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On Cormac McCarthy
Speaking of the author of No Country For Old Men, the Atlantic just took B.R. Myers' classic "Reader's Manifesto" - in which Myers goes after McCarthy with hammer and tongs - out from behind the firewall. And by coincidence, I'm just now reading All The Pretty Horses for the first time, and recently came upon this passage:
[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.
I thought I remembered encountering these images before, and sure enough, Myers uses this particular paragraph as an example of McCarthy's literary sins, writing:
As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special ...
It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.
My (limited) experience with McCarthy bears out this critique, but it seems an insufficient reason to dismiss him. McCarthy's novels cry out for a line editor with a strong sense of the ridiculous (the above paragraph, for instance, could have turned out fine with the final two sentences sliced off), but there's much more to his writing than its excesses. Which is why I prefer James Wood's more nuanced take, from a TNR review of The Road, which is reproduced at length below:
Continue reading "On Cormac McCarthy" »
Into the West
Today's movie-geek crack: the HD trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, and the red-band (i.e., rated-R; i.e., seriously badass) trailer for the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men (hat tip: J. Last).
The Politics of Mad Men
I still haven't watched more Mad Men - I will, I promise! - but the fact that it inspires articles like this one isn't exactly encouraging. Writing for The Nation, Anna McCarthy makes the show sound like The Sopranos meets Pleasantville - a glossy, tedious exercise in ex post facto liberal condescension. Mad Men, she writes, is "concerned with demonstrating the progress we've made in gender relations since the alienated years before the women's movement," and with dramatizing "the disaffection of midcentury suburbia's 'lonely crowd' and the oppressive expectations of the feminine mystique," not to mention "the hatefulness of conformist WASP culture." (Such dramatic conceits are hackneyed enough at this point that even a Nation writer like McCarthy can recognize that they "are not terribly original," and gently suggest that may be "more revealing as a window onto the present, exposing what 'cutting-edge' popular entertainment considers the cultural gains and losses of the past fifty years.")
Then she whips out this hum-dinger of a conclusion:
Maybe, and perhaps wholly unconsciously, Mad Men signals a desire to return to a time when advertising, and the consumer culture it helped sustain, represented the vitality of Western democracy and the deeper moral meanings of capitalism. The perception that consumption is patriotic is still around, part of the arsenal of ideas used to gain support for the "war on terror," but it's becoming increasingly hard to stomach, especially as bankruptcy and foreclosure rates rise. Automobile ownership, planned obsolescence and the pure plastic perfection of Tupperware were once part of a battle against totalitarianism, American weapons of containment in the cold war. Nowadays, they are part of a global image problem, one that all the President's admen may be powerless to fix.
Dana Stevens, call your office.
Social Conservatism and Double Standards
I understand that there's a difference, legally-speaking, between pleading guilty to a criminal offense and tacitly confessing to a crime you haven't - and probably won't - be charged with, but I still think it's unfortunate that Larry Craig might be forced to resign by his fellow Republicans, while David Vitter has apparently survived being outed as a client of a major D.C. prostitution ring. I agree with Megan that what Craig did was arguably a greater betrayal of his wife than what Vitter may have done, but from any social-conservative calculus (or at least my social-conservative calculus) prostitution has to be considered a greater social evil than cruising for gay sex in bathrooms. This relates to a point I fumbled through in my conversation with Mark yesterday - the unfortunate extent to which socially-conservative politicians have focused their fire on gays, because opposing gay rights was for a long time an 80-20 issue for the Right (though no longer), while studiously ignoring the various beams in heterosexuals' eyes. It's a hard pattern to break, but the GOP could find worse places to start than making sure that Vitter shares whatever political fate awaits Larry Craig.
Anti-Americanism, Again
Larison, on the Bourne question:
The first mistake anyone who flings the “anti-American” accusation makes is to equate the government with the society as a whole. If someone or something is critical of the U.S. government, it is very often deemed anti-American or, if the person doing the criticising is American, unpatriotic. This plays by the state’s rules: it makes patriotism dedication to the state, rather than the country, and it makes the state into the embodiment of America. This is simply not true, and it’s a very good thing at times that this isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that the citizens don’t have some small part to play in the dreadful policy decisions made by the state (it is our government, after all), but the decisions being taken in Ultimatum are the sort that the public is never supposed to know about because the average citizen of this country would still probably be horrified at ordering the deaths of foreign journalists in the name of protecting some part of the behemoth security state.
Okay, but let's not take this too far. For instance, I would submit that a film like Braveheart (which, like the Bourne movies, I'm very fond of) qualifies as obviously "anti-English" even though it's technically only critical of the English government and military, or that the infamous Valley of the Wolves is an anti-American movie even though it mainly concerns itself with the wickedness of certain American soldiers (and evil Jewish-American doctors, of course). Obviously, the phrase "anti-American" is at once loaded and nebulous, but I think that it's fair to say that any film that leaves the audience with an overwhelmingly and cartoonishly negative impression of a particular nation qualifies as "anti" that nationality, whether that impression is primarily formed through a representation of that nation's government or not. I take Daniel's point, and Chris's, that the Joan Allen-Julia Stiles axis may offer enough of an alternative vision of what an American is to get The Bourne Ultimatum off the hook in this regard, but I think it definitely tiptoes toward anti-American territory more than its predecessors, by being more cartoonish in its depiction of the pervasiveness - as opposed to just the presence - of naked, self-aware evil within the U.S. bureaucracy.
