Poverty porn and Celebrity Saviors

Oh, my! I looked away from pop culture for a few unguarded decades and failed to notice that philanthropy can have unintended consequences and that noisy philanthropists may be promoting themselves.

For political leaders, who increasingly struggle to make a connection with their publics, and the media, which has an unhealthy appetite for poverty porn, the attraction of Geldof was always that he was a maverick, a doer rather than a thinker, whose quickly thought-up campaigns — from Live Aid in 1985 to Live 8 in 2005 — provided politicians with an opportunity to shoulder-rub with rock stars and look caring at the same time and gave the media yet another opportunity to publish photographs of emaciated foreigners. This is also what riled Geldof’s then small number of critics, which included me. Some of us argued that the depiction of Geldof as Africa’s “messiah” both rehabilitated the outdated idea of the White Man’s Burden and also distracted from any serious debate about the kind of massive economic development sub-Saharan Africa really needs, and how it might go about getting it.

(Note to self: add “poverty porn” and “celebrity savior” to sound bite collection. Second note to self: don’t use it to the point of cynicism.)

To Change the (Barbarian) World

(This posting may be of limited interest to non-Orthodox readers.)

I just discovered a new Orthodox blog that looks somewhat promising, Koinonia. The owner/host has completed a very manageable 3-part series, Barbarians at the Gate, where he takes to task not the barbarians (he just identifies them fairly trenchantly), but the indifference or capitulation of the Orthodox Church to those barbarians. Part of his solution is that we cease and desist from bashing Western Culture and get down to the work of transforming it.

Our alliance with barbarism has happened because we have rejected the Christian roots of Western culture in a misguided effort to (1) keep the Church Greek (or Russian, or Arab, or Serbian) or (2) to distinguish “True Orthodoxy” from “false Catholicism” or (3) because, like Frank Schaeffer, we are simply cultural-despisers who have found that the Orthodox tradition is a convenient cudgel with which to continue waging our political or cultural battles. Whatever the reason, this amounts to a refusal to engage in any meaningful way with the cultural marketplace of ideas. As a result, it leaves the public square utterly naked – even as we moan and complain about it privately. Worse, it makes us the tools by which Nietzsche could proclaim that God was a non-factor (“dead”) in modern life. Itputs us in a position where we not only fail America – to be salt and light for our neighbor and our country – but also Christ and ourselves.

…

The spiritual genius of the Orthodox Church has always been the ability of the Church to take on and transform the dominate culture. This means that just as Jesus was the authentic Jew among Jews, the Church has been – in turn – authentically Greek among the Greeks, and authentically Russian among the Russians, so too we must be authentically American among the Americans. While have rarely done this perfectly, we have largely done this without sacrificing the Gospel or the communion of the various local or ethnic churches.

Is there any reason, other than sloth or despair, why we think we cannot do this in America as well?

It hit a nerve. My posts in the short life of this blog have been relatively heavy on culture-bashing. I bash because I really do care – like an inarticulate father who doesn’t know what to do with a sick child except to yell.

Part of the challenge in Barbarians at the Gate is that there are people outside the Church with whom we can and must make common cause. He suggests, among a handrul, the Catholic Church.

I suggest that James Davidson Hunter, author (coiner?) of the influential Culture Wars in the 90s, is also one with whom we can make common cause. I highly commend this paper he gave at Trinity Forum 8 years ago. That “briefing” finally has grown to a book of the same title. I am greatly looking forward to reading it (if I can moderate my blogging long enough to fit it in).

Davidson’s main points from the briefing eight years ago:

Culture is a resource, and as such, a form of power.
Culture is produced.
Culture production is stratified into a rigid structure of “center” and “periphery.”
Culture changes from the top down; rarely if ever from the bottom up.
World-changing is most intense when the networks of elits and the institutions they lead overlap.

Another with whom we can make common cause is Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, who has been inspiring me for several decades now. I think we have some examples to emulate as well from the folks at Front Porch Republic.

The work at hand is not revolution, but the slow permeation of salt and the absorption of light. We need to be about it sooner rather than later.

