Up your assonance!

Originally posted on Nearly Rhymes, 25 February 2011:

Here are the definitions for “assonance” in the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. Resemblance or correspondence of sound between two words or syllables.

2.

a. Prosody. The correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the accented vowel and those which follow, but not in the consonants, as used in the versification of Old French, Spanish, Celtic, and other languages.

b. In extended use: = half-rhyme n. at half- comb. form 2o; the correspondence or rhyming of one word with another in the final (sometimes also the initial) consonant, but not in the vowel. Also applied by philologists, in studying rhyming pairs of words (i.e. with identical vowel), to final consonants of such similarity of articulation as to be acceptable, with poetic licence, in a rhyming position.

3. A word or syllable answering to another in sound.

4. transf. Correspondence more or less incomplete.

The lists of word pairs that this blog’s founder posted below include examples of “assonance” in each of these four senses. He has asked me to take the blog over for a while. So, here’s another list of miscellaneous assonantal word pairs:

• Other thunder
• Withered river
• Annual animal
• Inevitable vegetable
• Slippery hickory
• Slight hike
• Slither, mister!
• Panther’s answers (pace Ogden Nash)
• Handsome mansion
• Shifty sixty

Nearly Rhymes

Originally posted on Los Thunderlads, 25 February 2011:

Some time ago, fotb “Mister Slither” launched a site called “Nearly Rhymes.” He heads it “Some phrases that just about rhyme” and gives it the cautionary tagline “May include phrases that do rhyme.” I’ll quote a few of his word pairs:

From the inaugural post, “Some phrases that include the names of nationalities and just about rhyme“:

• Spanish spinach
• Tanzanian human bein’
• Who’d expect an Uzbek?
• Phoenician phonetician
• Wax-can the Oaxacan

From the second post, “Some hostile rhymes“:

• He’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’
• He’s on his way to the fist cafe
• He’s nattering for a battering

From the third post, “Words that more or less rhyme with some animal names“:

• Ghostly goat
• Ostrich outrage
• Purple gerbil
• Compliant lion
• Flippant hippo
• Livelier tiger

Mister Slither hasn’t posted there since November 2010; today he added me to the site as an administrator. To show my gratitude, I’ve put up a post called “Up your assonance!” in which I quote the dictionary and list 10 word pairs that more or less rhyme.

Gigapan Inauguration

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 3 February 2009:

Thanks to Alison Bechdel for linking to this Gigapan photo of Mr O giving his inaugural address. She asks you to look for Yo Yo Ma taking a picture with his cellphone- I’ll ask you to look for Clarence Thomas taking a nap. To be honest, I’d never heard of Gigapan before- it’s fascinating.

A letter to various officials

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 4 February 2009:

On Saturday, 24 January, I sent letters to President Obama and my other elected representatives in Washington about the case of Harry Nicolaides. Below is the text of the letter to Mr. O. I sent slightly modified versions of the same letter to the other officials.

Dear Mr. President:

Several weeks ago, I read a magazine article by Australian writer Harry Nicolaides. Mr. Nicolaides reported from Tachilek, a town in Burma located only about 50 meters from the Thai border. Originally published in an Australian magazine called Eureka on 29 July 2008, the article claimed that child pornography was openly sold in Tachilek. Mr. Nicolaides claimed to have evidence of videos sold there depicting the binding, rape, and torture of thousands of children aged 4-12 years, most of them apparently produced in Europe or North America, the rest in Cambodia and other Asian countries. Mr. Nicolaides claims that men from Europe and North America cross the border freely, never searched by Thai or Burmese police. The article is available online at: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=8264.

I saw Mr. Nicolaides’ name in the news again today. Thai authorities arrested him late in August, four weeks after the publication of his article about Tachilek. The charge against him was that a novel he had published in 2005 contained a paragraph that might be construed to refer to Thailand’s Crown Prince and to constitute lese-majeste. This past Monday, a Thai court sentenced Mr. Nicolaides to three years in prison.

It strikes me that Mr. Nicolaides’ article about Tachilek, if true, constitutes a valuable service. One might hope that the Thai authorities would be grateful to be alerted to the existence of this trade and for the opportunity to stamp it out. Certainly the citizens of the countries where the videos are produced owe Mr. Nicolaides a debt of gratitude. Perhaps the court that sentenced Mr. Nicolaides was not at liberty to take this service into account. In view of the international dimension of the Tachilek question, might the Thai ambassador to the United States have occasion to put in a word with the king?

Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

Yours truly,

Amy Crehore in the news

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 6 February 2009:

An interview with Amy Crehore appears online in Sadie magazine. Another interview is on newsstands in Inked, a magazine that caters to men who like pictures of girls who have lots of tattoos.

Black Ball Finale

She talks about her art, about ukuleles, and about “Dreamgirls and Ukes,” her upcoming solo show at Thinkspace gallery in Los Angeles. If you’re going to be in LA anytime between 13 February and 6 March, you should go. (Yes, I know the instrument pictured here isn’t a ukulele.)

On her blog, Amy Crehore posted a link to an interview Thinkspace did with her as part of their promotion of the show.

While I’m at it, I should mention that in the 90s Amy Crehore was in the band The Hokum Scorchers with her friend, ukuleleist Lou Reimuller. She promises that the Hokum Scorchers will play at Thinkspace opening night. And in 1981-1985, she and a guy named Tom Campagnoli were behind some really trippy comic books called “Boys and Girls Grow Up.”

The Nation, 26 January 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 7 February 2009:

Eric Foner finds much to praise in Abraham Lincoln, chiefly his “capacity for growth” and his belief that “there was a bedrock principle of equality that transcended race- theequal right to the fruits of one’s labor.” Foner dwells on the Second Inaugural, asking us to imagine the moral courage it must have required for Lincoln to name the evil at the heart of the Civil War not as Southern treason, but as “American slavery.” The famous passage saying that we must acquiesce in God’s will to punish us for that sin even if “all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword” raises Foner’s special approbation. “In essence, Lincoln was asking Americans to confront unblinkingly the legacy of bondage and to think about the requirements of justice.”

Two other pieces deal with the relationship between modern institutions and the ancient past. Britt Peterson‘s review of several books about looted work from southwest Asia and southeast Europe that has made its way into museums around the world begins with a story that raises a basic question. In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was forced to send acollection known as”the Lydian hoard” to Turkey, since the artifacts had been stolen from sites in that country. However, the Turks had not yet come to Turkey when those artifacts were produced in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Therefore, the artifacts are not especially interesting to nationalist-minded Turks. They are now housed in a small museum in the town of Usak. This museum receives barely 100 visitors a year, fewer than the exhibit used to recieve in a typical hour at the Met. Some pieces have been stolen and replaced with obvious copies. Do the artifacts have a value intrinsic to themselves? Or is their worth a function of the use we make of them and the concern we have for them? If the latter is the case, then what, exactly, was stolen from the Turks when the Hoard was originally looted?

