What, Me Worry?

I know my track record on pointing out likenesses is a little spotty, but does anyone else think Roman Polanski...


...looks a little like Alfred E. Neuman?

Why Wikipedia Still Isn't Perfect

From the article on Euripides' Bacchae:

[Dionysus] has driven the women of Thebes, including his aunts, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron, much to the horror of their families. Also Known In The Third Generation Of The Bible He Likes Eggs. Complicating matters, his cousin, the young king Pentheus, has declared a ban on the worship of Dionysus throughout Thebes.

Somewhere, an undergraduate is copying and pasting this information into an essay.

Who doesn't like eggs?

Idle 2016 Speculation

FLG will become president due to an unusual chain of historical circumstances. Much will ensue, of varying consequences. Historians will look back on his administration as one that decisively ended the scourge of piracy in the twenty-first century.

Idle 2012 Speculation

David Paterson runs for governor and loses in a wipe-out to Giuliani. Giuliani has some reform credentials by 2012, and is chosen as the vice-presidential candidate by someone a bit to his right on social issues - Pawlenty, Romney, Palin, etc. Conservatives mind him less than they did in 2008 - partly because it's just the VP slot, partly because they're hungry for power and willing to compromise.

In 2004, I thought Pawlenty would get the VP nod in 2008, so my idle speculation has limited predictive value.

The Rooster and the Fox

A fable, the important extract of which is:

A rooster was perched on a branch of a very high tree, crowing loudly. His powerful exclamations were heard throughout the forest and caught the attention of a hungry fox who was out and about looking for a prey.

The fox saw how high the bird was positioned and thought of a sly way to bring the rooster down for his meal.

"Excuse me, my dear proud Rooster," he gently spoke, "Have you not heard of the universal treaty and proclamation of harmony that is now set before all beasts and birds and every creature in our forest. We are no longer to hunt or prey nor ravish one another, but we are to live together in peace, harmony, and love. Do come down, Rooster, and we shall speak more on this matter of such great importance."

If only Pres. Obama had a classical education ...

Speaking of Roots

I wonder how many Jews live in New York City (proper, not suburbs), whose families have been here since at least 1924?

Didion & Obama

I just finished re-reading Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and it is as good as I remembered. What really catches me is that the elegy to the vanished past is also an elegy to a vanishing (now vanished) small-town America, and, not casually, to a vanished Anglo-Saxon America. (Didion? Elle est francaise, n'est-ce pas? Oui, but at some distance.) In her case, Sacramento, and she sees the melancholy passing of the Old West, the Old America, everywhere - even in places such as Newport, Rhode Island, where, I confess, she sees more than I think is really there. But she is always bringing her own impressions to what she observes, so pas de problème.

One of her essays, "Letter From Paradise," is about visiting Hawaii (she has less fun than you and I would have, dear reader), and she is, of course, attuned to the passing Anglo-Saxon plantocracy. She notes casually her visit to Punahou School, opening up as she visits from a school for the white elite to a school for all Hawaiians. This reminds me that Obama would attend Punahou a few years later, and Didion's story suddenly acquires some more resonance. It also occurs to me that Didion would have had a field day writing about Obama's mother and her family, the Dunhams. Particularly the grandfather, Stanley Dunham - Anglo-Saxon, from the Plains, wandering discontentedly westward to Seattle and then Hawaii, never finding the elusive, golden dream. And then his daughter dislocates herself from this old world, marries a Kenyan, an Indonesian, removes herself from the old story, and her son - if he even remembers any of this old, Didionesque world, he seems to have torn it from his heart.

Zombie Corpse of Judaism

I basically agree with Leon Wieseltier in his review of Norman Podhoretz's latest book:

Judaism is not liberal and it is not conservative; it is Jewish. But this is the beginning of the matter, not the end. For Judaism is immense and various: it holds within itself an oceanic plenitude of opinions and tendencies, developed over 2,000 years of philosophical and legal deliberation, and they do not all go together. To say that a view is Jewish is to claim a provenance more than an essence.

I.e., Podhoretz is seeking the zombie corpse of Judaism. (Why, why, doesn't Wieseltier use phrases like "zombie corpse"? Oh, wait, because it's garish and tasteless. Moving on.) But Wieseltier elicits some letters which try to turn liberalism, rather than conservatism, into Judaism's zombie corpse. Was ever commentary so clearly inferior to its source material? (As Gemara and Mishnah are to Torah, so Goldberg and Glasser are to Wieseltier? Too unkind a comparison to Gemara and Mishnah,) (Is Godzilla another commentary?) I note in particular this remarkably smug section in a letter by Mr. Goldberg:

Jews are liberals because of rachmones, often translated as compassion, but really so much more. It has elements of sympathy and empathy as well.

My. Not just compassion, but sympathy and empathy too. That is very impressive. We will leave aside the possibility that you can be rachmonious, yet not liberal. Isn't it nice that Jews are rachmonoid? Because no one else in the world has ever even thought of compassion, sympathy, and empathy. Why, the gentiles don't even have the words! - ummm. Maybe another explanation works better? I'm sure it won't be that difficult if you think a little bit, Mr. Goldberg.

The comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen, on the other hand, displays the superior, take-no-prisoners attitude of the right wing.

Never mind. While you have rachojones up the wazoo, thought is clearly beyond you. This was one of the two best letters sent to the Book Review? Oy vey es mir.

On Blog Wars

Bruinen sends to her little river an old column by William Safire to mark his passing. I note a relevant passage:

12. Scorn personal exchanges between columnists. Observers presuming to be participants in debate remove the reader from the reality of controversy; theirs is merely a photo of a painting of a statue, or a towel-throwing contest between fight managers. Insist on columns taking on only the truly powerful, and then only kicking 'em when they're up.

This applies to the blog-o-sphere as well. Chest-thumping attacks on Charles Johnson, or Mark Levin, or Glenn Beck, are to be scorned. Heck, when politicians attack Rush Limbaugh, they're reducing their own stature.

But what of your own needling of Leon WIeseltier, Jonathan Chait, or who have you?

Oh, pish. I'm a little boy shooting spitballs - it's not as if anything I say here amounts to a hill of beans. I'm sure Chait sleeps well at night, even knowing I'm writing critical things about him.

Hanson on Obama's Foreign Policy

I think this blog post by Victor Davis Hanson on NRO's Corner is the most succinct cogent critique of the Obama administration's foreign policy that I've yet read. I feel like I've tried, despite pessimism, to give Obama's foreign policy the benefit of the doubt, but it's been so much worse than I expected.

I thought the election of Obama probably meant that Iran would get nukes (and this was a major reason I felt confident in casting my vote for McCain) but I never dreamed that Obama's administration would be so needlessly cavalier in its treatment of our allies, so unimaginative, so utterly ruled, to all appearances, by the belief that everything wrong with the world can be blamed on George Bush and the American right. I already said a lot of what I think about these subjects here. But Hanson says it better.

The Aeneid as Literary Prototype

Sometimes -- okay, often -- I have little insights that make me feel like a complete idiot for not having had them before. For example, it just occurred to me that a large number of good books, especially books that manage to capture the love of readers, recapitulate the general structure of Virgil's Aeneid.

The Aeneid's structure, it's widely known, is a rather blatant cobbling-together of the two great Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, so that scholars speak of "the Odyssean Aeneid" (Books 1-6) and "the Iliadic Aeneid" (Books 7-12). The first, or "Odyssey" half of the Aeneid is the tale of a journey, of an effort to reach a destination. The second, or "Iliad" half of the Aeneid is about a great war.

Likewise with The Lord of the Rings, whose first half is a journey and whose second half is a war. You could say the same thing about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I've been reading Gene Wolfe's amazing Book of the New Sun, often cited as the greatest work of science fiction yet produced. Same thing there. You can also see this pattern in movies: Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, for example, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Guns of Navarone.