Wide Stance
This Slate video may be particularly hilarious to me because I know Josh Levin, who provides the voice-over for the undercover cop's report. But it's also the best explanation I've seen of what went, ah, down in that Minneapolis bathroom. And watching the foot-touch and the hand-under-the-stall maneuver makes Craig's behavior seem more self-evidently damning than it did yesterday, when Mark Schmitt and I diavlogged on the subject.
Songs of a Native Son
Since there's apparently a "cloud over Idaho" at the moment, this seems like a good time to mention that I recently had the privilege of meeting Josh Ritter, an Idaho native and possibly the best American singer-songwriter of his (that is, my) generation. I say this as a certified musical philistine, so by all means take it with a grain of salt, but there are plenty of non-philistines out there who agree with me; Amazon calls his just-released disc "the best album of 2007, hands down, by the most under-accorded American musical genius," though personally I would suggest starting with 2003's Hello Starling and going on from there. If you like Dylan or Leonard Cohen or anyone else in that vein, you owe it to yourself to give him a listen.
Also, he seems like a really nice guy. So hold your head high, Idaho!
Jason Bourne, Anti-American?
I wouldn't be as quick as Chris Orr to dismiss the notion that The Bourne Supremacy is an anti-American film. (And I gave it a positive review, mind you ...) Chris writes: "This is a movie, like most, with good guys and bad guys - and both groups are made up almost exclusively of current or former employees of the 'American government.'" True enough, and certainly a movie has to do more than posit an evil conspiracy embedded in the U.S. government to qualify as anti-American; otherwise our net would sweep up everything from 24 to All the President's Men. On the other hand, there has to be some point where an indictment of the bad guys within our government becomes so sweeping as to shade into outright anti-Americanism, and I think that the earlier Bourne movies walked the line that Chris is describing more carefully than the most recent installment: In those two films, you had a sense of the American establishment being balanced between the Joan Allen position ("this isn't us") and the pro-torture, pro-Treadstone, pro-anything goes position embodied first by Chris Cooper and then by Brian Cox. Whereas in Supremacy, the rot seems to go much, much deeper; the sins the U.S. government commits as an institution, in the light of bureaucratic day, are much worse; and Allen's "good American" seems a weird anomaly more than anything else. Yes, the film ends (SPOILER ALERT) with the bad guys exposed to press scrutiny and the indictments that follow, but there's nothing in the film as a whole to give you any confidence that a few prison terms will remove the deep corruption from the system; there will be another Treadstone, and another one after that, because this is the path that our government (and by extension, our country?) has chosen to take.
Again, I liked the movie in many ways, and I'm overstating the case a bit. I just think there's a large gray area between generic "corruption in high places" films that don't have a broader anti-American message and exercises in explicit Amerika-bashing like Dogville. And The Bourne Supremacy, more than Bourne's previous outings, is way out there in the gray, and too close to America-bashing for comfort.
Update: Alex Massie adds his two cents.
Second Update: I don't know why I kept calling Ultimatum Supremacy above, but my apologies.
Medium Town
Over at Andrew's place, Jamie Kirchick flags something I meant to link to but let slip my mind - Mark Oppenheimer's New Haven Review of Books, a collection of essays by writers who call the Elm City home (as I did, throughout my childhood). The collection includes Oppenheimer's own ode to the Springfield, Massachusetts of his youth, the New Haven of his adulthood, and other such medium cities - the places, in other words, that aren't New York, Washington or Boston, but aren't the suburbs or the deep country either. His affection for New Haven mirrors my own, though I wonder if our shared hometown isn't a special case among medium cities, given the presence of Yale. Having a great university in a small downtown, especially so close to Manhattan, enables New Haven to offer the charms of small-city life with some of the benefits of bigger-city living, and it's enabled the Elm City to survive a disastrous period of urban "renewal," sustain itself through the 1970s and 1980s - an era that tore the heart out of places like Springfield (among many others) - and then renew and reinvent itself over the last ten years.
My fear for New Haven (whose virtues I've defended for years against skeptics and snobs from the megacities) is that this recent renewal will go too far, in some sense - that the slow but unstoppable growth of Yale, and the expansion of New York's commuting population up the Connecticut coastline, will make it more and more like a miniature version of D.C. or New York, an upper-middle class town with a ghetto thrown in, rather than the working and middle-class area where I grew up. But of course this sort of "problem" is a luxury the Springfields of the world would kill to face.
Photo by Flickr user Andrew D. Miller used under a Creative Commons license.
