My son appears to believe that socks are disposable. This is one of the new ones. The picture would be more effective with half his foot sticking out through the hole in what used to be the toe, but you get the idea: it's a legwarmer now.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Laundryblogging
My son appears to believe that socks are disposable. This is one of the new ones. The picture would be more effective with half his foot sticking out through the hole in what used to be the toe, but you get the idea: it's a legwarmer now.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
The danger of frost
No doubt there's something profound and quasi-political to be said about the title of this post: something about the difficulties of living and working in uncertainty, and that hindsight is a cheap shot, and all that... but really, I'm just talking about gardening. For the first time in four houses, we have a yard with a sunny patch big enough for more than a couple of pots, so we've activated Plan Vegetable Garden. There are a few things I'd like to say about gardening, and here they are:
- I cut my teeth on an oscillating hoe.
- Figuring out your soil's composition, chemically and physically, is actually pretty easy if you know a couple of simple tests.
- And (a companion piece) figuring out how to correct your soil's composition is just a matter of memorizing a few simple rules, or even just having a decent gardening book handy.
- A small but productive vegetable garden can save you money and will certainly provide you with better-tasting food.
- Kids love to help in the garden; gardening is a great way to do something together as a family.
- Creating a show-worthy garden is less effort than you might think.
I'd like to say these things, but in all honesty I can't... My mother, though she gardened off and on when we were kids, proclaimed her own thumb "purple" and didn't try to draw out our interest - probably because she knew that #5 is a crock. Kids love to garden only if gardening means digging random holes, preferably in already-worked soil (because it's easier), and often "transplanting" picked flowers (dandelions are popular) into the holes, then getting really upset when they're dead the next day. The horticultural company that comes out with a flower that roots itself upon being picked and stuck into dirt will have the undying gratitude of parents everywhere.
To address the other points: As to #2 and #3, soil composition is mostly a closed book to me. When I'm digging in something that feels like reinforced concrete, I can make a pretty good guess that it's either reinforced concrete or clay; when I jump on my spade and sink to my knees I generally conclude I'm in either a pond or sand. But between these extremes, it's anybody's guess, and my solution to whatever I perceive as a "problem" with my soil's texture or chemistry is to add stuff to it that makes it feel and look more like potting soil. Sometimes I take what a good friend of ours terms the Darwinian approach, and figure that whatever can't thrive in the soil as it comes to the table, so to speak, ought by rights to be crowded out by That Which Survives. (This is the approach I've taken with the herb section of my garden this year: I did no soil amendment beyond mixing in the leftover bark mulch that we'd piled on the dirt last year, cut back my woody herbs from last year's pots almost to the ground, yanked them out of said pots and buried them in this year's garden plot, sprinkled on some water, crossed my fingers, and had a beer.)
As to #4, it's vaguely possible that I'll save money on lettuce, if the rabbits don't get to it. (The seven-foot deer fence we're going to have to put up may deter them. Then again, it may not; I've read Peter Cottontail.) But my savings are likely to go toward subsidizing my several attempts at tomatoes, which I've only successfully grown from seed by accident, in our compost heap.
As to #6, I calculated that I moved at least two, probably closer to three cubic yards of soil this weekend - that's somewhere between 54 and 81 cubic feet, or 400-600 gallon jugs' full. (I know that doesn't seem possible, but the conversion factor is 7.48 gallons per cubit foot. It's a conversion drummed into my head in the daily course of seven years of environmental consulting and project work, and I'll probably die with it on my lips.) With a cubic foot of damp soil (thanks to all the Powers That Be not wet soil) weighing in at about 100 pounds, I moved the equivalent of my Sienna with my extended family in it - maybe all that and a Mini Cooper on the roof rack - one spadeful at a time.
I do have a couple of things going for me: that patch of ground had been a garden before, though (again using the Darwinian approach) the daylilies had made it almost their sole turf, so it wasn't as compact as the lawn; seeds in little packets these days are made for the fumble-fingered home gardener rather than for the subsistence farmer whose life depends on their successful nurture; and anything grows in Pennsylvania. (OK, not citrus fruit. And nothing tropical. But "mainstream" veggies? There's a reason the Amish settled here.) Reality in the backyard may never touch my vision, but you gotta dream, right?
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Looking forward, looking back
Mohammed at Iraq The Model has something to say as we variously celebrate and mourn the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion:
Insh'allah.
Yes. We are facing enormous and dangerous challenges and this is not unexpected because the old will not easily step down and accept the loss; the old will fight back fiercely and the old here is not only Saddam and the Ba'ath, the old can be found among many of our current leaders and the mentality they carry that belong to the same generation that bred Saddam but I believe they will melt away as well because no one can go against the direction of time and the clock cannot be forced backwards.
The green bud looks weak and is buried in the dirt and surrounded by a tough shell but it will break through this covering, pierce the dirt and stand on its feet to announce a new era.
We will not be defeated and orphans of the dark past will get what they deserve and our sacrifices and the sacrifices of those who stand with us shall not go in vain, our sacrifices will pave an easier road for those want to follow us when they decide it's time for them to change.
And yes…Iraq will be the model.
Insh'allah.
That one talent which is death to hide
Chinese blogger Hao Wu has been detained by the Chinese government, charge unknown. Hao Wu is a documentary filmmaker and blogger who was working on a film project that involved his interviewing a Christian group not recognized by the Chinese government; there's speculation that he was detained and his materials seized in order to help the government prosecute underground churches in China. His family and friends, knowing him, expect that he would not cooperate with such an endeavor. However, the government ain't talking, so it's unclear whether he is being held for this reason or another.It appears, though, that individual liberty is again under attack, perhaps in two forms: Hao Wu's freedom of speech, and the freedom of Chinese people to practice their religion if that religion is not state-sanctioned. Yes, I know that these freedoms are not considered inalienable to China - which is one reason that multiculturalism as commonly practiced is an ethical outrage. Celebrate the good, appreciate the benign or at least un-bad in other cultures - certainly. But when a different cultural practice results in oppression of individuals and suppression of the liberties that we contend are inalienable, then it's time for us to stand on our own two feet, leaning on no other authority than our founding documents, and protest it.
The Chinese embassy in the United States has zero email information, which means I'll have to write an actual paper letter. But as Instapundit also helpfully provides contact information for Wal-Mart in China, an email to those quarters is in order too, since in dictatorships it's all about influence.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Some thoughts on music
Recently I've heard two old songs at least twice apiece, and while they were songs I loved when they first came out (in my childhood!), and songs I still sing along to, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with letting my kids hear them. (I should take the lesson that I grew up with these two songs on power rotation and never, ever paid attention to the lyrics... but anyway.) The songs: "The Piña Colada Song" and "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad."
Think about them for a sec if you never really have. In the first, the guy is bored with his girlfriend, so he takes out a personal ad looking for a replacement, implicitly without breaking up with the girlfriend first. Someone answers; they plan an assignation, sight unseen; and when they meet - [wahp-wahp-wahhhhh] it's "his own lovely lady." They've deepened their intimacy via the personals, they now know that each likes piña coladas and so on, and happily off they go to make love at midnight, in the dunes on the Cape, all oblivious to the fact that each of them had had full intentions to cheat on the other.
In the second, gosh, the girl is going to throw poor Meathead - I mean Meat
Loaf - out into the snow, because despite the fact that he both wants and needs her, there ain't no way he's ever going to love her. Sadly, his heart is permanently locked on some other chick who both wanted and needed him, but would never love him, though she at least had the decency to get out of bed and get out into the snow without argument.
Yuck. What amoral creeps ruled the airwaves in the Seventies. Is the new millenium any different? Hmm... I confess that I'm not keeping up well with the hits of today, though I'm reasonably familiar with the so-called "kid-friendly" tunes featured on Kidz Bop X ads. (Kidz Bop is a bunch of nameless children singing pop tunes, karaoke style. It's all the rage with those who don't yet need deodorant. The fact that these "kid-friendly" songs include "When September Ends" and "Vertigo" which are about as far from light and fluffy as you can get without actually venturing into "Cop Killer" and "My Name Is Luka" range, I wonder who's making the "kid-friendly" determination. Please note that I like these two songs quite a lot - I just don't think they're exactly "Puff the Magic Dragon," and yes, I know, I know - but at least "Puff" could make a reasonable pretense of being about an actual magic dragon.)
All that aside, If I had to take a stand somewhere on the general tone of Today's Music, I'd go with "painfully earnest," with the important caveat that my musical tastes don't run to hiphop, country, or dance, so I'm even more ignorant of these genres. There are worse fates than painful earnestness.
And so we move on to American Idol, a show I've never actually seen. I do, however, try to pay attention to commentary I hear about it, so I've reached a couple of conclusions that may or may not hold up. The first is that the show has rekindled an appreciation for singing, really from-the-guts appassionato performance. I just heard a brief music review on NPR of a - hmm, I think it was of a singer-songwriter rather than a band, but anyway the point of the review was that part of the singer's appeal is that he sings flat. I don't mean "without passion" in this case; I mean flat, as in, the note is supposed to be C# and he's singing C, if that. It's not a "bend," it's not remotely bluesy; the guy just can't sing. But some rarified stratum of music listeners considers his inability to hit the notes a feature, not a bug.
And this in turn reminds me of a science fiction short story I read years ago, "Vintage Season." In this story, which is told from the point of view of a man of the present day, a little clique of time travellers (not identified as such, yet) is travelling to all the "vintage seasons" of history: the spring just before the Black Death of 0-Dark-Ages (that's a military reference - nevermind), the summer before Hiroshima... I can't remember the specific examples beyond the plague one. But in the story's frame, the travellers are renting a house from the protagonist for the month of May, and they go on and on about the beautiful weather, the glorious sunsets, etc., etc. From time to time they mention another person, let's call him Bob though his name is probably Mephisto or something profound like that, who is the real connoisseur - he doesn't even arrive until the aftermath. Huh? thinks the protagonist, but with no other clues, can't figure out who Bob is, what the aftermath might be, or why these people want his house but only for a month. The travellers leave in a rush at the end of the month. The final scene shows us the protagonist near death, days later; he survives just long enough to see Bob, as they both hear the explosions coming closer as buildings are dynamited in a futile attempt to halt the advance of the Blue Plague. Something like that. Bob, or Mephisto, is a whacko who revels in rot, but who is seen by his contemporaries as a "aesthete" because he's so darn edgy; as a singer myself, I have a hard time seeing the people who enjoy the flat guy's singing as "aesthetes" of the same decadent type.
And at last this opinion o' mine brings me to my second observation about American Idol: that what we're seeing is a little of what opera aficionados like to point out about Italy. In Italy, they say, opera is a populist artform, or at any rate it was. A shopkeeper or a teenager (I'm going to make an unfounded assumption and add "say, 50 years ago" about the teenager, but it may be true today) would be as likely to hum an aria as a pop tune. Why, the opera-lovers ask plaintively, can't we achieve the same thing here? Why can't opera be as popular as Beyonce?
My answer: because opera, like it or lump it, has a connotation that will not allow it to become populist here. There's Il Divo, true, but opera as opera-lovers understand it is not available to the populist ear. As Andrew O'Hagan said in the Telegraph,
(I found O'Hagan's attitude enlightening: he is precisely the problem with opera. He finds nothing opera-worthy in the modern age. In fact, he makes the absurd claim that opera cannot encompass the banality of modern life - which assumes that life in the past was free from banality, rather than that opera composers rightly chose not to hammer on the banality, for heaven's sake. Wha??)
You want to know where modern populist opera lies? In Miss Saigon. In Rent. Yes, even in Cats, and even in Jesus Christ Superstar. Look at how opera was born, and it's obvious that the Golden-Age-of-Musicals musical was the new opera bouffe, and that West Side Story was the harbinger of a new golden age of modern populist opera. These works call for bravura singing - of a different type from traditional opera, but similarly demanding in range, power, and emotion; they succeed on a story that strikes a timeless chord; they demand a suspension of disbelief beyond the fourth wall of spoken theater. But I think it's precisely because they have populist appeal that they aren't appreciated as the heirs of traditional opera by those who want opera to be loved by a new generation.
And finally: my oldest is learning to play "Ode To Joy" on the violin. I am so very proud.
Think about them for a sec if you never really have. In the first, the guy is bored with his girlfriend, so he takes out a personal ad looking for a replacement, implicitly without breaking up with the girlfriend first. Someone answers; they plan an assignation, sight unseen; and when they meet - [wahp-wahp-wahhhhh] it's "his own lovely lady." They've deepened their intimacy via the personals, they now know that each likes piña coladas and so on, and happily off they go to make love at midnight, in the dunes on the Cape, all oblivious to the fact that each of them had had full intentions to cheat on the other.
In the second, gosh, the girl is going to throw poor Meathead - I mean Meat
Loaf - out into the snow, because despite the fact that he both wants and needs her, there ain't no way he's ever going to love her. Sadly, his heart is permanently locked on some other chick who both wanted and needed him, but would never love him, though she at least had the decency to get out of bed and get out into the snow without argument.
Yuck. What amoral creeps ruled the airwaves in the Seventies. Is the new millenium any different? Hmm... I confess that I'm not keeping up well with the hits of today, though I'm reasonably familiar with the so-called "kid-friendly" tunes featured on Kidz Bop X ads. (Kidz Bop is a bunch of nameless children singing pop tunes, karaoke style. It's all the rage with those who don't yet need deodorant. The fact that these "kid-friendly" songs include "When September Ends" and "Vertigo" which are about as far from light and fluffy as you can get without actually venturing into "Cop Killer" and "My Name Is Luka" range, I wonder who's making the "kid-friendly" determination. Please note that I like these two songs quite a lot - I just don't think they're exactly "Puff the Magic Dragon," and yes, I know, I know - but at least "Puff" could make a reasonable pretense of being about an actual magic dragon.)