One could argue that the journey-war pattern is only an especially explicit version of the basic development-climax pattern that all exciting stories must have. Perhaps so, and probably that explains the popularity of the type. Even the Odyssey, after all, has a sort of battle near the end of it -- the slaying of the suitors -- so maybe the journey-battle combination can be traced back much further than Virgil.

On How To Bore Your Readers

The eagle-eyed among you will note that I have deleted A&J's link to Robert [Stacy/Stacey] McCain. Endless conflicts with other bloggers are dull.

An Interesting Point

From Power Line:

Not only can Obama not be expected to partner with Israel when it comes to dealing with Iran, he cannot be counted on to provide -- indeed he is not capable of providing -- sound counsel on the matter. And perhaps most importantly, Netanyahu has less to fear from ignoring Obama's counsel then he would from a formidable, or even just competent, American president. Thus, Netanyahu must feel less constrained from acting alone, even as he fully realizes that acting alone represents the only option for acting.

On Criticizing Obama's Iran Policy

Is there any reason to believe that his pusillanimity is not bipartisan? Didn't Bush also speak-no-evil of this now-revealed nuclear plant? Didn't every single bureaucrat who knew about this keep quiet and not leak about its existence to the press? Do we have a reason to believe any American president - Bush, McCain, whoever - would actually do anything about Iran?

I'm perfectly willing to lambast Obama for his failures; I'm unconvinced the alternatives would have done any better.

Learning to Love Lovecraft

At NRO's Corner and elsewhere, there's an interesting debate going on about the politics of H.P. Lovecraft. I'm going to use this an excuse to dredge up and finish yet another uncompleted A&J post -- this one nearly two years old! It might all be intellectual bloviation, or it might be utterly unoriginal. Might be both! (There's a reason it was left unfinished for so long.) In any case, here it is:

* * *

I've been reading H.P. Lovecraft again lately. This is a vice I indulge in every few years: I'll check a collection of his tales out of the library, read three or four stories, and then lose interest. I suppose if I live to be 300 or so, I may eventually get through the entire Lovecraft corpus.

When I do put Lovecraft aside after one of these binges, it's always because I've become tired of his writing style, which violates what seems like it should be a fundamental rule of the storyteller's art. Instead of making the reader feel horror, Lovecraft will just tell him that something is horrible, or hideous, or damnable, or blasphemous, or unspeakable, or eldritch, or nightmarish, or accursed, or -- well, you get the idea.

Typically, the thing described by the adjective will be something fairly mundane, like a tree or a face or a ruined building that Lovecraft doesn't describe in any detail except to imply that it just isn't quite right somehow and therefore deserves to be called unearthly, or dread, or terrifying, or inhuman.... Lovecraft is a writer who probably uses more adjectives than verbs.

Sometimes Lovecraft even refuses to describe things you'd think he'd have to describe to tell his story. He'll refer to "certain queer dreams" or "certain indications in old manuscripts" or simply to "certain misgivings" or "certain signs." Often, for all their indefiniteness, these things turn out to be crucial elements of a story -- hinges of the plot. You'd think, being a writer, he could make something up. But no: the reader is left, ironically enough, completely uncertain as to what sort of thing the writer is talking about.

I suppose Lovecraft must have decided, based on his perusals of Poe, that vagueness is inherently unsettling and can serve to evoke horror. We never know, for instance, what exactly was so troubling about the "vulture eye" of the murdered man in "The Tell-Tale Heart." But it is important that Poe's narrator in that story is insane, and that his insanity is the true source of all the terror in that story. For my part, I find Lovecraft's vagueness excessive. Others may disagree.

In any case, what's really been interesting me, in my latest perusal of Lovecraft, are those cases where Lovecraft does describe something that he considers terrifying, or unholy, or demonic, and the phenomenon in question doesn't strike me that way at all. In many such cases, what Lovecraft calls hideous might seem, to many inhabitants of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, to hold only the fascination and the attraction of the unfamiliar.

Aliens are a good example. For Lovecraft, the mere existence of other intelligent races -- even benevolent and civilized ones -- has something monstrous and menacing about it. The idea that weird aliens may have lived on earth before man, and left remnants of their presence, seems to be especially horrible. When Lovecraft describes humans' uncovering of the ruins built by the race of Old Ones (in "At the Mountains of Madness") or by the Great Race (in "The Shadow Out of Time"), he cannot allow his narrators to be enthusiastic about the discoveries: the mere fact that they ever existed, and were different from us, is sufficient for Lovecraft to believe that reader ought to associate them with dread.

For example, here's a paragraph from "At the Mountains of Madness." Does it even belong in what purports to be a horror story?

In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles - and racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books. Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities - certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.

Cylindrical chairs! Pentagonal currency! Much stock raising! Limited manufacturing! The very stuff of nightmares!

In each of the two alien stories I've mentioned, Lovecraft seems to recognize that many people might not find his ancient races sufficiently blood-chilling. He resolves this problem, in both cases, by inserting into the stories other ancient races who are in fact malevolent and menacing; these other races are really peripheral to the plots but they serve to provide what is, for most people at all accustomed to science fiction, the only genuine terror in the stories. But Lovecraft still insists on referring to his rather interesting and appealing aliens as unholy, damnable, daemonic, accursed, blasphemous....

So what's going on here? I think I really began to understand him when, in my most recent dip into his oeuvre, I came across this passage in the lesser-known story "The Shunned House":

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, "My breath, my breath!" Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.

He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it--a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon an other; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snap-shots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.

Oh, my God! Did the dreams look anything like this? Or this? It seems as if the hideous visions Lovecraft's character has experienced is only the stuff of modern art.

To be perfectly fair, Lovecraft probably meant to evoke a picture more like Guernica, which was intended to represent a scene of genuine horror. In his stories, Lovecraft mentions specifically the paintings of Henri Fuseli, which are are genuinely creepy but not especially abstract, and Nicholas Roerich, whose Tibetan landscapes strike some people as mildly eerie but which, again, could hardly be described as "a shadowy geometrical confusion." Still, I don't think it's too much to suppose that Lovecraft, writing "The Shunned House" in the autumn of 1924, was influenced -- consciously or unconsciously -- by the new anti-representational trends in art.

Thinking of all this made me realize that what underlies much of the horror, real and putative, in Lovecraft's stories is simple discomfort with the disorientations and uncertainties of modernity: new discoveries in astronomy and biology; new modes of expression in literature and art; the decay of the cozy New England communities of Lovecraft's youth. Immigration! Miscegenation! Withywindle once pointed out to me how often non-white and especially mixed-race people show up in Lovecraft as agents of demonic powers: it was from Lovecraft that I learned the word "lascar" -- and "half-lascars" in Lovecraft are not people to be trusted. Lovecraft's treatment of race would be quite offensive if it weren't so often silly and quaint.

The folks who say the literature of horror reflects social anxieties are probably right in Lovecraft's case. Nearly a hundred years on, uncertainty and abstraction and the vastnesses of space and time, with their possibility of other races on other worlds, don't seem nearly so alarming. Other races on this world may still make some people nervous, I suppose, but that anxiety has become much more mundane than it evidently was in Lovecraft's day. When the later twentieth century wanted to evoke horror, it's approach was very different from Lovecraft's.

All in all, it seems like both the weaknesses and the appeal of H.P. Lovecraft have a lot to do with his historical moment. His stories reflect what might be called "the terrors of the post-Enlightenment" -- and thus it makes sense that vagueness would be seen as something frightening in and of itself.

The closest Lovecraft comes to a direct statement of the point of view I ascribe to him -- as far as I know, that is, which is not very far -- comes in the sestet of the third sonnet of his bizarre sonnet sequence "The Fungi From Yuggoth" (which, believe it or not, we've mentioned on this blog before):

At last the key was mine to those vague visions
Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,
Lurking as memories of infinitude.

