God bless the child

Sometimes a song is more than a song:

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Yes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Money, you’ve got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you’re gone, spending ends
They don’t come no more
Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own
He just worry ’bout nothin’
Cause he’s got his own

God Bless the Child, Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.

Nothing much has changed, has it? Ross Douthat’s Monday column at the New York Times, “The Great Consolidation,” surveys the events of the past few years and concludes:

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

If it doesn’t ring true to you, I’m surprised you’re reading this blog at all.

Is this the result of a conspiracy? Are there some bastards we can shoot to end it? I rather think of it as tragedy, not conspiracy. And, having grown up as I did, I sometimes think of it as misadventure (looks sorta like tragedy, but the reversal of fortune is brought about by an external cause, says Aristotle).

Even in tragedy, there can be comic moments, as when POTUS (President of the United States) rationalizes a Supreme Court Appointment:

In the past week, I’ve read two news stories about Kagan in my local paper that featured absurd language. The first was an AP story by Ben Feller on May 10. The second was an AP story by Julie Hirschfeld Davis on May 12.

The second story quotes Harry Reid as saying Kagan “has fresh ideas” because she’s been “out in the real world recently.” Reid is trying to turn a negative into a positive. Kagan’s lack of judicial experience means she has been doing other things instead of being cloistered among black robes. But are the other things she’s been doing part of “the real world”? For the past decade, she has been professor and then dean of Harvard Law School, followed by a year as U.S. solicitor general. That’s pretty rarefied living. In the ‘90s, she was a White House counsel and policy advisor. Is there anything “fresh” about a retread from the corrupt and sleazy Clinton years?

The first story reports, “The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.” Obama—he of the famed analysis regarding bitterness and clinging—has now condescended to express a tender regard for the vox populi. In between his policy talks with Bernanke, Geithner, and Blankfein; his strategy sessions with Chicago machine cogs; and his social visits with the Beverly Hills and Martha’s Vineyard set. Somehow he finds time to worry about the little guys and gals and then express that worry while the press dutifully notes the expression.

We are told that Kagan is a manifestation of Obama’s concern that the common people are not being heard by the Supreme Court. So he appoints a person who attended an exclusive high school, then Princeton, then Oxford, and then Harvard. Just the sort of person who is most likely to be in touch with the struggles and aspirations, the stances and aims of We the People. Ain’t democracy grand?

(Jeff Taylor, Few v. Many: The Topsy-Turvy World of Judicial Demographics, at Front Porch Republic)

Rima Fakih is soooo yesterday. Where’s my bread? Where’s the next circus?

Yes, Jeff: Democracy is grand.

Bach Chorale Mexican Baroque – Maestrao Gray’s final BCS concert

MEXICAN BAROQUE
Music of 17th and 18th Century
Sunday, May 23, 2010
4:00 p.m.
St. Boniface Catholic Church
318 North Ninth Street, Lafayette

“Mexican Baroque” is not an oxymoron like “Jumbo Shrimp.”

This vivid program features little-known sacred music composers of the Mexican high baroque — and that is very high indeed — sung in Latin with Baroque strings, trumpets, and timpani. Also, 18th century popular villancicos, guarachas and negrillas, sung in Spanish set to popular dance rhythms, and accompanied by guitars and percussion. The Mexican villancicos, described as “sacred entertainment for the masses,” have texts that are sometimes playfully humorous and sometimes profoundly spiritual. The alternation of the popular and sacred music of the Mexican high baroque reveals the deep reverence and the joy of living of the Mexican Baroque.

We’re two weeks out in rehearsal now, and I can say this is going to be a very memorable concert, and not merely because we bid vaya con Dios to Maestro William Jon Gray.

Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing preview

We don’t even have a nominee yet, but the posturing — academic and political — is shaping up, as signaled on the editorial page of today’s Washington Post.

In the right corner, weighing in with the mantra of “commitment to the text of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers,” is senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

In the left corner, weighing in with the historical untenability of ascribing to the Founders any unified “original intent,” is Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Ellis is would win the match on points, but Sessions has a knockout punch: by and large, Americans agree with him, whether or not original intent is tenable historically.

It is perhaps probably significant that neither one speaks of abortion, the issue that, whether explicitly or encoded, has dominated confirmation hearings for decades. The current hot button issues for Sessions are political speech, guns, and eminent domain.

Where’s a Conservative to turn on election day?

There’s too many good, smart people blogging and too few running for office.

Daniel Larison, to whose blog I just resumed subscribing, has several items in the last week on the incoherence of “movement conservatism” – i.e., the fake conservatism of the current G.O.P., Fox TV, TownHall.com, etc..