Repression and Republicans
On the case of Larry Craig, David Freddoso wonders "Why is it that Republicans — Craig, Mark Foley, and David Vitter — are the ones who keep getting caught in sex scandals nowadays?" No doubt some of it is random clustering (why does that phrase suddenly sound dirty?); I don't think the Vitter case speaks to any deep truth about a particular Republican predilection for prostitutes, for instance. And some of it is that there's a greater incentive for the media to go digging through the dirty laundry of politicians who trumpet their support for "family values," because of the hypocrisy factor. But it also stands to reason that the party that's associated with conservative beliefs about sex, marriage and family would include a higher percentage of the sort of people who try to avoid acting on their own homosexual inclinations for the sake of those beliefs - and that this higher rate of repression would breed a higher rate of embarrassing scandals.
The contrast between Craig - or Ted Haggard - and Jim McGreevey is instructive, in this regard. McGreevey was conducting long-term affairs with men, which suggests a person who had attained a certain comfort with his homosexuality, even as he attempted to keep it a secret. Whereas Craig and Haggard both seem to have sought out gay encounters in as furtive a fashion as possible, as someone would who's giving in to what they consider an immoral temptation, rather than merely acting on a desire they would prefer to keep hidden from the public. And not coincidentally, given this difference in how they approached their sexual desires - and the kind of scandals that ensued - both Craig and Haggard are Republicans, while McGreevey is a liberal Democrat.
Politically Incorrect Debate of the Day
That would be the Derb (no stranger to un-PC topics) versus Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, and other books in that vein. Here's the Derbyshire review of Religion of Peace; here's Spencer's response.
I have all sorts of thoughts on this topic, but for the moment I'll confine myself to taking issue with Derb's remark that "Christianity got its start as a religion of slaves. Perhaps it is fated to end the same way." The debate over the demographics of early Christianity is sufficiently tangled to make it possible that he's right; however, there's more reason to think that Christianity got its start as a religion of middle-class urban women than that it spread primarily on the lowest rungs of the Roman social ladder. Not that a "religion of women" would be any more appealing to Derb, I'm sure - particularly where the struggle with radical Islam is concerned - but for the sake of accuracy I thought I'd throw the point out there.
Ora Pro Owen
Matt Zoller Seitz on Owen Wilson, who attempted suicide over the weekend:
Of all the people I'd ever interviewed who seemed to have the potential for stardom, he was the person who seemed best equipped to handle it, because he seemed capable of getting along with pretty much anyone, and had what might be described as a sporting curiosity about fame. When he talked about the movie industry -- his knowledge based, at that point, mainly on secondhand reports from older filmmakers and the same faux-insider film monthlies that everyone else read -- he sounded like a kid excitedly summarizing the research he'd done for a paper on deep-sea diving or petrified wood. In 1995, after he'd moved to Los Angeles and started going on auditions and meeting with powerful people, he still seemed more or less the same guy -- observant, bemused, inquisitive and entertained by the unpredictability of life. When I did some follow-up interviews in late 1995 for my Bottle Rocket cover story -- which turned out to be my last Dallas Observer piece -- Wilson told me about a recent family reunion at which a young cousin asked his opinion of the budget overruns on Waterworld. "He asked, 'What do you think about the cost?'" Wilson said. "He sounded like a Los Angeles agent. I thought, 'What an odd question for an eight-year-old to be asking!' I told him, 'I don't know. It's not really my position to think about the cost.' Then his dad came up. He said, 'Oh, you're just protecting the industry. You're just a home-teamer.' That seemed kind of unfair to me, because I saw Waterworld, and I kind of liked it."
Read the whole thing. As Seitz remarks, "Wilson's a good-time shaman; when he appears, you smile, because know you're about to have fun. He makes good films better and bad films tolerable." He's also - or so one suspects - an immensely talented screenwriter. God willing, he'll be around, and happier than he is now, for many years to come.
The Past Is Another Country
I've heard enough people I trust rave about Mad Men to give it at least four or five episodes (I just watched the premiere two nights ago) to grow on me, and I'm happy to accept Matt's judgment that Sacha Zimmerman's review is a bit on the harsh side. But at least in episode one, this particular Zimmerman complaint rings true:
Throughout "Mad Men," corny references to the show's moment in time come thudding down on the viewer, alive with self-consciousness. The head secretary practically winks at the audience before telling the "new girl" not to be intimidated by the "technology" as she reveals a boxy, avocado-green electric typewriter. Draper chastises a subordinate for stealing a report from his trash, which he knows must have been the case because it's not like there's "some magic copying machine" around the office. And after being shown a mock-up of a space-themed advertisement, he riffs on how ridiculous it is to think that we would ever go to space. Then there are so many references to how none of the characters--even pregnant women--seriously believe cigarettes are bad for them (insert annoying "we know better now" coughing fit here), it's maddening. I get it: It's 1960! Now move on.
Part of what makes historical dramas so tough to pull off is that you're constantly walking a tightrope between the lure of this sort of thudding, look-back-in-irony condescension, and the instinct to generate sympathy through anachronism - for instance, by making sure that the hero of your epic Crusades movie talks an awful lot like a modern secular liberal. And I think this tightrope gets harder to walk the closer to the present day your story is set: HBO's Rome (which had many flaws, but largely avoided these particular traps) successfully wallowed in the pastness of the past precisely because its landscape was so alien to most viewers, with none of the connections to contemporary politics or mores that tempt filmmakers to condescension or anachronism. Whereas a show like Mad Men has it tougher: It's hard to separate a portrayal of that not-so-distant era from our own opinions (and memories) of it, and our knowledge of what followed on its heels.
