August 31, 2002
WHY TAKE BAGHDAD? :
Urban War, the Right Way : Baghdad Needn't Be Another Mogadishu. American Troops Are Up to the Task--but Is the Public? (Mark Bowden, August 302002, LA Times)Reports that Saddam Hussein is hoping to lure invading U.S. armies into protracted street battles in Baghdad have prompted visionsof American soldiers caught in a nightmarish 360-degree urban battlefield--"Black Hawk Down" redux.Given that his military is estimated to be only one-third as strong as the one routed by allied armies 11 years ago, Hussein's best hope against an invading American force would be to exact enough casualties to wear down support for the effort in the U.S. or frighten off support for such an invasion before it began.
Toward that end, the nightmare of the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, depicted in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down"might help convince Americans and their lawmakers that the cost of going to war against Iraq would be too high. But, in fact, the kind of urban fighting that members of Task Force Ranger faced in 1993 would little resemble such fighting in Baghdad.
The mission in Mogadishu was a limited, light-infantry assault, a lightning raid meant to capture unharmed several lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The whole purpose was to get into the city and get out quickly. The mission turned into protracted street fightingonly when Somalis were able to down two Black Hawk helicopters, forcing the soldiers on the ground to stay and rescue the chopper crews. An assault on Baghdad would come with heavy force and would be designed to defeat an entrenched enemy. It would involve a large contingent of footsoldiers supported by armor and precision air support. Task Force Ranger fought without the aid of tanks or AC-130 Spectre gunships because the
Clinton administration had declined to authorize these weapons. The full force of the U.S. conventional arsenal would back any move on Baghdad. The Rangers, Delta Force, SEALs and Air Force commandos trapped in Mogadishu numbered only about 160 men. Any force employed to attackBaghdad would be many times larger and linked with ready replacements and reinforcement. The most valuable armored tool in such an assault would probably not be a tank but a bulldozer.
Here's the question though: why take Baghdad? Especially if Saddam is going with a turtle strategy, sucking in his head and limbs and hiding in a "tough" shell, why not just take the rest of the country, giving us free reign to clean up his weapons sites and denying him access to his oil, surround Baghdad and tell the folks we'll leave when they send him out.
TURNING JAPANESE (via The Edge of England's Sword):
EU's recovery may have been washed away (Anatole Kaletsky, August 29, 2002, Times of London)[W]hile Britain has been saved from the euro, at least for the time being, by the operation of democracy and the good sense of voters, the rest of Europe is looking less and less fortunate on both counts. Europe is bouncing along the bottom of a deep economic slump and can no longer hope to export its way out of trouble by selling luxury goods to a super-charged American economy. Meanwhile, Germany, which is now perennially Europe’s weakest, as well as its largest, economy, is being sucked into a deflationary whirlpool similar to the one that drowned the postwar economic miracle in Japan.Yet there seems to be little hope that either democracy or good sense will come to the rescue. To understand this grim diagnosis, we must focus on Germany, whose dysfunctions and blunders have been primarily responsible for Europe’s economic woes since the late 1980s. [...]
Europe will need some much more decisive economic leadership if it is to avert long-term stagnation and quite possibly a Japanese-style crisis. Nobody in Germany seems fit to provide it.
The analysis here is of a kind with much of the European coverage of their economic and social situation, which is to say it gnoores most of the real problems because the solutions are too distasteful to discuss in polite society. Forget the Eu, the euro, monetary policy, etc., etc., etc, and consider these questions : has there even been a case of a nation or group of nations sustaining a rising economy at the same time as its population was both in real decline and relatively aging? Between the lack of young workers, the rising demand for government services by a graying population, and a continent wide move towards a large centralized bureaucratic state, is there any reason to believe that Europes economies can do anything but decline?
BACH WHO? :
Michael Jackson duped at MTV Awards (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 31, 2002)Michael Jackson has received so many awards during his career, he apparently mistook a birthday gift from MTV as another accolade.Britney Spears presented Jackson with a birthday cake at Thursday night's Video Music Awards. Before introducing him, the 20-year-old Spears gushed that she considered Jackson to be the "artist of the millennium."
When Jackson came out, he was presented with a cake and a statuette in the shape of a treble clef. He then said he never dreamed he'd be getting an "Artist of the Millennium" award, and went on to thank several people, including his mother.
"When I was a little boy in Indiana, if someone had told me as a musician I would be getting the artist of the millennium award, I wouldn't have believed it," Jackson said.
Thriller ain't exactly the Brandenburg Concertos, Mr. Bubbles.
BODY BLOWS :
Bush, the man of steel, is humbled by a $4bn battering from the WTO (Leo Lewis, 01 September 2002, The Independent uk)In 1908, Andrew Carnegie, the Scot who was then America's biggest steel tycoon, was facing a tense Senate hearing on hefty US import tariffs and the prospect of a trade war with Europe. "Take back your protection; we are now men and we can beat the world at the manufacture of steel," he thundered.Nearly a century later, the biggest names in US steel appear to find themselves on rather shakier ground. Despite having spent decades extolling the glories of globalisation, the US has suddenly found its steel industry the simultaneous victim and abuser of free trade. The US is swamped with cheap eastern European imports, and as a last resort the Bush administration has fallen back on the blunt instrument of protectionist tariffs.
In keeping with tradition, the US steel industry maintains its access to Washington's ear. With a move that stunned those who had not read the story in The Independent on Sunday predicting it, President Bush clearly demonstrated that fact in March when he announced a series of tariffs on steel imports – some as high as 150 per cent. The motive was obvious: nearly 30 US steel companies had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since 1998, and more would surely follow unless something were done. With mid-term elections looming in November, the steel industry did not have to work hard to remind Mr Bush of the dangers of mass lay-offs in Ohio and New Jersey.
But over the last 10 days, Mr Bush has been forced into some serious backtracking. As the official complaints and threats of retaliation have rained in from around the world, Washington has grudgingly exempted around a quarter of steel imports from the tariffs. Sniffing victory, some of the larger European producers optimistically believe that a complete reversal could now be close.
This is a well deserved butt-whipping of a column aimed at US protectionism. The only two things to point out are that the European steel industry is in fact illegally subsidized and that the tax break in question was not implemented on the watch of the current administration. Other than that, Mr. Lewis gets in a number of shots that I'm afraid we just have to take. Hopefully now that the steel tariffs have served their purpose by helping him win Fast Track Trade Authority, Mr. Bush will have sense enough to discard them.
SPEAKING OF CONSERVATIVE HUMOR :
The Conservatives have hardly ever had it so good (Andrew Gimson, The Spectator)Pessimism among Conservative candidates, extending to anguished doubt about their deficiencies as public speakers and their general ability to stay the course, is nothing new. As Chips Channon asked himself in his diary for 20 February 1934:"Am I wise to embrace a Parliamentary career - can I face the continued strain? James Willoughby told me today that he nearly gave up his Parliamentary campaign in November, as he just could not stand the ordeal of speaking: when he confessed this to his agent, the man replied, 'Don't let not speaking well dishearten you: I have known candidates who could not even read.'"
We must all hope that in its restless quest to mirror the British people, the Conservative party will launch a drive to increase the proportion of its candidates who cannot read, but at least it already possesses an impressive number who cannot speak particularly well.
Not only is this column laugh out loud funny, it's also very wise on the need for Tories to return to first principles.
CONDI'S COMP (via Ben Domenech) :
LOOMING LARGENT (The Weekly Standard)Largent embodies the conservative combativeness of the Republicans elected to the House in the class of 1994. He's a fervent opponent of abortion, gay rights, gun control, and the National Endowment for the Arts. On economic issues, he introduced legislation to scrap the tax code, he'd like to phase out Social Security, and last year he strongly opposed raising the minimum wage. He's also devoutly religious. In a speech following his 1995 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he thanked "my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ" and said, "Football is what He gave me the physical gifts to do for a time, but my faith really defines who I am, as a husband, a father, and a man." Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition's former executive director, calls Largent "the genuine article."But there are other traits that distinguish Largent from the rest of the House. Before he ran for Congress in 1994, he had never sought public office. During his athletic career, he scarcely followed politics beyond listening to radio broadcasts by Focus on the Family's James Dobson. That, and the birth of his first child in 1979, got him interested in public policy. But serving as an elected official never crossed his mind. "I didn't even know what 'GOP' stood for when I got to Washington," he says.
Political inexperience explains Largent's distaste for the wheeling and dealing that most people in Washington accept as a fact of life. When it was learned last year that Rep. John Boehner, who holds the number-four slot in the Republican leadership, had been distributing campaign contributions from tobacco companies on the House floor, Largent was appalled. He remonstrated personally with Boehner and even considered running against him in the House GOP's leadership elections.
Largent also possesses something found in few members of Congress: star quality. Since he came to Washington, People has twice named him one of its "Fifty Most Beautiful People in the World," and even a reporter for the New York Times gushed recently that Largent "looks like a male model and is so friendly he might be mistaken for a flirt."
Largent's glamour, particularly in the macho environment of the House, stems from his 14 years with the Seattle Seahawks. And he wasn't just any player: He was featured on a Wheaties box, and when he retired he had caught more passes than anyone else in pro-football history. He was selected for the Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible.
