The day's reading

 "... Islamists decide whether violent jihad should be launched against non-Muslims based on a cost-benefit analysis, not on any conviction that killing non-Muslims is immoral."

Shall we have the New York police department refrain from investigating Muslim terrorism because the Obama justice department says that's insensitive? Read it all.

Of Mafiosi and Mullahs - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

I'll weigh in

"A terrible day," according to Commentary's blog. Tantamount to the arrival of the Visigoths outside Rome, circa 408 A.D., according to the always humorously snarky and depressed Mark Steyn. (They share the classical references, but Steyn is quite unlike the more intellectual, but never humorous and always depressed Victor Davis Hanson.) Both -- all -- are talking about Standard & Poor's downgrading of the United States to a less than triple A rating, for the first time ever.

I'll weigh in. I'll agree that it's not a good piece of news. But it seems to me that reading editorials for a lifetime will teach us that most pundits are wrong about most things. When I was growing up, pundits and wise men yelled and screamed about the environment, pollution, overpopulation, the rise of Brazil and Japan and yes, China, as the world's next superpower. And so on. What they never said Boo about was the rise of Islamic terror, because they didn't see it coming. And it has turned out to be the biggest problem the modern West faces.

Now they yell and scream "Downgrade," and about all the economic woe undergirding it. Agreed. But they are pundits. What is the big picture they are now missing? -- what grave threat will we all face in twenty or thirty years, that no wise man at the moment can see heading our way?

Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.

Again with the commonplace book

It's incredible, and heartening, to see and read the wisdom that shows up among anonymous people thinking and commenting anywhere the freedom of the internet allows them to do so. It's not all blathering, ALL CAPS SHOUTING and "trolls." This is from a post at Pajamas Media called "The Slow Suicide of the West." And it's better than the base article. The commenter calls himself only "Kipling."

"The faith of the author in classical civilization is laudable but largely misplaced. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were eventually able to hold their civilizations together. The Greeks had their own intercene [sic] wars that eventually gutted their civilizations. The Romans pursued a vicious policy of conquest to fund their imperial coffers. For every Cicero there were countless Neros and for every Cincannatus [sic] a legion of Sullas.

"The strength of western civilization is built upon Biblical Christianity and its revelation to the world of universe of ordered liberty. The Nazis and Marxists did not just happen on the scene in the 20th century. They were the product of the philosophical quest for answers in the rejection of God that ended in the bloodbath of Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzche [sic -- he forgot the 's'] and nihilism marked the death of philosophy as he concluded that we are simply bubbles of emptiness on a sea of nothingness. With truth out the windows, the disciples of Nietzche [ditto] embraced the will to power and spread darkness across the land. No philosophy has risen to take its place and we live in a post-modern world where the individual determines truth.

"Western civilization can only restore itself when it reforms upon the foundations that made it great. These foundations include our classical ancestors but they also include the giants of Christiandom [sic -- Christendom] who developed the concepts of ordered societies that influenced our founders. Christianity gave us the dignity of man, the value of work and honest labor, and the drive to suffer and yearn as a means of spiritual growth. It gave us a belief in something larger than ourselves that was worth sacrificing and building for on a daily basis. It gave us strong homes, strong churches, and informed citizens. It gave us a sense of community and purpose that far surpassed the ancient world. It can do so again but we must go back to the ancient paths."

Is he right? Despite the [sic]s, he's thinking. Heartening. 

"So this is how liberty dies" -- by resumé

Is it "amid thunderous applause," as Padme sadly says in one of the Star Wars movies? Maybe, although poor George Lucas was more prescient than he knew. Trying to savage George Bush in that film, we may be sure the erstwhile freedom-loving director subsequently felt not the slightest distress at the thunderous applause that in a few years elected Barack Obama to office.

No, it's not necessarily the applause that marks the event. It might instead be the fact that liberty dies when one or two people, who don't care much about freedom or any other abstractions, nevertheless need to make a political career out of getting noticed for doing something. Someday, I do believe historians will look back marveling that the prime characteristic of our era was that we were all busy compiling our resumés. Think of the idiotic things we do, think of the time we are compelled to waste, because we, or someone in authority just above us who wants to be noticed and promoted, is compiling a resumé. The staff training days, the workshops, the break-out sessions, the role-playing, because the director wants to be able to boast "I implemented staff training days with break out sessions and role playing" when she writes her next grant. Think of the smarmily-acronymed drug and gang "resistance" programs delivered to bored, embarrassed students in the public schools, because the school principal wants to be able to boast likewise when he goes for his Ph.D., and the nice young police officer in charge of the program wants to be able to say he sponsored D.A.R.E.  and G.R.E.A.T. when he runs for county sheriff in fifteen years ... have you ever seen thirteen-year- olds required to dance, in front of an audience, to the song "D! -- I won't do drugs! A! -- I won't have an attitude ...."    

