Spread the Wealth

A retweet today--a review at Powerlineblog of what appears to be a most interesting book. The thesis is that given a second term President Obama would make it a major goal to tax the suburbs to redistribute wealth to the cities. It sounds plausible, given everything we know about this President:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/michelle-obamas-shhhh-moment-and-what-it-tells-us-about-her-husbands-plans-to-spread-the-wealth.php





As often, the details are the most telling. I haven't read the book and so can't endorse it, but at the very least it seems worth knowing about.

Religion and Tolerance

The controversy stirred up this week both by the remarks of the CEO of Chic-fil-A on the one hand and the mayors of Chicago and Boston on the other has been most revealing indeed. For one thing, the controversy has served to show, once again, that contemporary PC values are on a head-on collision with traditional beliefs of all kinds, most notably traditional Christianity. For decades, we lived with a type of cultural Cold War, in which liberals made headway into the culture by commandeering discourse about race, abortion, economics, divorce, and so on. And about most of these matters, religion was, when it found conflict on these topics distasteful, able to look the other way, since none of these was an existential threat to traditional religion itself. Technically speaking, one might argue that the Bible doesn't address abortion directly; it seems to permit divorce (though it allows remarriage only under very restricted conditions), and it says nothing favoring one economic system over another. So far so good: though traditional religion might be uneasy with liberal positions, it could, to this point, ignore them and get on with its own business.

Lately, however, things have taken a turn. Despite the fact that society is split on the matter of homosexual marriage, and despite it not being allowed in most states, popular culture now seems to view it as a matter of hate worthy of social excommunication if one expresses support for the norm. When a couple of years ago Carrie Prejean said in the Miss USA pageant what a majority of Americans believe and what has been the norm throughout recorded history in virtually all societies about which we have records, she was roundly anathematized by the press. Perhaps she knew then what Dan Cathy, the President of Chic-fil-A probably suspects now--that on the matter of marriage, there can be no compromise between homosexual rights and traditional religion. And this is true not because traditional Christians are bigots but because the Bible, the focus of belief for Protestant Christians, and the Magisterium, which is the collected authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, could not be clearer that homosexuality is wrong. The acceptance of homosexual marriage is directly incompatible with the clear teaching of traditional Christianity. This was clearly demonstrated in Massachusettes when, because the state allows same-sex marriage the Catholic Church could no longer provide adoption services, even though it had long been the largest such provider in the state. Why? Because on the matter of homosexual marriage the Church is required by very clear teaching to voice disapproval: when it condemns what the state recognizes as legal, it can no longer occupy the public space.

TMH has written before that since the question of origins has long been a religious question, teaching on origins that contradicts the religious view must constitute an unconstitutional discussion of religious topics in the public schools: something very similar is true of homosexuality. When the government--as embodied by the mayors of Chicago and Boston--try to enlist the engines of government in saying that the only acceptable position on homosexual marriage is the non-traditional one, then they are, by definition, using the government to attack traditional Christianity. Although they appear to be talking about neutral issues like tolerance and sexual orientation, the logical interpretation and the infallible result of their position is that traditional Christianity is no longer compatable with American culture.

That may indeed be the case, and it may in fact be the result that the kids, in particular, who the pollsters tell us are so fervently in favor of same-sex marriage, wish. But it will be well for the political discourse if we were honest about what is at stake: homosexual marriage is incompatible with traditional religion, and the society that celebrates the one will hardly be able to tolerate the latter.

Much Too Cool

After a long trip yesterday exploring some truly interesting spots off the beaten track in north central Mississippi, I returned home tired but happy. I remained tired, but I grew steadily less happy and more puzzled as I watched the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. To be sure, the matter of rings, forged by mock factory workers meant to evoke the dark grime of Industrial Revolution, was impressive, as was the presence of the RAF jets, but that was almost the only thing about the ceremony that gave unalloyed pleasure. Anything else that might have pleased tended to evoke confusion: why, I wondered, does Queen Elizabeth jump out of a helicopter? I know that James Bond might, but in what possible way is the Queen asociated with skydiving? There, indeed, was the stunt, impressive in its timing and precision, but instead of being able to enjoy it, one was distracted by a question without solution.