These qualities have won Largent a devoted following, particularly among conservatives, and made him popular on the fund-raising circuit. He attended about 50 events on behalf of other Republicans during his first term, and he looks out for his friends. When Gingrich canceled a fund-raiser for Rep. Mark Souder, a conservative Indiana Republican, after Souder voted in January 1996 against reopening the government, Largent called Souder the next day and said he'd come to the district for an event.
Souder, not surprisingly, is a Largent booster. So is Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who says Largent "is one of handful of guys I would trust my life with." His zeal for the Oklahoman is such that he wants him to run for president in 2000, though Largent has responded "coolly." "Other people's ambitions for Steve are greater that Steve's ambitions for Steve," Souder notes. Indeed, Largent told me he is "honored and humbled" people would want him to run for president, but says he doesn't think it's "realistic." "It's not an aspiration I have," he says, though he allows that "miracles do happen."
Mr. Largent is precisely the kind of candidate who presents a stumbling block for a Condoleeza Rice Presidency. If you are a Republican because you are conservative, you can trust a Steve Largent to, more often than not, share your view on an issue. Ms Rice is too much a tabla rasa for us to have such faith and as she fills in the slate she's bound to alienate people. The difficult balancing act she has to perform over the next few years is to begin to speak out on some non-foreign policy issues and, in doing so, either embrace conservative positions or explain coherently why she doesn't embrace them. She needn't necessarily toe the party line, but she'll have a tough time in the primaries if she's out of step with the party faithful on social issues like abortion, cloning, gay marriage, affirmative action and school vouchers.
METAL JAZZ? :
Alex Skolnick TrioLast night on on their overnight Jazz Show, our local NPR affiliate played a cut from Goodbye To Romance: Standards For A New Generation by the Alex Skolnick Trio. It was Aerosmith's Dream On, but these guys play a jazz version of it. Apparently there are also covers of tunes by Black Sabbath, KISS, and The Who on the disc. It was at least intriguing.
IS CASTRO DONE YET? :
Totally Uncooked (PEGGY ORENSTEIN, September 1, 2002, NY Times Magazine)Cooked food has not passed Klein's lips in five years -- that means not only meat but also vegetarian staples like pasta, rice and beans, which are not tasty in their natural state. Since, like most raw-foodists, he is also vegan, he abstains from dairy and eggs. Even tofu is taboo, because the soybeans it is made from are cooked. ''I've never felt better,'' Klein says. He sleeps less, has more energy. He even eats less. Although he does a two-hour ashtanga yoga workout each morning, he subsists on about 800 calories a day, which most nutritionists would consider starvation level. (The recommended daily allowance for an active adult male is 2,900 calories.) Raw-foodists claim, however, that uncooked calories metabolize more efficiently -- although there is no evidence for this. When I suggest that vegans I've met often look sickly, he shrugs. ''What we perceive as healthy may to a certain extent be socially determined,'' he says. ''They may have been very healthy and just looked weird to you.'' Klein himself is gaunt, though his arms are enviably muscular.Klein is among a growing number of people who believe that eating uncooked ''living foods'' extends youth and staves off disease -- who, in some cases, consider cooked food tantamount to poison. Heat, they maintain, depletes food's protein and vitamin content and concentrates any pesticides. More important, it destroys a food's natural enzymes, which, enthusiasts claim, facilitate digestion; to absorb cooked food, they say, the body must use up its own limited supply of enzymes. By helping the body retain enzymes, a ''living foods'' diet supposedly delays aging, boosts energy and prevents or cures virtually all life-threatening diseases. ''In nature, all animals eat living foods,'' wrote the raw-foods pioneer T.C. Fry, who died six years ago at a relatively youthful 70. ''Only humans cook their foods, and only humans suffer widespread sicknesses and ailments.'' He also wrote, ''All the diseases of civilization -- cancer, heart disease, diabetes -- are all directly attributable to the consumption of cooked food.''
The raw-foodist subculture is a mix of alternative-health types, spiritual seekers and the aggressively trendy. (Celebrity devotees include Demi Moore and Angela Bassett.) Many people turn to the movement after struggling with chronic illness or obesity. Numerous Web sites peddle juicers, suggest recipes and offer testimonials that read like conversion experiences. ''It was about two years ago, at the height of my suffering from deadly cancer, that I was introduced to the raw-food diet, which completely changed my life,'' proclaims one of the faithful on rawfood.com. There are potlucks in Little Rock, festivals in Portland, conferences in Boston, tropical retreats in Bali. A small library's worth of ''uncookbooks'' have been published, and there is a movement afoot to pressure the Food Network into producing a raw-foods show.
It would be easy to dismiss raw cookery as kookery, and many do. But the rise of raw also reflects something about America's current mood. Extreme dietary regimens tend to crop up during times of crisis as a simple fix for society's ills. Amid the wave of social reforms in the 19th century, Sylvester Graham (of cracker fame) linked vegetarianism -- and home-baked bread in particular -- to spiritual salvation. A short time later, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of cornflakes, promoted a regimen of ''biologic living,'' which, in addition to some visionary ideas about diet and exercise, included five daily enemas and radium therapy.
Living-food gurus similarly promise not only better health but also increased wealth, spiritual enlightenment and inner contentment -- something that, these days, many of us find in short supply. In fact, by serving up equal parts fashion and phobia, raw-foodists may have hit on the ideal cuisine for an anxious time. ''In American life today, there's a lot we can't control,'' says Barbara Haber, author of ''From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.'' ''But everyone has control over their own intake. We can't control terrorism, but we can make sure we don't eat anything cooked.''
While mildly sympathetic to folks who feel the world today is beyond their control, might I suggest an alternative way of asserting control that involves food but that's much more fun? Try doing what the wife and I do: when you go to the store today to pick out a steak, give it a name, the name of someone you hate, maybe Osama bin Laden. Then, rather than eating it raw, barbecue it. Barbecue it with flames leaping up. Barbecue it until the outside is black and crusty. Than hack it up with a sharp knife and woof it down. This sort of symbolic anthropophagy may not reflect any better mental health but it sure as heck tastes better than raw macaroni.
SELF-CARICATURE :
What can you even say about this that the picture doesn't say itself?
GOLDEN BALL AND CHAIN :
We infants in men's clothing (Leonard Pitts, Jr., August 30, 2002, Jewish World Review)They tell me the modern marriage is a partnership, a concept with which I have no disagreement. What I struggle to understand is why, where the family purse is concerned, my partner's vote carries so much more weight with me than my own. Am I really so much more likely to be seduced by useless gadgetry? Lose my mind at the promise of more watts per channel? Fall in love with a pretty faceplate?Don't answer that.
"When I get married," my son announced, "I'm going to say, 'Look, baby, I'll buy whatever I want to buy.'"
"No you won't," I told him.
And my cocky son, who never believes anything I say, who thinks I know nothing about anything, considered that with a rueful smile.
"Yeah," he said, "I know."
The wife actually argues that we should rent movies rather than just buy the DVD. Women...
THE TIMES, IN DEFENSE OF BAD BUDGETING :
Tax Cuts, Again (NY Times, August 31, 2002)[T]he overriding problem with more tax cuts is the cost. The proposals Mr. Bush is looking at are expensive. This week the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the recession, combined with increased spending and the cost of the 2001 Bush tax cuts, had vaporized all but $1 trillion of the 10-year, $5.6 trillion surplus projected less than two years ago. It would be unconscionable for Mr. Bush to propose any tax cuts without explaining how they will be paid for over the long term. A case can be made for some tax-cutting now, but only if the huge tax cuts scheduled to take effect several years from now for the wealthiest Americans are repealed.
Why is a budget that projects the government taking one trillion dollars more than it needs from the American taxpayers any better than one that projects the government taking one trillion less than it needs? Aren't both simply bad budgets? In fact, given that we had a rising economy while we ran deficits but plunged into recession as soon as we started running surpluses, isn't it time to consider the possibility that the surplus is part of the problem? Mustn't there be some deleterious effect on the economy when government takes more of our hard-earned money than even it can spend, when, in effect, government removes the vital free market mechanism of allowing taxpayers to determine how to spend those dollars? Who cares if we give tax breaks to left-handed eggplant growers in Wyoming; just give the money back to the people, any people.
THE BROTHERS JUDD LIBERAL HUMOR CHALLENGE :
This was the week that, for some reason, everyone finally realized that the Left is humorless :Bubble Wrap: The Nation vs. The Weekly Standard (John Powers, LA Weekly)
AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the journalistic lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the magazine is on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen steadily in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. Its finances may actually break even (a miracle in the world of political magazines). And its publishing adjunct, Nation Books, is raking in money from two hot titles: Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Forbidden Truth by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume DasquiÈ. Indeed, everything's going so well that I feel kind of churlish in pointing out what most on the left are unwilling to say: The Nation is a profoundly dreary magazine.Just compare it to another thin, ideologically driven rag, The Weekly Standard, a right-wing publication currently approaching its measly seventh anniversary. A few months ago, I began putting new issues of each side by side on an end table and, to my surprise, discovered that while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing stacks, I always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring. As gray and unappetizing as homework, The Nation makes you approach it in the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis -- where else can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by saying, "We're having big fun over here on the right."