Then there are small-time politicians who latch on to an issue, which itself has no value except that it erodes a little bit of freedom from people's daily lives, because the issue seems to have "legs" and because they, the small time politicians, want to become big time, or at least stay employed as politicians. Have you read the excellent cover article in the latest Weekly Standard, titled "Another triumph for the greens (why your dishwasher doesn't work anymore)"? 

In sum, Jonathan V. Last's article tells us how it happened that dishwasher detergents, which used to contain about 8% phosphorus -- this is the chemical that makes the detergents clean well -- now contain 0.5% and don't clean nearly as well. And we none of us have any choice but to buy them. The companies that make Cascade, Finish, and Electrasol all agreed to remove those useful phospates from their formulas as of last summer, because three politicians in Spokane, Washington, wanted them banned. Phosphates are blamed, rightly or wrongly -- note: rightly or wrongly -- for polluting fresh water and eventually killing fish, in the Spokane river specifically. The two meatiest paragraphs in the article follow:

It was in the midst of Spokane’s phosphorus-reduction mania that two politicians got the idea to ban dishwasher detergents containing phosphates. In April 2005, one of Spokane’s state representatives, Democrat Timm Ormsby, proposed a bill requiring that any dish detergent sold or distributed in the state contain less than 0.5 percent phosphorus. At the time, Ormsby didn’t think the bill had much of a chance. “I thought we were up against a pretty steep challenge,” he says, “given that other states had tried and failed.” The bill sat stewing until, a few months later, Spokane County commissioner Todd Mielke, a Republican, proposed a phosphate-detergent ban for the county.

Mielke, who served for five years in the state legislature before becoming a corporate lobbyist, was widely respected by Washington Republicans. When he joined forces with Ormsby, support for the phosphate ban took off in the house. It passed by a vote of 78 to 19 with such strong bipartisan support that both the speaker and the minority leader voted for it. The legislative strength of the bill surprised Lisa Brown, the Democratic majority leader in the state senate, who quickly became engaged. She knew a winner when she saw one. And it didn’t hurt that she, too, hailed from Spokane. With Brown muscling it along, the bill passed in the senate just two weeks later, 41 to 7.

Did both men, and the woman, have a genuine passion for reducing phosphates in their hometown's river, or a passion for fish, or nature, or only a passion -- and more and more I believe it is the ruling human one -- for telling their fellow beings what to do? Or were they just interested in improving their resumés? The result has been not only that good dishwasher detergents were banned in Washington state, but that the detergent manufacturers "threw in the towel" and decided to make all their products 0.5% phosphorus, rather than manufacture two sets of soaps, one for sale in Washington and one for the rest of the country. They recognized that there is no fighting Gaia.

And then, consider Lisa Brown. She, too, seems to be building her resumé.

Last January the Washington state legislature took up a proposal to ban phosphates from residential lawn fertilizers. It passed in the senate, but stalled in the house. The bill, which would have required neighbors to inform on one another, was sponsored by the Democratic majority leader, Lisa Brown [emphasis added].

Perhaps it's inevitable that democratic government becomes depraved. Eventually, there is nothing for candidates to promise, and nothing for elected officials to do, except to create more and more laws. At least olden-time aristocracies devoted a good part of their year to hunting, wenching, and court intrigue, and so left Jack Sprat alone to buy the dishwasher detergent he liked. Yet, note how people in un-democratic regimes walk through fire to vote.

Erasmus declared Folly the daughter of Plutus, Riches, and has Folly describe her father as the god "according to whose pleasure war, peace, empire, counsels, judgments, assemblies, wedlocks, bargains, leagues, laws, arts, all things light or serious -- I want breath -- in short, all the public and private business of mankind is governed ... this is my father and in him I glory."  If Folly in turn marries Democracy, it seems the children of the pair turn out to be the best and the brightest who like to outlaw things, and thus meddle and destroy in their own incremental way. They end up writing a lot of resumés.

One more thought, to be filed under the heading "incremental meddling." Eventually, the phosphate-banning, fish-loving environmental mania is going to come up against the grand topic of public health. Towards the end of the Weekly Standard article Jonathan Last writes,

The anti-phosphorus lobby began by agitating against phosphates in laundry detergent. In the early 1990s they were banned, though an exception was made for dish detergents. Now phosphates are banned in dish detergents, too, though these bans make an exception for commercial dish detergents, which still contain phosphates. Surely they are next in line for improvement.

"Next in line" are commercial detergents. What this means is that in time people who want to be noticed for having gotten something done are going to decide that it's not very important whether or not restaurant (or hospital?) dishes are clean. They also don't care if Jack Sprat actually wastes more water and more electricity hand-washing or double-dishwashing his dishes, as long as he's not using what they want to boast in their resumes about having banned. Will restaurant patrons complain about dirty plates and glasses? What of the public health inspectors, visiting kitchens and store rooms and also compiling resumés?

