Libertarians and marriage

I've fallen far behind my usual pace in sharing my "Periodicals Notes"; that pesky offline part of the world keeps distracting me with things like work, family, etc etc. There's a great deal of work I ought to be doing right now, as a matter of fact, but I can't resist taking time to note a couple of pieces in the latest issue of The American Conservative. As you can see from the cover illustration, the magazine's contributors generally oppose official recognition of homosexual unions, holding that marriage is an institution that must be reserved for one elephant and one statue, and solemnized by a self-certified ophthalmologist.

I've long been puzzled by the low quality of arguments offered against same-sex marriage. Opponents have had a great deal of time to come up with reasons why only opposite sex couples should be allowed to marry. Their position is broadly popular, and they have at their disposal the resources of major religious organizations, conservative think-tanks, and much of the press. You'd think that with all that on their side, they would be able to produce an argument that would be at least superficially plausible. Yet, when asked to defend their position, supporters of the status quo trot out arguments that are so feeble they inspire, not even laughter, but sheer pity. At the outset of his article in this issue, "Stonewalling Marriage,*" Justin Raimondo describes the situation with admirable clarity:

Opponents of same-sex marriage have marshaled all sorts of arguments to make their case, from the rather alarmist view that it would de-sanctify and ultimately destroy heterosexual marriage to the assertion that it would logically lead to polygamy and the downfall of Western civilization. None of these arguments—to my mind, at least—make the least amount of sense, and they have all been singularly ineffective in beating back the rising tide of sentiment in favor of allowing same-sex couples the “right” to marry.

Raimondo goes on to offer what the cover advertises as "A Libertarian Case Against Gay Marriage." Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a statement more typical of libertarianism than these paragraphs:

Of course, we already have gay marriages. Just as heterosexual marriage, as an institution, preceded the invention of the state, so the homosexual version existed long before anyone thought to give it legal sanction. Extending the authority of the state into territory previously untouched by its tender ministrations, legalizing relationships that had developed and been found rewarding entirely without this imprimatur, would wreak havoc where harmony once prevailed. Imagine a relationship of some duration in which one partner, the breadwinner, had supported his or her partner without much thought about the economics of the matter: one had stayed home and tended the house, while the other had been in the workforce, bringing home the bacon. This division of labor had prevailed for many years, not requiring any written contract or threat of legal action to enforce its provisions.

Then, suddenly, they are legally married— or, in certain states, considered married under the common law. This changes the relationship, and not for the better. For now the property of the breadwinner is not his or her own: half of it belongs to the stay-at-home. Before when they argued, money was never an issue: now, when the going gets rough, the threat of divorce—and the specter of alimony—hangs over the relationship, and the mere possibility casts its dark shadow over what had once been a sunlit field.

Who finds libertarianism appealing? This passage might suggest two groups. First, there are people who have known many couples who lived together for a long time, then married, only to go through a calamitous divorce shortly afterward. I suppose most Americans under the age of 60 could name at least a dozen such couples among their personal acquaintances. When I've seen the sequence long cohabitation/ brief marriage/ bitter divorce, I've always tended to explain the marriage as a desperate attempt to put some life back into a failing relationship. But some might look at the sequence differently, and wonder whether the relationships would have continued had the partners not ventured into the dread precincts of matrimony. Elsewhere in the issue, a piece* is built around the observation that young Americans tend to take many Libertarian ideas for granted; perhaps the changes in family structure that have shaped the lives of so many in recent generations have been part of the reason for this intellectual climate. Second, there are people who hold power in their relationships with others because they control economic resources on which those others depend. Some such people acknowledge the responsibilities that come with such power. Others not only refuse to accept those responsibilities, but do not like even to admit that they are in a position of power at all. For them, "money was never an issue," when the other parties in their relationships simply submitted to their will as regards it. Once those parties gain a share in the control of those resources as a matter of right, suddenly the terms of the relationship must be negotiated, not decreed by the "breadwinner." From the viewpoint of the deposed "breadwinner," this development might very well look like a departure from a "sunlit field" of liberty to the "dark shadow" of conflict, but the newly empowered "stay-at-home" may see matters quite differently.

Of course, it isn't only in the relationship between income-earners and their non-employed partners that one holding economic power may deny the existence of that power and see only the prospect of conflict when a subordinate acquires an independent standing. Employers often pretend that they are on an equal footing with their employees, and denounce trades unions as monstrous powers which bring disharmony into what would otherwise be an idyll of brotherhood. A fine example of this sort of thing can be found in this issue, in Peter Brimelow's "Less Perfect Unions," which denounces American schoolteachers for organizing their profession. When Raimondo reaches the heart of his argument against same-sex marriage, he presents a case that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the arguments gay liberationists have made over the years. Same-sexers, he argues, simply do not need "to entangle themselves in a regulatory web and risk getting into legal disputes over divorce, alimony, and the division of property." Opposite sex couples may believe that their shared interest in any children they may produce justifies such "entanglement"; Raimondo doesn't agree with them, but in deference to their assessment of their needs he stops short of the gay liberationist cry of "Smash the Family! Smash the State!," and does not call for the end of official recognition of opposite sex unions. He does take a page from the gay liberationist handbook, though, when he argues that same-sex marriage threatens to "take the gayness out of homosexuality." "By superimposing the legal and social constraints of heterosexual marriage on gay relationships, we will succeed only in de-eroticizing them." Raimondo extols the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s for its anti-state focus, and insists that the lack of official sanction and the formalization that goes with it have made homosexuality itself a force to resist the modern state. Same-sex marriage, Raimondo argues, would rob homosexual relations of their anarchic character, and reconstitute them as a pillar of the established order. Why, then, has the demand for gender-neutral marriage become central to the role of same-sexers in US politics? Raimondo has a theory:

The homosexual agenda of today has little relevance to the way gay people actually live their lives.

But the legislative agenda of the modern gay-rights movement is not meant to be useful to the gay person in the street: it is meant to garner support from heterosexual liberals and others with access to power. It is meant to assure the careers of aspiring gay politicos and boost the fortunes of the left wing of the Democratic Party. The gay marriage campaign is the culmination of this distancing trend, the reductio ad absurdum of the civil rights paradigm.

The modern gay-rights movement is all about securing the symbols of societal acceptance. It is a defensive strategy, one that attempts to define homosexuals as an officially sanctioned victim group afflicted with an inherent disability, a disadvantage that must be compensated for legislatively. But if “gay pride” means anything, it means not wanting, needing, or seeking any sort of acceptance but self acceptance. Marriage is a social institution designed by heterosexuals for heterosexuals: why should gay people settle for their cast-off hand-me-downs?

It seems a bit indecent to quibble with the content of so impassioned a peroration, especially considering that the issue is a more personal one for a same-sexer like Raimondo than it is for me. However, I would point out that he is shifting his ground here. Earlier, he had claimed that marriage evolved spontaneously among heterosexuals, who improvised various means of ensuring their interest in their children would be recognized. To the extent that the institution was "designed," that design came after the state intervened in this evolution and hijacked it to serve its own purposes. Now, he implies that marriage is suitable for heterosexuals after all, but not for homosexuals. This shift is important, because it shows him backing away from liberationism and its implication that people should discard the labels they wear, band together, and create a world free of the old restrictions. It leaves him all too much at home under the banner of "American Conservative."