But I'll keep watching ...
The Silence of God
That Mother Teresa endured a long dark night of the soul will come as no surprise to anyone who read Carol Zaleski's essay on the subject several years ago, but the depth and duration of her spiritual crisis nonetheless has the capacity to shock, and to humble.
Naturally, Christopher Hitchens has something to say about it:
In 1948, Hitchens ventures, Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. He likens her to die-hard Western communists late in the cold war: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance," he says. "They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And I think once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired." That, he says, was Teresa.
I think that this is a rather poor analogy for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because it conflates the experiential and ideological aspects of religion. One can, certainly, experience religious faith as a kind of ideological belief - as the adherence to a compelling and all-encompassing system of thought that explains the world and one's purpose in it. And this sort of belief is arguably analogous to Western Communists' (misplaced) confidence in Marxism generally, and the Soviet Union specifically. But the "mainspring" of religious faith for most believers - and particularly for a mystic like Mother Teresa - is the personal experience of God as a being who loves them and communicates with them, rather than the intellectual experience of Catholicism (or some other specific faith tradition) as a philosophical system that persuades them. This is why most religious people remain religious while being entirely ignorant of anything resembling serious theology, and indeed, why religious bodies can exist and thrive with at best a minimal theological superstructure. The theology is an attempt to make sense of the experience; the experience itself the primary thing.
So if one set out to find a secular analogue to what Mother Teresa experienced in her encounters with the divine, a more appropriate sneering comparison for Hitchens to employ might be to people caught up, not in an ideological fervor, but in a cult of personality - people who believed in the Soviet Union not for Communism's sake but for Stalin's, or in Nazi Germany because they were mesmerized by Hitler. And then her dark night of the soul would be analogous to, say, banishment from the Great Dictator's inner circle, rather than to ideological disillusionment. This analogy would seem to suit some of Hitchens' purposes, since he's forever complaining that the Judeo-Christian God is a totalitarian despot; on the other hand, the thing about cults of personality is that the personality in question tends to be, you know, real, which is hardly a notion that Hitchens is likely to entertain where Mother Teresa's God is concerned.
And his unwillingness to even entertain it is one of the (many) reasons why Hitchens' brief against religion is so thin: An ideologue himself, he finds it easiest to argue against faith-as-ideology, while leaving largely untouched the more difficult and more important question of what we should make of faith-as-experience. Confronting the case of Mother Teresa, who experienced the presence and love of Jesus Christ intensely throughout her young adulthood and (understandably) made these experiences the basis for her career as a missionary nun, Hitchens is like a man who seeks to disprove not only the faithfulness but the very existence of a woman's absent lover by arguing that her mind is held captive by a primitive, oppressive and dangerous theory of eros. Even if such an ideological critique were true (and obviously I find Hitchens unpersuasive on this count as well), it wouldn't get him where he wants to go, because the crucial question - whether the original experience itself is real; whether the now-absent lover still loves her, and whether he exists at all - would remain unanswered, and indeed unaddressed.
Warrior Politics
Joe Klein, in a post entitled "Heroes Trashed":
Well, I suppose it was inevitable that the Weekly Standard would figure out some way to trash the 7 enlisted men from the 82nd Airborne, who wrote the courageous Op-Ed piece about the unreliability of our Iraqi allies in the New York Times last Sunday.
By all means, read the Standard piece in question, written by seven Iraq War veterans: Whatever you think of its arguments, it's a model of respectful disagreement. (No thuggery here!) That Klein takes this as an example of "heroes" being "trashed" is emblematic of the difficulties involved in having soldiers, whether generals or enlisted men, take part in political debates as soldiers - a problem that extends to parents and relatives of military personnel as well, and runs from Cindy Sheehan on the dovish left to these commercials from the hawkish right. In each case, there's an assumption that our soldiers are invested with a unique political as well as moral authority, and that to question this authority is to disrespect (or "trash") their sacrifice.
Writing for the Atlantic earlier this year, Andrew Bacevich argued that this state of affairs owes something to the "irresponsible politicking of generals and admirals," something to "the abdication by Congress of its constitutional duties on matters of peace and war," and something to the foreign-policy blunderings of "an imperial, irresponsible, and habitually dissembling administration." But he suggested that it's also a predictable consequence of the move to all-volunteer force:
Military service, once viewed (at least nominally) as a civic obligation, has become a matter of choice. As a result, the burden of “defending our freedom” no longer falls evenly across society. Those choosing to serve do not represent a cross section of America, and most are presumably well aware of that fact.
To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer—or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement—has now come to rest upon the soldier.
Bacevich's conclusion ought to be appended to any "veterans speak out" op-ed or advertisement that appears from now till the conclusion of the war:
On matters of policy, those who wear the uniform ought to get a vote, but it’s the same one that every other citizen gets—the one exercised on Election Day. To give them more is to sow confusion about the soldier’s proper role, which centers on service and must preclude partisanship. Legitimating soldiers’ lobbies is likely to warp national-security policy and crack open the door to praetorianism.