Hospitals, I suspect, will become the battleground where environmentalism makes its stand. Being an environmentalist has to be a function of youth and health. Recycle as you like, carpool, plant a tree on Earth Day, think green thoughts, smile at nature and love Gaia as you please, -- but wait till the day when you have to enter a hospital. The things those doctors and nurses use once and then throw away will absolutely astonish you. And when it's your turn to benefit from their ministrations, you will want them to go one doing exactly that, no matter how many trees you've planted on Earth day or how many canvas bags you righteously lug to the grocery store. You will want them using and hygienically throwing away the exam gloves, the needles, the syringes, the cotton swabs, the plastic sheaths for ear scopes and thermometers, the plastic I.V. lines and drip bags, the plastic bed protectors and the hand sanitizers and the face masks and the little cups for your pills. All this is only what you see in the patient's room, where things are relatively tidy and unshocking. God knows what is used up and thrown away in operating rooms or labs, and I don't mean obvious biohazards. When it comes to our lives and our health, we don't care what goes into the landfill or flushes into the ocean. Perhaps a race memory of filth and disease is still that strong in us. In the hospital we say: keep me clean and keep me alive.

For the moment, anyway. Can the best and brightest, people like Ormsby, Mielke, and Brown, change that? Will your doctor be required to share needles for the sake of the environment? It seems impossible, but up until last July it seemed impossible that free citizens would not be permitted to buy a good dishwasher detergent. It seems impossible that we shall all be forbidden to buy lightbulbs as of 2014, but lo, the law exists. (You can stock up, if you don't mind pretending you live in the old Soviet Union whose peoples' hoarding habits we used to rather pity.) When it comes to the hospitals, then we will see what passions the religion of Gaia really compels. Or perhaps there's a greater and subtler force at work, and it's just our attachment to the incremental folly of resumé writing. Either way, I imagine the daughter of Riches somewhere in heaven, laughing, deliciously.      

If I kept a commonplace book

If I kept a "commonplace book" as nineteenth century people used to, I'd put this in it:

"Liberalism doesn’t only encroach upon things like opportunity and standard of living. It’s what it does to the self that’s most dangerous and pernicious. It pushes out the individual imagination and replaces it with wooden convictions. Before that wreaks havoc on a polity, it has its way with a mind."

Abe Greenwald, Commentary's Contentions blog, Oct. 25th.

Guilty pleasure (I like Carla)

I can't help it. I like this woman.

Image from The Swamp


Granted, she is painted in a new biography as a "narcissistic sexual huntress." I have no idea how you go about being that and it's probably bad, but it sounds much more exciting than folding the laundry and getting dinner. Granted, all France is apparently laughing fit to die at her latest music CD. And granted, I can't imagine too many worse nightmares than waking up next to Mick Jagger, which she did for eight years. This was either before or after Eric Clapton. Then Donald Trump. Then some philosophizing French father and son in succession.

The deceived wife/mother in that menage wrote a novel about it, in which Carla figures, slightly fictionalized of course. Still she -- Carla -- blazed on with her life. Now she is well along in her career as wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy and therefore first lady of France. She looks smashing, she looks delighted with her lot, and she looks particularly fascinating in the photo above, whispering into her husband's ear at some official function or other.

Someday, I want an American president's wife to do this. Just for a moment, be young, beautiful, and distracting, and make all the other important men world leaders look silly because after all this is what matters most anyway. I will also be pleased when an American president's wife has a website like this one. Go to the English translation page and note how the drawing of the guitar strings become both the outline of a pert and adorable naked woman, seductively posed, and the water she is dabbling her foot in.

I can't help it. I like her.

Two political ads

First, the "Mourning in America" ad, which refers to the well-remembered "Morning in America" spot of Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign. Having heard something about it, I expected the new ad to be far more powerful.



It shirks facts, and it ends with a disappointing plea for our government to "care about us." Isn't that the problem?

The next ad, from benhoweblog, is many times better. It revisits history, naming the two men whom we have been trained to revere but whom we now know, thanks in my opinion largely to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, to have been primarily responsible for sending the United States off its Constitutional rails in order to satisfy an elite ideology: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The ad also captures the fundamental point of the last two years' politics: economic misery is one problem, but the larger problem is just our elites' generations-long hostility to the Constitution. The insertion of the clip showing Barack Obama trumpeting "fundamental change!" to a screaming crowd captures, not an image of the simple days when he was a teenybopper idol, but an image of chilling and calculated evil.



Wise, too, of the makers of this ad to finish with many pictures of protesting crowds, for this reflects the other main point of the last two years' politics: popular movement, popular understanding of, and anger at, what is going on. Here are not actors portraying the sad unemployed, but the actual rallies and speeches the media would not report. Big red Xs over the portraits of Republican candidates who lost because they weren't conservative enough also capture history as it is unfolding.

Bravo, benhoweblog. Memo to the group Citizens for the Republic: a bit less timidity next time, please. 

Molly hides -- Robert, Hugh, Daniel, and Jonah do not

This is one of those stories of creeping sharia that one had hoped would always have a dateline of the UK or Sweden. Not that that's good, but those places are far away, and so when stories carry datelines like that, one can put aside, for a few moments, the fact of having to face what our ancestors knew.

