August 5, 2008
SUPPOSE TIMOTHY NOAH READ TIMOTHY NOAH:
Did McCain Create an HDTV Monster?: The technology he helped bring to market could kill his candidacy (Timothy Noah, May 19, 2008, Slate)
[T]his past weekend, I watched Saturday Night Live with my kids. McCain appeared in close-up in a mildly amusing skit whose purpose (at least from McCain's perspective) was to remove the age issue from voters' minds by turning it into a joke. It worked for Ronald Reagan in 1984; why shouldn't it work for McCain in 2008? With me, though, it had the exact opposite effect. As someone who'd pooh-poohed the age issue, I found myself gasping at McCain's mug as transmitted in glorious HDTV. Wrinkles, blotches, liver spots, scarry tissue—none of these were hidden by McCain's makeup. As McCain cracked wise ("What do we want in our next president? Certainly someone who is very, very, very old."), I found myself thinking, Jeez, he doesn't look like a guy who'll turn 72 this August. He looks like a guy who'll turn 82. (Note to reader: The link I provide to the SNL skit won't give you any sense of what I'm talking about, because the clip isn't high-definition.)For all I know, McCain is in fine physical condition. If he appears older than his chronological age, that probably has something to do with the torture he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam; nine years ago the Arizona Republic reported that he continued to experience "orthopedic limitations" related to his imprisonment, including pain in his shoulders and right knee. But TV is unfair, as Richard Nixon learned when his perspiration and five o'clock shadow helped give John F. Kennedy the edge in the first-ever televised presidential debates. Had HDTV been available eight years later, I'm not sure Nixon could have won the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency.
I'm not the only person who's noticed HDTV's cruel effect on McCain's puss.
The sad fact is that any discussion of Maverick's physical appearance is going to remind Jewish voters of the spiritual characteristic that's most on their minds: John McCain is a Christian. (*)
Better either to leave the whole topic alone, it seems to me, or to address the question of Christophobia head-on.
(*) [Note too the subhead, where "kill his candidacy" is so clearly code words for "this guy ought to be crucified"?]
MORE:
He Is Who He Is (Tony Blankley, 8/06/08, Real Clear Politics)
It's getting tricky to know how to refer to he who presumes to be the next president. It was made clear several months ago that mentioning his middle name is a forbidden act. (Pass out more eggshells.) Then, having nothing honorable to say, Obama warned his followers last week that Sen.
McCain would try to scare voters by pointing to Obama's "funny name" and the fact that "he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills." [...]But He has made it clear that the mere use of His name would be freighted with coded innuendoes of something too horrible to say straightforwardly. One has to go back to Exodus 3:13-14 to find such strict instructions concerning the use of a name. Moses explained: "Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they say to me, 'What is His name?' what shall I say to them?" And God said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am." And He said, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, 'I Am has sent me to you.'"
So perhaps we can call Him, for short, Sen. I Am (full code name: I Am who you have been waiting for).
Another aspect of the now-infamous dollar-bill incident that has gone unmentioned is Sen. I Am's choice of the dollar-bill reference itself.
He could have just said He doesn't look like other presidents. Even that is a little too cute for the nasty little point He slyly was trying to make, but at least He would be identifying Himself merely with the universe of American presidents. But His overweening pride found such company too base and demeaning for Him. So He needed to include Himself in the grander company of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Jefferson and perhaps Andy Jackson. (I doubt He had in mind Woodrow Wilson on the $100,000 bill or Grover Cleveland on the $1,000.)
JEAN IS OUR SHEPHERD, WE SHALL NOT WANT FOR LAUGHS:
How many meetings, lectures, traffic jams, kids events, tv shows, soccer games, etc. have you sat through, thinking: there's X minutes of my life wasted and I'll never get them back.
Well, here's 45 wonderful ones back from your cosmic account: Gehrig and the Old Man. He did this one on his brief PBS show too.
Put it on your iPod for your next walk and maybe I'll tell you some time about getting Steve Smith to flip us the bird and Franz Beckenbauer to apologize or the time the Other Brother pulled a Ralphie and dropped the f-bomb on Judge Judd at Shea Stadium.