Play with the cards you’re dealt

Interesting column today from David Brooks of the New York Times.

[M]uch research suggests that extremely self-confident leaders can also be risky … [C]harismatic C.E.O.’s often produce volatile company performances. These leaders swing for the home run and sometimes end up striking out. They make more daring acquisitions, shift into new fields and abruptly change strategies.

Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”

You don’t have to be a corporate leader to appreciate some of the insights.

Living toward the flourishing of others

Rod Dreher at Beliefnet writes enthusiastically about a new book, To Change the World, from James Davidson Hunter, who perhaps coined the term “Culture Wars” in his book by that title.

I have high respect for Hunter, though it’s been years since I read Culture Wars, so it was affirming to hear him making some of the points I made last month in Conscientious Objector the the Culture Wars. Hunter, eloquently:

The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians–and Christian conservatives most significantly–unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.

Me, [you supply the adverb]:

The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.

…

I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.

Hunter, interviewed, says he wants to accomplish three things through his new book:

A third thing that I would like for readers to take away is that there are alternative ways of thinking about the world we live in, and engaging it, that are constructive and draw upon resources within the Christian tradition. In the end, these strategies are not first and foremost about changing the world, but living toward the flourishing of others.

I like the italicized phrase at the end. It’s no panacea, however, as there remain some deep differences about how one promotes human flourishing. I’ll forego examples, lest I inflame things, though I have a very specific sharp difference in mind that arose between me and a bright young Christian of very liberal bent. For him it was self-evident that X promotes human flourishing. For me, it was almost self-evident that X promoted delusion, which might feel affirming and nourishing in the short term but ultimately would fail.

Dreher also has some extend quotes from Barbara Nicolosi-Harrington, a teacher of screenwriting in L.A.:

My vocation is to be a storyteller to the people of my time — and if I create a good enough story, stories have a way of transcending time. I’m very preoccupied with creating a story and characters that will haunt people in a way that sends them on a journey of introspection.

I am a political animal in many ways. It’s a big hobby for me. But I have, with the rest of my generation, almost completely lost confidence that real good in society can be achieved through politics. I don’t think that’s the pathway to lasting good. I think that politics can clear the field for good to be done, but I don’t think it actually achieves anything. I think culture is what creates good in the world. That’s the realm of the artist: the storyteller, the musician, the poet. And I see myself as a storyteller.

Me:

We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.

Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it….

I’m putting nobody under obligation by asking this, but what real good do you think politics accomplishes – or what great evil does it avoid?

The Gospel Reading for Pascha

The passion narratives having been read during the week, we come on the Day of Resurrection to read … not an explicit Resurrection narrative, but John 1: 1-17.

The choice of John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ….”) might seem an odd one, but:

In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Given the Orthodox emphasis on the Resurrection as Christ’s conquering of death (not – or not exclusively – a vindication of his “His message” or even of the deity of “His person,” as if to say “See? I’m God. I can do anything? Got that, dummies?”), the inability of light to “comprehend” the light takes on added power.

Another reason, however, may be the tradition of receiving Catechumens on Great and Holy Saturday. In other words, their formal catechesis having been completed, adults are received into the Church. We had no litany for Catchumens in the Liturgy today.

But what has that to do with why we read from John today? When I was a Protestant, we passed out the Gospel of John, separately printed, as a veritable evangelistic tract because of what we considered its warmth and accessibility. I believe it’s still the case that Wycliffe Bible Translators will translate and publish the Gospel of John in a new (to Wycliffe) language before any other Scriptures.

But it was not so in the early Church. The early Church actually withheld the Gospel of John from Catechumens, having them learn the facts of Christ’s life from the synoptic gospels. The Gospel of John was considered too theological for a novice. That’s right: the superficially warm and fuzzy Gospel of John is heavy theology!

Therein, no doubt, lies a rather large tale about how historic Christianity and Evangelicalism even conceive theology. Obviously, we’re seeing something more in John than its heart-warmingness. Something, even, that might be missed or misappropriated if John is read to early in a spiritual pilgrimage.