Anthony Grafton’s review of the recently published correspondence of Gershon Scholem and Morton Smith revolves around the question of whether Morton Smith’s greatest claim to fame was a forgery. In 1973, Morton Smith published a document that he claimed to have discovered fifteen years before. This Greek manuscript, apparently written in the eighteenth century, Morton Smith identified as a copy of a second century letter from one of the fathers of the church, Clement of Alexandria. The letter consisted of a complaint that a group of heretics were giving Christianity a bad name by following practices outlined in a text they called “the secret gospel of Mark.” The letter allows that there was in fact a secret gospel of Mark, which added to the canonical gospel stories about Jesus initiating select followers into mysterious kinds of knowledge. The heretics, the letter claims, have taken this secret gospel and added even more to it. In fact, they claimed that Christians were exempt from all moral laws and could find salvation by committing sins. Their favorite sins seems to have involved homosexual behavior, and their version of “secret Mark” seems to have suggested that Jesus also had a fondness for such behavior.

As soon as Morton Smith published the letter, there was suspicion that it was a forgery. Red flags went up when it was noticed that every single word in the letter appears somewhere else in the extant works of Clement of Alexandria. Students preparing assignments for ancient Greek and Latin prose composition classes have traditionally been required to imitate the style of one or another ancient author. Those students will typically draw their vocabulary from lists of words their model used. But of course the author himself would not have had such a list in front of him. Writing in his native language, he would have been at liberty to use whatever word seemed best to him. Indeed, no ancient text of any substance consists exclusively of words the author uses elsewhere. The fact that this letter does makes it look more like the work of an outstanding Greek prose comp student, which Morton Smith was, than like a genuine ancient text. As a clincher, a writer named Stephen Carlson pointed out that a reference to the packaging of salt in “Clement’s” letter makes no sense in the context of ancient practices, but is intelligible only in light of the anti-clumping process patented in 1910 by the Morton Salt Company. Thus, Morton Smith may have signed his work.

UPDATE: It’s in this issue that Stuart Klawans praises Silent Light, Carlos Reygadas’ film about Mennonites in Mexico, and delivers one-paragraph slams against Oscar contenders The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, and Doubt. I’ve seen Doubt and liked it, but his description is as funny as it is unfair:

Doubt: It was a dark and stormy night in American Catholicism, when Sister Meryl Streep and Father Philip Seymour Hoffman settled in for 104 minutes of shouting at each other. Co-starring Amy Adams as the sweetest young nun in the parish–a role I’d be happy to see her play, if John Waters were the director. Maybe in the new year.

Chronicles, February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 February 2009:

Chronicles is often criticized for its “neo-Confederate” bent. The two hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth draws that side of the magazine out in force.

Joseph E. Fallon quotes extensively from Lincoln’s friends and associates to the effect that the sixteenth president had little use for Christianity. He then analyzes Lincoln’s use of religious imagery in his speeches, arguing that he exploited beliefs which he did not share to browbeat his countrymen into supporting a policy of extreme violence and unaccountable executive power. Fallon dwells on the Second Inaugural Address, claiming that the famous passage saying that we must acquiesce in God’s will to punish us for that sin even if “all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword” represents a particularly gruesome moral inversion. “Lincoln assiduously promoted the idea that, while he was blameless for the war, its death and destruction served some higher good.” Fallon closes with a paraphrase of a well-known line which he attributes to Voltaire, that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Thomas Fleming asserts that the Civil War cost the lives of “600,000 American soldiers and perhaps twice as many noncombatants (most of them black.)” I’ve often heard the figure 621,000 as the number of combat fatalities in the Civil War, the other two claims in that sentence were news to me. I don’t know all that much about the Civil War, so for all I know Fleming could be right. He goes on: “Some years ago, when I was debating Lincoln’s legacy, a graduate student asked if I did not think the war that freed the slaves was worth the cost. He was actually shocked that I did not think that hundreds of thousands of dead slaves would have agreed with him.”

The cost of the Civil War to southern blacks is also a major theme of Clyde Wilson’s “The Trasury of Counterfeit Virtue.” “The notion that soldiers in blue and emancipated slaves rushed into each other’s arms with shouts of Glory Hallelujah is pure fantasy,” writes Professor Wilson. Instead, the historical record shows one case after another when Union forces tortured, raped, and slaughtered blacks with impunity. Wilson cites Ambrose Bierce to the effect that the only blacks he saw with the Union army were those whom officers were using as slaves.

Joseph Sobran mentions Lincoln’s statement, from the First Inaugural, that “the Union is much older than the Constitution,” only to dismiss it as evidence that “Lincoln’s knowledge of history was shaky.” I think there’s a bit more to be said for this claim than Sobran allows. Certainly the thirteen colonies that broke away in 1775-1783 had by that time for many years been much more closely linked to each other than any of them had been to other parts of the British Empire.

Justin Raimondo, editor of antiwar.com, looks at the comparisons between President Obama and his predecessor that one hears so often these days and takes them with undiluted seriousness. Lincoln, Raimondo reminds us, “suspended habeas corpus, jailed his opponents, and closed down newspapers that displeased him.” Raimondo evidently fears that Mr O’s praise of Lincoln might mean that he plans to follow this example. Lest this fear seem overdone, Raimondo does refer to the powers that presidents between Lincoln and Mr O have claimed for themselves. One rather silly moment in Raimondo’s article comes near the beginning, when he quotes a description of the similarities between these two Illinoisan presidents that mentions the fact that they are both quite thin. “Two thin men? What normal person would make such a comparison? To our elites, thinness is a sign of moral virtue.” Well, perhaps the mention of it is also a sign that Lincoln and Mr O don’t really have that much in common, so that likeners have to draw on the most superficial resemblances.

Daniel Larison, of the Eunomia blog, goes into depth on a theme that Professor Wilson also addressed, the role of Lincoln in fusing Big Government with Big Business and laying the foundations of the corporatist-militarist economic and political system the United States has today. Larison mentions Canadian philosopher George Grant, a critic of bigness in both economic and political institutions. “Over 40 years ago, Canadian philosopher George Grant said that American conservatives must oppose economic centralization if they seriously hope to pursue political decentralization.”

The Nation, 2 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 February 2009:

Click on the image to see who's who

Several articles about Barack Obama and what he should do, now that all the historical figures pictured on the cover are watching him.

A review of a new biography of George Plimpton makes me want not only to look at that book, but also to read some of Plimpton’s own writings, notably Shadow Box, Paper Lion, and Edie.

The preacher who delivered the invocation at Mr O’s inauguration, Rick Warren, represented a disappointment to those advocates of the rights of sexual minorities who had done so much to support Mr O when he was seeking the nomination. Jon Wiener points out that Warren’s clout is so far reaching that the US Senate in 2002 voted unanimously for a bill to relieve him of the necessity to pay federal income tax. The bill was specifically craftedto nullify an ongoing suit against Warren for tax evasion. The key parts of the bill appear to apply to Warren, and only to Warren. If Rick Warren has that kind of power, no wonder Mr O thought he could gain by favoring him over some of his most important supporters.

On a happier note, we read about Julius Genachowski, an old friend whom Mr O has named to head the Federal Communications Commission. John Nichols assures us that Genachowski sees the main question in media policy as the question of democracy. Committed to the promotion of “openness, free speech, competition, innovation, access, economic growth, and consumer welfare,” Genachowski will be in a position to strengthen America’s democratic institutions.

How not to write a blog post

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 February 2009:

Here Mencius Moldbug provides an example of what I try to avoid doing when I write a post.

