Alexander Marriott's Wit and Wisdom

2009-10-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

Roman Polanski and His Apologists

Admitted child rapist Roman Polanski was finally apprehended last week in Switzerland on an outstanding warrant for his arrest relating to his fleeing the United States prior to sentencing by a California court for his confessed sexual assault on a girl of 13. If you wish to read the documentation, the girl's grand jury testimony and Polanski's confession, please visit thesmokinggun.com. Amazingly, this unrepentent fugitive (to see an excellent article which explains just how unrepentent Polanski is go here) has received the support of some pretty big Hollywood producers, directors, and actors. They have written an abhorrent petition and applied their names and reputations to it. Among the notable signatories: Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese, Michael Mann, Terry Gilliam, and Wes Anderson (Harvey Weinstein has also gone out of his way to defend Polanski). I was already boycotting all Polanski films, but given the nature of his crimes, his completely amoral attitude concerning them, and the wording of the petition itself, I am now boycotting all future work of these other people as well. This sort of behavior, including the rationalizing, denying, trivializing, and excusing of horrific crimes, is unacceptable and for these people to brazenly assault the public (their ultimate benefactors) with fundamentally dangerous and immoral sophistry is as foolish as it is, at base, evil. In a free society, even justifying horrible crimes is not against the law, nor should it be, nor do we hold ostrakon meetings like the ancient Athenians. But all of us retain the right to ostracize with our feet and our wallets, I will be doing so, I recommend that whoever cares about punishing the worst criminals among us do so as well.

2009-08-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

Tarantino’s Nihilism Ends World War II
By Alexander Marriott

Warning: Plot Spoilers Ahead, if you want to see the ‘Inglorious Basterds’ you may not wish to keep reading.

I see many movies, but am only rarely left in a position after seeing any film where I feel compelled to write a serious review of it. Today is such a day. On the recommendation of a friend, who wanted me to see both ‘Inglorious Basterds’ and ‘District 9’ (both of which held no appeal for me whatsoever based on trailer previews), I agreed to see whichever one of them he dictated with the understanding that if I liked his selection I would then see the other. Upon assuming I would probably dislike ‘District 9’ he instead went with ‘Inglorious Basterds’ as the surest way of getting me to see both films. This strategy of my well-meaning friend failed, below are the reasons why.

Before proceeding to the flaws of this particular film, I need to address the general tenor and outlook of the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s previous works (‘Reservoir Dogs,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘Jackie Brown,’ ‘Kill Bill,’ ‘From Dusk Till Dawn,’ etc.) all display a very disturbing penchant for nihilistic portrayals of violence and humanity spliced with a knack for mixing unique cinematography and music to create some of the most indelible scenes of modern cinema. Occasionally, as in ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ there are characters portrayed who are not purely malevolent nihilistic violent pods, as that film was built around a plot involving an undercover police officer (played by Tim Roth) who was attempting to infiltrate and take down a ruthless band of thugs. Roth’s choices are the dramatic force which moves the plot along as he lies on the floor bleeding to death and we’re let in on the preceding action which led to this final series of moments (a typical Tarantino tactic). His work has, however, gotten increasingly nihilistic while pushing the envelope on stylized violence. The two ‘Kill Bill’ movies highlight this move, as he mixed a standard revenge plot with samurai sword fights, martial arts fighting, and a typical Tarantino hodgepodge of sadistic and darkly amusing characters.

Now to his most recent effort. Set during World War II, ‘Inglorious Basterds’ weaves together a couple of different stories (typical, again, of Tarantino). The first story we are introduced to involves a young Jewish girl, Shoshana Dreyfus, who barely escapes a frighteningly psychotic Nazi Colonel, searching for hidden Jews in the French countryside. After watching this colonel browbeat and terrify the brave French peasant who is hiding Shoshana and her family and eventually breaking the man into admitting his “crimes,” and then proceeding to murder the hidden family beneath the floor, we are introduced to the second main story line. Brad Pitt, portraying (if you want to call what Pitt does acting) a caricature of a hardass army lieutenant from Tennessee, organizes an illegal band of Jewish-American soldiers to be dropped behind enemy lines and murder “Nazis.” His speech, which is supposed to rouse them (and presumably us) to go on this mission is merely an odious appeal to racial anger (somehow, only Jewish soldiers are “really” invested in killing Nazis) and illegal homicidal violence. This is a key point. The German Armed forces, like all enemy soldiers in World War II (at least our enemies), were guaranteed rights under U.S. law due to Geneva Treaty obligations. Any plot to murder surrendered “Nazis” by us or anyone else would be, ipso facto, a violation of the laws of war. This is not meant as a paean to German soldiers who were fighting on behalf of a despotic cruel socialist regime of murdering racists, but the movie shows our “heroes” brutally and sadistically beating surrendered soldiers brains out with baseball bats. What is the point of such a scene? Some of my fellow moviegoers were prompted to laugh at this scene. Why? What is funny about watching a psychopath (and that is the only word for a man who would deliberately and in cold blood beat a surrendered man on his knees to death with a bat) beat a man to death and then dance around making ridiculous comments about being a slugger at Fenway Park? If this is comedy, then I shudder at the soul of the person who would conceive of it as such, and even more at those who would laugh. If it is not meant to be amusing, then what is it meant to be? Nothing. It is horrific violence, which does not create sympathy for the Jewish soldiers, quite the contrary. The surrendered German’s “crime” (at least the only one the movie lets us know about) was that he refused to point out the positions of his comrades on a map. That was his right (just like it was the right of Americans captured by Germans), he only had to give his basic information and then should have been shuffled away with the rest of the captured German rabble.

But the American racists who we are expected to cheer on, presumably because they are Americans and Jewish, can’t be made to abide these rules and notions of propriety. Their mission is couched in the very same racialist language that Goebbels and Hitler used (Pitt blathers about “the German” as if Germans were some separate and distinct form of humanity). This collectivist nonsense was not justifiable when the Germans employed it, nor when the Americans actually applied it in segregating their armed forces. But it is incredibly bizarre for a modern director to romanticize Hitler’s ideology in the words and deeds of Hitler’s fictional opponents (Pitt and company). I cannot imagine actual Holocaust survivors (let alone veterans of the Armed forces, Jewish or otherwise) reacting well to this horrific and insulting portrayal where they accept the notions which underlay the mass murder going on in the East.

Zoom ahead to 1944, Shoshana has moved to Paris and somehow owns a movie theatre (the explanation for this is peripheral and weak at best). She is attractive and living under an assumed identity to avoid detection from the Germans. Her beauty brings the attentions of a young German war hero who becomes smitten with her. He is the toast of the town as a movie produced by Goebbels about his exploits is set to premiere soon. The man pursues her persistently, eventually wrangling her into a meeting with Hitler’s propagandist (who Tarantino insists on making a grotesque caricature cartoon of a character, as if Goebbels as a serious figure would not condemn the man’s historical reputation effectively enough – see Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci in ‘Conspiracy’ to see just how effective that is with two different but no less horrible Nazis) where he convinces Hitler’s number two to have the premiere at Shoshana’s cinema. Shoshana is then interviewed by the very Colonel who murdered her family. Shoshana is representative of what is left of Tarantino’s humanity. She is a sweet woman who has managed to survive and find some measure of private happiness with her assistant Marcel. Shoshana is no wilting flower though, she seizes the opportunity to have her righteous vengeance and plots with Marcel to burn her cinema to the ground while the Nazis have their premiere.

Violence for the sake of violence continues to dominate the film as we see more murdering and bloodshed unfold, including a bizarre subplot involving a German actress who is a British agent and her attempt to infiltrate a British spy and Pitt’s thugs into the premiere and blow it up. Unfortunately, this is a Quentin Tarantino picture, so this plan goes awry in a humongous shoot-out at the rendezvous point, an allegedly deserted bar. Surprise surprise, it’s not deserted. And while the spy and his cohorts are able to bluster their way past the drunk German grunts in the place, no such luck with the creepy SS officer. When the masks are off if takes a couple of minutes of dialogue before the guns start blazing. Seconds later everyone is dead except the wounded German actress and one of the German grunts, who had been celebrating the birth of a son. Of course, Pitt then shows up and tries to get the actress out, going out of his way to assure that no one will get hurt (a clear lie given previous dialogue, and the fact that Pitt is playing an unscrupulous killer pretending to have scruples) all of which simply leads to the German actress killing the grunt after Pitt convinces him to let his guard down. Again, as he is a German soldier, I don’t actually have much sympathy for him, but Tarantino seems to go out of his way to make all of these scenes particularly sympathetic to the Germans, an odd paradox considering who the main characters are and what they’re doing and (theoretically anyway) why they are doing it.

So after Pitt is satisfied that our German frau is not double crossing them he hatches a plan worthy of his immediate demotion. He and two of his blunt instruments will pose as Italian film industry people, while they try to hide behind their pretty benefactor and sneak into the premiere with bombs wrapped around their legs. Obviously, this is doomed to failure, particularly since Tarantino has made the smartest character in the movie (aside from Shoshana that is) the German Colonel from the opening scene. This Colonel quickly figures out that the actress was at the bar massacre and quickly makes asses of Pitt and his goons who don’t speak any actual Italian. ***Here I must digress for a moment. Pitt’s character is an arrogant, violent, unthinking nabob who basically does whatever he wants paying very little heed to the consequences. I cannot be certain of why Tarantino wrote the character in this way other than that it represents the current fashionable elitist/European stereotype of what Americans, particularly those nebulous creatures who may disapprove of the current exalted leader, are like at their absolute worst. But since every American portrayed in the film is simply a variant of Pitt’s psychopath, we can only assume that he is not meant to be a curious outlier, but a representation of something fundamental about how Americans act or tend to be. Counter this to the brilliantly ruthless colonel and the elegant if fatally inept British spy, etc. What we are left with is the distinct impression that Americans are seriously and fundamentally flawed. But as I say, this is merely a digression based on a general gist I detected from watching the film, back to the review.*** Then he drags her into a room, shows her that he knows what she’s done with incriminating evidence, and then he strangles her to death. This is a painful scene to watch. Again, what is the point here precisely? Yes, he’s a killer, he strangles a beautiful woman to death. Why do we need to see her eyes and face as he crushes her neck? Tarantino already has set the man up as a horrible monster in the opening scene. This is gratuitous overkill, literally. This scene is merely one of many reasons why I will never view this film again, at least not in its entirety.

Of course, I said the film was set during World War II. It is not, nor does it pretend to be, historically accurate in any way. I actually have no problem with that. Historically set fictional alternate fantasies are fine vehicles for any decent and/or interesting plot and theme. Historical novels have been written with great profit for hundreds of years now with just this sort of result. Unfortunately, this film entirely lacks those things. I mention this because, of course, Hitler has decided to attend the film premiere, thus putting the entire German state leadership in one room. Shoshana’s plot, and Pitt’s idiotic substitute, now have the potential to end the war (in Europe anyway, you don’t even know that there is a World War going on by watching this movie). The Colonel, suddenly conscious of his historical legacy, decides that he’s going to jump ships, and demand terms from the Allies in return for allowing Pitt’s other two men (they are in the theatre) to carry out their assassination. The Allies, of course, agree to whatever he says and so he defects without warning the curiously non-existent security patrol at the theatre of impending disaster. Pitt, being the sadistic guy that he is in this movie, accepts this situation as a fact of life, except that he carves a swastika into the Colonel’s forehead as a sort of permanent scarlet letter of shame. A fitting punishment for sure, except that of all the people Pitt has had the opportunity to kill in the film (and has), no one has deserved it more than this Colonel. Why defy orders so horrendously and then stop short of killing the bastard? It makes no sense, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to (the movie could just as easily been titled ‘Stupid Basterds’).

Shoshana’s plot is, of course, the climax of the film. Rigging the theatre to burn down, she has her projectionist assistant, Marcel, lock the theatre goers into their unwitting crematorium (again, no security to thwart this, which is odd when the four or five highest ranking people of the Nazi state are in the room, but at this point Tarantino has added pointless silliness to the film’s other less than admirable attributes). Marcel then goes behind the screen to wait for a key moment when film of Shoshana interrupts the movie and tells the assembled Nazi’s they are going to be destroyed by a vengeful Jewess. While this is happening two other things are occurring: 1) Pitt’s two lackeys have discovered where Hitler is and are plotting in a nearby bathroom to kill him and 2) the young German war hero is attempting to force himself on Shoshana in the projectionist’s room where she is waiting for her “surprise” to begin. ***Another digression. The German war hero is being celebrated for having held up in a crows next and killed some 200 allied soldiers in a three day standoff before the allies abandoned their efforts to dislodge him. At one point, one character refers to him as a German “Sergeant York” a reference to the American World War I hero who single-handedly killing 28 Germans and capturing 132 more. There was also, of course, a movie made about this man called ‘Sergeant York’ with Gary Cooper playing the title character. There was a World War II parallel to this as well on the American side in the exploits of Audie Murphy who later starred in the movie about his own exploits, just like Tarantino’s fictional German. The clips we see of this film that is premiering look suspiciously like the sorts of things portrayed in ‘Sergeant York’ and I cannot help but think Tarantino is taking a swipe at that movie and those like it which lauded the heroic actions and exploits of American soldiers. I might be mistaken, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Back to the review.*** Of course, the “basterds” kill Hitler and Goebbels, riddling up the bodies with a few extra magazines of machine gun rounds for good measure, another needless scene which I guess we’re supposed to take sadistic joy in or laugh at? Who knows? When they aren’t pumping dead Hitler full of lead, they are taking random shots at the scrambling and now burning Nazis in the theatre below. Shoshana uses her wits to get away from the soldier so that she can protect herself by shooting him. She then shows her humanity by kneeling down to express regret over the unfortunate necessity of killing him as he lays there. But this is Tarantino, so no one ought to be surprised that the soldier then rolls over and kills her with his pistol before he himself expires. And so she does not even live to see her plot succeed. While all this has been happening, people have been throwing dynamite around like it’s going out of style (don’t ask why, it would make no difference if I explained it anyway) so when all of this has gone on enough—even Tarantino has a breaking point—all of that dynamite explodes and anyone who had been left alive is now tidily blown to bits. The actual ending of the movie is the carving up of the Colonel, but the cinema exploding is the more fitting end.

Tarantino’s World War II fantasy ends with the only (Marcel seems like a nice guy, but he’s an extension thematically of Shoshana) redeeming character dead and some sort of vague suggestion that the war (in Europe) was ending. What is the point of it all? Is it supposed to be a comedy? It is poor taste to say the least to make light of this particular historical epoch if not done with particular care and finesse. Yes, it matters a lot when people who were alive during the period and dealt with the real consequences of the period are still alive. That may not seem fair, but too bad. Tarantino’s nihilism would not be justified if applied to the Civil War or some other conflict either, but personal insults tend to hurt more than those made to those who are long dead and buried.Tarantino has never been a fan of those two words though: care and finesse. Why are we supposed to watch this two and a half hour bloodfest? What do we, as audience members, get from it? What is the theme of this movie? As far as I can tell, the theme is nothing. Nothing, other than that large pointless shoot-outs are “cool” to watch and that sadistic murdering can be funny if the murderer is a Jew and the victim is a German. The war itself is utterly lost. The casus belli for this imaginary illegal racist American killing squad—the holocaust—is also curiously absent. Perhaps because that might beg the question of why such a squad was not sent some place where the Nazis they happened to be killing were those involved in murdering Jews in massive numbers instead of marauding the French countryside murdering petty German soldiers. The movie is a pointless exercise and a waste of time. That would be bad enough if it were not also perniciously violent (I am not in any way opposed to dramatized violence, but like anything else, context is the key point) and ultimately profoundly disrespectful of the people who were actually victimized by German, Italian, Vichy, Japanese, and Soviet tyranny in this era and the brave men and women who fought against it from numerous countries around the globe. Tarantino should stick to making nihilistic fantasies set in fictional nihilistic places with his fictional nihilistic characters and stay out of the actual real life world setting filled with—yes—horrible evil and violence and murder and death and rape and destruction, but also filled with heroes and goodness and love and all the things that make life worth living and that give us hope when we confront those who would seek to destroy our lives, liberty and happiness. Were the world of 1941-1944 actually populated by Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’ the outcome of that titanic struggle would hardly have been any bullet ridden Hitler and Goebbels. There would have been no struggle at all.

2009-08-06T21:10:00.000-07:00

Letter Sent to Senators Reid and Ensign, and the Honorable Shelley Berkely of Nevada

If you haven't already written to your representatives in congress, please do so during the recess.

6 August 2009

Dear Senator Reid,

As you consider the prospect of “reforming” healthcare over the congressional recess I would like to share my views with you, as one of your constituents. I am twenty-five years old and a doctoral candidate in American History. I spend most of my time examining and studying the early political and intellectual history of our republic. I do not normally feel compelled to write to my elected representatives, though I always take the time to consider contemporary issues and elections seriously as a concerned and engaged citizen of the republic.

At the conclusion of our Revolution, those various figures great and small whom we generally call “Founding Fathers,” faced as scary and uncertain a future as any faced by any group of men in the history of the Western world. This is not needlessly melodramatic, but a simple fact. No sizeable republic had existed anywhere outside of small enclaves in Italy, Switzerland, and Holland for well over seventeen hundred years in the days of ancient Rome. Self-government and, more importantly, limited government, was, at best, a noble dream. Whether it could work given the nature of men, the precarious position of the United States in a world soon to be consumed by the fires unleashed in Revolutionary France, and the contradictory institutional arrangements among the sections of the new republic was anything but certain.