N.B.: You can get the show on a podcast fee: Brass Figalee
ONE MORE FOR THE LIST OF TIMES A MAN MAY CRY:
Small Vt. town has fond memories of Solzhenitsyn (DAVE GRAM 08.04.08, AP)
The famed writer, who died Sunday at age 89, became something of a local curiosity and a prized resident whose movements and even the location of his home were closely guarded secrets. He also became, for a time, a source of some annoyance to local hunters and snowmobilers after he built a gated fence around his 51-acre property.That issue was dispelled on Town Meeting Day in 1977, the annual state holiday when residents gather in school gyms and town halls to debate local budget items. At the Cavendish meeting that year, Solzhenitsyn apologized through an interpreter.
Dr. Gene Bont, a now retired physician who cared for the Solzhenitsyns - mainly the writer's three sons - said Solzhenitsyn told residents he needed privacy to accomplish his work.
Solzhenitsyn added: "'I know you have a great deal of freedom to hunt,'" the doctor recalled. "He said that one of the reasons he needed to fence off his property was that when he was living in Switzerland" - after first leaving Russia in 1974 - "he was interrupted so much he couldn't get any work done."
Cavendish, with roughly 1,500 residents, seemed to appreciate the explanation, said Town Manager Richard Svec. They became protective of Solzhenitsyn's privacy during his 18 years there.
"He'd always been a fairly enigmatic person, and him making a public appearance to the local townspeople, that went a long way with the folks in town," Svec said.
Bont added, "When the news media found out he was in Cavendish they just descended on the town to find out everything they could. People wouldn't tell them anything," and would even give reporters and television crews false directions when asked how to find the writer's house. [...]
He made rare appearances in town as well, in one instance turning up and offering brief remarks at a local parade marking the bicentennial of Vermont statehood in 1991.
Finally, in 1994, just before he and his family moved back to Russia, Solzhenitsyn spoke at the Town Meeting again, said Svec, who will play the writer giving that final address in a theatrical production devoted to local history later this month.
"Our children grew up and went to school here, alongside your children," Solzhenitsyn told his neighbors, as interpreted by his son Stepan. "Indeed, our whole family has felt at home among you. Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not imagine a better place to live, and wait, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont."
I'd choked up by the end of reading this one to the Wife at dinner.
RIDDLE US THIS...:
My Bet With Francis Fukuyama (Brett Stephens, August 5, 2008, Wall Street Journal)
There followed between us an exchange of emails, in which Mr. Fukuyama pointed to various pieces he had published prior to the war indicating some concerns about how the U.S. would go in, and some foreboding about what might follow. He also mentioned a $100 bet he had made in May 2003 with a friend -- a supporter of the war -- that Iraq would be a mess five years after the invasion, the definition of a mess being "you'd know one if you saw it." We agreed to make the same bet.I nearly forgot about the bet until last Friday, when the Washington Post reported U.S. combat fatalities in Iraq for the month of July. The total came to five. Six other soldiers were killed in noncombat situations.
The rate of combat fatalities may again inch higher. For all the progress made in the last year, Iraq remains a dangerous (if no longer terrifying) place. But to speak of Iraq as a "war" no longer accurately characterizes the nature of the situation: For purposes of comparison, U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam in 1971, when America's involvement was winding down and U.S. troop levels stood roughly where they are today in Iraq, averaged 115 a month.
Speaking of "war" also confuses our understanding of what the U.S. should do next. Put simply, and pace Barack Obama, "getting out of Iraq" and "ending the war" are no longer synonymous.
With this in mind, I wrote Mr. Fukuyama to suggest that he owed me $100. He conceded, albeit strictly on "the narrow terms" of the bet itself.
Mr. Fukuyama insists, however, that he has been vindicated on the broader issue: "We've spent a trillion or so dollars, 30,000 dead or wounded, a large loss in international influence and prestige, all for the sake of disarming a country with no WMDs."
If liberating 21 million Iraqis from Saddam wasn't worth one fifteenth of one year's GDP and 30,000 casualties (4,000 dead) out of a population of 300 million, what was the maximum in life and lucre we should have spent to liberate Western Europe in WWII? And if we stayed below those ratios how far would General Marshall have advanced? Would we even have finished the Sicily campaign?
