« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 » April 2008 ArchivesApril 30, 2008There Goes The NeighborhoodAs you may have noticed, my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has been foolish enough to start a blog. Meanwhile, Doublethink Online is hosting brand-new blogs by James Poulos (is there anywhere he doesn't blog?) and Sonny Bunch. You should check them out - especially on days like today, when posting gets a bit slack around these parts. April 29, 2008Farewell And AdieuSad news for film criticism, both online and in print, but perhaps good news for the movies: Matt Zoller Seitz, critic extraordinaire, is hanging up his keyboard to focus full time on filmmaking. Keith Uhlich, who's inheriting the editorship at The House Next Door, has the exit interview. Miley Cyrus Knows What She's DoingI agree with my fellow moralistic scold, Rod Dreher, that the MSM handwringing over how Miley Cyrus's handlers should have known better than to let the fifteen-year-old pose for the Vanity Fair photo that she's now apologizing for is more than a little ridiculous; the whole thing looks like a staged controversy, not a real blunder. If you're trying manage a transition from tween sensation to alluring grown-up star, doing an artsy, sexually-suggestive photo shoot and then hastily apologizing for it seems like a brilliant career move - you reap the benefits of the Vanity Fair treatment while simultaneously distancing yourself from it. And I also agree with Poulos that the photo in and of itself isn't problematic. You can make perfectly tasteful art, as he says, from the "worshipful celebration of the fecundity of the pubescent female body." The problem comes in because we inhabit "a culture in which 'worship' seems to mean corrupting unceremoniously and kicking to the curb." One day you're posing for Annie Leibowitz; the next you've ended up in the Britney-Lindsey-Paris circle of celebrity hell. Where I part ways from James and Rod, though, it on what this incident portends for Miley's future trajectory. Precisely because I think the Cyruses are stage-managing this whole "controversy" - and doing so pretty adeptly - I'm inclined to think that maybe, just maybe, they have enough worldliness and self-awareness to navigate Miley's adolescence without letting the celebrity machine grind her down into Britney Redux. That machine isn't evil because it corrupts every young woman who steps into its gears; it's evil because it preys upon the weak and the damaged and the dumb, the girls who aren't equipped to deal with the intersection of their celebrity and their sexuality, and with the culture's desire to use them up and throw them away. And while this whole phony controversy doesn't make me think that highly of Miley Cyrus and the people around her, it does make me think that they might be smart enough - and, yes, cynical enough - to play the system, rather than letting the system play them. April 28, 2008Jeremiah Wright, SOBWhat Andrew said, and good for him, though I take Noah Millman's point that any further distancing by Obama is more or less just theater at this point: We know who and what Wright is, we know how Obama thinks about their relationship (or how he wanted to think about it; he may be thinking different thoughts right about now).and it's hard to see what more there is that voters need to hear in order to make a judgment about whether and how the Wright-Obama connection ought to matter. But I will say this: Whatever one thinks of how Obama's choice of pastor should bear on his qualifications for the Presidency, it's hard to feel anything but pity for the junior Senator from Illinois after watching Wright's disgustingly narcissistic display over the last few days. Obama has compared his pastor to a crazy uncle, but I suspect - based on how he's talked about his minister, how he's written about him, and how people tend to think about their spiritual mentors - that if he were being completely honest, he'd describe Wright as closer to a father-figure instead. And now, as if being abandoned by his biological dad wasn't bad enough, he's lugging a quintessential Bad Father through his Presidential campaign - a pure creep straight out of an Augusten Burroughs memoir, who's happy to sabotage a younger, finer man who might just be the first black President of the United States in the hopes of feeding his own ego and becoming ... what? The next Al Sharpton? The next Willie Horton? How vile and pathetic. Obviously I'm not rooting for Barack Obama to win the Presidency, but if he does take the election this fall, there will be some compensating pleasures - not only the thrill that will accompany seeing a man ascend to the Oval Office who could have been bought and sold in a different, more unjust America, but the pleasure of knowing that Jeremiah Wright's attempt at self-aggrandizing sabotage fell flat on its face. Presidential Reputations