The early government of the United States was not limited in scope, power, or activity because of weakness or inability to marshal resources not gained until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was limited deliberately. Not because the Founders or anyone normally views it as a good thing that people don’t have employment, healthcare, food, education, or anything else commonly assumed to be a “right” today. It was limited because these items, items which are produced by other citizens, were not seen as the legitimate “rights” of other citizens. All men have the fundamental right to their own persons and the products of their own labor. They do not, however, own the products of other men by right. The critical development signified by the American Republic was the notion that government was instituted for the expressly limited purpose of protecting individual rights, including the fundamental rights of property.

Healthcare, no matter how vital we may think it is, is not a right. It is a service and/or series of services produced and offered by a whole host of our fellow citizens. One such citizen is my sister, a registered nurse in Clark County. This is not a question of prices and costs, but of rights. The government has been improperly intruding into the economy for over one hundred years now, with sometimes horrific effects, recently on display in the last year or so. The healthcare field is no exception to our mixed economy nightmare; it has been actively meddled in for decades from Medicare and Medicaid to the creation of HMOs, creatures of government interference. As awful as this situation is, the government is now considering, under pressure from President Obama, making matters much worse.

The government has no business getting involved in health insurance, even under the “benign” rhetoric of the current plan before congress. There is no mandate for this in the Constitutional charter ratified by the people of the United States in 1787-1789. Your job is, explicitly, to live within the confines of that document or to amend it for some non-delegated purpose. Creating a government insurance program is not a delegated power of the congress. There is a reason for this beyond the more primitive state of human healthcare in the late eighteenth century. A person cannot have a right to the products and services of another. That situation is normally called slavery. It was not compatible with human liberty when the republic was founded, and it is not compatible now. Such a situation is founded upon force, not liberty. It is, at base, fundamentally unjust and not worthy of this country. You should be working to rid the republic of all vestiges remaining that suggest force is a proper way for government to interact with the citizens who are its lords and masters.

Do not turn the American Republic, the republic of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison into the “bread and circuses” nightmare of Imperial Rome. If we go down that road any further, there will be increasingly little chance that we will find our ways back. Our situation today of affluence, power, and technological dominance over nature was not an accidental development, nor is its continuation at all assured. Your actions now matter immensely. History will judge whether you acted, like the heroes of other epochs, to guarantee a rebirth of liberty, or whether you pandered with other people’s money to “guarantee” services provided by yet others. As a historian, I am as certain of how this moment will be recorded as one can be. One path is glory, the other is ignominy. Please consider these matters and please choose wisely.

My regards,
Alexander Marriott

2009-07-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

Musings from the Road

In the finest tradition of modern historians, I am currently on the road, researching my dissertation at various archives around the country. So far I have been to the New York Historical Society, Princeton University, the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, and tomorrow the University of North Carolina. The remainder of the trip will be taking me to the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library in Harrogate, Tennessee, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, the Indiana Historical Society, the University of Rochester and then back to Princeton to finish up what I was doing when I passed through there earlier.

New York City was, as always, tremendously exciting and fun. I was staying at the Travel Inn Hotel on 10th and 42nd streets in Midtown Manhattan, which is about two blocks from broadway and the theatre district. The walk up to the historical society was a few miles, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's always great to see all the people going about their business in Manhattan. So many people from so many places doing so many things. It boggles the mind to consider all of the myriad activities of such a host, but that power to boggle the mind is one of the things I love about New York City. I saw the revival of Schiller's Mart Stuart while I was there. It was an interesting production. Only Mary and Elizabeth were in period costume, while the rest of the characters were in business clothing. Elizabeth, played wonderfully by Harriet Walter, stole the show with a delightful performance. I must say, my only substantial objection (I would have prefered everyone in period dress, but oh well) was that Elizabeth's evasions of responsibility were played up for laughs instead of the deadly serious dodges of reality and responsibility (with deadly consequences for much more than just the poor Queen of Scots) that Schiller intended them to be. The sense of a tragedy was compromised, and while this is my only real objection to the production, it is a serious one.

Princeton is a beautiful town, and the University is gorgeous. The procedures to get into the manuscript room are a bit tedious and the photography policy is downright silly. But, all of that aside, I enjoyed working there a great deal. Unfortunately it was at this point of the trip that my computer really began melting down. The monitor began fading in and out and doing all sorts of weird stuff. It had been doing this sporadically for a little while, but a moderate amount of jiggling and playing around usually got it to stop after a minute or two. But now it was becoming endless. But I was leaving for Washington and hoping that it would stop.

The Library of Congress is a wonderful place to work. Surprisingly laid back once you get through all of the security, the archivists are very helpful and you can photograph to your heart's content. I did not achieve all I wanted to while there, but I expect to be back over the Christmas break to finish up. Tragically, the computer died for good and I had to purchase another one. Also tragically, my metro pass got demagnetized, forcing me to purchase another, and I also overspent on the commuter train!!

Western Virginia is some of the prettiest country in the United States. I finally saw James Monroe's house, Highland. It was quite small, particularly compared with the large mansions of James Madison at Montpelier and Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (not to mention George Washington's Mount Vernon) but it was still very nice. Curiously, the only bust in the whole place that I saw was a large one of Napoleon Bonaparte. Monroe was perhaps the most radical supporter of the French Revolution among the founders (certainly among any of those who made it to the Presidency), and his daugther was good friends with the children of Josephine (Napoleon's first wife), Hortence and Eugene. The University of Virginia is amazing and Charlottesville is a very pretty little city. I enjoyed working in the Special Collections Library very much and found lots of interesting letters and pamphlets there.

North Carolina is hot. I can't say much more about it, the archives are closed on the weekend and I'm staying about 70 miles from Chapel Hill. I'll be there all day tomorrow researching and hopefully getting through all the things I need to get through. On Tuesday I'm off for the Cumberland Gap!

The trip has been lots of fun and very expensive. I traveled with my roommate Emily for the first leg of it to DC, she's studying the Holocaust in French North Africa, and that was wonderful. She's one of my all time favorite people. Then I stayed with my colleague Hannah and her parents in Staunton, VA, which was great. I've stayed with them before and we always have a good time. Now I'm alone until I meet up with my glorious benefactors in Indiana and proceed back to Las Vegas in the longest possible imaginable route. I will update again from the road and perhaps share some of my thoughts on our illustrious leader's attempts at attaining his ends.

2009-04-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

How “Historic” is the 2008 Election?

The American Historical Association (AHA) held a special panel at its annual conference this year considering the above question to which it invited six very prominent historians to offer insights and opinions. Surprisingly, I was not among those invited, but having read half of the responses made available in the most recent edition of the AHA’s magazine, Perspectives, I think another opinion is in order, one based on slightly different premises than those offered by the invited panelists.

First of all, the question is fundamentally flawed. Any event for which we have some sort of human produced evidence is, ipso facto, historic. What the question means to ask is: “How historically important is the 2008 election?” This may seem a small point, but you will notice that all three of the available essays deals with any and every piece of historically (ir)relevant detail before moving to the issue all three of them care most about, i.e. will Barack Obama’s election produce the fundamental statist changes each of them think is desirable and needed in these times? All seem optimistic that it might, but most of them are cautious not to “jump the gun” given their historically minded familiarity with past disappointments.

But assuming for the moment that history is not simply the march away from limited government to a statist utopia of supplying “equality” to all from all, then one must put prior experience and our best guesses for the future into an honest narrative of events. All three of the available AHA essays are very clearly partisan, which should not necessarily be a problem, but all of them say things which indicate a supremely uncritical attitude towards the meta-narrative constructed by the Democratic Party to explain current events and the previous administration. Jacqueline Jones says at one point: McCain’s campaign “evoked both the Cold War of the 1980s and the culture wars of the 1990s—an attempt to divide the country into warring camps: us v. them, straight v. gay, native-born v. immigrant, rural v. urban folks, conservatives v. liberals, “Real Americas” v. all the rest.” David Levering- Lewis, a man who seriously attempted to contact W.E.B. Du Bois’s ghost for his monumental two-volume Pulitzer Prize winning biography, contends about the election’s finals months: “Absent the breathtakingly sudden collapse of unregulated capitalism and the GOP candidate’s eerie economic unsophistication manifested in the final campaign weeks, neither Obama’s position on the Iraq war nor his insurance prescriptions for health care might have given him a clear electoral-college victory.” While Julian E. Zelizer blandly recapitulates: “The dramatic collapse of the financial and housing markets, as well as the crises in key industries like automobile manufacturing, has raised serious questions among many Americans about the effectiveness of several core conservative policies: tax cuts, deregulation, and unrestrained free trade.” The AHA billed this “discussion” of the 2008 election as some sort of “forum,” chaired by a very able but also very leftist historian, Eric Foner. Each and every essay they have so far released (and there is no particular reason to expect the other three historians to say anything substantially different) is not just an encomium to Obama, but to statism more broadly. This is fine if that is what the AHA is interested in doing, but “echo chamber” might be a more appropriate name for such a session. “Forum” suggests some sort of open discussion of at least mildly opposing views before an open and uncommitted crowd of spectators.

For any historian to pretend that the last eight years, which witnessed some of the most sweeping extensions of domestic federal power and spending ever witnessed in the history of the republic, was some sort of capitalist tyranny of no regulation and unrestrained trade is to create the most empty of strawmen. From the Ted Kennedy endorsed and approved No Child Left Behind Act (2001), to the reactionary and foolish Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), to the Medicare Prescription Drug Act (2003), to minimum wage increases in 2007 and 2008, as well as ever more bloated farm subsidy bills, the Patriot Act (2001), etc, etc, etc, the last eight years was merely an extension of big government. It is to either be woefully ignorant of basic economics and the simple facts of reality, or to maliciously mislead others to contend otherwise. I repeat: the Bush years cannot be characterized as anything other than a wholesale, eight year expansion of the federal government’s domestic powers and activities. To the extent that President Bush did anything particularly capitalistic, it was almost entirely confined to the realm of tax rate manipulation (temporary rate cuts) and the negotiation and passage of tariff reduction packages with Central America and Columbia. Deregulation was certainly not the order of the day in the years between 20 January 2001 and 20 January 2009. If government enactments are not enough to prove this point, please feel free to ask anyone who owns or operates a business anywhere in the United States (something historians never do, or even care to do). As someone intimately familiar with business owners, I already know the answer to this question all too well. Historians can certainly be partisans, but if they wish to be taken seriously outside of cloistered conferences once a year where no one except (maybe) other historians listens to what they have to say, they need to show that they are able to evaluate the facts of reality in an independent manner and not simply regurgitate partisan talking points and the rankest of misleading propaganda. Of course, this would not be an issue if Republican propaganda were being foisted at an AHA conference because the historians there would dismiss it as that and move on with brutal efficiency (as they should).

What is likely to change from the past administration to this one are marginal issues. The Republicans did not enact cap-and-trade regulation because they weren’t sold on the factual issues related to the cult of man-made “global warming,” not because they thought such a system was an unconstitutional extension of government power or a fundamentally immoral action (they did, after all, create the EPA). The Democrats will undo those restrictions on government power that were put in place by President Bush, not because he suddenly got cold feet about big government, but instead because he asserted some ridiculous mystical doctrine which prevented him from acting in good conscience. The Republicans did not create a government health care system only because of a vague and ill-defined notion that the quasi-private system currently in place “works better.” Only a few of them actually consciously and seriously contends that a public system would be immoral and unconstitutional. Like the Democrats, Republicans do not dispute the right of the government to act in these matters. They merely quibble over the marginal issues of how and where to act. These various marginal issues will mean a great deal to some people, but in terms of principle, they are not nearly as antipodal as these historians and other partisans like to pretend.

As for foreign policy, Bush spoke (sometimes and inconsistently) with a big stick, but nearly always threw carrots at everyone, even our enemies. Only Afghanistan and Iraq were made to pay for the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though the ideological, financial, and support structures, networks, and governments behind those attacks lay in other/additional countries (Iran being pre-eminent). President Obama seems likely to continue the inept and weak-kneed actions of the United States as regards our various enemies, but seems intent on dropping the pretext to the correct rhetoric President Bush was occasionally committed to trying to formulate and use. This “change” is merely one of superficial appearance and nothing more. If that’s all it takes to ameliorate a world flummoxed, baffled, enraged, and annoyed by our behavior in the last eight years, then the world is populated by people even more disconnected from reality than even I imagined (this applies just as much to the populace of the United States unfortunately).

So the question: How historically important is the 2008 election? Obviously, like the three historians whose opinions the AHA has released, we cannot know the answer with any degree of precision in 2009. Given that the history of our republic has been marked by two related but contradictory developments, the extension and protection of individual rights for all Americans and, simultaneously, the evolution and growth of government power and the state at the expense of the individual rights of some Americans for the “security” of others, Obama’s election is likely to be important in the following sense. When the mixed economy faltered, the party alleging fidelity to economic freedom intervened massively and disastrously and was replaced by the party alleging no such fidelity when the American people were required to choose. That the nominee of the party that won happened to be black is of historically minor importance (the key to that development historically occurred over 40 years ago). The historically significant point will be whether or not he succeeds in pushing through the legislation on healthcare, carbon emissions, taxes, etc. that he has indicated are his primary objectives domestically. But as far as the history of the republic goes and has gone for the last 80 years, President Obama’s objectives are not different in essential principles than those of any of his predecessors. He wishes to extend governmental controls and the concomitant initiation of force into the economic and private lives of American citizens. No president in living memory would disagree with that.

2009-01-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

Homo Economicus

As if the actual economic news, that is, the actual numbers and facts about the greater/general economy weren't depressing enough, there is the interpretation of said data by the media, business commentators, and political types to contend with. Also, there are myriad policy suggestions being "debated," suggested, passed, and implemented. And through it all, principles have taken their usual back seat.

There are a few main areas where I have some big time bones to pick however. They are 1) capitalism, 2) Keynes vs. supply-siders, 3) "stimulus" packages, and 4) doing "something" vs. doing "nothing."

Capitalism

It is often said in this present recession that a main culprit was capitalism. The argument runs that rapacious, greedy, and unregulated people in the financial markets and elsewhere ran hog wild while erstwhile pro-capitalist regulators appointed by a pro-capitalist president (Bush) gave a nod, a wink, a nudge, and a "say no more!" and then dutifully turned their backs on the resulting "free market" in derivatives or whatever. The remarkable thing is that this narrative is uttered in perfect seriousness and with a straight face. Not only is it as if capitalism ever actually existed in the United States (which at its peak of economic freedom in the 19th century was, at most, highly capitalistic), but it's as if capitalism existed in someone's actual lifetime. Not only that, within the last several years even! And here all of us capitalists were despairing about the mixed economy when we had capitalism all along!

Of course in reality, all this "capitalism is at fault" and "capitalism existed" stuff is non-sense. No sector of the American economy, except the black market, is unregulated. No sector functions without a federal agency and bureaucrats looming over it with regulations, statutes, and people ready to levy fines and penalties whenever legally required to do so. Jail awaits for whatever economic "crimes" are deemed most heinous. I know I felt safer without Martha Stewart prowling the streets. Most of these sections all have State agencies to deal with as well. The notion that the American economy is a free capitalist economy is a subterfuge, accepted even by erstwhile friends of capitalism, foisted by capitalism's enemies. The American economy is, like nearly every economy in the Western world, a mixed economy. It has free, competitive and capitalistic elements, in some cases quite a bit more than other Western economies. It also has closed, public/government, command elements which are anything but capitalism.

To say capitalism is at fault for the current situation is like blaming God for it. Sure, many people believe it exists, but it, in fact, does not. Or there has certainly been no credible proof offered by claimants, for either, that they exist. And that which does not exist cannot properly be blamed for anything. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government created and supported corporations operating under government laws and regulations which required them to do certain things (i.e. lend to high-risk people in order to meet an arbitrary government mandated goal of housing ownership) with the explicit guarantee that if and when the shit hit the fan, i.e. now, the government would merely tax, borrow, and print enough money to cover the losses. This is capitalism? Certainly not. It is merely symptomatic of the return -- a return which began a long time ago -- to the machinations of planners and manipulators that existed in the age before capitalism's tragically brief triumph (to the extend that it had one in the late 18th and early 19th centuries). Colbert, Richelieu, Buckingham, and Raleigh could not have concocted better schemes to use public/private firms to effect arbitrary government goals and policies which then greatly distorted not only the most directly effected markets, but the whole economy as a result. The infamous "South Sea Bubble" was mere child's play.

As the practise of lending to risky people and not imposing a cost for that risk (i.e. much higher interest) is contrary to sound business practise and contrary to reality (for it is certain that many of these loans would never have occurred without government interference) the government set up an affront to reality -- essentially a contradiction. Now, only if incredibly lucky could the government and the rest of us escape the consequences; by which I mean, some how some way, people otherwise deemed bad loan risks would almost to a man actually prove otherwise. Reality is not a kind opponent. Fighting her is, like fighting the collectivist Borg in Star Trek, futile. The contradiction corrected itself and these loans became "toxic;" as in, no one was ever going to be paying them back. The ramifications of hundreds of billions of dollars of these toxic assets, guaranteed by an irresponsible government with the complicit support of its citizens who have never once stood to halt these encroachments, these regulations, these interventions, is now all around us.

