineering and computer science and health administration -- will start to look mighty good to those students who were never more than titillated and entertained by what they got in their humanities courses.

On Spelling "Entrepreneur"

Thank God for spell-check. I can't pronounce it properly either. It's the February of abstractions, the Library of economics. This Febuary I will reread my liberry of entrepeneurial comic books; largely Scooge McDuck.

On Liberal Political Machines

When did liberals merge with the party machines? In the 1960s, liberals were distinctly at odds with the Democratic machines - partly because they were relatively conservative (not least on racial issues), partly for good government grounds. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, as I recollect it, turns on liberal opposition to the Democratic machine, not to liberal opposition to Republicans. As late as the 1980s, there was some tension (at least in NYC) between liberals and the Democratic machine - still white ethnic and more conservative. At some point since then, the machines and the liberals made peace - partly the machines became black and Hispanic, partly they fell into the hands of liberals, partly the white ethnics started cooperating fully with the liberal line. And somewhere along the line, the liberal good-government impulse seems to have fallen by the wayside - or, at any rate, ceased to articulate itself in terms of critique of Democratic political machines. Maybe this is too obvious for words, but it seems to me there's a story in here somewhere that could be teased out, fruitfully.

Professorial Employment

When we have made the revolution, and restricted the university to those students who truly belong - the literate minority, say - how many jobs will there be left for professors? Even assuming smallish class sizes?

On Power Point

I have just assembled my first-ever Power Point presentation for a class. First ever Power Point, period. But will I be able to get the Smart Classroom to work? Will I get my ID in time even to log in to the Smart Computer? Oh, so many things could go wrong.

I will now reveal just how clueluss I am about this technology stuff:

Wow! You can attach music files and movies to Power Point slides! That's so nifty!

This feature has been around for ... ten years? Fifteen? Fifty gazillion? Well, nice to find out.

On Civility II

Gentle Reader,

If you're going to be civil about, say, Ted Kennedy passing away, Miss Withymanners suggests patting yourself on the back about it, and inserting the odd critical remark in your supposed civility, is not the way to do it. I will post a few things from the National Review website, putting in bold the sections that ought to be deleted for true civility:

A Sincere Advocate [Victor Davis Hanson]
The country sends its condolences to the Kennedy family, as the last of the three prominent Kennedy lions passes from the American political scene. I have special empathy with the Kennedy family, since my mother — an appellate justice — also died prematurely from a cancerous brain tumor; the hope that a family invests in all sorts of cutting-edge treatments, the courage a patient shows in undergoing them, and the nefarious nature of such an insidious disease in the end become heart-rending — and overwhelming. At times such as these, it matters little that many of us disagreed with much of the vision of Ted Kennedy — nil nisi bonum de mortuis dicere. He had an incredible near-half-century run in the Senate, suffered terribly from the loss of his three brothers, and was a powerful and deeply sincere advocate for liberal causes respected by his peers of both parties. Requiescat in pacem.

We Would Never Want to Walk in His Shoes [Jim Geraghty]

... There will be plenty of time to recall all of the reasons Ted Kennedy made enemies in this life, plenty of time for our traditional, "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment." I've got the Michael Kelly collection that includes "Ted Kennedy on the Rocks," his definitive profile from the early 1990s, which showcases all the highs and all the lows. I'll go through it sometime soon to recall those sides of Kennedy that won't be showcased in the montages today, stories like that "sandwich" with Chris Dodd, but today's not the day for that.

A bit of a thought, though: Many of us have siblings, and many of us love them dearly. Many of us find the thought of losing them horrific; to lose two to assassin's bullets would drive many men mad. From some stories of Kennedy's behavior in the years immediately after, perhaps he did go a little mad, or at least sought to drown the pain with drink. Hate the man for his legislation, hate the man for his behavior, but save a little room for some sympathy, too; we would never want to walk in those shoes.

I'm guest-hosting the Hugh Hewitt show tonight, and obviously, Kennedy will come up. But we won't echo those on the other side who have rejoiced at the deaths of conservative giants. Whatever life throws at us, they'll act the way they act; we'll act the way we do.

Last-Minute Adjunct Work

Busy the next few days creating a syllabus.

On British Journalism

FLG writes:

On a related note, the BBC interviewed Michael Scheuer, former head of the Bin Laden desk at the CIA and current Georgetown professor. FLG has never listened to an interview where the interviewer had more self-righteous contempt for the interviewee than this one.

This crystallizes for me the problem with British journalism - that the forthright, searching questions, the explicitly held opinions, come at the cost of a blinkering of curiosity, the imagination, that would allow you to ask questions that might challenge your own belief, to allow for the possibilities of truths you don't expect. American journalism may be blinkered in practice, but the style that aims at objective dispassion - soporifically deadening although it may be - also allows for the possibility that the journalist will allow himself to be surprised with a new truth. Whatever reforms American journalism needs, it shouldn't adopt the British model.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe III

I've finished Caldwell's book. Not bad - it makes the case that Islamic immigration is rapidly destroying Europe concisely and temperately. It might even be persuasive when preaching to the unconverted - although to what effect, I'm unsure, since he basically says its too late for Europe to shift course. Some thoughts, then, on the substance:

1) It is astonishing how quickly the Muslim population in Europe has grown. Caldwell talks about trends back to 1945, but an extraordinary amount of the growth has been just since 1990; i.e., while I was an adult. It's difficult to realize quite how much change has gone by in what seems the blink of an eye.