Alex Massie polls his readership, asking everyone to pick the most overrated and underrated U.S. Presidents, and I thought I'd offer my ballot in the form of a blog post. In the overrated camp, I'd place Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy (both obvious choices, I think) and then throw in Harry Truman as well, whose reputation deserved to be rehabilitated from the nadir it reached during his second term, but whose current position as the bipartisan saint of American politics grossly overstates his virtues. In the latter camp, I'd place Eisenhower (whose reputation has risen, true, but not high enough for my taste), George H.W. Bush and Warren G. Harding - the latter for the reasons outlined by Ilya Somin here. (I certainly wouldn't haul Harding up into the near-greats or greats, but he deserves better than to be placed in the bottom five, just as his predecessor deserves far worse than his regular top-ten showings.) All of my picks are twentieth-century figures, you'll note. If pressed on the pre-1900 chief executives, I suppose I would say that Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland are slightly underrated (though only by virtue of being forgotten), and James Madison and Andrew Jackson slightly overrated. But with the exception of Lincoln and Washington, and perhaps famous debacles like James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, I'm not sure how profitable it is to argue the overrated/underrated question where nineteenth-century Presidents are concerned, since the majority don't have sufficiently-defined reputations these days to really be counted either way. Race-Baiting, Once MoreNow this, via Andrew and the Mississippi GOP, does strike me as a racially-charged ad. Not because of its content - it's the Wright stuff again - but because of the way its visuals play with the color scheme to link the local Democrat to Wright and Obama. See what you think: Race-Baiting RevisitedA reader offers the most plausible explanation I've seen for why that North Carolina ad should be read as racist: ... I understand what you are saying about the race card but you also have to think about the context. An ad airing in North Carolina attacking two gubernatorial candidate in a six-degrees-of-pastor-Wright is suspicious but could be fair game (although very silly). But then take close look at the ad. Notice how Beverly Perdue, the white woman, is featured in a photo embracing Obama, a black man. But somehow Richard Moore is featured on his own. Well, unless the abuse of the race card actually exacerbates racial tensions, by constantly framing the ordinary rough-and-tumble of political combat as Jim Crow come again. It is, of course, possible that the North Carolina GOP was trying to stoke fears of miscegenation by running the (strikingly unsexual, to my admittedly-Yankee eye) photo of Perdue with Obama, just as it's possible that the famous anti-Harold Ford ad from last year was trying to send out a "Harold Ford is going to rape your daughters, white America" vibe with its inclusion of a blonde, bare-shouldered bimbo from the Playboy party telling Ford to call her. But in both cases, it's worth noting that the ad in question could have been cut exactly the same way if the candidate it attacked were white. If Obama were a white politician being criticized for his ties to a left-wing white preacher (yes, they do exist), the difference between the two photos of the N.C. politicians would be chalked up to Obama having appeared with Perdue and not with Moore - if, that is, anyone stopped to ponder the difference at all. Likewise, if Ford had been a white Democrat with a reputation as a dandy and a ladies man running a populist and religion-infused campaign in a Southern state, the "call me, Harold" ad would have been treated as the clever culture-war foray it was, and either celebrated or criticized on those grounds. I certainly understand the urge to apply special scrutiny to these issues where our first plausible black Presidential candidate is concerned. And maybe I really just can't understand how subtle, and crucial, dog-whistle politics can be because I'm not from the South. But I just don't see how it strikes any sort of real blow against racism to close-read every attack ad against a black candidate for instances where he's shown edging just a little too close to a middle-aged white woman for the Bubba vote's comfort. I would also note, for the record, that most of the voices claiming that the ad is racist aren't mentioning anything about the Obama-Bev Perdue pairing. They're suggesting, as E.J. Dionne did last week, that any attempt to tie Obama to Wright is out-of-bounds, becomes it comes with noxious "racial undertones." Or else they're claiming, as the Times did this weekend, that labeling Obama "too extreme for North Carolina" is a form of racism - because the mere use of the word "extreme" represents "a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state." In other words, they're arguing for a blatant double standard, in which the sort of attacks that white politicians absorb all the time - being tied to their most controversial friends and allies, being labeled extreme or outside the mainstream - are by definition racist when they're launched against Barack Obama. April 25, 2008The Pundits And The PeopleTo my suggestion that Barack Obama may leave many people more cynical about politics than he found them, Matt responds: That sounds to me like the kind of thing a liberal would have said before getting pummeled by Ronald Reagan. Realistically, the number of people who have any awareness of "actual policymaking" is pretty tiny and I think most people mostly want to stay in the dark. People want to put in office people who they feel understand them and then forget about it. That's why you see so much identity-driven voting, and that's why an ability to make a large circle of people believe that you understand them is such