Of course banks won't lend whatever money the government gives them. They have learned a painful lesson. Any business being run by people in their right minds ought to be cautious if they survived intact. Financial institutions far-sighted enough to realize this was not a good deal to begin with are certainly not going to suddenly switch from the astute decision making they have thus far shown and begin making a plethora of hasty and ill-timed loans merely because politicians want their voters to stop yelling at them. Until these bad loans work their way out of the system, leaving behind the wreckage of everything and everyone they have consumed, no one should expect "easy" credit nor should they desire banks to continue bad loan practises.

One note here before moving on. Not having access to "easy" credit is not the same as not having access to credit at all. It merely means that the price of money (interest) and the terms of loans will be higher and stricter. This is an expected correction to the mistakes we have just witnessed. The government pumping in money is merely going to delay the return of reality and create more miserable problems in that some of the institutions will not learn the lesson and make more disastrous loans and cause more of these same episodes.

Keynes vs. supply-siders

The prognosticators on "both" sides of the political spectrum seem to only consider two schools of economic "thought." One, associated with liberals and Democrats, and typified by the economic ravings of Paul Krugman is based in the tradition associated with the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, of course, the guru of the great depression who advocated abandonment of long-term thinking, rejected the gold standard, and promoted "who cares about inflation" government spending as a way to jar an economy back to life, is like a bad penny. He has more lives than "Toonces the Driving Cat;" every time one assumes that Keynesian economics has died finally, there it is again. The "alternative" to Keynesian economics, often associated with conservatives and Republicans, and built around Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer, advocates manipulation of monetary policy (interest rates, the printing press, etc.) and tax rates to promote economic growth and job creation, while avoiding the alleged inevitability of an unregulated "boom/bust cycle" of capitalism.

These are both simply policy alternatives which embrace the same fundamental principles. If you don't believe that then I suggest you read Rush Limbaugh's laughably absurd editorial from the Wall Street Journal of 29 January 2009. Limbaugh's bipartisan "stimulus" is merely to "spend" the same $900 billion that's currently bandied about for the package on capital hill (see more on this below) but more evenly between President Obama's Keynesian preferences for random government spending on anything and everything and Limbaugh's supply-side preferences for tax rate manipulation. Both approaches are impossible without first accepting the premise that the government has a right to interfere in the economy, expropriate wealth, and redistribute it at will for whatever purpose. Limbaugh's "half" of the package may be more amenable if one is forced to accept one part or another, but he's willing to spend non-existant money, nearly $500 billion, on Obama's stuff while he's at it. He is countenancing, but with slightly different distributions, the premise of having your cake while also eating it. What is the point of cutting taxes while also spending half a trillion dollars you don't have? Taxes will just have to be raised later to pay it back, with interest, and avoid a default crisis.

Notice as well, that while the Democrats in congress and the white house are expounding new regulations and agencies in the package they are proposing, the "alternative" ideas expounded by the Republicans include no regulatory and bureaucratic reductions. You might say that this is because of their minority status -- they need to ask for and get what is realistic. But when they were in complete power of both the law making and law enforcing branches, Republicans still did not do either of these. In fact, they did just as their opponents are doing, just in different areas, or even in the same areas but in different ways. Window dressing never cost so much.

The reason is obvious. While they may dispute which regulations and manipulations are better and which chips should go where, they do not dispute the principles upon which the regulations, manipulations and chip shuffling are based. Keynesians and supply-siders, far from being widely divergent intellectual enemies, are merely different sides of another bad penny. The bitterness between them? No one wants to be on the side facing the pavement.

"Stimulus" Packages

Stimulus packages are the order of the day. Bush had them, a couple of them at various times actually, and under our new regime of perpetual change, we still have them, only bigger. Theoretically, or perhaps more appropriately, rhetorically, a stimulus package is supposed to "stimulate" the economy sort of like hitting a joint in precisely the right way in order to cause the desired reaction. The problem with stimulus packages as they are conceived of in Washington, D.C., and the current one in particular, is that it's not precisely clear what is being stimulated. To say, let's pass a bill to stimulate "the economy" inevitably begs an obvious question: what part of the economy? The government does not have enough resources to "stimulate" the whole economy even if it wanted to do so, and thus the law of scarcity requires choices to be made and for preferences and priorities to be defined. In so doing, squeaky wheels and crying babes inevitably win out, regardless of any actual stimulus effect.

The classic example of the current package is the tens of millions of dollars going to the National Endowment for the Arts. When pressed for the conceivable reason why and the related question of how this will stimulate the economy when hundreds of billions directly to banks and consumers failed is simply, "artists are losing jobs too." I'm still shocked that artists have jobs in the first place considering the state of modern art, but that's beside the point. Anything and everything anyone, in Congress, can think of has made it into the bill. Unemployment benefits are being expanded and extended, which will have the result of keeping people unemployed longer while also increasing the number of unemployed since it's now even more attractive than it had been. Medicaid is being extended from the poor to the unemployed, again, making the latter status even more palatable. State governments are being subsidized so that their poorly planned and deficit-ridden budgets are either greatly ameliorated or even "balanced." Public works projects of every shape and size, which are merely temporary jobs for mostly skilled union workers, litter the bill at every turn. Contraception is funded under the horrific notion that more people cost the government more money in benefits and entitlements and should thus be discouraged. The list is endless and woe unto those brave souls at Citizens Against Government Waste, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere who are trying to sift through it all.

Actually stimulating the economy? This bill will stimulate statists, collectivists, hippies, acolytes, "artists," and whoever else gets a piece of it, but the economy? No.

Doing "something" vs. doing "nothing"

President Obama and nearly every other talking head, jabbering congressman, and self-proclaimed "expert" bewails the danger of doing "nothing." Of course what they mean by nothing is: not passing any new regulations, stimulus packages, taxes, etc. But not doing those things, of course, is doing something (doing nothing is literally impossible without all of us dieing), just not the something the President and his mob of drones desire.

Many somethings could be done, including the current trading game between tax manipulation and runaway spending. But one could easily imagine a government deciding to wait and see what happened under the previous round of bailouts and legislation, to see if that "worked" before deciding the next response, if any. That would be something.

One could imagine a government deciding to scale itself back to be within itself a little more. To start saving and paying down its debt a little like most of its responsible citizens are currently attempting to do.

And one could dream of a government learning from its many and wide mistakes, and reversing course, deregulating (gradually to avoid chaos) the various sectors of the economy, withdrawing itself from monetary and tax manipulation.......yes, one can dream.

The point here is not that anything other than what is happening now will happen, but that these other alternatives are "something" and not "nothing" as everyone keeps saying. They may not be the "something" you or they support, but to pretend that this current proposed solution is the only one, is ridiculously and maliciously false.

Ironic that in this age of enlightened "change," the old shamelessness of false alternatives, fearful hectoring, and outright deception continue without missing a beat.

2009-01-29T00:13:00.000-08:00

Since I am almost always putting mostly, if not entirely, serious posts on this blog I thought I would digress a little and post something for everybody that I did for another forum. Facebook, a social networking site once reserved for college students and now open to all, has a thing going around inviting people to list 25 random factoids about themselves. Obviously this, while potentially serious, is a way to let people into some of the more personal and bizarre things that differentiate us all, even more than we are already, as individuals. I participated and below are my factoids, enjoy!

1. I stole pieces of the Turkish railroads that T.E. Lawrence and his Arab Legion blew up in the first world war, and no, I'm not returning them to the kingdom.

2. For some reason, probably because I don't think that they are, ipso facto, pure evil, people in college always suspect me of being a Republican. I am not. I do not affiliate with any political party and while being intensely political, modern politics disappoints and disgusts me no matter what letter happens to follow your name.

3. Because I live(d) in Las Vegas for so long people naturally assume I gamble all the time and live in strip clubs. FALSE. I gamble only when people insist on taking me to casinos for that express purpose and I've only ever been to two strip clubs in my entire life, once for a bachelor party and once because some relatives wanted to see one (they were not impressed and left after 10 minutes).

4. A frequent question when people see my room for the first time is "have you read all these books?" A fair question I suppose, but some of the books obviously displayed are dictionaries, who in god's name reads the dictionary? The answer by the way in no, I'd say I've read somewhere in the range of 35-40% of my holdings.

5. What do I consider to be a "turning point" in a relationship for it to become "serious?" Well, saying "I love you" is all well and good, but I'd posit that burping and farting in front of one another and being neither embarrassed nor offended is actually the "big" moment. That's right ladies, now you know what to look forward to.

6. Writing a dissertation is a lot like pursuing a woman, there's lots of careful studying and planning, patience and thought. And in the end it's completely in somebody else's hands. Unless you decide to quit, in which case this analogy is pretty useless.

7. I hate self-deprecation and yet I employ it all the time to defray a constant critique of myself made by others, namely my alleged arrogance. I'd make a new's years resolution about it, but I oppose picking random days to suddenly start altering one's behavior. Besides, it's not my fault I'm better than you! ;)

8. I love 18th and 19th century clothing, if I could wear it all the time, I would.

9. Would I have conspired to kill Caesar on 15 March 44 BC? Yes, yes I would have.

10. So the most exciting thing about coming to graduate school in new england was that I would be in the land of dunkin donuts again. I've been there maybe five times and they've since opened them in Vegas, go figure.

11. Since I'm an atheist I enjoy reading the holy legends of all active religions the same way religious people read the holy tales of the greeks, as myths and legends. So if Jesus came back from the dead, wouldn't that make him a zombie in the parlance of the present? If so, Voodoo and Christianity may become the syncretic super religion the world has been waiting for.

12. When I first became interested in history, I was swept up in the glory that was, or so I thought at the time, Napoleon Bonaparte. Over time I realized this was an error, and now I despise the man with something bordering on the feeling one has for an intimate that has severely betrayed and disappointed them. Bizarre I know.

13. I've only ever seriously kissed two women in my life. I've half seriously kissed countless others.

14. I was so caught up with youthful exuberance as a lad for women's legs that I used to kiss Tina Turner's when her music videos came on TV.

15. I collect busts. That's right, you heard me. Most are still in my room in Las Vegas, but it's a decent collection.

16. At one point in my life I was not fond at all of reading. What turned it around? Young Indiana Jones novels.

17. I never beat the first Super Mario until I was an adult.

18. Which is better, James Bond novels or James Bond movies? The answer is obvious to anyone who has read all the former and seen all the latter. I am such a person and the answer is, without doubt, the novels. The Sean Connery films however are still great.

19. My favorite run of the mill story plotline? Revenge tales, and here I mean a guy who has a legitimate reason to seek it, not some robber who is pissed at his partner for screwing him over or something. Christians may prefer vengeance in the hands of the lord but not I.

20. My favorite city in all the world is Chicago, the home of the world's greatest sports team the Chicago Cubs.

21. So Obama keeps comparing himself to Lincoln, like an ass, but not to the other President from Illinois, U.S. Grant. The Ku Klux Klan Act and the 15th Amendment aren't good enough or something? Oh yeah, something about me, I like Grant and am acerbic!

22. If I could be Vice-President my first goal would be to task NASA with sending me to the moon in order to solidify our territorial claims there. I would just hope there were no tie votes in the Senate!

23. I did not sleep the night before my Ph.D oral exams, and while I started off decently, by the end of the three and a half hours i just wanted to crawl onto the table and go to sleep. Unfortunately I then had to pick up a friend from the airport and then went out to celebrate with friends. The moral here is sleep before your orals, nothing I stayed up studying was a damn bit of help.

24. I am committed in theory to procreating one day, but no time soon, I am temperamentally unfit to raise a child at this time. Sorry ladies, I'll let you know when I can be your baby's daddy :P

25. If I could punch one "intellectual" in the face (assuming it would result in no lasting harm to them or me, and assuming that I suddenly became the sort of person who would do such things) it would without a doubt be Noam Chomsky/Howard Zinn/Gore Vidal/Al Gore. OK, so there is more than one intellectual I would punch in the face and, also, that last one made it in by mistake, Al Gore is by no means an intellectual.

2009-01-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

Leave Iranian "Terrorist" Organization Alone

Today's Wall Street Journal ran a story today concerning an impending legal challenge to be launched by an Iranian dissident group called "Mujahedin e-Khalq" (MEK). They will be challenging the designation by the State Department under former Secretary of State Rice that they are a terrorist organization. This group has recently won similar lawsuits against the British government and the European Union, much to the dismay of the regime in Tehran and Qom. According to the news article, the group has been charged by the State Department with such "terrorist" acts as assassinating senior Iranian officials and bombing overseas Iranian [diplomatic] missions. The article goes on to say that the group has renounced it's violent past and is more concerned now with bringing outside pressure on the government in charge in Iran. However, even if they were still engaged in the aforesaid activities, the fact that the U.S. government would designate such acts as terrorism merely underlines two related problems with current U.S. strategy in the war. The first is not properly identifying the enemy while the second is prioritizing negotiation and diplomacy with our actual mortal enemies above eliminating them.

Terrorism, by which I mean the use of any tactic designed to strike terror and fear into the civilian population of an enemy, is a tactical approach or even a strategic decision made on the part of a belligerent state or group. To fight a war on it, as such, would be to condemn ourselves and every other country that has ever made the strategic decision to make a war terrible for the civilians of an enemy nation in order to get them to quit/surrender. War, particularly if existential survival is at stake, sanctions all tactics whether we want to admit it or not, so long as those tactics are aimed at bringing the war to a quick and successful conclusion (i.e. punishing the enemy for initiating force or threatening it, and guaranteeing to the extent possible that they never will do so again). Our enemy is not terrorism anymore than it is flanking maneuvers or amphibious landings or paratrooper invasions. Our enemy is the people and states currently employing terrorism to kill and subdue us. They are Islamic radicals and fundamentalists who literally believe that an imaginary super-being commands them to kill those who don't believe in their delusions and martyr themselves if necessary in order to wipe non-believers and enemies of the faith off the earth. As the United States is clearly and obviously the most powerful nation of the western world, the part of humanity which has clearly staked itself (in fits and starts, inconsistent and half-hearted) to advancing humanity, civilization, reason, science and life -- in essence, everything Islam and its fundamental adherents are against -- we are ipso facto their prime enemy. They understand this implicitly and they occasionally identify it explicitly. Western post-modern hubris and self-immolation is so advanced that our so-called intellectuals scoff at this motivation as "simplistic" (as if identifying, let alone hating, the essential characteristics of a competing civilization were a simple and easy task to perform) and instead point to some alleged "imperialism" in our foreign policy as the "real" cause of these people's discontent. This explanation is, for reasons I will not go into in depth here, fraught with historical inaccuracy as well as being logically quite convoluted.

Since our diplomats and leaders cannot properly identify our enemy, and instead have targeted a tactic, every use of said tactic is now illegitimate regardless of context. Now I'm no expert on what MEK's goals are or what they would do with Iran if they somehow toppled the Islamic theocracy in power, but I do know that the current Iranian government is a radical Islamic terror regime par excellence. They have waged an open and deadly war against us from the very inception of the regime and we have responded as lamely and as meekly as anyone could from Carter forward without exception. MEK is a group that has every right, as human beings resorting to their natural right to throw off tyranny and revolt, to assassinate government officials and target its representatives in Iran and elsewhere. To do as the Iranian government wishes and to condemn MEK for waging a war on evil (tyranny and the kind of anti-reason, anti-life policies of the "Islamic Republic of Iran" are about as evil as anything that exists today) is repulsive and reprehensible. I'm not saying we should support this group, but we certainly should not punish them for doing the proper thing in attacking an illegal, oppressive, and tyrannical regime we don't even officially recognize.

Of course, our reason for doing this is to curry some diplomatic points in order to diplomatically dissuade the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon. Our diplomats and their bosses seriously believe this can work, as seriously as diplomats believed that they could resolve the crisis in the Balkans in 1914 and as seriously as Neville Chamberlain believed he could diplomatically "dissuade" Adolf Hitler. We continue to use diplomacy on a regime that declared war on us thirty years ago. This begs an obvious question: when will we realize they are not screwing around? We need to start taking some lessons from MEK about how to deal with those in charge of Iran and not a moment should be spared in our education. However, all that I've been discussing is leftover Bush policies. His replacement was elected to soften his predecessor's alleged hawkishness and to rely on "diplomacy first." President Obama is unlikely to do anything approaching what is appropriate in this matter without another attack from the Iranians on us or an ally, I just hope too many people do not have to die for his (and his predecessor's) errors and false hope in diplomacy.

2009-01-13T23:00:00.000-08:00

"Proportional" War is a Prescription for Never-Ending War: Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, etc.