*Sorry, subscribers only

An unexpected visitor

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 August 2009:

Yesterday was the first day of school. I taught in the morning, Mrs Acilius had her classes in the afternoon. We went in together on the 7:14 AM bus. We have a little bath mat that Mrs Acilius’ assistance dog P—— uses to keep from sliding in the aisle of the bus. When we take the bus to school, I keep the mat in my office so that Mrs Acilius doesn’t have to carry it with her everywhere she goes.

At about 1 pm, I was doing paperwork at my desk. A student appeared in the doorway of my office. “Excuse me, sir, this cat was running around in the hallway.” She was holding a little kitten. “He’s bleeding rather badly. I have to go to class. Can you do something for him?” I stood up and reached for the kitten. She looked relieved and held him out to me. Of course he scratched my hand. I handed the kitten back to the student, then picked up P——’s mat. I held the mat out, the student set the kitten down in it. As I wrapped him up, she rushed off to her class.

So there I stood with an injured kitten. What next? I decided to take him to the nearest office and appeal for help. My office is about equidistant from the Dean’s office and the Psychological Science department office. I decided to take him to the Psychological Science office.

That turned out to be a very good decision. Their office assistant took the mat and set it on her desk. Also in the room were the department’s administrative coordinator, a couple of undergrads, and the department chair. They all gathered around the kitten in a circle. The office assistant got a little jar, filled it with water, and offered it to the kitten. The chair got a little cardboard box and put the jar and the kitten in it. The administrative coordinator had some dog food in her office for some reason; she put a couple of pieces of that in the box. The chair then went to his office and retrieved some tuna left over from his lunch.

The kitten was very badly hurt. He sniffed the water and the tuna, but didn’t take any of either. The student hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was bleeding rather badly. The end of his tail was missing and blood was streaming out of it; there were deep scratches on the front of his chest. Someone I told about it this morning thought the kitten might have tangled with the hawk who circles the Quad; I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.

Seeing how much attention he was getting in the Psych office, I decided it was time to get back to work. So I excused myself and returned to my office. A half hour later, a psychology professor whose first initial is H came to my office. H—— told me that she had made a 4 PM vet appointment for the kitten. She swore up and down that she wouldn’t be able to keep him. “We already have two cats, and our place is so small- we can not have another cat.” Oh, she said, she would keep him for a while after he was released from the vet, but he’d have to live in the bathroom to keep him away from her two rambunctious older cats.

A few hours later, I was meeting with a student when Mrs Acilius came by my office. As Mrs Acilius waited for the end of my meeting, H—— saw her. H——- went up to Mrs Acilius and told her the whole story. She’d already taken the kitten to the vet. The vet had said the kitten was in shock from loss of blood and would need surgery to repair some mangled bones. H—— had agreed to pay for the surgery and was going to take the kitten in afterward, but she repeated that she could not have another cat. Apparently she went on and on about the sheer impossibility of taking another cat into her home.

When Mrs Acilius and I were leaving for the day at 4:30 or so, she reported what H—— had told her. I remarked that in my experience, swearing that you will not take in another cat is one of the stages in the process of adopting a cat. She said she suspected that it would prove to be the case here.

UPDATED, 16 October 2009:

After H—— paid for the cat’s surgery and kept him at home for a week or so, she gave him to the Psychological Science department secretary, M——-. I suspect H—— would have broken down and kept the cat herself, but the two cats she already has were so hostile to him that it was impossible. M——- has shown me several pictures and videos of the cat at home; he looks very happy and healthy. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to upload any of those pictures.

Since the cat’s new life started when he was taken to a psychologists’ office, Mrs Acilius and I thought he should be named him for a great psychologist. Mrs Acilius favored Watson, both for John Broadus Watson and also because it suggests Sherlock Holmes sidekick Dr Watson, a model whom a pet might emulate. I leaned toward Skinner, both for Burrhus Frederic Skinner and also because it suggests skinning, a hobby a cat might take up. When the cat was still with H——, we suggested these names to her. She said that the psychology faculty had also thought he should be named for a psychologist. Their chair had suggested Skinner, which she disliked, because, she said, “I don’t think behaviorism explains much.” So Watson was out, too. She and others favored Tedeschi, for Richard G. Tedeschi, who is known for a theory about how people who have suffered traumatic misfortunes can be transformed and grow stronger afterward. Since we knew that the cat had suffered a grave misfortune and hoped that he would have a bright future, that seemed appropriate.

M——- rejected all of those names. She named the cat Saint Ray, spelled StRay. Also appropriate.

The other day, M——- was showing me some pictures of the cat. She said she used to have a cat whose appearance and behavior were remarkably similar to StRay’s. A few years ago that cat had died, after 17 years with M——-. As she told me how much StRay reminded her of her late cat, she misted up and said that she almost thought that her late cat had sent StRay to her.

Weighty matters

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 27 August 2009:

An artist's conception of the field pack ancient Roman soldiers wore

About seven years ago, I read G. R. Watson’s The Roman Soldier (originally published by Cornell University in 1969; I read a copy of the 1985 paperback reissue), a handbook summarizing what scholars in 1969 knew about life in the ancient Roman army. One point Watson made that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read the book had to do with the field packs Roman soldiers wore. Some scholars in Germany had tended to give very high estimates of the amount of weight that Roman soldiers had to carry, in some cases solemnly asserting that a legionary would march about all day with over a hundred pounds of equipment on his back. Dismissing these estimates as a self-evident absurdity, Watson tries to figure out just how heavy the pack might have been (in the 1985 reissue, that discussion is on pages 62-66, continued in note 140 on pages 175-176.) The best estimate he can come up with puts the average weight of the Roman soldier’s pack at 30 kilograms (66 pounds,)which happens to be identical to the standard for most modern armies.

Watson’s evidence suggests that throughout history armies have tended to increase the amount of weight soldiers have to carry, until the kit becomes so heavy that the high command has no choice but to cut it down to something weighing about 30 kilograms. I suppose that the obvious reason for this tendency is that many people are involved in deciding what it is essential that a soldier should carry in the field. Each of those people has ideas about items that should be on that list, and each sees the addition of his or her favorite item as a victory. When no one involved in decision-making at that level has to wear a full field pack on a regular basis, the decision makers have no immediate incentive to deny each other their little victories.

I wonder if there might not be a second, less obvious reason for this tendency. Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on a psychological experiment which indicates that people who are holding heavy objects tend to take matters more seriously than the same people do when they are not holding heavy objects. If this tendency is and has long been general among all humans everywhere, then we would expect that people who are interested in human behavior would have noticed it. Military commanders are interested in human behavior. Perhaps, noticing the overlap between the category “people holding heavy objects” and the category “people showing seriousness,” commanders have formed the idea that they could induce ever greater seriousness in their subordinates by weighing them down with ever more heavily loaded field packs.