And in some undeniable sense that's true. Back in the '60s, the left was the home of humor, iconoclasm, pleasure. But over the last two decades, the joy has gone out of the left -- it now feels hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism -- while the right has been having a gas, be it Lee Atwater grooving to the blues, Rush Limbaugh chortling about Feminazis or grimly gleeful Ann Coulter serving up bile as if it were chocolate mousse, even dubbing Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun of morning television." (Get your political allegiances straight, babe. Katie's the Madame Mao of morning television. You're Eva Braun.)
Right-Wing Envy : Do you have it? (Jack Shafer, August 29, 2002, Slate)
While the right seeks converts, trying both to persuade and entertain, the left spends its journalistic energy policing the movement. Imagine The Nation running a weekly column about nothing, called "Casual," as the Standard does. Also, conservative journalists are more likely to allow readers to enjoy a magazine article without strong-arming them into signing the ideology oath that seems to come packed with most lefty journalism. For instance, when the Standard's David Brooks profiled "Patio Man," the acquisitive consumer who haunts Home Depot looking for things to buy, he both laughed at its subject and exalted him without fear of contradiction.Of course, lefty journalism needn't turn right to improve itself. But Powers hints that the source of The Nation's illness is the Stalinist impulse to prescribe proper attitudes toward culture, art, and journalism. A Nation writer who, say, wants to use humor or wit to make his point mustn't abuse gays, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Ralph Nader, foreigners, women, the infirm, working stiffs, Indians, Mohammed (but Jesus is fair game), whales, or any cultural stereotype. This leaves him just one angle from which to compose his point: Stupid White Men. Such is the state of left journalism that Michael Moore has made a career out of painting and repainting this mono-mural.
How the anything-goes drug-and-sex party that the cultural left threw in the '60s segued into an Amish wake featuring stern readings from the joyless work of Barbara Ehrenreich, the scoldings of Todd Gitlin, and the catechisms of Richard Goldstein is anybody's guess. Would Emma Goldman dance with these folks? Or would she make a beeline for the house on the right, which looks like a brothel in comparison to the one on the left? I await the Powers sequel.
Who's more miserable - the far right or the far left? (James Lileks, Rants)
The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you're all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I'll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O'Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they're cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston's apartment in "The Omega Man," surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.The hard left, on the other hand, demonstrates all the symptoms of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure - there's a rancid bitterness, a pissy miserablism that makes you feel very, very sorry for them.
All of them are, of course, correct, but Mr. Powers and Mr. Shafer and several of the folks who have commented on these stories make one major mistake in their analysis: because they are Leftists themselves or in some of the commentators cases reformed Leftists, they are forced to assume that this represents a change of some kind. Typically they harken back to the 60s when the Left was "fun". Mr. Shafer for instance refers approvingly, and apparently with a straight face, to the "anything-goes drug-and-sex party that the cultural left threw in the '60s". Surely at this late date there's no one left who really thinks that was fun, is there? You'd have thought the Clinton Presidency, where we got to see what the children of the 60s had turned into, or the Robin Wright character in Forrest Gump would have put the final nail in that coffin. It's entirely typical of the time that the genuinely humorous art it produced all makes fun of the Left's pretensions and heaps scorn upon the "party". One thinks in particular of Tom Wolfe, who in essays like Radical Chic made it clear that hat was fun about the 60s parties was not to be at one but to contemplate the participants. Even Hunter S. Thompson, who we still tend to think of as a defender of the 60s party, apparently understood even at the time that the joke was on him and the rest of the partiers. At the end of his book Hell's Angels, after a several hundred page paean to the care free biker gang spirit, those same bikers beat the living hell out of him. The whole text is revealed to have been an elaborate joke at his own expense. And that is the proper point to take away from the 60s: the partiers were not the perpetrators but the butt of all the truly amusing jokes.
YOU CAN'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER :
In Those Days, Too, Blood and Sex Could Make a Best Seller (EMILY EAKIN, August 31, 2002, NY Times)In 1796, a 20-year-old Oxford University graduate named Matthew Lewis published "The Monk," a Gothic shocker unlike anything English society had ever seen. The novel told a lurid tale of sex and murder involving a Roman Catholic priest: Ambrosio, the revered head of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, rapes and stabs Antonia, a local beauty of noble descent, in the crypt of the convent next door. The macabre nature of his crime is conveyed in graphic detail. The priest drugs her with an opiate so powerful that she is presumed dead and carted off in a coffin to the crypt, where, as soon as she revives, he forces himself on her and then finishes her off with two dagger blows to the heart. In an earlier fit of lustful frenzy, he also strangles her mother.A succès de scandale 200 years ago, the novel is being reissued this month by Oxford University Press with a terrific new introduction by Stephen King. By dressing the book in a 1950's-style noir cover - featuring a shrouded monk in sinister silhouette and the title in ghostly, backlit typeface - Oxford seems to be trying to have it viewed as a precociously modern work. [...]
When Lewis dashed off the book in 10 weeks while working at the British Embassy in The Hague, the Gothic novel was just a few decades old. Its progenitor, most scholars agree, was Horace Walpole, the author of the mildly spooky romance "The Castle of Otranto" (1764) and one of the first novelists to abandon all pretense to moral instruction in favor of sheer entertainment. Walpole's celebration of romantic love and fondness for vengeful ghosts and moldering castles became hallmarks of the Gothic.
"If this new genre had an Elvis Presley, it was Walpole," [Stephen] King writes. "Then came Matthew Lewis, the genre's first punk, the Johnny Rotten of the Gothic novel."
If you pick it up because of the Mickey Spillane-style cover you're going to be disappointed. It defies reading.
VOUCHERS NOW, PART 472 :
Lesson Plans for Sept. 11 Offer a Study in Discord (KATE ZERNIKE, August 31, 2002, NY Times)"For some kids, school may be the only place they have where they can find a listening ear," said Jerald Newberry, director of the Health Information Network for the [National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union], which produced the lesson plans.The criticism to the lessons on tolerance, Mr. Newberry said, is thinly veiled bigotry. "If you boil down the concerns of the opposition, what I would call the far right, ultimately it boils down to is: `I am not comfortable with my child being in school with someone who's different. I want to keep my child surrounded by people who are identical to me. The world is getting too diverse, and I'm scared.' " [...]
Among what Mr. Newberry called "100 gentle lessons" in the N.E.A. curriculum is one where middle school students make color wheels to relate color to how they feel. A tolerance lesson suggests talking to high school students about their definition of "terrorist." How many times in defining it, the curriculum asks, do the terms "Muslim" and "Middle East" come up, and how does that compare with the characterization of Japanese-Americans who, as the students learn, were sent to internment camps in World War II?
The N.E.A. Web site also included a link that urged teachers to avoid blaming Muslims for the attacks.
Actually, Mr. Newberry, I'm not comfortable with my child being in a school with a fact-warping, America-hating, self-loathing nitwit like you. Who do you think we should blame for the attacks, Zoroastrians?
GOOD VIBRATIONS LINGER :
Lionel Hampton, Jazz Great, Dies at 94 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 31, 2002)Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone virtuoso and standout showman whose six-decade career ranked him among the greatest names in jazz
history, died Saturday. He was 94.Hampton, whose health was failing in recent years, died of heart failure at Mount Sinai Medical Center at about 6:15 a.m., said his manager, Phil Leshin.
``He was a great man, a sweet, nice, gentleman, and one of the greatest musicians this country has ever produced,'' Leshin said. ``He's influenced thousands of musicians around the world.''
Hampton worked with a who's who of jazz greats, from Benny Goodman to Charlie Parker to Quincy Jones.
Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson were the black half of the fabled quartet with Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa that in 1936 broke the racial barriers
that had largely kept black musicians from performing with whites in public.
He played at our High School and was not only great but seemed like a genuinely sweet man.
DONAWHO? :
'DONAHUE' DEBUT DRAWS FEW VIEWERS (DON KAPLAN, August 28, 2002, NY Post)The ratings for TV vet Phil Donahue's new talk show are almost too low to track.The ratings for "Donahue" scored a .1 rating last Friday - that means fewer than 136,000 viewers nationwide were tuned in during MSNBC's hour-long 8 p.m. talk show.
Never mind the specific delusion that there would be an audience for Donahue at this moment in our history, when Western Civilization is under attack. Consider the general question of whether there's really much of a market for news with an openly Leftwing slant. Ann Coulter put it well in her Booknotes appearance :
COULTER: Oh no, no one in the entertainment world is going to watch this show.LAMB: Why not? [...]
COULTER: If they watched the show they'd all be conservatives. Did you see that NPR listeners, something like 72 percent are conservative? And you remember from your own show here when you just had open lines, it was all conservatives calling and you had to set up a liberal line. If liberals paid attention to politics, they'd all be conservatives.
For years before blogging came along, I used to send out pretty much all the same type stories that we link to now. One of the folks on the mailing list, a liberal, asked what the point was. I told him that I didn't think it was possible to be an intelligent person and actually know what's going on in the world and remain a liberal.
August 30, 2002
HAPPY CIVILIZATION DAY :
Charlie Chaplin's Long Nightmare Has Finally Ended: This Labor Day no one is celebrating workers. (DANIEL HENNINGER, August 30, 2002, Wall Street Journal)What's perhaps most interesting about the American workforce as we welcome a Labor Day weekend is just how little interest there is in the subject. Ever since the Industrial Revolution began to funnel families to big-city jobs, popularizers and theorists have obsessed over the culture of work.Some weeks ago I saw a restored print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a fantastic 1927 movie in which an all-powerful capitalist runs a magnificent futuristic city with lumpen workers who toil below ground at horrid, perpetual-motion machines. Ten years later in "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin's Everyman is still enslaved to the metal monsters.