All that aside, If I had to take a stand somewhere on the general tone of Today's Music, I'd go with "painfully earnest," with the important caveat that my musical tastes don't run to hiphop, country, or dance, so I'm even more ignorant of these genres. There are worse fates than painful earnestness.
And so we move on to American Idol, a show I've never actually seen. I do, however, try to pay attention to commentary I hear about it, so I've reached a couple of conclusions that may or may not hold up. The first is that the show has rekindled an appreciation for singing, really from-the-guts appassionato performance. I just heard a brief music review on NPR of a - hmm, I think it was of a singer-songwriter rather than a band, but anyway the point of the review was that part of the singer's appeal is that he sings flat. I don't mean "without passion" in this case; I mean flat, as in, the note is supposed to be C# and he's singing C, if that. It's not a "bend," it's not remotely bluesy; the guy just can't sing. But some rarified stratum of music listeners considers his inability to hit the notes a feature, not a bug.
And this in turn reminds me of a science fiction short story I read years ago, "Vintage Season." In this story, which is told from the point of view of a man of the present day, a little clique of time travellers (not identified as such, yet) is travelling to all the "vintage seasons" of history: the spring just before the Black Death of 0-Dark-Ages (that's a military reference - nevermind), the summer before Hiroshima... I can't remember the specific examples beyond the plague one. But in the story's frame, the travellers are renting a house from the protagonist for the month of May, and they go on and on about the beautiful weather, the glorious sunsets, etc., etc. From time to time they mention another person, let's call him Bob though his name is probably Mephisto or something profound like that, who is the real connoisseur - he doesn't even arrive until the aftermath. Huh? thinks the protagonist, but with no other clues, can't figure out who Bob is, what the aftermath might be, or why these people want his house but only for a month. The travellers leave in a rush at the end of the month. The final scene shows us the protagonist near death, days later; he survives just long enough to see Bob, as they both hear the explosions coming closer as buildings are dynamited in a futile attempt to halt the advance of the Blue Plague. Something like that. Bob, or Mephisto, is a whacko who revels in rot, but who is seen by his contemporaries as a "aesthete" because he's so darn edgy; as a singer myself, I have a hard time seeing the people who enjoy the flat guy's singing as "aesthetes" of the same decadent type.
And at last this opinion o' mine brings me to my second observation about American Idol: that what we're seeing is a little of what opera aficionados like to point out about Italy. In Italy, they say, opera is a populist artform, or at any rate it was. A shopkeeper or a teenager (I'm going to make an unfounded assumption and add "say, 50 years ago" about the teenager, but it may be true today) would be as likely to hum an aria as a pop tune. Why, the opera-lovers ask plaintively, can't we achieve the same thing here? Why can't opera be as popular as Beyonce?
My answer: because opera, like it or lump it, has a connotation that will not allow it to become populist here. There's Il Divo, true, but opera as opera-lovers understand it is not available to the populist ear. As Andrew O'Hagan said in the Telegraph,
Maybe opera is just too bold-gestured and not the kind of drama I can believe in when set in a modern context. Even where the music is lovely, and the look is right [...] there is something grandiose and even hysterical in opera's natural state which can obliterate subtlety. [...] The singing of words - "Get me a cup of coffee"; "No problem" - even in voices as capable as Stephanie Friede (as Petra von Kant) or Kathryn Harries (her mother), tended to ridicule all serious themes.
You can understand why people want to stage modern productions, but it is too literal-minded to imagine that things must move into the present day in order to be fresh. Opera's bombast and grandeur may be intrinsic to the past and to a notion of romanticism and society that no longer easily applies. Maybe that would explain why any modern opera that works (such as Jerry Springer) tends to be based almost entirely on pastiche.
(I found O'Hagan's attitude enlightening: he is precisely the problem with opera. He finds nothing opera-worthy in the modern age. In fact, he makes the absurd claim that opera cannot encompass the banality of modern life - which assumes that life in the past was free from banality, rather than that opera composers rightly chose not to hammer on the banality, for heaven's sake. Wha??)
You want to know where modern populist opera lies? In Miss Saigon. In Rent. Yes, even in Cats, and even in Jesus Christ Superstar. Look at how opera was born, and it's obvious that the Golden-Age-of-Musicals musical was the new opera bouffe, and that West Side Story was the harbinger of a new golden age of modern populist opera. These works call for bravura singing - of a different type from traditional opera, but similarly demanding in range, power, and emotion; they succeed on a story that strikes a timeless chord; they demand a suspension of disbelief beyond the fourth wall of spoken theater. But I think it's precisely because they have populist appeal that they aren't appreciated as the heirs of traditional opera by those who want opera to be loved by a new generation.
And finally: my oldest is learning to play "Ode To Joy" on the violin. I am so very proud.
Slainte - the postmortem
OK, I survived. Everything reheated as I'd hoped, nothing either boiling into leathery unchewability or drying out into Saharan tastelessness, and the shepherd's pie in particular garnered rave reviews from all quarters, with lesser partisan squabbling breaking out over the top round braised in Guinness and the Irish whiskey-glazed ham; I planned and prepped ahead so assiduously that I pre-cut apple slices for the salad the day before and left them soaking in the cider vinaigrette to keep them from browning - but on the "suspenders-and-belt" principle also brought along a strainer and a couple more apples to the neighborhood clubhouse just in case, and had to use both when I discovered that I'd inadvertantly pickled the apples; the Bailey's mousse that had worked perfectly in a home-sized batch absolutely refused to set up in a crowd-sized batch, but I discovered the problem in time to fly to the grocery store and buy (shudder!) boxes of "instant milk chocolate-Irish cream mousse - imported from FRANCE!!" that did the job reasonably well, then actually resisted my Catholic impulse to confess my duplicity to every attendee (so of course I'm confessing to whoever's out there in the blogosphere now instead)...
All in all, I've about had it with Irish food for the time being and plan to have a meatball parm sandwich for dinner tonight. Or curry. Can't get less Irish than that. I'm suffering a good bit of emotional letdown and frankly resent the fact that I still have to cook here.But I'll get over it. Thank you for your patience...
All in all, I've about had it with Irish food for the time being and plan to have a meatball parm sandwich for dinner tonight. Or curry. Can't get less Irish than that. I'm suffering a good bit of emotional letdown and frankly resent the fact that I still have to cook here.But I'll get over it. Thank you for your patience...
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Slainte
Blogging will be light until after St. Patrick's Day. While channelling my inner dumba**, I offered to take over my neighborhood's St. Patrick's Day party from the caterer-neighbor who usually runs it but who's been called out of town unexpectedly. My fridge is full of beef. My whole house smells like beef. I may never eat beef again. Or potatoes. I mashed ten pounds of potatoes this morning; only twenty pounds to go.
So slainte to you all, and may you be in heaven ten minutes before the Devil knows you're dead, and all that good Irish stuff, and I'll see you in a few days... if I survive.
So slainte to you all, and may you be in heaven ten minutes before the Devil knows you're dead, and all that good Irish stuff, and I'll see you in a few days... if I survive.
Friday, March 10, 2006
How - and what - are we doing?
The other day I heard an NPR story about a new reality show, Black/White (I'm guessing at the punctuation). The premise is that two families, one black, one white, move into a house together. So far, it's The Real World. But once in the same digs, when the members of each family venture out into the actual Real World, they're first transformed into their own "negatives" - the white family is made up to appear black, the black family to appear white. Then they go do things that will help them experience race as The Other. The white teenage daughter, for instance, checks into a Beverly Hills boutique in search of a job. The saleswoman to whom she speaks (who sounds about eighteen and as Beverly Hills as it's possible to sound) tells her that yes, they're hiring, but the manager isn't in and there is no application she can take with her. "Got it," snaps the daughter.
Unfortunately I had to get out of the car between this example and the tail-end of the story, so I missed any other examples. At the end of the story, when I turned on the radio again, the director (I think) was speaking about how his own views on race were affected by the program, or "project" as the participants called it. He had always thought that "color blindness" was the appropriate goal, but now, he said, he'd realized that it's even more important to try to empathize with those of other ethnicities, because their experience isn't the same as yours, no matter what yours is.
So my question for the day is, what is the correct model in the United States? Is it the "melting pot," the "tossed salad," or - my preference - the "stew"? The melting pot analogy implies that all differences are somehow dissolved into a single homogeneous substance; the tossed salad implies that each "ingredient" remains entirely intact and can be enjoyed either separately or in combination with others; the stew implies that the "ingredients," while retaining some of their starting character, nevertheless take on some of the "flavors" of other ingredients, so that the carrot, eaten alone, tastes of the onion, and thepotatoe (sorry, little joke there) potato tastes of the meat. I like stew. I like the ethnic "stew" I perceive in the United States; my life is richer for its exposure to other cultures and other people's stories. But what do other Americans think? This is not a trivial question. Europe appears not only to be using the tossed salad model but the composed salad model, in which the ingredients are kept separate on the plate, and the results have been played out just this year alone in riots, arsons, and murders on a frightening scale.
The reality show raised another set of questions for me too, one that comes up a whole lot on Protein Wisdom pretty much all the time under the heading of identity politics: who decides when "the problem of race" has been adequately addressed, and using what standard? I consider myself a classical liberal, which means to me that the way to address societal inequities is twofold: remove barriers in society, and change my own mind, if it needs changing, to align with the maximum in individual rights and liberties. The responsibility does not lie with society to legislate improper thought - in fact, it can't be done; attempts to do so, I believe, often just push it underground. What can be legislated - and adjudicated, when necessary - is removal of barriers, but then there arises the difficulty of determining what is a substantive barrier to equal opportunity, versus an inconvenient barrier to equal outcome.
Again, this question is not trivial, and I use the term "inconvenient" not to downplay those barriers that do stand in the way of equal outcome - for instance, the teenager in inner-city Seattle has access to Franklin High School, which is (or was, when I lived there) a great school, so he has substantive equality of opportunity for a high school education with my (not-yet-teenage) son here in suburban Pennsylvania. But my son will probably have the advantage of access to a group of peers' parents with better summer jobs available than the inner-city boy might have - maybe; let's stipulate it for the sake of argument. Let's further stipulate that the inner-city kid is African-American. Is his lack of access to better close-by summer jobs than fast food, or even more importantly, his lack of access to the people who can hook him up with better opportunities, a substantive barrier, subject to legislation, or just... one of those things?
Black/White is probably not a show I'll be able to watch; I can count the grownup television shows I've seen in the past year on one hand. But just on the face of it, it presents the case that while we've removed legal barriers to opportunity, actual equality of opportunity is still out of some people's - some groups' - grasp because of barriers no less formidable but not subject to the force of law, notably attitudes. But who determines when the attitude is finally correct? Did the teenage daughter really run up against racism in the Beverly Hills boutique, or was the saleswoman just a SoCal brat? Or were there actually no applications for employment at that boutique, just a face-to-face process with the manager? Did the teenage daughter follow up by asking when the manager might be in? Did she later call, or go back with her own face on, and ask the same questions? Or are we to conclude, as the snippet on NPR clearly wants us to, that she was denied even the opportunity to apply for the job because of her apparent race?
So. Where are we? What is racism today, as compared to racism historically? Is it a problem amenable to legislative solution (you'll have some arguing to do here), or is it a waiting game? With members of pretty much every ethnicity represented at the highest levels of government, business, academia, sports, entertainment, is proportional representation the desired outcome, or a shift in the goalposts? If porportional representation does not occur, is it a sign of racism, or of temporary coincidence in a meritocratic system? Cobra, are you out there?
UPDATE: I just found an article on the show in the Philadelphia Inquirer from last week. It's Black. White. rather than Black/White, but beyond that, the article was not especially illuminating.
Unfortunately I had to get out of the car between this example and the tail-end of the story, so I missed any other examples. At the end of the story, when I turned on the radio again, the director (I think) was speaking about how his own views on race were affected by the program, or "project" as the participants called it. He had always thought that "color blindness" was the appropriate goal, but now, he said, he'd realized that it's even more important to try to empathize with those of other ethnicities, because their experience isn't the same as yours, no matter what yours is.
So my question for the day is, what is the correct model in the United States? Is it the "melting pot," the "tossed salad," or - my preference - the "stew"? The melting pot analogy implies that all differences are somehow dissolved into a single homogeneous substance; the tossed salad implies that each "ingredient" remains entirely intact and can be enjoyed either separately or in combination with others; the stew implies that the "ingredients," while retaining some of their starting character, nevertheless take on some of the "flavors" of other ingredients, so that the carrot, eaten alone, tastes of the onion, and the
The reality show raised another set of questions for me too, one that comes up a whole lot on Protein Wisdom pretty much all the time under the heading of identity politics: who decides when "the problem of race" has been adequately addressed, and using what standard? I consider myself a classical liberal, which means to me that the way to address societal inequities is twofold: remove barriers in society, and change my own mind, if it needs changing, to align with the maximum in individual rights and liberties. The responsibility does not lie with society to legislate improper thought - in fact, it can't be done; attempts to do so, I believe, often just push it underground. What can be legislated - and adjudicated, when necessary - is removal of barriers, but then there arises the difficulty of determining what is a substantive barrier to equal opportunity, versus an inconvenient barrier to equal outcome.
Again, this question is not trivial, and I use the term "inconvenient" not to downplay those barriers that do stand in the way of equal outcome - for instance, the teenager in inner-city Seattle has access to Franklin High School, which is (or was, when I lived there) a great school, so he has substantive equality of opportunity for a high school education with my (not-yet-teenage) son here in suburban Pennsylvania. But my son will probably have the advantage of access to a group of peers' parents with better summer jobs available than the inner-city boy might have - maybe; let's stipulate it for the sake of argument. Let's further stipulate that the inner-city kid is African-American. Is his lack of access to better close-by summer jobs than fast food, or even more importantly, his lack of access to the people who can hook him up with better opportunities, a substantive barrier, subject to legislation, or just... one of those things?