2) In 1990, with the Rushdie fatwa, I realized Islamic immigration was a major problem in Europe, which needed a solution (cutting off immigration, increasing assimilation) soon. In 2001, I changed to thinking the solution need to happen now. In 2009, Caldwell thinks (in essence) that it's already too late: the decay of Christian Europe, the Islamification of Europe, is irreversible. I am afraid he is right.

3) I had not realized that a large majority of Muslim European marriages are with people from Muslim countries, not with fellow immigrants; this does make the growth of the Muslim population even more explosive, and put a spanner in the integration process.

4) Caldwell describes the European attachment to a welfare state, universal rights, and a moral duty to immigrants/refugees, in combination with suspicion toward Islamic immigrants, but an inability to enforce what few laws they have to restrict immigration, as political paralysis. This seems a reasonable way to put it.

5) Caldwell does take the basic problem as spiritual. Europe has lost its spirit - its religion, its will to reproduce, its belief--and Islam has not. The European inability to match belief with belief will doom them.

6) Caldwell is excessively optimistic when he considers the American counter-example. Yes, our economy is less calcified than Europe's; yes, it is easier to assimilate Hispanics than Muslims - but these advantages are less than he thinks. Nor is it quite accurate to describe Hispanic culture as basically like that of working-class white Catholics ca. 1970. Further, since he says the great threat of Islam is based on the demographic reservoirs of the Middle East, this does not comfort an American looking south at the demographic reservoirs of Latin America.

And some corollaries of my own:

7) Consider how the European population is fleeing westward - Russians heading to Poland, Poles to Britain, as Muslim Central Asians in turn fill up the suburbs of Russia. What we have is a contraction of the European population as well as its thinning out. I am reminded of the Indian tribes of colonial America, fragments of a dozen tribes shattered by plague and war, retreating westward to form one new tribe. So a European identity might form when the remaining Europeans meld in the corners of the continent remaining to them.

8) Israel is even more doomed than you might think. (Save for the providences of God.) Assume Israel survives the threat of nuclear holocaust, Palestinian guerrilla war, etc. Can it survive the fall of Europe to Islam, a Jewish island with no succour nearer than the United States? I would not lay bets.

9) Caldwell does not consider sufficiently the possibility of Europe surviving, but shorn of liberal democracy - turning to its inner Adolf, less dead than Caldwell thinks, and carrying out the mass slaughter/ethnic cleansing of Muslims necessary to ensure Europe's survival, but in some national-socialist shape rather than as a quasi-Americanized democracy. I would call this low probability, but not impossible. I would contemplate at this point what the European officer corps would do as the moment of Muslim takeover approaches. One gets hints that they remain more Christian and more conservative than European society at large; this might be significant in a crisis.

10) Nor does Caldwell consider the moment of chain-reaction conversion - when Europeans en masse convert to Islam, just as they have converted in the blink of an eye to feminism, anti-smoking, environmentalism, etc. How do the new Muslims behave? Perhaps they evict all the Arab and Turkish immigrants, confident that Allah wills it. Perhaps the birth rate rises at last. Perhaps they shift to hypernational expansion, combining European nationalism and Islam; the Fourth Reich is a German Caliphate.

11) What of the messy intermediate possibilities? A partial collapse of Europe, with Muslim and Christian militias, as in Bosnia, fighting for turf. We should be considering which fragments of Europe are most likely to resist Islamification - which nasty butcher boys we want to support as Sick Man Europe collapses. Do we support the Russians, whose cold-blooded brutality compensates for their collapsing numbers? - cede them hegemony over collapsing Europe, as marginally preferable to the Caliphate? Serbs, Basques, Ulstermen? - any bastards too stubborn to give up and die, our Phalangist allies to massacre Muslims for us. Some such scenario may be in the future.

12) European Jews need to get out of the continent now. Muslims on one side, neofascists on the other, and European states increasingly incapable of protecting Jews even if they so desired. Flee. Flee. Flee.

13) Wouldn't it be nice if America and Europe could get together to defend Western Civilization (=Christendom)? But the Europeans seem to regard us as savages much like the Muslims, and they dislike us more than they dislike the Muslims. So they've chosen their particular hell.

Uncle Romulus and the Tale of the Rule of Thumb

There is a historical debate going on, where Christina Hoff Sommers accuses Nancy Lemon of being completely unreliable in her textbook Domestic Violence Law. Oddly, much of the debate turns on Lemon selecting a text that assumes the existence of a historical Romulus, and building from this a grand historical structure about how violence against women is embedded into the history of the West. Sommers points out that Romulus never existed; Lemon, bizarrely, tries to defend the historical existence of Romulus, rather than saying "oops."

We at A & J deplore scholars who think Romulus was a historical personage.

When we are especially traditionalist, we at A & J deplore scholars who think Romulus was an historical personage.

All this brings up the interesting question of how one judges a major error of fact on a subject that is tangential to the main subject of a book. It does speak to scholarly authority--and to publishers' authority--but it is possible to be wackily wrong about minor matters and essentially right about your area of expertise. See, say, the correctness of the calculations of Kepler and Newton, despite being embedded in mystical whackjobberies. Or the solid archival research of any number of Marxist historians. You can be crazy on the big picture, sensible on the details.