a vital political skill. This seems largely persuasive to me, and I should have qualified my earlier remarks - the "people" I had in mind were the pundit-and-activist class, the folks who argue and fundraise and mobilize and are involved deeply enough in politics to care about "actual policymaking" in a way that the average American just doesn't. (See also Peter Suderman on this count.) Though I would add that if you end up alienating/disappointing a large enough chunk of this pundit-and-activist class, there's a trickle-down effect to the larger public, since the political class shapes how elected officials are perceived. (I think Bill Clinton's first two years in office followed this trajectory, for instance: First he lost the people who follow politics for a living, and then he lost the country.) But Matt's point makes sense a general rule: Politicians' favorable ratings tend to track with their personalities on the one hand and with large-scale trends (the economy, crime rates, etc.) and major debacles (Iraq, Katrina) on the other, more than with the day-to-day sausage-making of policy work. And Barack Obama's "I have understood you" approach to politics will continue to be an asset with many swing voters long after it ceases to be an asset with at least some of the political junkies who are rallying around him at the moment. Race-Baiting?Andrew describes the North Carolina advertisement that John McCain is noisily condemning as a "guilt-by-association racist smear." The ad is definitely an attempt at a guilt-by-association swipe, and it's crude and clumsy and sufficiently substance-free that there may be something to be gained by McCain in condemning it. But I would be very curious to hear Andrew's explanation for what makes the ad "racist." Watch for yourself: I don't think it's all that hard to imagine the Democratic Party of, say, Pennsylvania launching a similar ad attacking John McCain for his connections to John Hagee or some other noxious religious-right pooh-bah - ties which are far thinner, of course, than Obama's connections to Jeremiah Wright. Would Andrew label that sort of ad a "racist smear"? Presumably not - and yet it seems as though we're embarking on an election season in which any attack ad launched against Obama on what his cheering sections deems illegitimate grounds will get denounced, not just as "freak show" politics-as-usual, which would be fair enough, but as dirty racist politics straight out of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's U.S. of KKK-A. Which is to say, it's going to be a long year. The Audacity of the Party LineRegarding the possibility of Obama taking a page from Democrats for Life, a reader who follows these issues closely writes: Obama has never expressed any support for the "Pregnant Women Support Act" (i.e., the 95-10 bill introduced in Congress in 2007; it has languished ever since - neither Pelosi, nor Reid (nor any committee chair) have brought it forward for a hearing, etc.). In fact, Obama recently voted against one of its key provisions, namely, (re)inclusion of coverage for unborn children under SCHIP (the Allard Amendment). More damningly, he is a co-sponsor of the radically pro-abortion "Freedom of Choice Act." Indeed, he told a gathering at a Planned Parenthood event that "his first act" as President would be to sign it. None of this is terribly surprising, given the landscape of today's Democratic Party - Hillary Clinton is likewise a FOCA sponsor, needless to say - but it's a useful reminder of the limits of what Steve Sailer likes to call Obama's "I have understood you" appeal to people with whom he disagrees. It's an approach to politics that's sustainable only up till the moment when platitudes have to give way to actual policymaking, and as such it has the capacity to breed even greater disillusionment with government (by raising expectations and then dashing them) than the up-front partisanship it seeks to vanquish. The other day, a friend remarked: "Obama is making me more cynical about politics," and I think before all this is over an awful lot of people are going to agree with him. I suspect that number will include anti-war liberals and libertarian Obamaphiles like Andrew; I'm almost positive that it will include those anti-war, pro-life Catholics who have concluded that the Illinois Senator is a more conservative choice than John McCain. April 24, 2008Big Screen, Small StarsMatt Feeney, on Forgetting Sarah Marshall: It’s typical for these breakup movies for the guy to upgrade from the desiccated, WASPy blonde who dumped him to an earthy brunette, but the contrast in this movie is so glaring that I actually felt sorry for Kristen Bell, who plays Sarah Marshall. (This is going to sound harsh. I wouldn’t write it if I thought Kristen Bell were a TAS reader.) Her character is a sort of parody of a television actress, but the thing is that she looks like a parody of a television actress. Where Mila Kunis is a sort of Rousseauan ideal of natural beauty, all litheness and fitness and proportion, Bell has the tiny body and oversized head that actors are said to often have, so that even when her whole body is on screen, her head still looks like it’s supposed to have a television around it. A television actress herself, she was obviously cast because of how closely she resembles the thing her character is supposed to be a parody of. So, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Kristen