Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice
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Tuesday, June 24, 2003 On Irony and lack of it in American politics. Nevertheless, fourteen American soldiers have been killed in assaults in Iraq in June, fifty-six since May 1, and today six British soldiers died in two attacks around Amara near Basra; all of this is sad, none of this is to be belittled. Bush meeting with Musharraf today (dress code: suits but no ties, open shirt: closer to the suit,no tie, closed collarless shirt of pakistani couture), shows where the Bush doctrine is made of contradicting realities indeed: in the simplest terms, democracy in Islamabad means handing over the Paki nukes to the islamists (who know very well in which cave in North-Western Pakistan OBL is hiding), while keeping Musharraf in power means telling the world "democracy everywhere, except where military dictatorship serves our national interest better." The Germans call this Realpolitik. Machiavelli just calls it by its name: politics. President Bush calls -no irony - it the "special relationship" Washington has with Islamabad. The key man here is the fascinating Mansoor Ijaz- whose biography embodies both Pakistan's nuclear program and US-Pakistan relations in the past half century, who probably knows the region like no one else in the US, and who advocates (in a piece everyone will be reading today) for a middle road for Pakistan giving the islamists the democratic say they won in the elections. Pakistan is still the most dangerous place in the world, and even Bush must understand, behind the curtains, that you can't risk having the bomb fall into the hands of the fundamentalists "just" to promote the cause in the name of which Iraq was liberated. posted by Theo | 8:12 PM He ain't no armchair revolutionary... Mark Steyn put the deed to the word, as the Dutch saying goes, and spent a month on what the Brits would call "a motoring tour" across Iraq, drinking remarkably good water ("better than municipal water in Montreal — or in London, where I believe it’s mostly recycled Welsh urine these days"). People from Max Rodenbeck to Ahmad Chalabi probably get it right in thinking that the absence of rejoycing in the Iraqi street is mainly due to fear of Saddam that continues; without the tyrant's body dead or alive, there ain't no closure for the Iraqi's - nor, for that matter, for the allies. Iraqi's have reason to believe the Americans won't stay to get civil society passed the diaper stage, and they fear that if the yanks leave, and Saddam returns, there's no telling what might happen. Rumours still run wild throughout the Arab press of his imminent return. (See MEMRI). One has to hand it to Steyn, not (only) reclining with gin and tonic in the Palestine Hotel, but actually meandering Mesopotamia: Tikrit, Kirkuk, Rutba and Ramadi, Samarra and Fallujah. No civic collapse, no famine or absence of water, no humanitarian crisis. And the disasters in the international media - from the looting of Baghdad's Museum, to Wolfowitz admission that "it was all about oil" (Christopher Hitchens noted the other day the curious habit of BBC correspondents of referring to the fellow as ‘Vulfervitz’, declining to accept the bearer’s own pronunciation of his name, more ferocious, more wolf-like, more yiddish) to starvation of thousands and "a hundred Bin Ladens" (Mubarak) - all revealed to be mirages these people wanted to see so badly in Iraq, like a desert traveller's wishful thinking sees an oasis of baked air on the horizon. In good Steyn-tradition, there is some more (never enough) Fisking (i.e. unmasking Robert Fisk for being the single most insincere and mediocre journalist in the region "blinded by irrational yankophobia", or others for arguments made in bad faith and facts lied about rather than rational disagreement and honest reporting). While elsewhere Steyn and -better argued - Tom Friedman make the rather crucial point that the best way to help Iran is to ensure the success of a moderate shi'ism in Iraq (Jeff Jarvis has many Iran links), i.e. democratisation within Islam, not through secularization, most importantly, Steyn is the first front-line journalist to make the point I humbly made in this blog two weeks ago: finally someone raises the Congo story: There is, of course, a real humanitarian crisis in the world today — in the Congo, an environment blessedly free of blundering Yanks, where ‘international law’ has ridden to the rescue and, as in the Balkans and elsewhere, the UN is providing the usual genteel multilateral cover for ethnic slaughter. But, because it doesn’t accord with the New Universal Theory of Texan-Zionist neocon aggression, nobody cares. In Iraq, the Americans and British are muddling through; in the Congo, ‘international law’, as represented by the French and the UN, is failing big time. That’s my view and it happens to fit my prejudices. But it also fits the facts. If you have a little time to spare, watch this disheartening yet exquisite, CBC report, Congo. Wasted Promise by David McLauchlin. Intelligent and compassionate reporting of the best kind, with all the audio-video advantages of the net. posted by Theo | 8:45 AM Monday, June 23, 2003 OLD NEWS UPDATE Slate's Timothy Noah links to a 14-month old Michael Kinsley column that is certainly more relevant today than when it was first published: Another inconvenience of traditional reality is that there can only be one of them at a time. There is no such limit on alternative realities. You can stash them around the house for use as needed, like six-packs in the good old days. So Bush can have one reality where battling terrorism is paramount and another reality where Israel must negotiate and compromise with the sponsors of suicide bombers. If anything, this is more true of rationales for the Iraq war than it was of anti-terrorism measures. Read the whole thing. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:36 PM Friday, June 20, 2003 THEORY AND PRACTICE On my way to the local hardcore Anglo-Catholic parish for morning prayer, I had to switch to the Red Line--the all-night train--at Belmont. I sat across from a wino (6am is still wino hour on the Red Line) who didn't waste much time asking me for money and generally chatting me up. I was engrossed in the aforementioned Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, but he was as nice as the average wino and so I talked to him a bit. He asked what I was reading, heard my answer, and told me that he couldn't read. He asked some other people for money. Then he turned back to me--"Do you think you could read that book to me some time? I can't read myself." Stunned, I said I would, but soon got off at my stop and wished him well. Unless one goes looking for them, one doesn't get all that many chances to read to winos. Before I was out of the station and from the opening psalm until after the angelus ("And the Word became flesh...") I regretted not taking it. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:46 AM Thursday, June 19, 2003 FOLKS, THE USUALLY LAZY SAGES AT TPI have been on fire lately. Sadly, Blogger is having hosting problems so I can't link to any of our first-rate recent output and I can't harass my better-read acquaintances in the blogosphere into promoting said output to the readership it deserves. So you'll have to scroll down. But some things: Official TPI Mother BWD sends this link re working-class liberal education, on the Clemente Project (find the Oct. 1997 Harper's at all costs!). This to complement my post on working-class autodidacticism and the fate of the canon. Theo lays it down on European republicanism and (in a separate post) Cliff Geertz. I also discourse quite learnedly on the current accounts deficit. So if you haven't been here in a while, read up. You can skip all my political crap--just go read Matt and Kevin. Also, Reihan is back in full Tristram Shandy mode. Enjoy. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:04 PM THE WAR CONTINUES Once again, TNR proves that one of its issues is worth more than a Regenstein Library full of National Review with an editorial defending the war despite the administration's vexed relationship with the truth. The point, they say, was always nuclear weapons: TNR believed, in other words, that once Saddam fell the U.S. would find evidence of a reconstituted nuclear program. The postwar claims of Iraqi scientists now suggest we may not. Why Saddam would have abandoned his nuclear program, and why, if he did, he would not have proved it by granting the IAEA full access to Iraqi nuclear scientists this spring, remains a mystery. And, yet, that program may indeed have been dormant. Which, in hindsight, undermines one of the magazine's central rationales for war. Imagine that last line coming from anyone on the other side of the ideological watershed. The editorial goes on to say that political reasons could still justify the war, and that the most important outcome is the establishment of an Arab democracy. "That argument is not undermined by the Bush administration's past dishonesty," the editors say. "It can be undermined only by its future lack of resolve." That is true. But the editors are not taking the dishonesty seriously enough. Given the complete vitiation of Congress's war-making authority, there is now nothing hindering any president's warlike ambitions but public and media opinion. If George Bush can lie about the rationale for a war with no political consequences, this war's damage to American democracy, which TNR mentions in passing, will be great indeed. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:39 AM Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Philistine's Progress For the last few days I have been breathlessly devouring Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a social history that has fired me with missionary zeal for the cause of great books. Rose's thesis is that the autodidactic aspirations of the British working class had a profound impact on its political and social reform movements--because of, not despite, the fact that those aspirations were embodied by the canonical high culture of Britain and Europe more broadly. The book is at heart a polemical rejection of the insipid and condescending work of our age's "counterhegemonic" cultural mandarins, who take it upon themselves to elaborate on the gender/class/racial ideologies of the canon and its assumed subordinating effect on the underprivileged. As Rose quite rightly points out, few of these current studies bother to discover how the great books were read and understood by real people. It has always struck me as offensive to assume that women, for example, are too weak and stupid to read Milton's galloping mysogyny critically. Much of the book is drawn from unpublished diaries and memoirs of working-class people, and Rose finds that in fact, establishment favorites such as Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress were taken in various ways by their readers and that they contributed to the ability of their readers to make sense of and articulate their experiences. Rose's book has also helped me understand how the recondite priesthood of high culture (especially such heros as Eliot and Strauss) have failed the canon no less. By focusing on the timeless truths supposedly imbedded in the canon, its defenders have lost sight of the fact that what we gain from great literature is the ability to organize and state our thoughts in new and productive ways. To take my favorite example: Hobbes's great virtue is not that he convinced us to institute a social contract of his liking, but that he gave us a new and vibrant language for talking about politics. As the canon has been fragmented by the cultural left and hoarded by the cultural right, it has been destroyed by both; and not simply the canon itself, but the aspirations and liberating patterns of thought to which its study can give rise (an interesting companion study could be done on the reading of African-Americans). The great egalitarian program of the identity-obsessed Left has backfired utterly by saying to the poor, to women, and to non-whites, that the great books are not "for them." But it is not only these constituencies that have been harmed. In general, the fragmentation of great literature has deprived even the privileged of the tools for any but the most superficially moralistic criticism of contemporary society. The well-born of our own time may be fed "subversive" readings of reality TV, but in its own way such subversion just contributes to empty irony and ultimately quiescence. What struck me in the stories of working-class autodidacts is how much I identified with their slow and sometimes random discovery of genius. Even I, who had every advantage up to and including widely literate and conversant parents, have had to supplement my own first-rate liberal education with a lot of rummaging around. I was especially moved by the stories of those who raided the bargain book stalls, a practice still preserved in Hyde Park. At Powell's I was able to acquire cast-off copies of Wordsworth, Jowett's Plato, the complete Chaucer, The Song of Roland, Chekhov's short stories, Restoration comedies, and much else besides. It might very well be the case that a reasonably motivated miner from the 1890's Midlands was more literate than the child of a doctor in San Diego. Progress! posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:18 PM God-Bothering Notes, II A Presbyterian minister in Cincinnati has been expelled from the ministry and from the presbytery for marrying same-sex couples, even as a disciplinary action for so doing was pending. As I said before (sorry, archives unavailable) regarding the election of an openly gay Episcopal Bishop, I think that the liberals are probably right on doctrine. But they are utterly, infuriatingly wrong on discipline. The officers of any church are obligated to uphold the practices and beliefs of the church. Those who object on conscience may certainly do so, provided they are willing to suffer expulsion and ostracism (bearing in mind that these carry a pretty low cost these days). The effort by his supporters to make this pastor a hero while imploring the presbytery to ignore the rules is deplorable. You can't be Martin Luther and Erasmus at the same time. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:10 PM European Republic(ans) After liberalism and conservativism, another political concept that has a completely different meaning this side of the Atlantic is republicanism. In La Republique Française, of course, it has something a lot closer to its American twin than either would like to agree (Marc Fumaroli going so far as to say "There are between France and America so close, and so old, and so strange relationships, that at the end I consider America and France as inseparable, in a way.") That said, in those European countries for whom the killing of the monarch was not synonymous with the national myth of liberation but for whom the royal family's ancestor is the founder of that freedom, republicanism is the radical anti-conservative movement to abolish the monarchy. Over a third of European countries are (constitutional) monarchies, and what their fate is to be in the United States of Europe nobody really knows. William of Orange, a.k.a. the Silent, led the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish that started the 80 years war (1568-1648), whose declaration of independance, antedates the American by some two centuries in arguments very similiar it (arguing in 1579 that a king, even with divine right, can lose soveignty by abusing it in oppressing a people, who then have the right to defend themselves). It was also, of course, a war of religion, creating a republic where Dutch Calvinists and Lutherans and Jews could live freely, creating the most free polity in world history to that time, attracting people like Descartes, Spinoza and Locke to its intellectual center at Leyden. (Interestingly, it was a republic in which the Prince of Orange was a stad-holder, monarch-who-is-not-a-monarch. His grandson William II maried Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I, and his son William III of Orange-Stuart became the King of England; another descendant became King William I of the Netherlands in 1815). The unstoppable process of European unification, over which individual voters in respective countries seem to have no control or say anymore whatsoever, has now gone to the next level. A committee led by Valery Giscard d'Estaing is almost done writing the future constitution of the USE, in which G-d is not mentioned (Poland, 85% religiously catholic, voted for anyway, as presumably the Czechs will as well). Has the guillotine ever been subtler? Or is it merely the proper separation of Church and State? Two contradictory ideas of Europe: as intertwined, to the point of being inseperable, with Christendom, and as the history of hard-won freedom from the power of the Church. Both ideas embodied in the Dutch Revolt, but the former radically ignored by the EU's commission. Perhaps even more than military power, this might very well become, within a decade, the single most important rift in the West between the USA and the USE. For reasons of full disclosure, the above is my alibi for posting the following news. I know there will be very few monarchists among TPI's readers, but since no international paper has carried this story, nor probably will, I have the wonderful pleasure to announce that Princess Maxima and her husband, Crown Prince William-Alexander of the Netherlands, are expecting a child. posted by Theo | 12:40 PM Tuesday, June 17, 2003 THE REAL DEFICIT Billmon has a first-rate post about the current accounts deficit and its corrollary, our foreign debt (link via CalPundit). It may strike our friends on the right as excessively speculative, but it's important because this issue is hardly ever discussed in the media and because the consequences of this sea of red ink are, even if unknowable, certainly going to be huge. Billmon's most objectionable claim is that the US may start using our military to improve our terms of trade if other countries stop buying our debt. The question, as I see it, is this: is the political class likelier to use the military in such unethical ways than it is to sell Americans on a vastly diminished lifestyle in order to pay off our debts? This, I submit, is one of the reasons it matters whether there were WMDs in Iraq, and if not, how that misinformation was gathered and distributed. If we preserve our massive military dominance and we let our politicians gin up any old reason for using it, it seems pretty certain to me that we'll be fighting wars over something as repellent as financing our debt. In any event, the post, while long, is a great antidote to the style of the blogosphere and a good primer on the main economic issues. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:58 PM OUR CHICAGO-AREA READERS are encouraged to go see my friend Michael Fritz's production of Edward Albee's The American Dream. I forgot to mention it last week, but it's on this weekend--8pm Friday and Saturday, 3pm Sunday. It's at Luther Memorial Church, 2500 W. Wilson (my church) and proceeds go to Big Brothers Big Sisters (my agency). How many chances will you get to witness the intersection of Edward Albee, Lutheranism, and youth mentoring programs? posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:38 PM Monday, June 16, 2003 READ THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE. A top Bush counterterrorism official has started working for John Kerry. If you lend any credence to what he's saying, you should be very scared. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 6:51 PM Sunday, June 15, 2003 While all the world looks elsewhere... something really terrible is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo (or Congo-Kinshasa, a.k.a. ex-Zaire), where fighting between Hema and Lendu tribes, about whom nobody seemed to have cared enough before to even find out who they were, is full fledged, and has caused hundreds of dead since May, thousands of refugees, and according to some sources, tens of thousand of dead between these two tribes alone in the passed two years. With a mandate from the UN and the EU, 1400 French troops have now moved in, but only allowed to protect the city of Bunia, its airport and refugee camps, it is starting to look frighteningly much like a repetition of everything the Dutch and the French did wrong in Srebrenica in 1995, with two UN monitors (one Jordanian, one from Malawi) slaughtered last week, after having desperately asked for help for a week. Militias know that if the European soldiers are not allowed to shoot back, you can do anything with them you like. They have already been shot at. British, German, Canadian and South African troops have agreed to take part at some time, but all that remains unclear. The militia of the ethnic Hema community, which calls itself the Union of Patriotic Congolese, is backed by Rwanda, and has taken control of the town of Bunia in the province of Ituri in North East Congo on May 12, which is stricken with militias (UPC, RCD-N, RCD-ML, MLC, APC, to start) with alliances constantly shifting, about to explode into something much, much worse. A brief history: Hutu’s who had perpetrated the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, fled to Congo, which Tutsi-forces from Rwanda consequently invaded in 1996, ostensibly to hunt down Hutu militias, but in fact slaughtering some 300,000 Hutu civilian refugees and Congolese villagers. (The number is from the Observer). The 33-year brutal rule of Mobutu Sese Seko was already coming to an end when Rwandan troops continued their march for 2000 miles across what was then still called Zaire led by Laurent Kabila who had proclaimed himself leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mobutu was supported by the French, Kabila by the US, though some say that “Rwanda set up a puppet government in Kinshasa headed by an obese, retired Congolese revolutionary named Laurent Kabila. But Kabila soon ignored its orders. So, in 1998, Rwanda invaded again. That invasion drew the armies of seven other neighbouring countries into Congo, sparking a conflagration of killing that is still ablaze.”