Other moments made more sense: dancing aound the maypole is very English, I suppose (though this summer I saw a truly joyful maypole celebration in Bavaria), as was the business with the Dickensian tophats and smokestacks (though again, the Industrian Revolution is also part of German history), but these moments tended to be flat. In a pageant of English history, we were treated to a glimpse of bucolic medieval life, the Industrial Revolution, marching suffrgettes, and a few guys in uniforms from WWI: toward the end, these were all intermixed with redcoats surmounted with three-cornered hats in what was meant either to evoke such London traditions as the Lord Mayor's Parade or to concoct a soup into which bits of British cultural references floated indiscriminately about. What ingredient the large bicycle with the disproportionately menacing tuba was meant to suggest was, once again, a puzzle.

That part of the ceremony concluded with a phantasmagoria stemming from children's literature, with primary reference to Peter Pan, though near the end, J.K. Rowling managed to toss in a few words--too few to make much of an impression, so that, once again, one was left with the impression that she appeared, ad hoc, for good measure, as if to satisfy the expectations of her fans around the world. One might note that the references to children's literature came in the context of a nursery ward of some sort, in which children presumbaly suffering from illness or neglect were shown to be comforted or entertained by, among other touchstones of British nursery culture, dozens of Mary Poppinses floating down, black umbrellas fully opened at the ends of outstreched arms.

Toward the end England treated the world to yet another pageant, this one lossely based around the story of a boy who likes a girl whom he pursues against a backdrop of allusions to popular British music from the 1950s onward. Straightforward as one might expect such a segment to be, even one of the children in my household expressed confusion at how the boy, on finding and picking up the cell phone which the girl had dropped, managed to use her cell phone to call her--by the normal laws of telecommunications, he would have been calling himself (since he was after all holding her phone and she wasn't). As well as I remember, that was the end of the artistic portion of the O.C., after which the pedestrian parade of nations was a positive relief.

Strangely, the O.C. resolutely avoided any refence to anything that might lift the human spirit by alluding to anything truly great in British culture. The only culture refered to was low and popular. No reference (so far as I could see) to Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest writer who has inhabited the planet, no reference to the defiance of the English in WWII, though during the James Bond sequence we were treated to a passing, ironic reference to Winston Churchill. There was no reference to the great British explorations, the truly awesome power of the Royal Navy on the high seas, no sense of Britain for two hundred years the civilized and civilizing seat of commerce and trade, no allusion to Britain which led the fight among the Western powers to free the slaves. The references to British music--Handel, Elgar, Vaughn Williams--was reduced to an interlude in which a small orchestra played the truly inspiring theme from "Chariots of Fire" (cmposed by a Greek, no?), but Rowland Atkinson's gags during that segment had the effect of ridiculing an otherwise fine performance. The main allusion to British literature was to children's literature, though again to the popularly entertaining, since as far as I could see, the truly uplifting "Wind and the Willows" received no homage at all.

More than anything, what the the O.C. conveyed was a culture uncomfortable with itself and utterly disillusioned. The soldiers that presented the British flag seemed sightly out of pace with one another, and even what might have been a spirited rendition of "God Save the Queen" was made made cute and inoffensive by having the anthem led by a group of children that used sign language all the way through. One got the impression that no true cultural tradition could be left untouched by some gesture, however subtle, of distancing comment, that there was nothing included that might threaten to give the audience an unalloyed sense of wonder and excitement. Particularly toward the end, the cultural references were low at best, and they seemed at times to celebrate those whose controversial lives tended to affront traditional values--Amy Winehouse and Queen most prominent among them.

In the end, I was left with the impression of a halfhearted celebration (did anyone note the listless physical motions of the front line of dancers near the end of the pageant of history?) of an anodyne British culture and a much more energetic celebration of its more recent counterculture. It was, perhaps, all in all an exercise in cultural irony, the meaning of which seemed to be that we are comfortable only with popular culture: of anything else we are either ignorant or it produces in us boredom and indifference.