Bell gets to literally embody her own parody. That is not an identity that – having called attention to it in such a way – you can just climb out of for your next movie. Given the roll that Judd Apatow is currently on, Sarah Marshall must have seemed like a dream part for Bell, but, to be honest, I don’t see how her career will recover from it. Harsh but basically true, though I would differ with his take on Kunis: While I agree that her character was vastly more physically fetching than Bell's Marshall, I thought her performance, too, had the smaller-than-life quality that usually results when a television star gets miscast in a feature film. (Though she turned in better work than Jason Segel, who had the smaller-than-life quality that you'd expect if you cast that pretty-funny guy you went to high school with in a feature film.) Matt also wonders if by calling the movie a "something of a dud" I meant that it wasn't funny at all, to which I'd answer with a resounding no. Large swathes of the movie weren't nearly as funny as they should have been, and a few sections - particularly the running gag about the uptight newlyweds - were just painfully unfunny. But one of the leads was almost hilarious enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile. To wit: Christianity, Darwinism and The FallNoah Millman makes a good point: I continue to believe that both sides of the Darwin vs. Christianity battle are missing the most telling point. We should all agree that religious dogma has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a scientific theory. Heliocentrism is true; geocentrism is false. There is an enormous weight of evidence behind the theory of evolution by natural selection. There is going to be more and more evidence behind new theories about the workings of the human mind, and the interactions of the human genome and human personality. All religion can do is react to these discoveries and, as part of that reaction, caution us about drawing unwarranted conclusions (political, moral, what-have-you) from the evidence. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, because I think science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive. Of course, one reason I think it's a good point is that I just made it myself, in a review of Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity for the the just-released, not-yet-online spring issue of Claremont Review of Books. The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D'Souza included, often employ. I didn't attempt to address that challenge in the review, in part because I wouldn't say that I have a settled opinion on the matter. It seems to me, though, that the possible rejoinders to the Millman argument fall into three broad categories. One view would hold that strife and pain and death are only evils when they are experienced by creatures who are made in the image of God; since animals are not so created, they have more or less the same moral status as machines, and the Almighty is indifferent to their suffering. In this view, evolution by natural selection poses no difficulty at all for Christian theodicy: Pain and death are natural to our animal ancestors but an evil when experienced by self-conscious beings with free will, and for that reason homo sapiens were granted immortality initially, only to subsequently lose it through disobedience to God. (This seems to be the view that Stephen Barr takes in this post, though I may be misinterpreting him.) The second perspective the one that C.S. Lewis inclined toward; as you might expect from the man who created Narnia, he was particularly concerned by the problem that animal suffering poses for theodicy, and he argued that Satan's influence on the world must necessarily have predated the Fall of Man. Sin entered human history with the disobedience of our first parents, in other words, but it entered the history of the universe at the beginning of time, with Lucifer's disobedience. The emergence of Man through evolution-by-natural-selection, in this view, is a case of God making use of a fallen creation for His own good ends. The final perspective - which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with Teilhard de Chardin - suggests that the Fall is both a temporal and an extra- or supra-temporal event, one whose impact on creation runs both forward and backward in time, retroactively poisoning the pre-historic development of man as well as his history. This sounds like the strangest and most implausible of the possible explanations, obviously. But given the mysterious relationship between space and time that modern physics has uncovered, and the still more mysterious relationship between space, time and eternity that obtains if Christianity's account of things is true, it may not be quite so implausible as it sounds. April 23, 2008Why The Superdelegates Won't End ItBecause nobody can make them, says Jeff Greenfield: ...who are the brokers? Which political leaders can deliver pocketfuls of delegates? The short answer is, no one. The undecided superdelegates control exactly one vote each (or half a vote)—their own. The idea that a cohort of these folks will unify calls to mind the difficulty of herding cats. To be sure, dozens of House superdelegates will listen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but the politics of their districts—or their key financial supporters—are likely to matter