Black/White is probably not a show I'll be able to watch; I can count the grownup television shows I've seen in the past year on one hand. But just on the face of it, it presents the case that while we've removed legal barriers to opportunity, actual equality of opportunity is still out of some people's - some groups' - grasp because of barriers no less formidable but not subject to the force of law, notably attitudes. But who determines when the attitude is finally correct? Did the teenage daughter really run up against racism in the Beverly Hills boutique, or was the saleswoman just a SoCal brat? Or were there actually no applications for employment at that boutique, just a face-to-face process with the manager? Did the teenage daughter follow up by asking when the manager might be in? Did she later call, or go back with her own face on, and ask the same questions? Or are we to conclude, as the snippet on NPR clearly wants us to, that she was denied even the opportunity to apply for the job because of her apparent race?
So. Where are we? What is racism today, as compared to racism historically? Is it a problem amenable to legislative solution (you'll have some arguing to do here), or is it a waiting game? With members of pretty much every ethnicity represented at the highest levels of government, business, academia, sports, entertainment, is proportional representation the desired outcome, or a shift in the goalposts? If porportional representation does not occur, is it a sign of racism, or of temporary coincidence in a meritocratic system? Cobra, are you out there?
UPDATE: I just found an article on the show in the Philadelphia Inquirer from last week. It's Black. White. rather than Black/White, but beyond that, the article was not especially illuminating.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Come again?
MSNBC is reporting on a new Washington Post poll - no surprise there. The results: that "80 percent believe that recent sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely, and more than a third say such a conflict is 'very likely' to occur." In this poll, the American public reveals its doubts about the war in Iraq and its discontent with the current administration's handling of the war, the article says, noting that Bush's approval rating continues to tank (though, oddly, it's 7 points higher than in last week's CBS poll - be sure to check out the photo of Bush at that link for an illustration of objective journalism as it's currently defined).
But waitaminnit... How about this older poll?
So let's see here. Are the American people wise and deliberative, perceiving geopolitical matters with a clarity unmatched by the Bush administration... or ignorant sheep, easily led by same? Or have they just been studying up since 2003? Gosh, I need a program.
UPDATE: With a tip o' the hat to Belmont Club, here's Secretary Rumsfeld speaking about the fears of civil war in the aftermath of the destruction of the Golden Mosque:
The above obviously supports my point - that there's an agenda being set, and news is being shaped to fit it. Secretary Rumsfeld strongly implies later in the press conference from which the above is taken, though, that the agenda-setting is not necessarily (is not even probably) on the part of the journalistic media - but rather is a disinformation campaign on the part of al Qaeda itself. I'm chastened to admit that even though I've been posting and commenting on this and similar subjects for a long time now (on this blog, only once recently - here), I neglected to consider that the press might be useful idiots.
Wretchard at Belmont believes, concerning the recent report that Iran's "signature" is on particularly deadly shaped charges being found in Iraq, that the news cycle will go thusly:
And this, friends and neighbors, is why I get so frustrated at the continuing efforts on the Left to "gotcha" Bush: it's a bootless distraction from the matter of real import - that there is a segment of one of the largest religious populations in the world that is committed to our destruction. That segment is forced into asymmetric warfare with us at present and for the foreseeable future. But it's not necessary for them to win a war if they can win the peace, to borrow a phrase. How important is it that we, the West, either remain in control of or successfully integrate and inculcate our values into immigrating Muslims in the societies we presently dominate? Ask these people - except that you can't, because they're dead.
But waitaminnit... How about this older poll?
Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. [...] The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.
So let's see here. Are the American people wise and deliberative, perceiving geopolitical matters with a clarity unmatched by the Bush administration... or ignorant sheep, easily led by same? Or have they just been studying up since 2003? Gosh, I need a program.
UPDATE: With a tip o' the hat to Belmont Club, here's Secretary Rumsfeld speaking about the fears of civil war in the aftermath of the destruction of the Golden Mosque:
From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey. The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated. The behavior of the Iraqi security forces had been mischaracterized in some instances. And I guess that is to say nothing of the apparently inaccurate and harmful reports of U.S. military conduct in connection with a bus filled with passengers in Iraq.
Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side. It isn't as though there simply have been a series of random errors on both sides of issues. On the contrary, the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.
And then I notice today that there's been a public opinion poll reporting that the readers of these exaggerations believe Iraq is in a civil war -- a majority do, which I suppose is little wonder that the reports we've seen have had that effect on the American people.
The above obviously supports my point - that there's an agenda being set, and news is being shaped to fit it. Secretary Rumsfeld strongly implies later in the press conference from which the above is taken, though, that the agenda-setting is not necessarily (is not even probably) on the part of the journalistic media - but rather is a disinformation campaign on the part of al Qaeda itself. I'm chastened to admit that even though I've been posting and commenting on this and similar subjects for a long time now (on this blog, only once recently - here), I neglected to consider that the press might be useful idiots.
Wretchard at Belmont believes, concerning the recent report that Iran's "signature" is on particularly deadly shaped charges being found in Iraq, that the news cycle will go thusly:
The 'Iraq is in a state of civil war' lead will continue to be emphasized but attacks may suddenly shift to American troops after a long period of being concentrated upon sectarian targets to create another theme: a Shi'ite insurgency. This plus a clamor to 'bring the boys home' may create a triple wave designed to entirely collapse public support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. The enemy may have failed to win the Sunni insurgency; been unable to plunge Iraq into civil war; proved incapable of stopping the formation of a new Iraqi army and state. But none of that will matter if the three themes of 'ongoing civil war', a Shi'ite insurgency and the need to engage in headlong retreat are successfully promoted in "the capitals of the Western world".
And this, friends and neighbors, is why I get so frustrated at the continuing efforts on the Left to "gotcha" Bush: it's a bootless distraction from the matter of real import - that there is a segment of one of the largest religious populations in the world that is committed to our destruction. That segment is forced into asymmetric warfare with us at present and for the foreseeable future. But it's not necessary for them to win a war if they can win the peace, to borrow a phrase. How important is it that we, the West, either remain in control of or successfully integrate and inculcate our values into immigrating Muslims in the societies we presently dominate? Ask these people - except that you can't, because they're dead.
Urbanity, metrosex, crunchiness
I just finished a remarkable book: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. It's not a novel, but it appears to be one; its pace is both fast and carefully controlled, with shifting points of view that practically made me growl at the chapter headings when I realized that Larson was going to abandon the narrative he'd been following in the previous chapter to take up a new one. It's the story, or at any rate a story, of the Chicago World's Fair, or more correctly the World Columbian Exposition, in 1893. In brief, at the same time that a luminous group of American architects and artists was racing first to envision and then to bring about the miracle of the White City, a serial killer was setting up shop at the Exposition's outskirts, taking advantage of the combination of an unprecedented inflow of young and naive women into Chicago and the confusion surrounding the movements of tens of thousands of people at the Fair. I read it in two days, largely because it wouldn't let me sleep.
But - as always seems to happen these days - the convergence of my reading this book for my neighborhood book club with other events triggers the "blogging gene," and a post is born. The "other events": the Oscars, online discussions of the "crunchy con" phenomenon (such as it is), and my kids' getting back into Bambi. Here we go:
In Devil, Larson quotes unstintingly from the correspondence of the actors (pointing out more than once that in those days, everyone who could write did so, at length - I consider myself an heir to that time, and anyone attempting a word count on my blog entries would no doubt have to agree) and from publications at the time. What struck me in so many of Larson's quotations was the character of the writers, exposed in their words. Men praised one another freely. They complimented one another's accomplishments, sometimes with full sincerity, but sometimes out of courtesy at the expense of commenting on their own. People expressed soaring emotions at their first experience of the Fair - notably pride that Chicago, up to then considered a provincial hard-knocks cowtown (actually pigtown), had eclipsed Paris in the beauty, grandeur, scope, and attendance at its Exposition. Garrison Keillor's "where the men are all handsome, the women are all strong, and the children are all above average" formulation for life in Lake Wobegon seems real in these excerpted letters: the people may have been flawed, their faults may have rivalled ours, but they wrote like heroes. And writing, I believe, is a mirror image of the soul of the writer, at least when it's been adequately taught and learned.
So. There is the "urbanity" of the title. The writers were unfailingly courteous even when they were at one another's throats - just as civilized people ought to be. Miss Manners, my favorite etiquetteer, enjoys pointing out to people who say that good manners are wimpy that nowhere is it written that you can't be forceful and mannerly at the same time; in fact, classic Western etiquette contains specific forms even for insults and responses to them. (A terrific example, from the apparently now out-of-print Miss Manners's Guide To the Turn of the Millenium: the mother-in-law who gave her principled-vegan daughter-in-law a fur wrap for Christmas at a "senior relative's" home, which the d-in-law had to open in front of the family; the m-in-law asked pointedly, "How do you like it?" Miss Manners calls this now-rare gambit a classic: the expensive gift given as an insult. The d-in-law, according to Miss Manners, responded exactly correctly when, absolutely straight-faced and with flat inflection, she stared her m-in-law in the eyes and said, "You shouldn't have.") Of course, the fact that this book is about a serial killer too only highlights the urbanity of the rest of its characters.
Now, contrast urbanity with metrosexuality. Metrosexualness? Metrosex. Whatever. Practitioners may think of themselves as urbane: after all, they live in big cities, in which "urbanity" is rooted; they take care to observe the correct physical forms such as how to dress, how to dance, what darn fork to use. But the difference between an urbane man and the metrosexual man who internalizes metrosexual appearances as values is clearly illustrated in George Clooney's Oscar acceptance speech. Not the rather understated politics of it - but the part where he compliments his fellow actors. I've looked in vain for a transcript, but here's what I recall: First, he notes that every nominee turned in a terrific performance and it was a great honor even to be included in that group. But instead of stopping there and moving on to the "I thank everybody" portion of the speech, he has to undercut his own compliment by pointing out that it's impossible actually to compare people's performances unless everyone performs exactly the same role - and then wraps it all up by practically muttering, "Try it in a Bat suit," or words to that effect, which doesn't come off as self-deprecating but rather as sour.
Now, I think George Clooney is pretty cute, though I get tired of tilting my head so I can look at his mug straight-on. I loved him in O Brother Where Art Thou?. But he ain't urbane - just metrosexual.
Let me also say here that I have no objection - in fact, the opposite of an objection - to men's observing courteous forms. A man who dresses well, knows how to make conversation, even gets manicures if that's his bag - these are all great with me. It's the man who confuses these outward forms with inward convictions who's earned my dismissal.
And on to Bambi. It's a movie that - as we choir hounds might say - rather loves the sound of its own voice a bit much; there's so much footage of pretty scenery and innovative animation (the forest fire against the night sky, for instance) that story elements seem almost to intrude on the movie's real reason for being: to elicit "Awwww"s at the cute moments and "Oooooh"s of wonder at the better-than-photography beauty of the forest world. One easy-to-overlook element is that Bambi's parents are a model of what parents used to be expected to be. I'm not speaking just of the heroism of the mother as she lags behind Bambi to draw the hunter's fire, shouting to him to run faster, and not to look back; I'm not speaking just of the determination of the father as he prods and chides Bambi back to his feet to outrun the fire after he's been exhausted by dogs and grazed by a bullet. I'm speaking too of the mother's patient insistence that Bambi "try again" when he falls as a fawn, and the father's, what, four lines in the whole movie. It seems almost axiomatic in the context of the time that the father-figure would be "strong and silent," the mother-figure devoted but not indulgent. One of the great things Disney has done for American society, in my view, is to preserve these images of parenthood: Disney parents, at least in their feature films, are heroic in a manner that other cultural images of parenthood don't support. They're often a bit more hapless now than they were in the Bambi days, but there's a core of Bambi's father's determination and Bambi's mother's self-sacrifice in them still.
Rod Dreher points to a "new" subgroup among conservatives, the "crunchy cons." He compares this group to David Brooks's "Bobos":
He speaks of "authenticity" as a value after which crunchy cons strive: a sense that they have contributed meaningfully to their own lives. He gives the example of homemade apple butter; he talks about the organic food co-op to which he belongs; he says, "All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer."
I'm terrribly uncomfortable with his conclusions. I am the kind of person who keeps a pantry stocked with ingredients rather than mixes; I am the kind of person who prefers an old house in an old neighborhood, where even if the houses when new were all on the same plan, time has allowed subsequent owners to leave a unique stamp, to new developments; I am the kind of person who makes apple butter. (Actually not apple butter but jams of various kinds; I don't like apple butter.) But a few years ago I stopped hating Sam's Club and starting actually enjoying it, smiling at my fellow shoppers who, like me, didn't see shopping in a warehouse as either a Sacrament or a soul-sucking ordeal - just a shopping trip - and the sense of superiority in Dreher's and Brooks's prose bothers me to no end. One of Dreher's crunchy friends said,
It is stuck-up. Look at the words she chose: "real"; "worthy"; "Purina People Chow." In what way can we interpret this sentiment as other than "My choices are better than those of people who shop at Wal-Mart"? Now, when I'm shopping for the trappings of our life, they're required to be both pleasing and functional to the greatest degree possible, because, why not? When it's reasonable to combine beauty and practicality, who would choose the ugly-but-functional thing, or the beautiful-but-useless thing? (All right. I know there are people who would choose each of these, for principled reasons I don't share. I'm trying to show, here, why I mostly fit the profile of the crunchy conservative but hate the implications of it.) The key for me, though, is reasonableness. My household goes through almost a gallon of milk a day; I'm darned if I'm going to buy it from an Amish farmer in Lancaster County fresh from the cow. I buy three gallons at a time, twice a week, at Sam's Club - not because we can't afford or perceive "better" but because "better" isn't sufficiently "better" for me to expend the effort on it. I'm not less authentic because of that choice; I'm just practical about something that doesn't require more than practicality. Similarly, I haven't bought Bisquick in years - maybe ever; it was a fixture in my husband's house growing up, so he may have bought it for us at some point. But I don't see buying Bisquick as a character flaw, just as a choice a consumer makes on the basis of different priorities than mine.