If there’s anything to this speculation of mine, perhaps it is also part of the reason why there is so little protest against the spine-damagingly heavy backpacks that so many American children are forced to lug to and from school every day. Of course, many people are involved in deciding what a student should learn and do in school, and that is an obvious reason why the collection of textbooks and other materials students must transport on their persons tend to grow so heavy.

But perhaps a belief that the weight of the physical burden one carries correlates directly with the seriousness of one’s attitude is also part of it. We want children to take school seriously. We have observed that people holding heavy objects tend to be serious. If holding heavy objects translates into seriousness, maybe holding even heavier objects will translate into even more seriousness! It will definitely translate into more back injuries, but isn’t that a small price to pay for keeping the wee ones doubled over for much of the day?

The American Conservative, September 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 31 July 2009:

One of the traits of this magazine is a tendency to grandiose theoretical explanations. That’s one of the things I like about it; I’m into grandiose theoretial explanations myself. It isn’t scholarly publication, and few of its authors have academic reputations to defend, so that tendency is not always restrained by the standards that keep theorizing under control in academic journals. Sometimes that means that the magazine runs a provocative, bold idea that might not have survived heavier editing; sometimes it means that it runs something that’s just plain cheesy quality. Again, I’m a pretty cheesy guy, so that’s okay with me.

For example, this month Ted Galen Carpenter points out that Americans by and large are quick to view political disputes in foreign countries in a romantic light, seeing the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in all sorts of unlikely figures. The next piece, by John Laughland, picks up on this same theme, explaining this American tendency as a sign of the influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Laughland writes that “the key to understanding the West’s love of revolutions” is Westerners’ characteristic desire to believe that “politics can and should be a story with a happy ending.” This desire has run rampant in the West ever since the thinkers of the Enlightenment undermined the traditional Christian belief that the cosmos was ordered in a hierarchy, that justice was to be found in that hierarchy, and that the ruler’s power should be limited because the ruler was subordinate to God. Laughland identifies Immanuel Kant as “the greatest of all Enlightenment philosophers,” and summarizes Kant’s theory as a belief that ordinary reality is unknowable, but that the highest reality is “the categorical imperative- an abstract universally valid proposition that becomes real when it is willed.” Proceeding from these rather drastic simplifications, Laughland declares that:

The attraction of Enlightenment liberalism, therefore, is the result of a deep emotional need for a philosophical sytem that enables man to create a reality in a universe he does not understand and thereby to escape from the difficulties of the world by believing that everything will turn out all right in the end. Lacking a real belief in the afterlife, it also holds that the drama of human salvation is played out in this world, in history and politics.

Again, this is a severe oversimplification, but it has a certain plausibility. Where Laughland really goes off the rails is in his closing section, in which he argues that Enlightenment liberalism has an “objective ally” in Islam:

[B]ecause it has no priesthood, Islam, and especially Shi’ism, is fundamentally a “democratic” religion comparable to Puritanism and other forms of Presbyterianism. There is no established hierarchy; the Koran must be read equally by all. Of course Allah is supreme and Islam demands absolute submission to Him; on the face of it, this seems the opposite of the liberal model in which the individual is subjected only to himself. But this very submission is egalitarian, creating a mass of individuals who are equal in their abstractness. Moreover, God’s will is [merely] will, it has no correlation with natural law as in the Christian or Jewish traditions. Islam is therefore a profoundly voluntarist religion. Because Allah is absolutely transcendent and unknowable, he is like the Kantian thing-in-itself: mere command.

Laughland claims that the influence of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers is one of the reasons why Westerners behave as they do when confronted with complex political challenges. So to say that Islam is an “objective ally” of this influence, and to liken it as an intellectual tradition to the theories of Kant (as parodied above,) is to say that Muslims behave as they do in world affairs, at least in part, because Islam, as an intellectual tradition, is “fundamentally” anti-hierarchical. Laughland’s claims strike me as under-argued, to say the least. If Laughland were analyzing the works of particular Muslim thinkers and comparing them, on the one hand, with the works of traditional Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians who had addressed similar questions, and on the other hand with the works of post-Enlightenment Westerners, then one might imagine that he could have formed an hypothesis that traditional forms of Christianity offer certain intellectual resources unavailable to followers of either of the other two traditions. Further study might have tested this hypothesis. What makes this passage cheesy is, first, the lack of any indication that Laughland has conducted such a study; second, his failure to limit the scope of his generalizations to some definite group, such as a particular set of texts, making instead blanket assertions about all of Islam; and third, the absence of any identifiable interlocutor to whom the passage might be addressed. Laughland is not addressing himself to anyone who might contradict him or challenge his views, but is handing down pronouncements that no implicit reader would be in a position to try to disprove.

William S. Lind’s piece about the Predator unmanned fighter aircraft shows a similar tendency to the grand theoretical explanation. At least Lind’s theory is coherent, and germane to the subject at hand. He quotes Colonel John Boyd, United States Air Force, “America’s greatest military theorist,” who points out that a commitment to build a big ticket weapons system puts a contestant in an unconventional war at a disadvantage:

Because complex weapons are expensive, they are usually in service for a long time, sometimes decades. Soon after their introduction, most if not all of their operating characteristics are known, especially in the age of the Internet. Our opponents can invent and deploy generations of simple countermeasures in the lifetime of one high-tech system. They are “outcycling” us, in Boydian terms; they can go through many cycles of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting against our weapons systems while the systems go through only a single cycle. Boyd argued that there are few more certain prescriptions for defeat.

Richard Gamble reviews The American Patriot’s Bible, by Richard G. Lee. Gamble is the author of The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, and defends a very old-fashioned form of Lutheranism against all forms of nationalism. Gamble declares that the book under review “attempts with breathtaking audacity to synthesize Americanism and Christianity,” ignoring the wariness of this-world attachments at the heart of the Christian message. Lee and his staff, Gamble charges, have searched the Scriptures selectively, looking only for what they wanted to find, and have come up with a “Christianity of power, moralism, and worldly success, not one of persecution, cross-bearing, and division.” Lee’s book “combines the things of God and the things of Caesar at the very point where they most need to be kept apart. When the City of Man sets up Americanism as its faith, the City of God is forced to dissent.”

Daniel Larison reviews Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. For a long time, scholars described the events around AD 476 as the ”fall of the Roman Empire.” More recently, the dominant fashion was the “transformationist” approach, which emphasized the change of Europe’s economic and political systems at the ground level in those years, suggesting that the formal dissolution of the western Empire was a less significant event than it might have seemed. Now scholars are reacting against the transformationist approach, arguing that titles like The Rise of the European Economy seriously misrepresent a period which was in fact characterized by violent upheavals and immense social dislocations. Larison says kindly that Goldsworthy, a military historian who shows little or no interest in the economic, religious, and social changes that the scholars engaged in this debate have studied, is “critiquing both sides from a distance.”