a lot more to them. As for National Chairman Howard Dean, his office comes with few if any powers of persuasion. Even its fundraising pales in comparison with the party's senatorial and congressional campaign committees, and Dean's political clout has so far proven nonexistent. Al Gore clearly has the respect of his party, but many of the brokered convention fantasies revolve around him as the ultimate nominee, not kingmaker. Because they don't want to, says John Podhoretz: Yes. Sure. Because politicians with the most valuable votes in America are just going to choose up sides and not spend three months being courted and feted and promised. They are going to forswear having their feet kissed, their backs massaged, their views requested, their wants fulfilled, their needs anticipated. They are going to throw their vote away rather than milk it for all it’s worth. Limping To Victory
To my my Current from yesterday arguing that conservatives shouldn't let the Democratic civil war blind them to the mountain that John McCain still has to climb, I would add that it's also worth pondering Jay Cost's thoughts on the ways in which the primary campaign has actually been "quite helpful for the Democrats," since it has "exposed weaknesses in both campaigns that might not have been identified until October," and "given both an opportunity to strengthen themselves." He writes: Consider a few examples. We have learned that the Clinton organization was plagued by pro-Clinton myopia. Operating under the assumption that she could not lose, it failed to do everything it could to ensure victory. This included small things like mismanaging Bill, to big things like leaving caucus states unorganized. If Clinton had won Iowa and New Hampshire, knocking Obama out, it might not have discovered its myopia until it was too late. Learning in October that its basic assumptions were fundamentally flawed would have been disastrous. Cost goes on to argue that the problem for the Dems "is not that the campaign has gone on this long. Rather, it is that there is no obvious terminal point," and thus no way to stop the race for dragging on long past the "point at which the benefits to the campaign are outweighed by the costs." I agree, but I also think it's worth pointing out that while the competition has been helpful for the Democrats, the chronology - and the narrative the chronology creates - hasn't been helpful at all. If you're going to have an evenly-matched, hard-fought primary, you want it to stay evenly-matched throughout, with the eventual winner only pulling away at the very end. Or better still, you want the eventual loser to dominate the early going, and the eventual winner to gradually claw their way back into things and then pull ahead at the end, creating a great "comeback kid" narrative to carry into the general election. What you don't want is what the Democrats have now: A dynamic in which the eventual winner - Obama, that is - pulled way ahead in the middle of the campaign, only to have the eventual loser mount a furious comeback that everyone outside her inner circle (and lots of people inside, one imagines) knows is more or less hopeless, but which has succeeded in bloodying the front-runner at precisely the moment when he could be gearing up to use his enormous financial edge to crush John McCain. Cost is right: There's a very real sense in which it's good for Obama to have some of his weaknesses exposed in the primary campaign, rather than in October. But it would have been even better for Obama, and for his party, if those weaknesses had been exposed earlier in the primaries, and if these later weeks were given over to triumph and consolidation, rather than a slow limp to the finish line. Photo by Flickr user graciepoo used under a Creative Commons license. April 22, 2008Obama, Abortion, and 95/10Doug Kmiec, pro-lifer and Obama endorser, explains how Obama can By embracing a proposal equivalent to what the leaders of his own counsel of advisors have already endorsed: the so-called 95-10 legislation. This idea satisfies neither side of an absolutist clash completely - how could it and still be common ground? - yet it strives for a 95% reduction in abortion over 10 years, not by legal mandate that would contradict the Senator's belief that this decision must remain that of the mother, but instead by ensuring that no woman faces such decision without having already had the benefit of responsible information about abstinence and contraception. In the event of a pregnancy, the proposal would supply objective information about fetal development, the proper guidance of a parent if the prospective mother is a minor, and the public's assurance of necessary economic support to carry the pregnancy to term, and if it be the mother's informed choice, the adoption of her child. You can read up on the 95/10 plan here, on the website of Democrats for Life. They describe it as "a comprehensive package of federal legislation and policy proposals that will reduce the number of abortions by 95% in the next 10 years." I would describe it as a grab-bag of modest proposals, some of them creditable, that might reduce the abortion rate by 10 percent over 95 years. And while I would be delighted to see Obama endorse the plan, since it's always nice to have pro-choice politicians on the record suggesting that abortion is a bad thing and we ought to have less of it, I have a tough time seeing it happening. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose gender and record and reputation offers her enough maneuvering room to occasionally play the "safe, legal and never" card, I suspect that Obama simply doesn't have enough feminist cred to even tiptoe off the liberal reservation on abortion. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong. April 21, 2008Jazz And Gangsta Rap (II)In addition to ensuring that I'll be labeled forever as "rap scold Douthat", I think these three posts from last week about Bill Cosby, rap and jazz ended up conflating several intertwined but arguably distinct issues - the moral content of rap versus jazz, the artistic content of rap versus jazz, gangsta rap versus the broader universe of rap and hip-hop, non-ironic versus ironic approaches to exploitative entertainment, and probably a few others as well. Rather than trying to untangle them, though, I'll just cop out and suggest you go read Peter Suderman and Michael Brendan Dougherty on these and related subjects. In Defense of the Freak ShowJohn Harris and Jim Vandehei do a fine job of demolishing one narrative about the Debate That Everyone Hated last week in Philadelphia - namely, the notion that there was something particularly unfair to Barack Obama about the line of questioning the moderators took. But the larger critique - embodied in posts like this one, from Andrew - isn't that the debate was unfair to Obama; it's that it was unfair to the viewing public. According to this line of argument, in an election as important as this one (though really in any Presidential election, presumably), it's a dereliction of duty for the press to focus on issues that don't relate directly to policy questions - to obsess over Obama's relationship to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, for instance, or his decision not to wear a flag pin, or his comments about working-class voters, when there are serious matters like war and peace, health care and the environment, the deficit and the economy that deserve to be debated. One possible response to this critique was ventured by David Brooks, on the night of the debate. He argued that reporters have an obligation to ask about the "freak show" issues - as Harris and Mark Halperin famously dubbed them - because voters care about them. I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault. I take his point, but I think it's worth mounting a more vigorous defense of talking about issues like the Obama-Wright connection or Hillary’s fibs about Tuzla or even the essentially absurd flag-on-the-lapel controversy. I don't think these topics matter just because they’re "symbolic"; I think they matter because they’re personal, because they tell us something (or seem to tell us something) about the psychology of the person we're being asked to vote for. Now, obviously the mainstream press tends to overplay the personal issues, because they make for better theater and higher ratings and all the rest, and because television hosts, in particular, seem to live in terror of finding themselves too deep in the policy weeds. And just as obviously, these issues make easy fodder for partisan attacks, which is why they're so often whipped up by the noise machines of the right and (increasingly) the left. But that doesn't mean that they don't or shouldn't matter. Why do they matter? Well, because picking a man (or woman) to hold the office of the Presidency is an awesome responsibility: By voting to elevate Barack Obama or John McCain or anyone to the White House, you’re voting to vest an immense amount of responsibility in a single individual; indeed, you're essentially voting to grant them the sort of powers that the monarchs of old could only dream about. Yes, of course, Presidents are restrained by Congress and the Courts and the Constitution (well, sometimes), but there’s still a very real sense in which we’re electing a temporary king. And what was true in the court of European rulers way back when is likewise true for modern American Presidents: The personal is political. By this I mean that when we elect a new chief executive, we aren’t just electing to live with their policy positions. We’re deciding to live with their personalities – their sexual appetites and Daddy issues, their spouses and their friends, their religious beliefs and their psychodramas – for four or eight long years. (Or more, in our dynastic age, since we’ve been in Bushworld since 1988, and Clintonland since ’92.) April 18, 2008More CosbyI would be remiss if I didn't link to this engaging interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, from our crack web video team: The Pope and the ScandalOver at the Current, I have a post up on Benedict XVI's meeting with the sex-abuse victims. April 17, 2008The Art of Smashmortion (II)Yep, it's a hoax - or, if you prefer, "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body." Yesterday's Culture WarsThis interesting Louis Menand review of David Hajdu's book about the "great comic-book scare" in Fifties America seems worth quoting in the context of my last two posts: Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new. So one way to look at the comic-book inquisition is to see it as an effort to repress an edgy, provocative, satirical popular form and to dictate to people what books they should and should not read. In this view, a big, powerful, established social entity (consisting of