Lovecraftian horror is basically the horror of imprecisions.

Johnny Cash, Political Philosopher

I continue to jib at Alpheus' comparison of liberalism to Calvinism. But when I find myself needing citations, Johnny Cash he comes to me:

There's a man going round taking names.
And he decides who to free and who to blame.
Everybody won't be treated all the same.
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down.
When the man comes around.

Everybody won't be treated all the same. There is such a distance between that casual statement and liberalism, where everyone is meant to be treated all the same. Yes, yes, these can be reconciled -- have been, many times - and yet, and yet. Compare liberalism to Calvinism? To any Christianity? Only in the sense that they are Faustians who aspire too high--who aim to decide themselves, here and now, who to free and who to blame, rather than to wait for the man to decide when he comes around. (Immanentizing the eschaton, forsooth.) But this seems to me a far different comparison from the one Alpheus was making.

I suppose I jib at words. If Alpheus had written of liberals and Calvinists, I don't think I'd have objected as much; it's that he wrote of liberalism and Calvinism. And the things of earth and the things of heaven just aren't commensurable.

The hairs on your arm will stand up.
At the terror in each sip and in each sup.
Will you partake of that last offered cup,
Or disappear into the potter's ground?
When the man comes around. ....

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.

Does anything the Left believes resemble this? As a candle to the sun.

Speaking of Philosopher Kings

FLG critiques Obama's speech at the UN. I say that Obama's speech reeks of the sort of interpretation of Plato that FLG calls total hogwash -- look at it closely, and the entire vocabulary assumes a philosopher-king who knows best how to deal with mankind - who (also Rousseauianly) can define people's interests according to the Good, rather than according to how they define themselves. (Not that I believe Obama has read a word of Plato or Rousseau until I get positive proof otherwise--I still suspect him of general ignorance of the Western tradition. This would all be fourth- or fifth- hand, via the usual epigones.) While I wish Obama understood Plato as FLG does, he evidently does not. Although there is an odd reversal here--unless we take him to be actively trying to use his reason to bind the will, where the will is the United States--in that he is so much the philosopher that he is abdicating the kingly role, foregoing (at least internationally) the exercise of sovereignty, making himself (to plagiarize a phrase) the wisest fool in Christendom. Sophia, sophia, but no prudentia.

On Suffering, Continued

It's not that suffering as such provides moral authority. Suffering is an experience upon which a person invents his character, for better or for worse. You may become bitter, lessened, hateful, horrible by suffering; it may provide you no sympathy with the suffering of others, no endurance and pluck. Nor is it a necessary prerequisite for wisdom/sympathy: you may arrive at those without suffering. I would say that the necessary prerequisite is love; you must have some love within you first, to give your soul a proper direction in how it deals with suffering. For the obvious reference to the imitatio Christi: Christ's suffering did not come first; rather, For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life. To give too high a value to suffering as a means of wisdom, is, well, to give too high a value to pain, fear, the worst of man and not the best. Who would you rather have lead the country? - a man who has suffered, but never loved, or a man who has loved, but never suffered? I would choose the latter.

There Would Also be Calliope Music

One of my less viable fantasies involves the creation of a Sunday morning, "Meet the Press"-style political talk show called "Three Ring Circus." Although the topics discussed would be entirely serious, all the politicians and officials appearing on the show would have to wear clown makeup, complete with rubber noses, ruffled collars and large colorful wigs. The journalists and pundits would have other sorts of costumes: animals, pirates, spacemen, fairy princesses, Disney characters.

I know, I know. It's not going to happen. Still, the day I see a David Gregory dressed as a big pink rabbit, interrogating a John Boehner who's wearing greasepaint and crazy rainbow hair...well, that's a day I could die a happy man.

On Slovenia

"We're not large," said a man in Slovenia;
"Hardly any state nearby is teeniah.
But to ski in Ljubljana
Is a sort of nirvana
That will cure you of all neurasthenia."

Wannabe New York Jewish Intellectual

I do have some urge to be regarded as a New York Jewish Intellectual – they’re the cool club, nicht war? But the more academic annex of the club – more Lionel Trilling or Meyer Schapiro than Iriving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz. (If you must discuss the modern world, let’s be Daniel Bell.) Fun as it is to burble about the policy implications of ideas, somehow that seems beside the point in the long run. It’s the ideas themselves that matter, in all their irrelevant glory, not the applications to the modern day. And there are so many second- or third-rate policy intellectuals out there; why join that crowd of self-important scribblers? And, oy, to be a Jewish scribbler full of his own particular discovery of America, and generously eager to share it with other Jewish scribblers the world? Such a joy I do not entirely desire. Better to be a grand rabbin of Western Civilization; the Jew who tells the Gentiles about the glorious past they no longer remember. With footnotes, even.

On Russia

If I had to choose one hostile power to appease, it probably would be Russia. They are on the other side of the world from us, far from the sea lanes; we don’t need their oil or natural gas; they are a collapsing power, population plummeting and nothing but oil and gas to sell on the international market; and they are not animated by ideology/religion. Which isn’t to say that retreating before them is wonderful, but better Russians in Georgia than PROC troops in Taiwan.

On Debate Teams

I think that requiring all high school students to join debate team would go some way toward getting them to be able to write coherent papers in college.

A Note to MSI

Get back to your reading!

Umm ...

Over at the NRO, Andrew McCarthy has an article with the title "We Need an Administrative-Detention Law." I haven't read the article, but I confess my first reaction is "No, we don't."

The Moral Authority of Suffering

Withywindle recently mentioned a suggestion by Jonathan Chait that "extreme libertarianism" can be traced to "a certain form of childhood deprivation." This tends to support my contention that leftists like to argue against conservatives by coming up with ways in which they're just basically better than conservatives: in the case of Chait's remark, "better" takes the form of "healthier psychologically."

Withywindle's mention of Chait motivated me to dig up some paragraphs from an old, unfinished blog post documenting the frequency with which liberals have begun to claim that conservatives are the way they are because life has damaged them somehow. These paragraphs follow, edited somewhat both for length and to reflect the passage of time:

* * *

Take this, for example. It's a book review of a collection of essays that Withywindle once mentioned, in which leading conservative intellectuals describe their political journeys. Actually, it isn't a book review at all, in the usual sense, because it isn't particularly helpful to a reader who's trying to learn about the book and decide whether or not it's worth his or her time; the reviewer, Stephen Metcalf, is just looking for an opportunity to make fun of the conservative movement.

But Metcalf's fundamental "critique" of the right, while increasingly common among successful liberals, is still remarkble. For those who haven't gone to the trouble of registering with the Times Online (and I salute you!) here are the key paragraphs:

In Rich Lowry’s essay, the point is finally driven home. “To this day,” he writes, “I read between sets on the weight machines at the gym, and while brushing my teeth.” At least Lowry has the courage to announce it outright. “If high school had been an ape colony, we would have been those antisocial unattached males lingering on the fringes, envying the dominant males with their mates.”

To be genuinely humiliated is to know how to tap into the humiliations of others. Rejecting tout court a culture of cool that prevails against him, a certain sort of person turns to campus politics. Because these conservatives were, by and large, low-status males (or the feminism-disdaining women who loved them) in high school and college, they know instinctively how to connect with the culturally dispossessed.

And so it was that the workers of the world did unite, but with the bow-tie-wearing nerds at the Cato Institute. Ad hominem? Juvenile? Needlessly provocative? Maybe I could turn right after all.

The point, if one disregards Metcalf's clumsy lurch toward irony at the very end, seems to be this: conservative intellectuals are losers, and their politics are rooted in sexual or status envy. This envy of theirs affiliates them with the hopeless jerks in the red states -- the ones who secretly wish to be swilling espresso with trendy bisexual performance artists in Greenwich Village, but, since fate has rendered them too uncool for the lifestyle of their dreams, they vote Republican instead.