And yet ... the arguments do cohere. If you believe in high numbers for domestic violence in the US now in good part because you think it is part of a millennia-long tradition of Western domestic abuse justified by law, and then your big picture turns out to be fantasy, then maybe your high numbers aren't right either. They're not certainly wrong, but the reader is entitled to some skepticism. Or put another way: in the modern world where different elites defer to one another's expert judgment, a mistake on Romulus casts doubt on the presumptive faith offered to Lemon as an elite with specialized knowledge. You can give her some benefit of the doubt for a mistake outside her core competence - even one stubbornly and perversely defended - and still say that Sommers thereby establishes reasonable grounds for skepticism about the rest of Lemon's claims.

We at A & J like to think this chain of thought is generally applicable for such controversies.

P.S. If you follow the links, and read the comments, the debate about "the rule of thumb" is fascinating.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe II

About half-way through Caldwell's book. I'm interested most in the tone. So, this is a Public Intellectual speaking of Public Policy. It's the same genre as Jurgen Habermas' political essays - Caldwell is a journalist with journalistic tics, Habermas a philosopher with philosophical tics, but what they do is recognizably the same genre.

(The genre, by the by, has some intrinsically annoying aspects: on the one hand, where do these public intellectuals get off writing about public affairs as if they had some greater authority than the ordinary citizen? On the other hand, they make the scholar in me wince with their gross simplifications and dodgy argumentation.)

Caldwell says much the same as any conservative writing on things European and Islamic - Mark Steyn could sue for intellectual theft - but says it all in this remarkably calm tone, which assumes that all decent, reasonable, calm, intelligent people will assume with every point he so quietly makes. It's as if one were reading an excerpt from Bizarro-world, where the main-stream-media is conservative, and all the the softly-softly evenhandedness pushed a rightist point of view. The technique continues to be mildly annoying, even when used to forward views I espouse: he steals a number of bases in his quiet assumptions, and if I were on the liberal/left, I would be annoyed at his technique as, well, any conservative is annoyed by reading the New York Times.

As for the substance of what he writes: I'll just note here that he takes European supineness/PCness/whatever-we-call-it to date essentially back to 1945, and the reaction against Hitler that becomes a too broad reaction against any sort of nationalism, religion, defense of European tradition, etc. I take his point, but the simplification obscures just how different was the intellectual climate in Europe in the first few decades after the Second World War - yes, the PC seeds were there, as was the beginning of mass (Islamic) immigration, but the current supineness I just don't quite see in Europe in the 1950s or 1960s - not really until the 1980s, not in full force until the 1990s. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and attendant Muslim mobs in Europe howling in favor of it, is when I first became aware of just how problematic Muslim immigration into Europe was - and I continue to think that those mobs mark not just the growth of Islamic strength, but of a recent (=1980s) collapse of European moral fiber. One can't really criticize Caldwell for not writing a different book, but someone should write a book focusing on what changed between Enoch Powell's speech and Salman Rushdie's fatwa.

On Organic Corn

Worms. Yuck.

High Line Park

To the new High Line Park today - the old elevated freight railroad running along the far West Side of Manhattan, abandoned for decades, now turned into a park. Beautiful! - the park designers have chosen lovely plants and installed Japanese-y wooden benchs and walkways, and there are wonderful views of the architecture of downtown New York (Gansevoort to 20th St.), plus across the Hudson to New Jersey and down to Ellis Island. New York looks remarkably different from the second story - and even fairly drab buildings begin to look good. From there to the Chelsea Market for gelato; blessed relief after a brutally hot afternoon on the High Line.

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins

I was rereading this triple biography of early modern women a few days ago, and this time trying to read it (among other ways) as coded comments on Davis' own life and hopes - a reading Davis invites in the introduction, p. 4: I wanted to write of your hopes for paradise on earth, for remade worlds, since I have had those hopes, too. Davis having a notably Marxist past. The most interesting quotations for this I found in her biography of Maria Sibylla Merian, the artist who portrayed the metamorphoses of caterpillars. The following long quotation (p. 154) is very interesting:

Merian's goal was simply ill-served by boundary classifications. Her subject was a set of events--'you'll find in this volume more than a hundred transformations [Verwandlungen],' she said in 1683--and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classification, her sequence was not 'tumultuous.' Emerging from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader's eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The 'method' of the Raupen--highly pleasurable pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link--had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature's connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.

Consider this as coded description of Davis' own historical method - of historical method, period, both as description and proffered ideal. And then consider this bit about Meriam's debt to the Protestant Labadist sect:

Merian would never have produced the Metamorphosis if she had stayed with the elect, but she would never have crossed to Suriname if she had not once dared to be a Labadist.

A rather elegant way of saying what she owes to Marxism, even when she has moved on from it. (As I think she has, judging from her work.)

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

I've started reading Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. More anon, but the most interesting tidbit so far is his proffered analysis that it was because Hitler butchered so many millions of Europeans that Europe was short of labor after World War II, hence first started importing Turks, West Indians, etc., as laborers. This makes intuitive sense, although I'd be open to counter-argument. He also notes that the Nazi slave-labor empire was a sort of model for the massive movement of laborers through Europe since the war - not a close model, but still a model of sorts.

On Power

More on the 'madness' of fearing what the government should do, should it take over health-care. It's worth disentangling the different strands of the argument.