The FUnny Times, August 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 July 2009:

Ray Lesser’s “Your Inner Fish” includes these two memorable paragraphs:

In his book Your Inner Fish, [Professor Neil] Shubin describes many of the recent amazing discoveries in paleontology and genetic research to explain human origins and evolution. We quite literally contain the entire tree of life inside our bodies. He says humans are the fish equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle souped up to race 150 mph. “Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers — and you have a recipe for problems.”

The difficulty of engineering a fish to walk on two legs has resulted in many a sore knee and sprained ankle, not to mention closets full of poorly fitting shoes. The strange loops and detours our nerves and veins have to take to get around various organs lead to other common annoyances such as hiccups and hernias. Four of the leading causes of death in humans — heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and stroke — are mostly due to having at our core a body that was designed to swim around all day, rather than sit on its keister surfing the Internet, or drive truckloads of sardines from L.A. to Indianapolis. Fish don?t get hemorrhoids, either.

Jon Winokur’s ”Curmudgeon” column collects quotes on boredom. My favorite is from Henry Kissinger, “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” Norman Mailer and Bertrand Russell are not as far apart as one might suppose; Russell said, “Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by it.” Mailer said, “”The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.” These two are not far from an author Winokur leaves out, Blaise Pascal, who famously attributed most of the trouble in the world to people’s inability to sit quietly in their rooms. Frank Moore Colby said, “Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.” Nancy Astor said, “The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.” Rochefoucauld said, “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.”

Harper’s Index reports that in April of this year, 27 percent of the respondents to a poll identified as Republicans, while another poll in the same month reported that 20 percent of respondents agreed the “Socialism is better than capitalism.” So perhaps we should put the GOP on the same footing as socialists.

An extreme case of the etymological fallacy

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 17 July 2009:

Yesterday on Language Log, Mark Liberman posted about the a curious claim that in the language of the Pashtun people of Afghanistan, “the word for ‘cousin’ is the same as the word for ‘enemy.’” Professor Liberman cannot find evidence to bear this claim out, and strongly suspects that it is bogus. What sticks in my mind is this quote Liberman gives from an essay by Louis Dupree collected in Islam and Tribal Societies, edited by Akbar Ahmed and David Hart (Routledge, 1984):

Language sometimes reveals unarticulated (or downplayed) conflicts in a society. The term for cousin in Pashto is turbur [and] the word for the worst kind of hatred is turburghanay which could be literally translated ‘cousin-hatred’. But the non-literate, rural Pushtun deny this interpretation. They say: ‘Turbur is turbur and turburghanay is turburghanay. They are separate words. How can they relate? How could I hate my cousin? I would fight to the death with him. I would never leave his body behind in a fight. I would give him my last crust of bread.’

The overwhelming majority of Afghans and Pakistanis cannot read and write, so showing them that the written turbur is a prefix and -ghanay a suffix, which, when combined create a compound word, fails to impress.

It’s hardly surprising that this fails to impress! Even assuming that Dupree’s etymology is correct, and that the turbur he hears in turburghanay is the word for cousin, we would hardly be warranted to assume that the currency of the word turburghanay implies that Pashtuns secretly hate their cousins. As Josh Fruhlinger puts it in a comment on Liberman’s post,

Particularly instructive and hilarious is the quote from the Ahmed and Hart piece, in which the learned outsiders pity the illiterate Pashtuns for not understanding the underlying etymological-psychological implications of the language that they (the Pashtuns) speak. People are determined to believe that language shapes thought even when the acutal speakers of said language don’t recognize the things embedded in the language that are supposed to be shaping their thoughts.

Here’s a little squib about two kinds of mistakes, either of which can be called ”the etymological fallacy.” Dupree seems to have committed both kinds of mistakes. A person who insists on using words as if their meanings had to be implicit in the meanings of their etymological roots commits a mistake in semantics that can be called “the etymological fallacy.” It looks to me as if Dupree approached his Pashtun informants in the spirit of this fallacy. It’s as if he had gone to English speakers and pointed out that the English word nice comes from the Latin word nescius (which meant “unknowing,”) and proceeded to interrogate them about what it is that nice people aren’t supposed to know. The word has simply changed its meaning over the centuries, so that it has lost any connection it may once have had with the meaning of its etymological base.

A person who constructs an argument using one word and then proceeds as if the conclusions of that argument applied to other words derived from it commits a mistake in logic that can be called “the etymological fallacy.” It looks to me as if Dupree approached the writing of his essay in the spirit of this fallacy. Argument 1: The Pashto word turbur means “cousin.” The Pashtun attach great importance to cousinage, modeling other, more distant relationships in their tribal system on it. Therefore, turbur is a key term for understanding the Pashto tribal system. This turns into argument 2: The Pashto word turburghanay is derived from turbur. Turbur is a key term for understanding the Pashtun tribal system. Therefore, turburghanay is a key term for understanding the Pashtun tribal system.

The Economist, 18 July 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 July 2009:

Three pieces in this issue address the state of economics as an academic discipline. One laments the current state of macroeconomics, characterizing it as a discipline in which too many practitioners have been “seduced by their [theoretical] models” and have lost interest in data that might contradict those models. Another discusses the efficient markets hypothesis, the role that hypothesis has played in shaping the theory and practice of modern finance, and tries to asses the likelihood that the efficient markets hypothesis will retain credibility in light of the world’s current financial crises. A leading article calls on economists to bring about a “reinvention” of their discipline. Evidently the requirements of this reinvention dictate that “Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst.” Economists must recognize that “in the end” they are “social scientists, trying to understand the real world.” I’ve always been rather skeptical of economics, but I suspect that most economists knew that last part already.

There are also two pieces about lunar exploration. One asks whether it makes sense to send more people to the Moon, quoting Buzz Aldrin’s opinion that it would be wiser simply to move on to other destinations. Another reviews two new books on the Apollo 11 landing, in time for the 40th anniversary of that event.

The Nation, 3 August 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 July 2009:

Jonathan Schell’s remembrance of former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara begins with the story of Schell’s meeting with McNamara in 1967, at which he, then a young reporter for The New Yorker, briefed the secretary on what he had seen American forces doing in Vietnam. Schell would not hear from McNamara after that meeting, but declassified documents would subsequently reveal that the secretary had responded to it by attempting to discredit Schell’s story and block its publication. Schell mentions McNamara’s subsequent contrition for his Vietnam policies, stressing that the remorse he suffered was quite trivial compared with the what the people of Vietnam suffered during the war McNamara did so much to design. Still, Schell points out, McNamara was unique among high-level US policymakers of recent decades in publicly admitting error. The piece ends with Schell’s line “If there is a statue made of McNamara, as there probably will not be, let it show him weeping. It was the best of him.”

McNamara features in another piece on The Nation‘s website as well, an article by Robert Scheer extracted from Truthdig. Scheer denounces McNamara’s Vietnam record far more bitterly than Schell does. And Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn pointed out in his newsletter Counterpunch that McNamara’s record as president of the World Bank, often presented as humanitarianism that redeemed him after his time at the Pentagon, was in fact nothing of the sort. Relying on Bruce Rich’s 1994 history of the World Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, Cockburn lists one dictatorship after another that McNamara’s World Bank lavished with funds as it committed unspeakable atrocities. Cockburn might easily have added substantially to the tally of carnage the World Bank wrought in those years. In 2005, his newsletter argued that it was largely due to World Bank lending policies that the 26 December 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami was so deadly. It may even be possible that McNamara was responsible for more deaths through his activities at the World Bank than through those at the Pentagon.