Our ancestors collectively knew a lot about Islam. Evidence of their experience crops up in the oddest places, in books and documents of earlier times, in our own Marines' hymn of all things. They knew and remembered (and defeated) Muslim armies gathered outside the walls of Vienna. They knew Muslim slave raiders snatching men, women, and children off the coasts of Europe, as far north as Ireland, even in what seems to our astonished eyes the proto-modern world, the mid-17th century, by which time surely people were beginning to be rational. They knew, in Samuel Johnson's casual 18th-century phrase, all about "the Turkic contempt for women." They knew what our own ambassadors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were told by the Muslim representative of the Barbary states (today's Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya) in London who explained why Muslims enslaved American sailors in the Mediterranean: "that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." This last is from Adams' and Jefferson's report to the Continental Congress in 1786, and is quoted in Joshua London's Victory in Tripoli. Hence, incidentally, the young United States' fight against the Barbary pirates, and the reference to the "shores of Tripoli" in that hymn.

Our ancestors knew, in short, what we have had the luxury of forgetting for a while and would rather not be confronted with again, that Islam has a core of aggressive, triumphalist malice at its heart which brooks no compromise, but can only be admitted and defeated through the vigorous defense of Western freedom and frankly through battlefield victory where the battlefields are.

Our having to face this is a kind of double shock. Most Americans are believing people. It's a shock to imagine a religion could exist which has malice at its heart, and which is therefore so contrary to what a good God could will; and, childish as it may seem to say so, it's a shock to follow through and contemplate a loving and good God who could allow untold millions of people over centuries to be enslaved to this malice, in their national life, in their homes, in their bodies, in their minds. This is the way a large part of the world is. And its people are commanded by their holy books to export this, through intimidation and violence, to other lands. I am not speaking of the day-to-day aspects of the religion, of any religion, being malicious. What guides kind, decent conduct or enables man to offer praise, thanksgiving, and supplication to God is good. I am speaking of the core of this one religion, to which its purists may always revert:

Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam. Islam is less a personal faith than a political ideology that exists in a fundamental and permanent state of war with non-Islamic civilizations, cultures, and individuals. The Islamic holy texts outline a social, governmental, and economic system for all mankind. Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission. The misbegotten term "Islamo-fascism" is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state. ("Islam 101," Part 3, Conclusion, by Gregory Davis, a web page of Jihad Watch.)

 

So Molly Norris has gone into hiding, as obediently as if her own state had commanded her to -- which apparently, via the advice of the FBI, it has. May we peasants be permitted to know the identities of the American agents who suggested an American citizen do this? -- who admitted to an American citizen living on her own soil that she cannot be protected from the potential punishments meted out for blasphemy by a foreign and anciently violent religious and political civilization?

And why Molly? I want to know why creeping sharia picks off the small fry, while big important fish swim and thrive. Molly is -- or was -- a cartoonist living and drawing in Seattle, who made a simple and funny cartoon last spring as a free-speech response to the South Park episode that apparently did not depict Mohammed in a bear suit, but was censored by Comedy Central as if it did anyway. She drew all sorts of ordinary objects, cups of tea and pasta packages and things, each cheerily saying "I am the real likeness of Mohammed." She framed it as if it were a hortatory poster from a non-existent group, "Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor (CACAH)." Molly very insouciantly hit the nail on the head, at first, when she reasoned that if enough people draw "Mohammed," Muslim jihadists won't be able to kill them all, and death threats like those offered to the creators of South Park -- by two individual ciphers with a laptop, it turned out -- will become "unrealistic."

Fair enough Then her idea went viral. (She enjoyed an audience to begin with, which goes far toward explaining why her cartoon of April 20, 2010 got noticed at all. She worked, or used to, for the "alternative" paper Seattle Weekly.) Major newspapers and well-known bloggers reported on her. Somebody else quickly launched a Facebook page called "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," setting aside this past May 20 as the day for a free-speech and divinity-lampooning extravaganza. The page racked up guests and "Likes," and drawings poured in.

When devout Muslims who know their duty saw it, they, or some few of them, set up protest pages. Molly freaked about not wanting to offend anyone, and essentially about the catastrophic loss of her privacy, which is understandable. She also freaked about having her throat cut, most understandable since we can anticipate Muslims doing so, just as we can now anticipate them blowing themselves up in pizza parlors, beheading journalists, and flying planes into office buildings. Facebook freaked and shut down the "Everybody Draw" page. One man, an American-born imam named Anwar al-Awlaki who used to run a Virginia mosque but is himself now in hiding in Yemen, announced that Molly "should be taken as a prime target of assassination." It will help to remember that, in Islam, Mohammed is the perfect man and the model for all behavior. In small matters, this is why the devoutest men may dye their beards red and marry little girls. In large matters:

The Prophet particularly seems to have disliked the many poets who ridiculed his new religion and his claim to prophethood -- a theme evident today in the violent reactions of Muslims to any perceived mockery of Islam. In taking action against his opponents, "the ideal man" set precedents for all time as to how Muslims should deal with detractors of their religion. ("Islam 101," Jihad Watch, by Gregory Davis, section 1, c., i., The Battle of Badr.)