MORE:
Building on Progress in Iraq (Stephen Biddle, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, 8/04/08, Real ClearPolitics)
With a degree of patience, the United State can build on a pattern of positive change in Iraq that offers it a chance to draw down troops soon without giving up hope for sustained stability.The last 18 months have brought major changes in the underlying strategic calculus facing Iraq's main combatants -- undermining the Sunni insurgency, weakening the Shiite militias, severely degrading al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), strengthening the Iraqi security forces (ISF), and creating new, more positive political dynamics and incentives. But these developments have also brought new, if less acute, challenges to the fore -- demanding corresponding changes in U.S. and Iraqi strategy. Simply staying the course will not work under the new conditions in Iraq.
Both to deal with the new problems and to guard against any revival of the old ones, any further troop drawdowns, now that the "surge" is over, should be modest until after Iraq gets through two big rounds of elections -- in late 2008 at the provincial level and in late 2009 at the national level -- which have the potential either to reinforce important gains or to reopen old wounds. But starting in 2010, if current trends continue, the United States may be able to start cutting back its troop presence substantially, possibly even halving the total U.S. commitment by sometime in 2011, without running excessive risks with the stability of Iraq and the wider Persian Gulf region.
WE'RE SO CONFUSED...:
McCain's "One" Response - M25 Network (cardboard, Aug 05, 2008, DailyKos)
For many this ad will appear to be a joke, a silly campaign tactic, and little more than a distraction. But this ad was not done by some campaign volunteer with a bit of editing experience for (as McCain suggests) his supporters amusement. This was a professionally cut, edited, and produced ad full of sinister dog-whistles for evangelical ears.At best it is suggesting supporters of Obama are idol-worshipers. At its worst it is suggesting that Sen. Obama is some kind of anti-Christ.
The McCain campaign is unquestionably targeting the 44 million+ Americans who have read the Left Behind series.
It's subject to discussion whether Senator Obama has deliberately cast himself as a messianic figure ("we are the ones..."), but inarguable that his supporters have and that his campaign staff/volunterr network giddily sends out e-mails alerting people when the latest cult-like video gets posted at YouTube. Indeed, in the interest of marital comity I won't say who sent the e-mail about this one:
...but the forwarded mail came from someone working for Obama. And wasn't it Andrew Sullivan who recently referred to some recent bit of Obamaness as "objectively miraculous"?
Now, we mostly find it amusing that these folks think they're following the Obamessiah, but, if you aren't one of the ones who think he's the Second Coming then he is a false messiah, no? Obviously you have to be worried that your campaign's at least implicit, if not explicit, theme is heresy to tens of millions of voters, but maybe you ought to reconsider the theme rather than rant about it being exposed to ridicule, eh?
AND PEOPLE WONDER WHY THE UNICORN RIDER KEEPS HIMSELF SO VAGUE?:
In the Balance: Depending on who wins the presidency, the Supreme Court could turn sharply to the right or see its first crusading liberal justice in many years. (Stuart Taylor Jr., Jul 26, 2008, National Journal)
At a time when the Court is precariously balanced--with four conservatives, four liberals (including the two oldest justices), and the ideologically eclectic Anthony Kennedy--these contrasting approaches have provided opposing activists with nightmare visions to rally the Democratic and Republican bases during the presidential race.The liberal nightmare (and conservative dream) is McCain replacing one or more aging liberals with conservatives who proceed to overrule or hollow out Roe v. Wade and other liberal precedents; throw gay rights into reverse; discard the constitutional right to privacy; outlaw all racial preferences and school integration programs; narrow the reach of civil-rights protections for women, minorities, and disabled people; bless virtually unrestricted government funding of religious schools and sponsorship of crosses and other religious symbols on public property; stop shrinking and start expanding the death penalty; mow down gun control laws; roll back the four decisions since 2004 that have checked Bush administration efforts to expand presidential power in the name of fighting terrorism; and make it ever harder for consumers and workers to sue businesses.