You have to subscribe, of course, but the full piece is well worth reading.
Photo courtesy of the Defense Department.
My Assignment Desk
For Reihan: A review essay, expanding on this post, that takes on trends in recent South Asian historiography.
My Super Sweet Fifteen
From Liza Mundy's piece on the Quinceañera:
But the real worry is that the next generation isn't being tamed so much as unleashed, though not exactly liberated. These girls' post-quince lives will not be nearly so closely supervised as they might have been in their home countries, and they won't move toward anything like the same conclusion. Latina teens are among the most at-risk group of teenagers. Despite a high rate of religiosity, they are—like so many children of first-generation immigrants—often alienated from their parents' worldview. It doesn't help that more than 25 percent of Hispanic children live below the poverty line. They are also the fastest-growing teenage demographic: By 2020, one in five teens will be Hispanic. According to the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Latinas have the highest teen birthrate of all major U.S. racial/ethnic groups: 51 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before the age of 20, nearly twice the national average. Alvarez interviews one hairdresser who notes that of seven girls he styled for their quinces, four invited him, within the year, to a baby shower ...
It is notable that the quinceañera, which originated as a prelude to a wedding, in this country seems to have become a substitute for the wedding a girl may never have. One of Alvarez's central questions is why parents are willing to spend so much arduously earned money—the average price of a quince is $5,000; the colloquial phrase for giving a party you can't afford is "throwing the house out the window"—on a one-night blowout. The answer is that for many of these girls, a quince is the only blowout her parents can be sure of giving.
The Mundy piece calls to mind Heather Mac Donald's City Journal essay on Hispanic family values, which includes this passage:
Continue reading "My Super Sweet Fifteen" »
The Domino Theory, Then and Now
Matt writes:
I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.
Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds -- emboldened -- were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.
It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.
Well, okay, the fall of Vietnam didn't lead to a Red Dawn-like scenario, with America standing alone - actually, alongside "six hundred million screaming Chinamen," if I remember the movie right - against the Soviet juggernaut. But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the world wasn't really going the Soviets way in the late '70s, as people on both sides thought it was - or at least that their internal contradictions prevented them from capitalizing on the opportunities that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam afforded them, and eventually led them into their own Vietnam-style overreach. Similarly, our enemies in al-Qaeda, Iran and elsewhere probably won't make the kind of gains that, say, Rick Santorum and other feverish voices anticipate if we pull out of Iraq, and they simply aren't strong enough to pose an existential threat to the U.S. over the long run. But they will win a real victory, just as Soviet Communism won a real victory in the early 1970s, and that victory will have real repercussions around the globe. I think we were right to pull out of Vietnam when we did, and wrong to be there in the first place, but it's too simplistic to say that the domino theory looks "completely wrong" or "crazy" in hindsight; there are an awful lot of dead people in Indochina, Latin America and Africa who would quibble with that assessment.
The Right and Global Warming
Jim Manzi's NR essay proposing a conservative response to global warming - one of the smartest right-of-center policy manifestos I've read in a long time - is available online here. Everyone should read it: Conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue.
Reihan adds his two cents here.
The Iraq Debate, And My Place In It
Matt Feeney, on my last post:
I feel a certain unease with Ross Douthat’s disquiet with Jon Chait’s unhappiness happiness with Bill Kristol’s anger with certain liberals’ dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. Seriously, Ross’s objection to Chait – or, more accurately, Ross’s unwillingness to wrestle with Chait’s argument – seems to rest entirely on the fact that Chait’s magazine, The New Republic, has a wishy-washy, passive-aggressive, hard-to-pin-down position on the war ...
The underlying mystery here is hardly a mystery. At TNR, Peretz remains a vigorous defender of the war. Chait and some others were for the war and have become critics of its execution. Foer and others were against it from the start. I’m not sure how you would synthesize these positions into Weekly Standard-style editorial calls-to-arms or what, in the nature of magazines, obliges TNR to do so. TNR and the Standard are simply different kinds of magazines.
Larison chimes in:
By the same token, Ross’ critique of Chait would be considerably more powerful if it were possible to discern clearly what Ross’ own view on the war was at the present time. It isn’t that Ross never writes about the war, but he doesn’t say much about what kind of Iraq policy he thinks would be best. In his bloggingheads appearances, he will often make a point of declaring himself to be something of an agnostic on the “surge,” and thus ends up, by default, with a “wait and see” position. That’s fair enough, but it is a bad position from which to criticise someone else’s reticence about Iraq policy.