Five months only after publishing her art, and two months after this holy man in Yemen passed his sentence on her, "Molly," her ex-employer sadly acknowledged, "is no more." Dead? No. Buried alive. She has changed her name, moved, and gone into hiding. I daresay we cannot imagine the nightmare she is now living in, for all she knows, self-created and for the rest of her life.

Still I'm confused as to why Molly should hide. Gregory Davis, who wrote the excellent "Islam 101" summary for JihadWatch which I quote above, to my knowledge is not in hiding. Neither are any of the all-star roster of Western or adoptive-Western scholars and journalists who write and educate us today about things our ancestors knew: Robert Spencer. Hugh Fitzgerald. Daniel Pipes. Andrew McCarthy. Andrew Bostom. Bruce Bawer (who lives in Europe). Mark Steyn. Pamela Geller. Melanie Phillips. Brigitte Gabriel. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wafa Sultan. Jonah Goldberg, who wrote as superb and simple a piece on Muslim violence as it is possible to find, just a few days ago ("A convenient excuse," National Review Online, September 17, 2010). A few heavyweights, like Europe's Ba'at Yeor and America's Ibn Warraq, do publish under pseudonyms, but even that nod to danger seems rare. We are blessed with some brave people out there -- though it's still shocking to live (again) in the world where we have to say that.  

So then why would Molly hide, when far more serious and, to jihadists, surely more offensive and targetable people do not? My guess is that it's not so much that Muslim jihadists go after the small fry, or the women. My guess is that it happens to be a jackpot if any one of them operating independently can cow, at a great distance, someone -- anyone -- who was a private citizen but achieved prominence by offending Islam in a free Western country. When people like Molly "go ghost" and "essentially wipe away their identity," it helps create a mental climate in which ordinary citizens hear of this and think that jihadist power anywhere is actually stronger, more startlingly pervasive, and yet more hidden, somehow therefore more routine, than it is.

Not that Muslim jihadist power and aggression in our world isn't already appalling enough. Daniel Pipes writes that although he's "elated" at the public's waking up to the classical triumphalist Muslim insult of the Ground Zero mosque, he had hoped that the public might have woken up a long time ago to jihadist penetration of our security services. (This is why I want to know who in the FBI advised Molly to disappear.) And, just incidentally, have you heard about the Christians arrested for distributing Christian literature outside a Muslim festival in Dearborn, and about the $10,000 reward offered by Detective Sherief Fadly for information on whoever burned a Koran in East Lansing, Michigan? Memo to the Dearborn police and to Detective Fadly: distributing Christian themed pamphlets and burning a copy of the Koran are not against American law, though of course both activities violate sharia.

It happens that the writers above, particularly Andrew McCarthy and Daniel Pipes, pursue a theme among many in their articles which may be apropos to Molly. The theme is that our victory in the war between Islam and the world -- and yes, Islam itself divides the world into the House of Islam (where all is correctly Muslim) and the House of War (polluted by sinners not yet converted, subjugated, or dead) -- depends very much on Westerners being confident and joyous in their inheritance, and aware of and determined to hold to its manifest strengths.

For many educated Westerners, this is emotionally dangerous. It means having to judge other civilizations, judge Islam, and find it very wanting. We don't like doing this, especially the younger of us who have been well trained in Western guilt and a kind of pretty-pretty-princess moral relativism for decades. Creeping sharia succeeds quickest, these men say, where just we well-meaning, gently reared, abashed Westerners have already absorbed instruction in our collective crimes, hypocrisies, vulgarities, and shortcomings, and therefore are ripe for the typical how-dare-you-judge-anyone-else scolding -- from a people whose civilization is far worse and who regard criticism of its religious core as blasphemy. Needless to say, freedom is not their friend, nor do they like its being ours.

Molly, I fear, good soul of the courageous "alternative" paper, is one of those guilt-ridden, sensitive types with no confidence or joy in her civilization. At first she showed an absolutely correct, simple gut understanding of her society's basic virtues, but then inadvertently tested them against an intractable alien claim otherwise. Never having dreamed there could be other worldviews -- though I daresay she could have spouted the correct things about "diversity" at a moment's notice -- she certainly could not react to absolute judgment with a gut level be-damned-to-you judgment of her own. It almost seems that, in her own conscience, she agreed she had to go.