In The “Republican Obama” Syndrome on April 6, he writes, in the context of Movement Conservative Hosanna’s for some neophyte named Marco Rubio, about a paradox:

Obama causes a very strange reaction in Republicans. On the one hand, they want to regard him as a joke and an incompetent, but they also desperately want to find someone who can imitate his appeal and success, and so it is almost as if they go out of their way to anoint whatever young politician they come across as their new hero and then disregard all of the person’s liabilities by saying, “Well, he’s no more inexperienced than Obama was” or “She’s still better than Obama!” It is an odd mix of contempt for Obama mixed with admiration for Obama’s success and an even stranger need to outdo him in the categories that originally caused them to view Obama so poorly.

In Hawks Are Just Embarrassing Themselves on April 7, he deconstructs a particular hawkish comment (about Obama’s supposed contribution to “a startling period of auto-emasculation” in nuclear policy) and thus reveals a common genre of attack on Obama:

“The substance of Obama’s positions is unchanged from the previous administration, but it is imperative that I make him appear as a weak buffoon, so I will simply invent a complaint about entirely superficial appearances that mean nothing.”

[The author of the lame hawkish comment] is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing.

One Republican Obama critic actually lamented that “Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex.” Really?! And that’s bad?!

On a roll, on Thursday Larison questions in The Triumph of Ideology the claim that the conservative mind has closed by denying that the “Movement Conservative” mind was ever open.

The conservative mind of the sort described by Kirk is one that is both grounded in principle and also very capable of critical thinking and self-criticism, but what I think we have seen in recent years is not much the closing of such a mind as its replacement by an ideological mentality that is basically hostile to a conservative mind …

Where conservative intellectuals once had to prove themselves by the strength of their arguments, they could now increasingly get along by repeating not much more than slogans and audience-pleasing half-truths …

The creation of the conservative media as an “alternative” to mainstream media gave way to conservative media as a near-complete substitute for their conservative audience. At one point, there was a desire, which I think was partly very genuine, for greater fairness to the conservative perspective, but this soon morphed into the need to construct a parallel universe of news and commentary untainted by outsiders …

[T]he supposed radical reactionary extremists [so labeled by Movement Conservatives] were actually the far, far more reasonable ones who were not advocating all of the things that have become so important to movement conservatives: aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in “time of war” ….

I’m not keen on Obama (and neither is Larison), but give me some criticisms that aren’t brain-dead sound bites, for gosh sake!

One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.

(Deterrence and Disamarmament, April 8, again by Larison – emphasis added).

I’ve been reading for the first time Russell Kirk’s classic, The Conservative Mind (alluded to by Larison), and I am struck by the extent to which today’s putative conservatives are not true conservatives, but hawkish and cynical statists. Having lost the “evil empire” in 1989, they keep looking for enemies we supposedly can and must eradicate, and dissing the Democrats for insufficient eradicatory zeal.

Do you think I exaggerate? Are you going to fling 9-11 at me?

My take on 9-11 and terrorism, after more than a little vacillation, is “if there’s no solution, there’s no ‘problem.'” Problems have solutions. Terrorism has no solution and thus is not a problem. Terrorism instead is an evil, a dark mystery with which we must live for the foreseeable future – taking reasonable precautions, of course, but stopping short of “aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in ‘time of war.’”

In 1972, I voted for McGovern over the patently-crooked Nixon. Having absorbed in subsequent years the radical change wrought in the Democrat party that year (I’m thinking of blogging on that change), I’m not sure I could do something like that again. Not that I slavishly follow its endorsements, but Indiana Right to Life announced this week a blanket policy of endorsing no Democrats in 2010. My first reaction was negative, but it’s a decently-thought-out position:

Whereas the Democratic Party officially endorses the right to unrestricted abortion on demand; and

Whereas Democratic leadership continues aggressively to advance federal policies that undermine the right to life of unborn children; and

Whereas Congressman Brad Ellsworth, Congressman Baron Hill, and Congressman Joe Donnelly betrayed the trust of pro-life Hoosiers by voting for the pro-abortion federal health care reform bill; and

Whereas the Democratic caucus in the Indiana House, under the leadership of Speaker Pat Bauer, continues to block all legislation aimed at limiting, restricting, and reducing abortions in the state of Indiana; and

Whereas candidates of the Democratic Party are responsible for the policies and actions of the party and its leadership;

Be it resolved that the Indiana Right to Life Political Action Committee will grant no endorsements to any Democratic candidates for any public office.

Still, Republicans: give me a credible choice! Voting for McCain was the hardest Presidential vote I’ve cast since 1972. I’m beginning to understand people who stay home muttering “to hell with them all.”