1. It’s very long, 32 screens of text.

2. It starts with a series of acronyms that are neither generally familiar to the public nor explained anywhere in the text.

3. It deals with a wide range of topics. The terms “Right” and “Left” as applied to politics, the advantages of royalism over democracy, Carlyle’s theory of the state, the ongoing financial crisis, the relationship of money to value, the evils of John Maynard Keynes, the supreme importance of a strong state, the virtues of corporate CEOs, the mental illnesses of Hitler and Stalin, the evils of separation of powers, and the impossibility of changing anything for the better.

4. It contains strong claims about many matters which the author does not appear to understand. Making an analogy between political systems and stellar evolution, he say that “Betelgeuse, of course, will end in supernova”; a commenter points out that Betelgeuse is not massive enough to end this way. He lumps all proposals to respond to economic difficulties by loosening the fiscal policy of the government under the label “Keynesian,” then attacks John Maynard Keynes for them, regardless of what Keynes actually said or what theories the proposals in question may actually reflect. He claims that all systems which divide of powers within the state violate the Roman strictures against imperium in imperio, ignoring the rest of Roman political thought and the whole practice of the Roman Republic.

These four flaws all point to the same thing: the author of this post needs an editor. An editor would have assigned him a maximum length; would have blue-penciled the acronyms; would have insisted on a coherent arc of development; and would asked the author for the basis of his factual claims. It’s a shame this person blogs instead of submitting his work to an editor, because the piece contains several interesting points as well.

1. He writes:

As a political faction, Right just means “not left.” There are many Rights and only one Left. The modern Left evolved from one 18th-century Anglo-American tradition (English Radicalism), which over the last two centuries captured almost every intellectual and political institution in the world. Any post-1945 perspective outside this movement (Updike’s, for instance) is not the product of any significant intellectual quality-control process, because the modern Right has no significant intellectual institutions (by the standards of the modern Left).

The factual claims here are of course subject to challenge, but the main point is certainly worth thinking about.

2. He suggests, apparently as a thought-experiment, that all assets should be pooled, their owners compensated with dollars. In his words, “Imagine that, instead of holding securities, everyone held cash.” Since there are only about 2,000,000,000,000 dollars in circulation and total wealth is estimated at something on the order of 100,000,000,000,000 dollars, this would necessitate a great deal of printing. He further suggests that once these dollars are printed, it be made impossible to print more of them. He drops the experiment before getting to any of the difficult questions it raises, but those questions may be worth asking.

3. He quotes Alexander Pope’s dictum that “Fools over forms of government contest,/ That which is best administered is best.” That was one of Irving Babitt’s favorite quotes, so it always makes me smile. Granted, I agree with it less every passing year, but it still brings back fond memories of 1989-1990, the year I spent immersed in the writings of Babbitt and his followers.

4. Here’s another good paragraph, based on the line John Milton gave to Lucifer in Paradise Lost (“It is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven,” a line familiar to Star Trek aficionados):

Of all Luciferian motivations, democracy is the lowest. It is one thing to rule in Hell. It is quite another to have on hundred-millionth of a say in the selection of an official whose role in Hell is primarily ceremonial.

There is a good point here. If democracy begins and ends with voting for officials, then democracy is a rather small thing. Defenders of democracy must turn elsewhere to glorify it. I would suggest that Nietzsche was on the right track in The Twilight of the Idols. Democratic institutions themselves, once established, are no friends of liberty. However, it is in the struggle to build democratic institutions that liberty and the people who are capable of enjoying liberty take shape. Once the struggle ends, so does liberty.

5. The analogy with Betelgeuse comes in when he claims that “weakening a government makes it larger.” A weak government is not conducive to liberty, he asserts, because of its tendency to bloat. Only small government is conducive to liberty. Here his lack of definitions becimes critical. In what sense was Stalin’s government, for example, not strong? And what is liberty, that it is threatened by single-payer health care but not by absolute monarchy?

6. He blames separation of powers for the size of America’s public sector. “Essentially, big government is big because it is always competing with itself.” This is clearly false in the context in which he proposes it- the three branches of the US government do not compete with each other to build highways, for example. But there may be some sense in which it is true.

The Atlantic Monthly, January/ February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 February 2009:

Garrett Epps declares the creation of the presidency to have been “The Founders’ Great Mistake.” You’d think the history of the last 85 years would have made that clear to everyone, but evidently it has not. Epps does not propose abolishing the presidency. Instead, he outlines a plan that would keep the office in existence, but make the president dependent on the support of a majority in Congress. In effect, Epps would replicate a parliamentary system. That would be, if anything, worse than what we have now. At least now the president and Congress can fight each other to a standstill. Under Epps’ system, there would never be an opposing force to block the worst ideas that came out of the leadership of the ruling party.

Mark Ambinder’s piece on the way the Obama campaign handled race as an issue contains an interesting line:

Even during the 2008 primaries, a discomfiting pattern had emerged: Barack Obama did his best overall in the states with the largest or the smallest percentages of African American voters—think of South Carolina, where blacks made up 55 percent of the Democratic-primary vote, and Vermont, where they made up less than 2 percent. Obama won in states where black Democrats had already attained a measure of political power, or where whites had never competed with blacks.

Ambinder seems close here to an idea that has been rattling around on the far right for some time. Some writers, such as Steve Sailer, have claimed that “white guilt” is in fact a sign of disengagement from African Americans. Whites who support policies that might put other whites at a disadvantage to African Americans do so in order to show their superiority over other whites. On this view, “white guilt” is not a sign of belief in the equality of African Americans. Quite the contrary, it rests on a belief that African Americans will never be able to compete at the highest levels of achievement. Those who declare themselves racked by white guilt do so in order to show that they themselves are able to do so, and look down on those whites who have to worry about African American competitors. I don’t know if I believe that idea, but I do think it deserves wider discussion than it has received. Certainly it shouldn’t be relegated to Sailer’s blog and similarly confined venues.

Mark Bowden profiles Bob Fishman, who directs CBS’ television broadcasts of NFL games. The sheer number of decisions Fishman must make in the course of a minute of airtime staggers the mind. Cognitive psychologists should study the guy.

The Nation, 9 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 9 February 2010:

Alexander Cockburn quotes an interesting-sounding new book, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People, by Dana Nelson. Unfortunately, Nelson does not recommend abolishing the presidency. She does have a set of proposals to reduce its power, and she exhorts her readers to find ways of participating in political life that do not involve voting or require fixing national attention on one man.

This issue includes part one of “Adventures in Editing,” Ted Solotaroff’s recollections of his time as an associate editor of Commentary in the early 60s. Anyone interested in writing will enjoy Solotaroff’s description of how he learned to do that job. Anyone interested in narcissists will enjoy his description of how Norman Podhoretz behaved as the editor-in-chief of the magazine in those days. One bit that sticks in my mind is near the end of the piece:

Shortly after I’d come to Commentary, I’d had a conversation with Norman about recruiting writers for the magazine. It didn’t seem to me such a big deal; I said I knew of four or five people at the University of Chicago alone who could write for Commentary.

“You think you do, but you don’t,” said Norman. “You don’t realize how unusual you were for an academic.”

I said I wasn’t that unusual: I’d lucked into an opportunity my friends hadn’t had. “I’ll bet you a dinner that I can bring five writers you’ve never heard of into the magazine in the next year.”