Some 30 Labor Days after that, nothing much had changed. In 1955 the coal miner in Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" can't afford to die because "I owe my soul to the company store." It sold two million copies and every kid in America was singing it. But the definitive gloss on work in America appeared the next year with publication of William H. Whyte's "The Organization Man." For the purposes of contemplating the evolution of paid effort on Labor Day in the 21st century, it's still worth reading Whyte's vision:
"The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat." In Whyte's world, work had at least evolved from hell to purgatory.
Today we have Dilbert, the first labor theorist in all history with a sense of humor. I say this is progress.
We should scrap Labor Day and instead commemorate the attacks, with church services, concerts, and patriotic observances. This would serve as a permanent reminder that our freedoms have been paid for with blood and that many in the world would like to extract a higher toll. But it should be a day of thanksgiving, a day when we recognize and celebrate the values that were attacked on 9-11 and refresh our vows to defend them.
SPEAKING OF RIBBENTROPP... :
Germany Announces New Shift Away From U.S. Over Iraq (STEVEN ERLANGER, Aug. 30, 2002, NY Times)If the United States attacks Iraq, Germany will pull out its specialized nuclear, chemical and biological warfare unit from Kuwait, the German defense minister said in an interview published today.The conservative challenger in the electoral fight to be Germany's next chancellor, Edmund Stoiber, said today that he would do the same in the case of a unilateral American attack on Iraq, but only after consultations with European allies.
The new German position marks another shift away from Washington in the heat of a German election campaign that the chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, is trying to turn toward questions of peace rather than unemployment.The unit, consisting of six specialized Fuchs tanks and 52 soldiers, is designed to detect the use or presence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and then try to destroy them. The unit was sent to Kuwait as part of Germany's contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom, the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban that followed the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Saddam and Schroder...perfect together....
CRANK UP THE SOX' MIRACLE COMEBACK :
Baseball: Deal Reached, Strike Averted (Reuters, 8/30/02)Major League Baseball players reached a new labor agreement with team owners in 11th hour talks on Friday, narrowly averting a strike that had threatened to damage the sport for years to come.
This is how it must have felt on the day the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact was announced...
FOLDED UP IN THE PAPER TIGER :
China's Governance Crisis (Minxin Pei, September 2002, Foreign Affairs)In retrospect, the 1990s ought to be viewed as a decade of missed opportunities. The CCP leadership could have taken advantage of a booming economy to renew itself through a program of gradual political reform built on the rudimentary steps of the 1980s. But it did not, and now the cumulative costs of a decade of foot-dragging are becoming more visible. In many crucial respects, China's hybrid neo-authoritarian order eerily exhibits the pathologies of both the political stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union and the crony capitalism of Suharto's Indonesia.These pathologies -- such as pervasive corruption, a collusive local officialdom, elite cynicism, and mass disenchantment -- are the classic symptoms of degenerating governing capacity. In most political systems, a regime's capacity to govern is measured by how it performs three key tasks: mobilizing political support, providing public goods, and managing internal tensions. These three functions of governance -- legitimation, performance, and conflict resolution -- are, in reality, intertwined. A regime capable of providing adequate public goods (education, public health, law and order) is more likely to gain popular support and keep internal tensions low. In a Leninist party-state however, effective governance critically
hinges on the health of the ruling party. Strong organizational discipline, accountability, and a set of core values with broad appeal are essential to governing effectively. Deterioration of the ruling party's strength, on the other hand, sets in motion a downward cycle that can severely impair the party-state's capacity to govern.Numerous signs within China indicate that precisely such a process is producing huge governance deficits. The resulting strains are making the political and economic choices of China's rulers increasingly untenable. They may soon be forced to undertake risky reforms to stop the rot. If they do not, dot communism could be no more durable than the dot coms. [...]
Many in the Bush administration view China's rise as both inevitable and threatening, and such thinking has motivated policy changes designed to counter this potential "strategic competitor." On the other hand, the international business community, in its enthusiasm for the Chinese market, has greatly discounted the risks embedded in the country's political system. Few appear to have seriously considered whether their basic premises about China's rise could be wrong. These assumptions should be revisited through a more realistic assessment of whether China, without restructuring its political system, can ever gain the institutional competence required to generate power and prosperity on a sustainable basis. As Beijing changes its leadership, the world needs to reexamine its long-cherished views about China, for they may be rooted in little more than wishful thinking.
As is so often the case among foreign policy professionals, this article seems to be worried about the last crisis rather than the next. We all know how this one ends: communism can never, even when it attempts to weld itself to capitalism, provide the kind of decent life that citizens ultimately demand. The question is not: can this current political regime endure? Of course it can't. The question is: can this China endure a regime change? Absent a totalitarian, or at least authoritarian, central government, willing to use ruthless force to keep the State together, how can a nation of over a billion people of varied backgrounds, spread out over a massive geography, be made to cohere and be made to function efficiently? One seriously doubts that it can.
THE MEN WITH THE MEAT AXES :
Neo-Con Is Not a Keanu Reeves Fan Convention (Bobby Allison-Gallimore, 8/29/02, Caffeinspiration)Although the definition of a neo-con as opposed to a conservative is no doubt blurry, especially with the swelling of the neo-con ranks, I wonder if the answer lies somewhere in the vicinity of this hypothesis: could the distinction involve a belief by neo-cons (perhaps carried over from their former days as liberals) that successful implementation of their policies would result in a net gain for society, whereas conservatives feel that successful policy implementation can only result in slowing down the rate of society's inevitable loss, rather than resulting in any gain.
Those pesky neocons are proving harder to nail down than Jell-o., but Mr. Allison-Gallimore brings up one of the most important features of neoconservatism and one that mitigates against their being considered conservative at all. They retain a rationalist belief that they can perfect society through proper implementation of government policy. The great vivisection of rationalism is to be found in Rationalism in politics (Michael Oakeshott, Cambridge Journal, Volume I, 1947) :
The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think., difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a reason' common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument: set up on his door is the precept of Parmenides--judge by rational argument. But besides this, which gives the Rationalist a touch of intellectual equalitarianism, he is something also of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself.[...]The conduct of affairs, for the Rationalist, is a matter of solving problems, and in this no man can hope to be successful whose reason has become inflexible by surrender to habit or is clouded by the fumes of tradition. In this activity the character which the Rationalist claims for himself is the character of the engineer, whose mind (it is supposed) is controlled throughout by the appropriate technique and whose first step is to dismiss from his attention everything not directly related to his specific intentions. This assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics. And it is, of course, a recurring theme in the literature of Rationalism. The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment. He waits upon circumstance to provide him with his
problems, but rejects its aid in their solution. That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each
moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. And his politics are, in fact, the rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of a society. Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of reason'. Each generation, indeed, each administration, should see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tabula rasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean; as Voltaire remarked, the only way to have good laws is to burn all existing laws and to start afresh.
This stands in sharp contrast to the portrait of the conservative he draws in his other great essay, On Being Conservative (1956):
A man of conservative temperament draws some appropriate conclusions. First, innovation entails certain loss and possible gain, therefore, the onus of proof, to show that the proposed change may be on the whole expected to be beneficial, rests on the would-be innovator. Secondly, he believes that the more closely the innovation resembles growth (that is, the more clearly it is intimated in and not merely imposed upon the situation) the less likely it is to result in a preponderance of loss. Thirdly, he thinks that an innovation which is in response to some specific defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one that springs from a notion of generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection. Fourthly, he favours a slow rather than a rapid pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make appropriate adjustments. And lastly, he believes occasion to be important: and, all other things being equal, he considers the most favourable occasion for innovation to be when the projected change is most likely to be limited to what is intended and least likely to be corrupted by undesired and unmanageable consequences.
It comes as little surprise to read in Irving Kristol's own Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea that he personally rejected On Being Conservative when Oakeshott presented it to him for publication in the journal Encounter.
GET BUSINESS OFF THE PUBLIC TEAT :
W.T.O. Will Allow Europe to Impose Record Sanctions Against U.S. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 30, 2002)The World Trade Organization on Friday ruled that the European Union can impose trade sanctions of up to $4 billion against the United States in a tax dispute, the biggest penalty it has ever allowed.The sanctions are 20 times the amount levied in any previous WTO dispute. Experts say their potential effect on EU-U.S. trade would be so serious that the ruling will likely prompt a new compromise between the two sides.
The result is a big victory for the EU, which had requested the $4 billion amount. The United States claimed the award should be less than $1 billion.
The WTO considered the request from the EU after ruling last year that a system of tax breaks for companies from the United States was an illegal subsidy and violated international trade rules.
Considering that we didn't even dispute that the subsidies were illegal we deserve whatever we get. This is an extraordinary opportunity for Republicans, who are too stupid to take it. They should go to McCain and the Democrats and say: draft a list of every corporate tax break and subsidy you want to get rid of and we'll do it. We'll also get rid of the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, Export-Import Bank, etc.--every program and department that is set up primarily to benefit business. No tit for tat, no gimmicks. Just simplify the laws and treat business no better than we did poor people in Welfare Reform. Tell 'em, to sink or swim on their own.