As everyone is no doubt used to hearing, every time there is any sort of flare up in the never-ending conflict between Israel and her various enemies, is that Israel's actions are not "proportional." By this it is meant that while Hamas or whomever fires unguided rockets into Israel, possibly killing someone, possibly not, the Israelis retaliate with precision guided bombs and tanks which, while localized, are more deadly than the above rockets and tend to kill targets other than those the Israelis are after (whereas anyone is a target for Hamas, they're just hoping their rockets hit something human and preferably Israeli). Invariably, the shoddy weaponry of a dilapidated organization like Hamas kills fewer Israelis than the high tech firepower the Israelis deploy in response. This, to many of the allegedly educated peoples of the West, somehow constitutes a serious "problem." But questions arise. First, why is it a problem and second, what is the solution if it actually is a problem.

Much of the media coverage, it will be noted, assumes a giant fact not in evidence, principally that the lack of "proportionality" in Israel's response is a problem. That Israel has the power to fight a war where they lose as few as possible of their own people and kill as many as possible of their enemies should be neither surprising, nor should it constitute a problem. It is, ipso facto, the goal of all combatants to achieve this end to the best of their ability. The whole twisted logic of the suicide bomber is bent towards this end, one sacrificial martyr can wipe out hundreds in one fell swoop.

This of course does not mean that there never could be a problem of proportionality in foreign affairs. To suggest a ridiculous example illustrates the point. It would hardly be a properly rational response to hear news of a diplomatic insult and then order a nuclear strike on the offending government. The reason this is not a "proportional" response is that while annoying and even serious, a diplomatic snub of some sort does not constitute the use of force which would be required for a retaliation of any sort, nuclear or otherwise, to be justified. Israel is not reacting out of hand, they are meeting force with force. That Israel is far more wealthy, sophisticated, powerful, and advanced than their enemies is the fault of their enemies, not Israel, and it is their enemies who should pay the price for initiating force against a far superior enemy. The very fact that so few people have died in Gaza, a very small area with over a million people crammed into it, is a testament to just how much tip-toeing the Israeli armed forces are doing considering the wholesale destruction they are easily capable of. If a people or government abhors the results of war as we are led to believe the Palestinians do, they have a curious way of always provoking conflict.

Let us pretend for a moment that this "proportional" critique is legitimate. What is the solution? So Hamas plans to fire rockets into Israel. What does a "proportional" response entail? Must it be equal? Should the Israeli's forget that they have precision guided munitions and instead construct the inferior arms of their enemies to use against them? How would Israel firing unguided rockets into Gaza help this situation? Both sides would just be randomly bombing each other's civilian populations ad nauseum. When would it end? Has it ended so far?

The Israeli's have only ever achieved progress with their neighbors by beating them in war, thoroughly, and gaining recognition and respect that all the western diplomatic pressure in the world could not achieve. In every effort they have made where they restrain themselves and accept the notions that they, even while being attacked, would be in the wrong responding in whichever way they choose to minimize their own casualties and maximise those of their enemies, they have found themselves the losers. One only need think back to the operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon where this bleating whine of "proportionality" actually produced a retreat by the Israeli army before an inferior force. The conflict has been never-ending because the Israeli's never deal with it forcefully enough or because when they try the international diplomats step in to stop them, though the important player their is the United States. Every President since Nixon has thwarted moves and initiatives by the Israeli's to deal with its existential threats by threatening to halt arms shipments. It's a shame that we should do so unless we have some sort of interest at stake which would be harmed by Israel winning. If so, what is it? I have heard of none whatsoever, but I will keep my eyes and ears open for when it suddenly materializes.

In the meantime I will continue to hope that people realize that the only way to end a war is to make it so terrible for one's enemy that they either decide to quit or they die in it, not by playing a ceaseless game of tit for tat. No war ever ended that way and no war ever will.

2008-09-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

How the North Vietnamese Got the Last Laugh on McCain (and the rest of us)

So the original plan was to post on the Republicans' logical fallacy of choice, but after watching their convention it struck me that the most striking thing about it was John McCain's biography and how it was portrayed explicitly, but also how it's ultimate results infused the entire message implicitly. So while I would no doubt enjoy ridiculing the begging of numerous questions, or McCain's attempt to one-up his opponents in the ad misericordiam column, I will instead dedicate my analysis to John McCain's heroic battle with his North Vietnamese captors and his ultimate tragic defeat at their hands. Evidence for this defeat (which Senator McCain interprets as his victory) is drawn strictly from his nomination acceptance speech which was full of implicit admissions of the North Vietnamese triumph over Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain.

McCain's story is, by now, well known. On his 23rd mission over North Vietnam, John McCain was shot down and captured. For the next five and a half years, a battered and beaten John McCain fought a test of wills with his captors who dangled release in front of him in order to embarrass his Admiral father. He was beaten regularly. He was denied medical care. They did everything they could to get John McCain to give up. McCain and his fellow American POWs refused to capitulate and those who survived could return home with heads held high over their heroic service in an often unheroic war. But in a more fundamental sense, McCain lost his battle of wills and it's clear that he never realized it. The only thing that allowed McCain and his comrades to survive was their confident knowledge that as individuals, their lives were worth something, that they had rights that no amount of yelling, beating, or anything else their collectivist captors could throw at them would change that. Unlike the North Vietnamese, indoctrinated in a collectivist ideology which degraded individuals and exalted nothing but the "revolutionary morality" of the group (Ho Chi Minh's words), Americans were a proudly unapologetic individualistic people, and John McCain used to be one of them. That is, before being captured by the North Vietnamese.

John McCain's description of the pre-capture John McCain is a description of the sort of soldier it's easy to admire, the kind of person that I am, quite frankly, proud to have as a soldier defending our republic. McCain described himself in his speech this way: "I hadn't any worry I wouldn't come back safe and sound. I thought I was tougher than anyone. I was pretty independent then, too. I liked to bend a few rules and pick a few fights for the fun of it. But I did it for my own pleasure, my own pride, I didn't think there was a cause that was more important than me." Huzzah! Why didn't this John McCain run for President? The answer is simply that while McCain did not die that day, this version of John McCain would be killed over the next five and a half years by unremitting torture and pain. Why? McCain describes the process himself. What were the great lessons he learned while collectivist garbage passing itself as the vanguard of humanity tortured him? The post-capture McCain pathetically sums it up: "I didn't feel so tough anymore.....I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence.....I was never the same again; I wasn't my own man anymore; I was my country's." McCain believes he reached the true morality of America, he claims that this experience was a "blessing" precisely because he had this epiphany. The horrid tragedy is that McCain, much closer to the true spirit of this country before capture, actually was turned into an almost perfect foot soldier in the ideological army of the very people torturing him.

Ho Chi Minh, the romanticized tyrant who consolidated a socialist "people's republic" North of the internationally demarcated border and then began infiltrating his cadres and special army units into the South in order to destroy any attempts at non-socialist self-government in the South to avoid Vietnam becoming another Korean peninsula, laid out the underlying ethical code upon which his political screed was based and he did so repeatedly. I only mention this because the mythology of Ho Chi Minh as some sort of happy-go-lucky "nationalist" who was not helped or was even betrayed by the west, thus "forcing" him to turn to China and the Soviet Union for help, is pure nonsense. Ho was a committed socialist and later communist going back to his time in France during the First World War. Ho was an ardent nationalist as well, but his sense of Vietnamese nationalism was not unconnected from his political ideas (as they shouldn't be for anyone actually). One reason he undermined and attempted to destroy the South's various elected governments was their opposition to socialism and allegiance to a moderately liberal order.

Quoting his friend, Bob Craner, who helped get him through the worst of his torture, McCain told the Republican National Convention and the millions watching on televisions around the world: "No man can always stand alone." Ho wrote an essay in 1958 entitled "On Revolutionary Morality," which sounds not dissimilar to John McCain's post-capture understanding of his relation to society and the proper ethical posture of citizens to one another. Ho was, unsurprisingly, not overly fond of individualism. In the struggle for survival he said "To succeed in this struggle each individual must rely on the force of large numbers of people, on the collective, on society. Alone, he cannot get the better of nature and subsist." This principle also applied to production: "Production, too, must rely on the collective, on society. Alone, the individual cannot produce." And aside from words like collective and revolutionary, see if this sounds somewhat familiar in light of McCain's "Country First" sloganeering: "Our era being a civilized, revolutionary era, one must rely all the more on the force of the collective, of society, in all undertakings. [McCain, keep in mind, referred to his "energy plan" as a "great national cause" that "we" must all "attack" together] More than ever the individual cannot stand apart but must join the collective, join society." (emphasis added)

What was the role of proper revolutionary in Ho's mind? There was more than one way to be a moral revolutionary in Ho's system. You could follow the list of party martyrs and others who "laid down their lives for the sake of the people and the Party, thus setting brilliant examples of total dedication to the public interest and complete selflessness." Short of that height, one had to "devote one's life to struggling for the Party and the revolution;" one had to "work hard for the Party, observe Party discipline, and implement Party lines and policies;" and one had to "put the interests of the Party and the labouring people before and above one's own interests. To serve the people wholeheartedly. To struggle selflessly for the Party and the people and to be exemplary in every respect." And unless a would-be revolutionary wanted to forget, Ho exhorted: "the prime criterion of a revolutionary is his resolve to struggle all his life for the Party and the revolution."

John McCain doesn't speak of revolutionaries, but he does speak to the proper roles citizens should play in the republic, and he also speaks to the concept of patriotism and what it should mean to proper citizens. Like one of Ho's ideal revolutionaries, McCain is a servant without (allegedly) a life of his own: "My friends, I've been an imperfect servant of my country for many years. But I've been her servant first, last, and always. And I've never lived a day, in good times and bad, that I didn't thank God for the privilege."

What should be the pinnacle of human ambition? Success? Wealth? Individual accomplishment and achievement? NO! McCain will have none of that, just like the man responsible for his torture. McCain the individual, the actual maverick, died long ago in North Vietnam. The Senator, who belongs not to himself, but to his country (the rankest form of collectivist drivel uttered at either convention this year), has something else in mind entirely. His idea of showing one's humanity is not by exercising one's reason, that faculty which separates us from the rest of the animals and allows our domination of the rest of nature and, thus, allows us to survive and prosper, but instead is exemplified by his wife's altruism and empathy: "Her concern for those less blessed than we are -- victims of land mines, children born in poverty, with birth defects -- shows the measure of her humanity."

A person's individual worth? Instead of being derived from the individuals ability to think rationally, set rational goals, and then achieve those goals, McCain gives us a collectivist valuation straight from one of Ho's contemporaries (almost anyway): "Roberta McCain gave us her love of life, her deep interest in the world, her strength, and her belief that we're all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country." Of course this is merely a reiteration of John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not" query in his inaugural address, but just as Kennedy was horribly wrong, so is McCain. People do not exist in this republic of ours or anywhere merely to be servants to the state. One's "usefulness" to the country is irrelevant to their rights and the obligations of their government to protect and defend them, yet McCain's drift seems to be that maybe there is relevance after all and that is frightening. Who defines this usefulness? What are the criteria? What are the rewards for being deemed useful to the state and what are the punishments for failing to be so deemed?

McCain doesn't see anything outside of a collectivist context anymore, which is unsurprising given that he is, by his own proud admission, no longer his own man. For instance, people should not even be seen as autonomous individuals in the world of John McCain, but merely as one more member of society with something to contribute to said society or the state, or both. "In this country, we believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential [for contributing]." Forget the idea that Republicans used to champion (rhetorically) of being left alone by the government. McCain merely promises for the government to "stand on your side and fight for your future." Who knows what that means? But instead of being honest and standing in your way or doing the right thing and getting the hell out of the way, McCain's government will pretend that it's helping you as it attacks you where you're not even looking, from the flank.

And remember that pursuit of happiness bit in the Declaration of Independence? I had always assumed (apparently incorrectly) this applied to individuals defining their happiness rationally and then freely pursuing it in a country dedicated to protecting their individual rights, including the protection of their various achievements and properties gained in their pursuits. Not so according to McCain, "nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself." Since when? Does McCain, a man who claims to not even belong to himself, appear very happy? Also, what cause is greater than oneself? Love of country and what it stands for (any country) flows from a series of value judgements made by individuals. Should one decide to value their country and what they think it means and stands for highly enough, even the acts of fighting and dieing to protect it means that one is serving one's own cause still, since anyone who has joined the armed forces has obviously made the decision that defending the country they love is worth the risk of their untimely demise.

It's ironic that McCain and the other RNC speakers would ridicule Senator Obama's laughable "community organizing" experience for what it is, a nullity, but their own candidate lauds, promotes, and exhorts just such "service" as the pinnacle of what any person could do with their lives and for their country. If Senator Obama ever wised up and stopped being a completely naive milquetoast, he could pillory Senator McCain by his very own standards, but I'm not holding my breath. No, the saddest thing about the current state of the two party system is that when the party which usually plays up the rhetoric of liberty and individualism switches over to the collectivist nonsense of the other party, who will stand up to offer the rational alternative? The answer, sadly, is no one.

2008-09-01T01:06:00.000-07:00

A Brief Note on "Experience" and the Presidency

"Experience" is the word of this election, contrary to all of the hoopla surrounding "change." Senator McCain has made much of Senator Obama's lack of "experience" to discredit his opponent's pretensions to knowing what he is talking about on a whole host of issues, but primarily those dealing with foreign policy. Senator Obama has now countered that Senator McCain's Vice-Presidential nominee selection, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, is an even greater novice, having only been in her current job for a year and a half. So what is one to make of all this talk of "experience?" Is it merely a canard? Or is there something to it? And if so, what?

The history of the Presidency is full of the experienced and the inexperienced, but it really depends on what sort of experience one values when selecting a President. For instance, George Washington had virtually no governing experience whatsoever when he became President. He had served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and, of course, had been Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. But, he had never been an executive officer in a constitutionally limited republican government, which is far far different from being the commander of an army. James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover were men brimming with experience that most thought would be invaluable to their respective Presidencies. Abraham Lincoln had no executive experience at all and his only national experience in government was one rather unsuccessful term as a representative from Illinois.

What sort of experience do we want in a President? The job is rather straightforward: 1) Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, 2) Sign or veto legislation from congress, 3) Appoint officers to various posts in the executive branch and the federal judiciary, and 4) Protect and defend the constitution. Very few people will ever have experience in more than one or two of these however. Aside from General Washington for instance, no one has ever had experience as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces before being President. State governors are the only people with some sort of comparable experience in items 2 and 3. And I would contend that there are very few politicians around who can credibly or legitimately claim they have any notion of how item 4 works. To put it simply, the job is a unique one that even a lifetime of experience will never adequately prepare one for. Ironically, the only thing that prepares someone to be President is being President, which is why people running for reelection are seldom besmirched as being inexperienced.

Experience is valuable mostly to voters because it provides something by which to judge how someone behaves and acts in office, under pressure, etc. Someone with little or no experience in office of some kind has to rely more on rhetoric and assurances simply because there is little or no publicly available evidence upon which they can base their claims. Incumbents are dominant not simply because of money, though that can and does help, but because they are experienced. As long as that experience does not upset a majority of their constituents, or rather a majority that cares and votes, they are highly unlikely to be turned out of office involuntarily. But while experience matters to voters when trying to get an idea of how a person will behave in office and perform as President, it is a surprisingly unreliable indicator of future job performance.

Richard Nixon did not have a reputation for dishonesty until becoming President (one of the many reasons his actions in office destroyed him so utterly in his second term). Military chiefs have been Presidents fairly often in the United States, but their various performances are hardly indicative of any patterns: George Washington served two terms and performed the job as only the republic's one indispensable man could, Andrew Jackson served two tumultuous but ultimately quite successful terms, William Henry Harrison died within a month of taking the job, Zachary Taylor had a difficult year and three+ months before dieing, Ulysses S. Grant's Presidency was an inglorious end note to a brilliantly successful performance in the Civil War, and General Eisenhower's presidency was an eight year affront to sound governance. There have been men in the job with far more experience than any of the nabobs currently running, like John Adams, John Quincy Adams, William Howard Taft, etc. who have not had particularly successful times in office.

Senate experience is no more indicative of success or failure than being a governor of a state or a member of congress or even a Vice-President. Success as a President depends upon the person filling the job and the events he will face while in office. The judgement of the potential President is really what prior experience is meant to highlight in concrete ways. How does the candidate make decisions? What ideals and principles guide them to the decisions they eventually make? All the experience in the world means nothing if that experience is characterized by poor, irrational, or otherwise inept judgment.

Senator McCain should beware that fact whenever he points to his reservoir of "experience." Any thoughtful examination of his years in the Senate reveals a non-stop horror story of government expansion, assaults on individual liberty in a whole host of areas, and an "I'm holier than thou" hypocrisy unworthy of anyone trying to become President, even in these degraded times of ours.

Senator Obama should not be quick to dismiss experience when he has nothing to offer in assurance that he's thought through any of things he's saying or proposing. If he has thought them through, then it's an unfortunate sign of the caliber of his alleged "intellect."

The real experiences the press should focus on are the experiences of the American people over the past seventy-five years (at least), and the failures, big and small, of their perverse "experiment" in altruist-based and collectivist-laden government. The Presidential candidate who does not take that experience seriously and attempt to learn from it is doomed before he even gets elected no matter how much or how little "experience" he's had in making things worse.