I seem not to remember other O.C.s besides the one in Beijing four years ago, but compared with that, last night's performance was an embarrassment. In Beijing the Chinese celebrated their culture, even to the point of embellishing it (when, exactly, are the Chinese known for having exported their culture by ship?), but then even such embellishment indicates a culture proud enough to view itsef as the stuff of myth and legend that gives shape to life and helps its members make sense of the world and lead meaningful lives in it. I wouldn't say that China celebrated in an imperialistic way, but their military procession that carried and raised their flag was impressive in the sharpness of its movements, and the incandescent energy of the choreographed movements of the large groups assembled on stage was only one of many positive impressions from the ceremony. The sense of wonder when we found out that the impressive display of moveable type was not mechanical but rendered by humans, the amazingly precise and intricate movements of hundreds of dancers on stage, the use fireworks throughout, and the complete lack of ironic comment on all of this was refreshing and left the audience, if not with a feeling of transcendance, at least with a sense that human beings inhabit and are able to help create a world that takes us out of ourselves. The Chinese relished their moment; the British, by contrast, seemed embarrassed--like a bored school child called upon to give a report on British history. What can he do to show that he's above it all, jaded, sophisticated, an untouched in his spirit because he's too busy, too connected even to have a spirit after all? Do as little as possible and then ironize everything to show your chums that you are way too cool to take seriously the thought that anything, anything at all might be bigger than yourself.

Nationalism?

The events of the day in Syria are both thrilling and alarming. Thrilling, of course, because the audacious suicide strike that seems to have decapitated Assad's regime may bring an end to the dictatorship much more quickly than was anticipated even a few days ago; alarming on account of the rapid pace of change in that country. More alarming still, we think, because once again America seems to be on the wrong side of history. As we mentioned in this space several times before, the unimaginably brave Syrian rebels, who sacrificed themselves by the thousands in what must for months have seemed like an entirely hopeless cause, deserve the freedom that they have fought valiantly to achieve, but the United States, which ought everywhere to support such opposition to vicious authoritarian rule, was so silent as to essentially show contempt for the Syrian revolution. That we offered scant friendship to freedom in Syria makes little sense, unless one believes what we have so far been reluctant to assert but for which there appears mounting evidence--to wit, that President Obama seems to support the overthrow of regimes like that in Egypt which are friendly to the U.S. and Israel and to offer no support for the overthrow of even more brutal regimes which actively work against our interests. The price of such an insane policy (if it is indeed a policy and not merely pure ineptitude) will inevitably be that the new Syrian government will remember America's indifference and be impervious to American influence, when we could, by aiding the rebels when it would have mattered, have secured yet another ally in the heart of a troubling part of the world.

Speaking of national movements, one notes that there appears in southern Europe to be a growing dissatisfaction with the European Union, largely, of course, because Greece and Italy, whose people have a more casual, less economically responsible way of life than do their northern European counterparts, wish their more responsible neighbors to give them money and do not wish to abide by the rules with which that money comes. Germany is now the colossus that dominates the European economy, and so the Germans now begin to feel the resentments of the southern European nations. Why the resentment? The Germans have several times now transferred to Greece and Spain large sums of cash taken from German taxpayers, yet the Germans are reviled.

The situation is ironic because it mirrors German attitudes toward the United States thirty years ago. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan, asserting American power, put intermediate range nuclear missiles in Germany to huge outcry from a country that the Americans less than forty years before had liberated from an insane tyranny and had then rebuilt with American taxpayer money. When I was there then, I remember my extended family denouncing American policy to me with an anger that grew sharper as I reminded them of what America had done for Germany in the past. In the end, of course, Reagan's policy succeeded and the existential threat posed by Communism to western Europe died away. And now it is Germany's turn. Just as America was--and often still is--resented by weaker nations simply because it was--and is--powerful, so now the German ant, which has worked and saved all the year long is resented by the southern European grasshopper simply because Germany has more. This is all a reminder that nationalism isn't always a good thing. One major reason, now often forgotten, for the European Union in the first place is that in the old Europe of the early twentieth century nationalism meant rivalry, tension, and often war; countries within the European Union, however, do not go to war against one another. If that Union should dissolve, the old resentments, baseless though they may be, will return and with them will return the possibility, however remote, of war.

The dangerous rise of nationalism is captured in literature nowhere so well as in Joseph Roth's very fine German novel Radetzkymarsch, set in the waning years of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, for which Roth had a great deal of fondness. His fondness was based in part on his conviction that once that old Habsburg empire dissolved into a number of distinct nationalities, the old, generally peaceful, generally civilized order would be drowned in a cacophonous babble of voices all demanding power, all willing to gain that power through the quickest, and therefore the most corrupt and dangerous ways possible. In a climactic scene near the end, a ball in a regional Imperial town is disrupted with news of the Archduke's assassination, and the various military officers, from different ethnic groups but serving the same Emperor Franz Josef I, begin shouting at one another not in the official German that they had been using that night but each in his own native language. As Europe begins its rapid descent into the chaos of contending interests that exploded in WWI, so these characters begin to express with venomous intensity the old hatreds and resentments that had to this been point been subsumed by their common purpose in a large enterprise.