So – or so it seems to me – the Gospel for today from John may be appointed not just for its evocative power, but to continue the instruction of the “Newly Illumined” who were received the day before – and are now “ready for meat” in more than one sense. I wish I were equipped to flesh out this little epiphany better than this, but there it is.

The paradox of the self-denying mind

I jokingly said on FaceBook a few weeks ago that I thought I’d lost my need for certainty over the last decade, but I wasn’t sure. One of the areas which no longer move me to indignation very often is the “Creation/Evolution” controversy.

As if by force of habit, however, I do still read about it when I stumble onto something. I probably have 3-4 unread books in that general area, as well as having read a dozen or more over the years – and a dozen is probably a gross underestimate.

I’m not really competent enough in the hard sciences to rely on primary sources sources, but there are some accounts for intelligent non-scientists that seem to be at a fairly high level. I take them all with a grain of salt, however, as (1) it has become clear that everybody has an ax of some sort to grind – else they wouldn’t be writing about it and (2) one side sounds pretty good until I revisit the other side.

There are Christians whose integrity and intelligence I respect (it is because I respect and read them that I stumble onto articles and books on the controversy as often as I do) who are adamant foes of evolutionary theory and proponents of Intelligent Design. But I don’t share their visceral passion. They may be right and I may be wrong. I was wrong once. (Thought I was a second time, but I was wrong.)

Here’s my full bona fide, extemporaneous disclosure of what ax I have to grind – I who can go weeks at a time without thinking about the controversy:

“I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed)
I.e., I believe there is an invisible creation, which conventionally is called “supernatural” but is in fact just as created as the visible, “natural” created world. The key distinction is not nature versus supernature, but created versus uncreated. And only the Holy Trinity is Uncreated.
The uncreated Holy Trinity is impenetrable by science or reason generally, but has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. That’s Himself. Not scientific detail about the past. (And not – cover your eyes, Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye – details of earthly life that are yet future.) The Old Testament preeminently reveals Christ typologically; secondarily, it reveals God’s dealings with earthly Israel and its neighbors. If there’s tertiary purpose – and there probably is – it doesn’t come readily to mind.
Although there are Orthodox Christians – including Father Seraphim Rose, who was no intellectual slouch – who adhere to something like a full-throated Creationism® (used as a term of art for creation in 6 days of 24 hours about 6,000 – 10,000 years ago), I do not by any means understand that to be obligatory. My own position, very lightly held except for the preceding points, is generally Intelligent Design rather than Creationist®.
Whatever else you can say about it, the theory of evolution has been scientifically fruitful. So, I’m told, was the theory of alchemy. If you can get the whole Guild on the same page, it tends to make things interesting and productive even if the theory later collapses. So evolutionists have not been dogmatically hanging onto a delusional and unproductive theory just because it reinforces a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism (though one of their own famously said he’d prefer any natural explanation to any supernatural explanation because of such a prior commitment).
I do not understand Darwin to have said anything about the origins of life – only about The Origin of Species.
I don’t think neo-Darwinism has much more to say about the origins of life than did Darwin – except, perhaps, a few just-so stories.
I believe in what Wesley J. Smith calls “human exceptionalism.” Regardless of the origin of the human species in evolutionary terms, there’s within us a microcosm of the one in whose image we are made.

Believe it or not, that’s all preliminary. The actual occasion of this posting is my discovery (if I’d read it before, I had forgotten) of an essay by polymath George Gilder, titled Evolution and Me. Gilder does not diminish the importance of others’ work in Intelligent Design, but takes his own path away from any materialistic reductionism through Information Theory:

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or “source code” used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of “news.” Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.

As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.

I wont go much beyond that teaser about any details. Gilder speaks for himself, and you’ll find him persuasive or not for yourself.

But I do want to say this: I have difficulty seeing this as a “breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism” (Discovery Institute blurb) in any way that should affect non-scientists like me. Perhaps it really is a breakthrough scientifically (don’t expect to see white flags waving, however), but I’ll relegate that question to the scientists themselves.

For non-scientists like me, Gilder’s argument is cumulative evidence that there’s more going on in humanity, if nowhere else, than that which can be explained materially. The proverbial “bottom line” is kind of old hat:

Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Max Delbrück (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.”