What a mewling little tragedy that she should be the first American to go into hiding out of obedience to sharia. I know it's very easy to say someone else isn't brave enough in a situation that we ourselves are not living through. But did she, this comparative small fry, really get worse or more actionable threats or angrier pronouncements than those heard by Robert Spencer just for a start? His publishers restate them as negative selling point blurbs on the jackets of his books -- "Allah should pull his spine out and beat him with it every day for all eternity," and other official clerical gems. Robert, Daniel, Hugh, and all the others have been working to recapture and publicize our ancestors' knowledge of Islam for years, and are far better known than Molly. Yet in a matter of weeks, she dissociated herself from one drawing, and in a matter of months submitted to sharia in her own land, ostensibly forever. And her liberal, tolerant, speak-truth-to-power friends and colleagues did nothing in her defense. Mark Steyn puts it bluntly: "no one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you" ("Mollifying Muslims and Muslifying Mollies," Steyn Online, 20 September 2010).

Foolishly or not, I hold out hope for a nice, saccharine American ending to this saga. In three months -- not more, don't forget our collective attention span is not what it should be -- I want to see Molly on the cover of People, pensively and serenely photographed, telling her story of survival and bravery and uplift. Or maybe it would go better in Vogue. They can fit her in amid the fawning interviews with Eric Holder and Timothy Geithner, and perhaps dress her in couture, too. If they dare.

Image from Wikipedia article, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"

It's happened

It's happened. I've looked and looked again, checked and double-checked. I've waited a day, a week, and checked again.

Remember the "Woo-hoo demographic"? Remember my unscientific monitoring of the mommy-bloggers who all loved and voted for Barack Obama, and kept his blue and red Hope badge on their sidebars forever? Do you remember my worry at the way they utterly ignored him after the twin joys of election day and inauguration day, my fear that they constituted a huge demographic able to put him back in office in 2012 no matter what, precisely because they loved the hope and the excitement and novelty, loved the idea of a better future, loved Michelle and the girls and didn't care about anything he actually did? ("Thank God it's over. I'm BORED. I need a new toaster.") I said that I waited and watched, looking for some sign that even they might at least be paying attention to his behavior, his words. Something. This was back when his returning of the Churchill bust was still a bit of a shocker, at least for those of us outside the woo-hoo demographic. What kind of ill-bred infant needs to make a gesture like that? And so much more to come.

I waited for one mom blogger in particular to take his badge down from her site. Of all of them, I followed her most, and saw her as probably among the truest-to-type of that happy, energetic, good-souled troop of people. I thought, when the day comes that she takes the Hope badge down, it may indicate that the Great God has lost someone significant, or lost people like her in significant numbers. Perhaps both. 

She's taken it down. Perhaps she just got bored with her sidebar after roughly two years, and it's silly and meaningless of me to plumb depths there. But it's happened. It was the change I was waiting for. Boo-yah.

Hello, mom bloggers! Someone? Anyone? (March 2009)

I begin to understand

I begin to understand why a landed aristocracy should have arisen over the course of centuries in Europe and particularly in England. It makes sense, if nothing else, as a way to stop the galloping growth of government. There is nothing for political candidates to do in the modern world except perpetually run for office, perpetually promising us what they'll do for us (with our money) and perpetually legislating, legislating, legislating. The time will come when there is little left to legislate except, as our next Supreme Court justice seems to think is fair, what we must eat and drink every day.

I think I would prefer living in a system where a landed aristocracy controls the reins of power, but at least goes home to its estates and does nothing but wallow in idle privilege for a large part of the year. Squire Allworthy, hunting, shooting, fishing, and wenching, and occasionally rearing foundlings, would at least be in a position to leave us all alone when Parliament was not sitting. He could ride the circuit as a justice of the peace, too, I suppose, and hear cases and ladle out right and good, and get a little more fishing and wenching done that way.

Who wants to vote for a return to dukes and earls? Do you think an American earl would understand the premise? I'll bet his countess would.

A new experience

What I saw and heard at a political candidate's "meet and greet" at a crowded local sports-bar restaurant, amid the thundering din of twenty televisions blasting out the Chicago Black Hawk's Stanley Cup playoff game (#6 in the series):

I saw a barely-known candidate and his staff circulate among tables full of strangers, introducing the concept of a challenge to a Chicago Democratic machine incumbent whom most political observers would consider unbeatable, no matter the dirt clinging to him.

I saw a handful of people, among them young marrieds and another political candidate too, approach him, introduce themselves, and talk to him about their concerns.

I saw a young woman approach her potential future U.S. Congressman and ask him "just one question" -- namely, whom he held finally responsible for the oil spill in the gulf. His answer satisfied her, and then she explained her background. Her husband, she said, worked for BP, and most people's views on the subject infuriated her because most people did not have the facts. (I didn't. Who has ever heard of TransOcean, and the argument on the rig the morning of the explosion?)

I heard the candidate's campaign manager describe her own experience running for office in the state. She was ahead in all the polls, she said, until the Wednesday before the primary election this past February. She attended meet-and-greet events, she traveled, she spoke with mayors in her district, she tried to be the best candidate possible and to get the word out about herself and her views. The weekend before the election, her opponent, unknown, inactive, and invisible, received a cash dump of $35,000 into his war chest, the bulk of it from a local union and the rest from two big local construction industry firms. "So what did this do?" I asked -- "it bought exposure for him?" She agreed. "It bought exposure," she said. He won. Memo to the common man: you may only contribute $2400 to the candidate of your choice, in a primary and in a general election.