How does this point of view square with my flat-out judgmentalism concerning the difference between urbanity and metrosex? A reference to My Fair Lady sums it up pretty well: Col. Pickering treats a flower-seller like a duchess; Mr. Higgins treats a duchess like a flower-seller. Col. Pickering is a courteous man; Mr. Higgins is a boor in metrosexual clothing. Both men may prefer vintage port and fine pipe tobacco; their choices in that regard are unimportant compared with their character.
But - as always seems to happen these days - the convergence of my reading this book for my neighborhood book club with other events triggers the "blogging gene," and a post is born. The "other events": the Oscars, online discussions of the "crunchy con" phenomenon (such as it is), and my kids' getting back into Bambi. Here we go:
In Devil, Larson quotes unstintingly from the correspondence of the actors (pointing out more than once that in those days, everyone who could write did so, at length - I consider myself an heir to that time, and anyone attempting a word count on my blog entries would no doubt have to agree) and from publications at the time. What struck me in so many of Larson's quotations was the character of the writers, exposed in their words. Men praised one another freely. They complimented one another's accomplishments, sometimes with full sincerity, but sometimes out of courtesy at the expense of commenting on their own. People expressed soaring emotions at their first experience of the Fair - notably pride that Chicago, up to then considered a provincial hard-knocks cowtown (actually pigtown), had eclipsed Paris in the beauty, grandeur, scope, and attendance at its Exposition. Garrison Keillor's "where the men are all handsome, the women are all strong, and the children are all above average" formulation for life in Lake Wobegon seems real in these excerpted letters: the people may have been flawed, their faults may have rivalled ours, but they wrote like heroes. And writing, I believe, is a mirror image of the soul of the writer, at least when it's been adequately taught and learned.
So. There is the "urbanity" of the title. The writers were unfailingly courteous even when they were at one another's throats - just as civilized people ought to be. Miss Manners, my favorite etiquetteer, enjoys pointing out to people who say that good manners are wimpy that nowhere is it written that you can't be forceful and mannerly at the same time; in fact, classic Western etiquette contains specific forms even for insults and responses to them. (A terrific example, from the apparently now out-of-print Miss Manners's Guide To the Turn of the Millenium: the mother-in-law who gave her principled-vegan daughter-in-law a fur wrap for Christmas at a "senior relative's" home, which the d-in-law had to open in front of the family; the m-in-law asked pointedly, "How do you like it?" Miss Manners calls this now-rare gambit a classic: the expensive gift given as an insult. The d-in-law, according to Miss Manners, responded exactly correctly when, absolutely straight-faced and with flat inflection, she stared her m-in-law in the eyes and said, "You shouldn't have.") Of course, the fact that this book is about a serial killer too only highlights the urbanity of the rest of its characters.
Now, contrast urbanity with metrosexuality. Metrosexualness? Metrosex. Whatever. Practitioners may think of themselves as urbane: after all, they live in big cities, in which "urbanity" is rooted; they take care to observe the correct physical forms such as how to dress, how to dance, what darn fork to use. But the difference between an urbane man and the metrosexual man who internalizes metrosexual appearances as values is clearly illustrated in George Clooney's Oscar acceptance speech. Not the rather understated politics of it - but the part where he compliments his fellow actors. I've looked in vain for a transcript, but here's what I recall: First, he notes that every nominee turned in a terrific performance and it was a great honor even to be included in that group. But instead of stopping there and moving on to the "I thank everybody" portion of the speech, he has to undercut his own compliment by pointing out that it's impossible actually to compare people's performances unless everyone performs exactly the same role - and then wraps it all up by practically muttering, "Try it in a Bat suit," or words to that effect, which doesn't come off as self-deprecating but rather as sour.
Now, I think George Clooney is pretty cute, though I get tired of tilting my head so I can look at his mug straight-on. I loved him in O Brother Where Art Thou?. But he ain't urbane - just metrosexual.
Let me also say here that I have no objection - in fact, the opposite of an objection - to men's observing courteous forms. A man who dresses well, knows how to make conversation, even gets manicures if that's his bag - these are all great with me. It's the man who confuses these outward forms with inward convictions who's earned my dismissal.
And on to Bambi. It's a movie that - as we choir hounds might say - rather loves the sound of its own voice a bit much; there's so much footage of pretty scenery and innovative animation (the forest fire against the night sky, for instance) that story elements seem almost to intrude on the movie's real reason for being: to elicit "Awwww"s at the cute moments and "Oooooh"s of wonder at the better-than-photography beauty of the forest world. One easy-to-overlook element is that Bambi's parents are a model of what parents used to be expected to be. I'm not speaking just of the heroism of the mother as she lags behind Bambi to draw the hunter's fire, shouting to him to run faster, and not to look back; I'm not speaking just of the determination of the father as he prods and chides Bambi back to his feet to outrun the fire after he's been exhausted by dogs and grazed by a bullet. I'm speaking too of the mother's patient insistence that Bambi "try again" when he falls as a fawn, and the father's, what, four lines in the whole movie. It seems almost axiomatic in the context of the time that the father-figure would be "strong and silent," the mother-figure devoted but not indulgent. One of the great things Disney has done for American society, in my view, is to preserve these images of parenthood: Disney parents, at least in their feature films, are heroic in a manner that other cultural images of parenthood don't support. They're often a bit more hapless now than they were in the Bambi days, but there's a core of Bambi's father's determination and Bambi's mother's self-sacrifice in them still.
Rod Dreher points to a "new" subgroup among conservatives, the "crunchy cons." He compares this group to David Brooks's "Bobos":
Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian ("Bobo") behavior. "Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred," he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. "We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action."
He speaks of "authenticity" as a value after which crunchy cons strive: a sense that they have contributed meaningfully to their own lives. He gives the example of homemade apple butter; he talks about the organic food co-op to which he belongs; he says, "All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer."
I'm terrribly uncomfortable with his conclusions. I am the kind of person who keeps a pantry stocked with ingredients rather than mixes; I am the kind of person who prefers an old house in an old neighborhood, where even if the houses when new were all on the same plan, time has allowed subsequent owners to leave a unique stamp, to new developments; I am the kind of person who makes apple butter. (Actually not apple butter but jams of various kinds; I don't like apple butter.) But a few years ago I stopped hating Sam's Club and starting actually enjoying it, smiling at my fellow shoppers who, like me, didn't see shopping in a warehouse as either a Sacrament or a soul-sucking ordeal - just a shopping trip - and the sense of superiority in Dreher's and Brooks's prose bothers me to no end. One of Dreher's crunchy friends said,
"Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — 'authentic.' I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You're looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty."
It is stuck-up. Look at the words she chose: "real"; "worthy"; "Purina People Chow." In what way can we interpret this sentiment as other than "My choices are better than those of people who shop at Wal-Mart"? Now, when I'm shopping for the trappings of our life, they're required to be both pleasing and functional to the greatest degree possible, because, why not? When it's reasonable to combine beauty and practicality, who would choose the ugly-but-functional thing, or the beautiful-but-useless thing? (All right. I know there are people who would choose each of these, for principled reasons I don't share. I'm trying to show, here, why I mostly fit the profile of the crunchy conservative but hate the implications of it.) The key for me, though, is reasonableness. My household goes through almost a gallon of milk a day; I'm darned if I'm going to buy it from an Amish farmer in Lancaster County fresh from the cow. I buy three gallons at a time, twice a week, at Sam's Club - not because we can't afford or perceive "better" but because "better" isn't sufficiently "better" for me to expend the effort on it. I'm not less authentic because of that choice; I'm just practical about something that doesn't require more than practicality. Similarly, I haven't bought Bisquick in years - maybe ever; it was a fixture in my husband's house growing up, so he may have bought it for us at some point. But I don't see buying Bisquick as a character flaw, just as a choice a consumer makes on the basis of different priorities than mine.
How does this point of view square with my flat-out judgmentalism concerning the difference between urbanity and metrosex? A reference to My Fair Lady sums it up pretty well: Col. Pickering treats a flower-seller like a duchess; Mr. Higgins treats a duchess like a flower-seller. Col. Pickering is a courteous man; Mr. Higgins is a boor in metrosexual clothing. Both men may prefer vintage port and fine pipe tobacco; their choices in that regard are unimportant compared with their character.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
They're not just cartoons
Via Instapundit, David Warren at Real Clear Politics vindicates me in the latest dinner-table debate:
The husband and I go round and round on this subject, he mostly saying, "They're just cartoons" and I mostly objecting, "No, they're a shot across our bow - if we're not willing to stand up for a value as fundamental to our society as free speech, what are we willing to stand up for?" I take no joy from Warren's confirmation; I don't want the kind of conflict that appears to me to be looming. (And, let me be more clear: the husband doesn't trivialize the issue - he just sees a different starting point from mine, at the violent responses to the cartoons rather than at the initial and apparently carefully fostered outrage and the furious backpedaling efforts of some - too many - in the West.) But it is what it is. There's a strain of Islam that does want this conflict. Whether it's a sign of a Final Battle like Armageddon and thus a desired outcome among certain of the devout, like the red heifer breeding project among some fundamentalist Christians1, or a more secular spoiling-for-a-fight thing whereby some Islamists recognize a widening crack in the West's armor that they're eager to exploit, I don't know. The difference in motivation does matter; religious fanatics are generally thought to be harder to convince to lay down their arms than mere power-seekers. But either way, this time looks more and more like the world between the wars.
Bloggers are enjoined not to throw around the N-word - no, not that one (well, yes, that one too, but on the grounds of civility rather than stifling debate); "Nazi" is the word that triggers Godwin's Law. But because that group was so successful at rising from the "nothing" of an unhappy populace to within a few bad decisions of European domination, it's worth a look, because so many of the elements are similar: the very real disparity between the downtrodden group and the world they can see outside their reach; the perception, perhaps justified, perhaps not so much, that their downtroddenness comes as a result of that outside world's deliberate actions; the handy scapegoat; the emphasis on ideological (in this case) purity; the conviction that any who don't conform to that standard of purity are inferior, but are not just to be ignored - rather destroyed; a tendency here in that outside world to feel a bit (or a lot) guilty about that same disparity and to attempt to assuage our own guilt by (another word that comes dangerously close to invoking Godwin) appeasement; an arms race; the actual - not virtual - stifling of dissent; a continual racheting-up of protest from marches to flag-burnings to kidnappings to - what? Kristallnacht? Or have we been there already?
If I were a relatively powerless fringe group who desperately wanted power, I could do worse than to look to that group for strategy and tactics. I could draw the simple lesson "Don't go mad" from the leader of that group and reasonably believe that I could sidestep their defeat. Most importantly, I could push my case as far as possible as quickly as possible, so that the sweet convention that that group May Not Be Named could effectively do my debate-stifling for me for a while - and when the West awakens, they may be surprised at how much I've accomplished during their nap.
I'm simultaneously gratified and saddened to learn that Mark Steyn agrees.
1It's possible to read Revelations in such a way that certains Signs and PortentsTM point to an imminent Armageddon. (In my own faith tradition, we tend to go by the "You know not the day nor the hour" verse instead.) One of these signs is the birth of a red heifer in Israel. There's at least one fundamentalist Christian group out there that's trying to take the timing into its own hands by undertaking a project to breed that red heifer predictably from parents who will then be transported to Israel. In my opinion, this project is misguided in so many ways I don't know where to start - but conceptualizing God as a kind of garbage-in-garbage-out Black Box will do as well as any other starting point. But please note that because (a) I'm not in or of the group, and (b) I first heard about them on the pretty much hostile-by-definition NPR some years ago, I may be wrong about both their motives and their methods.
The cartoons themselves were a red herring from the start -- a fake issue, trumped up by fanatical Muslims seeking grievances to abet a confrontation, and thereby extract concessions from the West. It is a fire, still being stoked around the world by radical “Islamists”...
The husband and I go round and round on this subject, he mostly saying, "They're just cartoons" and I mostly objecting, "No, they're a shot across our bow - if we're not willing to stand up for a value as fundamental to our society as free speech, what are we willing to stand up for?" I take no joy from Warren's confirmation; I don't want the kind of conflict that appears to me to be looming. (And, let me be more clear: the husband doesn't trivialize the issue - he just sees a different starting point from mine, at the violent responses to the cartoons rather than at the initial and apparently carefully fostered outrage and the furious backpedaling efforts of some - too many - in the West.) But it is what it is. There's a strain of Islam that does want this conflict. Whether it's a sign of a Final Battle like Armageddon and thus a desired outcome among certain of the devout, like the red heifer breeding project among some fundamentalist Christians1, or a more secular spoiling-for-a-fight thing whereby some Islamists recognize a widening crack in the West's armor that they're eager to exploit, I don't know. The difference in motivation does matter; religious fanatics are generally thought to be harder to convince to lay down their arms than mere power-seekers. But either way, this time looks more and more like the world between the wars.