It’s a bit odd that this issue doesn’t make more of McNamara’s time at the World Bank, since it devotes a great deal of space to another public-sector financial institution, the US Federal Reserve. William Greider calls for reform of the Federal Reserve, warning that the Obama administration’s plans to increase the already vast powers of this body without reform involves the USA in several dangers. Among these: “It would reward failure”; it would encourage the Fed to print money with which to paper over the unsoundness of financial deals it helped to complete in recent years; “The Fed can’t be trusted to defend the public in its private dealmaking with bank executives”; “Instead of disowning the notorious policy of “too big to fail,” the Fed will be bound to embrace the doctrine more explicitly as “systemic risk” regulator”; and, as if that weren’t enough, “This road leads to the corporate state—a fusion of private and public power, a privileged club that dominates everything else from the top down.” Considering that “the corporate state” was a 1930s-era synonym for fascism, you can see that Greider is pretty serious about his opposition to the Obama plan.

As an alternative, Greider proposes “democratizing the Fed,” subjecting it to the same requirements of transparency and accountability that other government agencies must meet. Under his proposal:

A reconstituted central bank might keep the famous name and presidentially appointed governors, confirmed by Congress, but it would forfeit the mystique and submit to the usual stand ards of transparency and public scrutiny. The institution would be directed to concentrate on the Fed’s one great purpose—making monetary policy and controlling credit expansion to produce balanced economic growth and stable money. Most regulatory functions would be located elsewhere, in a new enforcement agency that would oversee regulated commercial banks as well as the “shadow banking” of hedge funds, private equity firms and others.

The Fed would thus be relieved of its conflicted objectives. Bank examiners would be free of the insider pressures that inevitably emanate from the Fed’s cozy relations with major banks. All of the private-public ambiguities concocted in 1913 would be swept away, including bank ownership of the twelve Federal Reserve banks, which could be reorganized as branch offices with a focus on regional economies.

Such reform may sound radical to some, but would in fact represent a return to Constitutional norms:

Altering the central bank would also give Congress an opening to reclaim its primacy in this most important matter. That sounds farfetched to modern sensibilities, and traditionalists will scream that it is a recipe for inflationary disaster. But this is what the Constitution prescribes: “The Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof.” It does not grant the president or the treasury secretary this power. Nor does it envision a secretive central bank that interacts murkily with the executive branch.

The prevailing political culture of Washington may be keep us from being optimistic that this plan will be adopted, but Greider claims we needn’t be overly pessimistic:

Given Congress’s weakened condition and its weak grasp of the complexities of monetary policy, these changes cannot take place overnight. But the gradual realignment of power can start with Congress and an internal reorganization aimed at building its expertise and educating members on how to develop a critical perspective. Congress has already created models for how to do this. The Congressional Budget Office is a respected authority on fiscal policy, reliably nonpartisan. The Congress needs to create something similar for monetary policy.

Instead of consigning monetary policy to backwater subcommittees, each chamber should create a major new committee to supervise money and credit, limited in size to members willing to concentrate on becoming responsible stewards for the long run. The monetary committees, working in tandem with the Fed’s board of governors, would occasionally recommend (and some times command) new policy directions at the federal agency and also review its spending.

Jeff Faux’s “So Far from God, So Close to Wall Street” argues that the trade policies enshrined in the North American Free Trade Agreement have hurt working people in Mexico. He quotes a Mexican businessman who told him that while NAFTA was advertised as a way of narrowing the wage gap between the US and Mexico, it has in fact narrowed the wage gap between Mexico and China.

Knlowledge is its own reward

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 July 2009:

In Consultation, by Joseph Schippers

Dostoevsky sometimes had his intellectual characters ask each other if they would rather be clever and miserable or stupid and happy. If they claimed they would rather be stupid and happy, he had them jeer at each other. “You’d have me believe that you could be like the simplest peasant woman, believe everything she believes, if it meant happiness?” Evidently he thought that clever people needed cleverness more than they needed happiness.

It seems that Dostoevsky would have been at home among rhesus monkeys. Ed Yong reports on an experiment in which rhesus monkeys were offered varying amounts of water and the opportunity to know how much water they were about to be offered. The monkeys showed an interest in knowing how much water they were about to be offered that had no connection with the water itself.

An abuse of power?

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 13 July 2009:

He's still getting people worked up

Andreas Willi, professor of Greek at Oxford, takes issue with a letter addressed to the US president that has lately been gathering signatures from American classical scholars. Willi’s article can be seen in pdf form here.

WHOSE IS MACEDONIA, WHOSE IS ALEXANDER?

On 18 May 2009, 200 Classical scholars from around the world sent an open letter to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. This unusual action, and the contents of the letter, raise issues which may not have been considered by all those who have endorsed it, but which deserve consideration. In order to put the discussion that follows into context, it may be useful first to quote the body of the letter itself. [[1]]

***

Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.

On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the “Republic of Macedonia.” This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.

We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no business in supporting the subversion of history. Let us review facts. (The documentation for these facts can be found attached and at: http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html)

The land in question, with its modern capital at Skopje, was called Paionia in antiquity. Mts. Barnous and Orbelos (which form today the northern limits of Greece) provide a natural barrier that separated, and separates, Macedonia from its northern neighbor. The only real connection is along the Axios/Vardar River and even this valley “does not form a line of communication because it is divided by gorges.”

While it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in Macedonia. Likewise, for example, the Egyptians, who were subdued by Alexander, may have been ruled by Macedonians, including the famous Cleopatra, but they were never Macedonians themselves, and Egypt was never called Macedonia.

Rather, Macedonia and Macedonian Greeks have been located for at least 2,500 years just where the modern Greek province of Macedonia is. Exactly this same relationship is true for Attica and Athenian Greeks, Argos and Argive Greeks, Corinth and Corinthian Greeks, etc.

We do not understand how the modern inhabitants of ancient Paionia, who speak Slavic—a language introduced into the Balkans about a millennium after the death of Alexander—can claim him as their national hero. Alexander the Great was thoroughly and indisputably Greek. His great-great-great grandfather, Alexander I, competed in the Olympic Games where participation was limited to Greeks.

Even before Alexander I, the Macedonians traced their ancestry to Argos, and many of their kings used the head of Herakles—the quintessential Greek hero—on their coins.

Euripides—who died and was buried in Macedonia—wrote his play Archelaos in honor of the great-uncle of Alexander, and in Greek. While in Macedonia, Euripides also wrote the Bacchai, again in Greek. Presumably the Macedonian audience could understand what he wrote and what they heard.

Alexander’s father, Philip, won several equestrian victories at Olympia and Delphi, the two most Hellenic of all the sanctuaries in ancient Greece where non-Greeks were not allowed to compete. Even more significantly, Philip was appointed to conduct the Pythian Games at Delphi in 346 B.C. In other words, Alexander the Great’s father and his ancestors were thoroughly Greek. Greek was the language used by Demosthenes and his delegation from Athens when they paid visits to Philip, also in 346 B.C.