I saw the candidate's wife, young and pretty, cheerfully greet total strangers in a loud, strange, and tiring venue for what probably seems, and indeed may be, the umpteenth time that day, that week, that month. It was also their wedding anniversary.

I saw the candidate, and the staff and the small handful of people who had come out to meet him, at length relax and eat potato wedges and chicken wings, and crane their necks to watch a bit of the hockey game along with the rest of the patrons, because really there was no getting away from it.

I heard the candidate admit "it is tough" drawing a decent sized group to these meet-and-greet events. It's only June, the November elections seem a long way away, and the very people who might be most inclined to vote for a conservative Republican representative in Illinois are also the type to not put politics at the center of their lives. They are the type to want to live and let live.

And at the end of the night I saw the candidate take the bill for the potato wedges and the chicken wings, look at it, and reach into his back pocket for his wallet and his credit card.

We all shook hands and left, and the hockey fans stayed.

By the way, the Hawks won.

For more information: Isaac Hayes 2010

It's hate

So, now "we," the U.S.A., have decided to support a United Nations resolution demanding that there be a nuclear-weapons free Middle East -- how sweet -- and that Israel specifically should open up whatever facilities it has for inspection. No mention of Iran, which is thiscloseandgettingcloser to a nuclear bomb which it has in turn promised to use against Israel. All this, by the by, just before a meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. I guess maybe this time Netanyahu will get something to eat, and not be left alone to cool his heels in the White House while his host goes off and has dinner with his family.

All the smart people who write politics are working, right this minute, on proper, cool, yet properly anguished and deeply intellectual responses to this up-ending of a decades-old friendly American policy toward Israel. They'll have their articles up by tomorrow morning. I can save them a lot of trouble, and assure them the day is coming when they will have to simply admit: Barack Obama may not be a good old fashioned anti-Semite. After all, it seems he can put up with Rahm Emmanuel without throwing up in his mouth. But he is a good old left-wing American academic who loathes Israel and could very calmly see ... well. Let's just say the day is coming when an event will occur that will force the commentators to say: he's not naive. He's not inexperienced. He's not puzzlingly or foolishly fixated on a post-modern world where ideologies, like those of the mullahs eager to bring the Mahdi back via bombs on Tel Aviv, don't or shouldn't matter. I would venture to say, he's not even really "young."

He's a hater. Yes, maybe U.N. resolutions are toothless in themselves, and maybe there is some kind of pathetic comfort in that. But Obama has opted to change this one piece of American foreign policy specifically because he hates. I daresay in this case there is something personal in it. Benjamin Netanyahu has what Barack Obama doesn't have -- a biography. Good luck persuading him, in deeply intellectual and anguished tones, back from where he is and delights to be. Then again, maybe they won't bother trying. Maybe this is the event.

I have the answer

Yes, I have the answer to everyone's health care problems -- insurance, "reform," Obamacare, you name it. I do believe it would make a great phone call to Rush Limbaugh's Open Line Friday, but alas and thank goodness, I have a job and I can't make phone calls during his airtime.

Every man must simply go, for his health care needs, to his local veterinarian. Animals and people can't be all that different physically, and think what will be obviated. Think of the health care you get for your cat or dog, successfully and unthinkingly. You go when your pet is sick or injured, you get him taken care of, you pay your bill, and that is all. No insurance, no co-pays, no nonsense about your employer somehow having to pay a share of it all beforehand. No mandated coverage for everybody's molting costs or nail trims or heartworm pills, therefore no mysteriously and constantly rising premiums. No liberals screaming about how American pets are "the sickest in the world," no gleefully contradictory and dutifully circulated myths about how uninsured cats and dogs have no access to care, but also overuse emergency rooms and so rack up charges that burden all the other cats and dogs. No panting (pardon the pun) after the wonderful health care system that French and Cuban pets enjoy.

Veterinarians who go into the business of treating people could make a killing at it. "Black market" doesn't begin to describe what could go on. I picture underground hospitals, massive complexes full of all the beeping machines and competent staff and blinking lights of a hospital, but hidden, speakeasy style, behind peephole doors behind secret entrances. That may be in our future anyway, but if vets are running the show they can at least hang out a shingle that looks like this -- and of course they could still see the other kind of animals, thus giving the whole thing the appearance of legality. Now that guv'mint is in charge, I look forward to accessing care as good as Martha's.

Points for prescience

A long time ago I had the idea of writing a short story about a future time in America when everyone's grocery store purchases would be instantly fed into a state-managed computer database, so that the government could keep track of the nutritional quality of citizens' food choices. And even while you were standing in line at the checkout, the conveyor belt could stop and your transaction could be suspended if the computer noticed that you had already bought your quota of fat or sweets for the week.

It may not be in the health care bill, but then again, who knows? Can I get points for prescience?