Meanwhile, Chait himself writes that I'm guilty of a non sequitur for using his attack on Kristol as an excuse to gripe about TNR's recent silence on the Iraq War. I take his point, but I don't think that my turn was exactly a non sequitur so much as an expression of disinterest in a controversy that's completely tangential to the much-more important debate about what to do next in Iraq - a debate from which TNR, both in its editorials and in the essays it chooses to run, has largely absented itself of late. Kristol accused The New Republic of giving up on success in Iraq - indeed, of choosing to ignore evidence of success because of a commitment to a narrative of defeat - and cited the Beauchamp piece as his prime example, and I think Chait is absolutely right to call that criticism unfair and unfounded. (Though I think Chait's larger attempt to draw a contrast between the old neocon idealism and the new neocon thuggery is considerably weaker, as are some of his other swipes). But it's unfair and unfounded in part because it's impossible to tell what TNR does think about the war, which in turn gives the whole debate a sideshow quality that makes me inclined to tune it out.
Continue reading "The Iraq Debate, And My Place In It" »
Which Side Are You On?
Jon Chait's attack on Bill Kristol's supposed "thuggery" in support of the current American strategy in Iraq would be considerably more interesting if it were possible to discern where Chait's own magazine stands on the question. The new issue of TNR, in which Chait's anti-Kristol broadside appears, contains articles on Mitt Romney and Karl Rove, the netroots and the psychology of Bush voters, and sundry other topics. It leads with editorials on Sudan (which expresses support for "an outright NATO invasion of Darfur") and Presidential library fundraising. And it marks the seventh straight issue in which TNR's editors - who passive-aggressively endorsed the surge back in May - have seen fit to say exactly nothing about what the United States should be doing, whether militarily, politically or diplomatically, about the minor difficulties we currently face in Iraq. Which leaves the reader with the impression, fairly or not, that TNR's take on the most important foreign-policy question facing America is that Bill Kristol is a jerk.
Lost in the Bureaucracy
I think Shadi Hamid (via Matt, who shares his take) is a little hard on that Peter Baker piece I mentioned yesterday, about how Bush's democracy-promotion agenda has been frustrated by the foreign-policy bureaucracy. For one thing, I don't agree with Hamid's claim that in Baker's telling, "President Bush comes out as a courageous visionary whose wonderful ideas were stilted by the State Department bureaucracy and by the government’s traditional resistance to new ideas." Rather, I think he comes across as a well-meaning, ineffectual, and extremely naive politician whose somewhat dubious ideas were effectively resisted by the State Department bureaucracy (though maybe I'm just reading the piece through the lens of my own biases). Meanwhile, both Matt and Hamid make the point that when Bush really wanted a policy course pursued - namely, the invasion of Iraq - the opposition from the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere was steamrolled. Which is true enough, and I don't think there's any question that invading Iraq was a higher priority for Bush than the larger reorientation of American diplomacy in a more pro-democracy direction. But I think the contrast between how Iraq played out and what's happened to the freedom agenda doesn't just speak to Bush's priorities; it also speaks to the unfortunate truth that it's become easier for an American chief executive to invade a foreign country than to control the more banal, day-to-day workings of his own diplomatic corps.
Self-Evident Truths
Joe Biden:
And we are a spiritual nation. We are a nation that was founded upon — the only nation I can think that was founded upon the notion that there is a — a — that there is a God. We hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal, et cetera.
Andrew retorts:
Isn't the point of self-evident truths that we do not need God to perceive them?
Maybe so, but in the specific document that Biden was attempting, with characteristic grace, to cite as support for his point - the Declaration of Independence, that is - the existence of God is itself taken to be self-evident, and the principle of human equality is grounded on what the authors describe as the self-evident truth that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." No doubt many of them thought of this Creator as a watchmaker God or some similarly impersonal Designer, rather than the Judeo-Christian Deity, and of course one can attempt to ground the principle of human equality on something other than endowments from a Creator. But the fact remains that insofar as the Declaration should be considered the founding document of the United States of America (which is a whole separate debate), Biden's comments about America being founded on the notion that there is a God seem inarguably - one might even say self-evidently - correct.
Respect Versus Compassion
I mean to link to it last week, but Michael Currie Schaffer is on to something when he draws a contrast between Tommy Thompson and Karl Rove's styles of conservative governance. I would go a bit further than he does, though, and suggest that there was an ideological as well as a practical difference between the two, which makes it something of a mistake to call Thompson "the original compassionate conservative." As Reihan and I have argued elsewhere, the sort of right-wing politics that Thompson embodied - particular in the push for welfare reform - was predicated on respect, rather than compassion; it emphasized self-help, individual responsibility and equal treatment, and lacked the implicit condescension that has lurked in Bush's "when people are hurting, the government's got to move" tendencies. This is a slippery distinction, I admit - No Child Left Behind, Bush's signature issue in 2000, was an uneasy hybrid of the two impulses, as were many of the Administration's foreign-aid forays - but I think it's a real one, and it goes to the heart of a number of Bush-era failures, the "comprehensive" immigration reform debacle chief among them.
I also think Schaffer is too quick to dismiss the political appeal of Thompson-style good-government conservatism, particularly in a general election. He writes:
Of course, before casting Rove as the villain in the GOP's abandonment of the gubernatorial goody-goodies of Thompson's generation, it's worth going back to the scoreboard. When he ran his candidate as a policy-paper perusing governor, Rove and the GOP lost by half a million votes and dipped to 50 seats in the Senate. Waging total politics, at least the first couple times, led to more successful results. Rove didn't so much betray the wonks as cast them aside when they proved unpalatable to any body of voters not dominated by the likes of David Broder. Rove's time may have passed in 2006, but Thompson's had passed well before it.