( the Observer yesterday). Mobutu fled to Morocco in 1997, where he died within a year. Soon, Kabila scrapped all democratic reforms, postponing elections until all militias left the country. In January 2001, Kabila was killed by a body guard, and his son Joseph took power, and remains there today. In Ituri, the Rwandan army pulled back, leaving all their arms to the Hema-tribe. The Rwandan president Paul Kagawa fought in Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo, and after the genocide in his country, he doesn't believe in the UN anymore (blame him! - ed.), while the MLC, the militia led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, is supported by Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, who led the rebellions against Idi Amin (who is still alive and well and living in Riyad), was close to Mobutu, and therefore against Kabila, Jr. Rwanda and Burundi have their own reasons for wanting to oust Kabila. The only sane person on the ground, according to the informative notes of an otherwise rather naive and helpless workshop on DRC held at the U of Kent in Canterburry last year, seems to be Sir Ketumile Masire, and "Inter-Congolese Dialogue Leader", and former President of Botswana. "Highly educated, capable person: managed to improve living conditions in Botswana greatly while in power. Seems to be taking holistic approach to resolving the conflict: wants to address human suffering and involve the community in the process. Particularly concerned about the suffering of women." The U of K report lists structural problems of the failed state, the plundering and warfare, and lists as the causes for war the combined factors of national boundaries that make no sense in terms of ethnic groups and their divisions, the lack of political culture other than warfare, all bound up with the legacy of colonialism and the cold war, but above all its incredibly rich reserves of natural resources: gold, diamonds, timber and coltan (some reports write coltran, wrongly). This seems to have been the only factor that interests the Security Council, and only after an alarming 56 page report prepared by Mrs. Ba-N'Daw, a former Ivory Coast energy minister. In the anarchy, lone international players are finding, as always, their way to to business, and as always, through Switzerland, which has now siezed the accounts of coltan and gold smugglers. I spoke with an Africanist the other day who told me that Coltan is necessary element in every single mobile phone, and that 80% of it is found in Congo. Coltan, or columbite-tantalite, is the stuff of mythology and sci-fi thrillers. The element tantalum, my friend Alex Burrough informs me, was named after Tantalos, because the oxide Ta2O5 is insoluble in acid, and is therefore unable, just as mythological Tantalos in the Hades, "to quench his thirst". "It is only found in 3 billion-year-old soils, like those in the Rift Valley region of middle Africa, western Australia and central Asia - has become a critical raw material in high-tech manufacturing", writes The Industry Standard, in a must read piece called Guns, Money and Cellphones, that ties this whole story together into a frightening tale of the dark side of globalized economy and information technology. It is worth its weight in gold, people die for it every day, and you are using it right now. The Observer ends: “Between 3.1 million and 4.7 million people are estimated to have died in Congo's war: already, the highest death toll in any conflict since the Second World War.” Why is nobody talking about this? A piece by Somini Sengupta in the NYT, but not even the Council on Foreign Relations has anything, and very little at allAfrica.com. No one. Nothing but silence. posted by Theo | 7:00 PM GO, SAM! CONTEMPORARY FICTION is a deceptively fertile patch of ground. More new books are being published now than perhaps ever before in recorded memory; but it is clear that amid all this Potemkin-village profusion, critical standards have been more or less gleefully left behind. Since we hold this truth to be self-evident, that all good things pass through Jimmy's at 55th street and Woodlawn Avenue on Chicago's South Side, we are pleased to announce the virgin voyage of Mr. Samuel ("half irish, half jewish: either drunk or complaining") Munson in the Republic of Letters. posted by Theo | 6:39 AM The Programme Polarizing world. Rashid Khalidi will leave the University of Chicago to recieve the Edward Said chair at Columbia, the source of whose endowment the University still refuses to make known, and which is named for the man whose most recent piece in Al-Ahram calls for a Neo-Nasserite Pan-Arabism to bring down American power. Max Rodenbeck, whose book on Cairo is the best of its kind and who has been a dispirited flaneur in Baghdad lately (write a tune about that, Sting! - ed.), writes that Iranian Arab language tv is broadcasting 24/7 that "The Christian right wing which controls Washington seeks to wipe out Eastern civilization," declared one commentator, adding that this evil intent was "based on the ideology of Francis Fukuyama that says ancient cultures have no value because America's superior culture has replaced them." And the motto of Salam Pax' website is Huntington's "the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." How to keep the world together? One way, is the extraordinary precarious, delicate and nearly perverse kind of trip of which Yossi Klein Halevi writes movingly in TNR Another might be the following. In response to my last two posts on reactions and reflections academic, intellectual and otherwise to Islam and the West, my friend Alex Burrough sent the following from Leiden, lieu de mémoire, (University with the second Orientalist chair in history after Oxford): The first step is perhaps the following: The 'orientals' must learn to understand that the declaration of human rights is equally a declaration of human duties... The 'occidentals' need to learn that the revelation of human duties can equally be read as a granting of human rights ... Then 'we' might finally be able to start talking.... tout autre est tout autre/la illaha il'allah posted by Theo | 6:23 AM Saturday, June 14, 2003 To Mecca and Back The second half of Clifford Geertz’ survey of post 9/11 books on Islam is out in the New York Review of Books, and is on the whole disappointing. As I expected, he includes Paul Berman, but is clearly antipathetic to what he considers not so much an attempt to "understand Islam" than an effort to describe it in such a way that an approach to dealing with it, moral, necessary, clear, and proven, emerges of itself—one which, now that we are the only Supergrand and the Force is really with us, should prove quicker, less costly, and altogether more effective than it was the first time around. (Notice the Star Wars lingo. Interestingly, my friend DMC suggested that the Taliban’s self-image as guardians of spiritual humanity, hiding out in the deserts of Afghanistan, more resembled Skywalker and Solo hiding out against the armies of the vast Empire, etc. than vice versa. The point being that when it comes to Star Wars, two can play that game. Geertz uses it to ridicule serious commentary by Berman and Daniel Pipes, which is not really professional.) Geertz starts off with the larger point he wants to make as a whole, the important idea that the itineraries of Islam are more vast, and the shapes Islamic life and thought takes around the globe are more varied than anyone writing about them in the West has understood (this is a little easy, but having just written that himself, Geertz of course digs the ground under his feet. Being a better scholar than Edward Said, he won't make the same orientalist fallacy or its methodological mistakes, but something itches here nonetheless): More than any other single thing, it has been the rising tendency to ideologize faith in so much of the Muslim world that has made it increasingly hard to arrive at summary accounts of what is happening there. The movement from religion to religious-mindedness, from Islam to Islamism, from a rather quietist, withdrawn, and scholastic immersion in the fine details of law and worship, the ordinary piety of everyday life, to an activist, reformist, increasingly determined struggle to capture secular power and turn it to spiritual ends, has transformed what once was, or seemed to be, a historical macro-entity to be set beside Christianity, the West, science, or modernity, into a disorderly field of entangled differences about which it is difficult to say anything at all except that it seems at once various and volatile. Geertz discusses basically four kinds of reaction to "what is going on in Islam", three western, one from within the Muslim world. The first is of the left, and is headed by Parisian scholar Gilles Kepel, who “sees this new Islamism as stemming from a "cultural revolution," from a collective change of mind inspired and given direction by the teachings of a handful of religious intellectuals, and driven forward by the foundering of secular, modernizing nationalism everywhere from Algiers and Tehran to Karachi and Jakarta.” To leftist intellectuals, Islamist groups represented a religious variant of fascism. To middle-of-the-road liberals, they were no more than born-again medieval fanatics. But gradually, as Islamist numbers increased, the left discovered that Islamism had a popular base and, casting about for the mass support so critical to their ideology, Marxist thinkers of every stripe began to credit Islamist activists with socialist virtues, while, on the right, it began to dawn on people that Islamists were preaching moral order, obedience to God, and hostility to the "impious" materialists—that is, to the communists and the socialists. More and more people, both within the Middle East and without began to view Islamism as the authentic creed of modern Muslims, to see in it the outline of an Islamic civilization within the multicultural world of the coming twenty-first century. Though I’ve