“I don’t want to take your money,” he said. “I’ll bet you won’t bring three.”

We turned out to both be right. With one exception, the novelist Thomas Rogers, none of the former colleagues I had in mind sent in a review or piece that was lively enough to be accepted. A former fellow graduate student, Elizabeth Tornquist, who was turning to political journalism, also managed to crack the barrier. The others had fallen into one or another mode of scholarly dullness or pedagogical authority and, despite my suggestions, had trouble climbing out to address the common reader. My efforts to point their prose and sense of subject in a broader direction brought little joy to either party. “How dare you revise my formulation of an intellectual problem” was a fairly typical reaction.

Which may explain why so few “little magazines” really make it. It certainly explains why someone Podhoretz was needed to make Commentary into the magazine it was. Only someone who didn’t mind losing friends could edit their work as mercilessly as was necessary to make a periodical worth reading and talking about; only someone who didn’t mind sucking up to the rich and famous could raise the money and generate the publicity necessary to keep it afloat.

The American Conservative, 26 January 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 9 February 2009:

Much of this issue is devoted to Israeli military operation in Gaza and its likely consequences for the politics of the Middle East. The four items I want to note are not related to that topic, however.

An obituary for Samuel Huntington notes that Huntington produced “pathbreaking scholarship in all four major subfields of political science.” This led me straight to Wikipedia, which lists the five major subfields of political science as “political theory, public policy, national politics, international relations, and comparative systems.” Which of these Huntington missed I don’t know.

Another obituary, for Father Richard John Neuhaus, includes a much harsher assessment of its subject. Neuhaus is described there as a 1950′s liberal whose lack of imagination led him to conclude his public life as the ringleader of a group of “predictable apologists for the very secular policies of the Bush administration, which were notable neither for their attention to claims of transcendent justice nor for their respect for the dignity of the human person.” Among Neuhaus’ many delinquencies was a public campaign of defamation he and his followers waged against the staff of Chronicles magazine in 1989.

Ronald Reagan hitting a girl

A review of William F. Buckley, Junior’s The Reagan I Knew includes a couple of anecdotes from the book. I reproduce them below:

Buckley’s Reagan is robust: when we (and Buckley) first meet him, he is about to introduce a Buckley talk at a Los Angeles high school. But the microphones are dead and can only be switched on from a locked booth above the auditorium.

“His diagnosis seemed instantaneous,” Buckley recalls. “He was out the window, his feet on the parapet, his back to the wall, sidestepping carefully toward the control-room window. Reaching it, he thrust his elbow, breaking the glass, and disappeared into the control room.” In a moment, “we could hear the crackling of the newly animated microphone.”

At their final encounter, in 1990, the ex-president again demonstrates his adventurous streak. He holds out his cup of tea to Buckley: “Stick your finger in this.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

The drink is scalding. “Now, watch this,” Reagan says as he swigs from the cup. “See? The tolerance of your mouth tissues is infinitely greater than that of your hand! … You know who taught me that? It was Frank Sinatra.”

You can see why someone like that would grab people’s imaginations.

The Nation, 16 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 9 February 2009:

Gary Younge points out that Barack Obama is in fact the President of the United States. From this fact, he draws the conclusion that the time has come to put away the posters and other artwork endorsing him and get to work pressing him from the left, as others will surely do from the right.

Akiva Gottlieb reviews two novels by Bulgaria’s Angel Wagenstein, novels replete with heretical rabbis, lazy Nazis, and other exemplars of moral ambiguity. The review opens with a reference to Joshua Cohen’s “Untitled: A Review,” from Cohen’s short-story collection The Quorum. A reviewer finds on his doorstep a volume of six million crisp, white, blank pages. He decides that this book is a history of the Holocaust, in fact “the only way to write about the event, the idea.”

Eric Alterman takes on Rabbi Abraham Foxman and the Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Alterman contends that “Anti-Defamation League” is a double misnomer for this organization. He contends that it launches harsh attacks indiscriminately at all critics of Israel, attacks which less often counter defamation than they themselves amount to defamation; and that under Rabbi Foxman it is so much a one-man operation as hardly to qualify as a “league.”

The editors endorse Tom Geoghegan for Congress. (Others have done so since.) Geoghegan has written for many publications regularly noted here. A piece of his appeared in the final issue of The Baffler, for example, the only one that appeared after I started these notes.

Part two of Ted Solotaroff’s “Adventures in Editing” tells the story of his difficult dealings with Cynthia Ozick and of the wildly eccentric personality of Alfred Chester. Here are a couple of nuggets from the parts about Chester:

[Ozick] said that she was a friend of Alfred Chester. Was I his editor?

I was. Alfred was our star literary reviewer–flamboyant, irreverent, unpredictable, even from one paragraph to the next. A flaming queen with a red wig, crystalline prose style and a razor wit, he seemed about 179 degrees across the human spectrum from this literary vestal virgin. But perhaps not. His stare burned with the same intensity.

Later:

The author I most enjoyed working with during this second act was Alfred Chester. Except for our both being Jewish and literary, we couldn’t have been less alike. I, the burdened husband and then single parent with a strong streak of idealism; Alfred, the bohemian queen who confessed in his review of Naked Lunch:

I am a ne’er-do-well, I suppose, a cynic, an immoralist, and therefore very contemporary. In a pinch, I would give up everything, because I value nothing, except my skin…. It feels so good, especially in the sun or in the woods or in the sea or against another. Philosophy, politics, furniture, books, paintings, human relationships, the whole of Western civilization–none of it feels so good, none of it is me.

Alfred had grown up as the youngest child in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn and was marked by a treatment for a childhood illness that left him not only bald for life but also without eyebrows, eyelashes and body hair. With his scruffy, outlandish orange-red wig, which sat uneasily on his head, he looked bizarre. Without it, his narrow blue eyes, usually glinting with irony, his chubby cheeks and his sexy pout of a mouth came more sharply into view and made him look like a Jewish Pan.

He had recently returned from a decade in Paris and had entered the New York literary scene with a big splash–an archly provocative put-down in Partisan Review of Tropic of Cancer (“Even Romeo and Juliet is more stimulating”).

An interview with a man named Nato Thompson revolves around Thompson’s friend, “experimental geographer” Trevor Paglen.

A novel interpretation of academic freedom

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 10 February 2009:

Thanks to 3quarksdaily for linking to this column by Stanley Fish. I’ve copied four excerpts below:

My assessment of the way in which some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by events at the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier, Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken away in handcuffs and charged with trespassing.

What had Rancourt done to merit such treatment? According to the Globe and Mail, Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks : Everybody was getting an A+.”

Later:

Rancourt is a self-described anarchist and an advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a style of teaching derived from the assumption (these are Rancourt’s words) “that our societal structures . . . represent the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).

Among those structures is the university in which Rancourt works and by which he is paid. But the fact of his position and compensation does not insulate the institution from his strictures and assaults; for, he insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient workers and managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s doctrine — knowingly or unknowingly.”

It is this belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters that underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12, 2009).

It turns out that another tool of coercion is the requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the college catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” – “where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.”