SO I SAY, WELCOME, TO THE BOOMTOWN :
Japan recovers from recession (Charles Scanlon, 30 August, 2002, BBC)The Japanese economy has recovered from one of its worst recessions but it remains heavily dependent on growth in the United States.The latest figures show gross domestic product was up by 0.5% in the three months to June.
Is it really a recovery when the growth number is the size of an accounting error? Here's the important thing to keep in mind: there's not a single factor that would lead one to believe that the Japanese economy will recover, ever.
A FAVOR, PLEASE :
BE A DATA POINT! (Patrick Ruffini, 08.29.02)Since I'm going away for Labor Day and I'm unlikely to post anything from the road, I thought I'd put this out there when it might get a few extra eyeballs. It's a poll — my first effort to get a clear picture of political attitudes in the Blogosphere, among readers and authors alike. Crunching crosstabs is like crack to me, and I want some good, solid data. How many ultra-liberal women are defense hawks? I'll tell you, but first I need a meaningful sample to know. Please take this, no matter how meaningless or unthinking you think your answers might be. Thanks!
We'd appreciate it if folks could take a minute, it truly takes no longer, and complete Mr. Ruffini's survey. The numbers should be revealing and Mr. Ruffini is just the man to do something useful with them. Here's a prediction: 80%+ will be white, male, libertarian, pro-war, but at least a third of those will pick Gore in '04 to reveal their contempt for Mr. Bush's positions on steel and cloning.
August 29, 2002
HEADS OR TAILS? :
What are we doing here? (Dr. Abraham Twerski, M.D., August 29, 2002, Jewish World Review)Just what are we doing here? What is the purpose of existence? Is it to "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die?," as the prophet Isaiah asked? It is not necessary for spiritual man to know the purpose of his existence, but it is essential that he think about it and search for it. If one concludes that he has no, purpose in life, that is his privilege, but as a human being he must exercise the unique human capacity to at least contemplate whether there is a purpose to life or not.This is necessary because this search is crucial for self esteem-a necessary prerequisite for a person to maintain his emotional health. Self esteem requires a sense of having value or worth. Generally we value things for their function or for their aesthetic value. Of these two choices, man is not merely a decorative ornament, so we are left with contemplating our function: Just are we for? To be without a purpose would be devastating to our self esteem.
Now for the big question. Can you have purpose in life without postulating a Creator? To speak of one's ultimate purpose one has to assume that there is an ultimate purpose for the entire universe; a universe where each person has an individualized role. For the Universe to have a purpose there must have been some Intelligence that brought the Universe into being in order to fulfill that purpose. In a Universe that came about spontaneously and happened to evolve in such a way that after billions of years man appeared on insignificant earth, man can hardly be considered to have a purpose.
...and that, to me, is an intolerable thought. I know many people who are unable to believe in a Creator because their reasoning precludes it. I know several who believe in a Creator because they've had a personal experience of Him. I, on the other hand, have to admit I've never had a moment where I thought that I could truly perceive the Creator. But, even if applying it backwards, I find "reasoning" a sufficient means to arrive at the necessity of His existence. Because a life without purpose and without morality would be a horrible and ugly thing and because purpose and morality are only possible if there is a Creator, I choose to believe in Him.
MORE EAKINS :
The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1875) (Jonathan Jones, August 3, 2002, The Guardian)Artist: Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), one of the greatest American painters, an artist of severity, of 19th-century sobriety, who never seemed to doubt that his was a moral vocation. [...]Subject: Eakins approached Dr Samuel D Gross (1805-84) with his idea for a portrait in the operating theatre at Jefferson Medical College. Gross was an innovative surgeon and champion of surgical intervention. This operation - to save a gangrenous leg by removing pus - is one he pioneered.
Distinguishing features: It is Gross's face that holds you, his forehead caught by light from above, a glowing white star fringed with silver and grey, and the black pits of his eyes, their darkness only heightened by the light. He has paused for a moment to explain a detail of the procedure to the students all around him in the shadows of the theatre. The painting does not freeze the moment so much as expand it infinitely: there is a massive, grand stillness to this imposing canvas in which you contemplate with awe the dominating, dignified figure of the surgeon, all in black, except for the shocking shining red blood on his right hand as he holds the scalpel like a pen, or perhaps a palette knife.
What is Gross thinking?
As the husband of a doctor I can practically guarantee you he was thinking the following: "Boy, I hope they have the fried chicken basket in the cafeteria today."
PEACE IN OUR TIME :
If Churchill were alive today, he would strike at Saddam (John Keegan, 29/08/2002, Daily Telegraph)The odour of appeasement that permeates the Western world has apparently driven President George W Bush to seek strength by studying the career of Winston Churchill.Depressed by the warnings of his father's old friends against taking action against Iraq, he is looking for support in the life story of the supreme anti-appeaser. Churchill's refusal to be silenced by the peacemongers during Hitler's rise to power, a refusal all too painfully proved right when war came, sets an example President Bush finds reassuring.
If Churchill was right about Hitler, he seems to be asking, how can America be wrong about Saddam Hussein, a dictator who is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, a power Hitler never possessed?
The parallel is compelling, particularly to Americans, among whom Churchill, son of an American mother, continues to be venerated as perhaps he never was in his father's country.
But how right was Churchill?
It's interesting that the great military historian John Keegan, who I'd understood to be fairly skeptical about the war, should weigh in now in favor. but I wonder if he's not missing an important point here. If Churchill were alive today, he'd be in the wilderness, unwanted by an appeasement minded populace. For sixty years now Neville Chamberlain has been kicked up one side of the Atlantic and down the other by politicians, columnists, journalists, and historians who insisted that they'd have known that Hitler had to be stopped early. The underlying mesage of the scapegoating of Chamberlain has been that when the moment came again to either strike at a megalomaniacal dictator bent on murdering millions or to backdown in the face of his bellicose threats that we'd all demonstrate that we'd all learned our lesson. Bunk!
ONE NATION, UNDER THE UN :
France speaks out against US war plan (BBC, 29 August, 2002)Mr Chirac told a meeting of French diplomats US threats ran counter to France's notion of collective security based on co-operation between states, respect for the law and the authority of the UN Security Council.
The "authority" of the UN Security Council? Boy, if the leader of one of Europe's major "conservative" parties really thinks that the UN is sovereign over the national security of his own state then there's just no hope.
HAUNTED BY JAMES :
Great Eakins Exhibit Finally Shows Up-With Nude Swimmers! (Hilton Kramer, August 29, 2002, NY Observer)The great Thomas Eakins exhibition, which was reviewed here when it opened last fall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see The New York Observer for Oct. 15, 2001) has now come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It hardly needs saying that everyone with an interest in the art of painting will want to see it. Even if you've already seen the exhibition in Philadelphia-or in Paris, where it has been shown in the interim-it's worth revisiting the show at the Met. Some paintings that were not available when the show opened in Philadelphia are now included in the Met's version. One of them is Swimming (1884-85), a painting of nude young men that the literary scholar F.O. Matthiessen once appropriately compared to the frank sexual imagery in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."Eakins' fine portrait of Whitman is also in the exhibition, and the parallel interests that united the painter and the much older poet have frequently been noted. Yet I have sometimes wondered if a very different American writer, Henry James, might not provide an ampler perspective on the famous troubles that Eakins faced in the course of his Philadelphia-bound career.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and Henry James (1843-1916) belonged, after all, to the same American generation. They were, in fact, the greatest artists of that American generation in their respective fields of endeavor. And while neither appears to have taken even the slightest interest in the other's work, they had a lot more in common than is usually recognized.
My two favorites are The Gross Clinic and the fabulous Baseball Players Practicing.
IT'S MORNING IN AMERICA (MOURNING IN EUROPE) :
Half a billion Americans?: Demographic forces are pulling America and Europe apart. If the trend goes on, it will fundamentally alter America's position in the world (The Economist, Aug 22nd 2002)America's census in 2000 contained a shock. The population turned out to be rising faster than anyone had expected when the 1990 census was taken. There are disputes about exactly why this was (more on that shortly). What is not in doubt is that a gap is beginning to open with Europe. America's fertility rate is rising. Europe's is falling. America's immigration outstrips Europe's and its immigrant population is reproducing faster than native-born Americans. America's population will soon be getting younger. Europe's is ageing.Unless things change substantially, these trends will accelerate over coming decades, driving the two sides of the Atlantic farther apart. By 2040, and possibly earlier, America will overtake Europe in population and will come to look remarkably (and, in many ways, worryingly) different from the Old World.
In 1950, Western Europe was exactly twice as populous as the United States: 304m against 152m. (This article uses the US Census Bureau's definition of "Europe", which includes all countries that were not communist during the cold war. The 15 countries that make up the European Union are a slightly smaller sample: they had a population of 296m in 1950.) Both sides of the Atlantic saw their populations surge during the baby boom, then grow more slowly until the mid-1980s. Even now, Europe's population remains more than 100m larger than America's.
In the 1980s, however, something curious began to happen. American fertility rates-the average number of children a woman can expect to bear in her lifetime-suddenly began to reverse their decline. Between 1960 and 1985, the American fertility rate had fallen faster than Europe's, to 1.8, slightly below European levels and far below the "replacement level" of 2.1 (the rate required to keep the population steady). By the 1990s American fertility had rebounded, rising back to just below the 2.1 mark. [...]