The conservative nightmare (and liberal dream) is an Obama Court requiring taxpayers to fund essentially unlimited abortion rights throughout pregnancy; ordering all 50 states to bless gay marriage; expanding and perpetuating the use of racial preferences far beyond the 25-year phaseout suggested by the justices five years ago; prohibiting tuition vouchers for religious schools; stripping "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance; banning the death penalty; striking down the new federal wiretap law; expanding judicial oversight of military detentions, CIA interrogations, and perhaps other operations worldwide; opening the floodgates to big-dollar lawsuits against business; eroding property rights; and perhaps creating new constitutional rights to physician-assisted suicide, human cloning, and massive government welfare and medical care programs.
Put just those two paragraphs on a ballot and ask voters to pick one and you get a 60-40 landslide for the GOP.
WHY NOT MAKE IT 74 FOR CLASSIC AND 60 FOR PERSONAL ACCOUNTS, THEN GIVE FOLKS THE OPTION?:
Increase Retirement Age for Social Security (Marie Cocco, 8/05/08, Real Clear Politics)
The American Academy of Actuaries -- an independent, professional group that has never before endorsed a particular method of bringing Social Security into long-term balance -- is calling for an increase in the retirement age.I know this isn't what people want to hear. There is enough serious economic stress now to make mention of one more sacrifice almost too much to bear. As for me, I've been working since I was 14 and don't want to wait a day longer than necessary to retire.
The actuaries do not suggest a specific age (the current age to claim full benefits rises gradually to 67 for those born in 1960 and later). Nor do they estimate how much money a gradual increase would save the system.
What they do is present a compelling argument that makes far more sense than any politician's garble. "It's a demographic solution to a demographic problem," says Bruce Schobel, who chairs the academy's retirement security task force. In 1940, a 65-year-old man lived an additional 12 years longer, on average, and females lived about 13. By 2007, those figures had reached about 17 years for men and 19 for women.
The choice of 65 as the normal retirement age when Social Security was created in 1935 was driven entirely by cost estimates, Schobel says, and 65 was a compromise. The only change in the normal retirement age since then was the gradual boost to 67, enacted in 1983.
We Need a Raise: The retirement age is too low as we’re living much longer (Bruce Bartlett, 5/25/05, National Review)
It may be hard to believe, but according to historian Robert W. Fogel, the life expectancy at birth was just 32 years in England in 1725. Those of us in the “colonies” were better off, but life expectancy here was just 50 years at that time. Under such circumstances, the idea of retirement was absurd. People worked until they died. They had no other choice.As recently as 1900, within the lifetime of many people’s parents and grandparents, the situation wasn’t any better. According to the Census Bureau, life expectancy at birth hadn’t improved at all in the previous 200 years. It was still about 50 years in the U.S. — 48.3 years for men and 51.1 years for women. In many relatively advanced countries it was far worse.
In 1900, life expectancy for men was less than 40 years in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, and Spain. It was under 50 years in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan. Australia seems to have had the longest life expectancy, but even there a male could expect only 53.2 years at birth while a female could expect 56.8 years.
But just a few decades later, there had been dramatic improvement everywhere. The life expectancy for men in 1950 was over 60 years in every major country except Japan, Hungary, and Spain, and was close to 70 years in the Scandinavian countries. However, in most developing countries, life expectancy was still at medieval levels. Throughout most of Africa and Asia, one was fortunate to reach 40 years.
As of 2000, the life expectancy for men was well above 70 years in every major country except Hungary, and was above 80 years for females in most countries. A woman born in Japan could expect 84.1 years of life. And even in developing countries, there had been substantial progress. Fifty percent increases in the previous half century are not uncommon.
Of course, in terms of retirement systems, the life expectancy at age 65 is what really matters. In 1940, when Social Security paid its first benefits, a man that age could expect another 11.9 years and a woman another 13.4 years. This year, a 65-year old man’s life expectancy has risen to 16.2 years and a woman’s is 19 years. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, by 2040 every man who reaches his 65th birthday can expect to live to see his 83rd birthday in all major countries. A woman reaching 65 years will likely live to celebrate her 86th birthday.
Unfortunately, our retirement systems are still largely based on an era when life expectancy was much lower. The nature of work and compensation has also changed so as to encourage earlier retirement than the nation can afford. As economist Eugene Steuerle pointed out in recent congressional testimony, in the 1940s the average worker didn’t begin drawing Social Security until age 68 — 3 years above the normal retirement age. At that time, the option of early retirement at age 62 didn’t even exist.