This is unconvincing stuff. Given the state of the economy and the post-impeachment unpopularity of the Congressional GOP, 2000 should have been a banner year for Democrats, and the fact that George W. Bush did as well as he did had a great deal to do with his (Rove-crafted) image as a "reformer with results," particularly where education policy was concerned. (As Josh Green notes, quoting Rove, "people who named education as their top issue voted for the Democrat over the Republican 76–16 percent in the 1996 presidential election, but just 52–44 in 2000.") Just because Bush improved his showing in '04 by hammering away on national security doesn't make his 2000 performance unimpressive, and it certainly doesn't demonstrate that a reformist, pragmatic conservatism is necessarily a political loser.
Photo by Flickr user Whereisyourmind used under a Creative Commons license.
Dysfunction in High Places
Peter Baker's long WaPo piece on how the Bush "freedom agenda" was stalled by bureaucratic intransigence is a depressing read on every front. On the one hand, it's a damning portrait of a weak President who entertained delusions of world-historical grandeur but couldn't even keep his own Vice President on board with the mission, let alone his Cabinet agencies; on the other it's a story of how the federal bureaucracy works to frustrate and undermine the elected officials whose policies it supposedly exists to implement. It moves from depressing White House anecdotes like this one ...
Gerson, Bartlett, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner and other aides met at the White House on Jan. 10, 2005, with a group of academics. Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis suggested that Bush promise to work toward "ending tyranny" by a date certain in 20 or 25 years. Some scoffed, but Gerson liked the idea.
The group adjourned to lunch in the White House mess, where, Gaddis later recalled in a lecture, Rove recommended the "chocolate freedom tart," a French desert renamed during the Iraq invasion.
... to depressing bureaucratic anecdotes like this one:
Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.
"It's our policy," the official said.
"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.
"Read the president's speech," the official said.
"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."
On both fronts, the word that comes to mind is decadence.
Up in the Air
My instinct is to agree with Matt when he suggests that post-9/11, "airplanes have become relatively unattractive targets for terrorists," which means that "endlessly piling on more and more security measures to air travel is pointless." That said, there seems to be a persuasive argument (via Reihan, a few months back) for implementing different security measures than the ones we have now, focused less on passengers at the metal detectors and more on the planes sitting unguarded on the tarmac.
It's also worth noting that while one would assume that terrorists recognize that it's now easier, as Matt writes, to "blow up a train or a bus, open fire on a crowded subway station, try to hijack a truck carrying deadly chemicals, or do any number of additional things" than to muck around with airports and hijackings, it isn't entirely clear that they do recognize this. The lure of the airline attack (and the spectacular attack in general) seems to persist even in a climate where attacks on lower value targets would be far easier to pull off, and arguably just as damaging. From Richard Reid to the the British bomb plot to the idiots who wanted to attack JFK to the car bomb at the Glasgow airport, a disproportionate percentage of post-9/11 plots have involved planes and airports, even though trains, buses, shopping malls and other low-security targets would seem like more logical places to wreak havoc. Why this is I'm not sure - force of habit? a desire to disrupt global transportation? the symbolic appeal of striking at one of Western modernity's more visible technological achievements? - but it's something to keep in mind when you're suffering through the agonies of airport security.
Cat Ladies
Unlike Matt, I was familiar with the term "cougar" - a descriptor for older women on the prowl for younger men - but it's still a little weird to see it show up as a category in Mark Penn's ridiculously fine-grained typology of American voters. I thought of "cougar" as a pejorative phrase like "butterface" or "two-bagger," or at least a mildly offensive one like MILF - in other words, the sort of thing you'd hear all the time from a certain kind of guy, and absolutely never from a political consultant.
The Way West
Once you get past the civics lectures from Paul Haggis, Robert Redford, and company, this fall's movie season might be remembered as a good few months for stories from the American West. There are two straightforward Westerns that look promising - The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, which should be worth seeing for the cast alone (any movie that finds room for Zooey Deschanel and Mary-Louise Parker deserves an audience); and 3:10 to Yuma, a remake of a 1957 classic, which stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale and gets a glowing advance review from Aintitcoolnews' Quint here. There's also No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers' take on Cormac McCarthy's desert noir, which is earning good advance word, and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, due out at Christmas-time, with Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil prospector in Old California. Meanwhile, the Sean Penn-helmed adaptation of Into the Wild - not a gunslingers-in-cowboy-hats movie, but a "Western" film in the broader sense of the word - looks like it has a chance to be great.
I don't know whether this is quite enough to make for one of those dubious Arts and Leisure stories in which three anecdotes are claimed to betoken a major pop culture trend; on the other hand, I certainly wouldn't object to a larger revival of the Hollywood Western. It isn't my favorite genre by any means, but given that we've probably hit a creative wall - for a while, at least - where mob movies are concerned, Hollywood needs to find some mythic American stories that don't involve kryptonite or the Batmobile, and the Western is an obvious place to go looking for material.