Another northern Greek, Aristotle, went off to study for nearly 20 years in the Academy of Plato. Aristotle subsequently returned to Macedonia and became the tutor of Alexander III. They used Greek in their classroom which can still be seen near Naoussa in Macedonia.

Alexander carried with him throughout his conquests Aristotle’s edition of Homer’s Iliad. Alexander also spread Greek language and culture throughout his empire, founding cities and establishing centers of learning. Hence inscriptions concerning such typical Greek institutions as the gymnasium are found as far away as Afghanistan. They are all written in Greek.

The questions follow: Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander’s empire if he was a “Macedonian”? Why was the New Testament, for example, written in Greek?

The answers are clear: Alexander the Great was Greek, not Slavic, and Slavs and their language were nowhere near Alexander or his homeland until 1000 years later. This brings us back to the geographic area known in antiquity as Paionia. Why would the people who live there now call themselves Macedonians and their land Macedonia? Why would they abduct a completely Greek figure and make him their national hero?

The ancient Paionians may or may not have been Greek, but they certainly became Greekish, and they were never Slavs. They were also not Macedonians. Ancient Paionia was a part of the Macedonian Empire. So were Ionia and Syria and Palestine and Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Bactria and many more. They may thus have become “Macedonian” temporarily, but none was ever “Macedonia.” The theft of Philip and Alexander by a land that was never Macedonia cannot be justified.

The traditions of ancient Paionia could be adopted by the current residents of that geographical area with considerable justification. But the extension of the geographic term “Macedonia” to cover southern Yugoslavia cannot. Even in the late 19th century, this misuse implied unhealthy territorial aspirations.

The same motivation is to be seen in school maps that show the pseudo-greater Macedonia, stretching from Skopje to Mt. Olympus and labeled in Slavic. The same map and its claims are in calendars, bumper stickers, bank notes, etc., that have been circulating in the new state ever since it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Why would a poor land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?

However one might like to characterize such behavior, it is clearly not a force for historical accuracy, nor for stability in the Balkans. It is sad that the United States of America has abetted and encouraged such behavior.

We call upon you, Mr. President, to help—in whatever ways you deem appropriate—the government in Skopje to understand that it cannot build a national identity at the expense of historic truth. Our common international society cannot survive when history is ignored, much less when history is fabricated.

***

Some readers may be amused, as I was myself, when they first read what looks like a—somewhat naïve—undergraduate essay. But the amusement disappears when one realizes that the letter has been signed by countless leading scholars, many of whom teach Classics or Ancient History at renowned institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Cambridge or Oxford, to name but a few. The political impact will no doubt be limited despite this fact. But since the opinion of people of this caliber has considerable authority within the academic community, and since their sheer number may make it look to the outside world as if they represent our disciplines in their entirety, a reply is in order; for what is presented as a summary of “historic truth”—a notoriously slippery term—is in reality a crude statement that betrays some fundamental principles of historical scholarship. What follows is thus not to be understood as an endorsement of any real or imaginary expansionist ambitions of the modern Republic of Macedonia, but as a call for greater methodological and factual levelheadedness and caution when attempts are made to instrumentalize the classical world in modern-day politics.

It is true that most of the factual observations in the letter are correct. But it is equally true that (a) the text is one-sided and (b) its argumentative logic is often weak. As for (a), it would have been only fair to state more clearly how much of our knowledge about the ancient Macedonian kings’ “Greekness” we owe to the fact that, at least for propagandistic reasons, it could be subject to doubts in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of, say, a Spartan king. The internet documentation which is referred to in the letter may be right when it sees nothing but “a personal grudge” behind Demosthenes’ calling Philip II a “barbarian,” but to cite Herodotus 5.22 as conclusive evidence that Alexander the Great was “thoroughly and indisputably Greek” is seriously misleading, since Herodotus’ statement “I happen to know that [the forefathers of Alexander] are Greek” is triggered precisely by the existence of a dispute over the matter, long before the age of Demosthenes. As for (b), the question “Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander’s empire if he was a ‘Macedonian’?” cannot be adequately answered with the words “[Because] Alexander the Great was Greek,” given that we have numerous examples of ancient empires in which the lingua franca was not the language of the ruler. Nor can the presence of Heracles’ head on Macedonian coins or Euripides’ stay at the Macedonian court prove anything more than that the Macedonian kings were ready to embrace Greek traditions and Greek culture.

But all of this is not the real issue at stake. What is at the core of the letter is a mistaken and unhealthy notion of historical identity. “While it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in Macedonia”—but is that really so? How many Paionians did we ask about it, and at what point in history? The comparison with Egypt is awkward, for at least after the incorporation of “Paionia” under Antigonos Gonatas (249 BCE) a territorially continuous political unity had come into being which survived as such in the Roman provincial administration. That the case of Egypt is rather different in this respect need hardly be stressed. And even if it could be ascertained that a distinct Paionian identity continued to exist, that alone could never prove that there was not also an overarching Macedonian one; after all, it is perfectly possible to have a Californian and an American identity at the same time. Moreover, to use an ancient but immediately relevant analogy, are we really to think that Thucydides got it all wrong when he wrote that, decades before the conquest of Paionia, the term “Macedonia” also applied to lands not inhabited by “ethnic” Macedonians (Thuc. 2.99)?

Identities are thus shifting, not static, and they can be multiplied if need be. Few signatories of the letter would probably deny this fact when dealing with other areas of the ancient world. But to call Cleopatra a “Macedonian” gives away what constitutes true identity in the eyes of the letter’s authors: to them, identity seems defined by ancestry and blood-lines, by the past more than the present. Are we then to conclude that, for example, John F. Kennedy—or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, for that matter—were never real Americans? And if John F. Kennedy’s ancestors spoke Irish at one point, is it preposterous for all English-speaking Americans to use him today in their construction of a national identity because of that?

One might object that this is different. By coming to America John F. Kennedy’s ancestors chose to become Americans (with Irish roots); but why could the Slavs coming to Macedonia then not become Macedonians (with Slavic roots)? Yet different it remains, for no political body ever encompassed both the entire territory of the modern United States and Ireland at the same time. Hence, a different analogy must be sought. The internet documentation offers one suggestion:

***

An apt analogy is at hand if we imagine a certain large island off the southeast coast of the United States re-naming itself Florida, emblazoning its currency with images of Disney World and distributing maps showing the “Greater Florida.”