Analogous to such canonical self-denying sayings as The Cretan says all Cretans are liars, the paradox of the self-denying mind tends to stultify every field of knowledge and art that it touches and threatens to diminish this golden age of technology into a dark age of scientistic reductionism and, following in its trail, artistic and philosophical nihilism.

Anyone who has taken philosophy knows that the “meat machine” is – well, a philosophical possibility. But I can’t live that way. And every word the materialist says to prove materialism to others says that he can’t live that way, either.

As I lose my need for absolute factual certainty, that’s evidence enough for me.

Sexual miscellany

Whiling away the hours until the Paschal Vigil tonight, I’ve caught up on a little reading. I mention sex (1) to drive traffic and (2) because there’s a sexual component to two of my three notables. (The third will get a separate posting.)

First, in the spin battles over Obamacare, we have Kate Michelman, abortion activist, lamenting that the Democrats so quickly abandoned insistence on covering “all the medical services women need and deserve.” From her perspective, the Democrats aren’t reliable friends, and “the pro-choice movement must have a powerful political presence independent of the Democratic Party.” She blames the Democrat strategic decision to recruit moderates after the 2004 election, which in fact led to election of several relatively moderate Democrats starting in 2006.

Indeed, it’s got to be a tough time to be a pro-abortion Democrat. There’s got to be – what? one? two? – dissonant voices in the Festive Friends of Feticide chorus that used to do unison soooo much better. Of course, the Republicans can count on Olympia Snow (sadly, Orthodox) and Lincoln Chafee peeling off from the GOP abortion platform at the drop of a hat. And there’s others whose pro-life song is delivered up so tone-deaf that I don’t really trust them to hold if the wind shifts a little. Maybe “tone deaf” is the wrong metaphor, but they don’t sound authentic. They sound like they’re dropping memorized sound bites.

So I feel your pain, Kate – enough so that I won’t call myself Republican today. I’m now roughly 30 years into dreaming of the day when abortion won’t be a partisan issue, but as the parties try to achieve their optimally big tents, that day bodes to be a while coming.

Ironically echoing her distrust of Democrats is Kathleen Parker, a generally conservative columnist at the Washington Post, lamenting Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak’s vote-switch for 30 pieces of silver a rather meaningless Executive Order. The unreliability runs both ways. Someone else dissed Stupak by saying you can’t count on pro-life Democrats. Indeed, party discipline can be pretty compelling. Stupak defends himself against Parker here.

Looking well past the next election – and the next, and the next – is Kasper Melville’s Battle of the Babies in the UK’s New Humanist magazine. The story should be a familiar one for both the triumphalist secularists and the tongue-clucking “hell in a handbasket” religious folks: the devoutly religious are outbreeding secularists by a large enough margin to spell the doom of secularism as any dominant force.

The latest iteration of this “prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books.” Kaufmann is facially neutral, while Melville is a secularist himself. They’re both not too alarmed by the prolific breeders in Anabaptist Amish and Hutterite enclaves, but the Quiverfull “movement” has Melville’s knickers in a knot:

However the success-through-fertility of [Amish and Hutterites] has served as a powerful model for newer variants of fundamentalism with a far more sinister agenda. One such is the Quiverfull movement (The name derives from Psalm 127: “Children are a heritage from the Lord/ Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them”). Kaufmann describes Quiverfull as “backward engineered religion”, an attempt to replicate the successful growth of these historic sects, combined with an ambitious agenda for political power. Under the leadership of the infamous religious conservative Doug Phillips, son of Howard, who was instrumental in the early stirrings of the Religious Right, Quiverfull, a coalition of neo-fundamentalist protestant denominations and communities, dedicated to biblical literalism, deeply patriarchal and morally conservative and separatist in mindset, has a 200-year plan, a “self-conscious strategy for victory through fertility”, as Kaufmann calls it. “They look around and see the low birth rate amongst the secular population, and the success of the sects, and they say, ‘Hey, we can take over here and quickly.’ They think that God should be the family planner. For them contraception is one step toward abortion. There are stories of Quiverfull women who can only have three or four children breaking down and feeling that God has not blessed them.”