What the overthrow of the old orders, welcome though these changes are, will bring in the Middle East God only knows. As European dissolution looks also like a possibility--though only like a possibility--one remembers that the severing of international ties, while it may allow many little men to strut and fret their hour upon the stage of life, is not always a good thing.

Comfortable Illusions, Hard Reality

Today is a sad day in American political and judicial history. Our Supreme Court has shown itself once again to be masters of sophistry, laying themselves open to the preposterous arguments of the Obama Administration which claims on certain days of the week that the individual mandate is not a tax and on other days that it is a tax; in so doing, the current ruling lies in a tradition of decisions based upon untruth. The beginning of this tradition is the claim in Griswold v. Connecticut that when the Constitution supplies no grounds for a certain decision, shadows and penumbras (i.e., pretexts) will provide the excuse necessary to allow a ruling that the actual text of the Constitution will not allow; one remembers, too, that Roe v. Wade was based upon the lie that Norma Jean McCorvey had been impregnated as a result of rape, a lie that McCorvey herself has often repudiated. That we are governed by sophistry is really no surprise, since sophistry is simply the most expedient alternative to truth. Truth, which is simply the description of reality, conveys the realities of existence, one of the most basic of which is that success requires hard work and that short cuts usually give us terrible results. Today's decision bynthe Supreme Court underscores precisely those truths about life. As a society, we reject ever more emphatically these ancient truths, and so we are left with illusion, with the hope (half, after all, of the President's reason for being) that we can leave easy, comfortable lives not requiring much in the way of hard, sacrificial contact with the rough surface of reality. It is precisely this love of illusion, which tells us that we can have something for nothing, that has placed us in our current predicament. Several years ago, when things in Iraq were difficult, we began as a society to say that we never needed to be there to make that sacrifice, that in fact the only reason we were there is because President Bush unilaterally decided to invade that nation. We delude ourselves into forgetting that Congress voted to give the President the authority to invade Iraq--even those liberal Senators voted for it. So then, faced with historical reality, we fall back on the illusion that President Bush lied us into war, that he tricked us, once again ignoring the historical reality that President Bush provided all the relevant intelligence to Congress before their vote and that most of those who voted for the invasion and later claimed to be against it refused even to look at the President's evidence when it was offered. So we prefer illusion, which is more convenient in the short term, though it leaves us with the dangerous ability to justify virtually any conduct with virtually any argument. It is this love of illusion that led many people to vote for President Obama in 2008, on the grounds that "Hope and Change" actually meant something, that it was not the empty slogan of the demagogue. And in voting for him, so many were able to congratulate themselves on choosing cool over the solid virtue and hard-won accomplishment of John McCain, President Obama's opponent. Such was the clear implication of Peggy Noonan, who, if she really is as sophisticated as she thinks of herself as being, ought to have known better. But that's precisely the problem: she, and so many others like her, are sophisticated, too clever for the hard old virtues, and so she breathed huskily about how cool and sophisticated Senator Obama is. Her sophistication also expressed itself with disdain about Sarah Palin, also a person who achieved success with hard work bred by her association with old unsophisticated understanding of the hardness of the world in the way it really works. This illusion that we can be politically cool without consequence is now shown finally to be dangerous. A vote for Obama was a vote, as he warned us, for a complete transformation of our society. Now that the damage has been done, we are again faced with a choice, this time perhaps possibly final. The only way to repudiate the dangerous life of political illusion into which we have fallen is to wake ourselves and take up the hard task of hard electoral politics. That it can be done is evident by the recent victory in Wisconsin, but it will take across the nation what it took there--sacrificial financial contribution and sacrificial commitment of time and energy. In the short term, this decision by the Supreme Court is a good thing, since, by placing the very unpopular health care bill at the center of the summer campaign, it may well be the nail in the President's coffin. But the defeat of Obama will not undo his legislation. The only way to do that is to keep the House and win the Senate by an overwhelming margin. Again, that can be done, but it will take a commitment to almost superhuman and sacrificial political virtue. If, as has so far been the case, we prefer life of illusion because political life in the real world is just too hard, then we will find that we have today taken a very great slide along what Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. A couple of months ago on The O'Reilly Factor, Bernie Goldberg made the arresting remark that Americans are addicted to entertainment and that that addiction is a very bad thing. Entertainment gives us cool; its very heart blood is to take the empty and insignificant and by dressing it smartly, providing it with an emotional soundtrack, giving it a script full of currently cool expressions, and surrounding it with carefully-coordinated pastel backdrops, making us believe that it means anything. The mere fact that we can let ourselves be thus deceived--and deceived to the point of electing Barack Obama--means that we are no longer instinctively at home in the world of hard reality. The only way to recover our identity as truly free men is to tear our eyes from the meretricious and eternally flickering images on the wall of Plato's cave and begin the long, hard slog up the tunnel into the harsh light of the world of reality. If we don't, we can continue to enjoy the life of illusion for awhile longer. But if we wish to recover what we've lost, we will need to elect a conservative Congress that will not only repeal the Affordable Care Act and confirm as a matter of course conservative justices to the Supreme Court, year after year. Nothing else will do.