It would be easy to make fun of this argument, or to persuade oneself that Metcalf himself doesn't take it very seriously, except that a fair number of opinion makers on the left have been saying very similar things. Chris Matthews, for example, has suggested more than once that neoconservatives are the sort of people cool guys like him (?!) used to make of fun in high school, the "pencilnecks" who avoided schoolyard fights at all costs. Rather deliciously, Matthews has himself been tarred with the same brush by Glenn Greenwald, who lumps Matthews in with "effeminate" men like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis Hanson and other prominent neocons. Here's a more extended version of Greenwald's basic argument, complete with unflattering photos to make the point that neoconervatives are very unsexy. In Matthews's and Greenwald's analyses, the invasion of Iraq is the manifestation of the resentment that the neocons felt while they were growing up, the punch they could never quite bring themselves to throw at the kids who made fun of them or stole their lunch money, or won the affections of little red-haired Suzie on whom they (the future neocons) always had a hopeless, badly-concealed crush.

Another recent version of this "explanation" of conservatism came with the imprimatur of science -- or of psychology, anyway. Remember the study by the Berkeley professor, published in the Journal of Research into Personality, purporting to show that conservatives are the kids who were whiny in nursery school? If not, here's the study (courtesy of Michelle Malkin's website) -- and here and here are some criticisms of it.

I could continue accumulating links, but this sort of characterization of conservatives is by now just common enough that I don't think I need to do so. I first heard a version of it from a third-wave feminist back in the early nineties, and as far as I can tell it's been growing in popularity ever since. Its most common manifestation may be the "chickenhawk" label (or libel), which at a minimum carries the implication that the chickenhawk is too cowardly to do what he -- or she, I supppose -- asks of other people. I guess it's convenient to refer to the whole ball of wax as the "loser stereotype" of conservatives.

So what to make of this? The first thing I want to note about the "loser stereotype" is that it's a relatively new way for the left to attack the right. In the old days, one frequently heard conservatives described as greedy, or heartless, or mean, or stupid. I don't think one usually heard that the conservative temperament was born from envy. In fact, this was a way in which some conservatives (like Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises) used to condemn liberals. According to Rand, von Mises, and others, leftism was by and large an emotional reaction on the part of life's losers, who were driven to oppose a status quo in which they could not succeed through their own powers. Now, liberals have appropriated that argument and turned it against conservatives.

So what is one to make of all this? What factors have conditioned the development of the loser stereotype? Is there any truth to it? Is it possible that Withywindle's "Federalist geeks" do exist, but only in the lowest, most abject ranks of the teenage hierarchy?) Or has the whole thing somehow arisen out of thin air?

* * *

In the unfinished post from which those paragraphs come, I never really managed to answer that question to my own satisfaction. But I tried:

* * *

My first instinct is to say that the "loser stereotype" is really just an old stereotype of intellectuals generally, and its prevalence reflects the fact that intellectuals are now, for the first time in a while, in the driver's seat of the conservative movement -- a fact resented both by the anti-intellectual paleocons who have been elbowed aside and by the liberals who are now being out-intellectualed.

But the "loser stereotype" isn't just about the neocons as intellectuals. It's also, if I'm not mistaken, about them as moralizing intellectuals, who are always talking about justice and decency, about good and evil and making the world a better place for the little guy. All this has been suspect in modern thought at least since Friedrich Nietzsche defined it as characteristic of "slave morality." Only victims, the Nietzschean thinking goes, would bother to be so concerned with trying to mitigate life's injustices. The compassion of victims is therefore a form of selfishness.

I think that Metcalf's book review and Greenwald's screeds are fundamentally Nietzschean in precisely this way, and that all the other examples I've cited fit into the same pattern. So, perhaps, does the study cited by Withywindle (which I think is probably nonsense) about conservatives being conservative because they fear death. I suspect that what really upsets the left is that the neocons have stolen the language of morality from them and that they (the liberals) can no longer credibly claim to be on the side of the suffering and the powerless. Solution: undermine neo-conservative claims to be acting for moral reasons by "exposing" their morality as a species of self-interest.

* * *

Meh. I don't know how much I buy my own argument here. One thing, however, seems clear to me: the Left needs to get its story straight about the relationship between suffering and moral authority. Because for as long as I can remember the Left has been saying that people's suffering is some sort of moral credential -- the possession of an important perspective on the world that comfy bourgeois conservatives lack. But if being a victim of racism (for example) grants a special kind of moral understanding, then why on earth is "a certain form of childhood deprivation" -- whatever Chait means by that -- disqualifying? If a person's feelings of exclusion based on national origin mean that his judgment of what's wrong with society carries special force, then why should it be different for feelings of exclusion based on being a geeky teenager in a schoolyard full of tough, cool Chris Matthewses?

Textbook Bleg

Is there an American history textbook out there - college level, but not very difficult - that isn't very PC? Gary Nash's is somewhat wearying in its tone; decent alternatives?

On the New Republic, 23 Sept. 2009, IV

I've mentioned how I find uncompromising argument not entirely to my taste. Jonathan Chait - of "The Case for Bush Hatred" fame - has two pieces in this New Republic that demonstrate this style is not confined to the right. In "Middle of Nowhere," Chait argues for uncompromising pursuit of maximal health-care reform, because -- well, read the arguments, but the basic comparison is to civil rights, Galileo, global warming, other things where no reasonable person apparently can admit of compromise. There's a sensible point buried in here, that one shouldn't compromise just for the sake of compromise. But (aside from the vaguely uneasy sense I get in my wallet when people talk about the moral imperative of spending my money) the tone is basically unrelievedly negative toward Republicans and conservatives, advice by a liberal Democrat toward others of his ilk with no particular interest in speaking beyond that circle. Chait is indifferent toward my views, or hates them, or somewhere in the middle. That tone alone makes me skeptical of anything else he might say.

Chait also reviews ('Wealthcare") some books on Ayn Rand. You will be unsurprised to learn that he loathes her and her ideas. I'm not overwhelmingly fond of Rand or libertarianism either - but were I the editor of TNR, I might look for someone able to enter into her point of view with at least a modicum of sympathy. Chait doesn't like Rand; he doesn't like aspects of modern economic conservatism; he takes any contemporary "moralistic" or "apocalyptic" economic conservatism to betray her influence. I suspect he is unaware of the rest of conservative economic thought through the centuries, and therefore misidentifies a great deal of stuff as Randianism. But I note in particular one very annoying sentence: "The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study." Because saying people who disagree with you are insane never goes out of style among the left! The psychological link between a certain form of adult womanizing and extreme liberalism also awaits serious study. Also the psychological link between smug small-mindedness and journalistic careers in The New Republic.

It really was a much better rag when Andrew Sullivan edited it. It's a pity he's gone bonkers lately, but he was admirable in the 1990s.

Go-Getters

The pathologies of the modern meritocracy have been the subject of frequent discussion both here and on sites we link to (I'm thinking especially of FLG and Stacy McCain). Let me add another pebble to the pile.

It occurred to me earlier tonight that I don't regard high status as any kind of evidence of drive or of being a "go-getter." I tend to assume that, nowadays, it's quite possible to rise to the top in business, education, and politics without really struggling to get there, and I only assume someone is a determined go-getter if, in addition to success, there's other more particular evidence to support that belief.

Maybe this is unfair of me. Maybe I'm overly influenced by the fact that the correlation between determination and success in my own life has been astonishingly weak: my greatest "successes" have not been based on ambition and my most energetic efforts have usually gone unrewarded. In academia, I see lots of other evidence for a weak correlation.