Today, a majority of workers begin drawing Social Security benefits at age 62. If they waited as long as their parents, they would have to wait until age 74. Because people are drawing benefits earlier and living longer, Steuerle estimates that total Social Security and Medicare benefits for a typical two-earner couple have risen from $195,000 in 1960 to $710,000 today. He estimates that without reforms, this figure will rise to $1.1 million in 2030 (all in 2005 dollars).
TOUGH TO PEAK WHEN DEMAND NEVER EXCEEDS SUPPLY:
Oil price falls further to $118 (BBC, 8/05/08)
Oil prices touched three-month lows of $118 a barrel on Tuesday amid signs of rising supplies and slowing demand.
I THINK WE'VE FOUND MAVERICK'S NEW ECONOMICS ADVISOR (via Glenn Dryfoos):
WHICH EPISODE OF STAR TREK IS IT WHERE THE BEINGS ARE JUST DISEMBODIED BRAINS?:
When "Skinny" Means "Black: "The Journal stumbles over racial subtext. (Timothy Noah, Aug. 4, 2008, Slate)
In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." [...]
The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds.
Two questions: isn't the current racial caricature of black men that they're all morbidly obese from a diet existing almost exclusively of fast food?; and, why aren't we being racist when we discuss the Irishman John McCain's temper, beery background and abysmal academic performance?
Meanwhile, if these folks really care about racism in politics, they don't have to look far to find a campaign that's using it.
THE UNICORN LEAVES NO HOOFPRINTS:
Where’s the Landslide? (DAVID BROOKS, 8/05/08, NY Times)
Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama’s 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. “The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count,” Kantor wrote.He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.
He was in the law school, but not of it.
This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not fully of them.
His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.
He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.
His candidacy is, on the one hand, completely dependent on that vagueness--so that he could be all things to all people in the primaries--and, on the other, doomed by it--as Republicans get to fill in the hollow.
ONE UGLY PAWN:
Hezbollah Strengthens Its Grip in Lebanon: Winning Israel's release of a notorious killer gives the militant group a key success (Mitchell Prothero, August 4, 2008, US News)
"Kuntar? It was never about him—it was the sacred promise of Sayed Hassan to return the prisoners that was pursued. The file on Kuntar was symbolic to show that only armed resistance can force the Zionists to act," declares a Hezbollah fighter whose nom de guerre is Abu Hussein. "He is only free because of his value as a message to those who want us to talk without the dignity of arms."And to make sure no one missed the point, Nasrallah arranged for Kuntar and the Hezbollah fighters to be flown to Beirut's international airport for a red carpet celebration that included the newly installed President Michel Suleiman, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, and Lebanon's new cabinet, which includes 10 opposition members that provide Hezbollah and its allies with veto power over all government decisions.
Members of the pro-western government were put in a difficult situation: refuse to participate and be dubbed an enemy by Hezbollah, or stand on the tarmac to celebrate the freedom of a man who bashed in a 4-year-old girl's head with his rifle butt.
"You don't want to know how hard this is for us," said one government political figure. "There was national pride when the resistance freed the south (from Israeli occupation); even if you opposed Hezbollah and supported Israel, you felt some pride to see Lebanon liberated. But over this? One thousand people, hundreds of children, died (in the 2006 war) to free this monster none of us even know? Hezbollah freed him to show they could. And now they will make us 'celebrate' their victory because they know they can."
Hezbollah, through its political arm, and Lebanon's pro-western elected government have reached an uneasy détente after Hezbollah-led forces routed activists loyal to the government and Sunni leader Saad Hariri in May. The ease with which Hezbollah and its more secular allies in the Amal Movement defeated Sunni and Druze supporters of the government stunned the nation and left most pro-western political figures terrified in the realization that Hezbollah can remove them from power by force at any time. "So why not try and get along with them?" the political figure added. "It's not like we have a choice."
The choice is obvious: division into your constituent parts.