Not to worry, Casper: Evangelicals (your “fundamentalists”) cannot maintain anything for 200 years. Someone will get a ThD from Fuller for reinterpreting “happy is the man who has his quiver full.” Nobody gets a doctorate for preserving and transmitting Evangelicalism unaltered. There may still be something called “Evangelicalism” in 200 years, but it’s doubtful that it will look anything like today’s version.

Remember, you heard it here first: Quiverfull is just one of Evangelicalism’s fleeting manias. They remind me of the T-Shirt I heard about: “They say I have Attention Deficit Disorder, but they just don’t underst… Hey! Look! A Chicken!”

Now Muslims are a different matter, though I’ve long been mulling over to the extent to which Islam, too, are inherently incoherent inasmuch as their religion, too, is based on a book susceptible of private interpretation. (They do differ from one another, you know.)

Rod Dreher, looking at Melville’s article (after I’d noted it but before I blogged) passes over the Quiverfull folks and focuses on a common a trait noted by Kauffman:

“I call them ‘endogenous growth sects’. The defining features are that they have strong boundaries to the outside, they try to live segregated from the rest of society, they practice ‘in’ marriage, they have high fertility rates and high retention of members – it’s grow-your-own-fundamentalism. The irony is that in terms of growth this is the most successful model for religion in Western secular societies. This is not true for the developing world, or for the Muslim world, but it is for the West.” The reason why Kaufmann covers both older forms of fundamentalism like the Amish and Hutterites, sects that are not likely to put the fear of God into secularists because they seem so passive, so withdrawn and uninterested in imposing their worldview on the rest of us, alongside more aggressive and self-consciously power-hungry forms of evangelical Christianity and Islamism is because, in his argument, the older sects provide the model of success that is now being followed by the newer ones. To understand them, Kaufmann argues, we need to look at the older forms they are self-consciously aping.

This is what Dreher calls the “Benedict Option” – semi-monastic, consciously counter-cultural. I’ve been wondering, as has Dreher, whether conscious separation, which surely will get us labelled “fundamentalist,” is the only real option in a very seductive society.

A Myth lingering

I’ve long been fascinated by the academic idea of “myth” as roughly “the stories by which we live our lives.” In that sense, a myth can be true – indeed, one would hope we’d live according to truth, not delusion.

As Wikipedia says in its opening paragraph on mythology:

…The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, the academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on its truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a religious narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term “myth” in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story...

It was in this academic sense that C.S. Lewis wrote of myth becoming fact in the incarnation of Christ.

There was a time in my life when myth becoming fact would have sounded like gibberish – arrestingly expressed, but gibberish. I know this to a certainty, though I discovered Lewis in college, because I remember branding a new faculty member in my evangelical Protestant boarding high school as “liberal” because he spoke of certain fiction (probably Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner) as being “true.” “Truth” was “fact” – like in the Bible – I knew deep in my bones.

How I could believe that when Christ said “I am the … truth” is beyond me. (It’s obligatory, it seems, for former Evangelicals to call their upbringing “fundamentalist,” but this is one intellectual roadblock I had that seems to warrant the equation of evangelicalism and fundamentalism – at least as expressed at my boarding school.)

One such true myth by which we refuse to live is the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair mythically is about scapegoating and bigotry, with the bending of the rule of law thrown in for good measure. (Oh my! People do still hear about Dreyfus, don’t they? It’s not a myth if they don’t.)

I say we “refuse to live by it because of interment of Japanese during World War II and the interment of suspected bad guys at Guantanamo Bay even today. Sometimes, wrongful convictions through prosecutorial misconduct generally is the phenomenon writ small.

There is a review of a newish book on the Dreyfus affair at the Financial Times which may be of interest. I had forgotten how long the scandal echoed loudly in France, and I had no idea that it may have influenced Theodore Herzl to found modern Zionism.

I have tended to admire France, grudgingly (I was treated as haughtily there as any other American), for marching to its own drummer, but the record clearly is not all admirable.

Then again, what history is all admirable? Even modern Israel is writing chapters that, G*d willing, they will some day rue.