Maybe things are different in business and politics, but I wonder. As I indicated in an earlier post (linked to above) I find it rather hard to be impressed by a meteoric ascent along a well-marked course -- a good college to a good law school to a good job in a large, stable organization, to better job in a large, stable organization, etc. And I think a big part of the reason for my skepticism is that I doubt whether those people had to work very hard or show any special resourcefulness or determination. Maybe they just possessed enough talent not to fall off a conveyor belt they hopped onto at an early age.

We always tell children about the importance of drive -- my father recommended it to me, and I'll certainly recommend it to my kids, if I have them. But I can't shake the feeling that drive and determination may be less common virtues among the very successful than among the moderately successful: the small business owners and defense attorneys and freelance writers and technicians and so on -- positions in society and the economy where you have to hustle and adapt, where it's much harder to get where you've gotten just by staying on a conveyor belt.

If that's true, couldn't that be a big part of the reason the meritocracy has lost legitimacy in the eyes of so many Americans?

Film Recommendation: Arguing the World

One way to commemorate the passing of Irving Kristol, chief architect of what came to be called neoconservatism, would be to watch the fascinating little 1998 documentary Arguing the World, which is available for instant viewing by those with Netflix accounts. The film begins with undergraduate intellectual ferment in a cafeteria alcove at the City College of New York during the 1930s and traces the ideologically divergent careers of Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer over more than five decades. I watched it about two years ago, and loved it. It's catnip for anyone who cares about politics, twentieth-century history, and the power of ideas (and especially for those of us who feel we missed out by not being born New York Jewish intellectuals). I'm hoping to view it again some time this weekend.

Complexity, Complexity

People going on and on about complexity I find vaguely annoying. A brief couplet on the subject:

Complexity! Complexity! There's nothing like complexity.
It justifies inertia and self-satisfied perplexity.

And that, said Withywindle, is that.

On The Last Word In Comments

Very often I don't answer a comment, and leave it without reply. Here are some reasons:

1) I'll only repeat myself.

2) I know I'm right! - but, um, your comment is more persuasive than what I've been writing. So I'll just leave it alone and [pretend it doesn't exist/mull about it/first the former, then the latter].

3) I suddenly became insanely busy, and by the time I came back to the blog, it seemed a bit late to restart the conversation.

And, as a positive point of courtesy:

4) People who always insist on having the last word, and always being right, are unpleasant. So I sometimes think I ought to let commenters have the last word, and let the discussion drop.

So, whether it is stubborn pride, laziness, or courtesy, I'm not ignoring your comments when I don't give a final reply to them.

....Therefore All Men are David Gergen

This may be one of those posts that doesn't quite have a point to it, but I've been thinking lately about how often logical fallacies can become cogent in the context of real arguments. Most arguments aren't based on strict deductive logic, but involve reasoning from effects to causes and a calculation and comparison of probabilities. And this means that you can get closer to truth in ways that are totally illegitimate where pure deduction is concerned.

For example, if A tries to convince B that B should believe X because David Gergen believes X, that's "argument from authority," which is impermissible in a syllogism but makes sense as an argument if one thinks David Gergen is a smart, well-informed guy. But that opens the door for B to respond that, no, David Gergen is in fact a twisted crypto-Nazi pedophile.* That's arguing ad hominem, also a logical fallacy in the context of pure deduction but clearly justified by the possible relevance of A's argument. And so on.

I'm sure all this is familiar to folks who think about these things, as the sections on "informal logic" in the wikipedia entries for the two fallacies I've linked to suggest. If I have a point, it's only that what looks like an illegitimate argument isn't always illegitimate. Sometimes the logical fallacy alarm in my own brain goes off when something isn't really a logical fallacy at all.

Or maybe the real point is that funny pictures of David Gergen aren't nearly as common on the internet as they ought to be.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*Athens & Jerusalem has almost no reason to believe this.]

The World as it Might Not Be

Drudge today points out that the Obama administration's decision to cancel plans for a U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe comes on the 70th anniversary of the "stab-in-the-back" Soviet invasion of Poland. Nice. At least we can take comfort in the fact that Poles and Czechs aren't new to this kind of treatment.

The Democrats keep talking about "smart power" and "creative diplomacy." So far, though, I've seen nothing smart or creative in this administration's foreign policy. There's nothing smart or creative about giving potential rivals what they want in hopes of reducing friction. That's got to be one of the least creative responses to a conflict that I can think of. Real creativity would involve reconciling the Soviets without giving a backhand slap to the young democracies of the East.

Speaking of democracies, what do these Democrats have against democracy anyway? I don't understand why we're mad at Honduras for tossing out a guy who was clearly planning a standard-issue Latin American coup. I don't understand why Obama seems so unperturbed by the crushing of the democratic movement in Iran. I don't understand why he's bowing to autocrats and calling dictators "amigo." We were told at the outset that neocon-style "democracy-building" was off the table, but can't we at least be well-wishers? Can't we at least recognize that, historically, democratic constitutions make small states less predisposed to upset the global applecart?

In February, the Times said Obama appeared "poised to return to a traditional American policy of dealing with the world as it is rather than as it might be." Now that's what I call -- to use one of the president's favorite expressions -- a false choice. Obviously you have to reckon with the world as it is. But how do you set goals and lay plans unless you're also reckoning with the world as it might be? Unless you imagine possible futures and work to realize desirable ones, you have no compass. All you can do is react and placate and temporize, taking what Frank Herbert described as a safe path to stagnation and destruction. And this seems to be the Democrats' preferred foreign policy. It's nothing but a gigantic failure of imagination -- an unwillingness to recognize dangers before they're staring us in our collective face, an unwillingness to imagine solutions to problems that involve more than one or two steps.

And speaking of an unwillingness to recognize dangers: Biden justifies the decision to abandon missile defense in Eastern Europe by saying Iran is no real threat to the U.S.A. I beg to differ, Mr. Vice-President. Iran is a threat to us. It's true they lack anything like our industrial capacity and military power. They don't even have nukes yet. But let's remember: this same little country (not so little really, by world standards) destroyed Carter's presidency, brought Reagan to heel, played Bush Sr. and Clinton like well-strung fiddles, and nearly wrecked Bush Jr.'s project for a democratic Iraq -- and that last story isn't over yet.

How did they do all this? Because the Iranians are dealing with the world as it might be, contrary to the biases of Democratic foreign policy. The mullahs have plans, and dreams -- some half-baked, no doubt, but some frighteningly feasible. They've thought about the leverage they'll gain when an Iranian missile with some sort of nuclear payload can hit Bombay or Cairo or Athens (now that would be payback for supporting the Ionians!). They've thought long since about the power of Islamist ideology to reshape the Middle East and the world. They've thought about how to break American will in Afghanistan and turn the fall of Saddam Hussein to their long-term advantage. They've thought about how to harry Israel until it just isn't a viable state anymore.

In the words of Oscar Hammerstein: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not saying Iran doesn't have weaknesses: it does -- serious ones. Likewise with the other states that would seek to undermine American power. But if we don't have some imagination -- some serious consideration of the world (or worlds) that might be -- we're not going to exploit them. Meanwhile, the upstart enemies of democracy and order will be cogitating how they can best exploit our weaknesses, how they can bring their longed-for world of tomorrow into existence. That sort of gives them an edge, doesn't it? In terms of foreign policy, they know what they want -- and in detail.

And all we seem to want is a way to get to a place where we don't have to think about foreign policy anymore, where we don't have to want anything from the world. But we seem to want to get there without giving up our trade agreements and grand alliances and all the perqs of being a superpower. We seem to want to get there without making any tough choices at all. We want to keep saying "nice doggie" and never having to think about where we can find that stick.

If only history had something to teach us about where this kind of thinking leads.