CRUDE PROPOSAL:
Windfall Profit Tax -- Bad Idea (Pete Davis, 8/04/08, Capital Gains and Games)
I worked on the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980 (P.L.96-223, enacted April 2, 1980), and I'm with Senator McCain on this one.The 1980 WPT didn't work on many levels as shown in the Congressional Research Service's analysis of March 6, 2006:
1. It reduced domestic oil production and increased our dependence on foreign oil by between 3% and 13% of oil imports;
2. It raised only $80 b. or 20% of the $393 b. of revenue projected;
3. It was costly and complicated to administer, particularly for small producers;
4. It created lots of distortions, favoring new wells over old wells and tax exempt production of state governments, certain parts of Alaska, Indian tribes, charities, educational institutions, and royalty owners. It also shifted investment from extraction and production downstream to refining and marketing. Investment was shifted overseas and jobs and profits went with it.
It's not supposed to work, just seem to be punishing corporations.
BLESS YOU, PRISON:
The Bleat (James Lileks, 8/04/08)
In the summer of ’78 I was back home in Fargo between college years – exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown “culture,” almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away.Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.
The Dissident (Stephen Brown, 8/5/2008, FrontPageMagazine.com)
That The Gulag Archipelago was published at all is something of a miracle. The KGB had desperately tried to stop its 1974 publication in the West. It had interrogated a woman, one of the four Solzhenitsyn used to type the secretly-written manuscript, for four days to discover its whereabouts. After revealing the location, the woman committed suicide. For all its intimidation, however, the KGB failed to prevent the book’s publication in the West.Its immediate effect in the West was profound. Solzhenitsyn’s philosophy for dealing with Soviet tyrants was straightforward: The harder you hit them with the big fist, he once said, the better they understood. In exposing communism’s then-unknown crimes against humanity to a worldwide audience, Solzhenitsyn dealt a severe blow to the Soviet state.
The Kremlin was stunned, and failed to react for several days. But it eventually stripped Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and expelled him from the Soviet Union. Cast out from his country, the reasoning went, Solzhenitsyn would fade into oblivion. Instead, he changed history.
Moral Giant (Rich Lowry, 8/05/08, National Review)
In The Gulag, he showed how the Soviet system wasn’t perverted by Stalin in the 1930s, but was murderous from the beginning, the sulfurous spawn of a Vladimir Lenin determined to rid Russia “of all kinds of harmful insects.” He argued convincingly that Soviet communism was as evil and destructive as Nazism. But the central insight of Solzhenitsyn’s work is not political or historical, but moral.In his suffering, he gained insight into the twistedness of the human heart. “Gradually it was disclosed to me,” he writes, “that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”
This deeply humane understanding of evil is anathema to a political ideology like communism that draws bright, artificial lines between the chosen people and their enemies, thus justifying unimaginable acts of sadism. “Thanks to ideology,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.”
Solzhenitsyn’s suffering in the camps saved him from ideology: “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” And for that, he made the astonishing exclamation, “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”
Such a man wouldn’t bend to any party or fashion. Soon after his exile, he gave the commencement speech at Harvard. He began by noting that “truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter,” then proceeded to scourge the West for its moral decadence.
The West Should Heed Solzhenitsyn (Quin Hillyer, 8/5/2008, American Spectator)
Here, though, is where not just the conservative appreciation for Solzhenitsyn but also the more general Western appreciation of him became more difficult to sustain. Oh, sure, conservatives were thrilled that Solzhenitsyn railed against the communists. And even European "social Democrats" ended up very glad that he blew the whistle on the Soviets who menaced them. But anti-communism was only part of the Russian Nobel laureate's message. As harsh as he was in denouncing the gulag, he was almost as harsh in denouncing not just the diplomatic weakness (up until then) of the West but also its moral decrepitude. Again in the Harvard speech, here's what he said:"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."
Somewhere between the age of Churchill and today we lost the idea that freedom obliges us, all of us, to expend "blood, toil, tears and sweat." Somewhere between the rationing of World War II and the Age of the Shopping Mall we forgot that a 5.7 percent unemployment rate after eight rocky months is a phenomenal achievement rather than a crisis. And somewhere along the way we forgot that while every one of 4,000 American deaths in a foreign land is a tragedy, they are collectively the mark of a nation that protects its soldiers amazingly well while freeing the world from a dangerous megalomaniac. Solzhenitsyn himself probably saw, personally, at least as many of his compatriots killed in any one of several bad weeks while fighting on the front lines against the invading Nazi death machine.Thirty years before Phil Gramm complained that we have become a nation of whiners, Solzhenitsyn said much the same thing. One can almost hear him sneer as he noted to the Harvard grads that "the center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy." One wonders what he made of the looting after Hurricane Katrina, and of the political buck-passing that accompanied the botched responses thereto. [...]