***

But this will not do, and here we begin to perceive a categorial error even if we do not wish to subscribe to the “postmodern” possibility of choosing one’s identity freely. By focusing almost exclusively on Alexander the Great, the letter conveniently forgets everything that happened later in the area. Let us leave it open how the Paionians or their descendants thought of themselves by the time Macedonia lost its independence, and whether or not they would have objected to seeing their own region referred to as part of “Macedonia” at that stage. One point is crystal-clear: the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia does have a shared past with the modern Greek province of Macedonia—and a past, at that, during which the entire area was unquestionably thought of as “Macedonia” by many, if not most, of its inhabitants. [[2]] For “Macedonia” was not only the name of the relevant Roman province—later divided into Macedonia Prima and Macedonia Salutaris (not: *Paionia), both of which became part of the Byzantine Empire—as well as the heartland of Tsar Samuil’s so-called “Bulgarian” Empire in the 10th and 11th centuries CE. It was also, more importantly for the recent history and nomenclature in the Balkans, a distinctly perceived territorial unit within the Ottoman Empire. Essentially this is the “pseudo-greater Macedonia” depicted in the modern Macedonian maps which the letter decries, rightly or wrongly, as politically inflammatory. When this land was divided in 1912/13, ten years after the unsuccessful Ilinden Uprising of 1903, between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia as a consequence of the Balkan Wars, a “Macedonian” identity of sorts had been in the making for centuries and was now forcefully broken up. To be sure, this early modern “Macedonia” was never politically independent or ethnically homogeneous in any sense, and certainly not exclusively Slavic. But neither must we erroneously believe that those parts of it which form the modern Greek province of Macedonia were ethnically as distinctly Greek as they have become, for better or worse, in recent times. So the “apt analogy” of a “Greater Florida” is in reality a politically biased image that misconstructs the “historic truth” it claims to promote. No matter what its ethnic mix was—and what serious scholar would nowadays want to argue that the only “good” states are ethnically “pure” states, in which everyone must speak the same language?—the tendentiously-labeled “pseudo-greater Macedo¬nia,” far from being a recent invention, did exist as a real identitarian concept well before the 20th century. And in a sense its roots can be traced back to the conquests of Philip II, Alexander the Great and their successors in “Paionia”; for if those conquests had never taken place, the history of the region would have looked different and the territory of “Paionia” might not have shared the fate and fortune of “Aegean” Macedonia for long stretches of its history. Thus, unless one subscribes to a dangerous “blood-and-soil ideology,” there is no reason why the modern Slavic Macedonians should not be allowed to continue to call their country “Macedonia” and to pride themselves in Alexander the Great just as much as the modern Hellenic Greeks do. What does it matter if Alexander “was Greek, not Slavic,” as long as no one claims the opposite?

One final analogy may help us look at the entire issue more soberly. The West Germanic Franks originally lived near the Lower Rhine, in the territory of modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. During the Migration Period they began to move southwards and eventually established hegemony over most of Roman Gaul. That did not mean that the Romans living in Gaul at the time immediately had to think of themselves as Franks or start to speak the Germanic language of their kings, including Charlemagne. Nevertheless the name of the Franks ultimately imposed itself on the entire territory they ruled, and it survives to this day in the modern name of France. Clearly this does not imply that France “brazenly mocks and provokes its neighbor[s]” Belgium and the Netherlands—where the “real France” must be located according to the ancient sources—by appropriating the name of a people that did not speak the ancestor language of modern French, or by calling schools or streets after Charlemagne. Nor would anyone think of writing a letter to President Obama to protest against this state of affairs. But why should such a letter then be written in the case of modern Macedonia? If one of our foremost academic duties as Classicists and Ancient Historians is to think about the ancient world sine ira et studio, we must do the same when invited to express our views on a contemporary political issue, however much those who invite us try to make it look as if they shared our love for historical understanding. By putting our academic authority behind tendentious political statements like the letter quoted above, we risk not only bringing into disrepute our disciplines and the institutions at which we are allowed to work and teach, but betraying the past whose guardians we ought to be.

ANDREAS WILLI
University of Oxford

WORK CITED

Rossos, Andrew. 2008. Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Stanford.

[[1]] The letter (accessed 10 July 2009), together with some additional documentation and a full list of signatories (which at the time this article was accepted for publication included well over 300 names) is freely accessible at http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html.
[[2]] For a balanced and accessible survey of Macedonian history and the “Macedonian question” (written by a Greek Macedonian) see now Rossos (2008).

Banana Furniture

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 10 July 2009:

Furniture made to look like bananas:

and

and

Furniture made of bananas (well, banana leaf):

and this lamp:

Furniture made for bananas:

and

x is to y as furniture is to bananas:

and

and

The USA and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 July 2009:

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan

The 16-30 June issue of Counterpunch carries a brief article by Andrew Cockburn about US government backing for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In view of the concerns top American officials have expressed about the possibility that Pakistani nukes might fall into the hands of Bin Ladenite extremists, and of the fact that Dr. A. Q. Khan sold Pakistani nuclear material on an international black market, it is sobering to learn of the extent to which Washington has been involved in the development of Pakistan’s arsenal. When CIA analyst Richard Barlow tried to blow the whistle on the US government’s complicity in helping Pakistan acquire nuclear weapons in the 1980s, his career was ruined. Even the Khan affair doesn’t seem to have changed the CIA’s attitude; indeed, Khan’s shipping manager was a CIA agent. The article lists an impressive array of malefactors involved in the business of promoting Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. Some of them, such as an unnamed group of “Israeli arms merchants,” are accustomed to bad press; others, such as the Dalai Lama, usually get friendlier publicity.

An unlikely speculation about Mr O

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 7 July 2009:

The BBC’s outgoing North America editor, Justin Webb, writes:

The other fascinating development in recent days has been the end – or not – of the Obamas’ search for a church.

I have suggested it before but let me lay it on the line here in black and white: THE MAN IS A QUAKER. He may not yet know it but that is where his search should end. There is a lovely Meeting House somewhere around Dupont Circle as well so he could get there easily.

I think the meetinghouse Webb is referring to is the one on Florida Avenue, which was originally built so that Herbert Hoover, the first Quaker to occupy the US presidency, would have a grand place to worship.

Elsewhere, Webb identifies himself as “the product of a Quaker school so am incapable of lying.” So I suppose he must be in earnest, though I can’t seem to find why he thinks that Mr O is a Quaker. Perhaps it has something to do with his ethnic background. The country with the largest number of the world’s Quakers is Kenya, B. H. Obama, Senior’s homeland; though virtually all of them are members of the Luhya tribe of western Kenya, not the Luo tribe from which the elder Mr O sprang. Despite the similarity in the names “Luo” and “Luhya,” the two peoples are quite unrelated. So I doubt that would be it.

The Banana Coffin

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 6 July 2009:

Banana art in the news:

MONTROSE, Colo.—Casket makers catering to natural burials have offered biodegradable coffins made of such materials as recycled newspapers or cardboard. Montrose-based Ecoffins USA is selling caskets made of banana sheaves.

They take six months to two years to biodegrade.

Marketing director Joanna Passarelli says the company sold $40,000 worth of banana-sheaf or bamboo coffins to funeral homes last year.

At least 14 funeral homes around the country offer them.

Ecoffins USA is the sister company of The SAWD Partnership, which has helped fuel the “green” funeral movement in the United Kingdom.

In natural burials, bodies aren’t embalmed and eventually decompose into the earth.

