When they’re not insisting that we’re beloved by one and all, certain U.S. “leaders” are impugning the motives of those who don’t love us.
But there are reasons why they might hate us. Not one of them is “for our freedom.” Continue reading “Why do they hate us so?”
“Long wars are antithetical to democracy.” So opens a Washington Post op-ed column by Andrew J. Bacevich. “Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.”
General McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview ranks right down there with Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview in the annals of stupid decisions by public people who should have known better. He couldn’t keep them from profiling him, but he didn’t have to sit down for an interview, accompanied by Aides full of adolescent smartassness. For his lapse in judgment, we’d owe him a great debt of gratitude — if only it would cause us to abandon the aspiration to empire.
The problem, Bacevich suggests, goes back to the abandonment of a “citizen army” (i.e., the draft) in favor of a standing army of careerists, led by outstanding high officers but (and here Bacevich barely hints — I think he understands it, but it was beyond his scope) staffed by cannon fodder — young men and women appreciably poorer and darker-skinned than the sorts of people who by and large run the government and those institutions that might hold government accountable. Men and women who, we can tell ourselves, knew what they were getting into.
The big fib of the week?
“Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” [Barak Obama] In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.
Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.
In the all-volunteer Army, the military-industrial complex has found its perfect instrument. There’s no need for a frank military coup; we already have a covert military-industrial coup.
I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. No doubt there are connivers in the world, but I believe much less in the efficacy of conspiracy than of tragedy: the inexorable outworking of fatal flaws in a generally admirable protagonist; or metaphorically, the eventual expression of a fatal “genetic” flaw in every single regime in our world-gone-mutant.
Americans might do well to contemplate a famous warning issued by another frustrated commander from a much earlier age.
“We had been told, on leaving our native soil,” wrote the centurion Marcus Flavius to a cousin back in Rome, “that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens [and to aid] populations in need of our assistance and our civilization.” For such a cause, he and his comrades had willingly offered to “shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes.” Yet the news from the homeland was disconcerting: The capital was seemingly rife with factions, treachery and petty politics. “Make haste,” Marcus Flavius continued, “and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire.”
“If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!”
(Emphasis added) Thank you, Professor Bacevich. If we manage to disenthrall ourselves long enough to notice when our greatness is all gone, we won’t be able to say nobody told us.
And thank you, Washington Post. This is the kind of real conservativism that the idjits at TownHall.com will never publicize. (They’re saying things like we should “fire Obama” — as if that would solve the problem.)
Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:
Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.
Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.
…
[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.
Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!
I often like Dennis Prager’s syndicated columns, and there’s some things to like about a recent one titled “The World is a Cruel Place and if America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler.”
Prager first, and pretty fairly, defends Christianity against today’s common calumnies. Then he realistically rehearses the woes of much of the world today, including the oddity that Russia, while remaining fiercely Orthodox in many ways, nevertheless lost its moral compass during 70 years of Communist tyranny and hasn’t regained it, functioning today as a nihilistic thugocracy.
Then he proposes that Lincoln’s America — “The Last Best Hope of Earth” — is the balm for the world’s woes — if only we can get the left out of power, because the left thinks of America in post-Christian, Christendom-hating ways that render America impotent.
But there’s an odd asymmetry to that argument. It seems to presume that if we only get rid of left-leaning leaders, America will resume its role as the modern realization of Christendom rather than another nation rapidly becoming post-Christian. Although we’re lagging Europe in explicit secularization, we are implicitly secular right down to the pews of most Churches (see here for a long and evocative essay by Father Stephen, and here for a shorter piece explaining that “The default position of America is secular protestantism”).
Our foreign policy as carried out by both parties promotes our imperial goals, not Christianity, and muscular Krustian foreign policy will only make us more odious in the eyes of the world.
Sorry, Dennis: I’m not sure even you believe this one. If you want to make a case for voting out the Democrats and voting in Republicans, you’ll need to do better.
Michael Gerson challenges not only libertarianism (which I’ve never been able to embrace), but constitutional conservatism, which I have embraced:
The Tea Party movement, being resistant to systemization, is resistant to characterization. But in its simplest form (and there seems to be no other form), it might be called “constitutional conservatism.” It adopts a rigorous hermeneutic: If the Constitution does not specifically mention it, the federal government isn’t allowed to do it. This represents a kind of 10th Amendment fundamentalism — a muscular form of states’ rights that would undo much of the federal role since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps since Abraham Lincoln.
This philosophy has the virtue of being easily explainable — and the drawback of being impossible. The current federal role did not grow primarily because of the statist ambitions of liberals; it grew in response to democratic choices and global challenges. Federal power advanced to rescue the elderly from penury, to enforce civil rights laws, to establish a stable regulatory framework for a modern economy, to conduct a global Cold War. The “establishment” that advanced and maintained this federal role included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. In many areas, the federal government has gone too far, becoming bloated and burdensome. But the federal role cannot be abandoned.
So I guess the principle is “if it’s ‘necessary,’ tough luck that the constitution doesn’t allow it.”
Easily explainable, possible – and to my ears, still intolerable.
It puts us in permanent servility to court judgments of whether something “goes too far” or is “bloated and burdensome.” I’d really like a brighter line than that.
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 ownYes, 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 ownMoney, 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 ownMama 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.
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.
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.
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.”