And then:

Rancourt first practiced squatting when he decided that he “had to do something more than give a ‘better’ physics course.” Accordingly, he took the Physics and Environment course that had been assigned to him and transformed it into a course on political activism, not a course about political activism, but a course in which political activism is urged — “an activism course about confronting authority and hierarchical structures directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion in order to democratize power in the workplace, at school, and in society.”

Clearly squatting itself is just such a “defiant or non-subordinate assertion.” Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy. He practices it.

How did Rancourt’s supervisors respond to his activities?

The record shows exchanges of letters between Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and letters from each of them to Marc Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board of Governors. There is something comical about some of these exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he is not guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination is his job, and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate activities, he plans to expand them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt “does not acknowledge any impropriety regarding his conduct.” Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that “Socrates did not give grades to students,” and boasts that everything he has done was done “with the purpose of making the University of Ottawa a better place,” a place “of greater democracy.”

The Nation, 23 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 11 February 2009:

Stuart Klawans reviews three new films, Gomorrah, The Class, and Coraline. Gomorrah, he assures us, is not merely a hyper-violent Italian gangster movie, but a critique of globalization, a portrait of “what the world looks like when it has been remade by gangsters.” As a teacher myself, I was intrigued by Klawans’ description of The Class. Evidently the film depicts two hours in the life of a grammar and composition class in a French public school, taught by a man with a daring, aggressive technique. ”François has no fear of sharp distinctions. His pedagogical method is to push his students and then to shove, so that he’s always on the verge of going too far with them–or finally steps over the line.” Coraline is evidently a reimagining of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” While the story centers on a son’s obscure sense that his father has rejected him, the main action of the film begins with a girl openly rejecting her parents and leads her toward the same kind of destruction as Kafka’s character had witnessed.

Richard R. John explains how recent changes in rates and policies at the US Postal Service have rewarded mass-circulation magazines and penalized low-circulation magazines. A look at the subcategories under “Periodical Notes” will show that this is a matter of vital concern to your humble correspondent. Professor John points out that from its founding, America’s post office has always given favorable terms to low-circulation publications. He appeals to George Washington and James Madison in his plea to keep it that way.

Professor John mentions in passing that postal officials and corporate lobbyists have referred to the Internet in their attempts to defend the new policy. He might have quoted any number of observers who have predicted that the Web and other network technologies will eventually do away with print magazines. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that those predictions will sooner or later come true. But that is precisely why we must continue to back low-circulation magazines now. A magazine has a personality of a sort that does not exist anywhere else. Through the collaboration of its contributors and editors, a good magazine develops a voice, a character. This distinctive personality makes it possible for regular readers of that magazine to put the ideas presented in it into a much fuller context than they would be able to find anywhere else, and to do so essentially at a glance. Perhaps someday, perhaps someday soon, a new form of online publication will arise that will accommodate this sort of personality. For now, the closest approximations are publications like Slate and Salon that mimic the conventions of print media. Even they don’t quite get it; if I read Slate every day for a month, I become able to recognize a Slate article by its style. Still, because I read it online, I don’t read one article after another- I read one article, click on an external link to something quite different, check back here to see if anything’s going on, then do some work for an hour or two, then spend a few more minutes browsing that may involve looking at another article in Slate. That’s quite a different experience from sitting down with a magazine for an hour.

A picture of Lawrence Dennis as a boy

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 February 2009:

Here’s a picture of Lawrence Dennis and his aunt as they were when they toured England in 1910. In those days he was billed as “the boy evangelist.” Before long Dennis would be sent from his boyhood home in Atlanta to elite schools in the North, schools where he began passing for white. After graduating from Harvard, Dennis would serve as a US Army officer in World War I, a diplomatic agent in Central America in the 1920s, and a banker on Wall Street in the days before the Great Crash. In a series of books published in the 1930s, he would argue that the USA was destined to become a fascist state in which dissent would be greeted with criminal prosecution. For predicting the end of free speech in America, he would be arrested and tried for sedition in 1944. I guess that showed him.

Counterpunch 16-31 January 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 February 2009:

From Paul Craig Roberts, part two of a three-part survey of economics. In Part One, published issue-before-last, Roberts had defended supply-side economics as the insight that reducing marginal tax rates increases the amount of goods available in the economy at every price range. In this original sense, Roberts asserted, supply-side had “nothing to do with trickle-down economics or the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves.” Roberts claimed that when inflation declined after the Reagan tax cuts of the 80s, the old Keynesian theory that loosening fiscal policy would raise prices was definitively refuted and supply-side just as definitively established. This article was essentially a synopsis of Roberts’ 1984 book The Supply-Side Revolution.

In this issue, Roberts argues that the doctrine of comparative advantage, for 200 years the cornerstone of the intellectual defense of free trade, does not apply to today’s world. Roberts says that comparative advantage, as originally laid out by David Ricardo and elaborated ever since, rests on two basic presuppositions. First, that the differing geographical, demographic, and climatic characteristics of countries would mean that in each country there would be different opportunity costs associated with choosing to make one product rather than another. Second, that “the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connections” meant that capital and, to a lesser extent, labor would remain fixed within national boundaries.

Today, Roberts declares, both of these presuppositions are exploded. In our world, “most combinations of inputs that produce outputs are knowledge-based. The relative price ratios are the same in every country. Therefore, as opportunity costs do not differ across national boundaries, there is no basis for comparative advantage.” The second presupposition is even more thoroughly discredited. Not only do owners of capital routinely migrate from country to country, but in the era of multinational corporations and electronic communications owners of capital need not follow their investments abroad to supervise their operations.

Roberts cites many scholarly publications that challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage. Among them: Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, by Ralph E. Gomory and William J. Baumol; The Predator State, by James K. Galbraith; Robert E. Prasch’s January 1996 article in The Review of Political Economy, ”Reassessing the Theory of Comparative Advantage“; and, from 1888, R. W. Thompson’s History of Protective Tariff Laws.

http://www.counterpunch.org/

The American Conservative, 9 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 February 2009:

Considering the state of America’s economic system today, it’s hardly surprising that this issue focuses chiefly on economics.

Adam Fergusson provides a synopsis of his long out of print book When Money Dies, an elegantly written study of the cultural and psychological effects of hyperinflation on the middle classes in Germany during the 1920s. An introductory note mentions that Amazon lists a copy of the book for $2,500. Gripping as the synopsis is, it isn’t hard to see why someone would be reluctant to part with a copy of the book for less. On the other hand, the high price may represent a fear that Weimar-style hyperinflation will soon strike here, a fear that Fergusson’s prose, vivid as that of any nightmare-inducing tale of terror, will certainly feed.

George Selgin, professor of economics at the University of West Virginia, argues that while deflation resulting from a collapse in demand is a very bad thing, there is also a good kind of deflation. This good deflation results from an increase in supply. Indeed, Selgin points out, prices in gold-standard countries fell and average of 2% annually from 1873-1896, years during which output in those same countries increased at almost 3%. This good deflation is perfectly natural- “technology was improving, so goods cost less to produce. Why shouldn’t prices reflect that reality?” In fact, Selgin argues, supply-driven deflation ”never exceeds an economy’s rate of productivity growth, and that rate itself sets a lower bound to equilbrium real rates of interest.” So, supply-driven deflation is not a destabilizing phenomenon, but a stabilizing one.