On the New Republic, 23 Sept. 2009, III

Richard Posner writes lucidly about what is attractive about the thought of John Maynard Keynes - although the title given by the editors, "How I Became A Keynesian," is more enthusiastic about Keynes than Posner's actual article, which indicates significant reservations about Keynesian theory. But note why he likes Keynes:

The dominant conception of economics todays, and one that has guided my own academic work in the economics of the law, is that economics is the study of rational choice. .... The General Theory is full of interesting psychological observations .... He uses such insights without trying to fit them into a model of rational decision-making.

In other words, Posner is slower than FLG - or Albert Hirschman, or Adam Smith - to realize that, shock!, passions influence people's economic behavior! The heart has reasons too, and they affect investment! And Keynes knew that!

Gentle readers, this is a rather low bar to hurdle; and it speaks very badly of the economics profession that so few nowadays do. I would submit to Judge Posner that Keynes is not the only man to have realized that passions and economics have something to say to one another; and that one can preserve that basic insight and come up with a wide variety of economic theories. Though I say this with due respect to a man whose writing and thought is the best thing in this issue of The New Republic.

Why Would I Want to "Shave the Baby"?

I hate linking to the Huffington Post, but I'm compelled to do so by my fascination with poorly conceived children's toys.

On the New Republic, 23 Sept. 2009, II

Noam Scheiber's "Peking Over Our Shoulder" describes how much of the Obama administrations actions and public pronouncements have been aimed at reassuring our creditors in Beijing. This speaks to a question Mickey Kaus keeps asking: why does Pres. Obama spend so much time talking about how his health-care plan will cut costs, when this is obviously making the American people uneasy? The implied answer: Pres. Obama emphasizes the cost-cutting aspects of health care so as to dampen Beijing's unease about the fiscal consequences of his health-care plan. That the need to placate Beijing might end up ruining his attempt to install universal health care is gallows comedy.

On the New Republic, 23 Sept. 2009, I

In their editorial "House Cleaning," TNR calls on Pelosi to turf Charles Rangel and John Murtha from their chairmanships: "She needs to strip them both of their chairmanships and make public examples of their bad behavior, to show voters that the Democratic Party doesn't selectively tolerate sleaze--before it's too late."

In the same issue, TNR runs an article by Eliot Spitzer.

In Which I Offer, for the Edification of Readers, a Critique of Maureen Dowd's Most Recent Musings

MoDo, yesterday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Maureen...you lie.

A Brief Geography of the Left from the North Pole to Geneva

The Left has often been accused of wanting to play Santa Claus. There's truth in that, and the crucial thing to realize is that it's not the gift-giving they really enjoy -- it's the whole process of making a list and labeling everyone naughty or nice. I've written before about the absurdity of having the government decide to fund health care and then talk about "personal responsibility," but it's not so absurd once you realize that the "personal responsibility" line -- the scapegoating of those who are supposedly costing the rest of us money, be they insurance company executives or diabetics who don't watch their sugar -- is the psychologically salient point. When I talk to liberals, it's the identification and classification of their enemies, and the elevation of themselves above those other people, that really seems to get their juices flowing.

And why not? That sort of thing is common enough on the Right too. It's human nature. But like every other dark facet of human nature, we can resist or we can indulge. When we indulge, we like to have a rationale or an excuse -- and that's what the Left's belief in its own benevolence provides. It's not unlike Calvinism: for many of the faithful, the inadequacy of man to attain heaven by his own effort (= the free market doesn't work) means that God's grace is all the more beneficent because undeserved (= the government will take care of you!). But the real psychological payoff for many believers comes when grace is extended to some sinners but not to all (= we can't provide for the "truly needy" without punishing the "undeserving" -- with both categories to be defined according to our good pleasure).

Actually, just as in Calvinism, the focus in modern Leftism isn't so much on the beneficence of God (the government) as it is on the wickedness of individual human beings. But at least in Calvinism there's a pretense of forcing each person to examine his or her own soul. In modern liberalism (and in Calvinism as too often practiced) all you have to know is that those other people are bad, or at least messed up in some way. One of my ongoing frustrations in arguing with liberals is that I sit there, trying to convince them, and wondering -- genuinely wondering -- why they don't seem to be listening. At some point in the conversation, I usually discover they've elaborated some theory of what's wrong with me, and why they therefore don't need to listen to my arguments. I'm not saying conservatives never do this, but it seems to be nearly universal on the politically engaged Left. You can see it not just in private conversations but in the whole public discourse. It makes no sense that the majority of opposition to Obama would be racist -- a lot of the same people who deplore Obama now also deplored Clinton, and Kerry, and Gore. Many of us disliked Clinton much more than we find ourselves disliking Obama. But there's a general assumption on the Left that antipathy toward Obama has something to do with his race. Because something has to be wrong with us...so they can feel better about themselves.

And so, as this post indicates, I'm starting to elaborate my own theory of what's wrong with them. What is it that René Girard says about mimesis and the loss of social cohesion? And how does Girard say social cohesion is typically re-acquired?

On the other hand, I'm still not interested in taking anyone's money, telling them I won't give it back to them if they don't behave, and pretending that this makes me better than they are. So I've got that going for me...I hope.

On Changes

Some Politico story brings up the usual scare-story: them evil white Southerners just oppose health care because they're racist, dontcha know. Which is not inconceivable for some non-trivial number of white Southerners (just as there may be support for the health care program on racial grounds for some non-trivial number of Obama supporters), but it bring to mind the interesting question of mutability. I talked earlier about how astonishingly quickly the Muslim population had grown in Europe, so quickly that you can understand the difficulty of people reacting to the changing facts in time. But while I am generally impressed with the enduring cast of mental attitudes, in one formulation or another, it's also astonishing how quickly people's minds can change too. Consider the cast of mind that animated a bombing campaign against De Gaulle in the early 1960s; that cast of mind, along with the political situation that inspired it, seems to have evaporated from modern France. (Seems!) Likewise, the liberal boogy-men of America - white Southerners, evangelical Protestants - who, we will stipulate, were always far more human than liberals allowed, have also changed astonishingly in the last two generations. It's difficult to get a bead on this - Abstractart reports unpleasant attitudes among fellow evangelicals of his acquaintance, as do other people I know. Other people report something far different. The remarkable American talent for amnesia helps evangelicals and white Southerners, as it helps everyone else, to let go the past.

Some of this change is a response to liberal critique. Some is a response to internal dynamics - the growth of evangelical Protestantism to large areas of Africa and Asia, such that white evangelicals now how to talk and live in a larger, far more multiracial community. But the point is that there has been extraordinarily rapid change in the attitudes of liberals' betes noires - so rapid that they cannot be blamed entirely for not realizing how much has changed.

This is not to say that evangelicals and white Southerners are Nice People, or that nothing has survived in their attitudes from 1960, or 1900. (Distinct points, let it be noted; I'm not equating niceness and modernity.) It is to say that what they are is complex, difficult enough for evangelicals and white Southerners themselves to formulate, changing all the time, and sufficiently distinct from liberal stereotypes that liberals ought to engage in a serious rethink of their prejudices* - where prejudice is a word I use either descriptively or positively. Granted, these changes have been startlingly quick, and granted, they may not endure; still, to continue to ignore them is laziness increasingly worthy of condemnation and contempt.

* Some begin to. Not nearly enough.

Israel and Russia II

An interesting news story makes me follow up on previous idle speculation:

NETANYAHU: We would like to overfly Russia on our way to bomb the Iranian nuclear reactor. And possibly use your airfields as bases.

PUTIN: I'm thinking of a word ... "chutzpah"? You did just hijack that tanker of ours. And Iranian reaction would be intense if they discovered our involvement, and they would inevitably find out. And it would be very bad treatment of a protege, an ally, a trading partner. What could you offer to make us do a thing like that.

NETANYAHU: We'll flip.