followed Keppel’s op-eds in Le Monde these past months, and thought some were good, nowhere in Geertz’ piece follows, however, the thought that the Western Left's whole solidarity with and apologetics for Islamists might be completely unfounded and based on deluded anti-americanism, anti-globalization neo-marxist sentiments which are far more divisive than anything Huntingtonian, and less well thought through. Rather, he ciritices Keppel's (and Noah Feldman's) idea that Islamism is n decline. Daniel Pipes, in his review of Keppel, is a bit more to the point: "One way to become a Famous Intellectual in France is to take a nonsensical thesis and be the first write a whole book advancing it." For the next Western reaction, ostensibly that of the American right, Geertz’ heaps Paul Berman and Daniel Pipes together with Stephen Schwartz (a character so bizar and charicaturesque, I usually picture him as Mike Meyers). “Taken together, and for all their differences, which are more of focus than they are of thought, Pipes, Schwartz, and Berman represent a particular, and particularly well-defined, approach to constructing "Islam" (and "Islamism") as a formed idea in the American mind: they regard it not as a product of events and processes foreign to Western history and culture, most especially modern Western history and culture, but as extensions of that history and that culture—old wine in only slightly new, awkwardly relabeled bottles. The apparently exotic is in fact the familiar with a different accent. The twenty-first century, so far anyway, is just a rerun of the twentieth with the names changed. It is quite clear what it is we are faced with in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the southern Philippines—or, for that matter, in Jersey City and along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn: "totalitarianism." All we need is the wit to recognize the fact and the courage to act upon it.” This is wrong, of course. Berman’s book especially is about something entirely different. See below. The third Western reaction, and the one that obviously has Geertz’ preference, is the one he calls “more empirical and policy-oriented diagnostical works, less concerned with announcing what "Islam" and "Islamism" essentially are than with discerning what, conceivably, they might in time become, and how we ought, from our side of things, to react. Studies of the views and aspirations of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, of political processes and governmental institutions in existing Islamized states, of differences in social attitudes from one region or section of the Islamic world to the next, and of the changing roles of religious scholars and clerics, the schoolmen of Islam, in secular, everyday politics, all direct themselves toward describing a religion that is more an evolving collection of contrasts, an array of possible ways of living and believing, than it is a closed and permanently settled transcendental ideal.” The key works here, he says, are ex-CIA Graham Fuller’s "The Future of Political Islam" and prof. Noah Feldman’s “After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy” (Martin Kraemer has an important piece countering Feldman's optimism with what a pessimist calls experience “Jihad is Over – if Noah Feldman wants it”. ) Feldman is a fascinating young law professor who helped the Eritreans write their consitution while he was at Yale, and now has been charged with helping the Iraqi’s write theirs. Kraemer: "He's a 32-year-old assistant professor of law at New York University and author of a new book (his first) entitled After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. He's also been anointed chief U.S. adviser to Iraq for the writing of its new constitution...Feldman is Jewish (raised in an Orthodox home); summa cum laude at Harvard (Near Eastern studies); conversant in Arabic; a Rhodes scholar with an Oxford D.Phil. in Islamic studies; and a law graduate from Yale. "The East is a career," wrote Disraeli." Despite all of Kraemer's just reservations and criticism far more informed than mine, I am sympathetic to Feldman’s project. It is what we might call neo-liberal. It does not come from the conservatives, yet completely engages and commits the US to reconstructing Iraq on the neoconservative, and truly liberal, faith in the possibility of liberal democracy in Islamic countries. It does not claim to be philosophical, but is a guide line for making the best of a terribly difficult situation, from the point of view of safeguarding the cultural heritage and spiritual tradition of a muslims country, while helping them find a way to bring about liberal democracy in their countries. It is one thing, for all its inclusiveness and courage, to say that muslims are as capable of democracy as anyone else. It is quite another to set out to write a constitution that will do just that. Call it realpolitik, idealist or even -help him- optimist, it's a damn good thing Bush took this man on board. Geertz then adds some remarks on studies emerging from within the Muslim world, some interesting surveys and important factual documentation essential to any social science whether political or anthropological. (But the authors cited are Riaz Hassan at Ohio State, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman at Brown, which leaves one wondering whether the boundaries between the Muslim world and the West are the ethnic frontiers within Western academia. If an “American” goes to Pakistan for research, he goes to the field as an anthropologist, whereas if an American muslim does the same at the same institution, then is his work is somehow authentic voice from within the Muslim world? That cannot be right.) The deeper problem, it seems, is that while attacking writers like Schwartz, Pipes and Berman for not being proper social scientists, Geertz misses a rather essential point: that there is a intellectual debate going on, that instead of a clash of civilizations à la Huntington or à la Bin Laden, there is a philosophical struggle about modernity and tradition, one that illustrates the profound difference between philosophy and social science. This philosophical struggle, between reason and revelation, between ancients and moderns, between tradition and change, is at the core of Western Civilization, but has been, in the past, equally important to Islamic philosophers as Al-Farabi, Ibn-Rushd, Ibn-Khaldun and Avicenna. Because social sciences have been plagued by ideology and the polarizing fallacies of Mr Said and his students, they have instilled the clash of civilizations, along with an extreme cultural relativism into their work (on how badly things have gone wrong, read Martin Kraemer). This line of thought denies the possibility that a text by say, Plato, can speak to a Muslim the same way it does to a Westerner, or even, that a Muslim can be equally a Westerner (Mr Said being the living example of the best argument against his own thought). The humanities and the social sciences have lost the idea that a text can somehow speak the truth to us, rather than never being anything but “a certain represenation of the truth”. The importance of this philosophical debate (and the price we pay for neglecting it as such) is illustrated best by the fact that, though as I expected, Geertz inluded (a misreading of) Berman (for this is the central argument in Berman’s book, and Geertz, for all wisdom, somehow cannot see it), as I feared he does not mention Roger Scruton, whose excellent piece on the comparative intellectual history of political thought in Islam and the West can be found online at the Intercollegiate Review of last fall, and the preface and first chapter of his latest book can (and should!) be read at ISI Scruton, the rare western philosopher who has studied arabic and islam properly, has many important observations distinctly different to the Middle East scholars, anthropologists, historians of religions, foreign policy scholars taken by Geertz to span the whole spectrum of the debate. Sure, Scruton has his reading of Islamic history, taking the fact that since Mohammed achieved what Moses and Jesus failed to do (achieve political power and being both prophet and political leader in his lifetime) political order was based on people, whether in Sunni or shiite tadition, to mean that “therefore, although the Koran is the record of a political project, it lays no foundations for an impersonal political order” and that “there seems to be no room in Islamic thinking for the idea—vital to the history of Western constitutional government—of an office that works for the benefit of the community, regardless of the virtues and vices of the one who fills it.” But he takes it to a whole different kind of debate, stating that therefore “In effect, everything is owed to G-d, with the consequence that nothing is owed to Caesar.” All duties, no rights. This post is too long as it is, but this ought to be the starting point for something else (what kind of conclusion is that, bozo? haven't you read Heraclitus? - ed.) posted by Theo | 7:31 AM THAT WHICH LEAVES US INDIFFERENT... I want to take some time off from heaping scorn and calumny on Republicans to tell you about something genuinely disturbing. Yesterday I was doing exit interviews with the students in a program we coordinated at an elementary school in the Cabrini-Green housing projects. The last kid I spoke to showed me the book he had made as part of the library class. After he left, I looked idly at the other books, and found one with the arresting title "The Girl Who Killed Herself." Its author was a seventh-grader. The story was about a girl who lived with her older sister and aunt. One day her sister told her what happened to her parents: mother had a heart attack, father died in an industrial accident. Shortly after this, their aunt died and the girls were picked up by DCFS. They were sent to different foster homes. At the first foster home, the girl was "jumped" by the twin daughters of the parents. She was sent from home to home, suffering frequent abuse, until she decided to kill herself. Her last foster parents were convicted of killing her. There is a way in which the children of the inner-city are drafted into the service of our political arguments. Liberals see only the occasion for more state-sanctioned pity, in the form of more money shovelled at schools and welfare systems. Right-wingers tend to see only a degraded culture, self-destructiveness, and excessive welfare bureaucracy. Reading "The Girl Who Killed Herself" reminded me that both of these views deny the individuality of these children. At the same time, typical left-right arguments tend to be made in ignorance of the institutional and social horrors the poor, and especially children, face. Rush Limbaugh used to like to say (maybe he still does) that "we have the richest poor in the world," a sentiment which is beyond stupid when you consider all the non-material ways in which the poor are poor--something that is often ignored by welfare sate liberals as well. In a way I was relieved that the girl who wrote that story was not someone I could do anything for in the context of my responsibilities there. I hope she's better than she sounds from her writing, but, like almost everyone else, I had to leave her to her fate. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 7:08 AM Thursday, June 12, 2003 CREDIT WHERE DUE Perhaps we may be done anointing Bush with camphor and wreathing him with the garland of the sacred oak. National Review Online--which I repeatedly abuse for publishing unresearched, illogical, credulous writing--has put up an editorial suggesting that war proponents may have made mistakes: But if opponents of the war are overreaching, it must be said that supporters have made mistakes of their own. A frustrated president said that we had "found" WMD when we had only found mobile labs that could be used to develop them. Some hawks have even denied the importance of WMD as a reason for the war. They have spoken as though the discovery of mass graves and other evidence of Baathist cruelty were all the justification the war needed. A reduction in the amount of evil in the world is of course an accomplishment worth celebrating. But we did not go to war in a humanitarian enterprise. Sure, this has some predictable shortcomings. The remark of the "frustrated president" is known, in specialist circles, as a "lie" or an "untruth." But note the huge step forward that this represents. Instapundit can point to all the mass graves he wants, but it won't answer the questions NRO has raised. Unlike many liberals, I was in favor of the war. But I don't take the fact that so many liberals opposed the war to mean that they wanted us to lose, or that they had a furtive fondness for Saddam Hussein, or that they think the end of the regime there is a bad thing. The question is how we justify our use of military power. Since there is no country in the world that can check our power, the only brake is public opinion and democratic governance: what reasons our electorate and officials will accept as valid, and what excuses for mistakes or failure won't be tolerated. Maybe NRO's brave editorial will help us move past "any" and "none." posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:29 PM TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY Michael Crowley has a must-read article in TNR about America's Jacobins, the House GOP leadership. Highlights: To the most hard-line Republicans, giving Democrats any legislative role is utterly taboo. Just days after September 11, 2001, for instance, House Speaker Dennis Hastert agreed to work with House and Senate Democrats on an economic recovery package. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay protested the bipartisan work, but Hastert, in a rare assertion of his authority over the rabid Texan, overruled him. In a Capitol building conference room a few days later, staffers for Dick Gephardt, then House minority leader, and Tom Daschle, his Senate counterpart, were working late into the night with Republican aides on the details of an airline bailout. Sometime around 3:30 a.m., DeLay stormed into the room in a rage--"absolutely red-faced, screaming and yelling," according to a Democratic aide who was present. "Who elected you to Congress?" DeLay yelled at Democratic staffers. To the Republicans he shouted, "We're getting out of here," before marching out with the obedient aides in tow. The next day, DeLay introduced a bill stripped of most of the Democratic provisions. Or this: "The press has been disgracefully acquiescent," says Frank. "Democrats these days are told by other Democrats, who are not full-time in politics, `Well, we're disappointed. We don't hear much from you.'" One reason for this, Democrats say, is that the press doesn't write about the procedural tactics the GOP employs to quash opposition. The public often assumes Democrats rolled over in cases when they were, in fact, steamrolled. "The press won't cover Rules or Rules Committee votes," says Sirota. "It's process--but it's tantamount to substance." Read the whole thing. It's damning. Karl Rove and those who admire him generally suggest that the ruthless amassing of all this federal power is all to the purpose of diminishing the power and scope of the federal government. Don't believe it. No one who seeks to control a state so completely ends up wanting it to wither away. More on this and the article on neo-con Trotskyism when time allows. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 12:22 PM Wednesday, June 11, 2003 WHITE EVANGELICALS: NOT AS HYPOCRITICAL AS WE THOUGHT The story I linked to in the post below, about Gov. Bob Riley's (R-AL) Gospel-based push for a tax code less burdensome for the poor, has made me think about the possibility of using economic issues as a way to bridge the ever-widening gap between liberal/mainline churches and fundamentalist/evangelical (the terms are not synonymous) groups. It looks like the days of the Christian Right being a moralizing front for the GOP's economic elite may be coming to an end. Despite Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson's loathesome attempts to convince their followers that God demands lower capital gains taxes, it turns out that people are actually reading the New Testament and finding out that--who knew?--it has a lot to do with the ethical treatment of the poor and disadvantaged. Groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network are perhaps signalling the end of the unholy union of charismatic protestantism with powerful economic interests. I'm unfairly disposed to dislike and distrust evangelical and fundamentalist protestantism, and I do believe that in many ways its ascendance is disastrous for the future of Christian thought and practice. Still, churches like mine are going to have to do more to develop relationships with this movement, as it's not about to go away and as its zeal on issues like the environment and economic policy may help reinvigorate our own mission. And it puts GWB's "compassion" dog-and-pony show in a new light. While many observers believed that the rhetoric of social engagement has been deployed to attract moderate voters, it may also be playing to the nascent social conscience of white evangelical protestants--i.e., Bush's base. There is no hope of separating him from that base, even on justice issues--if you're capable of believing that the earth is 6,000 years old, you're surely capable of believing that Bush cares about poor people. But at the local and state level, there may be some very fruitful alliances to be made. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 1:56 PM Tuesday, June 10, 2003 A CONVERSION EXPERIENCE Bob Riley, right-wing governor of Alabama, is doing precisely what the religious Left wants to do: he's making a Gospel-based argument for more progressive taxation. Check out this remarkable article by Adam Cohen in today's NYT. Especially note the quote from John Giles, which is priceless. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:53 AM Monday, June 09, 2003 GEORGE F. WILL LIKES TO SAY, with the dramatic pomposity for which I adore him, that "one is entitled to one's own opinion, but not to one's own facts." This is not, in a strict sense, true: the American Right has largely seceded from traditional scholarly and journalistic practices and institutions in order to provide facts more congenial to its worldview. Yet I want ever so much to share Mr. Will's schoolmarmism, so we'll try to keep the maxim relevant. President Bush reportedly told Polish TV that we have already found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [because they would believe him?--ed. But Stanley Kurtz rides to the rescue in an NRO column today that beggars belief. This one is worth looking at in detail because it's so stunningly bad. We have found WMD, Kurtz claims: According to the Times, the looted nuclear facility, "contained ample radioactive poisons that could be used to manufacture an inestimable quantity of so-called dirty bombs." So in the course of trying to embarrass the administration, the Times has inadvertently raised a very important point in the administration's defense. Saddam's nuclear-weapons program contained sufficient material to pose a serious threat to the United States. In the hands of terrorists, nuclear dirty bombs supplied by Saddam could have rendered landmarks and key sites in American cities uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Kurtz is saying that the looting of a nuclear facility is a vindication of the Bush policy! This is insanity. The materials--which not close to being useful for a warhead--are now God-knows-where and much, much likelier to show up in dirty bombs. It is the height of absurdity to suggest that this material is safer in the hands of a non-state actor than in the hands of Saddam, monster that he was. Kurtz does not say this explicitly, but his argument, if you can call it that, has to assume it. Now it's true that this was a site that the inspectors knew about. That, however, might not have prevented Saddam from transferring the small amount of nuclear material necessary for a dirty bomb to terrorists. And the Iraqis may well have been carrying out other critical tasks in pursuit of a nuclear bomb at secret facilities. And there was always the danger that, in the absence of regime change, the Europeans would have tired of sanctions and inspections — as they'd done before — and let Saddam complete his nuclear work. "Might not have prevented..."; "may well have been..."; "there was always the danger that...". Has the subjunctive mood ever been put to such hard labor to justify a war ex post? Let's leave aside the second sentence, in light of the fact that, if anything, we probably hastened the feared transfer. You could literally write this paragraph about any country in the world. This is Cynthia McKinney-style free-association. Another serious danger was the possibility that, at a propitious moment some time down the road, Saddam might simply have kicked the inspectors out. After all, that's what the North Koreans did. They waited till we were tied down by our struggle with Iraq, booted the inspectors out, and powered up their nuclear program. Had we failed to invade, Saddam could have waited until a weaker president was in power, and/or until the U.S. was tied down in a war (perhaps with Korea), and simply thrown the inspectors out. After all, he'd done it before. Here's more abuse of the subjunctive--"the possibility