Another article notes the rise in popular opposition to central banking since Representative Ron Paul made the abolition of the Federal Reserve a central plank of his 2008 presidential bid. A number of high profile financial commentators, such as potential US Senate candidate Peter Schiff, have taken up the “End the Fed” banner.

The Atlantic Monthly, March 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 February 2009:

A profile of Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, focuses on this gifted theologian’s attempts to lead the Anglican communion in its effort to make up its mind about homosexuality. Williams himself has many friends who are gay and took a consistently liberal line on gay issues before 2002, when he became the nominal leader of Christianity’s third most popular tradition. In 1989 Williams gave a speech to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement called “The Body’s Grace,” in which he argued that a Christian understanding of grace requires us to understand that persons need to be seen in particular ways. Sexual relationships provide one of these ways of being seen that are key to the development of the human person. Christians must therefore find value, not only in persons who are inclined to engage in homosexual acts, but in those acts and the relationships of which they are part. The essay is, from one point of view, quite conservative- Williams claims that the kind of being seen that deserves this value is a kind that must be developed over time and that only one person may do the seeing. He thus sets his face against sexual liberationists who would resist the imposition of couplehood as the one appropriate form of human sexuality, and aligns himself with those who would merely extend that imposition to same sex relationships. Compared to other Christian leaders, of course, Williams does not seem conservative at all. Even the view that same-sexers should be allowed to imitate opposite-sex couples and to assimilate their behavior to norms that have traditionally been imposed on them is daringly progressive in the world where the Archbishop of Canterbury moves.

Since most of the Anglican communion’s 80,000,000 members live in African countries where homosexuality is the object of extreme cultural disapproval, it has been quite difficult for Williams to hold to his liberal, assimilationist stand while at the same time meeting the first requirement of his job and keeping the communion united.

Atlantic editor James Bennet recalls his meeting with recently assassinated Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan. A theologian of a very different stripe from that of Rowan Williams, Rayyan’s “bigoted worldview, and his rich historical imagination, gave him a kind of serenity.” This serenity was nothing daunted when Rayyan sent his own son on a suicide mission against an Israeli settlement and planned to send another on a similar mission.

Those of us who call for the abolition of the US presidency (what with today being Presidents’ Day and all) will thank the Atlantic for its note of “Politicians: Be Killed or Survive,” a study finding that the only political figures who face a significant risk of assassination are those who operate in systems where power is so highly centralized that assassinating one person will effect significant change in the policies of the state.

Brian Mockenhaupt reports on an effort to persuade US combat veterans that it’s okay to seek help for psychological injuries by showing them performances of Sophocles’ plays about wounded warriors, Ajax and Philoctetes.

Demographic Maps of the USA by Religious Affiliation

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 19 February 2009:

A couple of years ago, LeFalcon sent me a link to a set of maps like these, which codify the counties of the USA by the percentage of the population who adhere to particular religious groups. It’s fascinated me ever since. Below, as an example, is the map for Quakers.

You can see that Quakers are rather thin on the ground everywhere. In their uniformity, they are unusual. The striking thing about the maps is how divided the USA is regionally. So, look at the distribution of Baptists:

And compare it with the distribution of Roman Catholics:

The overall map shows just how strong these regional divisions are.

The Nation, 2 March 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 21 February 2009:

A review of several new books from and about Iran mentions the thinker Jalal Al-e Ahmad and his concept of gharbzadegi, or “intoxication with all things western” The reviewer assures us that this concept represents “one of the most influential critiques of the West.” In fact, he takes issue with some of the books under review for failing to presuming to discuss twentieth-century Iranian intellectual life, yet failing to mention the presence in that life of so towering a figure as Al-e-Ahmad. Since I’d never heard of Al-e-Ahmad or gharbzadegi, I thought I’d better make a note of this. So here are links to the Wikipedia articles about Al-e-Ahmad and gharbzadegi.

An interview with astrophysicist Adam Frank focuses on Frank’s religious ideas. Frank’s big idea seems to be that religious systems give us a way of processing and talking about emotions like awe and wonder that come upon us when we notice the scope and orderliness of natural phenomena. Frank shows his Astronomy 101 class a TV documentary about the origin of the universe, then asks them what they think of the music. His point is that the documentarians are packaging the Big Bang as a creation myth. Frank does not mean this as a condemnation of the show- on the contrary, he embraces this myth-making. Frank’s attitude reminds me of an idea I mentioned here a few days ago. I’ve long thought there was a great deal to be said about the relationship of scientific theories about the origin of the universe to traditional creation myths.

George Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 22 February 2009:

Since today is George Washington’s birthday, I decided to include my favorite of his writings, his letter to the Congregation Yeshuat Israel of Newport, Rhode Island.

Letter from George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport

c. August 1790

Gentlemen:

While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

The Nation, 9 March 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 22 February 2009:

Robert Dreyfuss looks at the regional elections held in Iraq on 31 January and finds good news. A new alliance of Shi’a and Sunni groups is beginning to operate in Iraqi politics. Soon, Dreyfuss hopes, this alliance will be strong enough to present itself as a genuinely nationalist bloc and to insist on an end to the US occupation.

No such development is in sight in Afghanistan. An editorial expresses the fear that the Obama plan to send more US troops to that country will make “Bush’s War” into Mr O’s very own.

Katha Pollitt speaks up for free speech. On the twentieth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah against Salman Rushdie, she finds fault with fellow leftists whose only response to violent behavior by Muslims who have taken offense at speech labeled anti-Islamic is to “see these incidents as gratuitous provocations by insensitive Westerners” and to support restrictions on speech that amount to blasphemy laws. She grants that many of the incidents that have generated violent responses in the Muslim world have indeed been gratuitous provocations by insensitive Westerners, and is happy to list extremists from other religious groups whose conduct has been every bit as deplorable as the worst we have seen from Khomeini and his coreligionists. But:

Appeals to the hurt feelings of religious people are just a dodge to protect the antidemocratic and retrograde policies of religious states and organizations. We’re all adults; we have to live with unwelcome expression every day. What’s so special about religion that it should be uniquely cocooned? After all, nobody at the UN is suggesting that atheists should be protected from offense–let alone women, gays, leftists or other targets popular with the faithful. What about our feelings? How can it be logical to say that women can’t point out sexism in the Bible or the Koran but clerics can use those texts to declare women inferior, unclean and in need of male control? And what about all the abuses religions heap on one another as an integral part of their “faith”?

An essay about Israeli novelist David Grossman of course concerns itself chiefly with Grossman’s insights into the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. What sticks with me from the essay is this quote from Grossman about writing:

[Y]ears ago, reflecting on a story he was writing that featured a bitter, emotionally unstable protagonist, he described his desire to have the tale surprise him. “More than that, I want it to actually betray me,” he wrote.

To drag me by the hair, absolutely against my will, into the places that are most dangerous and most frightening for me. I want it to destabilize and dissolve all the comfortable defenses of my life. It must deconstruct me, my relations with my children, my wife, and my parents; with my country, with the society I live in, with my language.