Bloggers are enjoined not to throw around the N-word - no, not that one (well, yes, that one too, but on the grounds of civility rather than stifling debate); "Nazi" is the word that triggers Godwin's Law. But because that group was so successful at rising from the "nothing" of an unhappy populace to within a few bad decisions of European domination, it's worth a look, because so many of the elements are similar: the very real disparity between the downtrodden group and the world they can see outside their reach; the perception, perhaps justified, perhaps not so much, that their downtroddenness comes as a result of that outside world's deliberate actions; the handy scapegoat; the emphasis on ideological (in this case) purity; the conviction that any who don't conform to that standard of purity are inferior, but are not just to be ignored - rather destroyed; a tendency here in that outside world to feel a bit (or a lot) guilty about that same disparity and to attempt to assuage our own guilt by (another word that comes dangerously close to invoking Godwin) appeasement; an arms race; the actual - not virtual - stifling of dissent; a continual racheting-up of protest from marches to flag-burnings to kidnappings to - what? Kristallnacht? Or have we been there already?
If I were a relatively powerless fringe group who desperately wanted power, I could do worse than to look to that group for strategy and tactics. I could draw the simple lesson "Don't go mad" from the leader of that group and reasonably believe that I could sidestep their defeat. Most importantly, I could push my case as far as possible as quickly as possible, so that the sweet convention that that group May Not Be Named could effectively do my debate-stifling for me for a while - and when the West awakens, they may be surprised at how much I've accomplished during their nap.
I'm simultaneously gratified and saddened to learn that Mark Steyn agrees.
1It's possible to read Revelations in such a way that certains Signs and PortentsTM point to an imminent Armageddon. (In my own faith tradition, we tend to go by the "You know not the day nor the hour" verse instead.) One of these signs is the birth of a red heifer in Israel. There's at least one fundamentalist Christian group out there that's trying to take the timing into its own hands by undertaking a project to breed that red heifer predictably from parents who will then be transported to Israel. In my opinion, this project is misguided in so many ways I don't know where to start - but conceptualizing God as a kind of garbage-in-garbage-out Black Box will do as well as any other starting point. But please note that because (a) I'm not in or of the group, and (b) I first heard about them on the pretty much hostile-by-definition NPR some years ago, I may be wrong about both their motives and their methods.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
What we have here is a failure to communicate
Austin Bay is looking at captured al Qaeda documents; he's been doing so for, oh, a couple of weeks. I haven't posted on them so far because they frankly weren't very enlightening to me; they revealed a committed, ideology-based, well-organized, but misled cadre - nothing we didn't already know. The translated documents can be found here, on the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point website.
However, the post to which I linked in the first paragraph is interesting, because it points up two new, or newish, bits of information: first, that al Qaeda's private thoughts about Saudi Arabia are considerably different from its public pronouncements - more in a moment; and second, that al Qaeda considers (or did at the time this document was written, at any rate) the oil spot strategy, starting in Saudi Arabia, its best bet for global jihad. The second point is interesting mostly because of the irony: the oil spot strategy is what Krepinevich was talking about last year as our best chance of success (with a good bit of rueful head-shaking about how the Bush administration just didn't see it and was therefore failing miserably - a piece of typical realpolitik shortsightedness that failed to take into account that Iraq is the oil spot). So it's perhaps not surprising that al Qaeda, that bunch of ultra-realpolitniks in spite of their driving ideology, should adopt the same strategy.
More important is the disconnect between al Qaeda's public and private expressions about Saudi Arabia. From the synopsis of the al Qaeda document given by Austin Bay, at the same Austin Bay link as above:
Note that this is a translation of al Qaeda's words, not Austin's. Contrast this statement with bin Laden's from 1996:
...as it appeared here. Now, bin Laden, as a Saudi himself, obviously draws a distinction between his kind of Saudi and the House of Saud and its sympathizers - but examine this disparity in message through the prism of the recent attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra: al Qaeda in Iraq is part of the so-called "insurgency." Their goal in Iraq, however, is larger than an actual insurgency's goals, which would be to bring about the end of an American presence and to take on political power in Iraq. These insurgency goals are indeed what the Ba'athist insurgents in Iraq want, for obvious reasons: they were in the catbird seat under Saddam and want that seat back. The way for this now significantly minor (rather a non-sequitur of phrasing, but the synapses aren't clicking all that efficiently this evening) minority to achieve those goals is to foment a civil war and to be the last ones standing. That's the only way they can reclaim power, now that the Shi'ite majority has discovered its power and the Kurds have been able to enjoy theirs.
So why was the Golden Mosque bombed? It doesn't advance the aims of al Qaeda, which (according to this source, center on driving Americans out of all Muslim lands, particularly Saudi Arabia, and displacing Western-style democracies throughout the Middle East (with destroying Israel and reestablishing the caliphate in there for good measure). The way to drive Americans out of Iraq, much less the Islamic world, is not to create a need for more and longer-lasting American military presence with two years to go in Bush's term; the way to bring down the fledgling Iraqi democracy, much less to quell democratic movements elsewhere in the Middle East, is not to give a government only just vigorously drying behind its ears a chance to appear statesmanlike and to exert control while still well supported by the United States (better in both cases to wait until more American troops had been withdrawn, and Americans were accustomed to an ongoing orderly disengagement). al-Zarqawi is on record as wanting to see a bloody war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and indeed al Qaeda under his leadership claims responsibility for the Golden Mosque bombing. But was it strategically supported? Or was he acting outside his role as leader of al Qaeda in Iraq? Or, was he taking an opportunity to claim credit for a devastating attack carried out by Sunni, perhaps Ba'athist, insurgents? Is bin Laden even now slapping his forehead and saying, "Why again did I let that numbskull pledge fealty to me"?
Heck, I don't know. What strikes me, though, is that there's less consensus in al Qaeda than they need in order to accomplish their goals. In Iraq they've miscalculated again and again, galvanizing the population against them so that every month brings more informants and fewer safe havens. In Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is actually a main stream of Islam rather than a narrow tributary, will al Qaeda be similarly fragmented in its approach? The attempted-but-failed attack by al Qaeda on a Saudi oil facility last week suggests that it may be so: if al Qaeda were to succeed in toppling the House of Saud by destroying the Saudi economy, the job of rebuilding what they had destroyed without help from the West could (it seems to me would) be more than they could handle.
Not that I want to give advice to the enemy. But as even Juan Cole says, "By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he [bin Laden] denied himself any real impact." I can't resist the urge at this moment to point out that making Howard Dean chairman of the DNC was a similarly head-scratching move - but as I've tried to point out repeatedly in the past few weeks, that's neither here nor there; the Democratic Party either will or won't carry on in its current often inexplicable vein and neither outcome threatens real national unity, nor is the divide between Left and Right in this country so great that it can't be bridged when necessary - whereas bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda are in a struggle for their own lives and, if they can survive, for any slightest whiff of political power. You'd think they would decide on a message that would further their struggle, rather than one that only chips away at (if not outright decimates) any coalition-building they've managed so far.
However, the post to which I linked in the first paragraph is interesting, because it points up two new, or newish, bits of information: first, that al Qaeda's private thoughts about Saudi Arabia are considerably different from its public pronouncements - more in a moment; and second, that al Qaeda considers (or did at the time this document was written, at any rate) the oil spot strategy, starting in Saudi Arabia, its best bet for global jihad. The second point is interesting mostly because of the irony: the oil spot strategy is what Krepinevich was talking about last year as our best chance of success (with a good bit of rueful head-shaking about how the Bush administration just didn't see it and was therefore failing miserably - a piece of typical realpolitik shortsightedness that failed to take into account that Iraq is the oil spot). So it's perhaps not surprising that al Qaeda, that bunch of ultra-realpolitniks in spite of their driving ideology, should adopt the same strategy.
More important is the disconnect between al Qaeda's public and private expressions about Saudi Arabia. From the synopsis of the al Qaeda document given by Austin Bay, at the same Austin Bay link as above:
The fight against the Americans (Jews and Crusaders) is characterized as a series of battles; the struggle with Saudi Arabia is a war. An oil spot strategy must be pursued against Saudi Arabia, with the goal of expanding the circle of jihad through successful operations that break down the fear barrier which keeps Mujahideen from fully engaging the Saudi state.
Note that this is a translation of al Qaeda's words, not Austin's. Contrast this statement with bin Laden's from 1996:
"The ordinary Saudi knows that his country is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services…Our country has become a colony of America…Saudis know their real enemy is America" (UPI Intelligence Watch, March 21, 2005).
...as it appeared here. Now, bin Laden, as a Saudi himself, obviously draws a distinction between his kind of Saudi and the House of Saud and its sympathizers - but examine this disparity in message through the prism of the recent attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra: al Qaeda in Iraq is part of the so-called "insurgency." Their goal in Iraq, however, is larger than an actual insurgency's goals, which would be to bring about the end of an American presence and to take on political power in Iraq. These insurgency goals are indeed what the Ba'athist insurgents in Iraq want, for obvious reasons: they were in the catbird seat under Saddam and want that seat back. The way for this now significantly minor (rather a non-sequitur of phrasing, but the synapses aren't clicking all that efficiently this evening) minority to achieve those goals is to foment a civil war and to be the last ones standing. That's the only way they can reclaim power, now that the Shi'ite majority has discovered its power and the Kurds have been able to enjoy theirs.
So why was the Golden Mosque bombed? It doesn't advance the aims of al Qaeda, which (according to this source, center on driving Americans out of all Muslim lands, particularly Saudi Arabia, and displacing Western-style democracies throughout the Middle East (with destroying Israel and reestablishing the caliphate in there for good measure). The way to drive Americans out of Iraq, much less the Islamic world, is not to create a need for more and longer-lasting American military presence with two years to go in Bush's term; the way to bring down the fledgling Iraqi democracy, much less to quell democratic movements elsewhere in the Middle East, is not to give a government only just vigorously drying behind its ears a chance to appear statesmanlike and to exert control while still well supported by the United States (better in both cases to wait until more American troops had been withdrawn, and Americans were accustomed to an ongoing orderly disengagement). al-Zarqawi is on record as wanting to see a bloody war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and indeed al Qaeda under his leadership claims responsibility for the Golden Mosque bombing. But was it strategically supported? Or was he acting outside his role as leader of al Qaeda in Iraq? Or, was he taking an opportunity to claim credit for a devastating attack carried out by Sunni, perhaps Ba'athist, insurgents? Is bin Laden even now slapping his forehead and saying, "Why again did I let that numbskull pledge fealty to me"?
Heck, I don't know. What strikes me, though, is that there's less consensus in al Qaeda than they need in order to accomplish their goals. In Iraq they've miscalculated again and again, galvanizing the population against them so that every month brings more informants and fewer safe havens. In Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is actually a main stream of Islam rather than a narrow tributary, will al Qaeda be similarly fragmented in its approach? The attempted-but-failed attack by al Qaeda on a Saudi oil facility last week suggests that it may be so: if al Qaeda were to succeed in toppling the House of Saud by destroying the Saudi economy, the job of rebuilding what they had destroyed without help from the West could (it seems to me would) be more than they could handle.
Not that I want to give advice to the enemy. But as even Juan Cole says, "By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he [bin Laden] denied himself any real impact." I can't resist the urge at this moment to point out that making Howard Dean chairman of the DNC was a similarly head-scratching move - but as I've tried to point out repeatedly in the past few weeks, that's neither here nor there; the Democratic Party either will or won't carry on in its current often inexplicable vein and neither outcome threatens real national unity, nor is the divide between Left and Right in this country so great that it can't be bridged when necessary - whereas bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda are in a struggle for their own lives and, if they can survive, for any slightest whiff of political power. You'd think they would decide on a message that would further their struggle, rather than one that only chips away at (if not outright decimates) any coalition-building they've managed so far.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Compare and contrast
I think I'm like a fine wine.
(Thom, I swiped the picture from your site because I don't have a scanner for my own yearbook. Do you want a link back?)
"Think of how we feel..."
I've been looking all over for a transcript of a little "think-piece" by NPR's Daniel Schorr that my husband heard yesterday. (A brave man, he - my husband, not Schorr - also listens to Air America at times.) Apparently, it went something like this (please note that there isn't a real quote in this whole post; I'm setting apart the paraphrase so it's clear that it isn't me, that's all):
"Stop the tape!" as my sole source of hard news, Rush Limbaugh, says (heavy-handed irony alert). Apparently, according to Schorr, the response of the intrepid members of the Fourth Estate to a secretive and powerful (and distrusted - by them at any rate - and not well-liked) high elected official is to shrug and wander off, dejected, rather than to follow him around, keep on calling his staffers, and basically be journalists rather than stenographers.
The upshot of the piece, and again I apologize for not having an actual transcript and going from my husband's notoriously imperfect memory, appears to be that we should understand and feel sorry for the White House press corps, because they abdicated what they so often claim as their right on behalf of the American people but I think would be more accurately termed their job to dig out true stories and report them. Let me repeat: faced with an unusually powerful and secretive vice president - recall that Teddy Roosevelt was originally stuck in the Veep seat by his own party to sideline him, since the position was considered about as powerful as that of a queen who's already produced the heir and the spare - the press corps packed up their Vice Presidential desks and resigned themselves to Four More Years! of doing little besides attending the Monday morning press briefings and the occasional cocktail party.
Oh, I understand, all right. Nice work if you can get it.
Some people have been saying that the news media have acted like spoiled children over Cheney's hunting accident and the delay in notifying them. Think of how we feel: most Vice Presidents throughout our history have clamored for press coverage and complained when they didn't receive enough. After all, most have been poised to run for President as a successor to the incumbent. Dick Cheney is a notable exception, Not only is he completely uninterested in running for President, but he's also the most powerful and the most secretive Vice President ever. I guarantee that there isn't a Vice Presidential desk at any major news outlet, five years into this administration, because as [someone or other] quipped, "That desk would be like the Maytag repairman!"