2008-08-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

Argumentum ad misericordiam: or, the Democratic National Convention '08

Ah, convention time is here again! Unfortunately, this means the Olympic games are now over and now the two parties of our long dysfunctional Third Party System (the First is sort of a misnomer to describe the battles of the Federalists and Republicans from 1789-1817; the Second refers to the Democrats and Whigs, 1828-1852; the Third, of course, began in 1856 when the Republican party ran it's first Presidential candidate, John C. Fremont) are taking their own crack at political propaganda. Without the power of the state to repress opposition and criticism, unlike the authoritarian hosts of this year's Olympic games, the American parties must rely on appeals to reason, or, short of that apparently Herculean effort, fallacious arguments. This has been true for some time, and both parties deal in fallacies as a matter of course. The same fallacies often, but both parties deal in some fallacies more than others. Next week, when Republicans gather in Minnesota to nominate Arizona Senator John McCain, I will focus on their fallacy of choice (you will have to wait till then to figure out what that is if you cannot already guess). But this week is the turn of the Democrats and so I will focus on their favorite fallacy, the argumentum ad misericordiam, or the appeal to pity.

This is a classic political fallacy. For those unfamiliar with the world of formal logical fallacies, the argumentum ad misericordiam is typified by an appeal to some sort of sad anecdotal story in order to then plead for an action/conclusion of some kind. For example, Al Gore was/is famous for pointing to an old person he had met whose medical and prescription drug bills amounted to more than he could afford, and thus the government should do "something" to bring down costs or to nationalize the insurance system, etc. It is a fallacy because instead of establishing the actual issues involved in such a policy decision, i.e. what is and is not a right, why, what is the proper role of government, etc., it simply tells an emotional story. An emotional story which is likely to make people feel sad or sympathetic and thus skip over all the actual issues such a decision should and does require (i.e. the actual premises of the argument) to justify the conclusion. The hallmark of a fallacy is that it takes a shortcut from the question to the answer without the necessary steps to prove it. In this case, the person using the fallacy wishes for those listening or reading to suspend their thinking and to base their judgment on their sympathetic feelings.

After just two days of their convention, the fallacy has already been used ad nauseum. While the examples could be listed endlessly and will no doubt pile up even higher as the convention crescendos tomorrow and Friday with the formal nominations of Senators Biden and Obama, I wish to focus on two of the principle speeches from the first two days. Namely, those of Senate candidate Mark Warner of Virginia and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, and their repeated uses of this fallacy. These speeches could be critiqued for any number of reasons, for instance Mark Warner begging the question(s) when he said: "Look at health care. If we bring down costs and cover everyone, not only will America be healthier, we'll be more competitive in the global economy." How will "we" bring down costs? Why are costs high or increasing? How will the country be healthier if costs go down when it's already among the healthiest societies the world has ever known? How will this make the country more competitive? Competitive at what? Why is this a legitimate concern of the government? The list goes on and nowhere in the speech does Mr. Warner even recognize that such questions exist and require answering. Then there is Senator Clinton, who uses the ad misericordiam fallacy like it's going out of style, when she absurdly invoked Harriet Tubman's advice to runaway slaves as a parallel to present day America and for imploring people to vote for Senator Obama. There were numerous faults one could criticize (as there will no doubt be next week), but as this fallacy will come to dominate Senator Obama's message even more than it already does, there is value in exposing it fully and specifically.

The questions Mr. Warner was interested in asking and attempting to answer were embedded with appeals to sympathy and ignored the more important and fundamental questions. He said: "How many kids have the grades to go to college but not the money? [Ironically, he provides no answer to this, nor does he make an attempt to figure out why college tuition keeps going up, i.e. the increasing amounts of government money being pumped into the system, which is, ironically enough, his probable policy solution] How many families thought their home would always be their safest investment? [I don't know, but what does it matter? Mr. Warner makes a good point, real estate is an investment, it may be a relatively safe one, but it's an investment all the same. Who is not aware that investments sometimes go bust?] How many of our soldiers come back from their second or third tour of duty wondering if the education and health care benefits they were promised will actually be there? [What is he talking about exactly? Presumably this is a reference to the problems at Walter-Reed Army Medical Center, but he doesn't say exactly. As far as ad misericordiam fallacies go, he doesn't even provide a specific instance where something like this has occurred. Given that he fails to do that, it's no surprise that he forgets to address the question of what a republican government's exact obligations are to the veterans of its armed forces.]" The more important and fundamental question? Why should the government be concerned with these things and thus be doing "something" about them? Answering this is crucial for then discussing what actions are warranted, if any. Why does he not ask or answer these critical questions? If he could answer them persuasively, without the use of fallacious reasoning, it would go a long way to bolstering his policy solutions. It's curious he fails to do so. It's curious he fails to even attempt to do so.

Mr. Warner fails because he assumes, wrongly, that the answer is self-evident and agreed upon. He says so quite frankly: "I think we are blessed to be Americans. But with that blessing comes an obligation to our neighbors and to our common good. So you give every child the tools they need to succeed. That means quality schools, access to health care, safe neighborhoods. Not just because it's the right thing to do -- of course it is -- but because if those kids do better, we all do better." (emphasis added) Blessed to be Americans? What does that mean? It wasn't an accident that our country is where it is materially and is what it is politically. There was no divine favor or fortune involved, just concerted human action motivated by human ideas. Where does this obligation to others come from? Given the religious overtones of the word "blessed" one can only assume that it is the ethos of altruism flowing from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethical tradition. Where do the rights of these children come from? Why do they have a right to these "tools" of quality schools, health care, and safe neighborhoods? He may be correct. Indeed, if by "safe neighborhoods" he means police and the adherence to and prosecution of the laws he certainly is correct. While that goal is merely the government fulfilling its role and protecting its legal monopoly on violence, the other alleged rights are the products of other private citizens taken from one group (educators and doctors) and given to others, in this case children (children, next to the elderly, are a favorite of those who employ the ad misericordiam fallacy). While that distinction seems obvious, Mr. Warner passes over it and merely asserts that it's the right thing to do, case closed. This hardly constitutes an actual argument.

Mr. Warner was not yet finished tugging at heartstrings, he continued by focusing in on a particularly ridiculous, but nonetheless effective, "problem." Mr. Warner said:

"Let me tell you about a place called Lebanon: Lebanon, Virginia. Lebanon is in the coal fields of southwest Virginia. The population of that whole town could fit right here on the convention floor. Lebanon is like many small towns in America: It has seen the industries that sustained it downsized, outsourced or shut down.

Now, some folks look at towns like Lebanon and say, "tough luck. In the global economy, you've lost." But we believed that we couldn't and shouldn't give up on our small towns and expect the rest of the state to prosper. And that's what brought me, toward the end of my term, to the high school gym in Lebanon. To announce that we were going to bring over 300 high-tech jobs. Jobs that paid twice the county average.

One student told a reporter from the Washington Post that before this, he always thought he'd have to move away to raise a family and get a good job. I just heard from this young man, Michael Kisor. Today, he is a junior at Virginia Tech. His older brother just moved back home to Lebanon because there was an information technology job open for him that was just too good to pass up.

That's a story worth rewriting all across America."

Why is it a story worth rewriting? Since when is moving for work something to be disdained and discouraged? The story of America has always been the incredible freedom of movement for opportunities elsewhere from our earliest colonial days to the present. Mr. Warner lauded his own business failures earlier in the speech: "After I graduated law school, it didn't take long to realize that America really wouldn't miss me as a lawyer. So I started a business. My first company failed in six weeks. My next one was much more successful. It failed in six months. And then, a buddy of mine told me that there was this new idea. This thing called "car telephones" ... "cell phones." Friends told me, "Warner, you're crazy. Get a real job. ... No one's going to want a phone in the car." But I saw a different future. And with luck and a lot of hard work, I got in on the ground floor of the cell phone industry." Given his own failures and subsequent success, why disdain failure and (SHOCK!) change in the economy? Failure and change are what frees up resources to do something more productive and more valuable. His story actually illustrates this concept. If Mark Warner had remained a lawyer, he'd have been wasting his aptitudes and abilities, he says so himself quite openly. It was Mark Warner's failures and calculated risks to employ himself in the economy where he could be most successful that led to his eventual success. You'd think he'd be for breaking down whatever barriers exist within the economy so that his story becomes even more common than it already is, but, curiously, he does not. If Lebanon's economy fails then the young people will seek opportunity elsewhere, probably in one of the south's burgeoning cities. One of the great lasting legacies of slavery and the Civil War for the South has been it's economic backwardness and provincialism. Mr. Warner's solution is to try to "bring" jobs to small towns and keep people in them, but what kind of solution is that? It's certainly not a solution derived from his own life. If a person loves small town life so much, why is it the responsibility of government to try to make sure there is a job, let alone a good one, to allow them to stay in a small town? What about people in big towns and cities who want to live in small towns? What about people in small towns who don't like small towns and would rather live in cities? What about people who wish they made more money or were happier at work or would rather not work but still have money, clothes, a house, etc.? Is it the purpose of government to fulfill every random whim of any random citizen? Mr. Warner is either oblivious or duplicitous, and just as wrong either way.

[Note: Before moving to Senator Clinton, I briefly wish to take issue with Mr. Warner's historical contention that Thomas Jefferson was "the founder of our party." As a former governor of Virginia, this is inexcusable. While it is obviously tempting to wrap oneself in Jefferson, there is no good historical reason for the Democratic Party, let alone it's modern version, to do so. Jefferson's party, often referred to at the time as the Republican party, was a temporary organization whose only purpose was to defeat the Federalist party. Once that was done, the victorious Republicans ruled briefly with no or laughably minor opposition before splitting into new competing parties. One of those parties took the name of the Democracy, and was based around Andrew Jackson, a man who invoked Jefferson's policies and memory, though ironically Jefferson disliked the man from Tennessee. Henry Clay, who led the other (Whig) party, also claimed Jefferson's mantle and could do so credibly since he had been a loyal Jeffersonian Republican. Obviously the Democratic party survives to this day, but it does not advance the political ideas of Jackson (or Jefferson) anymore. The ideological founders of the modern party are William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not Jefferson and Jackson.]

Senator Clinton is a past master in the ad misericordiam fallacy, she wields it with ease and, unlike Mr. Warner, with great (though not too great, too many details can often spoil the effectiveness of the anecdote) specificity. Her first use of it was a real classic, right up there with anything Al Gore ever dug up: "I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn't have health insurance and discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head painted with my name on it and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children." Good god, what else might have happened to this poor woman to make her story sad? Perhaps if she had burst into flames upon meeting candidate Clinton it would make her story even more effective, but only slightly given how pathetic a story it already is. Of course, this woman is supposed to be more sympathetic because of her altruism, as she apparently purposely adopted not one autistic child, but two! Why she would do so is a bit of a puzzler, but ok, to each his own. But how foolish is she to adopt two children with developmental disorders while apparently having no health insurance? The fact that she then came down with cancer (and apparently is getting treatment without insurance, hmmmm........) only highlights how little thought she put into her actions. But, Senator Clinton tells us, we must provide her with health insurance. Not, as is often alleged, to get her treatment since her baldness tells us she is already being treated unless she randomly decided to shave her head, but to pay for that treatment. Why? No answer. Obviously, if the story did not move you to suspend your reason and accept the conclusion without question then you're obviously a bad person.

She then followed up with an equally dubious repetition of the fallacy: "I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage and that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn't know what his family was going to do." Since these stories are from her recent run for the Democratic presidential nomination, one can only assume that this boy's mother is working under the new Democratically sponsored increased minimum wage. The Democrats increased the minimum wage in the midst of a faltering and weak economy. (Ironically, Senator Obama is now advocating a further increase of the minimum wage as part of his economic plan) Any honest economist will, at least, concede that minimum wage laws are price floors for the price of labor. As is the case with price floors in other markets, minimum wages will decrease the number of jobs and/or the number of hours offered by employers who hire unskilled labor. This is just another reason that people should try not to work in minimum wage jobs as careers, let alone decide to have families when in such positions. No one concerned with unemployment or decreased hours should ever advocate minimum wages, let alone increases in them.

Even more perversely (though unsurprisingly), Senator Clinton advocated more unionization. Unions are notorious for restricting the supply of skilled labor and forcing the price of their competitors, unskilled labor, up to make it a less attractive alternative in the face of violent, disruptive, and destructive union strikes. So her attempts to appeal to pity continually falter badly and become useless under the assault of even basic thought, but then again, they're not designed to promote thought. Instead, they are meant to short-circuit thought, and all too often they do precisely that. In grand fashion she finished it a pitiful fury, telling her listeners that "the future of our children hangs in the balance," and to "think about your children and grandchildren come Election Day." Presumably those without children should think about their potential children or other people's children and grandchildren. And since we're all seemingly responsible for everybody else, other people's children and grandchildren may as well be everyone else's.

This form of collectivism is alarming and it goes unacknowledged by its advocates (and "opponents" in that other political party) who will not deal in their ideas honestly and fully with voters. Why? is a curious question, but one which I do not care to speculate on at the moment. Americans deserve an honest debate in actual ideas and not unreasoned sob stories. Tearjerkers that are all too often about people who don't actually deserve our sympathy. But, more importantly, even if the situation is genuinely worthy of pity, these stories are inconsequential towards justifying the proffered conclusions. Ironically, Democrats are advocating government intervention for problems and calamities caused by government intervention. Contrary to the rhetoric of Democrats and Republicans, the American economy is hardly free and open, it is a mixed system of governmental interference and command elements with a previously much freer market. Whether it is health care, education, the broader economy, or anything else in the litany of calamities that is being bewailed, the culprit is almost always the previous round of government solutions to previous government-created disasters. And on and on it goes led by the good-natured, but unreasoned, sympathies of the American people.

2008-08-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

Shocked, SHOCKED! that there's lobbying in this government

One of the most amusing bits of serialized nonsense in this election has been the extent of paroxysm and irrational hand wringing over the fact that political operatives working with campaigns or advising candidates are also, get this, former or current paid lobbyists. It is reminiscent of the scene is Casablanca when Captain Renault, famously played by Claude Rains, expresses his "shock" that there's gambling going on at Rick's, even though he's perfectly aware of it as a frequent patron of the place and an erstwhile friend of the proprietor. The duplicity and utter faux-surprise expressed whenever one of these lobbyists is "discovered" is indicative of at least two troubling things: 1) the amazing ability of people for self-deception or outright fraud and 2) the inability of alarming numbers of people to put together simple cause and effect.

To be shocked that people involved in modern politics are often lobbyists or become lobbyists is naive at best, shockingly duplicitous at worst. The government's power to control or heavily influence market outcomes and performance is immense and it would be foolish in the extreme for any person or corporation with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars at stake to not hire lobbyists to try to make sure the government, at the very least, did not harm their interests. It is also not surprising that some of these people attempt to gain favor or advantage while they're at it. Given anti-trust laws, just to name but one of many onerous ways the government interferes in the market, and the ability of the government to, literally at will, destroy entire companies, no responsible board of directors could go without having people on the ground to speak with, cajole, persuade, influence, etc. the relevant lawmakers who have the power to destroy them. Let's not forget what we're dealing with here. Lobbyists wield alleged economic "power." In other words, the most they can do, aside from almost certainly hopeless appeals to reason, is throw around money. Law makers wield the power, and it is the very real power that comes with the legal monopoly on violence, of the state. When the government "busts" a "monopoly," it literally confiscates assets and redistributes them. Good luck to the private citizen with even the greatest amount of economic "power" who would attempt to confiscate, that is steal, the property of his competitors or rivals.

Ironically, the people most up in arms about the presence and influence of lobbyists are not those who would attack the power and scope of the government. Instead, whether they are McCain or Obama supporters, these people are not only perfectly at ease with all the government currently does, but are advocating much more aggressive and all-encompassing action. The other possibility, aside from straightforward fraud or hypocrisy, is that these critics are simply incapable of putting two and two together. When the government takes on greater and greater powers and roles, people invariably begin to seek protection, favor, and advantage. Since the government, even as powerful as it is, cannot please all of these people simultaneously, it is hardly a shocker that those capable of doing so pay more and more lobbyists to cajole and jockey for favor. It is also scarcely remarkable that former office holders are the most sought after lobbyists. Not only do they know the system from the inside, but they often have existing relationships with their former colleagues. This is not a pretty system by any means nor is it in any way desirable, but to act like its logical and reasonable consequences are somehow aberrations that are out of place is ridiculous and disingenuous.

There is only one solution if one wants to dismantle this system of lobbying and that is to systematically roll back the scope and power of the government. If the government has no power to crush corporations that fall out of favor or are overwhelmed by competing lobbyists nor the ability to grant favors or special privileges, the cost-benefit of hiring and paying such people will quickly turn negative. And a free marketplace, where companies and individuals have to survive by their own merits and fail by their own deficiencies, thus not being articificially supported by the state in one of any number of ways, will be a just marketplace.

The only other course is a bleak one hardly anyone would knowingly or consciously advocate, but it's the course we're on if we don't make efforts to retreat from it. Societies with more and more powerful governments and less and less private control and autonomy in the marketplace eventually end up with fewer and fewer lobbyists. Why? The answer is quite simple. When you no longer have the ability to effect government decision making, nor the ability to dispose of your assets as you see fit, lobbying becomes the ultimate exercise in futility. All the economic "power" in Germany could not make one bit of difference to the Nazis once they gained absolute power over the economy. Private property remained in name, but hardly in fact. People produced what they were ordered to produce and they did so in accordance with government objectives, not the demands of the marketplace. In the Soviet Union, private property officially vanished and thus there was no one to lobby and nothing to lobby for. No matter which way we end up going, lobbying and lobbyists are going to eventually be a thing of the past, let us just hope that our futures don't make us look back upon either with longing.