European commissioners are fond of boasting that the European Union (EU) is the largest market in the world. They claim an equal status with the United States in trade negotiations as a result. Some also think that, because of this parity, the euro will one day become an international reserve currency to rival the dollar.
But assume, for a minute, that Americans remain, as they are now, about one-third richer per head than Europeans. The high-series projection implies that America's economy in 2050 would still be more than twice the size of Europe's-and something like that preponderance would still be there even if you assume that by then much of Central and Eastern Europe will have joined the EU. The balance of global economic power would be tilted in fundamental ways. With 400m-550m rich consumers, the American market would surely be even more important to foreign companies than it is today. And if so, American business practices-however they emerge from the current malaise-could become yet more dominant. [...]
The geopolitical impact is fuzzier, but still powerful. At the moment, America's political connections and shared values with Europe are still strong, albeit fraying. But over time, America's ties of family and culture will multiply and strengthen with the main sources of its immigration-Latin America chiefly, but also East and South Asia. As this happens, it is probable that it will also pull American attention further away from Europe. [...]
If Europeans are unwilling to spend what is needed to be full military partners of America now, when 65-year-olds amount to 30% of the working-age population, they will be even less likely to do more in 2050, when the proportion of old people will have doubled. In short, the long-term logic of demography seems likely to entrench America's power and to widen existing transatlantic rifts.
Perhaps none of this is altogether surprising. The contrast between youthful, exuberant, multi-coloured America and ageing, decrepit, inward-looking Europe goes back almost to the foundation of the United States. But demography is making this picture even more true, with long-term consequences for America's economic and military might and quite possibly for the focus of its foreign policy.
If you never read another article we post here, read this one. In a relatively short space it reveals why the Atlantic Century is over, why Europe is through, why the U.S. is an inevitable hegemon, why we don't any longer have common interests with former allies but do with former non-aligned states and may with former foes, why immigration is vital, why abortion kills countries, why Social Welfare systems are timebombs, etc., etc., etc.. As an added benefit, it suggests I'm not as big a crank as I may seem.
ALMOST KAJAGOOGOO :
Heath happy with 'Jenny' but doesn't dwell on relationship (MIKE LACY, Aug. 29, 2002, Knight Ridder Newspapers)Tommy Heath is shy. Very shy. He says at least half of the people in the Oregon Electric Co. office where he works as a computer
"geek" consultant doesn't know him as the rest of the world does. It's not that he's embarrassed. But unless someone needs to know he's also the leader of Tommy Tutone, the band with one of the biggest hits in the 1980s, he simply doesn't mention it. [...]In 1982, the song 867-5309/Jenny off his second album, went to No. 4 on the charts. But it had No. 1 effects. It pretty much changed the telephone industry when it caused cities all over the country to discontinue the number because of repeated calls looking for "Jenny." In fact, it is still not a listed number on the Coast. Rick Stewart with Bell South said the number is used only for outgoing calls for "a large company" in the area. [...]
"I'm proud to be a one-hit wonder. I'd rather be a three-hit wonder, but it's better than being a no-hit wonder."
I swear the lead singer from A-ha drives the ice cream truck in our neighborhood; he's very animated.
EH? :
A war only the White House wants (ERIC MARGOLIS, August 25, 2002, Toronto Sun)Israel has been trying for 20 years to get the U.S. to go to war against the Arabs and Iran, knowing this will permanently enlist America's vast wealth and power in its cause, and permanently alienate the U.S. from the Islamic world.If ever the United States needed real friends, it is now. And real friends like Canada, Germany and France are trying to deter the empty, misguided George Bush and his hijacked cabinet from committing an outright aggression that risks plunging the Mideast into chaos, or even nuclear war.
Note the clever construction there? The Israelis (for which read Jews) aren't real friends, like the Canadians, French? & Germans?
NOT REMNANTS :
COLLEGE BOARD DROPS BOMBSHELL (CARL CAMPANILE, August 28, 2002, NY Post)The people who administer the SAT exams dropped a bombshell yesterday by suggesting high schools nationally are inflating students' grades.The College Board noted that the percentage of students given grades of A-minus or better jumped to 42 percent this year from 32 percent in 1992.
At the same time, the SAT scores of students with the higher grades dropped.
Gee, and we thought turning education into a self-esteem factory would produce smarter kids...NOT!
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BLAX :
Getting Whitey : "The white is being paid back for years of portraying blacks in movies as simple, shiftless, and stupid, although occasionally faithful and brave as well" (David Denby, August 1977, Atlantic Monthly)The eagerness of urban black audiences for movies with black casts, stories, and themes, and particularly for black heroes, exemplars of racial pride, has created the first situation of guaranteed profit for commercial film makers since the 1940s. Recent genres like the youth film, the drug-addict cycle, and the revisionist Western have failed after a few box-office successes, or failed altogether, but at the moment, any film which shows blacks facing down whites in violent confrontations (the more corpses the better) is going to do quick and heavy business in the big cities. From large studios like MGM to fly-by-night outfits that barely exist on paper, everyone is struggling to get a few black movies into the theaters before the bottom falls out of the market; within the next year as many as two dozen features for the black audience should be released-some directed by whites, but most of them made by young blacks experienced in stage and television directing, still photography, film acting, and documentary. [...]What has already appeared is of immense importance in the history of mass culture, even if it is aesthetically null. The film makers, whether white, or black, have sensed the audience's rage and its mood of revolt against insulting images of blacks in past movies and against the white man in general. The black cinema has discovered the profitability of revenge: the desires to make money and to erase a legacy of racial humiliation coincide perfectly in a cinema whose moments of purest audience joy consist of black men and women responding to white racism by killing oppressors. Movie audiences always wanted heroesfor fantasy release or just the basic pleasure of watching beautiful physical action, but this may be the first time an audience has demanded physical heroism in order to confirm an emerging sense of identity. The mood in the theaters is festive, alternating between admiration and mockery. If a white person wanders into one of these movies, he will have the novel experienceof complete exclusion...
Saw the movie Soul Man in a theatre where I was the only pigmentally-challenged viewer. C. Thomas Howell dresses up in black face to get into Harvard as a minority. At one point he gets on an elevator and an older white woman, the only other person on board, visibly panics and clutches her purse to her bosom. Folks started shouting at the screen: "That happens! That's happened to me!" The crowd reactions ended up being better than the film.
GO ALL THE WAY :
Have Evolutionary Explanations Gone Too Far? (Jeremy Stangroom, Philosophers.net)Dylan Evans began by noting that science has always had to face down its detractors. 'They sit, Canute like, on the sands of obscurantism, shouting in vein at the advancing tide of knowledge. "Get back! Come no further! Leave me this little piece of unexplained territory!" Thankfully, science takes no notice. The Promethean spirit that animates scientific enquiry, that terrifying curiosity that inhabits the human soul, always proves stronger than the fear of knowledge that opposes it.'He pointed out that when evolutionists first suggested, sometime before Darwin, that humans had descended from non-human species, they were the target of this kind of reactionary criticism. However, in the case of evolution, the criticism has not gone away. Evans noted that 'although the evidence for evolution is overwhelming today, there are still those who ignore it. Over half the US population still believes in the literal truth of Genesis. Thankfully, the population in the UK is somewhat more enlightened on this matter. Few people here seriously doubt that we evolved from other life forms. But even in the UK, there is still a widespread reluctance to take this idea to its logical conclusion, namely, that our minds are just as much the product of evolution as our bodies. This is Canutism. The new Canutes admit that the tide has come further up the shore. Science has already claimed the human body as its own, they recognise, but please don't let it claim the human mind.'
But, he insisted, it simply isn't possible to separate out the body from the mind. 'What is the mind after all, if not the activity of the brain? And what is the brain, if not a biological organ, the product of evolution like any other organ?
'Unless we want to fall back into a long discredited Cartesian dualism,' he insisted, 'we must admit these simple facts. The mind, like the body, is the product of millions of years of natural selection and historical accident. This means that there simply must be some kind of evolutionary psychology. The only real question is how to go about doing it.' He concluded, therefore, that it wasn't the case that evolutionary explanations have gone too far, rather they haven't gone far enough.
One of the enchanting things about most believers in evolution is precisely that they can't face going all the way. To accept that all human behavior is determed by evolution is more than they can face. Thus does their residual religious faith trump their scientific rationalism and make them quite lovable.
THE FOUR Rs :
Retrograde on School Choice (Nathan J. Diament, August 22, 2002, Washington Post)Organizations such as the ACLU, the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP properly pride themselves on fighting religious, racial and ethnic bigotry wherever it is found. Thus it is deeply troubling that in their determination to thwart school choice programs, these champions of equality would resort to invoking state constitutional provisions whose lineage lies in the sullied era of 19th-century bigotry against Catholics.I am referring to the "Blaine Amendments" adopted in many states in the late 1800s. One of these -- in Florida -- was the basis on which a trial judge recently struck down the state's school choice program at the behest of "civil liberties" organizations.
The Democrats remain the party of rum and rebellion and now they're retrograde on vouchers. But the GOP is now the party of Romanism.
EUGENECISTS, TAKE NOTE :
Like dad, Lockbaum versatile on field (Steve Wieberg, 08/22/2002, USA Today)Baseball ranks, oh, fourth or so among Gordie Lockbaum Jr.'s sports priorities. Behind track. Behind wrestling. And not surprisingly, behind football.The name of the just-turned-13-year-old Worcester, Mass., shortstop, whose team plays tonight in the Little League World Series' U.S. semifinals, may ring a bell. His dad, Gordie Sr., is a member of college football's Hall of Fame, a two-way star at Holy Cross who was third in the 1987 Heisman balloting.