psychiatrists and government officials) is squashing a bunch of little, powerless entities (consisting of individual comic-book artists and readers). Jazz And Gangsta RapI should note, in response to a commenter's point on my last post, that yes, obviously gangsta rap obviously has already been domesticated by the upper-bourgeoisie, becoming a tame sort of protest music for young well-off white kids who aren't really protesting anything. But there's distinction between this sort of domestication and what's happened to jazz, which hasn't just become safe - it's become highbrow. And the following (irony-drenched and NSFW) video notwithstanding, I have a tough time imagining the same thing happening with Dr. Dre. (Moreover, if it does happen - if the fortysomething intellectuals of 2030 end up dragging their griping kids to hear the N.W.A. in the Park concert series - it will be a vastly more plausible indicator of cultural decline than the highbrowfication of Miles Davis.) Bill Cosby And Cultural DeclineI highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' profile of Bill Cosby in the latest Atlantic, but one passage seemed worth plucking out and arguing with. Here's Coates: Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception ... Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments ... In one sense, these are all good points: The supposed golden ages of the past had problems of their own, which are connected to the problems we have today; the impact of pop cultural trends on sociological trends can be vastly overstated; gangsta rap is as much a manifestation of pre-existing pathologies as it is a cause of new ones; etc. But there's also a sense in which Coates' argument here, with its emphasis on the perpetual recurrence of cultural declinism among reformers and intellectuals, runs the risk of eliding the reality of actual-existing cultural decline. The fact that legends of a golden age can obscure a far more complicated reality doesn't change the fact that cultural indicators do vary from era to era; true, no era is Edenic, but some periods simply are more virtuous than others. The fact that prior generations of intellectuals fretted, Cosby-style, about African-American crime rates, family structure, and so on doesn't change the fact that those problems have grown much, much worse in the interim. And the fact that some moralistic crusades are foolish and misguided doesn't mean that all of them are. The anti-jazz crusaders confused the music with the venues where it played, but that doesn't mean that they were wrong to inveigh against alcoholism and gambling, and the fact that fifty years later jazz has become easy-listening music for the haute-bourgeoisie doesn't mean the same thing will happen - or should happen, more importantly - to this kind of thing. The Art of SmashmortionThere's a sense in which the best pro-life response to the Yale student whose "senior art project" involved repeatedly impregnating herself using artificial insemination and then taking abortifacent drugs to induce miscarriage would be to ignore her completely, rather than rewarding her with the spluttering outrage she's obviously seeking. That said, as much as I'd like to see the appalling Ms. Shvarts denied the satisfaction of the publicity she craves, there's a larger sense in which stories like these - with the uncomfortable questions they raise for at least some segments of the pro-choice side - are too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored. So keep flogging it, Drudge! Also, am I the only one who detects a whiff of fraud about this project? I mean, does this sound like any Yale seniors you know? She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. I know, I know, she's passionate and fearless about her "art," willing to go to any lengths to shock the bourgeoisie. But still ... Update: Yuval Levin shares my skepticism. April 16, 2008I Am Donald SutherlandI should note that we've also posted the audio from a West Virginia University panel on "Digital Media and the 2008 Election" on iTunes. The event featured Matt and myself, among other luminaries, and it inspired John Cole, in attendance, to remark: Ross reminded me less of a conservative writer than he did a sociology teacher who sleeps with his students. Think Donald Sutherland in Animal House. Maybe I should reconsider the beard-tweed combination. Jason Segel: The Funny YearsForgetting Sarah Marshall, which I review for the next NR, is something of a dud - it's a rare case where I agree with David Denby's assessment - and the mediocre work turned by Jason Segel, in particular, is a textbook example of why some supporting actors shouldn't be handed leading roles. (Or allowed to write their own movies, for that matter.) But Vulture's here to remind us that when Segel isn't trying to be something he isn't, he can bring the funny. Prosperity And "Fundamentalism"Daniel Larison has a couple of good posts up in response to Andrew's attempt to defend Obama's comments about religion. Andrew casts the remarks as a reference, not to faith as such, but to "a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often - but not always - part of the fundamentalist psyche," and that can indeed be a manifestation (or so "history has sometimes shown," he contends) of "economic, political and cultural frustration." In response, Daniel makes the point that history may have "sometimes" shown this, but usually