2008-08-14T21:19:00.000-07:00

Beijing Olympics: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Presidential election years have invariably, since McKinley's first trouncing of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, brought us the Summer Olympic Games. Perhaps the most obviously ongoing legacy of the classical in our utterly modern world, the Olympic games bring together the world's greatest athletes under their national banners. These games are unfortunately, like the 1936 and 1980 games before, being hosted by a police state. In the previous times this has happened, as it is in this case, the games have become an instrument of propaganda and obvious cheating on the part of the dubious host government.

But more on that and other matters in a moment. The joy of the Olympics is undeniable. The amazing and the talented athletes competing against each other is a display of human endurance, achievement, and beauty all brought to one spot on earth for a brief sixteen days once every four years. It's all the more incredible because it's always contrasted by the depressingly drab political pandering of a Presidential election; whereas that contest of two is all too often a choice between two things far less than the best among us, the Olympics rewards the best after rigorous competition against others who are hardly much worse. This is the good that the Olympics represent and the happiness it promises to all men the world over. The ancient Greek sense of life, that of exalting what was most admirable and beautiful in life, is preserved in the modern games and that is precisely why they are sought by countries, peoples, and cities the world over.

The bad is that, on occasion, governments that represent everything the games stand against, which stand for death and destruction and exalt all that destroys man's life on this earth, host the games. Such a government exists in Communist China and we have already witnessed numerous pieces of dubious propaganda from the minor affair of substituting little girls in the opening ceremony for the sake of "beauty" to the absurd double dealing of the Chinese women's gymnastics team who have cleverly taken advantage of the IOC's easy to get around age verification rules. We are sure to witness more propaganda in these allegedly non-political games and, unfortunately, more dubious tactics in the competition.

The ugly is all American. Whatever pact with the devil American broadcasters made with the Chinese government in order to broadcast the Olympics, it was not worth it. The completely laudatory, uncritical, and propaganda laced coverage NBC and others are providing for the Chinese government is entirely unacceptable. To be in a country with the most extensive gulag system in the world, where the government grinds up its internal "enemies" at whim, and that is an enemy to individual rights (and thus individuals, Chinese and otherwise) everywhere and yet provide silly coverage of Chinese culinary habits or the irrelevant Forbidden City or the Great Wall would be ridiculous if it were not so sad. True absurdity is to be completely unskeptical of the guides being provided to them when they tour Beijing. Of course the guides are friendly and courteous. Of course the guides show them only the most pleasant things to do and see in the capital (no surprise that everyone on camera in these excursions appears happy and pleasant, anything else would be evidence against them with their state, making what these journalists are doing all the more abhorrent). If these journalists, and that is what they claim to be, cannot travel and question at will, without minders, then they should refuse to be used as propaganda tools and merely report on the competitors and their successes. Anything else would be, and is, morally ugly. And yet, the press has the temerity to suggest that they should be "neutral" in terms of cheering for their countrymen in competition. It's enough to make someone sick. We expect this from the likes of the communists in China, but it hurts when our fellow Americans sink to such depths on TV for everyone to see.

Despite the evil that is the state based in Beijing and the ugly ineptitude that is the compromising and clueless American press, these Olympics have still provided glorious moments in athletic competition. Michael Phelps's utter domination of the swimming pool is something to behold. Nastia Liukin's triumph in the women's gymnastics all around competition over her Chinese opponents was enough to make one stand and cheer. Bela Karolyi's lovable foil to Bob Costas's annoying Chinese front man during gymnastics coverage is classic television. Who knows, maybe we'll even see a courageous Chinese man or woman refuse to be used as a pawn for the glory of the slave regime which abducts them at early ages to have their lives forfeited to a purpose they may or may not have ever pursued independently, but I'm not counting on it. If the American press willingly drinks the koolaid without complaint, why should we expect the far more courageous act of will it would take to ensure spiritual independence at the cost of everything else? Because it's the Olympics and that's what they are ultimately all about. That's why we love them and it is proper that we do.

2008-03-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

The Big Blank Out of '08

So cities around the world are going dark for an hour as a sign of "solidarity" with the earth/environment and to highlight the "threat" of human caused global climate change (in one direction or another since it seems that any "change" from whatever is "normal" is caused by us)? Why stop for an hour? Why not keep them all off all the time, every day, every month, every year? We can join those prophets of a couple hundred years ago, the Luddites, and smash all the lights. We can even devote whole days to the task (obviously not the nights) of destroying these "threats" to our and, more importantly, our planet's survival; these horribly insidious coils of tungsten and tubes full of gas.

Millions of people have already given up the benefits of hundreds of years of scientific knowledge and research and achievement in their food (for all of those "organic" consumers out there, I'm referring to you), why not go another step? A few "brave" prophets have even willingly given up the advances of medical science, the car, and the house. We can return to candles, or even better, live in pitch darkness as people did before candles were made cheaply available. Granted, there won't be much of a night life, but then again, night lives only consume energy, and energy consumption "hurts" our beloved planet and environment. What better way to prove our "solidarity" and "concern" than this, a minor sacrifice of our enjoyment of life? Life itself, in the exhalation of carbon dioxide is harmful, and the methane produced by the animals we use to support our continued existence in large numbers has been pointed to as a leading culprit in harming our "pristine" globe. Something must obviously be done.

The world is going mad in its attempts to undo civilization and its greatest achievements. We are so far removed (in the Western world anyway) from the horribly tragic and meagre material existence of only a few centuries ago that we can, without the slightest bit of thought, throw it all away without even looking back (or thinking we should even have to look back at all). That the governments in allegedly free countries around the world can actually forcibly deny power to those who would otherwise be willing and able (that is to pay) to use it is a travesty and a bleak sign of the state of things.

It's hard to imagine why Bin Laden and his cronies hate the West so much and want to destroy it right this very moment. The West, by and large, hates itself and given a few more years will willingly destroy itself and everything that made it great. Few western intellectuals defend western technology and science. In fact, the case is quite the opposite, they excoriate both as mere fronts for power and imperialism, clever masks for racism and ultimately "arbitrary" anyway, no better than "alternative" ways of dealing with reality like "magic" and other forms of mystical denials of reality practiced by primitives around the world in the past as well as now. Even more, Western science and technology are far worse because they assert an intellectual superiority which is illusory (according to these learned thinkers) and which have caused the subjugation of the entire world, its people and environment, under the pillage of their evil parent: capitalism.

Western intellectuals will not stand up and combat their foes around the world largely because they agree with them and do not see them as foes. Obviously they, for the most part, disdain Bin Laden's religious fervor, but they do not disdain his hate for the West, because they also hate it. Ever since Rousseau and Kant declared war on the Enlightenment and all that it had set in motion (every achievement of the West, in science, art, government, etc. can be traced back to that movement or the Renaissance which slightly preceded it) it has become the default position of nearly every Western intellectual to lament the achievements of the west, to fret, to whine, to wring their hands and contemplate some alternate "Utopia." Unfortunately, politicians and large numbers of people (who ignored these intellectuals for the most part, which in turn contributed greatly to their whining) are now jumping on the bandwagon of taking western achievement out of its historical and necessary context.

Now we can apparently have free governments without respect for individual rights. We can have all the material benefits of western civilization while we destroy the very foundation of their production. We can have the west without the west. Of course, all of this is a horrendous contradiction and quite impossible. Giving up Western civilization and not lifting a hand or a mind in its defense will not lead to a paradise of all the material benefits of the west minus all those western ideas that are apparently so despised by western leaders, intellectuals, and growing segments of the people. It will lead to North Korea, a country far "ahead" of the west in killing those evil lights. Just look at the satellite photos of that country at night, it exists in darkness amid a sea of electricity. They are certainly in solidarity with their environment. If that is our goal as peoples and as a civilization then we must stop kidding ourselves about having our cake and eating it too.

We will have the benefits of the intellectual achievements of our illustrious forefathers, which requires us to acknowledge what those benefits require; which requires that we stop apologizing to everyone for our alleged faults and misdeeds and actually proclaim the superiority of our way of life to in the face of competing alternatives. Or, alternatively, we will try the impossible and fail. Our affluence and abundance is currently so great, so unbelievably vast, that the idea of it vanishing seems impossible and absurd. It would certainly mark the greatest collapse of any civilization in the history of the world, but it is not, regrettably, impossible. Ideas and actions have consequences in reality. To persist in the irrational folly of the savages, which is what I will now refer to environmentalists as because that is clearly what they are intellectually, will lead us to the very state of existence which they desire. A state of existence almost too horrible to contemplate and a state of existence which will make the murderous designs of history's most evil tyrants seem like slaps on the hand in terms of death and destruction.

Bin Laden need only wait. At it's current rate of decline, the West will do the job for him. It may take a little longer than he would like, but the job will get done all the same and more fundamentally and lastingly than his crude methods could ever hope to achieve. This big blank out of '08, in ways poignantly symbolized by the hour long blackout, is a troubling sign indeed for everyone who unabashedly loves Western civilization and all that it means. Let it be a call to action. If we do not point out the cause and effect of ideas and actions, defend our greatness against all-comers, at home as well as abroad, then this will be only the first of increasingly longer and more devastating blackouts and blank outs in our near future. Where it will lead should be incentive enough to get started.

2008-03-23T17:42:00.000-07:00

The First thing I'm going to do......

If you're currently or have been a graduate student, then you're already well aware that at some point, usually before you are able to begin seriously working on your dissertation, the last piece of the puzzle on the road to earning your Ph.D., you are required to take some sort of formidable qualifying examinations. Some schools require both written and oral components, while others "just" administer an oral examination. My oral exams will be held at noon on May 15.

I have been asked numerous times what I plan to do after they are over, assuming I pass of course. Well, aside from an obvious celebration of some sort, my plans are very, well, some might say mundane. My only goals after the exams are over and before I transition into full-time dissertation mode will be to read three works of fiction. What are they?

Amusingly and to my great regreat I began reading Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs before I began graduate school in the summer/fall of 2005, but was not able to finish it before my classes started and it has been sitting on my bookshelf with bookmark in the middle ever since. This I must finish immediately after my orals are completed.

Next, to my great surprise and joy, a scholar working in the National Archives of France discovered very recently a "new" novel by Alexandre Dumas which happens to be set during one of my favorite periods of French history, the revolution and age of Napoleon. The novel is titled The Last Cavalier and I will read that after I finish with Hugo.

Finally, and I've been longing to do this for some time now, I will reread what I believe is the greatest novel ever written, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I first read it over ten years ago (when I was 13 years old) and while I am confident that I understood it then in spite of my age, I am anxious to read it again in the light of eleven additional years of knowledge and experience. I am also deeply in need of spiritual replenishment, which I know I can count on in the pages of that wonderful opus. I am anxious to not let the cynicism and misanthropic tendencies of the current epoch (and my own take on it) become the overriding impetus behind my own thought and spirit.

After that is complete, then I will begin working steadfastly and seriously on my doctoral dissertation so that I am not in graduate school for another three years if I can help it!

2008-03-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

Thus the death of unity (and that's a good thing)

With the controversy over his two decade long association with a demagogic blowhard strangling his campaign, Illinois Senator Barack Obama'a Rousseauean appeal for universal unity and unpartisan politics is being destroyed by his own capacity for the disingenuous. Sitting idly by while his "spiritual mentor" condemns the country for "crimes" it has not even committed for twenty years, Obama expects the sort of divisions and hatred fostered by such rhetoric to be undone in the course of one political campaign because he speaks well and wishes it were so. This is the primacy of consciousness at its worst/best.

It is also a sign of one of two things. Either Obama is supremely foolish or he is the typical unprincipled demagogue of modern American politics cleverly masquerading as a unifying "leader." Either he is a major league dope who cannot connect cause and effect (irrational, unsupported, inflammatory, and racist ideas shouted out by his "spiritual mentor" leading to and fostering a divisive hatred) or he is a dangerous sort of ambitious person seeking to eradicate partisan animosity through unification of the body politic in and around his own person. I have set this up as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, but that is misleading. He can, and probably is, both of these things. His big league dope bona fides have been on display openly since day one in his allegedly "inspiring" oratory. His complete disregard for cause and effect, the long term consequences of his policy ideas, and the absolute bone-headedness of his approach to dealing with our enemies has been damning him on this front since he launched his campaign in Springfield last year. But his call for a unified and undivided body politic that can focus on our "problems," which he always associates with various "public" enemies (businessmen, "special interests," and "extremists" that is those who dare to oppose the idea that citizens owe the country or their communities their "service" instead of selfishly pursuing their own happiness), is a dangerous echo of Rousseau and all of his one-party state intellectual heirs. Who are those heirs? Well, only insignificant historical blips like fascists and communists who did and do insist on one party homogeneity in their politics. I think the results of this sort of un-partisan politics are obvious.

His call to get "beyond" our current political divisions is ridiculous and dangerous. A one party consensus behind anyone, aside from a George Washington type figure who would be committed to principles of limited government and was not obsessed with power (in other words, a person who no longer exists in our political universe), would be disastrous. The only thing saving the constitution and our remaining memories of "limited" government is the division in our government both in form and parties. And even that division only slightly breaks the headlong dash into further and further socialism and the command economy. Were significant pluralities or, yikes, majorities of the parties and independents to suddenly unite behind the leadership of one man who proposes to use the power of the state to fulfill promises of resources to his unified horde of supporters we are all in serious trouble, particularly if we happen to have any of those resources.

The current two party system is bad enough in that is has institutionalized two altruist political parties and, through force of law, hampers third party challenges to their supremacy. Basically, these two groups are fighting and battling over power as opposed to many extreme policy differences (though some occasionally crop up). To suddenly unite them behind one "leader" is frightening. Even more frightening is the large-scale gullibility of the electorate of hearing Obama promise this state of affairs and responding positively. And it's not just the run-of-the-mill democratic primary voter idiots either (in fairness, the run-of-the-mill republican primary voter is also an idiot), but prominent and occasionally intelligent intellectuals (like Joseph Ellis among others). Were the electorate, or most of it anyway, virtuous and knowledgeable of history and political philosophy, the rights of individuals and committed to liberty in all spheres then, perhaps, the danger of a unified body politic would be minimal. But even that ideal polity and citizenry would need to be restrained and checked against violations of individual rights. In days like this, one realizes that the rise of a national demagogue (and this has happened before, in 1932 for instance) is indeed possible.

Fortunately, the American people, even the supremely gullible, are generally skeptical and disdainful, again generally, of hypocrisy. That Senator Obama, who claims to be a unifying leader who embodies every and all conceivable qualities which the great mass of the American people hold in common, is sitting by while his "spiritual mentor" accuses the government of the United States of unleashing biological warfare upon its own citizenry and the rest of the world, murdering "innocent" people without offering any context, and bringing the just fury of Islamic terrorists upon itself explodes his logic. Ironically, Obama has been wrapping himself in this man's coattails in order to appear sufficiently religious and pious. That goal was ridiculous. His call for unity is just plain dangerous (even in wartime, a loyal opposition is useful and necessary). Now one irrational desire is destroying another. And who says there is nothing good in American politics these days?

2008-03-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

No Movie For Actual People

I haven't seen very many movies lately, I have been working mostly and nothing has much interested me to be quite honest. While toying with the idea of seeing There Will Be Blood, a movie based upon American socialist Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, mainly because Daniel Day-Lewis appears to deliver another amazing performance (as opposed to any affinity I have for the themes of this anti-capitalist story or the originator of them), I decided to throw caution to the wind and see the recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men. If you have not seen the movie and are desirous to do so without having plot and ending spoiled for you, then stop reading now.

What an awful film. Unlike other pictures made today which morbidly focus on evil villains, but which still have alternative characters who eventually kill them (for instance Bruce Willis kills John Travolta in Pulp Fiction or Tim Roth gunning down Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs) this movie fails to offer up some alternatives to Javier Bardem's chillingly psychopathic killer. Instead there is an impotent old Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones and a horribly unlucky sap played by Josh Brolin, who achieve nothing. Bardem, playing the evil killer Antoine Cheguern whose entire motivation as a person is basically to kill and rob but mostly to kill, moves through the world as an unstoppable force which the "good" and less evil people in the movie can only pathetically try to avoid before he destroys them, and destroy them he will. Brolin's character (and his wife who I will talk about in a moment) come as close as the film will allow to an actual heroic character in that he is the only one Bardem hunts that he doesn't actually kill, and he injures Bardem at one point.

I will back up for a moment to explain why Bardem is after Brolin. Drug deal between Mexican cartel and American dealers goes bad in the desert, everyone dies and Brolin stumbles upon this and finds an untended case with two million dollars in it which he takes home. Bardem is seemingly some sort of hired gun who the American dealers hire to find the bag, which has a transmitter in it. When they give him the tracking device he, of course, kills them and sets off after Brolin. The dealers then hire Woody from Cheers to track down Brolin and Bardem. Brolin, who is also being chased by the Mexican cartel people, manages to evade and injure Bardem who then proceeds to perform his own medical repairs while Brolin (who is injured) gets treated in a Mexican hospital where he is found by Woody, who tells him about Bardem and the need to make a deal with him (Woody) before Bardem finds him (Brolin). Of course, Woody seemingly forgets his own cautions and gets trapped and subsequently murdered by Bardem without the hope of even putting up a fight. While one can hardly sympathize with Woody's character, this scene is well acted and painful to watch.