If he wasn't likely to go to the dread Holy Cross it might be possible to root for him.
August 28, 2002
I DON'T CARE IF THEY EVER COME BACK :
The Baseball Strike for Dummies (GREG COUCH, August 28, 2002, Chicago Sun Times)So you haven't been paying attention. Not really. Not to all those tedious details about sliding scales and straight pools and luxury taxes. You know baseball players might go on strike Friday, and likely will have their chauffeurs walk the picket line.Players are averaging $2.4 million a year. Why walk? Owners say the salaries are so high they can't afford them. Why keep offering them?
If this isn't resolved soon, then everyone around the fax machines, water coolers, smoking areas will be griping and you're going to have to keep quiet. So here's a quick look at the basics of this dispute.
Kill the current major leagues and start over with the guys in the minors. The game will be fine in ten years and only a select group of us will still care. It'll be like a cult for us Omega Men.
ESTRICH, AS IN OSTRICH :
Now she admits her duplicity. (Media Research Center, 8/28/02)Bill Clinton defender Susan Estrich conceded during a Saturday appearance on FNC that she had "defended the indefensible" in explaining away as irrelevant to his job performance Bill Clinton's personal behavior.Recalling her many media appearances post-Lewinsky, Estrich expressed regret: "I mean I've done it. I've said 'Oh, sex with an intern, oh big deal, you know. I don't care, you don't care, what could be better'....I sat there for years and I did that, in the hopes that it would finally go away and, you know, Bill Clinton would become Jimmy Carter and we could all live happily ever after."
There was something deeply disturbing not only about watching decent people like Susan Estrich defend him, but even more so about watching the three Senators who we thought had souls--Lieberman, Moynihan, & Kerrey--vote to keep the guy in office. What a dark moment for a once great party.
I BET MOBY'S A PSEUDONYM TOO :
REVIEW : of Fatboy Slim : Live on Brighton Beach (JOSH HATCHER, Relevant)When somebody got the bright idea to plop [Norman] Cook in his hometown, in front of 40,000 dancing fans, they got what they anticipated, a masterpiece of house music. It has all the feel of a live performance, but with the flawless presentation that someone might expect from studio work. Even a few humorous moments when the police had to interrupt the concert to announce that the tide was coming in and amidst a booing crowd encouraged them to move to safety.
Norman? And I thought his real name was Fatboy...
HE PUTS THE CRETIN IN CHRETIEN :
Chrétien: Hamas Isn't a Terrorist Group (Stephen Brown, August 26, 2002, FrontPageMagazine.com)It was another shameful Canadian moment.Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien added to his dismal record in the war on terrorism when his government just recently published a list of seven outlawed terrorist organizations in Canada. The murderous Hamas organization was not among them.
The Prime Minister has excused himself by saying that Hamas has a charitable wing that runs schools and hospitals in the Gaza strip and West Bank; only its military wing, he says, should be sanctioned.
What the heck kind of standard is Mr. Chretien adopting here? Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all ran schools and hospitals but they also killed what? fifty million people?
POPULISM ISN'T POPULAR :
Why Democrats Must Be Populists : And what populist-phobes don't understand about America. (John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, September 9, 2002, American Prospect)[Al From and Mark Penn] believe that while populist appeals help with the Democratic base, they hurt Democratic chances among upscale voters -- whom From calls "new-economy swing voters" and whom Penn has labeled "wired workers." They blame Gore's loss in key border states such as Missouri on the defection of these voters, and warn that if Democrats persist in pressing populist themes in November 2002, they will lose those states again.But this argument doesn't stand up. If you look at Gore's poll ratings before and after his speech at the Democratic convention, his support shoots up among the very voters whom the DLCers believed were cool to such populist appeals. According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Gore's support increased 12 percent among voters who make between $50,000 and $75,000 per year (and by 19 percent among independents, according to the Gallup poll). If you look at the final results, Gore did relatively well among upscale voters, particularly those with high levels of education. Where he slipped precipitously from Clinton's margins in 1996 was among white working-class voters.
Take From and Penn's example of Missouri. In downscale north and southeast Missouri, where the term "wired workers" would provoke quizzical glances, Clinton had won white working-class voters by 50 percent to 38 percent in 1996, but Gore lost them by 60 percent to 38 percent, a huge 34-point swing. By contrast, Gore won upscale new-economy St. Louis County -- the high-tech suburban area to the west of St. Louis -- by 51 percent to 46 percent. Gore lost Missouri in the working class north and southeast, not in the affluent St. Louis or Kansas City suburbs.
Gore lost these working-class voters primarily because his populist appeal and his defense of Social Security could not overcome the Republican wedge issues of 2000: Democratic support for gun control and the shadow cast by the Clinton scandals over Gore's character. In an extensive post-election poll conducted by Gore's pollster Stanley Greenberg, white, non-college-educated male voters, who swung sharply from Clinton in 1996 to Bush in 2000, cited Gore's "exaggerations and untruthfulness," his "anti-gun positions" and his "being too close to Clinton" as the prime reasons for voting against him. College-educated white male voters who opposed Gore, meanwhile, overwhelmingly cited Gore's untruthfulness.
From's and Penn's fears that populism will drive away upscale voters stem in part from their misunderstanding of populism. They are fond of saying that other Democrats are living in the past, but this is a case where the DLCers are. Their model of populist advocacy is the 1930s, when populism did appeal primarily to a working-class electorate. They can't conceive of well-to-do, college-educated populists. But populism's leaders have historically been drawn from the well-to-do and the college-trained. During the early 20th century and again today, populist themes have resonated among upscale as well as downscale voters.
There's a strange disconnect in this essay as the authors argue in favor of economic populism but against social populism, without even seeming to recognize that they're doing the latter. This is an entirely predictable trap that Leftists continue to fall into, misapprehending Man as a primarily economic being. What they are asking for though is that Democrats try to cobble together an inherently unstable coalition that requires a socially liberal pitch to economic elites and an economically liberal pitch to the very poor. The problem is that both pitches tend to turn off the middle class, while the rich, though absorbed by guilt and self-loathing, are well aware that economic populism won't help the poor and the poor are generally hostile to the lax morality of the upper classes. (This last is something that Charles Murtaugh has been pondering.)
A TIME FOR BUSINESS AS USUAL? :
10-year surplus shrinks further Democrats say tax cut to blame (Jim Drinkard, 8/28/02, USA TODAY)The nation's 10-year budget surplus, projected at $5.6 trillion just 18 months ago, has all but disappeared because of lagging tax collections and increased spending to counter terrorism, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday.The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that it will be 2006 before the government emerges from annual deficits, a year later than the White House projects.
For the period 2002 through 2011, the cumulative surplus would amount to just $336 billion if current spending policies continued and tax cuts expired as scheduled in 2010, the non-partisan agency said. If the tax cuts were renewed, as appears likely, the surplus would disappear.
This begs the obvious question : why are we still budgeting for a surplus during a time of war and recession? It certainly appears to be a time to get serious about returning money to the taxpayers.
HAWKISH DOVE :
U.S. Keeps War Pressure on Iraq, Says Case Strong (Stuart Grudgings, August 28, 2002, Reuters)U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on Wednesday that Washington was confident it could convince skeptical allies to back military action against Iraq, and would be "moving forward" at the right time.Armitage said in Tokyo he believed the United States had a compelling case to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and could win enough international support, despite signs of growing opposition from friends and rivals alike. "We believe that we will ultimately able to make a compelling case and, in the course of time, will be moving forward," Armitage told a news conference in Tokyo.
"It is our view that an Iraq left unattended is a threat to its neighbors and a threat to ourselves."
Mr. Armitage has been widely portrayed, along with his boss, Colin Powell, as one of the angels on George W. Bush's shoulder, whispering, "Peace"; while Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz whisper, "War", in the other ear. Mr. Armitage may well oppose the war, but he sure doesn't sound like someone who has trouble justifying one.
GUILTY AS CHARGED--VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO :
Who's more miserable - the far right or the far left? (James Lileks, Rants)Who's more miserable - the far right or the far left? The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you're all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I'll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O'Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they're cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston's apartment in "The Omega Man," surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.
We almost never link to James Lileks (or InstaPundit or Andrew Sullivan for that matter) because one assumes that anybody who'd bother reading us will have already visited them--we're well aware of our lowly place in the Great Chain of Being. But Drew Craft forwarded this and took such undisguised, and well-justified, glee in the image of cultural conservatives as resembling The Omega Man that we can't resist. This was one of the Brothers' favorite movies when we were kids, shown on WWOR Channel 9 with sufficient frequency to earn cult classic status for most kids who grew up in the Tri-State area, and we accept the comparison with no little pride.