Solzhenitsyn clearly was no fan of consumerist American modernity. He said that it in its own way it was as dehumanizing -- or, perhaps more accurately, as de-spiritualizing -- as almost anything the gulag could engender. Yet in all of his complaining, in all of his cultural criticism of both the Free World and the communist one, this great Russian thinker's underlying message remained redemptive. As truly awful, by ordinary standards, as Ivan Denisovich's day in the labor camp had been, Ivan went to sleep thinking that "nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy." After all, "he'd had a lot of luck today. They hadn't put him in the cooler....He'd finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon....And he'd gotten over that sickness."
With God's help, human beings have a remarkable capacity to find hope in the thinnest gruel. We have the capacity, he believed, to get over our sickness.
MORE:
-OBIT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918–2008: Russian traditionalist, Nobel laureate, feted in the West for criticism of Soviet Communism, then spurned for rejecting liberal materialism (Andrew Cusack, 3 August 2008, Norumbega)
-OBIT: The death of Solzhenitsyn: The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on how the author of the Gulag Archipelago, who related the terrible truth about Soviet totalitarianism, outlived his era to become something of a living monument to Russia's past (Andrey Kurkov, 05 August 2008, New Statesman)
-In Memoriam: Solzhenitsyn's Life And Writings (Forbes, 8/05/08)
-INTERVIEW: Alexander Solzhenitsyn On The New Russia (Paul Klebnikov, May 9, 1994, Forbes)
-ESSAY: The Prophet at Harvard (Dinesh D'Souza, 8/05/08, AOL News)
-OBIT: The man who shook the Kremlin: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died this week, was instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, and he never wavered from his belief in a writer's moral responsibility to truth and beauty (Alexander Nazaryan, 8/05/08, Salon)
THE DESTRUCTION OF EXISTENTIALISM WAS JUST COLLATERAL DAMAGE:
Stronger Than the Gulag (Anne Applebaum, August 5, 2008, Washington Post)
Although more than three decades have passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed samizdat versions of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" began circulating in what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript -- the first-ever historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system -- before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn's sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose, not an experience anyone was likely to forget.People in that first generation of readers remember who gave them the book, who else knew about it, to whom they passed it. They remember the stories that affected them most -- tales of small children in the camps, or of informers, or of camp guards. They remember what the book felt like -- the blurry, mimeographed text; the dog-eared paper; the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night -- and with whom they discussed it. [...]
[W]hat Solzhenitsyn produced was simply more thorough, more monumental and more detailed than anything that had preceded it. His account could not be dismissed as a single man's experience. No one who dealt with the Soviet Union, diplomatically or intellectually, could ignore it. So threatening was the book to certain branches of the European left that Jean-Paul Sartre himself described Solzhenitsyn as a "dangerous element."
LEAVE IT TO SENATOR OBAMA...:
Gasoline prices fall again (Martin Zimmerman, 8/05/08, Los Angeles Times)
Gasoline prices are still tumbling, the government reported Monday, while a steep drop in crude oil prices in New York futures trading could indicate that more relief for consumers is on the way.The U.S. average price for a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline slid 7.5 cents to $3.88, its lowest level since May 19, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of filling stations.[...]
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, meanwhile, crude for September delivery fell $3.69 a barrel, or 3%, to $121.41, its lowest close since May 5. It traded as low as $119.50 a barrel during the day's hectic session.
...to backpedal on drilling while prices are falling after standing fast while they rose. Such is the sad nature of reactionary politics.