So now Bardem threatens the life of Brolin's wife, giving Brolin the unhappy alternative of bringing the money to Bardem and being killed or continuing to run in which case Bardem would kill him, his wife, and get the money anyway. Brolin refuses. Of course, in classic anticlimax the Mexicans kill Brolin, Bardem gets the money, Tommy Lee Jones has a number of pointless conversations, almost unwittingly captures Bardem or gets killed by him depending on how you look at it, and the movie ends. The psychopath walks off into the sunset, unmolested by anything except occasional bad luck, certainly not by any "heroes," they either do not exist anymore or are retired, and babbling, old men (hence the title). The country, and the world, is a place for Bardem and men like him to do as they please.

The most terrible scene in the movie comes very near the end and involves Brolin's widow. So now that her husband, and for good measure mother (who dies of natural reasons I guess), are dead, Brolin's wife returns home to find Bardem waiting to "keep his word." As he had promised her husband that he would kill her, he must finish the job. When she points out that he doesn't have to, he laughs and tries to unburden himself further of responsibility by flipping a coin and telling her to call it. In the only truly heroic action in the movie she refuses to let him escape his responsibility and tells him that he will be the one murdering her, not the coin. Of course, this film is so abysmally bleak that even such heroism cannot prevail against Bardem's unstoppable evil and, without dramatizing it, we all know he kills her.

Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff, the old man in the movie, has the sense and capability to do his job and catch Bardem, but instead throws up his hands to the universe and calls it quits. Moaning about how bad things are (the movie is set around 1980) and shaking his head at how little respect exists compared to when he was younger, he doesn't even pretend to struggle for what it is he values (and even that point of definition is very vague). At the very least Bardem's monster is purposeful, and therein lies the insidious imputation of the film. Evil gets things done (is rewarded) and never is punished in any real way by anything, be it man or the universe, not even that, but people don't even try to stop it from winning.

This is not the world as it can and should be, it's not even the world as it is (not yet anyway, and certainly not in 1980). This is the world as it should never be. It is a horror movie of a different sort than those we are used to. There are no zombies or aliens, no vampires or puppets, not even any insane maniacs (Bardem's character is clearly not "unhinged" in the clinical sense) or the sort of unrelenting campy blood fests which generally characterize that genre. Instead, No Country for Old Men portrays a world where the worst evil does as it pleases, triumphs over everything essentially unopposed and those who know better ramble about dreams and do nothing. "Horror" is the only word fit for that sort of universe.

2008-02-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

Socialism = Morality?

So it is not often that I share any stories from graduate school in this forum, because for the most part they are not particularly relevant to what I do here. I am training to be an historian of the United States, concentrating in the political and intellectual history of the early American republic. Obviously, when it is relevant I use knowledge I have gained during this training in my arguments and writings, but I don't generally post on specific happenings within my graduate program. Today, I make an exception. A seminar I am auditing in preparation for my final oral examination before I begin my dissertation has brought me face-to-face with the explicit voicing of an all-too-frequent idea in this modern world we live in.

The setting: A discussion of essays concerning the advent of slave labor in the colonial period of Atlantic/Caribbean history. The specific point which interested my colleague was a moral condemnation of slavery as a labor system. This should be a rather humdrum occurrence in modern historiography (and is for the most part), no one would countenance for one moment a substantive disagreement on this point. However, this colleague of mine was fascinated by this overtly "socialist" judgment creeping into a work of history. What does that mean? For starters (and I confirmed this for my own understanding after the class), it means quite unequivocally that socialists are the only ones who make a moral case against slavery as a labor system. When I queried in class if it were possible for a capitalist to morally condemn slavery I was told quite simply, "No." The only thing which comforted me in this moment was the fact that I was not the only one in the room insulted by this remark, in fact the sense of shock was quite palpable.

Of course, the reasoning (if it can be called that) behind this argument is easy enough to tease out and I did so with this colleague of mine afterwards in an attempt to understand the thought process at work here. Essentially socialism is about as close to a secular manifestation of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethical code as one can come up with. Materialism, selfishness, "greed," and individualism either have severely circumscribed or non-existent roles in both. As socialism is the only political and economic system devised entirely on the moral ethos of altruism, the life blood of the ethical doctrines of the western monotheistic tradition, it carries with it (whether stated or not) the gravitas which the religious version has gained with centuries of unquestioning obedience and worship. Things with thousands of years of history behind them tend to gain some degree of legitimacy whether they deserve it or not.

When I asked, "Well what about ethical systems which reject altruism as immoral," I was then asked, "Why is it immoral?" Rather than ask for my colleague to explain what exactly morality meant to man's life on earth and then explain how is was that altruism was moral to begin with, I merely countered that: "Altruism is self-destructive (sacrifice is, and is meant to be, destructive), a moral code which destroys you can hardly be called 'good.' [Unless, of course, you are evil] SO, back to my question, what about ethical codes which reject altruism as immoral?" Then I got the classic blank-out response, "They're wrong." The conversation ended there, I was fully satisfied that I had rooted out the origins of the statements in class, and my colleague was content to let the dialogue die on an unsupported assertion.

Of course, the horrid thing in this is that, if accepted or unchallenged (fortunately that did not happen!), a dreadful dichotomy is established. Either one accepts the awful ethics of altruism and its economic and political corollary of socialism in order to morally condemn slavery or one accepts slavery in order to avoid altruism. Obviously this dichotomy is false, not to mention a classic one dating back at least to Marx. Altruism is a doctrine of self-sacrifice, but it's essence is sacrifice. And it is the idea of sacrifice, in all its hideous permutations, whether of self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of others to one's self, which underlays socialism and slavery. Sacrifice is the common denominator.

It is no accident that societies built upon socialism resemble societies built on slavery in that the great mass of people are being sacrificed either to some smaller group of people or, theoretically, to each other. In either case, their lives do not belong to them but to others. The only real difference is whether one prefers being ground up in the sugar mills of an 18th century French plantation in St. Domingue (Haiti) or being pounded into the dust of some five year plan in Soviet Russia. Either way, you are just as sacrificed; either way, you are just as dead.

2008-02-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

A Poem?

OK, so I'm no poet. I can only read the words of Scott, Yeats, and Byron in awe with no hope at even imitation, let alone anything else. But, like Lincoln, I occasionally am moved to express myself in poetry. I share one of these rare efforts now, please be gentle in the criticism.

FORBIDDEN LOVE

Two hearts,
One inflamed; the other, not.
Can love exist between the two?
When one is cold; the other, hot.

Love is worth the risk, no?
To put one’s happiness in reality’s hand?
But be prepared to be most low,
When she scoffs at a fool’s stand.

Ignore the truth for love’s embrace!
The joy you feel will help you,
But this is a most dangerous chase,
It is all your Waterloo.

Reality is as the Duke,
Strong, Firm, like Iron,
Not impressed by the fluke
Of your Corsican environ.

Love is for those who are honest,
Tricking yourself, you’ll fail;
When your false ship begins to list,
You best be there to bail!

2008-02-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

Where is Charles Keating???

This election, particularly the Republican nomination fight, has been very puzzling. Numerous Democratic pundits keep claiming that they fear running against Arizona Senator John McCain more than any other Republican. I keep asking myself, why? What am I missing? Senator McCain is not an effective orator, would be the oldest person ever elected to the office (this is an issue and makes his VP selection all the more critical), agrees with them on most major issues except the Iraq War, and threatens to depress his own party so much that Donald Duck could be the Democratic nominee and win. Even if he overcomes those issues, there is another issue from McCain's past, a past he enjoys talking about when he refers to his own admirable military service, which will sink him. It calls into question his character, his credibility, and his own proudest legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill (it might more accurately be called the McCain-Feingold Destruction of Free Speech Bill).

What is this issue, why is it so important, and why has it not been brought up so far in this campaign? The last question I cannot answer, it baffles me. Why Mitt Romney or any of the other Republicans would not skewer McCain with his own signature issue and make him look like the fool he truly is is a question I will not try to answer. Perhaps most of the electorate does not remember the Savings and Loans "crisis" of the late 1980s (in fact I was only a very small child at the time, but as a historian it's my job to look into these things), but I am sure John McCain does.

When deregulation hit the Savings and Loans Associations in the 1980s, a predictable speculative boom occurred which eventually came crashing down. Charles Keating ran one of these businesses in Phoenx, Arizona and donated money to numerous politicians, including his friend John McCain. Standard story of modern politics, right? Wait, it gets a little more interesting. During an investigation of Keating's real estate company (which owned the S&L) five Senators who received money from Keating (including McCain) met with the investigators attempting to strongarm them and get them to back-off of Keating's business dealings and practises. Basically what Keating did was make numerous high-risk investments which did not payoff, eventually causing his companies to go bankrupt, including his S&L. In an effort to avoid investigation from regulatory agencies Keating obviously called in favors (why else would these five senators, including McCain, go out of their way in one specific investigation?) in an attempt to not be found in violation of banking regulations. When the role of these senators, the infamous "Keating Five," became known, a scandal ensued and the Senate ethics committee censured them in various ways. This ended as far as McCain was concerned in 1990.

In the subsequent decade the posterboy of government corruption and payola, McCain, reinvented himself as a "Maverick" and champion of governmental reform, particularly (in grand irony) of campaign finance. It was his chief issue in his campaign against President George W. Bush in 2000, and which he finally got passed into law when the Democrats gained control of the Senate in 2001. In fact, the Keating Scandal, as inauspicious a start in the Senate anyone could create for themselves, may be the catalyst of McCain's whole subsequent facade as an "Independent" force in American politics. Essentially, he's a fraud attempting to get so far away from what happened in his first term in the Senate that most people, hearing of the Keating scandal for the first time today, scarcely believe that it's the same guy.

As a character issue, the Keating scandal is a troubling sign about McCain's priorities. Let me preface this by saying that McCain's status as a hero in unquestioned, but military heroes do not always make the best political leaders and are not above making poor decisions in their civilian lives. Being willing to use his power as a United States Senator to intimidate investigators conducting a lawful invesitgation smacks of Nixonism. It shows, at the very least, the ability to act as unethically as any public official can act without committing an outright felony.

This does not bode well for McCain running as ethical an administration as can be expected in this day and age. Perhaps the main lesson from the Clinton administration was that ethics no longer matter, by and large, to the electorate (in spite of clearly breaking numerous laws in plain view, indeed on TV in front of everyone, he maintained high popularity throughout his impeachment and trial) and thus McCain has nothing to fear from being made to look like a liar and hypocrite. I suspect, however, that the character of the reaction will be molded by the presentation (as in the Clinton case when everyone yelled, in the face of reality, that it was "only" about sex).

Though I said I would not try to answer the question of why this isn't being talked about (yet), I will advance a suspicion. Perhaps the reason the Democratic pundits (who, like all pundits, are not to be trusted) pretend to shake in their boots about McCain is because they know McCain is like Swiss cheese, full of holes. Saving things like the Keating scandal makes sense then, they want to make sure that McCain gets nominated first and he goes around a little longer blathering about his "straight talk" before they ruin him. Then again, I'm not sure if they are actually that smart.

2008-01-19T08:09:00.000-08:00

Obama and the Founding Fathers?

Historian Joseph J. Ellis has recently published a piece in the Los Angeles Times ('The better angels' side with Obama, 19 January 2008) which seeks to defend Democratic candidate Barack Obama (Senator from Illinois) from critics of his message to independents and Republicans to unite behind his candidacy. According to Ellis, a very respected academic historian who teaches at Mount Holyoke and has published two very acclaimed popular works on the founding fathers (2000's winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Founding Brothers, and 2007's American Creation), Obama is not "a weird historical aberration." The Senator's message, which seems to fly in the face of modern two-party zero-sum politics, has "roots in our deepest political traditions," says Ellis. Even more hyperbolic, Ellis claims that Obama's appeal across party lines "is in accord with the most heartfelt and cherished version of our original intentions as a people and a nation." Unfortunately, this argument is just a latest example of the pitfalls and problems one witnesses when good historians venture into modern political fights in which they, and this is certainly no sin, have a favorite to defend.

The only way this comparison, and Ellis singles out the first four presidents of the republic -- George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison -- between the founding fathers and Barack Obama makes any historical sense is if we drop the vital context of issues and ideas. Ellis is correct on the simple level of political hope, the founders dreaded the idea of factions (self-serving groups of people working against the public good) dividing and ruining the republic and thought the creation of political parties were the beginning of a dangerous slippery slope into a state of competing and destructive factions. However, this desire for unity did not -- emphatically did not -- prevent divisions and the rise of the first party system of Federalists (George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton et al.) and Republicans/Democratic-Republicans/Jeffersonians (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Albert Gallatin et al.).

Important in understanding this split is that both sides viewed it as a temporary expedient to defeat a dangerous combination of demagogues or monocrats depending on which side you were. Even more crucial is that this party divide centered on very real differences in ideas which could not be (easily) compromised. One side supported the French Revolution, the other opposed it, one side favored the creation of a federal financial system, the other opposed it, one side thought war with France likely in the late 1790s and passed legislation in anticipation of it, the other did not see war as likely at all and opposed preparatory measures. These differences were real and important, forgetting them may allow for nifty modern comparisons, but such comparisons are disanalogous in the extreme.

But beyond that, Ellis curiously quotes Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural to support his comparison. The obvious line he pulls out of context is Jefferson's soothing words to the elections losers "we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans." But one needs to know what Jefferson meant here to understand that line. He was not just saying that party distinctions did not matter. He was saying that most Republicans and Federalists actually had agreed on a specific vision of government that I am positive would not actually be "kosher" to any currently running presidential candidate, let alone Barack Obama. Quoting Jefferson's First Inaugural: "Still one thing more, fellow citizen--a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, an this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities." In other words, to unify the country the government had to keep out of the affairs of the people (for the time period this was a clear attack on the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts) and not drain the resources created and earned by the honest work of honest citizens. Is Obama advocating this vision of government to avoid dividing the people among "haves" and "have-nots"? To avoid creating a situation where some people hope to cash-in on the stolen wealth of others? To avoid creating a government which does anything but leave the people "free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement"? I think not.

So when people get eager or excited over candidates and want to defend them against charges of "novelty" by appealing to the authority of the ages, let alone America's founding fathers, beware such comparisons as, at best, superficial and shallow. Ellis is a very able historian and a very gifted writer, but he's not doing any service to the profession, the founding fathers, or even Obama but making simplistic and ultimately useless comparisons. If the ideas on politics that the founding fathers advocated, like individual rights, limited government, etc., were of any real importance to the American voting public, Obama's candidacy would have much much much more to worry about than simply the naivete of his call for unity.

2008-01-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

Presidential Debates, Etc. Etc. Etc.......

Ok, so it was my policy to stay away from this insanely premature election season until the actual year in which the election was to take place finally got here. Representative Paul prompted me to jump the gun, though I kept that as much as possible to historical and ethical criticism. But having watched my first entire debate this evening (the Republican debate between Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, I missed last night's Democratic debate due to other plans, though I did see the speeches of the three main candidates after the Iowa caucuses), I finally have some comments and observations concerning the whole swath of candidates, issues, etc.

First of all, who is not sick of the lame refrain of "change" by now? It has to be the most absurd election year cliche which only a group of complete idiots would lap up and cheer for in and of itself. Obviously, anyone elected will necessarily bring change (in personnel if in nothing else, though to assume any candidate would ever run on or govern by way of a "I will do everything my predecessor did" strategy is sophomoric at best), but Giuliani brought up the obvious point that one needs to know what exactly this change is, good or bad? If we are switching from a mixed economy, particularly in health care, to one which is completely under government command, or "only" just more so than it already is, then it is obvious that such change is poison. It would be like "changing" from the slow death of the arsenic laced water we are currently drinking to some water laced with cyanide. This is not the sort of "change" I want to vote for. Even with all of the tremendous problems of the health care system, all of which lie in the myriad interventions the government has already made into it (it is completely false and ludicrous to call the American health care system capitalist or free market, it is, like the rest of the economy, a mixed system of private ownership and government regulation), I prefer a dysfunctional mess to government nationalization, i.e. death.

The most bizarre approach to foreign policy is certainly coming from the Democrats. Obama, in his victory speech the other night in a rare moment of cliche-less nonsense, promised to get the rest of the world on board with the United States again. What does that mean? Why is much of the rest of the world not on board right now? If it is simply a disdain for Bush then electing anyone would produce a salutary result. However, if it is because the United States is fighting an "aggressive" war against our enemies (this assertion is laughable) then the only way to get them back on board would be to abandon such a policy. This is a change in the completely wrong direction. If the governments and peoples of other nations decide they do not favor our policies towards our enemies, that is their right, but it is not an obligation of ours to abandon our vital security interests in order to be better friends with others, that is a ridiculous idea and an idiotic way to conduct foreign policy. Should we just poll our allies when we wish to go to war or impose sanctions? If we would be less popular for merely defending ourselves and removing various threats to our security (a right which every nation must claim, defend, and have in order to retain sovereignty and credibility) then that is an unfortunate reflection on our alleged friends than upon us.