THE WHIPPIN' ENDED YEARS AGO :
The End of the Age of Inflation (Robert J. Samuelson, August 28, 2002, The Washington Post)The Age of Inflation is ending the way it began: quietly. Along with the Cold War, the rise and fall of inflation has been a defining event of the present era --
but one that is overlooked, because inflation receded so gradually that almost no one appreciates its historic significance. For four decades, Americans rode the inflation roller coaster up and down with huge economic, political and social consequences. It shaped how we live, affecting everything from the rise of political conservatism to yesterday's stock market frenzy and today's housing boom.The inflation roller coaster, as measured by the consumer price index, proceeded from a meager 1.4 percent in 1960 to a peak of 13.3 percent in 1979 and then coasted down. In 2001, it was 1.6 percent. On the way up, Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 -- a pivotal political moment -- stemmed heavily from an anti-inflation backlash. People despaired at the double-digit onslaught, which disrupted all sense of order and predictability in everyday life. No one could know from week to week the prices of food, clothing or almost anything.
Lenin once said that "the way to crush the bourgeoisie [the middle class] is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." In America, that process discredited government, which people blamed for inflation's ravages.
Personally, I think Mr. Samuelson may be the best columnist in America, certainly the best economic columnist. But it's simply inaccurate to say that the end of inflation has been overlooked, as a general matter. It's true that it's taken the mainstream--which is to say, liberal--press quite a while to figure it out, but conservatives like Jack Kemp, Larry Kudlow, Bob Novak, Newt Gingrich, etc., have been criticizing the Fed for keeping interests rates artificially high for years now. In fact, here's what perceptive Fed critics were writing 18 months ago.
CONSISTENT IN CAROLINA :
Cuckoo in Carolina (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, August 28, 2002, NY Times)The ruckus being raised by conservative Christians over the University of North Carolina's decision to ask incoming students to read a book about the Koran--to stimulate a campus debate--surely has to be one of the most embarrassing moments for America since Sept. 11. [...]As a recent letter to The Times observed, the problem with the world today is not that American students are being asked to read the Koran, it is that students in Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim lands are still not being asked to read the sacred texts of other civilizations--let alone the foundational texts of American democracy, like the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Federalist Papers.
The fact that they ignore such diverse texts is the source of their weakness, and the fact that we embrace them is the source of our strength. What we should be doing is driving that point home, not copying their obscurantism. [...]
America will always be a strong model for how a nation thrives in the modern age, as long as our culture of curiosity, free inquiry and openness endures. And the Arab Muslim world will continue to struggle with modernity as long as 12th graders in public schools there are never challenged to read Genesis, Luke, Job and Psalms over their summer vacations.
When a columnist who, though you may disagree with him often, you respect and think is reasonably intelligent gets a story as wrong as Mr. Friedman gets this one it's awfully hard to avoid the feeling that he's intentionally mischaracterized the situation in order to score political points. The alternative, that he's a dunderhead, simply seems implausible.
OUR THROAT, SADDAM'S FEET :
Iraq Speech by Cheney Is Criticized by Schroder (STEVEN ERLANGER, August 28, 2002, NY Times)Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany has criticized the speech on Monday by Vice President Dick Cheney, saying that it signals a mistaken shift in American aims regarding Iraq.In an interview broadcast tonight on RTL television, Mr. Schroder said the goal of the Bush administration no longer seems to be to persuade Iraq to allow unconditional arms inspections by United Nations experts. Instead, he said, the American goal seems to be to remove Mr. Hussein by military means regardless of whether inspections occur, which he says will undermine the chance of getting Iraq to allow the inspections.
"If the aim changes now, then it's one's own responsibility," Mr. Schroder said. "If somebody is to be removed with the aid of a military intervention, you can hardly convince him to let inspectors into his country. It's the change of aim that is the mistake."
The insipidities of the German Chancellor, fresh from his unilateral attack on freedom fighters who'd seized Iraqi soil, remind one of Winston Churchill's assessment of the Germans : The Hun--he's always either at your feet or at your throat.
RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW :
Soaring City Slickers : Birds of prey are being reintroduced to U.S. cities. Will they stay? (Jennifer Uscher, 8/26/02, Scientific American)The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), a bird that more than any other symbolizes North America's wide-open spaces and vanishing unspoiled wilderness, is now the newest avian resident of New York City. In June 2002, the city's Parks Department teamed with the Earth Conservation Corps to transplant four eaglets to a tree house in Inwood Hill Park on the northern tip of Manhattan in the hopes that, after the birds are released, they will one day return to nest in the city.Though other birds of prey have been successfully reintroduced in U.S. cities, some local biologists and birdwatchers have doubts about the project, charging that the area is not remote enough from human activity and that the Hudson River, where the eagles will soon fish, is still dangerously polluted. They wonder whether the eagles will adapt to urban life as well as other raptors, including red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) and peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus), and will soon be seen soaring over midtown’s skyscrapers on their seven-foot wingspans.
It was great when they reintroduced the peregrine falcons in NYC and all the animal lovers were all dewy-eyed. Then the things started swooping down and snatching pigeons in front of people and ripping them apart on ledges outside office windows and folks realized what predators actually behave like. The sudden descent of ambivalence was palpable and immensely amusing.
GOD BLESS BILL KRISTOL :
Canadian model of healthcare ails : Report ranks Canada's state-funded system near the bottom among industrial nations. (Eric Beaudan, August 28, 2002, The Christian Science Monitor)When Bill Clinton attempted to reform US healthcare in 1994, his administration often touted Canada's publicly funded, universal access system as a model to be emulated. As it turns out, the Canadian system may be crumbling under its own weight.Despite spending nearly C$100 billion (US$64 billion) per year on healthcare--the most per capita among countries that run a similar system--a study released last week by the Fraser Institute, a public-policy think tank in Vancouver, shows that Canada ranks only slightly higher than Hungary, Poland, and Turkey in the quality of service its citizens receive.
Canada is the last industrialized nation to rely solely on government funds for its core healthcare system. There's an emerging view that it, too, may abandon a system that has long been a symbol of its national identity.
"We are no longer the model," says Michael Walker, executive director of the Fraser Institute. "When you consider that equal access in a country as spread out as Canada would require a greater number of physicians and diagnostic equipment, we're clearly headed in the wrong direction."
Here's how The Newshour describes Bill Kristol's role in killing the Clinton Health Care Plan :
December 2, 1993 - Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends. The timing of the memo dovetails with a growing private consensus among Republicans that all-out opposition to the Clinton plan is in their best political interest. Until the memo surfaces, most opponents prefer behind-the-scenes warfare largely shielded from public view. The boldness of Kristol's strategy signals a new turn in the battle. Not only is it politically acceptable to criticize the Clinton plan on policy grounds, it is also politically advantageous. By the end of 1993, blocking reform poses little risk as the public becomes increasingly fearful of what it has heard about the Clinton plan.
For stopping us from heading in the disastrous direction outlined in the article above, if for nothing else, Mr. Kristol is a conservative hero, neo or no.
RCs AND NEOCONS :
Meanwhile, Paul Cella, wonders where Roman Catholics--like Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and Paul Johnson--fit in with the neocons. For the proposition that they are such he cites the following : Capitalism and the Human Spirit (Michael Novak, Spring 2000, Public Interest) :I doubt that neoconservatives have (or ever had) a creed, but I am willing to commit myself to the truth of the following propositions: Economics is fundamental, and yet prior to economics is politics; prior to politics is culture; and at the root of culture lies formal public worship, embodying beliefs about God and man in dramatic form (cult, in its primary sense).
We'd first note that even Mr. Novak assumes he's one of the first to craft a set of foundational propositions for neoconservatism. Second, those he drafts are not actually neoconservative but rather theoconservative. In placing Man's relationship to God at the center of his philosophy rather than Man's relationship to the State, he falls into a rather traditional conservative category. There's no neo there.
THE YOUNGER PODHORETZ WEIGHS IN :
Here's John Podhoretz's response to our query about the organizing principles of neoconservatism :I think my reply would be : Go soak your heads.
We're assuming that's the rough equivalent of : "I know of none".
MORE ON MAUREEN :
I'm With Dick! Let's Make War! (MAUREEN DOWD, August 28, 2002, NY Times)I was dubious at first. But now I think Dick Cheney has it right.Making the case for going to war in the Middle East to veterans on Monday, the vice president said that "our goal would be . . . a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and protected."
O.K., I'm on board. Let's declare war on Saudi Arabia! Let's do "regime change" in a kingdom that gives medieval a bad name.
By overthrowing the Saudi monarchy, the Cheney-Rummy-Condi-Wolfy-Perle-W. contingent could realize its dream of redrawing the Middle East map.
Once everyone realizes that we're no longer being hypocrites, coddling a corrupt, repressive dictatorship that sponsors terrorism even as we plot to crush a corrupt, repressive dictatorship that sponsors terrorism, it will transform our relationship with the Arab world.
Well, the good news is she made it through a column without mentioning W's physique. The bad news is she's had some kind of weird moodswing--joining several others at the suddenly hawkish Times--and now recognizes that war may be justified merely by the repressive nature of the regime in question. She's also put the cart before the ass by suggesting we should take out Arabia before Iraq. All in good time Ms Dowd, all in good time...
August 27, 2002
CONDI PLAYS IN C :
Walking in faith (Condoleeza Rice, August 4, 2002, Washington Times)Although I never doubted the existence of God, I think like all people I've had some ups and downs in my faith. When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky's Supermarket not very far from my house ÷ I will never forget ÷ among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, "Do you play the piano by any chance?"I said, "Yes." They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the centerof Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don't play gospel very well--I play Brahms --and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.
"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.
As Mike Daley who sent this said, forget VP, she should be President one day.