it doesn't show anything of the sort - a point that dovetails in obvious ways with my own remarks yesterday about cultural conservatism, prosperity and voting behavior. I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component - from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants' revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as "fundamentalism") does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest - at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn't include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency - that "economic frustration" has very little to do with its appeal. (It's also worth noting that to the extent that contemporary religious conservatives, Catholic and Protestant alike, do emphasize poverty and economic tribulation, it's usually in the context of exhorting their co-religionists to help others in need, whether in the U.S. or (especially) overseas. Gersonism is a politics for prosperous Christians looking to do good in the world, not economically-frustrated believers clinging desperately to their churches, guns, and bigotries.) Looking For the Black SwanRiffing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, Rod Dreher writes: Taleb's discussion of the role of randomness in our lives, and how we cannot anticipate freak events (all we can know for sure is that they'll happen, sooner or later) makes me reflect on how I've never really gotten over watching 9/11 unfold right before my eyes. The anger is gone, mostly, but the sense of dread and unease isn't. I saw -- we all saw, but I saw it and heard it and smelled it, and I couldn't get away from it for a long time, because you always smelled it when you went outside for months afterward -- that our entire world could change radically in the course of a morning. Taleb talks about how his native Lebanon had lived in relative communal piece for centuries, such that nobody there could imagine the civil war that came upon them in the 1980s. And when it did happen, everybody assumed it would end quickly, because, well, it had to. But it didn't, and it was terrible. What I find interesting about this is that I share Rod’s premise – the assumption that various inherently unpredictable disasters are lurking ahead of us – without sharing his tendency to scan the headlines looking for harbingers of the apocalypse. If anything, I lean in the opposite direction, and tend to be dismissive of the various doom-and-destruction scenarios that make their way into print these days. I think Rod and I draw similar political conclusions from the “black swan” premise, in the sense that both his “crunchy” politics and my Sam’s Club politics are dedicated to shoring up the sort of habits and institutions that are especially useful in times of dislocation and upheaval, and cultivating what Reihan has termed, in conversation if not in print, the “resilient society.” (Though of course Rod and I would often disagree on what that cultivation and shoring up ought entail.) But when it comes to specific scenarios for dislocation and upheaval, my default instinct tends to be that precisely because “black swan” events are by their nature wildly unpredictable, there’s little to be gained by trying to predict which one – peak oil? avian flu? the next Great Depression? – will actually end up throwing our society for a loop. Better to pursue a politics geared toward all eventualities, in other words, than to play a guessing game that’s only likely to cost you precious resources, and still more precious sleep. Of course, this approach has its own set of problems: Some calamities are predictable, some unpredictable ones are dire enough to militate for action even when the odds are that the action in question will prove unnecessary, and I worry that my instincts may incline me toward an unwarranted panglossianism about a variety of problems, from global warming to the current economic situation. Somewhere between Rod’s approach and mine, then, lies the happy medium that policymakers ought to strive – so they should read us both, and split the difference. April 15, 2008ObamacastIn our latest podcast, downloadable from iTunes here, you can listen as Marc Ambinder and I discuss the great "cling" controversy. What Obama Really Got WrongTimothy Noah, surveying the literature on the white working class and its voting behavior in the wake of Obama's San Francisco fiasco, tiptoes close to an important point about the roots of culture-war politics but doesn't quite get there. Citing a fascinating new paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, he writes: Although [Teixeira and Abramowitz] found working-class whites more likely to oppose abortion than upper-class whites ... the working-class whites were far less likely than upper-class whites to abandon the Democrats over the abortion issue. Only 57 percent working-class whites opposed to abortion identified with the GOP, compared with 92 percent of upper-class whites opposed to abortion. Abramowitz and Teixeira also lean toward the DLC and away from [Thomas] Frank on the question of whether economic populism can save the Democrats, mainly because working-class Americans, like Americans as a whole, tend to harbor unrealistically grim notions about how bad life is for everyone else while simultaneously harboring unrealistically sunny notions about how good life is for themselves ... "The white working class today is an aspirat |