"Stop the tape!" as my sole source of hard news, Rush Limbaugh, says (heavy-handed irony alert). Apparently, according to Schorr, the response of the intrepid members of the Fourth Estate to a secretive and powerful (and distrusted - by them at any rate - and not well-liked) high elected official is to shrug and wander off, dejected, rather than to follow him around, keep on calling his staffers, and basically be journalists rather than stenographers.
The upshot of the piece, and again I apologize for not having an actual transcript and going from my husband's notoriously imperfect memory, appears to be that we should understand and feel sorry for the White House press corps, because they abdicated what they so often claim as their right on behalf of the American people but I think would be more accurately termed their job to dig out true stories and report them. Let me repeat: faced with an unusually powerful and secretive vice president - recall that Teddy Roosevelt was originally stuck in the Veep seat by his own party to sideline him, since the position was considered about as powerful as that of a queen who's already produced the heir and the spare - the press corps packed up their Vice Presidential desks and resigned themselves to Four More Years! of doing little besides attending the Monday morning press briefings and the occasional cocktail party.
Oh, I understand, all right. Nice work if you can get it.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Born (or happy) in the USA
Try this on for size:
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Mark Steyn, Columnist to the WorldTM, is writing for an Australian audience, but let's consider the American numbers:
According to the Census Bureau, there were 60,253,375 kids under 15 in the United States in 2000, with a total population of 281,421,906. That's just under 21.5%. Better... but still too low.
This organization, ironically an arm of the Sierra Club with a "vision for environmentalism [that][...] includes educating women worldwide to achieve lower birth rates, lowering consumption levels in industrialized and developing nations, and protecting national parks and the world's remaining wild spaces from exploitation and development [as well as][...] support[ing] the fight to unseat President George Bush from office along with all other politicians hostile to preserving the environment[,]" cites this information:
There's the datum - 2.1 is replacement level, FYI. It took me four or five "click-throughs" to determine that the above was being presented as a (relatively - apparently the number represents an uptick from prior years, which is negative in their paradigm) positive datum. Finally, I found, on another page of their site:
The underlying and unspoken principle is that if everywhere on Earth becomes as sought-after a place to live as the United States, we won't have to worry about so many people coming here - and the point is well taken - but note the methodology: the SUSPS wants to level the playing field by emphasizing "open space and ecosystems" over human opportunity, as if it's our national park system that causes immigrants to flood our borders. It's a NIMBY argument that, if implemented, would only accomplish "keeping a brutha down" by not allowing entry to people who want to come here to try for their version of the vaunted American Dream, not creating an open-space utopia in which all humanity can frolic together in low-density harmony. Side note: all right, who are the racists? "Many talented immigrants" indeed. I encourage readers to visit the source document; I've selectively quoted here, and some of what I left out is even more inflammatory than what I've included.
Let's return to Mark Steyn for a moment. His piece in The Australian, cited above, is a salute to Danna Vale, a backbencher in the Australian Parliament who asked whether abortion is in Australia's interests when the demographics are what they are, or, "Can a society become more Muslim in its demographic character without also becoming more Muslim in its political and civil character?" (The quote is Mark Steyn's; I don't know to what extent he was paraphrasing Ms. Vale.)
I would posit that the goal, for us in the United States, is to ensure not so much "every child a wanted child" (which seems to me to be at least as much of a problem of parents as of their apparently unwanted children) but "every American an American who is happy to be here." I, unlike SUSPS, am not advocating a return to prior, "sustainable" levels of immigration. I do want immigration to take place in orderly and legal fashion, but as the descendant of fairly recent immigrants myself and as the mother of children half of whose ancestry consists of very early European immigrants to this land, I'm all for immigration. And I have no argument with immigration of Muslims, either, or Buddhists or Hindus or animists or any other -ist you'd care to name, except those -ists who are not happy to be here and want either to eliminate "here" altogether or so change the character of "here" that I can no longer be happy to be here.
Tortured construction... but what it comes down to is this: the Bush Doctrine is the SUSPS Doctrine turned on its head: both acknowledge that the United States is THE Premier Destination for many in the Third World. (The Bush Doctrine also acknowledges that some people respond to the disparity not by wanting to come here but by wanting to punish us for living at the tail of the curve, or by claiming that what we are and what we represent are anathema rather than the most tolerant, stable, prosperous culture the world has ever spawned.) But SUSPS wants to shut the doors now that "we" are all inside, while Bush wants to make "outside" more like "inside," so that people can choose from a less skewed set of options (or, alternatively, be considerably less envious of "inside" and dissatisfied with "outside").
I don't have a good wrap-up and I have to get my daughter to a playdate; blogging is heck, some days.
Update: I just read another Steyn piece here. As Inigo says, "Let me explain. No - it's too complicated. Let me sum up:"
Mark Steyn has been nattering on about demographics for a good few years now - he says since 9/11 caused him to take sudden note of a demographic group that hadn't seemed especially noteworthy before. It was not, he said, the people flying the planes who disturbed him; it was the people dancing in the streets afterward. He started digging into the numbers for the West versus the Muslim world and concluded, as he puts it, that:
That's a mighty short quote to set apart that way, but it's a mighty important one. In this OpinionJournal piece, Steyn is wordier than I've ever seen him, making and remaking the point that Europe-as-we-know-it is on the brink of death - he says, "Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone."
Is this tragedy, or just life? Well. If the people poised to take over those grand buildings were like-minded to the Europeans they'll replace, it'd just be life, and Europe would live on as the great dream it's been since the Enlightenment. But what Steyn sees in the near future is A Handmaid's Tale wrought by Muslim, not Christian, hands. He notes:
What we are, what we stand for, is important. For the moment I'm going to put aside cultural relativism utterly and say, it's better than Wahhabism, Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism, or pick your term - the form of Islam that strives for cultural purity and rejects Western liberalism - in its classical sense - as decadent and even more basically wrong, and that embraces jihad as its means to these ends. We ought to - we must - demand that our liberal values prevail, as long as we consider them valuable. We ought to - we must - resist this post-modern urge to be the ones who set our own Alexandrian library alight in the name of multiculturalism: if bringers of a new Dark Age want to break through our ranks, let them try, but while we can defend what we are, let us do so.
I've quoted extensively, I know, and I've carried on at great lengths even for me, but I've also found my summing-up:
One-way assimilation or death.
Why is this newspaper published in the language of a tiny island on the other side of the earth? Why does Australia have an English Queen, English common law, English institutions? Because England was the first nation to conquer infant mortality.
By 1820 medical progress had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. Britain had the manpower to take, hold, settle and administer huge chunks of real estate around the planet. Had, say, China or Russia been first to overcome childhood mortality, the modern world would be very different.
What country today has half of its population under the age of 15? Italy has 14 per cent, the UK 18 per cent, Australia 20 per cent - and Saudi Arabia has 39 per cent, Pakistan 40 per cent and Yemen 47 per cent. Little Yemen, like little Britain 200 years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world - one way or another.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Mark Steyn, Columnist to the WorldTM, is writing for an Australian audience, but let's consider the American numbers:
According to the Census Bureau, there were 60,253,375 kids under 15 in the United States in 2000, with a total population of 281,421,906. That's just under 21.5%. Better... but still too low.
This organization, ironically an arm of the Sierra Club with a "vision for environmentalism [that][...] includes educating women worldwide to achieve lower birth rates, lowering consumption levels in industrialized and developing nations, and protecting national parks and the world's remaining wild spaces from exploitation and development [as well as][...] support[ing] the fight to unseat President George Bush from office along with all other politicians hostile to preserving the environment[,]" cites this information:
[In 2000,] the average number of children born to women over a lifetime is at 2.03 - slightly below replacement level.
There's the datum - 2.1 is replacement level, FYI. It took me four or five "click-throughs" to determine that the above was being presented as a (relatively - apparently the number represents an uptick from prior years, which is negative in their paradigm) positive datum. Finally, I found, on another page of their site:
[The Sierra Club's policy of an "integrated and international approach to the global need for slowing population growth"] implicitly assumes that if global population can be stabilized, the influx of people into the U.S. will decline and U.S. population can be stabilized. Unfortunately, this grossly oversimplifies complex social and demographic forces.
Today's current world population harbors millions - if not billions - of people who are eager to enter the U.S. This degree of immigration would devastate our remaining open spaces and ecosystems and place an unacceptable burden on our infrastructure.
[...]
Thus, while we support the Sierra Club's current global policies designed to stabilize world population, we urge the Sierra Club to return to the roots of the environmental movement that encompass U.S. population - to preserve and protect our own environment for the benefit of future generations.
[...]
Unfortunately, the Sierra Club has abandoned its previous position for sustainable levels of immigration in favor of a less politically controversial policy that still threatens the environment. Therefore, SUSPS calls for the Sierra Club to readopt its policy in favor of sustainable levels of immigration. SUSPS does not call for an end to immigration to the U.S. That would deny Americans the benefit of many talented immigrants who wish to contribute to our society. Instead, SUSPS calls for a return to sustainable levels of immigration.
The underlying and unspoken principle is that if everywhere on Earth becomes as sought-after a place to live as the United States, we won't have to worry about so many people coming here - and the point is well taken - but note the methodology: the SUSPS wants to level the playing field by emphasizing "open space and ecosystems" over human opportunity, as if it's our national park system that causes immigrants to flood our borders. It's a NIMBY argument that, if implemented, would only accomplish "keeping a brutha down" by not allowing entry to people who want to come here to try for their version of the vaunted American Dream, not creating an open-space utopia in which all humanity can frolic together in low-density harmony. Side note: all right, who are the racists? "Many talented immigrants" indeed. I encourage readers to visit the source document; I've selectively quoted here, and some of what I left out is even more inflammatory than what I've included.
Let's return to Mark Steyn for a moment. His piece in The Australian, cited above, is a salute to Danna Vale, a backbencher in the Australian Parliament who asked whether abortion is in Australia's interests when the demographics are what they are, or, "Can a society become more Muslim in its demographic character without also becoming more Muslim in its political and civil character?" (The quote is Mark Steyn's; I don't know to what extent he was paraphrasing Ms. Vale.)
I would posit that the goal, for us in the United States, is to ensure not so much "every child a wanted child" (which seems to me to be at least as much of a problem of parents as of their apparently unwanted children) but "every American an American who is happy to be here." I, unlike SUSPS, am not advocating a return to prior, "sustainable" levels of immigration. I do want immigration to take place in orderly and legal fashion, but as the descendant of fairly recent immigrants myself and as the mother of children half of whose ancestry consists of very early European immigrants to this land, I'm all for immigration. And I have no argument with immigration of Muslims, either, or Buddhists or Hindus or animists or any other -ist you'd care to name, except those -ists who are not happy to be here and want either to eliminate "here" altogether or so change the character of "here" that I can no longer be happy to be here.
Tortured construction... but what it comes down to is this: the Bush Doctrine is the SUSPS Doctrine turned on its head: both acknowledge that the United States is THE Premier Destination for many in the Third World. (The Bush Doctrine also acknowledges that some people respond to the disparity not by wanting to come here but by wanting to punish us for living at the tail of the curve, or by claiming that what we are and what we represent are anathema rather than the most tolerant, stable, prosperous culture the world has ever spawned.) But SUSPS wants to shut the doors now that "we" are all inside, while Bush wants to make "outside" more like "inside," so that people can choose from a less skewed set of options (or, alternatively, be considerably less envious of "inside" and dissatisfied with "outside").
I don't have a good wrap-up and I have to get my daughter to a playdate; blogging is heck, some days.
Update: I just read another Steyn piece here. As Inigo says, "Let me explain. No - it's too complicated. Let me sum up:"
Mark Steyn has been nattering on about demographics for a good few years now - he says since 9/11 caused him to take sudden note of a demographic group that hadn't seemed especially noteworthy before. It was not, he said, the people flying the planes who disturbed him; it was the people dancing in the streets afterward. He started digging into the numbers for the West versus the Muslim world and concluded, as he puts it, that:
"The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
That's a mighty short quote to set apart that way, but it's a mighty important one. In this OpinionJournal piece, Steyn is wordier than I've ever seen him, making and remaking the point that Europe-as-we-know-it is on the brink of death - he says, "Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone."
Is this tragedy, or just life? Well. If the people poised to take over those grand buildings were like-minded to the Europeans they'll replace, it'd just be life, and Europe would live on as the great dream it's been since the Enlightenment. But what Steyn sees in the near future is A Handmaid's Tale wrought by Muslim, not Christian, hands. He notes:
We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .
[...]
Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.
What we are, what we stand for, is important. For the moment I'm going to put aside cultural relativism utterly and say, it's better than Wahhabism, Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism, or pick your term - the form of Islam that strives for cultural purity and rejects Western liberalism - in its classical sense - as decadent and even more basically wrong, and that embraces jihad as its means to these ends. We ought to - we must - demand that our liberal values prevail, as long as we consider them valuable. We ought to - we must - resist this post-modern urge to be the ones who set our own Alexandrian library alight in the name of multiculturalism: if bringers of a new Dark Age want to break through our ranks, let them try, but while we can defend what we are, let us do so.
I've quoted extensively, I know, and I've carried on at great lengths even for me, but I've also found my summing-up:
One-way assimilation or death.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Sixteen candles
Today marks the sixteenth anniversary of my first date with my husband. He made me spaghetti. Out of a package, it's true, but it was good, it was surprising, it was served on actual china in a dining room free of his four roommates, and it was prescient. For sixteen years, he's been good, surprising, considerate, and mindful of my sensibilities. He's given me - no lie - the best years of his life so far, three terrific kids, a huge amount of patience, and the honor of his trust. I've tried to give him the same - not as successfully, I'm sure, since I'm patience-challenged, but the intent has always been there.