YUP, THAT'S THE TICKET:
China tries to put its best face forward (Willy Lam, 8/06/08, Asia Times)
[T]he low caliber of central and local officials has been demonstrated by the failure of those in five western provinces to either pre-empt or adequately handle the "Tibetan uprising" this spring; the large number of tofu, or shoddily constructed, school buildings exposed by the Sichuan earthquake; and pervasive reports about collusion between police and underground gangs that was behind the riots in the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan the past several weeks.These disturbing incidents have notably stoked concerns among the party's top brass over shaken public confidence in the capabilities of the CCP. The dubious quality - particularly in terms of efficiency and clean governance - of huge numbers of what chairman Mao Zedong called "servants of the masses" has prompted the leadership under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao to launch what could be the largest-scale personnel reform scheme since the mid-1990s.
All it takes is a little reform and suddenly government bureaucrats are competent. You bet....
QOMBAYA:
Al-Sadr Plans to Turn Militia Into Civic Organization (Fox News, August 04, 2008)
Anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is planning to disarm the Mahdi Army by turning the militia into a civic and social service organization, a significant strategic shift, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.In a brochure obtained by the paper and confirmed by Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, Sadr's chief spokesman, the Mahdi Army will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy. A new guiding principle will also be introduced: al-Mumahidoon, indicating that his supporters will be the foot soldiers of the Shiite messiah, Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi, who Shiite Muslims believe will return to rid the world of evil. [...]
The al-Mumahidoon office will be separated into sections, including religion, education, social services and information. Posters bearing the indicating a new direction for the Mahdi Army have been put up in some areas of Baghdad, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Mookie is kind of Iraq's Baden-Powell...
THE UNICORN RIDER WHO CRIED WOLF:
Race-card flap reopens Clinton camp wounds (BEN SMITH, 8/5/08, Politico)
The Clintons and their allies may forgive Barack Obama for beating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, but there’s one sore point they’re not quite ready to absolve: Leaving the impression that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a race problem.“I am not a racist,” Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn’t quite related to that subject. "I've never made a racist comment and I never attacked [Obama] personally." [...]
But regardless of the real meaning of Clinton’s words, and of Clinton’s long relationship with African-Americans, this is the rift between the Clinton and Obama camps that still cuts the deepest, and the one that may have the severest consequences for Obama’s White House bid. When John McCain’s campaign manager last week accused Obama of playing the “race card,” the Clintons or their supporters could have provided a powerful rebuttal. Instead they were silent, and in private, some even quietly cheered.
The depth of the anger in Clinton’s circle became clear Friday, when McCain’s chief strategist compared his candidate to Bill Clinton, and the Clintons seemed to accept the analogy.
Bad enough the Obama camp resorted to phony racism charges last time they were losing, the problem is Mau-Mauing was only likley to be effective in Democratic caucuses.
NOT THE POSH CANDIDATE:
Topless Women, Kid Rock, Bikers, And John McCain (Sam Stein, 8/03/08, Huffington Post)
On Sunday, the McCain campaign announced that the Senator will participate in the Sturgis Rally 2008 at Buffalo Chip in South Dakota, an annual tribute to American veterans. The event is up the Arizona Republican's wheelhouse, attracting thousands of active duty and former servicemen, many who have a natural affinity towards the Senator.But it is hard not to notice the evocative, non-political sideshows that will literally surround McCain's speech. As the presumptive nominee takes the stage, the "Ringin' Wet & Wild" women's wrestling event will be taking place on the main amphitheater. Two hours before then, the "Miss Buffalo Chip Beauty Pageant - Bikinis on the Beach" will be staged at a different venue. That affair is described by ESPN's Jim Caple as "essentially a topless beauty pageant. And occasionally bottomless, too."
His scheduler had to make up for the oil rig fiasco somehow, huh?
N.B.: I've told the story here before, but when I worked on the NJ Gubernatorial campaign in 1985, we went to every county fair (all 21) and the state fair. At one--I think Monmouth Country or Ocean County--the Democratic Party booth was next to the freak show booths. One had a two-headed goat. One had some kind of mutant chickens. But the one closest to the Democrats had a menagerie of sullen Haitian midgets. So you'd be standing there, with the candidate shaking hands and chatting people up, while in the background you'd be hearing this continual tape loop : "Tiny people! See the tiny people! Haitian midgets! See the Haitian midgets!" Over and over and over and over again. It was like something out of an Ed Wood film.