The American Conservative, 23 February 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 28 February 2009:

Daniel McCarthy chronicles the American Right’s shift from the skepticism about the office of US President that fueled the principled critique of excessive presidential power that thinkers like James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall sustained in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the abject presidentialism of the Bush/ Cheney Republicans. McCarthy does not suggest an agenda for curbing the power of the presidency; still less does he express agreement with my favorite idea, abolishing the office. He does not even hope for a return to the arrangement of the nineteenth century, when the Congress was the senior partner in the leadership of the federal government. The wish he does express is that conservatives will once more express a wish for a return to those days.

Richard N. Gamble, author of the magnificent book The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity The Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation and of a neat article about Irving Babbitt’s view of Abraham Lincoln, reviews several recent books about Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy. Most interesting to me were Gamble’s remarks about What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy, by Malcolm D. Magee. The key paragraph is this:

Magee gets Wilson largely right, but one further refinement of his analysis would have been helpful in connecting American Christianity and the “faith-based foreign policy” of the subtitle. It is not enough to say that Wilson was a Calvinist or a Presbyterian. Wilson, as Magee’s evidence makes clear, was a particular kind of Calvinist and Presbyterian. He adhered to a branch of Calvinism that tried to reorder every institution by bringing it under Christ’s dominion. Magee refers to “the Presbyterian tradition,” but it is doubtful there ever has been anything so unified in American history. Wilson owed his view of the church and the world not to confessional Presbyterianism but to the transformationist strand of evangelicalism that came to dominate mainstream Presbyterianism in the late 19th century. Wilson imbibed an activist faith that in many ways distorted historic Presbyterianism. He rejected creedal, confessional Presbyterianism. In order to understand his foreign policy, then, we must understand not his Presbyterian roots in general, but the fact that he emerged from a branch of Protestantism that had more in common with low-church, sentimental, meliorist evangelicalism than with historically Reformed Christianity. Magee fills in an important dimension of Wilson’s thought and personality, but finding the precise faith on which Wilson based his foreign policy requires that the story of American Christianity be told a bit differently.

Kirkpatrick Sale reviews a novel by Carolyn Chute, The School on Heart’s Content Road. In a fictional town in a rural Maine, a commune full of aging hippies form an unlikely alliance with the local underemployed rednecks. Forming a militia, they decide that the only way for Mainers to reclaim their freedoms is to secede from the USA. Since Chute is herself a member of the real-life 2nd Maine Militia and an advocate of the dissolution of the USA, it is perhaps surprising that the militiamen are an unimpressive bunch whose revolt peters out into drunkenness and random fornication. But not so surprising that she promises a series of four sequels.

Bill Kauffman goes to his favorite gun show and reports that the American Left is missing a fertile recruiting ground there. The attendees are “working and rural citizens who are pro-Bill of Rights, anti-corporatist, and open to radical alternatives.”

A full world

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 28 February 2009:

The 1-15 February issue of Counterpunch carries the third of three short articles in which Paul Craig Roberts surveys the academic discipline of economics. On the 15th, I noted the first two parts, in which he defended supply-side theory and attacked the theory of comparative advantage. This third part concludes with Roberts declaration that “If economics is to be of any use to humanity, it must cease being absurd.”

Roberts points out that the world mainstream economists describe is one empty of things humans have made. In this “empty world,” the only limits on production are the limits of human productive activity. ”Nature has no role in the game.” In the real world, by contrast, nature is full of things humans have made. The limited availability of natural resources, of “natural capital,” imposes sharp, sometimes terrifying limits on production. Roberts calls for economics to be reinvented to give a realistic description of this “full world.”

Roberts takes up the banner of mathematical economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who proposed that the discipline of economics essentially start over. Georgescu-Roegen attacked the “Solow-Stiglitz production function,” which, according to Roberts, “assumes that man-made capital is a substitute for nature’s capital. Therefore, as long as man-made capital can be reproduced, there are no limits to growth.” Roberts asserts that Georgescu-Roegen “destroyed the Solow-Stiglitz production function,” but mainstream economists cling to it “because it is a mathematical way of saying that ecological limits on economic growth do not exist.” Georgescu-Roegen proposed replacing the Solow-Stiglitz function and the body of economic theory that depends on it with a new understanding of production. “In contrast to the Solow-Stiglitz absurdity, Georgescu-Roegen made it clear that production is the transformation of resources into useful products and waste products. Labor and man-made capital are agents of transformation, while natural resources are what is transformed into useful products and waste products. Man-made capital and natural capital are complements, not substitutes.” Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen died in 1994; the most notable living exponent of his ideas is economist Herman Daly. Roberts particularly recommends Daly’s 2007 book Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development.

Chronicles, March 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 28 February 2009:

I first became aware of the political question of same-sex marriage in 1980. I was in fifth grade and we were supposed to conduct debates in class about issues of the day. I was assigned to the group opposing this proposition: “The Equal Rights Amendment should be passed.” Researching for my part in the debate, I found an argument that the plain wording of the proposed amendment (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”) would grant men the right to marry other men and women the right to marry other women. This was in the context of an article opposing the amendment.

At first I was excited to find this claim. Up to that point all that I had been able to find were dry legal arguments that would never capture the attention of my classmates. Here at last was a point that would grab the imaginations of everyone in the room and hold them for as long as I needed.

But as I thought it over, I realized that there was an obvious question that would stump me if anyone asked it. Why shouldn’t same sex couples be free to marry? The only argument in the article was that same sex couples couldn’t reproduce. My immediate response to that was to think of my grandmother. When my grandfather died, she was in her fifties, most assuredly past childbearing. Yet she remarried, and no one thought to object. So why was the sterility of same sex couples a reason why they should not be allowed to marry?

In the decades since, I’ve kept an eye on the debate. I’ve found some very sensible arguments supporting the right of same sex couples to marry, and some intriguing arguments to the effect that no one should marry. But what I have not found are many substantive arguments in favor of reserving marriage for heterosexual couples. This is quite surprising. One would assume that by now someone would have come up with a worthwhile argument in favor of the status quo.

In this issue of Chronicles, Thomas Fleming explains why he is opposed to same sex marriage. He begins by describing a discussion between Governor Mike Huckabee and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Huckabee cited the Old Testament’s definition of marriage as necessary heterosexual. Stewart replied that the Old Testament conceives of marriage quite differently than do contemporary societies, for example allowing polygamy and assuming that households will own slaves. Fleming summarizes this conversation thus: “Governor Huckabee was slaughtered by the host of The Daily Show. He refused to confront honestly either polygamy or slavery… Huckabee had, after all, subscribed to the liberal notion that ‘all people are created equal,’ and now he was restricting the equal rights of homosexuals. When he could only defend his position by citing the law, Stewart quite appropriately asked, “What if we make it that Hispanics can’t vote?”

Fleming agrees with Stewart that marriage as it is conceived in the USA now is something that might as well be opened to same sex couples. What Fleming opposes is that current conception. Fleming’s view is complex, and at odds with mine. I can be fair to Fleming only if I quote him at length:

In the marriage debate, the champions on each side make fundamental mistakes that corrupt the discussion and make it impossible to begin the process of defending marriage. It is easy to spot the errors of the left, both the Marxist left and the libertarian left: They hate marriage as it has existed throughout our history and would replace it with a voluntary ad hoc attachment that can be entered or abandoned with ease. For them, marriage is no longer a serious contract, as liberals once wanted it to be, but only the sort of paperwork a tourist fills out when he is renting a car. Naturally, he agrees to take out certain insurance, pay traffic tickets, and be held liable for damages. Beyond that, he only expects to drive the car– or bed the woman– for a limited time. For them the purpose of marriage is (as Jon Stewart and his ‘gay’ friends might argue) mutual affection within a stable relationship.