1) That the proposed law is (or will be, when it emerges from the sausage factory) so loosely written that it will give bureaucrats inordinate control over our lives and the national economy.

2) That the proposed law will further erode our independent character, and render us pliable to further legal enserfment at the hand of the government.

3) That the power government will amass will lead inevitably (=risk inordinately) the further grabbing of power by government, whether by enacting further legislation, tendentious reading of the proposed laws, bureaucratic fiat, and sheer exercise of force.

This last, I think, is what Klein et al take to be 'madness.' It is, I would say, a political judgment - one not in its nature subject to proof or disproof, since the argument rests on taking pre-emptive action to avoid health care, as failure to do so would lead to the iron shackles of despotism. As a political judgment, its field is the raw realm of human will, where law ultimately has no rule. To call this madness I would take to be a somewhat myopic view; Klein as Candide, sure that the laws will hold. Did he or his fellow liberals have such faith about the powers assumed by the Bush administration in the Patriot Act, etc.? I rather think not - and if I think they were mistaken in their judgment, for sundry reasons which need not detain us, I did not, and do not, think they were mad to have such fears.

District 9

District 9 is a very good SF flick. I won't give away plot points, but it is expertly done, and generally avoids Hollywood schmaltz.

On Self-Respect

There used to be a thought that to be dependent on someone else was dishonorable - a violation of independence and self-reliance; a degradation from liberty, where to lose freedom was not merely inconvenient and inefficient, but shameful. I don't think that's been anywhere in the current debate over health care - people argue about the efficiency of government health care, the opponents talk about how it infringes on liberty, but I don't think I've heard people say that it's shameful to be dependent on the government for handouts. Too many people on the dole for a politician to risk saying that anymore, I guess.

Which speaks, incidentally, to the dangers even from - especially from - effective government. Various liberals say how Social Security, etc., have worked well, so we shouldn't assume that every government program will work badly. It's true: Social Security does work at its stated goal fairly well (although it is, clearly, far easier to operate than health care.) But look at the corollary effects - the government raids the Social Security kitty for current expenses, perhaps the national savings rate has gone down from what it otherwise would have been (an argument dependent on a counterfactual; I don't know it can be proved or disproved), and, clearly, the objection to being on the dole has been eroded from the national character, for we all expect to be getting government checks when we reach a certain point. So, yes, Social Security works quite well, as an acid-drip on the virtue of self-reliance.

Manly independence, Harvey Mansfield would say, and talk about this as one of the corollaries of the assault on manly virtue. And I do think a certain sort of patriarch would have hated not only dependence on the government for shelter, health care, etc., but also hated dependence on his own children; a humiliation no less keen for being familial. Perhaps a certain sort of matriarch too, but my sense is that these objections were (are?) more common among the patriarchal set.

On Fear

Picking up on FLG's disquisition on Ezra Klein, whether it is reasonable to fear government - with immediate reference to government-controlled health care - and whether it has been characteristic of Americans to fear government, a quotation come to mind from Edmund Burke, 'Speech on Conciliation With the Colonies':

Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. .... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

And then one should consider those soothing reassurances that we need not fear the growth of government. Consider these syrupy words from Federalist #45:

Several important considerations have been touched in the course of these papers, which discountenance the supposition that the operation of the federal government will by degrees prove fatal to the State governments. The more I revolve the subject, the more fully I am persuaded that the balance is much more likely to be disturbed by the preponderancy of the last than of the first scale. .... The State governments will have the advantage of the Federal government, whether we compare them in respect to the immediate dependence of the one on the other; to the weight of personal influence which each side will possess; to the powers respectively vested in them; to the predilection and probable support of the people; to the disposition and faculty of resisting and frustrating the measures of each other.

And look how well that prediction worked out!

Job Applications

I've sent off the first two of the new cycle. I have no particular expectation of success. If I was going to get a permanent job in academia, last year was the best chance.

I'm actually exploring career options outside of academia. I shan't provide details until something pans out. It's all dispiriting, since I'd rather be a professor, and I think I'd be a decent professor.

Reading to Your Baby Promotes Memorization Skills ... in the Parents

Goldberry: What book do you want us to read to you?

Shirebourn: (Points to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.)

Goldberry: Not again!

Goldberry and Withywindle, in chorus, neither looking at the book: "I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. ...."

Affirmative Action, Medical School, and Health Care Costs

Via Robert VerBruggen at Phi Beta Cons, an interesting-looking blog called Discriminations discusses affirmative action effects for admission to medical school. It turns out that blacks with a college GPA between 2.8 and 2.99 and an MCAT score of 36 to 38 are virtually guaranteed admission, while for whites and Asians with similar qualifications the admission rates are only 40.7% and 36.8% respectively.

That's a huge difference, and if you compare the three charts for these three racial categories (links at the Phi Beta Cons post), you can see that similar disparities exist for other combinations of GPA and MCAT score.

One conclusion that could be drawn from this data is that medical schools are admitting dangerously underqualified black candidates and that this is a travesty. After all, being a doctor isn't like being a lawyer or a college professor. If you're not at the top of your game, people die or suffer real adverse effects to their quality of life.