The Politics of Fear
Color me underwhelmed by the social science research cited by John Judis in this article, which purports to show how sub-rational responses associated with the fear of mortality explain the political success of George W. Bush specifically, and social conservatism more generally, in the wake of 9/11. On the one hand, it seems unsurprising to the point of banality to suggest that a heightened awareness of one's own mortality can increase the attraction of religious traditionalism, in-group solidarity, and so forth. On the other hand, the specific examples Judis cites to demonstrate how these psycho-political tendencies have impacted the politics of the last six years seem tissue-thin:
For instance, because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives ... and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage. This may well explain why family values became more salient in 2004--a year in which voters were supposed to be unusually focused on foreign policy--than it had been from 1992 through 2000. Indeed, from 2001 to 2004, polls show an increase in opposition to abortion and gay marriage, along with a growing religiosity. According to Gallup, the percentage of voters who believed abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances" rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2002 and would still be at 19 percent in 2004. Even church attendance by atheists, according to one poll, increased from 3 to 10 percent from August to November 2001.
Moving backward point by point, there's no evidence that the post-9/11 spike in church attendance persisted beyond a very narrow window of time. On an issue where polls vary as wildly as they do on abortion, a three percentage-point swing would seem to be at most barely meaningful, and probably just statistical noise. Maybe the debate over gay marriage was more salient in 2004 than 1996 because of "worldview defense" in the wake of 9/11, but Occam's Razor would suggest that a certain Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, and the predictable public backlash against judicial activism that ensued, might have had at least something to do with it. (Gay marriage wasn't much of an issue in the '02 midterms, you'll recall, when "worldview defense" should have been at its height.)
The rising hostility toward illegal aliens sounds like a better example of what Judis's researchers are talking about, since immediately after 9/11 there was a spike in the percentage of Americans who suggested that we should admit fewer immigrants every year. But by the time immigration surfaced as a major political controversy, in the autumn of last year, the numbers had settled back to around pre-9/11 levels, which suggests that the salience of the issue lately has far more to do with normal politics - specifically, voter hostility to a sweeping immigration reform proposal championed by none other than President Bush - than with some atavistic hangover from September 11.
Finally, I don't know how much outright "rage" there was toward France and Germany - I think it was more a question of people jumping at the chance to crack jokes about effete, weaselly Europeans - but sure, the whole "freedom fries," pouring-out-French-wine business was dumb and chauvinistic, so I'll give that one to Judis. It doesn't change the fact that much of his piece seems like typical liberal heavy breathing about how certain voter preferences - for security over liberty, and tradition over experimentation - are illegitimate and dangerous because they tend to favor conservatives, and because they helped George W. Bush win re-election.
The Courage of Their Convictions
I don't usually get annoyed by Hollywood's politics, but I was traveling this weekend (hence the lack of blogging), and my two plane rides offered time enough to read through Entertainment Weekly's fall movie preview issue - which was time enough to be consistently irritated. (This will be a great autumn, I'm afraid, for Very Serious Political Dramas.) Though maybe my irritation had less to do with the politics per se than the frequent protestations about how the movies in question don't take sides in any ideological fight. Start with Reese Witherspoon discussing Rendition, "a sober political drama about a pregnant Midwestern woman who discovers that her Egyptian husband ... is being secretly held by the U.S. government." (It looks pretty sober to me.) She explains:
"It doesn't smash people over the head with a message - you're not even sure if the husband is guilty or innocent - which is one of the reasons I wanted to do it," Witherspoon says. "It represents different cultures in a real human way."
Hey, maybe so. I'm more willing to give Witherspoon the benefit of the doubt than I am Paul Haggis and his new Iraq War drama, In the Valley of Elah:
A film about the effects of war on soldiers when they return home is certainly not an easy sell. "I think it is going to be upsetting," says Sarandon, who plays the soldier's mothers. "I don't think people want to know the damage that war is doing to our men." But Haggis doesn't see Elah as a political film. "It doesn't matter if you thought going into Iraq was right or wrong," he says. "Let's set all that side and ask, 'What's the hidden human cost?' I have the same hope for [Elah] that I had for Crash - that it'll stir debate, that people will walk out of the theater arguing and talking about what's happening in America."
Continue reading "The Courage of Their Convictions" »
Cannon on Rove
Very much worth your time.
War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
Via Julian Sanchez, I came upon a quote from Christopher Hitchens that I hadn't encountered before. It runs:
In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the passage early in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, when the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, feels similar stirrings (albeit with vastly different political motivations) upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:
The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
Continue reading "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" »
All My Sons
Arthur Miller's secret:
No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it's the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller's son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it's impossible to say whether his father's friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old.
Read the whole thing.
The Myth of the Rational Voter
Louis Menand, in a great piece on voter irrationality from a few years back:
... after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that "very substantial portions of the public" hold opinions that are essentially meaningless-off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.
Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse's sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered "don't care" or "don't know." In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don't understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
Or put another way:
(hat tip: Alex Tabarrok)
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