Husband, it's been a good sixteen years. I hope you're up for another round.
Husband, it's been a good sixteen years. I hope you're up for another round.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Why can't we be friends?
It's about the Danish cartoons again.
Based on the comments I received for this post, I'm going to have to assume that among the handful of readers I enjoy there's a sadly high proportion who may not know what's going on in the world. No offense intended to those who do; please, keep up the good work. The great advantage we have over our philosophical parents and grandparents is that we can inform ourselves so much more completely than they could. But for those who aren't "up" on the story, here we go:
The original cartoons were published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. You can see them here - and I'm linking to Michelle Malkin's site both because she, unlike the New York Times and unfortunately so many others, had the cojones to show the images, and because I know she's a tremendously polarizing figure, as they say. In other words, for fun.
The paper invited Danish caricaturists to draw Mohammed to make the point that non-Muslim Danes felt "chilled" by the disproportionate and often violent responses of European Muslims to perceived cultural or religious slights. There is a proscription against portrayals of Mohammed in some Muslims traditions (but not all - see for instance Omar's comments here on IraqTheModel); this proscription was the pretext for - eventual - widespread demonstrations, riots, arson, and deaths. However, it's come out that the means of distribution of these cartoon images wasn't what we might expect - a genuine grass-roots Internet-fueled viral-meme campaign wherein Danish Muslims told their coreligionists elsewhere, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on... (If you're too young to remember the reference, it's a shampoo commercial.) Instead, sometime in December 2005 or so, a group of Danish imams created a pressbook including these cartoons and others, including three particularly egregious images of diverse origins (one of them was a bad photocopy of a French contestant in a pig-squealing contest, who, in a burst of high spirits, donned a pig nose - this image was passed off as an insulting caricature of Mohammed). The imams toured the Middle East with this dossier, but (in spite of the cartoons' appearance in an Egyptian newspaper as early as October 2005, which appearance resulted in verbal denouncements but no violence) failed to stir up a lot of publicity until January 2006...
...when, suddenly, they were the spark to the tinder and the fundamentalist fraction of the Muslim world took to the streets. Most American newspapers and as far as I know all British newspapers to date have refused to publish the images; the BBC showed them briefly; some European newspapers I wouldn't have expected to show spines have shown spines and republished. The competing values to be balanced at those journalistic organs that have not republished the images are, as Andrew Sullivan says not "risible"; they're justifiably concerned about their staffs' safety. But the mass walkout of the editorial staff of the New York Press when the paper's owner refused to allow the republishing of the cartoons is a sign that not all journalists - indeed, I hope not even most journalists - would find that their own safety overbalances the scales against informing their reading or viewing public about this issue.
And at last we've reached the point where my title comes in: if there's one issue on which the American Right and the American Left ought to be united, it's press freedom. We do share this value. We also share the frustration of not always having it work in our favor - which we all recognize is par for the course when freedom of expression is at issue. We rail against some instances of free expression, we sometimes demonstrate to protest them, we write angry letters, make placards, march, lobby, and get all ticked off - but can we not agree that that fraction of the Muslim world that flew right the heck off the handle here was wrong to do so, by the standards of modern civilization?
Because if we can't find common ground here, perhaps there's no common ground anywhere for us. I fully support the right of Muslims who feel so inclined to demonstrate peacefully, to record their disgust and send it to the editor, to march for more "sensitivity" on the parts of newspaper editors. But. But. My support stops when the match is lit. We must not allow freedom of speech and the press to be chilled by the threat of violence.
In the United States, where by and large violence does not accompany angry protests against disrespect of one religion or another, it is possible, appropriate, and often wise for the media to be "sensitive" to their viewers; take for instance the Will & Grace episode that was slated to appear on Good Friday this spring, in which Britney Spears was to play a Christian TV chef making "cruci-fixin's," for some reason. (Pause: whew. That was a stretch.) The episode, I understand, has been pulled because it's singularly insensitive to Christians on the most solemn day of the Christian calendar. It would have been perfectly legal to air the episode - but I'm guessing the show's sponsors decided they didn't want to lose quite that much business. However, the self-censorship, if you will (and no doubt some will), of that episode can be assumed to spring from a different motive from the self-imposed media blackout on the Danish cartoons, where it's occurred, because fundamentalist (and other) Christians who would doubtless be offended by Will & Grace's tasteless joke at their expense were not about to saw any heads off over it, and everyone on both sides of the table knows it; we have no such assurance concerning the Islamist/Wahhabist/fundamentalist Muslim groups fomenting violent riots. To be silent on the issue of the cartoons is tacitly to admit that free speech is a value for us only so long as our own ox isn't gored. Or our own editor isn't kidnapped. It's not a decision to make lightly - but it is a decision to make, not to softsoap and avoid and couch in terms of "nuance."
So, I salute you people of the Left who are not sitting squarely on "sensitivity" but rather standing up for this proud, secular, foundational principle that we share - freedom of the press, without which there is no America. I hope that you realize, believe, and perhaps even are willing to acknowledge right out in public that we do indeed share it.
Ball's in your court.
Based on the comments I received for this post, I'm going to have to assume that among the handful of readers I enjoy there's a sadly high proportion who may not know what's going on in the world. No offense intended to those who do; please, keep up the good work. The great advantage we have over our philosophical parents and grandparents is that we can inform ourselves so much more completely than they could. But for those who aren't "up" on the story, here we go:
The original cartoons were published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. You can see them here - and I'm linking to Michelle Malkin's site both because she, unlike the New York Times and unfortunately so many others, had the cojones to show the images, and because I know she's a tremendously polarizing figure, as they say. In other words, for fun.
The paper invited Danish caricaturists to draw Mohammed to make the point that non-Muslim Danes felt "chilled" by the disproportionate and often violent responses of European Muslims to perceived cultural or religious slights. There is a proscription against portrayals of Mohammed in some Muslims traditions (but not all - see for instance Omar's comments here on IraqTheModel); this proscription was the pretext for - eventual - widespread demonstrations, riots, arson, and deaths. However, it's come out that the means of distribution of these cartoon images wasn't what we might expect - a genuine grass-roots Internet-fueled viral-meme campaign wherein Danish Muslims told their coreligionists elsewhere, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on... (If you're too young to remember the reference, it's a shampoo commercial.) Instead, sometime in December 2005 or so, a group of Danish imams created a pressbook including these cartoons and others, including three particularly egregious images of diverse origins (one of them was a bad photocopy of a French contestant in a pig-squealing contest, who, in a burst of high spirits, donned a pig nose - this image was passed off as an insulting caricature of Mohammed). The imams toured the Middle East with this dossier, but (in spite of the cartoons' appearance in an Egyptian newspaper as early as October 2005, which appearance resulted in verbal denouncements but no violence) failed to stir up a lot of publicity until January 2006...
...when, suddenly, they were the spark to the tinder and the fundamentalist fraction of the Muslim world took to the streets. Most American newspapers and as far as I know all British newspapers to date have refused to publish the images; the BBC showed them briefly; some European newspapers I wouldn't have expected to show spines have shown spines and republished. The competing values to be balanced at those journalistic organs that have not republished the images are, as Andrew Sullivan says not "risible"; they're justifiably concerned about their staffs' safety. But the mass walkout of the editorial staff of the New York Press when the paper's owner refused to allow the republishing of the cartoons is a sign that not all journalists - indeed, I hope not even most journalists - would find that their own safety overbalances the scales against informing their reading or viewing public about this issue.
And at last we've reached the point where my title comes in: if there's one issue on which the American Right and the American Left ought to be united, it's press freedom. We do share this value. We also share the frustration of not always having it work in our favor - which we all recognize is par for the course when freedom of expression is at issue. We rail against some instances of free expression, we sometimes demonstrate to protest them, we write angry letters, make placards, march, lobby, and get all ticked off - but can we not agree that that fraction of the Muslim world that flew right the heck off the handle here was wrong to do so, by the standards of modern civilization?
Because if we can't find common ground here, perhaps there's no common ground anywhere for us. I fully support the right of Muslims who feel so inclined to demonstrate peacefully, to record their disgust and send it to the editor, to march for more "sensitivity" on the parts of newspaper editors. But. But. My support stops when the match is lit. We must not allow freedom of speech and the press to be chilled by the threat of violence.
In the United States, where by and large violence does not accompany angry protests against disrespect of one religion or another, it is possible, appropriate, and often wise for the media to be "sensitive" to their viewers; take for instance the Will & Grace episode that was slated to appear on Good Friday this spring, in which Britney Spears was to play a Christian TV chef making "cruci-fixin's," for some reason. (Pause: whew. That was a stretch.) The episode, I understand, has been pulled because it's singularly insensitive to Christians on the most solemn day of the Christian calendar. It would have been perfectly legal to air the episode - but I'm guessing the show's sponsors decided they didn't want to lose quite that much business. However, the self-censorship, if you will (and no doubt some will), of that episode can be assumed to spring from a different motive from the self-imposed media blackout on the Danish cartoons, where it's occurred, because fundamentalist (and other) Christians who would doubtless be offended by Will & Grace's tasteless joke at their expense were not about to saw any heads off over it, and everyone on both sides of the table knows it; we have no such assurance concerning the Islamist/Wahhabist/fundamentalist Muslim groups fomenting violent riots. To be silent on the issue of the cartoons is tacitly to admit that free speech is a value for us only so long as our own ox isn't gored. Or our own editor isn't kidnapped. It's not a decision to make lightly - but it is a decision to make, not to softsoap and avoid and couch in terms of "nuance."
So, I salute you people of the Left who are not sitting squarely on "sensitivity" but rather standing up for this proud, secular, foundational principle that we share - freedom of the press, without which there is no America. I hope that you realize, believe, and perhaps even are willing to acknowledge right out in public that we do indeed share it.
Ball's in your court.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Sheesh, Ann
OK, I admit it: I often find Ann Coulter funny. But not today:
Sigh. Thanks, Ann. Any other thoughts? Keep them to yourself, will you? Stop doing us "favors." And as is so often the case, thanks, Instapundit, for the point to the site.
Update: Of all the things I've written about since starting this blog, I never dreamed for a minute that I'd get my longest comment thread out of an eye roll at Ann Coulter.
So. Addressing some of you in the comments, beginning with my buddies and high school classmates from long ago, the Kirby brothers: Thom, I've got to get over to your blog to indulge in some cussing! And Gary, yes, I know some might read this post as ammunition; I chose to write it anyway. You're correct, I think, that the Left won't self-police and won't acknowledge self-policing efforts on the Right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we know is right. In my ever-so-humble opinion, of course.
On to the rest of yez. I am indeed a fiscal conservative and I'm not at all pleased with Federal spending at the moment. However, I don't make the mistake of attributing the "Clinton surplus" to Clinton when he was the beneficiary of the so-called "peace dividend" (which, recall, led to comments like Rumsfeld's infamous but absolutely true "You have to go to war with the army you have," along with outrage from the Left that we ought to have delayed going to war while we built up our military, while our enemies would presumably have been leaning on their guns and trimming their nails, maybe having a smoke) and the dot.com bubble. And I likewise find it utterly clear that in order to have a Federal budget, you have to have a Federal government, which implies a nation, so national defense takes precedence over a balanced budget for me. A more descriptive and accurate statement about my fiscal policy, such as it is, is that I favor fewer and smaller government programs but recognize the fact of certain "natural monopolies," such as an army, without which a nation cannot function well, or at all.
I was and am a classical liberal: a devotee of and believer in the individual, his rights, his responsibilities. The term "liberal" has been long hijacked by some on the Left who act and talk as if they believe it means "dedicated to the premise that 'social' justice, as opposed to justice, ought to be the preeminent goal of society." I favor tolerance (but not preference nor a "right" not to be offended); equality of opportunity (but not efforts to create an impossible level playing field); equality under the law; freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly; I believe in freedom from unreasonable search and seizure - but also that the word "unreasonable" means something different from "any"; I believe in the right to keep and bear arms and in the responsibility of those who choose to do so to train and protect themselves and those in their household to avoid tragic accidents (and I point out that a pool is much more dangerous, statistically, than a gun); I believe that the Constitution is a "living" document in the sense that its words and ideas should and do continue to direct and inspire Americans, and speak hope and defiance to oppressed people around the world, but not that it's a "living" document in the sense that contextual reinterpretation ought to trump original intent. And finally (for purposes of this discussion), I'm absolutely thrilled that I didn't have to fight my way across the world, learn English laboriously as an adult, and undertake to become a citizen by dint of effort and commitment in order to enjoy the rights, liberties, opportunities, and responsibilities that devolve on American citizens generally. In short, I believe that being born American is the single luckiest thing ever to happen to Americans (beyond being born in the first place).
Does that clear anything up? I'm not a Democrat and have never been a Democrat (all right, I admit I was campaign manager for the "Democratic" candidate in my high school's mock election in 1984 - thanks a lot, Kirbys, for showing up and making me refer to those bygone days so much here) - but there are a whole lot of Democrats out there who, by their words and behavior, can't honestly be called "liberal" in this sense. "You keep saying tha' word; I do no' think it means what you think it means." Ditto "progressive," but I have no particular affinity for the term (I'm not convinced that progress for progress's sake is necessarily good), so I won't muddy the waters by amending my description of myself to include it.
When do I find Ann Coulter funny? When she says something like this:
or this:
I do not find her funny when she refers to Muslims as "ragheads." At moments like those, I find it appalling and inexplicable that she could say such a thing while apparently sharing a number of other principles and beliefs with me, which is pretty much the point of this post. Lindata, by "eliminationist" language do you mean "racist" or something similar? Coulter certainly uses insulting language about liberals frequently, but not generally in this vein; otherwise I wouldn't read her at all. Insult comics have a long and - well, not glorious, but at least storied tradition; racist comics went out with the Polish joke. Ann Coulter again crossed a line that she's crossed on a few occasions in the past (I hated her comments culminating in "now more than ever" about converting all Muslims to Christianity, for instance, while, as a Christian myself, acknowledging that Christianity appears to me to have a much better claim to the term "religion of peace" than Islam, based on both the teachings and the recent behavior of adherents of each), but as an entertainer, not as a spokesman for me.