I don't buy this argument. The medical school admissions data for blacks indicates that blacks with really sucky GPAs and MCAT scores don't get into medical school. Besides, just getting through medical school is tough, and after that one has to go through residency. Along the way every medical student has to pass at least three challenging qualifying exams (which I believe are called "boards"). Getting your license to practice medicine means you need letters of reference from established physicians and a clean history of practice during your residency. There are all sorts of additional hurdles for different specialties and different levels of the medical profession. I don't understand the system nearly as well as I'd like to, but as I've watched friends of mine navigate this process I've come to feel comfortable that there are plenty of safeguards to make sure that the guy or gal who's slicing open your chest and tinkering with your mitral valve isn't there just because he got into medical school via affirmative action.

So I draw a different but only slightly less disturbing conclusion, which is that we could be letting a lot more people into medical school. A lot of whites and Asians are being denied the chance to have perfectly productive, successful careers in the medical profession. This is still a travesty -- not because it undermines the quality of care, but because it limits the quantity of care.

Fewer doctors means higher costs and more rationing, which are exactly the problems we're trying to solve in our present national debate over health care. I don't know why more folks aren't arguing that we need to create more opportunities for people to become doctors. At a minimum, there should be places in medical school for all those whites and Asians who currently aren't getting in despite their exceptional MCAT scores. Over time, several hundred more medical school graduates each year could bring down costs, expand access to health care, and alleviate some of our current discontents.

Of course, the AMA won't be happy with this idea, because in the long run increasing the number of doctors will lower doctors' salaries. But...so what? The only plausible basis on which they can argue against expansion of their profession is the need to maintain quality. And the fact that there can be such large affirmative action disparities in medical school admissions -- without impacting quality of care very much -- demonstrates pretty conclusively that there's a huge untapped pool of good doctors out there.

The Public Sphere

This whole health-care debate does illustrate what is meant by "the public sphere" to a remarkable extent. The Republican opposition can't obstruct; the Democratic majority considers what it has to do in light of public opinion, as formed by independent debate, and is constrained by the voice of that public opinion as it emerges from that debate. And of course one then squabbles about how free that public sphere is - the conservative opposition, inconsistently and unworthily, now taking the tack that money corrupts the genuineness of that debate, now that the money is on the other side of the table. This is, of course, a question directly at the heart of the public sphere: does money distort free debate? The present debate indicating that all sides accuse the other side of having distorting money on their side; the accusation now smacks of pro forma. Set that aside for the moment: to the extent the health care bill is modified - or if it fails - that will be the work of the public sphere, and public opinion, almost purely. It is remarkable to see how this works in practice.

James Ensor

I went with my dad to see the James Ensor show at MOMA. He isn't just a painter of macabre skulls - although that is some of his best work. He starts out as a muted Impressionist, quite proficient with his brush strokes, and then begins to experiment in a variety of styles, including the masks-and-skulls imagery he's (I think) best known for. The show makes him seem a bit too experimental for his own good - unlike Pissarro, say, he doesn't stick with any one style long enough to really master it. And then his career did end after only two decades - hardly any paintings between 1900 and his death in 1949. But given these limitations, the show does give an impression of a gifted artistic mind working to stretch his capacities, and striving to improve his work. Worth seeing.

Persecution and the Art of Blogging

The wise will read carefully. All mitsakes are deliberate. As Jefferson said, the tree of luxury must be well-watered with human blood.

What Does One Call It?

Frank Rich today:

It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.

But from the point of view of the "common guy," "socialism" and "corporatism" don't feel that different. They're just different ways in which the powerful organize themselves for the control of society. Palin had it right: the relevant distinction is between "the people" and "the powerful."

The only real answer to the sort of anxieties Rich discusses is some sort of fighting populism. If we're not likely to see populism triumphant in America anytime soon, it's only because a lot of the really disadvantaged segments of American society can't be dislodged from their allegiance to the Democrats.

But at the margins, a little populist rhetoric can move the independents, and Rich's column contains a useful reminder for the Republicans. Obama should be attacked not primarily for wanting to expand the power of government, but for trying to limit the opportunities of the ordinary citizen. The big problem for the Right is to find a persuasive way of characterizing the consolidation of elite power that's going on in America. Glenn Beck says "tyranny," which sounds archaic and disproportionate. Jonah Goldberg says "fascism": same problem. "Dirigisme"? Too French. "Syndicalism"? Several objections there.

Maybe we should learn from Rich and adopt the formulation "socialist-corporatist"? It's clunky, but it's descriptive.

On Anthony Boucher

Jeff Sypeck, I believe, recommended a while back that I read Anthony Boucher's "St. Aquin" story. I bought the Compleat Anthony Boucher. It probably is his best story - and the rest, I'm afraid, tended to the dispiritingly mediocre. (Sorry, Jeff!) Above all, it was the way women were portrayed - dim sex objects with no inner life. And the sort of male characters attracted to dim sex objects with no inner life in turn scarcely achieved two-dimensionality. A reminder of why feminists complained, both about the portrayal of women in literature and about the attitudes toward women in real life; the reason LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness does have a point.

Yay, me! I'm so much better than all men before 1970!

I said all this to my mom, and she queried when I became Feministly Enlightened. Um, good question. I read no end of Boucheresque SF growing up, and Its Profound Limitations didn't make a great impression on me. On the other hand, I did read LeGuin, and later pulp which at least makes the odd stab at regarding women as human beings, and I must somehow have acquired a standard of comparison. No later than college, I should say; I think I was preening myself on this sort of thing by the time I graduated high school.