PUTIN: [Pause.} I'm listening.

NETANYAHU: We'll flip. The Russian navy has a base in Tel Aviv. Our technology is your technology. Mossad will co-operate fully with whatever you're calling the KGB nowadays. Our political pull in America will work for you - discreetly, in the circumstances, but for you.

PUTIN: I'm not sure you can deliver on this offer. When the Americans find out--

NETANYAHU: Why do the Americans need to find out? - and besides, they are offering us less nowadays.

PUTIN: Just the one bombing raid?

NETANYAHU: Greater sympathy for our settlements would be greatly appreciated. Any stray crumbs of information you have about Syria, the Palestinians - really, anybody in the Muslim world - would also be greatly appreciated. But for now, the bombing raid.

PUTIN: Trade our standing with a billion Muslims for that of five million Jews?

NETANYAHU: Five million Jews who have stood up against a billion Muslims so far. (Smiles.) We have other options against Iran.

PUTIN: At least two that I am aware of. (Taps his fingers against the folders on his desk. NETANYAHU's smile slips.) What a very interesting proposal. Let us consider some of the details at greater length. Do you take vodka in your tea?

NETANYAHU: Sometimes I take tea in my vodka. A habit I picked up from Arik. (Drinks) Budem zdorovy!

PUTIN: (Drinks.) L'chaim!

Brief Thoughts on the Health Care Speech

(1) Was anything Barack Obama could have said earlier tonight worth an hour of being seen on television standing in front of a smirking Nancy Pelosi?

(2) Obama has always been luckiest in his enemies and opponents. I'm curious to see what the media does with Joe Wilson. His rudeness looks bad -- and was bad -- and I'm sure a lot of people in the media will love to highlight a South Carolina Republican heckling The First African-American President. On the other hand, Wilson was right: Obama wasn't being honest, and it's best for the proponents of health care reform if the country doesn't think too hard about that.

Busy, Busy

Some blogposts hanging fire, as I desperately try to catch up with everything in the world, and fail. To preview:

1) In Commentary, there is a symposium about why Jews are liberal, and various, especially Michael Medved, talk about it as an allergy to Christian nationalism, terribly passe after the last few decades. To which Withywindle thinks to himself, And you're surprised that a few decades haven't changed an allergy built on nearly two millennia of terrible shared history? And when was the last time Muslims slaughtered Jews in anything like the numbers Christians have? The Almohad invasion of Spain? Much as I think the interests and affections of Jews ought to lie with evangelical Protestants, who could be surprised that they don't? People's suspicions and fears don't (as a rule) change on a dime - nor, as a rule, should they.

2) Been reading the recent bio of Booker T. Washington - Ralph Luker's books are in the footnotes. Also Leon Litwack on the Jim Crow South. It is always terrifying to read the details of black life, then and there. The Booker bio makes it sound as if his main legacy was teacher training at Tuskegee, and funneling the money of northern millionaires to substitute for the lack of public funding in the South for black schools - but never quite states that conclusion explicitly. Be interesting to read an article that addresses the point directly.

3) Thomas Friedman is a Jane Austen character; a fool sure of his knowledge, and eager to share it. And even less tolerable than Frank Rich in that he pretends to a theoretical knowledge of the world. God, I can't wait for the Times to go out of business.

The World is Flat! The East is Green! (UPDATED)

Thomas Friedman is a twit at the best of times. This is the man who once wrote a book called The World is Flat all about how no part of the world occupies a privileged position anymore. (If it seems like a round world is a better metaphor for that situation, that's because you don't live in Friedmania, an especially barren, windy corner of our flat planet. I'm not even going to touch what deep truth he thought he was getting at with The Lexus and the Olive Tree.) This is a man who was on Meet the Press last weekend raving about modems should have carried warnings "when that was how we connected to the internet." This is a man who has apparently never tried shaving off that mustache of his, even for a little while.

Today, Thomas L. Friedman, who makes more money that I ever will and regularly hobnobs with sheikhs and princes, wrote this:

China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

and:

“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” said Joe Romm, who writes the blog, climateprogress.org.

Which China is this? Is this the China that's building a new coal-fired power power plant every couple of weeks? Is this the China that's putting up gigantic dams to harness its rivers, little caring for the snail darters and pandabirds that live in the regions to be flooded? Is this the China whose industrial pollution recently managed to wipe out the last of those delightful Yangtze dolphins? Because surely Friedman and his source Joe Romm aren't talking about that China. They're talking about a Celestial Kingdom of their own left-liberal fantasies. If the real China does eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy -- which is possible, to the extent that clean energy becomes a reality -- it will have a lot more to do with their cheap labor, increasingly available credit, waxing entrepreneurial spirit, and relatively unsentimental (i.e., sensible) approach to energy projects of all kinds. It won't be because -- as Friedman alleges -- the Republicans have created something called "one party democracy." (If you read Friedman's column, this turns out to mean "two party democracy," just as "the world is flat" turns out to mean "the world is round." The Chinese may eat our lunch on green jobs, but the most esoteric paradox of Chan Buddhism has nothing on our New York Times columnists.)

The advantage of Friedman's column of course, is that more or less comes out and says what more and more liberals are thinking: we need to get rid of democracy and impose autocratic rule by "a reasonably enlightened group of people." Well, I suppose that's fine if you've got lots of Wen Jiabaos sitting around. But here in the States, I have a terrible feeling we'd just wind up being ruled by a lot of Thomas Friedmans.

UPDATE: Wow...the whole "right blogosphere" seems to going after this Friedman column (but none as wittily as yours truly, of course :-/). I think there's an overreaction here, or a mis-reaction, or something. As I said, I think it's good for the Right to have prominent folks on the Left admit that they're uncomfortable with democracy. But is it so rare and surprising?

I thought the weirdest thing was the re-imagining of the PRC as a place that's fully embraced American environmentalism, which I think is to learn almost precisely the wrong lesson from China's rise.

Listening to Johnny Cash

"Man Comes Around" and his cover of "I Hung My Head." Haunting, beautiful.

On Time Travel Stories

Drew asks "Why do we, as modern human beings, tell stories about time travel?" A quick stab at a theoretical answer:

European thought, since the Renaissance, has 1) increasingly emphasized the individualized depiction of the human being; 2) (re)discovered a historical sense, aware of change in history (historical narrative) and difference among men in space and time; and 3) dislocated man and history from the moral frame, divine meaning; man and history acquire increasingly independent meaning, not simply earthly illustrations of the divine, with divine meaning first relegated to the background and then dispensed with entirely.

This sense becomes increasingly strong in the Renaissance, in Guarino da Verona's exercise letters, Ciceronian pastiches, in Renaissance history, in Montaigne's essays; it finally reaches literature with the (eighteenth-century) realistic novel, that seeks to create characters who are not simply models of good and evil, but described accurately, and model good behavior indirectly at best, for the understanding reader of whom a greater demand is now made. In a sense, the realistic novel is the first alternate history - here is Spain, but an alternate where Alonso de Quijana lives and has gone mad; here is England, where a dashing madcap named Tom Jones wanders into an interesting variety of beds. Here we have both the individual and history - history enough to describe England now, distinct from all the other times and places in the world.

There are a number of different paths forward from here; one is to concentrate on history and time, ever more dislocated from the divine. The travel novel - Melville's novels of the South Pacific, say - take us away from here; the historical novel - Walter Scott, Victor Hugo - takes us away from now. In both cases, the historical sense is even more focused; there is in both cases, and perhaps especially in the historical novel, a focus on the importance of historical scene, an implicit argument that human character changes within historical circumstance and is not merely timeless, an assumption that we have something to gain from contemplation of the elsewhere and the elsewhen. While this can be loosely divinized, or universalized, there really is no point in the alien historical or geographical frame unless it makes for an essential difference.