The Republicans of course have gone completely off the deep end on "illegal immigration" otherwise known as the global voting of feet which stands as mass proof against the absurd dogmas of cultural relativism. That people move to America for the opportunity to make money, become part of the American nation, or do whatever else they wish (presuming they are not violating any actual rights of others), presents no actual problems at all. It has long been a maxim in the making of laws, it is unwise to make laws which are certain to be broken. It merely promotes disrespect for lawmakers for legislating against reality and by making criminals of people engaged in non-violent activity which is in no way ethically or morally wrong. Certainly in cases where rights are violated (i.e. murder or rape or theft, etc.) then punishment must be meted up harshly and swiftly, but no rights are violated in the act of immigration to the United States "legally" or otherwise. It is pure folly to prevent people seeking opportunity, security, freedom, and everything else America offers from doing so. The problem is when people come for handouts and giveaways, but the problem there is with the handouts and giveaways. When you give away things for no effort whatsoever it should be unsurprising that some undesirable people would come to receive such plumbs.

Other issues I have commented on elsewhere or will comment on, undoubtedly, in the future. As for candidates.....

Mike Huckabee -- A former Baptist minister??? He makes Bush look like an atheist. Though watching him in New Hampshire, a state whose Republican voters are mostly not religious nut jobs, you might never know he just ran a campaign vaunting his "Christian leadership." What does this mean? Either is as concerned with and warped by religion as his Iowa campaign attests, or he is merely a dangerous demagogue who merely says whatever he needs to in whatever state he happens to be in. Whatever the case, he is a mess and a scary folksy windbag who I cannot see myself voting against, unless Kucinich or Gravel is the nominee on the other side.

John Edwards -- Truly the most frightening of any of the major candidates. He's basically running on a "bread and circus" message of taking stuff from anyone he calls rich and giving that stuff to anyone who is envious and angry and supports him. Not only that, but I cannot recall in my own experience or my knowledge of history a candidate, even in modern times where qualms about presidential ambitions no longer exist, a candidate so devoted to making himself president. The man has basically been campaigning since the day after John Kerry conceded the previous election. So maybe it's no shock he seems so much more angry and aggressive this time around, I'd be too if I campaigned non-stop for five or six years for anything and did not win hands down.

John McCain -- Ughhh, how is this guy so popular, particularly as a "maverick" or opponent of politics as usual? Am I the only one who remembers the Keating Five scandal? Why does McCain get a pass on that? Just because he was held hostage in Vietnam and survived politically in Arizona hardly seems reason to forget that he was the poster child for the bought and sold politician. Kudos to him for recasting himself as a maverick and the great champion of fighting "special interests" and money is politics (oh yeah, his bill with that genius Russ Feingold has really cut spending on elections or curbed commercials or any other of the alleged ills it was allegedly supposed to combat, I can't imagine why that ineffectual admission the candidates are now forced to make when they pay for ads isn't working!), but his actual record is less glamorous and even though the press seems to love the guy, I seriously doubt his opponent (if he is nominated) will let the public live in ignorance of McCain's less glorious past.

Hillary Clinton -- What a lame candidacy. Her only claim to fame, that which led directly to her senate seat and all of this vaunted experience she now claims is so vital, is that she was a former President's wife. Big deal. Under that logic, Laura Bush should become President, she has the most relevant reservoir of recent experience to impart to the job. Seven years in the Senate however, actually constitutes legitimate experience that should not be entirely discounted, but her opponents also have Senate experience (Obama nearly three years, Edwards six) not to mention prior local political experience in the case of Obama. This is mostly irrelevant anyway, "experience" in holding prior offices has never been an accurate judge of competency in the presidency. For instance, James Buchanan had been an ambassador, a Secretary of State, and a congressman for about twenty years and was a disaster as President. Abraham Lincoln on the other hand served two years in the House of Representatives and received one patronage job in Illinois from President Taylor, that's it. Building one's entire case on their alleged advantage in office holding experience will also fall by that strategy.

Fred Thompson -- He seems to have checked out of the race, angling for a VP nomination perhaps to a Giuliani who might need a more "conservative" man (not to mention a Southerner) to balance out his ticket? I don't know, but he seems to not be interested in his own candidacy so why should I be?

Barack Obama -- The talk of the town, the hot shot, the front runner. In a year which seems to guarantee a Democratic victory, being the Democratic front runner would seem to make you in line to be the 44th President of the United States. Honestly, at this point, even though he utters nonsense when he's not uttering ridiculous nothings, he's probably one of the least offensive candidates in a party known for producing offensive (to reason, morality, anything) candidates. Even I think he's a likeable fellow, not that that's a reason to become President, but it's a plus when both of your opponents (Clinton, Edwards) are jerks. Obama is essentially a milquetoast, a fresh slate, a blank. I don't mean to suggest that he's an idiot, but since he rarely says anything that isn't just a cliche or whatever his opponents also say, he's sort of just a nebulous personality that lacks originality. This is not as bad as it sounds. He could turn out to be a decent president assuming he does not surround himself with pacifists and compromisers and does not have congressional acquiescence to do whatever he might suggest domestically. I need to see more of the man to be quite honest, but these are my initial impressions.

Mitt Romney -- The guy has too many ideological "transformations" this late in his life to be taken credibly by me. And these "transformations" are almost all nearly in the wrong direction. His strategy to combat a religious zealot Huckabee is to "me too!" his way around it. This is distasteful in the extreme, and I think fundamentally dishonest.

Rudy Giuliani -- The most unconventional of the major candidates. Despite being a high ranking member of the Justice Department in the Reagan administration, his most relevant recent experience though was as mayor of New York City. The road to the White House has rarely led from such an unlikely source. Clearly the impetus of his candidacy is not as a prosecutor in the Justice Department, or a goofy crime and poverty fighting mayor in the country's biggest city, but as the person on the ground during the worst shedding of American blood on American soil since the Civil War. The country underwent something nearly undefinable during the hours and days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and even though Joe Biden can ridicule Giuliani's constant evocation of that day, what should this man speak of? Clearly and appropriately that event became the focus of his public life (as it should have become Biden's if he wants to claim to be a foreign policy genius). Mayor Giuliani, of all these candidates, is the only person who still has the continuing and very real problem of crazy religious fanatics trying to kill us in his center sights. He is also the only Republican running with any sensible thoughts on issues of private life and conduct who is not also nuts (Ron Paul). So as things stand now, I think he is likely to do the least amount of harm of all candidates while also pursuing vigorously the only actual issue in this campaign that matters at all and that the President by himself has a shot at effecting quickly and directly.

More later.

2007-12-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

Abraham Lincoln and the Necessity of the Civil War
By Alexander Marriott

One of the more minor Presidential candidates, Ron Paul (Representative from Texas), appeared recently on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Aside from enunciating a rather incoherent jumble of ideas about what he would do in the horribly unlikely calamity of his being elected President, Mr. Paul enunciated a political heresy (and a historical heresy), which I wish to address here.

Below is the transcribed exchange which I will be referring to throughout my comments:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

After this exchange, Mr. Russert went on to make Mr. Paul look foolish on numerous other, more current, issues. First of all, Mr. Paul is not the originator of this idea, nor even it's most eloquent expositor. He is, however, the one with the most prominent perch upon which to shout such ideas to a public that (given the state of education and the general historical knowledge of most people) might not know any better. I am not opposed to Mr. Paul's candidacy as such, he would be no more harmful than any of the other incompetents (on both sides) currently running for office (nor am I pining for the entrance of any third party incompetents like Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Nader). To confront inevitable claims of partisan bias against poor little Mr. Paul, I simply have no horse in the presidential race so far and cannot say I shall have one anytime soon. If and when I do, I shall let you know who and why.

But to the "point" Mr. Paul was so eager to make in his exchange with Mr. Russert, that the Civil War was unnecessary and that Lincoln "did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic." Kudos to Mr. Paul for correctly identifying the form of government which we live under, I am almost certain that all other candidates would improperly identify the government type they are endeavoring to lead. However, this is where the kudos must stop. Mr. Paul's comments are uninformed historically, contradictory, and ultimately revealing of a greater weakness and danger which lies within the modern "Libertarian" movement.

Historically speaking, Mr. Paul is quite right in saying that the death of over 600,000 men in the Civil War was horrifically tragic. However, to say those deaths and the war in which they occurred were "unnecessary" is a quixotically ahistorical and perversely amoral observation. The parallel he attempts to make in response Mr. Russert's assertion that "We'd still have slavery," that the United States could have and should have followed the lead of Great Britain by pursuing a path of compensated emancipation (where the government pays slave owners the price of the slaves, essentially buying them, and then freeing them, though the British example was far more complex taking decades to actually eliminate slavery). The could and should aspects of this are different questions. Whether the country should have pursued such a policy is irrelevant if it could not actually pursue such a policy. So the question which needs to be answered is that of whether the United States, in March 1861 when Lincoln became president, could have pursued a policy of compensated and gradual emancipation. The answer historically speaking is not only an unequivocal "NO!!!" but a "HELL NO!!" And that answer comes not from Lincoln, who at his most radical before 1861 only ever suggested compensated gradual emancipation plus the subsidized emigration of the free blacks to colony somewhere, perhaps Africa, but from the people who attempted to destroy the government and inaugurated the war Mr. Paul excoriates as "unnecessary." In order for any emancipation scheme to peacefully have worked it would either have required the people and leadership of the Southern states to concede that slavery was wrong and needed to be done away with (which they most emphatically did not, quite the reverse, by 1861 it was not a radical opinion in the South to claim that slavery was a "positive good") or at least for them to accept the ability of the federal government to regulate the issue, even against their wishes (which they were even more emphatically against). And Lincoln and the Republicans did not even claim an ability to regulate slavery in the Southern states, merely an ability to prevent slavery from spreading into the territories. Lincoln was not even inaugurated into the presidency before the entire lower south "seceded" and Jefferson Davis was in "office" as President of the so-called "Confederate States of America." The spark with which the war began was not Lincoln marching an army into the South to restore order as certain of his predecessors would have most certainly done, but was the bombardment of a federal fort by the rebels. To have not responded at that moment with the use of force would have been to concede that the government did not have the right to govern and protect its own property, what sort of government would that have been? It would have been no government at all, and therein lies what Mr. Paul was most likely going for.

Regardless of how historically inept Mr. Paul's claims are, they are in themselves contradictory. He says: "Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic." Moving on from the baseless assertion that the Civil War was "senseless," what does Mr. Paul mean when he says that Lincoln went to war to "enhance and get rid of the original intend of the republic"? Perhaps he misspoke. Otherwise, this statement is a blatant contradiction, how could Lincoln wage war to enhance and simultaneously get rid of the original intent of the republic? But, more importantly, how could putting down a rebellion waged explicitly for the idea that slavery was a positive good and essential to the survival of liberty (if you don't wish to take my word for this please read Alexander Stephens' "cornerstone" speech, he was the Vice-President of the so-called "Confederate States of America"), be against the original intent of the republic? Does Paul not believe the country was founded on the idea that all men were created equal? Does he not believe that all men have unalienable rights, among them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? These are what generally passes as the original intent of the republic. How does crushing a rebellion dedicated to the exact opposite ideals and ending the great contradiction of the founding (slavery) constitute an assault on the republic? Lincoln exercised extraordinary powers as Commander-in-Chief during that rebellion, but he did not do anything which either had not been done in previous emergencies or threats of rebellion or which had not been suggested as possibilities by those who thought about what would happen in the case of rebellion in the years leading up to the Civil War. It must ultimately be remembered that he faced the greatest crisis the country has ever faced and that given what he might have done and what many people begged and demanded that he should do, Lincoln acted very moderately and was remarkably restrained particularly when one considers the history of republics and civil wars. Lincoln was no Cromwell, no Caesar, no Franco.

Mr. Paul has waged a campaign for the presidency (specifically the republican party nomination) based largely on his anomalous position among his competitors in fundamental opposition to the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism more broadly, and seemingly any and all wars or war-related enterprises. His latest comments on Lincoln and the Civil War merely underline his irrational assault on war and the use of force, even in self-defense or for the protection of liberty (American or any other apparently). War is horrible and as General Sherman said, it is "hell," but he knew and Lincoln knew an obvious fact of reality that apparently Mr. Paul, along with a dangerous amount of his fellow citizens, has forgotten. There are things even more horrible than war, like the loss of life and liberty, like slavery. If we are not to at least remember favorably the necessary, I would argue heroic, examples like those set down by our founding fathers and subsequent leaders who followed them into glory, then we truly are lost. With Mr. Paul at the helm it would be a classic case of the blind leading the blind. Then we shall truly know hell.

2007-11-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

Writers on Strike

A peculiar spectacle in Hollywood and New York, and everywhere else TV shows and motion pictures are being made, is before us. The writers are on strike. Of course when one thinks of workers on strike it usually calls up images of beefy scary looking truckers or other threatening masses of mostly men picketing outside factories and the like, daring anyone dumb enough to even attempt to break through their lines. This is not the case as mostly scrawny looking men and women, clearly of the nerdy variety, march around with bland (ironic for writers) signs and lame unionist chants. At stake? Contracts with TV and motion picture producers over royalties from DVD and other "new" media, which has grown by leaps and bounds since their last contract.

This is a very legitimate issue which any producer of intellectual property (in this case scripts, screenplays, etc.) should be properly concerned with. The problem here though, and it's a problem which exists for the entire industry, is why writers (and I mean good and exceptional writers) would ever want to tie themselves to unemployed, mediocre, or otherwise bad writers under the same contract. The advantage for the sub-par, or even par, writers is obvious. A share of revenue they would otherwise either never get or would only get on a very lucky day. The talented writers, however, have no such advantage. In fact, even a much better contract than the one they currently have is likely to be inferior to a contract their abilities and value could net them were the writing labor market a free one. This is a demonstrably true (both in economic theory and in practice) proposition, and thus puts a strike against the age-old idea that economic interest alone determines one's actions. So why do the talented ones "go along" with this (for them) waste of time and hit to their pocketbooks?

One reason is ideological. Hollywood and the acting/producing community in general has staid remarkably true to its unionist heritage while much of the rest of the economy has moved very quietly and successfully away from unions. Even the best and most talented writers take pride in their belonging to a "guild" of craftsmen, much like their medieval forbears upon which their organization is based. Of course, laws back up this activity (writers are legally able to collectively quit their jobs temporarily without any repercussions other than an obvious lack of pay) and thus add a coercive element that would otherwise be entirely lacking. And it is well known that, as a group, actors, writers, producers, directors, etc. are a very liberal group of people among whom a pro-union proclivity is a sine qua non of their culture.

Another reason is fear. Standing against ones peers on an issue like this is a scary prospect on many levels, not the least of which is the deserved reputation for violence which striking mobs of workers have gained over the years. Not only that, but if you are not confident in your moral right, as a talented individual, to not be shackled to the dead weight of your inferior colleagues, you're hardly likely to put yourself forward to suffer the abuse which would be inevitable. Also, anyone in such a community who asserted their superiority and thus their ability, desire, and right to make as much as that ability allowed them (far above their less talented fellow writers) to, would have aspersions like "selfish," "individualist," "greedy," or that horrible appellation given to any who is thought to work for themselves amidst a strike "scab," attached to their careers and reputations. Such a person would soon find themselves blacklisted by their industry and by their guild. This is ironic given the myth that Hollywood survived persecution and is anti-blacklist (they just did not like the criteria for the movie studio blacklist from the 40s and 50s).

Perhaps another reason is economics. Some successful writers, not particularly confident that their abilities will be around forever, may reason that sticking with the union contract, as opposed to being paid what they are worth as an individual writer, is the safer and, in the long-run, more profitable path. These people, while successful now, are thinking as if they were one of their more mediocre colleagues. This reasoning betrays a lack of confidence in their talent common among today's successful people in all fields of endeavor. It is actually portrayed today as a virtue to have confidence "issues" or to display humility, anything to avoid the appearance of arrogance: arrogance taken to mean a grand view of one's talents and worth and a willingness to boast about it. The actual meaning is something closer to a deliberately invalid and inaccurate view of one's talents and worth and a compulsion to boast about it. One would just be dishonest to not give an accurate appraisal of their virtues and faults, abilities and deficiencies, pros and cons; dishonest with others but also, just as important, dishonest with themselves.

So while the writers march, with signs which belie their craft and chants which demonstrate why they are not orators, and as our favorite programs go into reruns and we begin to grow frustrated and angry with the whole mess and look for people to blame we should remember some things. The producers, faced with the demand to pay all writers a minimum amount in media royalties, even to inferior writers, were correct to refuse. If the writers wish to operate as a guild and negotiate collectively, they must realize that the market price for most of their mediocre membership is going to be quite low. Among those same writers though, it is the talented, the able, the good, and the great among them whose fear, ideological wrongheadedness, or lack of confidence (or all of them working together) which has given this movement any strength at all. Were they not willing to support their inferior colleagues then their strike, their guild, and the coercive laws which support them against aggressive anti-union measures from the producers (i.e. hiring outside writers) would collapse or be on a much shakier foundation than currently buttresses them.