I'm trying to think who's the best male SF writer of the 1940s and 1950s at portraying female characters. Heck, I'm trying to recollect any who were remotely good at it. Nothing comes to mind - although it's been a while since I read most of that stuff. Any thoughts?

If Moldova Falls, the Barbarians will take Beijing

There has been some back and forth about Sino-Russian cooperation in areas of mutual interest. Many of these posts, particularly Bhadrakumar's original post, are stultifyingly boring discussions of possibly interesting subjects. But I note in particular the following passages:

In a stunning development, China entered the fray this month and signed an agreement to loan $1 billion to Moldova at a highly favorable 3% interest rate over 15 years with a five-year grace period on interest payments. The money will be channeled through Covec, China's construction leviathan, as project exports in fields such as energy modernization, water systems, treatment plants, agriculture and high-tech industries. Curiously, China has offered that it is prepared to "guarantee financing for all projects considered necessary and justified by the Moldovan side" over and above the $1 billion loan. In effect, Beijing has signaled its willingness to underwrite the entire Moldovan economy which has an estimated gross domestic product of $8 billion and a paltry budget of $1.5 billion. .... Moldova is a country where China has historically been an observer rather than a player. This is Beijing's first leap across Central Asia to the frayed western edges of Eurasia. Why is Moldova becoming so terribly important? Beijing will have calculated the immense geopolitical significance of Moldova's integration by the West. It would then be a matter of time before Moldova was inducted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), before the Black Sea became a "NATO lake" and the alliance positioned itself in a virtually unassailable position to march into the Caucasus and right into Central Asia on China's borders.

Note, to begin with the wonderful phrase "Moldova is a country where China has historically been an observer rather than a player." China, historically, has had no conception of the existence of Moldova, for the good reason that a place of no importance halfway around the globe doesn't usually grab your attention. Can it possibly be true that some bureaucrat in Beijing has gotten the ludicrous idea that if the Moldovan domino falls, NATO will conquer Uzbekistan? I suppose if Bhadrakumar can recite this talking point with a straight face it's possible someone in Beijing is so self-deluded. If this is so, we should encourage the Russians and the Moldovans in their duping of Beijing; if Beijing insists on spending money to confront Western influence, by all means plump it down in Moldova. Sadly, I suspect the Chinese elite really wants to use Moldova as 1) a staging ground for laundering money; and 2) a staging ground for Chinese exports to Europe. But I now roundly encourage all security bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels to start blithering about "the immense geopolitical significance of Moldova's integration by the West" - just so long as they don't believe a word of what they're saying.

Health-Care, Time-Sensitivity

It seems to me that this debate about the quality of government-provided health care turns (or should turn) on the timeliness of the service provided. It's not so much whether you get first- or second-rate opinions, surgery, drugs, etc., but when you get them - where timeliness is not only a convenience, but rather important in terms of the health benefit you receive. And of course the whole point of health-care is that you're buying time itself to live with - and health care rationing is the rationing of time. Not just the extra year you live; how long you have to fill out forms, wait at a doctor's office, etc. We are discussing somewhat, and I think should discuss more, how much time the current system requires, in form-filling, fighting private-sector bureaucrats to make them disgorge necessary treatments, etc., vs. the government system. I suspect the government system would require more time from patients, independent of the delays in service (ten months wait for a maternity ward, classically), but I note that the current system imposes rather large time-costs on doctors and their administrative staff.

There is a political-theory aspect to all this, which I would offer up tentatively - that my brand of conservatism is time-bound, concerned with time, and utopianisms, focused on eternity, rather insensitive to time. Hence the idea that a command-and-control economy is best at producing iron bars, not services; that Soviet warfare was notably less nimble than German warfare; that trying to impose government control on health care, a service economy where time is of the essence, is trying to impose timelessness on the timeful, and a bad idea, if a characteristic one of liberal philosophy. But I would say all this a bit tentatively. It would be interesting to find out how the better government health care systems - France and Sweden, say, which are supposed to work better than Canada's or the UK's - work in terms of timeliness and time costs.

Time costs presumably affect less those whose time is worth less (those who earn less per hour) and the retired. The retired, of course, are already covered, basically. Those who earn more, therefore, ought to complain most about time costs. I suspect that if government health care does impose substantial time costs, it will result in 1) pressure for shorter hours and unpaid time off, to allow people to go to the doctor (how many of their spare hours do the French spend at the doctor's office?); and 2) more women dropping out of full-time employment, and spending their time on health care forms, etc. This last effect I suspect is entirely unintended, but I think you'll see it.

Opa!

For years, the English have refused to return the Greeks' marbles. Now it's Englishmen's marbles that are feeling the heat, so to speak.

Why Not a Health Care Plebiscite?

What are we to do? Both supporters and opponents of the Democrats' health care proposals claim their vision of health care is more popular with the American people. Both sides cite poll numbers. Both sides claim that their opponents represent powerful interests who are deliberately trying to create the illusion of popular sentiment.

So what about a national referendum on health care plans? Why not let the American people vote yes or no on one or more complete proposals?

It's true, we don't have a history of national referenda in this country, but that doesn't mean there can't be a first time. One could argue that, since the Constitution doesn't make provision for plebiscites, the idea of holding one is unconstitutional. But the Constitution also doesn't include any provision for the government to get involved in health care. If it's constitutional for Congress to involve itself in health care to the extent of creating a "public option," then surely it's also constitutional to make that involvement contingent on a vote of approval by the American people.