The Nation, 20 July 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

An article by Robert Dreyfuss explores the division among the Iranian political elite that has contributed to the recent mass demonstrations there. Dreyfuss convinces me that the government has a narrow base of support among elite groups in the city of Teheran. Most of the people he talks to regard Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmedinejad as too hard-line and traditionalist, while many others are turning to rightist groups that accuse those men of being too soft. However, I’m skeptical of Dreyfuss’ attempts to suggest that the Teherani elite is in this matter representative of the country as a whole. Dreyfuss cites the Chatham House study which compared voter turnout in Iran’s 2005 presidential election with turnout in this year’s contest, concluding that the number of votes reported had increased by so much that fraud was a likelier explanation than was a rise in actual participation. On Dreyfuss’ own showing, though, the opposition has the support of many key power players. Among them are many men who may be in a position to falsify votes. And the fact remains that the only opinion poll conducted in Iran before this year’s election predicted the same result that the authorities certified. The election may well have been a phony, but Dreyfuss definitely wrong to say that it “seems far-fetched” to think that Ahmedinejad may have won.

A reissue of William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy prompts an appreciation of Williams’ work. Williams work is characterized as a reinterpretation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis about the role of the frontier in American history. For Williams, the frontier was not the boundary between land already claimed by Americans as their property and that claimed only by nomadic tribes who did not regard land as something that could be owned. Nor did the frontier close in 1890. Instead, the frontier was ever present, always manifested in whatever territory American imperialism might turn to next. Williams systematically erased the distinctions historians had made between the westward expansion of Americans into native territory and the imperial expansion of American power into territory controlled by other nation-states. For him, all expansion had as its goal the creation of a “surplus social space” which could be used as a valve to release social pressures that might otherwise threaten the power elite.

Two pieces deal with South Carolina’s lovelorn Governor Mark Sanford, one solemnly accusing him of lacking empathy for the poor folks who might get jobs if various spending programs he has opposed were implemented, another pointing out that the greatest hypocrites in this matter are the reporters who claim that it pains them to publish details of and speculation about the governor’s sex life. Even the accusing piece concedes that Sanford has never been a morality campaigner, and that when he was a congressman he had an actual antiwar record. I’ve been drawn into discussions about Governor Sanford at both Dykes to Watch Out For and Language Log; I’m glad I’m not the only person outside of the Republican Party who sees some good in the guy.

The American Conservative, August 2009

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

With this issue, our favorite “Old Right” read gives up its quixotic biweekly publication schedule and becomes the monthly it should always have been.

In the cover story, Brendan O’Neill casts a gimlet eye on the environmental initiatives now chugging through official Washington. He sees in them little more than a series of raids on the treasury by well-connected businesses. He cites Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economist who found that every job his country’s wind power initiative had created represented a cost of $2,200,000 to the taxpayer. Of course, the jobs don’t pay $2,200,000- most of that money goes to corporate interests. O’Neill argues that the alternative energy plans now under consideration in Washington are at least as bad as is Spain’s wind power initiative.

Former US Army interrogator Matthew Alexander explains what he did in Iraq that his colleagues didn’t. He followed the rules, they didn’t. He treated detainees with respect, they didn’t. He obtained useful intelligence, they didn’t. When information he had elicited led to successful US military operations, they got medals, he didn’t.

David Brown thinks that America missed its chance in the years after the Soviet system collapsed. The former Soviet Union and the countries that had belonged to the Warsaw Pact had post-Communist revolutions. The USA could have benefited from the same. Just as the political and economic systems of the East Bloc states were defined in relation to their dependence on the USSR in those years, so the American political and economic regime were defined by opposition to that same power. As the Warsaw Pact states gained freedom by reorienting themselves away from the USSR, so America too could gain a new freedom by shuffling off the militaristic apparatus that was built in the name of the Cold War. As the author of Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown thinks that Charles A. Beard (of Knightstown, Indiana), William Appleman Williams (of Atlantic, Iowa), and Christopher Lasch (of Omaha, Nebraska) offer a critique of militarism that may help us find our way out of our present dilemmas. Brown particularly praises Williams for his combination of Beard’s economic interpretation of Anerican political history with Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the role of the frontier in American life. Williams’ refusal to acknowledge the moral lines other historians had drawn between the westward expansion of Americans into native lands and the imperialistic expansion of American power into lands claimed by other nation-states also earns an approving mention, deflating as it does the idea that the United States was ever a country isolated from neighbors. With that idea deflated, we can also rid ourselves of the idea that adventures such as the war with Spain or America’s intervention in the First World War represented a break from isolation.

A review of Spies by Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev and Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by Susan Jacoby of course takes a very different tone than did a review of the same two books in The Nation some weeks ago. The reviewer, Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, not only affirms the guilt of Alger Hiss and the others whom Joseph McCarthy and his ilk used as hate figures, but argues that liberals have always missed the point of McCarthyism:

If the main danger was at home, then we need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Such an ardent McCarthyite and Taft Republican as the novelist Louis Bromfield, in his forgotten classic A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), referred to the Soviets’ “ramshackle empire,” and characterized the Marxist movement as an “international psychopathic cult,” which could not long survive without infusions of technology and aid from the West. The alleged “threat” posed by the Soviet Union was minor, he declared, compared to the threat to our old Republic represented by militarism, the arms race, and the distortion of our economic and political life by the rise of an American empire.

It was because of views like Bromfield’s, Raimondo writes, that so many survivors of the antiwar America First movement of the 1930s, having been smeared as pro-Nazi by many of the very men whom McCarthy named as Soviet agents, could keep their skepticism of US militarism while joining enthusiastically in the McCarthyite crusade.

A tribute to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley quotes her poem “Thirteen” in full:

Thirteen’s no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.
It is not wit, or powder on the face,
Or Wednesday matinée, or misses’ clothing,
Or intellect, or grace…
Thirteen keeps diaries and tropical fish
(A month, at most); scorns jump-ropes in the spring;
Could not, would fortune grant it, name its wish;
Wants nothing, everything;
Has secrets from itself, friends it despises;
Admits none to the terrors that it feels;
Own half a hundred masks but no disguises;
And walks upon its heels.
Thirteen’s anomalous—not that, not this:
Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,
Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.
Is the one age defeats the metaphor.
Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walled
But easily surrounded, in no city.
Nor, quitted once, can it be quite recalled—
Not even with pity.

Alexander Waugh is the grandson of novelist Evelyn Waugh; Chrostopher Buckley is the son of pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. Alexander Waugh reviews Christopher Buckley’s memoir of Mr and Mrs William F. Buckley, Jr. Alexander Waugh includes a quote from his own grandfather about the elder Buckley. Having received letters from Buckley, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend to ask “Has he been supernally guided to bore me? It would explain him.” Which reminded me of Dwight MacDonald’s defense of Buckley’s columns, in which MacDonald claimed that Buckley’s writing was ”no worse than a bad cold, really.”

Banana Art Today

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

Click on the image for its source.

These two look happy:

These don’t look too tasty:

The same Russian-language site that presented the banana spectrum above also offers this picture:

And this one:

As well as many others.

Here’s a happy one:

And a problematic one:

As well as a genuinely adult one:

These last three came via our friends at Crooked Brains.