Within this tradition, I would take time travel and alternate history (including "fantasy worlds," very different from Once Upon A Time, When There Was Magic) to be variants of historical fiction - travels to the past, to imagined histories, alternate or future. They are interesting because they turn time itself into a material - separate it entirely from providence or even progress - highlight the contingency of time as well as its materiality. Time travel, in addition to reflecting modern scientific modes of thought, is a (crude) poetic image to illustrate that time is a Godless thing, made and remade by human intervention. (Even the stories that show how time can't be changed reduce God and providence to mere logic, the prevention of paradox. And frankly, they're usually pretty dull. If you want the grinding wheels of fate, read Thomas Hardy.) (Just for fun, imagine if Thomas Hardy had written The Time Machine.) So in the broadest sense, time travel stories help work out the implications of Petrarch's discovery that something had changed between Cicero's time and his.

Why do we do it more now? - oh, some usual narrative of Modernity and Science and the Slow Death of God makes for a broad explanation, I fancy. I would want to fit that narrative into the outline I've just made, and leave some graduate student to fill in the details in a dissertation.

Google Books

Google Books is a wonderful resource, but like all of us they sometimes make mistakes. For example. the cover of a 1999 collection of essays on the development of Greek thought should not look like this.

On Lawyerly Argument

Mark Levin, Andy McCarthy, and Ann Coulter all, I think, share a certain lawyerly style -- uncompromising, trying above all to beat an enemy rather than to consider their best arguments. (Of the three, McCarthy is by far the most genial writer.) Obviously, a fair number of opinion writers do something similar - Paul Krugman, Joe Klein, etc. - but without the legalistic rigor of those three. I wonder if this is more common among conservative pundits - if more conservative pundits have a legal background. It is not a style I find entirely to my taste - although if I'm going to read a tendentious argument, I'd rather it had lawyerly intelligence behind it, and not just journalistic babble.

On Power Point II

The slides function as an outline for a lecture. For those of us traditionally more loose-jointed in our teaching style, this provides more focus, but at the cost of spontaneity. And of course you have to think about where the discussion fits in the slides! Aside from the usual Technology, Feh, rant, it is curious & interesting how you need to rethink teaching to incorporate Power Point.

Proofs of Incompetence

I'm revising the galley proofs of an article -- at least, I thought it was an article when I was writing it. It turns out that what I've actually written is a series of unreadable sentences that would find their true calling as cautionary examples in an undergraduate style guide. In fact, I may use some of them as revision exercises in my own classes in an effort (probably futile) to expiate my shame.

Is it too early in the afternoon to begin drinking?

On Obama's Truther

But it is not as if getting rid of the Truther will make the Democrats a respectable party. They are rotted through and through, from the mass of Senators and Representatives who watched Michael Moore's excretions approvingly, to the mass of voters who gave their suffrages to Pres. Obama himself - a man whose associations were already beyond the pale of any decent polity, and (to repeat a phrase) who therefore should not have been elected municipal dogcatcher. To speak nothing of the Clintons! That we have to get to the level of this Van Jones before public opinion begins to react is a cause for lamentation.

A lesson: we already knew Pres. Obama was (at best) contemptibly complaisant about the various anti-American grotesques of this country and abroad; now we have confirmed, yet again, that he is not even aware enough of decency to disguise his complaisance. His political incapacity, in complement to his moral incapacity, is highlighted here.

But some prioritization of disgust is in order. Does Van Jones lend the witness of his character to lies? To be sure. But this is as nothing to the responsibility for wrongful death - the late Edward Kennedy, the chancrous Al Sharpton. These men had and have blood on their hands; for the Democrats to tolerate them, unrepudiated, is and has been a scandal against which complaisance in the face of Trutherism is as nothing. Van Jones is vile; but Mary Jo Kopechne and Yankel Rosenbaum are dead.

A note to the tu quoque brigade: I have voted for my share of Democrats in my time, and justified it by believing slanderous fantasies about Republicans. I regret my actions deeply. Alpheus has a far better record on this score than I do.

Accordion Teaching

My first class has a fair number of talking students; my second class not. I have to prepare enough material for the second class, and figure out how not to rush through the first class. All this more than usually visible to the students given the PowerPoint skeleton in background. "Accordion" is the image which comes to mind - wheezing prevented from being literal only by the liberal application of soda.

"What is Truth?" said Jesting Pilate, and Would Not Stay for an Answer

Van Jones is saying that the "truther" petition he signed in 2004 doesn't reflect his views now and didn't reflect his views then. Should one believe this remarkable statement?

I, for one, do believe it -- in a sense. I doubt Jones ever really thought that there was a serious chance the Bush administration orchestrated or countenanced the 9/11 attacks. When he signed that petition, the facts simply didn't matter to him: for Jones, supporting trutherism was just a way to express hostility toward George Bush or, perhaps, to demonstrate solidarity with his political allies. Lots of politically involved people don't really believe the things they profess to believe. They just profess to believe them because doing so helps them to cultivate their own partisan sentiments and define the public discourse in a way that they find comfortable. It's quite a common phenomenon, I think.

Unfortunately for Jones, it makes him look even worse than he would if he were a loony pure and simple.

Time Travel and its Discontents

There's something about time travel in science fiction that's always bothered me, and it's not one of the paradoxes that usually get talked about. To most readers of sci-fi it will probably seem like a childish quibble, but it actually affects my enjoyment of stories, especially when a story generally seems to be doing its best to be logically and scientifically rigorous.

When sci-fi heroes travel through time, they often end up in the same place that they left, just decades or centuries into the past or the future. This is what happens in Wells's The Time Machine, for instance. To take a more contemporary example, some characters in Gene Wolfe's Claw of the Conciliator must travel to a ruined city to communicate with a person who once lived there -- an especially weird plot point, since elsewhere in the book it appears possible to bridge time and space simultaneously.

But why should someone who moves in time remain at the same latitude and longitude on the surface of the earth? The earth is simultaneously rotating, swinging around the sun, rushing through space at incredible speeds while our arm of the Milky Way Galaxy moves around the galactic center. If there's such a thing as absolute space, then I'm thousands and thousands of miles away from the location I occupied just yesterday. And if there's not, then it seems like relocation in space should be every bit as easy (or hard) as relocation in time.

I keep hoping to run into a scientist who will explain that Einsteinian physics, properly understood as I'll never understand it, provides a justification for the way science fiction authors treat the relationship between time and space. Or maybe somebody who's more familiar with sci-fi that I am (Withywindle?) can point me to a book that explicitly addresses this issue.

Or maybe I should just try to get a life and enjoy the stories? Alpheus doesn't swing that way.

From Alpheus's Bad Idea File: Naked Office Hours

...because nobody ever comes, especially not at the start of the semester. I could sit there in a state of undress for an hour and a half, and no one would know.

I suppose there's a chance that one of my colleagues would stop by. But then I could just explain: "Oh, I'm having office hours naked today."

Maybe there's a down side I don't see.

On Sandra Boynton in Middle English

The Going to Bed Book reads quite well in (Chaucerian) Middle English. Although Shirebourn was mildly puzzled.

Wetweat Wedux

Where Withywindle weads, Will fowwows.

I will endeavor to avoid the suspicion that Pres. Obama wants to fight a war somewhere that isn't Iraq simply to prove that he's not a weakling. But what on earth would make you want to scuttle from Iraq and increase your military forces in Afghanistan? - could it be that it is precisely because no US interests are involved that it can become an avowedly moral, liberal war? The very uselessness of fighting there makes fighting desirable?

As my previous posts mentioned, I can sorta see the point of fighting in Afghanistan as part of a grand strategy to put pressure on Iran and Pakistan. But does the President remotely have such a grand strategy in mind? If he doesn't, then this is folly on folly.