So. Thanks for the spurious congratulations on "discovering" my "limits." Let me offer my congratulations on your exposure, willy-nilly, to the fact that the Right, while no more monolithic than the Left, is perhaps something different from what you thought it was.
With Ann Coulter you should only expect a bad stand-up comedian with a conservative schtick. That's what CPAC attendees got today. My expectations were low, yet she proceded [sic] to go below them. She referred to Muslims as "ragheads."
Sigh. Thanks, Ann. Any other thoughts? Keep them to yourself, will you? Stop doing us "favors." And as is so often the case, thanks, Instapundit, for the point to the site.
Update: Of all the things I've written about since starting this blog, I never dreamed for a minute that I'd get my longest comment thread out of an eye roll at Ann Coulter.
So. Addressing some of you in the comments, beginning with my buddies and high school classmates from long ago, the Kirby brothers: Thom, I've got to get over to your blog to indulge in some cussing! And Gary, yes, I know some might read this post as ammunition; I chose to write it anyway. You're correct, I think, that the Left won't self-police and won't acknowledge self-policing efforts on the Right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we know is right. In my ever-so-humble opinion, of course.
On to the rest of yez. I am indeed a fiscal conservative and I'm not at all pleased with Federal spending at the moment. However, I don't make the mistake of attributing the "Clinton surplus" to Clinton when he was the beneficiary of the so-called "peace dividend" (which, recall, led to comments like Rumsfeld's infamous but absolutely true "You have to go to war with the army you have," along with outrage from the Left that we ought to have delayed going to war while we built up our military, while our enemies would presumably have been leaning on their guns and trimming their nails, maybe having a smoke) and the dot.com bubble. And I likewise find it utterly clear that in order to have a Federal budget, you have to have a Federal government, which implies a nation, so national defense takes precedence over a balanced budget for me. A more descriptive and accurate statement about my fiscal policy, such as it is, is that I favor fewer and smaller government programs but recognize the fact of certain "natural monopolies," such as an army, without which a nation cannot function well, or at all.
I was and am a classical liberal: a devotee of and believer in the individual, his rights, his responsibilities. The term "liberal" has been long hijacked by some on the Left who act and talk as if they believe it means "dedicated to the premise that 'social' justice, as opposed to justice, ought to be the preeminent goal of society." I favor tolerance (but not preference nor a "right" not to be offended); equality of opportunity (but not efforts to create an impossible level playing field); equality under the law; freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly; I believe in freedom from unreasonable search and seizure - but also that the word "unreasonable" means something different from "any"; I believe in the right to keep and bear arms and in the responsibility of those who choose to do so to train and protect themselves and those in their household to avoid tragic accidents (and I point out that a pool is much more dangerous, statistically, than a gun); I believe that the Constitution is a "living" document in the sense that its words and ideas should and do continue to direct and inspire Americans, and speak hope and defiance to oppressed people around the world, but not that it's a "living" document in the sense that contextual reinterpretation ought to trump original intent. And finally (for purposes of this discussion), I'm absolutely thrilled that I didn't have to fight my way across the world, learn English laboriously as an adult, and undertake to become a citizen by dint of effort and commitment in order to enjoy the rights, liberties, opportunities, and responsibilities that devolve on American citizens generally. In short, I believe that being born American is the single luckiest thing ever to happen to Americans (beyond being born in the first place).
Does that clear anything up? I'm not a Democrat and have never been a Democrat (all right, I admit I was campaign manager for the "Democratic" candidate in my high school's mock election in 1984 - thanks a lot, Kirbys, for showing up and making me refer to those bygone days so much here) - but there are a whole lot of Democrats out there who, by their words and behavior, can't honestly be called "liberal" in this sense. "You keep saying tha' word; I do no' think it means what you think it means." Ditto "progressive," but I have no particular affinity for the term (I'm not convinced that progress for progress's sake is necessarily good), so I won't muddy the waters by amending my description of myself to include it.
When do I find Ann Coulter funny? When she says something like this:
The Democratic Party has decided to express indignation at the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al Qaeda is not allowed to have a private conversation with Osama bin Laden. If they run on that in 2008, it could be the first time in history a Republican president takes even the District of Columbia.
or this:
Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party, may have had some unpalatable goals, but at least they were big ideas. Wipe out the Indians, kill off the national bank and institute a spoils system. Love him or hate him, he never said, "I'll be announcing my platform sometime early next year." The Whigs were formed in opposition to everything Jackson stood for.
The Republican Party emerged from the Whigs when the Whigs waffled on slavery. (They were "pro-choice" on slavery.) The Republican Party was founded expressly as the anti-slavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today.
Having won that one, today's Republican Party stands for life, limited government and national defense. And today's Democratic Party stands for ... the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't especially like. We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies party. They're the Hook-Up party.
I do not find her funny when she refers to Muslims as "ragheads." At moments like those, I find it appalling and inexplicable that she could say such a thing while apparently sharing a number of other principles and beliefs with me, which is pretty much the point of this post. Lindata, by "eliminationist" language do you mean "racist" or something similar? Coulter certainly uses insulting language about liberals frequently, but not generally in this vein; otherwise I wouldn't read her at all. Insult comics have a long and - well, not glorious, but at least storied tradition; racist comics went out with the Polish joke. Ann Coulter again crossed a line that she's crossed on a few occasions in the past (I hated her comments culminating in "now more than ever" about converting all Muslims to Christianity, for instance, while, as a Christian myself, acknowledging that Christianity appears to me to have a much better claim to the term "religion of peace" than Islam, based on both the teachings and the recent behavior of adherents of each), but as an entertainer, not as a spokesman for me.
So. Thanks for the spurious congratulations on "discovering" my "limits." Let me offer my congratulations on your exposure, willy-nilly, to the fact that the Right, while no more monolithic than the Left, is perhaps something different from what you thought it was.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Moderates speak
A group of moderate Muslims has started a website: We Are Sorry. Unfortunately they don't identify themselves, but what they do say is that not only the violence of the radicals (which has included several embassy-burnings and at least one kidnapping) but also the across-the-board boycott of all Danish products was inappropriate in response to the depictions of Mohammed last September. As it happens, I of course agree about the violence, but if the world's Muslims decide not to buy Danish for any reason or none, that's their own business.
Let me say that the reaction from some in the blogosphere, to initiate a "contest" to produce the most offensive image of Mohammed, is also inappropriate, but as a matter of free speech, permissible - if just barely, since it skates mighty close to the edge of incitement.
It remains to be seen whether the attempts of either side to elicit a hotter, larger, and more immediate conflict than we're already experiencing will succeed. I'm enough of a peacenik to hope that the conflict can be contained and limited, but not enough of one to believe that it can be solved by all parties' "just sitting down [why is sitting down always a part of these formulations?] and talking"; it's a part of Islam we're at war against, the faction that rejects the "internal struggle" interpretation of jihad in favor or the "infidels must convert or die" version, and the rest of Islam is going to have to choose a side eventually. The question is, will they choose on principle, or wait until the outcome is clear? If they choose now to side with the modern world, or if they wait until we win, the result is the same though our level of trust would be significantly lessened in the former case. If they choose now to side with the radical element, I believe we'll still win, but at greater cost to both sides as we're forced to recall and replay our own bloody history from times when our existence was similarly under assault.
This is a crummy post. I'm far more involved in reading about what's happening than in opining on it at present, but lest this page grow cold and dark, I'll keep trying to put something up regularly.
Let me say that the reaction from some in the blogosphere, to initiate a "contest" to produce the most offensive image of Mohammed, is also inappropriate, but as a matter of free speech, permissible - if just barely, since it skates mighty close to the edge of incitement.
It remains to be seen whether the attempts of either side to elicit a hotter, larger, and more immediate conflict than we're already experiencing will succeed. I'm enough of a peacenik to hope that the conflict can be contained and limited, but not enough of one to believe that it can be solved by all parties' "just sitting down [why is sitting down always a part of these formulations?] and talking"; it's a part of Islam we're at war against, the faction that rejects the "internal struggle" interpretation of jihad in favor or the "infidels must convert or die" version, and the rest of Islam is going to have to choose a side eventually. The question is, will they choose on principle, or wait until the outcome is clear? If they choose now to side with the modern world, or if they wait until we win, the result is the same though our level of trust would be significantly lessened in the former case. If they choose now to side with the radical element, I believe we'll still win, but at greater cost to both sides as we're forced to recall and replay our own bloody history from times when our existence was similarly under assault.
This is a crummy post. I'm far more involved in reading about what's happening than in opining on it at present, but lest this page grow cold and dark, I'll keep trying to put something up regularly.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
And back to business
I have next to nothing to say about the State of the Union Address that hasn't been said in timelier and more complete fashion, more assiduously, and more hilariously (but you might have to backtrack a bit to the Protein Wisdom Conceptual Series to get some of it) by others. (OK, OK, I have to give you a little of Jeff's: "Alito, wearing robe, enters the hall. Instinctively, Amanda Marcotte clenches her vaginal muscles to protect her uterus.") I shared in the disbelief when the Democrat side of the hall rose to congratulate themselves on not only blocking Bush's effort to reform Social Security but not coming up with any alternatives for it, as well as when they stayed resolutely seated at various moments when Bush posited an America on the side of freedom, democracy, and self-determination. Mmm-hmmm.
Some other notes:
- Buy Danish! In case you've missed the story, protests have been occurring at various places in the Middle East and elsewhere because a Danish newspaper printed twelve caricatures of Mohammed, who is traditionally not pictured (though the tradition is not always observed - thanks to Michelle Malkin, who also reproduces the cartoons, for the link to the Mohammed Image Archive). Europe appears to be taking an unprecedented-in-recent-times stand with the Danes, so bravo to them. Me, I'm going to buy some Havarti today. Maybe some ham. And I hope I still have the email address of my Danish friend from college, so I can ask her how to make - ahem, phonetic-ish spelling to follow - röt gröt mit flutheh, a red-berry pudding with cream that she served at her wedding dinner. Oooh, oooh, I know: I'll do Smørgåsbord for our Super Bowl party!
- Read this for an eyewitness account of the situation on the ground in Iraq and with our troops. Note particularly:
Our occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War is a closer example of what we face in Iraq; we fought an extensive insurgency there for years, then remained in the country for nearly a century, with very positive eventual results.
and:[...]in the latest scientific poll of the Iraqi public, released December 12 by Oxford Research International[:] Asked how things are going for them personally, 71 percent of Iraqis now say life is “good,” compared to 29 percent who say “bad.” A majority insist that despite the war, life is already better for them than it was under Saddam Hussein. By 5:1 they expect their lives will be even better one year from now. Seven out of ten Iraqis think their country as a whole will be a better place in one year.
- This lengthy piece (thanks to the inimitable Instapundit for the link) discusses reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The part Glenn Reynolds highlights is the discussion of electrical supply: under Saddam Hussein, rolling blackouts in the north (Kurdish area) and south (Shi'ite area) were routine, in order to keep Baghdad powered 24/7. Now, rolling blackouts still occur, and little or none of the country has adequate electricity, but the total amount of power generated and supplied exceeds the total under Saddam - it's just more equitably distributed.
- As if it needs to be said, Cindy Sheehan has demonstrated again that she's moved from grieving mother to shameless grandstander. I'm sorry for her loss; I can't imagine the pain of losing a son (quick sign of the cross and knock on wood, covering all bases). But, just as it was inappropriate for Dave Delp to wear a rude anti-Clinton t-shirt to the Senate gallery during Clinton's impeachment hearings, and just as Rep. Young's wife acted inappropriately by wearing a "Support the Troops!" t-shirt (she was also escorted out), while Cindy Sheehan has the same freedom of speech as any American, she has no intrinsic right to a national audience, particularly when the forum is held for another (and Constitutionally-required) purpose. Apparently the Capitol police have apologized for their actions in removing both women; they were following what amounts to an etiquette rule of very long standing at the Capitol, but they've now knuckled under to "free speech" advocates who apparently have no sense of decorum. [Query to self: if Sheehan or Young had worn a tasteful suit with the same message embroidered on the jacket, would that have been acceptable? Hmm... nope, not as far as I can see. The rule both women broke is reasonable, and equitably applied, it seems. Why the backpedaling?]
I'd say that's enough to go on with.
Important omission to be corrected: Please note that I do not advocate dissing any religion's peaceful tenets! There's no virtue in mocking Islam or Muslims, any more than there is in mocking Judaism or Christianity or their adherents. But these drawings were typical editorial cartoons, far less disrespectful of Islam and Muslims than pretty much any European picturing of Israeli Jews and their allies (that'd be us, folks). Where they blended the image of Mohammed with the actions of fundamentalist Muslims (or Islamists, as I'm following the lead of many in calling them), the blending was factually accurate. My objection to the reaction of Islamists is that they appear to believe that we "infidels" are as bound by Islam as they are themselves, and they're willing to back up their belief with blood.
Unfortunately for them, if the sacrilege of picturing Mohammed is a life-and-death value for them, a free press has long been rather a life-and-death value for us. We now have the clash of civilizations out in the open: first, Palestinians overwhelmingly elect Hamas to lead their would-be nation, and then Islamists burn Danish flags and threaten Danish lives over some line drawings. It's been quite a week, hasn't it?
I'm whistling in the dark; this is terribly serious.
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