Another possible objection, I suppose, is that such a referendum would be expensive. But I'm not sure the cost of voting is ever a very good argument against democracy. Besides, the cost of holding a national referendum on health care is tiny compared to the possible expense of any health care plan that's likely to get through Congress. And do we want to put a price on the peace of mind we'd have if we knew that a major change in the citizens' relationship to their government actually had the approval of the citizenry as a whole? (If we're really worried about cost, though, we could easily combine the referendum with the federal elections next year.)

We disagree about whether the country needs or wants a health care plan like the one the Democrats are proposing. But we all agree that democracy is a good thing. So let's stop accusing one another of defying the will of the people and actually submit any proposal passed by Congress to the people themselves.

How about it?

Euonym

Belatedly, it occurs to me: isn't "Axelrod" the perfect name for a guy whose whole job is spin?

Tim the Enchanter

A recent New York Times article by Michael Gordon on a blunt military memo about Iraq going the rounds included some wonderful passages. The memo was

Prepared by Col. Timothy R. Reese, an adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command. .... Before deploying to Iraq, Colonel Reese served as the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Army’s premier intellectual center. He was an author of an official Army history of the Iraq war — “On Point II” — that was sharply critical of the lapses in postwar planning. .... Colonel Reese appears to have anonymously circulated a less detailed version of his memo on a blog called “The Enchanter’s Corner.” The author, listed on the site as “Tim the Enchanter,” is described as an active-duty Army officer serving as an adviser in Iraq who is “passionate about political issues.” That post on Iraq, along with one criticizing President Obama’s health care proposals, has been removed but can be found in cached versions.

Who? Who? Who on earth could "Tim the Enchanter" be? Could 2 plus 2 equal ... 4? Gordon must have been laughing as he crafted those sentences, very journalistically not making unwarranted conclusions as he makes it perfectly plain what's going on. Heh, it makes me want to be a journalist.

And I am hornswoggled by the existence of Colonel Timothy. We have here a 1) high-ranking army intellectual, 2) whose memos are widely read and widely influential, 3) who also blogs, not only about his own field of expertise, but also about politics in general, 4) under the rather thin pseudonym* of "Tim the Enchanter", 5) which reveals that he is a Monty Python fan. Did you ever imagine one person would display this combination of characteristics? I certainly didn't. Isn't it wonderful how we find out about quirkily new sorts of people? Although I fear that Colonel Timothy and his quirks are about to become a retired army intellectual very shortly. At the very least, I wouldn't lay odds on him getting promoted anytime soon.

* Withywindle is aware that his own pseudonymity is all too threadbare, but he has less of a career to sacrifice than Col. Timothy.

Dear Flag...

To: flag@whitehouse.gov
From: alpheus@athens-and-jerusalem.blogspot.com
Subject: Health Care Disinformation!!!!!!

To Whom It May Concern (Flag):

I am writing to let you know that I received an email today from a very good friend of mine, a Mr. Withywindle. In the course of this email, he passed along what I believe to be false and misleading information concerning health care reform. Specifically, he repeated an extreme right-wing Republican talking point about our president having once expressed a desire to fully nationalize the health care system. At another point in the email, he appeared to question the president's judgment on the health care issue in general.

Although in my heart I believe Mr. Withywindle to be a basically decent and well-intentioned man, and although up until now I had no reason to doubt that he was a loyal American, I have become aware of the threat posed to our country and the president's agenda by all forms of extreme right-wing Republican disinformation about health care. Therefore, in accordance with your recent plea to all loyal citizens to relay information about "fishy" emails to the White House, I am forwarding you the text of Mr. Withywindle's message, along with some relevant information about him, his family, and his other associations and predilections. I know you will use it only for the benefit of our great country. I also trust that you will not need to tell Mr. Withywindle that I sent you any of this. After all, if he is now in thrall to the extreme right-wing Republicans and their talking points, it's just possible he might react to my decision to contact you as a betrayal of trust, and this might interfere with any further information-gathering efforts in which you might desire me, as a loyal citizen, to engage.

I should also mention that another close friend of mine, a Ms. Arethusa, recently let slip certain contemptuous remarks about the First Lady's wardrobe which I felt were mean-spirited and unfair. At first I was not sure these remarks were relevant to the health care debate, but I remembered your admonition that harmful rumors "often travel below the surface via...casual conversation." It occurred to me that denigration of Mrs. Obama's clothing might be some sort of insidious extreme right-wing Republican talking point, possibly related to J. Crew's elimination of health care for part-time employees (i.e., refusal to play ball with Big Insurance). This is also not the first time Ms. Arethusa has privately make statements about President and Mrs. Obama.

Due to the nature of my relationship with Ms. Arethusa, I can provide a somewhat fuller dossier on her than I can in the case of Mr. Withywindle. Please use it discreetly, as she too might overreact and misconstrue my reasonable desire to alert you to the sorts of alarming things that are being thought and said out here in America by hitherto loyal Americans. If Ms. Arethusa were to learn of this email, it might be worse than the time I left a bag of salad on top of the refrigerator.

In closing, I would like to ask that you not judge Mr. Withywindle and Ms. Arethusa too harshly. I am sure they are only misguided. I also ask that you not judge me by my acquaintance with these two individuals, which is, upon second thought, not really as close as the materials I have enclosed with this email might otherwise suggest.