Fast and Furious

The big news out of Washington today goes to show just how unpredictable important events--like a presidential election--can be in our world of rapidly disclosed information in our tech-rich environment. After making it seem last night as if he would hand over today the documents sought by Congress on the Fast and Furious matter, Attorney General Eric Holder has instead informed the House Committee asking for these papers that President Obama has locked them away under Executive Privilege. We don't here wish to wade into the tiresome debate about Executive Privilege (President Bush invoked it to keep from handing over documents to Congressional committees, so does that make it alright? Senator Obama thought it was wrong for President Bush to do so; does that make it wrong?). We do wish to point out, however, that so intently concerned about reelection as President Obama is at the moment, there is no way that he would risk looking like President Nixon if he didn't have to. Hence it seems clear that according to a cost-benefit analysis the White House deemed it less damaging to stonewall than to reveal what these documents contain. At the very least, that must mean that these documents indicate that Eric Holder lied to Congress when he claimed not to have known about Fast and Furious; at the most, it might mean that the President himself knew about the operation--a huge political liability because Fast and Furious was a stupid program that may well have helped kill a United States Border Patrol agent. The operation involves the emotionally charged issues of illegal immigration of the worst sort, gun ownership for criminal purposes, and drug smuggling. Therefore, being associated with Fast and Furious would be a disaster for President Obama--a bigger disaster even than appearing to cover up by means of Executive Privilege possible malfeasance in his Administration. That is the most plausible reason why a vulnerable President Obama would take the hit that he surely will for not releasing these documents.

Praise and Blame

Kudos to George Clooney for appearing on Fox News Sunday this morning in order to bring attention to the plight of non-combatant civilians in Sudan. Good show first of all that the über liberal Clooney would appear on Fox, which is typically a whipping boy of committed leftists, even better that he's calling attention to the hardships of innocent civilians in a corner of the world that few people care about. To our mind, Clooney is a fair-minded liberal of the sort that one can have constructive dialogue with, not one of the all-too-common type today for whom power is everything and who therefore are willing to stoop to any tactics to achieve their goals.


No kudos whatsoever to President Obama for his response to another place in which non-combatant civilians are being ground beneath the authoritarian boot in the worst tradition of the twentieth century: Syria. We have discussed before the odd fact that when the Arab spring came to regimes friendly or responsive to the United States, the President lent both moral and material support to those who overthrew those regimes, while in places like Iran and Syria, with regimes hostile to the United States, he says as little as he can get away with. Not being conspiracy theorists, we don't charge the President here with a hidden agenda, but we do think that he ought to speak out against tyranny where freedom has a serious chance of replacing it. President Obama's virtual silence two years ago during the uprisings in Tehran was shameful; equally shameful is his lack of vigorous response to the rebellion in Syria. The people of Syria are worthy of immense respect for their dogged resistance in the face of overwhelming firepower. Even two months ago their cause seemed hopeless, which alone earns them the respect of freedom loving people everywhere. Now, with no help from the United States, the rebels appear to have a significant chance of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. (According to the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Jazeera this week, Assad seems to have lost politically, and the sense in Syria is that he will be leaving.) That the United States appears indifferent to their heroic and inspiring attempt at freedom is a terrible thing which can only damage our reputation as the friend of freedom everywhere in the world.