Conservatives, although they are right in their instinctive reverence for the institution, typically make the mistake of accepting the old liberal view of marriage, which made it a contract between individuals that is enforced by the state. As a result, they concentrate their efforts on beefing up state regulation of marriage and divorce– as if governments had not already done enough damage– and, by forever speaking of marriage as made between two individuals, they can never entirely escape the liberal-libertarian trap. If a man and a woman can enter freely into a contract, why can they not, by mutual consent, find an exit? In forever speaking of marriage as a human right– and, to use Governor Huckabee’s first-grade syntax, “a one man one woman life relationship” formed by two individuals– they will always have to fall back on law or prejudice as their ultimate defense of normal marriage.

The fundamental problem reveals itself in the vague language, a distant echo of Rousseau and Marx, used to defend traditional marriage. By “life relationship,” did Huckabee mean an unbreakable bond throughout their lives or merely a relationship to enjoy life together?

It is as obvious to Fleming as it is to those of us who support same sex marriage that a same sex couple can display “mutual affection within a stable relationship,” and that such a couple is perfectly capable of “a relationship to enjoy life together.” So, grant that either of these definitions is an adequate description of the purpose of marriage, and same sex couples will be entitled to participate in it.

Of course, Fleming does not grant this. His view is radically different. First, he points out that the definition of marriage as a “one man one woman life relationship” is rather peculiar in historical terms. It goes back only to the Enlightenment and is by no means universally accepted in today’s world. “[T]here is every reason in the world why [Christians] should reject the Enlightenment’s redefinition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman who wish to enjoy life together.” If it was only in the eighteenth century that Europeans began to regard marriage as a relationship between the spouses, between whom did earlier generations regard it as a relationship?

In any free society, households can only be independent if, first, they are embedded in a wider network of kin and clan, whose members will aid them, and, second, if they possess sufficient property to maintain their existence and keep from falling into dependency, either on the rich and powerful or on the government. This link between marriage and property endured, for the responsible classes, down to the end of the nineteenth century. Men often put off marriage until they were sufficiently well fixed to be able to provide a home and necessities for their future family.

In the twentieth century, however, governments… made it possible to buy a house on easy terms– and at perhaps three times the price. We no longer have to take care of our children or provide for their education, and we no longer expect our children to take care of us in old age. The lord– that is, the government– will provide.

So, Fleming’s criterion of marriage is to be found in extended family systems. For him, the purpose of marriage is to situate a household within “a wider network of kin and clan, whose members will aid them” and to ensure that the household will “possess sufficient property to maintain their existence and keep from falling into dependency.” Marriages formed as the result of romance and dissoluble by easy divorce can hardly be expected to create and maintain such networks or to regulate the accumulation of property as effectively as can the barely dissoluble arranged marriages of premodern Europe. Fleming might also have cited such nonindustrialized contemporary countries as Afghanistan, which seem to closer to qualifying as “free societies” by his definition than do states under capitalism. What are the political implications of the sort of family relationship Fleming favors?

The ancient conception of marriage and family– from Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas, Dante, and Althusius– as the foundation of the social order means exactly the opposite of what Huckabee and Stewart would like it to mean. The family constructs the lower orders of society, which in turn construct the state; therefore, no legitimate state, whether a republic or a monarchy, will strip the province, village, or family of their traditional prerogatives. A healthy society may, indeed, pass laws, good and bad, to confirm the family forms that have been inherited from earlier generations, but it will never innovate, for example by liberalizing divorce or legalizing same-sex marriage.

Now at last we’re getting somewhere. Fleming opposes same-sex marriage because it is incompatible with his belief that we ought to recreate social and economic conditions that existed in the preindustrial world. I can see why Fleming believes that a society composed of independent households “embedded in a wider network of kin and clan, whose members will aid them” is more compatible with the dignity of the human person than is a society composed of atomized individuals subject to the demands of the market and the will of the State. I don’t as a matter of fact agree with him- I suspect that life within one of the patriarchal households he wants to reestablish would be pretty stifling. After all, there must be a reason why so many people have chosen to seek their fortunes in towns far from home since the outset of the Industrial Revolution. But I can see his point.

What I don’t see is how he can call his position conservative. The view of marriage that emerged in the Enlightenment may have been radical in its day, but it accorded very well with the needs of the economic system that was rising at the time. Households can hardly be independent when they make their livings, not from land they own and work together, but from jobs they hold at the pleasure of employers. Extended family networks can hardly exist where the majority of the population makes its living as participants in a labor market which rewards those who relocate frequently and penalizes those who are willing to move only short distances from their ancestral home. Fleming seems to suggest that we in the West should scrap, not only the last three hundred years of thought about what marriage is, but the last three hundred years of economic and social development.

To call for a return to an earlier form of society is in fact to call for revolution. If the USA were to scrap industrialization and the concepts of family that go with it, we would be carrying out the most extreme disruption of society imaginable. If undertaken in a spirit devoid of Fleming’s evident compassion and urbanity, such an effort might easily replicate the horrors the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia. Surely the conservative approach, the approach that would “confirm the family forms that have been inherited from earlier generations,” is precisely to legalize same sex marriage.

The Nation, 16 March 2009

Originally posted on Los Thunderlads, 28 February 2009:

Frances Richard reviews recent books about the nature of photography, citing along the way several not-so-recent but extremely interesting titles. Among these is Downcast Eyes by Martin Jay, a study of twentieth century French thinkers who have argued that vision is overrated. Also, Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” in which he introduced the idea that he’s been working on ever since, that we change people and situations when we make them objects of vision and that it is dishonest of us to pretend that our making images and looking at them is an innocent activity that has no effect on anyone or anything else.

A review of Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation focuses on the influence of corporate money on scientific research. The reviewer holds that this is the most important question Shapin ought to have addressed in his history of the last few decades of science, and that it is a question he takes far too lightly.

Gary Younge argues that only an energized Left can turn the populist impulses that the current global economic crisis has spawned into something constructive. “The last time things looked this bad globally, we ended up with Nazism, fascism and war,” Younge points out, claiming that today’s right-wing populists are little better than their counterparts of the period after the Great War. The most memorable part of Younge’s column for me was the story at the beginning:

When I was a student in the Soviet Union, during Gorbachev’s final months, my landlady used to take the dog out for a walk at the same time every night. Since it was winter and I am no dog lover, I decided not to join her. But when the weather cleared up I once accompanied her and found that she met several other local dog owners at exactly the same time. The timing, it turned out, was no coincidence. They called it Dog Hour–the moment when the state-sponsored news program Vremya came on, and they therefore left the house.

Frustrated as they were, none suspected that the superpower state they found so maddening would soon collapse. The party was still in control and the state had a formidable military at its disposal. But what was clear from this nightly routine of passive resistance was that the system had not only failed in its mission to deliver goods and services to the people; it had lost all credibility with them. It had power but lacked influence.

Following the news over the past few months, I have felt like taking a quick walk around the block myself. Watching global capitalism disintegrate in real time is a dizzying experience.