Please accept my best wishes for President Obama, Mrs. Obama, Jenna and Barbara Obama, and the entire health care reform effort which I know to be so critical to our survival as a free an insured people. After the nightmare of the Bush years, with their rampant suspicion-mongering and intimations of civic disloyalty, I am proud to reflect that we will never again descend so far from the ideals of our founding fathers.

Loyally yours,
Alpheus

Scenes from the 1920s

Not long ago, I tried to explain to Arethusa why the 1920s fascinate me. Although it's hard for me to put my interest in that era into words, I think it has to do with the fact that, in the aftermath of World War I, all the cultural forces that define the modern world were rapidly taking shape but, at the same time, the mores and values of an older culture had not yet been forgotten. The coexistence of an older world with the new world that was coming into being made it easy to perceive, articulate and critique the new world's features in a way that has since become impossible.

I was thinking about all this again last night when I read the following passage from F. Soctt Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922). It's an entry in Gloria Gilbert's, the heroine's, diary:

"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting--it's going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate--to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers... Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings--

"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state."

Today, I think, one wouldn't have to assert such a perspective in the face of another, older way of looking at things. For better or worse, most everyone simply has some version of this mindset and most of us, lacking a comparandum, aren't even really aware of it.

On Republican Presidential Contenders

John Miller over at NRO asked YAFfers what they thought of a variety of Republican Presidential possibilies. So, I ask myself, what do I think of them myself? Not that it matters much - Obama will doubtless win re-election in 2012 by dint of being the incumbent - but I'll just post my thoughts now, to see how they compare with my thoughts 3 or 4 years down the pike. So:

Mitt Romney - Neville Chamberlain is supposed to grow on me? The man who introduced unaffordable universal health care to Massachusetts should fix the economy? Pass.

Sarah Palin - Wrongly attacked by the left, but she doesn't have the experience to be president, and quitting the governorship was too erratic for comfort. Pass.

Bobby Jindal - Come back when you have a track record governing Louisiana. And I'm told you have no charisma - develop some. Wait and see.

Tim Pawlenty - if you had a personality, McCain would have chosen you instead of Palin. Pass.

Mike Huckabee - You have to take Econ 101 and convince me you truly believe. Pass.

Newt Gingrich - That would be a little too much personality. Pass.

Mitch Daniels - Midwestern fiscal rectitude! Sounds good! But I don't yet know if you have a personality, and what you think about anything else besides keeping finances in order. Wait and see.

David Petraeus - I would like you to stay in the military and win our wars. You'd only run for president in 2012 if we had done very badly abroad, and I'd rather not see that. 2012 is the McClellan run; 2016 or 2020 is the Eisenhower run. And I would want to know your views on everything outside the realm of counter-insurgency warfare.

On Earmarks

When you look at this pork-and-plum-packed monstrosity of a health-care bill, you see McCain's point. Getting rid of earmarks would be like fixing broken windows on the city streets - symbolic in itself, perhaps, but (one hopes) with great practical consequences. But set aside the noxiousness of all this pork - is it actually useful for getting important legislation done? Right now, it looks as if the porky and ideological bells and whistles are doing more to drag down the health care bill than to forward. If I were a liberal who wanted to change massive amounts of America, it seems to me I would have even more incentive to forward a McCain style goo-goo government cleanliness, if only to help get my bill passed with a minimum of distractions.

Or perhaps that is wishful thinking. The prescription drug bill went through in a pretty sordid manner.

(By the way, is that bill a success? I haven't heard anyone complaining lately about the way it works, which makes me think it must be doing reasonably.)

But in any case, I do think the current awfulness highlights what was right about McCain's emphasis on earmarks.

Cynical Speculation

It just occurred to me that maybe I'm all turned around with respect to the proper role of higher education. Most parents, after all, send their kids to college to make sure they can get a good job and maintain or advance their social/class status. Most students want the same thing from college (in addition to four years of largely unsupervised extended adolescence).

From that point of view, isn't it desirable that college classes should be mostly about the cultivation of certain political views, social attitudes, and lifestyle preferences that are markers of, and passports to, elite status? And if strong character, eccentricity, and the inclination to think for oneself are detrimental to the attainment and preservation of membership in the elites, aren't they exactly the sort of qualities that higher education should discourage -- even punish?

Withywindle Will Hate Me For Posting This (UPDATED)

Sometimes I post childhood photos of Sarah Palin. And sometimes I post pictures of Barack Obama naked and riding a unicorn:


No, I don't know what Dr. House and Comrade Stalin are doing there. I assume this is a comment -- but what? -- on the health care debate: Stalin seems to be holding a bottle of pills. Also it looks like something bad has happened to the Capitol dome.

You can see lots more naked-Obama-and-his-Obamacorn art here. Content warning, though: some of the paintings are in questionable taste. In one, for example, Obama and his unicorn are fighting Sarah Palin, who's also naked (except for high black boots) and riding a moose; parts of Palin which should not be visible are in fact quite conspicuous. Even if this is some sort of satire on the absurdity of the Obama cult (which I think it might not be), I'm attracted mostly by the fact that these paintings are so bizarre.

Here's the artist's web site. I learned of the existence of these things from a commenter on Ann Althouse's blog.

UPDATE: I'm pretty naive. It took Arethusa to point out the phallic imagery.