Obamacare and the future of the Democrat Party

Interesting column at the Washington Post today from a columnist I can’t remember reading before, Matt Miller, a progressive think-tanker, about why Obamacare is driving Republicans to distraction. (I guess I’m going to use “Obamacare” as shorthand for a while, although Obama let Congress write “his” signature legislation.)

Shock 1: Losing big. For starters, Republicans simply have not lost on an issue this big in decades…

Shock 2: The quest for security. The next blow is the dawning awareness that the quest for economic security in a global era is reshaping politics. The instant premise of Republican analysis — that the public will never tolerate Obamacare’s repeal once it is implemented — concedes the point that health reform will bring a measure of security that families crave…

Shock 3: The death of the tax issue. The final shock is the cruelest of all: the demise of the tax issue that’s defined the Republican brand since Ronald Reagan…

Until Obamacare, I had said that the parties had become very similar in economic policy. Miller thinks the Republicans engineered that, and I think he’s onto something:

Media coverage features so many breathless political ups and downs that it’s easy to assume each party tastes victory and defeat in equal measure. But as a matter of ideology, these overheated fights take place between the 45-yard lines on a field that conservatives shrewdly tilted to their advantage several decades ago.

Meanwhile, in the less-august-than-Washington-Post blogosphere, a Democrat explains with many charts and graphs why his party is doomed because their “tent” is too big:

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what’s on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

I think that’s what Matt Miller is referring to as the GOP keeping the game between the 45 yard lines.

Cigarettes, terror, and Barack Obama: Glamour is Serious Stuff

So many insights, so little time!

Virginia Postrel at the Weekly Standard writes of “the deeper meaning of glamour,” opening with an anecdote about a C-Span Booknotes watcher who was disappointed that she was involved with the website “DeepGlamour” instead of something serious.

Boy, what a moron! What could be more serious than Deep Glamour? (C-Span’s founder, Brian Lamb, by the way, is a local boy made good.)

Postrel names and reminds readers of a very important pervasive, perhaps even fundamental, human reality: our ability to be persuaded by a bit of mystery – even taken in as suckers (though she doesn’t say that).

As critics who denounce movies that “glamorize violence” or “glamorize smoking” understand, glamour is much more than style. It is a potent tool of persuasion, a form of nonverbal rhetoric that heightens and focuses desire, particularly the longing for transformation (an ideal self) and escape (in a new setting). Glamour is all about hope and change. It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable. …

Glamour can, of course, sell evening gowns, vacation packages, and luxury kitchens. But it can also promote moon shots and “green jobs,” urban renewal schemes and military action. (The “glamour of battle” long preceded the glamour of Hollywood.) Californians once found freeways glamorous; today they thrill to promises of high-speed rail. “Terror is glamour,” said Salman Rushdie in a 2006 interview, identifying the inspiration of jihadi terrorists. New Soviet Man was a glamorous concept. So is the American Dream.

Barack Obama was elected partly because his “campaign’s iconography employed classically glamorous themes, with its stylized portraits of the candidate gazing into the distance and its logo of a road stretching toward the horizon.”

Glamour is Serious Stuff. Serious enough that I’m adding it as a category.

My grandmother used to recoil as we watched circus performers in tight or skimpy (by the day’s standards) outfit on black and white television: “Does your mother let you to look at that?” (That’s not a typo; that was one of her speech mannerisms unless my memory is fooling me and she really did say “allow you to look”.) She probably was dimly aware (she of humble origins, widowed at 29 years and for 65 years beyond, worker of fingers-to-the-bone) that this contraption, popularized after her 50th year on earth, was somehow subversive and potentially transformative by bringing glamour into the home in a new way.

It occurs to me that one of the implications of Postrel’s insight is that parents – if they allow their children to watch television at all – need to begin early and age-appropriately to point out the manipulativeness of so much of it, and not just the commercials. The trouble is, identifying the manipulativeness of the shows themselves requires some real work. When smoking was already accepted, who’d have thought that smoking characters were committing glamourization? When consumerism is already accepted ….

I highly commend the article.