that"--couple with another damning argument against the Bush policy: "after all, that's what the North Koreans did." In other words, it would have been wrong to have let a small threat grow while we tended to a major threat, because we did the exact opposite, and the major threat grew. That's Jesuitical even for an NRO contributor. But even if Saddam was a couple of years away from a bomb, the need to invade was urgent. The point was precisely to stop Saddam before he got close enough to a bomb to exploit our uncertainty about his capacity and blackmail us. That, after all, is exactly what the North Koreans have been doing for some time. I don't recall this highly refined argument being common pre-war. But a good way to test a justification for a war is to ask what war it wouldn't justify. This one would justify quite a few. Both the president and the vice president did, of course, talk about the potential threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam. But to emphasize that, and especially to spell out the danger scenarios outlined explicitly by Kenneth Pollack, would have been difficult and awkward. It would have harmed American power to note in too much detail just how vulnerable we were to nuclear blackmail. The same dynamic helps explain the administration's relative silence about the barrel over which the North Koreans now have us. We do our best to pretend that Kim Jong Il has not got us in as difficult a situation as he in fact does. This is just ridiculous. The VP and Prez used crudely forged documents to vastly overstate the nuclear threat posed by Iraq. They never missed a chance to push the threat, vanishingly small as it was. And I would wager that "the administration's relative silence" about NK has something to do with the extent to which their preferred approach to the country has failed. Did the Iraqis have chemical and biological weapons? No one doubts that they did. Did they destroy or move them out of the country prior to the inspectors' arrival to prevent their discovery from justifying an invasion? That wily Ba'ath Party--"we'll give up our most powerful weapons and hasten our own demise, but won't it be an embarrasment to Bush when they don't find them!" Or worse, as I've said before, the worst-case scenario--Saddam's transfer of his weapons--came about as a consequence of the war! Little did those Ba'ath Party apparatchiks know that brave right-wingers like Stanley Kurtz would see through their schemes and believe everything Bush tells us regardless of all evidence to the contrary. If we don't stand with the president now, when he most looks like a dupe, a liar, or a failure, we are letting the bad guys win. This war could still turn out to be good thing, provided we stay the course and rebuild Iraq. But it does matter how we justify our wars. It does matter if we delude ourselves perpetually. Credulity of this sort makes all rational an ethical discourse on war completely impossible. All of this over and above the fact that it obviously matters if we've just increased the world's available supply of bad, bad weapons. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:11 PM God-Bothering Notes Minnesota churches are allowed to keep guns out of their sanctuaries. But sadly, not out of their parking lots. The Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire elected an openly gay bishop. The secular liberals of the blogosphere--Yglesias, Atrios, etc.--have greeted this announcement with predictable approval. Although I have no time for anti-gay politicians or churchmen, I'm not entirely happy about this. As I understand it, the Episcopal Church, like my own Lutheran denomination and most mainline protestant groups, allows two options to clergy: marriage or chaste single life. Whether for good or ill, the marriage rite is restricted by these churches to heterosexual couples. The fact that this new Bishop--who appears to be a very good and faithful priest--has a long-term partner basically abrogates this rule. If it were up to me, the church would bless faithful gay unions and this wouldn't be a problem. But it is not fair for liberals to simply short-circuit the process by which these changes must and should take place. By turning the issue into an up-or-down vote on the episcopacy of an otherwise excellent gay priest, liberals make it an act of smallness and bigotry to deny him his seat based on his sexuality. It behooves liberals to continually force these issues into an individual context as a way to avoid painful doctrinal struggles. And the fact that rules on clerical sexuality are so widely flouted does not make a difference in this argument. A certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in decent maintenance of any rule worth having. Better to have an inadequately applied rule than to signal that rules--while still on the books--have been replaced by the ad hoc deployment of sentiment. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:03 AM Saturday, June 07, 2003 EXHIBIT A IT'S BEEN VERY DIFFICULT for me to take the various "where are the weapons of mass destruction -- Bush lied!" conspiracy theories seriously. The desperation with which they're offered is indication enough of their bogosity. This from Instapundit. Read the rest of the post and note how he subtly shifts the burden of proof onto the sceptics, as if the absence of any unambiguous WMD findings doesn't support their case. Toss in a cheap reference to "conspiracy theories"--a hugely overused conversation-ending cliche on the Right these days--and change the subject to mass graves, and suddenly the problem of zero evidence for the administration's pre-war claims vanishes like 8,500 liters of VX. Let's try this again: Bush made repeated and scary claims of a vast Iraqi WMD stockpile (bolstered by major media and other governments, to be sure). So far we have found none of these weapons. From these indisputable facts, I draw the following possible conclusions: 1) Bush and the administration cooked the intelligence, i.e. "lied"; 2) They passed on false information that they believed was correct, i.e. "were duped"; 3) They were correct about WMDs, and one or more of the following has occured since the war broke out: a. The Iraqis destroyed the banned weapons; b. The Iraqis hid the weapons exceedingly well; c. The banned weapons were removed by persons unknown. A lot of lefties have been fond of 1), in part because it paints Bush in the worst light and in part because his aversion to truth-telling on the domestic front (e.g, taxes) makes it plausible to those who don't like him. If it's correct, Bush is a true fiend. For those less hostile, 2) may be more plausible, but it certainly doesn't speak well of the president or, especially, the reliability of our absolutely critical intelligence-gathering system. Bush's defenders are mostly going with 3); Rumsfeld proposed 3)a, which is so laughably improbable that even Ari Fleischer hasn't to my knowledge repeated it. Many are suggesting 3)b, in which case the military's leisurely pace in searching possible sites is distressing. And many leave open the possibility of 3)c, which they fail to note is precisley the scenario that non-hysterical anti-war commentators most feared. If it is true, it would be a complete vindication of the anti-war position. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:00 PM SUCKERS Unless the Bush administration does something to suggest that it tangibly welcomes gay citizens into its big tent, then it will deserve to lose many of the votes it won last time around. Certainly the administration has now done a lot to give a direct one-word message to its gay supporters: suckers. Guess who? Andrew Sullivan! I love Mr. Sullivan, but he is like a broken f-ing record. John Ashcroft could call for the public stoning of Michael Musto and Sullivan would be saying this crap the next day. This is merely an amplified version of his manner with regard to tax and spending issues. He asks questions with a naivete redolent of a Matlock-style hick lawyer, but there's no clever turnaround at the end. I've been saying for a long time that a lot of smart liberals have been turned into spittle-spewing fools by this president. I'm beginning to think that the same thing is happening, in an opposite direction, with putatively intelligent conservatives. The fiscal policy is a disaster waiting to happen; the social agenda is by and for extremists; potentially dangerous sites in Iraq remain unsecured; the judiciary is slowly being turned into a political fiefdom; we've been petty in victory; we reward dictatorships and punish democracies based on their acquiescence to our war policy. The funny thing is that a number of conservatives will agree to many or even most of these statements--at least gentler versions of them. But yet nothing gets them to join outright opposition. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:35 PM A post by the farmer at Atrios has made this blog redundant. It's a play on the famous speech from As You Like It, with George W. Bush as the subject: All the worlds a political stage. And all the pundits and pol-ops merely players: They have their exit strategies and their entrance requirements; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the child. Mewling fluke of privileged charms. And then the winsome schoolboy, with his skull and bones. And vacant wellborn face, sleeping at Yale Oblivious to intellect. And then the rover Lies to burnish, stuporous, doleful, pallid Clade to the listless eyebrow. Then a soldier Full of warrior tropes, and played like a card. Missing from duty, yet suddenly wreathed in laurels. Seeking the bubble reputation Levin for the canon's grouse. And then the injustice. In sound and folly with crafted shapen lines With guise and smear and suits of formal cut, Fond of slantwise maws and tortured nuances And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts. Into the lean and codpieced brigadier dragoon, With spectaculars on cue and press on board His boastful pose well played, a world too tried For his cranks crunk; and his slow tangled tongue Turning again toward churlish quibbles, quips And siren songs resound. Last scene of all, That ends this shortchange retrogress misery Is no second curtain, and mere oblivion for a fool. For someone who really, really dislikes this president, I'm pretty tired of the "Bush is stupid" routine. But this is a masterpiece of the genre. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:53 PM Thursday, June 05, 2003 Instapundit links to an illuminating nugget: Why are we unpopular at the United Nations? Consider the U.N.'s membership list. Most of the so-called nation-states are anything but. Sure, they have Rand McNally borders, but they aren't modern states rooted in legitimate, popular authority. These hoaxes are areas controlled by the primitive sovereignty of tyranny, empires of fear where autocrats (often backed by a favored ethnic group, a tribe with a flag) call the shots. Yeah, they hate us. The autocrats running the fake states hate us because they fear the liberty that empowers us will encourage their oppressed to topple them. Yes, surely that is what motivated tyrannical, fly-by-night nation-states like France, Chile, and Turkey to oppose our righteous liberating mission. I don't note idiocy like this just to point out the self-justifying delusions of right-wingers, although that is fun. It bears mentioning that this is the kind of thinking to which I've been susceptible myself. And it's true in so far as we are not loved by the governments of Lybia, Zimbabwe, and so on. But while we weren't looking, a lot of democracies sprang up around the world. And anyone who's paid the least attention to world opinion knows that most of those countries weren't too high on attacking Iraq, either. In fact, Coalition of the Willing extras like Spain and Italy joined in despite the overwhelming opposition of their electorates. As if that weren't bad enough, the Bush administration has tilted pretty hard against democratic nations that had the temerity to do what their people wished (Turkey, Chile, France) and towards dictatorships that stuck with us (Uzbekistan, Singapore, perennial favorite Saudi Arabia), bravely flouting (and flaying) popular opinion. The Left certainly hasn't been as principled as it should be in defending and expanding democracy. But how the Right manages to engage in such cheap democratic triumphalism while supporting a president who never met a democracy he liked [Including ours?--ed. Get thee behind me!] is a mystery to me. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:02 AM Tuesday, June 03, 2003 Check out this hilarious parody of The Corner (link via Atrios): THIS IS THE LIFE! [Wilfred F. Bumpley] Good Lord I'm drunk. Here it is, 11AM on a Tuesday, and I'm completely legless. If anyone ever tries to tell you that money can't buy happiness, I suggest you pour a full bottle of 15-year-old scotch over their heads; and if you ever have the opportunity to be born into wealth, do. No regrets, no regrets at all. To be fair, the real Buckley has a pretty good article up today about WMD. And by "pretty good" I mean "reasonably concordant with reality." posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 4:52 PM A Novel Defense on WMDs Hussain Hindawi and John R. Thompson have an impressively credulous piece on NRO defending against those cretinous America-haters who suggest that maybe the WMD case was wildly overblown. But even NRO contributors can't find a way to deny that no weapons have yet been found, thus: There are in fact two highly credible — and probable — answers [to the question of what became of the banned weapons]. In the months of contrived and contorted, seemingly endless U.N. diplomacy, Saddam and company had ample time [a] to hide any type and number of weapons in difficult to detect places around California-sized Iraq, and/or [b] to export them into safe havens controlled by the world's far flung, loosely allied terror network. So by the time the war started, either the weapons were effectively beyond use, or the nightmare scenario of arms being transferred to terrorists had already come to pass. Option A does not look very likely from what I've read, but it's possible, and I would very much like to see it proven correct. Option B, however, if true, would constitute a complete failure of the Bush policy. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:17 PM Lies, Damned Lies, and GWB's Case for War Andrew Gullivan links to a USA Today poll that has some striking numbers: 70% of respondents think that things are going "moderately" or "very well" in Iraq, and 67% percent don't think the administration deliberately misled the country in establishing Iraq's threat. Now, for one thing, every modern war I can think of was started under overplayed (Tonkin; Nazi infiltration of Latin America) or entirely false (remember the Maine?) pretences. Unfortunately, that has simply become the MO of modern democracy and dictatorship. The judgment we usually pass on wars, if we are not obsessives, tends to leave this aside and focus on the geopolitical context of a war and its consequences. I suspect that the same will hold for Iraq. Still, it bothers me that I was duped. I'm too lazy to link to the voluminous evidence that the Administration deliberately manipulated the work of the intelligence community to make a stronger case for Iraq's threat, but I think it's telling that there is almost no one on the Right who bothers to dispute the claim in substance. Even I'm a little amazed at the complete quiescence of the American Right in the face of this deeply compromised affair. The serially deluded Sullivan is a pretty easy mark; he might hem and haw about everything from tax cuts to bigotry to not-enough-troops-to-win-the-peace, but somehow he always ends up as the good soldier. But I'm a little surprised that no one at NR or the Standard has chafed at their emasculation. I distinctly remember doomsday predictions of a nuclear-capable Saddam--including one NRO piece that opened with a hypothetical note from the dictator announcing that nuclear bombs were hidden in a dozen American cities and would be detonated if certain of his demands were not met: a withdrawl of support for Israel, ending sanctions against Iraq, rescinding Miguel Estrada's nomination to the federal bench. Since Saddam turns out to have been about as far from nuclear capability as the sovereign state of Oregon, I have yet to see anyone say--"whoa, that was a bit hysterical. We'll try not to do that again." Did Iraq have serious ties to terrorist groups? Did it possess substantial stores of WMDs? Well... Syria sure does! A closer look at the USA Today poll reveals something that I find scary: Of the 67% who think the Administration was honest about the pretext for war, 31% say the information was accurate and 31% say the Administration thought the info was accurate when it in fact was not. This is the kind of "big tent" that Lee Atwater couldn't have anticipated in his wildest dreams! This very favorable poll number depends on a precise balance of entirely contradictory opinions, and it suggests to me that the truth or falsehood of the Administration's claims is ultimately irrelevant. Similarly distressing is the trend the poll finds in the percentage of Americans who say that the war will be justified only if we find banned weapons. On March 23, that number was 41%. The latest poll puts it at 23%. What could possibly account for this precipitous drop? No polls suggest any increased patience by Americans for the humanitarian part of the mission, so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with that. My utterly cynical guess is that it has to do with winning. Americans, like anyone else, like to win. If we find ourselves winning a war, then, sure enough, the task of justifying it will become a lot easier. Only defeat inspires criticism. Perhaps this is why Vietnam is so widely considered an immoral disaster and the Spanish-American War, which was far less justified and in ways a clearer atrocity, is pretty much unremarked upon. If I'm right about this, it just goes to show that American power is morally neutral, at best, in itself. Leadership is everything, since Americans will support any war that succeeds and we can succeed anywhere, against any foe, at any time. All the more reason to be ferociously critical of our leadership. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 12:46 PM Sunday, June 01, 2003 Our Text for Today Chicago Diarist, 1 June 2003 This afternoon I splurged on a last-minute ticket to hear Andre Watts at the Symphony Center. I expected a seat in the upper balcony, the only seating in town more nausea-inducing than the upper deck of Don't Buy from U.S Cellular Field or the gallery of the City Council chamber, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself about 16 rows from the stage on the ground floor. The bill featured three pieces by Schubert--a wonderful klavierstuck, a somewhat bombastic sonata, and a very nice fantasy--followed by short selections from Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel. I had seen Watts once before and he was excellent again, but I couldn't help but feel that the crowd was a little too generous with its standing ovations. They seem to have become an entitlement, especially if a performer spices his competence with a flamboyant stage presence. It made me think of the tedious affair that the State of the Union address has become. Even a good speech starts to sound pretty dreadful thanks to the obligatory standing applause that is deployed solely for effect, without any hint of honest enthusiasm. "Faint with damned praise," as I think Pope put it. A dear friend of mine visited from New York at the end of the week. As we discussed what exactly we might do with ourselves, I explained that I've given up on being a poet because there is already too much poetry and too few readers. Better to teach and help ensure that serious literature has an audience than to add to the unread, or soon-to-be-unread, heap. Better to be a small part of something big than to entertain attempts at greatness. "That's the problem with people in New York," she said with surprising vehemence. "No one wants to be a small fish in a big pond. Everyone wants to be a big fish in a small pond." Thanks to the fragmentation and diversification of fields of action, significance has been democratized [Credit this observation to David Brooks please--ed.] While our ambition may have shrunk in absolute terms, it has increased in relative terms--that is, relative to the recognition and importance we are likely to be granted by our particular subculture. All of which brings me back to today's Gospel, from John. "I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." The temptation to lower one's sights are all around, perhaps more immediately than ever before in human society. There is counterfeit greatness close at hand for all of us. Labels: Chicago, diarist, Music posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 8:24 PMSaturday, May 31, 2003 Evil Dewar's A propos of Theo's post below, I noticed a great couplet from The Junkers' new album, Live Characters Nightly: Jesus said that blessed are the pure; Then blessed is the whiskey that's distilled by Mr. Dewar From "Too Drunk for Church" posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 8:29 AM The Hungry West There are neo-cons, paleo-cons, and then there is Roger Scruton. Even though each side of the Atlantic has its own political vocabulary – cf. the disparate meanings of “liberalism” - the concept of the “conservative” might however be thought to be more homogenous. This, too, is deceptive. Scruton’s conservatism is of a different order, in many ways outside the spectrum of American politics. Wit, dandy, philosopher, pianist, (and one who believes only Gulf Arabs are driven around in spotless Rolls Royces; a real gentleman drives his Rolls across country roads himself, the muddier the better), author of many books like An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, The Meaning of Conservatism, and most recently, “The West and the Rest. Globalization and the Terrorist Threat” (which was published in series, in part, at NRO). Scruton is one of the most intelligent voices on the right in Europe. Together with his wife he runs OpenDemocracy.net, the most recent editorial of which was posted on ALDAILY last week. Following Ben’s posting several weeks back about the loss of the family meal, the influence of fast food, Scruton’s piece, Eating the World. The Philosophy of Food, raises similar, very important points, (“His weakness for Médoc, which is not a weakness at all but a strength, endears Kant to your editorial team, all descended from long lines of dipsomaniacs.”) The most obvious way in which it differs from American conservatisms, is its distrust in the invisible hand of what one University of Chicago alumnus calls “One Market under G-d” (Thomas Frank went on to found The Baffler, not linked to ALDAILY, a very serious magazine on the left, and the best-hidden publication in Hyde Park). Scruton's is a kind of anti-globalization-conservatism one just doesn’t get in the US, and a voice, from deep in the West (ern rolling hills of England) that ought to be heard more on the other side of the pond. Speaking of “the hunter-gatherers whose genetic make-up we inherit”, and of a ritual, spiritual experience of food that “lies buried within us”, Scruton says “the species-memory of it will influence our conduct however much we wish to grow out of our genes.” In what seems to me a very European move – Scruton makes a genetic-biological conservative argument for a philosophical point, or if you will, a material argument to make a spiritual point. The least that can be said is that we need to re-examine food, in all its aspects – economic, social, moral, spiritual – if we are to understand either this global economy or the environmental problems that are now afflicting it…We need to examine just what else has changed, now that food is available at so little cost, with minimum exertion, and with scant attention to the time, place or ceremony with which it was once consumed. In pursuing the philosophy of food since classical times Greek, Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Scruton finds much inspiration from The Hungry Soul, a book by the U of C’s own Leon Kass (acronym of “As Leo-Kons”). Scruton is a master of off-the-cuff remarks that nevertheless seem to voice something of the essence: like rice changes its perceived character, in accordance with global pressures and demands, ceasing to be a gift of God and becoming instead a patented human artefact. Or even better: temperance (as it was traditionally known) is not the same as dieting. Temperance is a way of keeping the body at a distance; dieting is a way of living with the body on intimate and obsessional terms. It is a kind of negative greed. Deeper, what is going on here is vintage conservatism: a critique of modernity by means of tradition. Elsewhere, in his latest book, “The West and the Rest”, it is fascinatingly precisely in terms of a philosophically serious critique of modernity that Scruton engages Islam. Behind the terror, the anger, the hate and obsessive hysteria across the lands of Islam, and behind the poverty, the tyranny of various stripes, behind all the rage of what is unhappily called “islamofascism” (I won’t use it again, for the simple reason that it is not fascism) Scruton recognizes that political Islam’s antagonism towards and challenge to the West, contains at (rare) moments also a philosophically serious critique of modernity. In the fast-food culture food is not given but taken…Fast food has broken free from spiritual life, to become a negation of those identity-forming traditions which make national foods and local foods so important to those who have lived with them. It is food devoted to the production of a new human type, for whom place, time and community are losing their significance. There can be no more vivid symbol than this of the global food economy and what it does, not just to people’s budgets but to their sense of themselves. The New York Review has a very informative piece by anthropology’s eminence grise, Clifford Geertz, a wide range of reactions in the West to Islam in the past two years. It is the first of two, and one would hope Scruton and Berman are treated in part II. Paul Berman’s latest book, “Terror and Liberalism”, in which the NYT piece on Sayyid Qutb is published as a chapter, suggests that there is a philosophically serious critique of modernity within radical Islamic/Islamist though, that cannot be countered by the force of arms, but by the power of thought, that cannot be engaged other than with ideas, namely by means of a defense of modernity. Even though he is merciless in his defense of the West against contemporary Arab and Islamic worlds, Scruton ironically opens up another, altogether different horizon of a possible engaging of Islam, namely on conservative, mondernity-critical terms. (After all, I would like to add, Leo Strauss started off with Al-Farabi’s reading of Plato against the background of the Sharia). All this reminds us that the cult of dieting occupies religious territory and is competing for attention with older traditions based on the acceptance of decay and death. At the heart of the contest between creature comforts and the health police, therefore, is a deeper dispute about the nature and the destiny of our species. posted by Theo | 6:42 AM Wednesday, May 28, 2003 Warren G. Harding at War Check out this remarkable graph. It shows every major poll of Bush's approval rating since shortly before September 11. It lends credence to the disturbing possibility that this president needs war in order to succeed politically. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 3:22 PM IF A MILLION JOHN DERBYSHIRES WERE CHAINED TO A MILLION TYPEWRITERS, how long would it take them to write a logically coherent column? To call this man a moron would be a grave insult to the developmentally disabled. Last week he was calling journalists--the people who do all the hard work for lazy cranks like Derbyshire--scum. His harangue today is devoted to the proposition that public-sector workers should be disenfrachised, on account of their vested interest in bigger government. While we're at it, Derbyshire suggests that we disenfranchize farmers who recieve massive subsidies, the employees and owners of companies who benefit from trade restrictions, people who rely on Social Security for their livelihood, and ex-CEOs of corporations that do all of their business in government contracts. Just kidding! Derb suggests no such thing. If he were in the habit of giving any issue more than five seconds thought, these rather glaring inconsistencies would be pretty obvious. But then again, he surely would lose his job at NRO. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:45 PM Sunday, May 25, 2003 REMINDER A good 20 months since 9/11, Thomas Friedman reminds us, and we still haven't gone after the source - the well of funding, the well of ideology - of "Islamofascism", because, well, that other well is in the way. Friedman is one of the best and intellectually serious minds in American liberal politics, and along with Robert Kaplan possibly the best journalist in the English language on the Middle East, nevertheless, this argument is by no means primarily, nor exclusively Democratic, nor leftist, nor anti-american. In the Spectator last November, even Mark Steyn made this point, when the Saudi crown prince Abdullah visited the Texan landscape so familiar to him, and the Saudi ambassador Bandar Ibn Sultan's wife Haifa turned out to have funded Al Qaeda. No one like Steyn to tell you what time it is: Nothing quite explains the administration's willingness to assist the Saudis in making a mockery of America's war on terror. Even murkier rumours that the royal house has the goods on Bush and Cheney for some dark oil-biz shenanigans can't account for the scale of the administration's denial. We have a huge Saudi-financed pile of American corpses, the Saudis are openly unco-operative, and meanwhile back at the ranch it's ribs with Princess Haifa. In slightly more diplomatic but no less subtle terms, Even "dark prince" Richard Perle's Defense Policy Board recommended last year that the Saudi's no longer be treated unconditionally as friends but rather for the enemies of America, and of pluralist liberal democracy that they teach their kids to be, as if the president needed to be reminded of his "You're either with us or against us". There used to be the (terribly weak) argument that went along the lines of "Iraq first." Well, that argument is no longer, and Friedman seems to be the only one stating the obvious. Money quote: (...) we must protect ourselves — by telling the Saudis, and ourselves, the truth. In private, Bush aides have been fuming: The U.S. gave the Saudis intelligence warnings before the recent attacks, but they took no steps to deter them. Publicly, though, the Bush team bites its tongue. We never talk straight to Saudi Arabia, because we are addicted to its oil. Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers. If we were telling the Saudis the truth, we would tell them that their antimodern and antipluralist brand of Islam — known as Wahhabism — combined with their oil wealth has become a destabilizing force in the world. By financing mosques and schools that foster the least tolerant version of Islam, they are breeding the very extremists who are trying to burn down their house and ours. But we also need to tell ourselves the truth. We constantly complain about the blank checks the Saudis write to buy off their extremists. But who writes the blank checks to the Saudis? We do — with our gluttonous energy habits, renewed addiction to big cars, and our president who has made "conservation" a dirty word. (...) And so the circle is complete: President Bush won't tell Americans the truth, so we won't tell Saudis the truth, so they won't tell their extremists the truth, so they can go on pumping intolerance and we can go on guzzling gas. Someday, our kids will condemn us for all of this. posted by Theo | 7:54 AM |
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