Wild-eyed

All the famous political commentators, the pundits, the Krauthammers and the Hansons and the Rubins, keep on writing, keep on predicting, as if the president will now act logically. Now he will respond, in some non-perfunctory way, to events that are not about him and his godhead. He will "cool [favorite] motifs" (like apologizing for American history), transfer Napolitano to some other job, start taking terrorism seriously, in short, grow up, grow in office. A few weeks ago, poor Max Boot at Commentary's Contentions actually praised Obama's "boffo" speech accepting the Nobel Peace prize, calling it a masterpiece and another example of the president growing in office. Two weeks later, Boot was complaining about the administration's "foreign policy incoherence."

They are all trying too hard. Where the future is concerned, I see emotional scenes. Bits of a novel or a movie. It is simple enough, to see a complete, finished man acting in character.

Twenty years of membership in Jeremiah Wright's church mean something about him. His declaring, in the very month he was inaugurated, that returning wounded veterans ought to pay for their own medical care meant something. A man like that doesn't start growing in office at forty-seven.

I see: either the withdrawal of worship -- for he is being criticized, even by his acolytes, it seems -- combined with the true burdens of the presidency will lead to private breakdown; or he'll be caught on tape expressing absolutely outrageous personal truths of a "I don't give a f --- about this country" sort -- although he might be forgiven for that, as he was for his seat in church; or he'll be caught in some sort of personal scandal overwhelming enough to utterly change the terms on which anyone looks at him: the way it is now impossible to watch Tiger Woods play mere golf. This last vision derives from an insight not my own, but the insight struck me and I've mused, let's say.

Wild eyed, I suppose. The pundits lose nothing in keeping their predictions calm and reasonably respectful, albeit still angry and stern, bewildered and sad. They might be proved right, and if not, who will notice? And they are keeping within the conventions of gentlemen's political discourse, keeping their careers safe. The funny thing is, the longer they approach this man as if he's normal, as if he's fully adult, the more professionally frustrated they are going to be by his incoherencies. Maybe they should get out to the movies more.

Ch-ch-changes

As we wade in to a new future of nationalized banks and major industries, of probable socialized health care, high unemployment, endless taxes, and just generally Animal Farm-style governance -- oh yes, achievement will be punished, and some pigs will be very much more equal than others I am sure, and nothing to do about it but try to "put boulders in the road," as Rush Limbaugh says -- it occurs to me that the destruction and disappearance of old worlds is a constant in human history. Pundits being wrong about a lot of things, including the dire results of change, is also a constant, but valuable things do vanish. Noble systems break down, useful knowledge is forgotten, new rules and systems imposed, often enough through deception or crowd hysteria or violence. People and nations witness ends that would have seemed unbelievable if seen in a crystal ball. Or in their own childhoods.

I don't compare President Obama's assault on the country to, say, the cranking up of the French Revolution (which started as an upper-class tax revolt, funnily enough), or to the sweeping of hordes of Goths into the crumbling Roman empire. Or to the sweeping of Arab Muslim hordes into Zoroastrian Persia, say. ...I only just learned about this so I get bragging rights in passing it on. It produced most curious results in history. Zoroastrian Persian diplomats stationed abroad found themselves, after a climactic battle in their homeland in 642 A.D., suddenly without a country, an emperor, or a religion to represent. Forever. A thousand years of high civilization and fearsome conquest, vanished. Those berobed and sandaled diplomats, in Alexandria, in Tripoli, must have had to find other ways to survive, for there was no point even in going home.

And Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, and Goths sat on the throne of Augustus. Roman legions withdrew from Britain; civilized European men slaughtered one another by the millions in the trenches of World War I. And then the civilized empires which sent them to their deaths collapsed, too.

Dear me, such very massive and tragic examples, and all out of chronological order, too. One could be accused of a yowling and infantile panic. No, I don't quite compare the President's plans to all this, but in him we do have someone unprecedented. We have our first anti-American American president, who seems genuinely to want to restructure the country for his own personal pleasure and intellectual and especially academic satisfaction -- payback, even -- and power. It would be as if the former professor Ward Churchill was president. It would be as if any one of my old left-wing professors was president. He is them. No one would doubt that their attitude was fundamentally anti-American, even though like all good open-minded America-hating liberals, each lacked the true courage of their convictions, to pick up and go live elsewhere. I remember my professors scoffing at the deep-voiced young men in the back of the class who challenged them to go live elsewhere. They scoffed, so if you were bright and following along, you could take that as an assurance that the deep-voiced young men were stupid, bigoted -- conservative. But the professors never quite had an answer to the challenge. The truth was always that it is so much safer and more fun not to move, but to change the where.

So we have a president, inexperienced, aggressive in some things and passive-shabby in others (all those bows from the waist, poor, ill raised child) and indoctrinated in economic systems that are righteously, emotionally pleasing but impoverish everyone, who wants to change things. The nation has changed, has been changed, in other ways before now, in ways that to the private citizen constituted a private tragedy, or perhaps a cosmic one, or maybe didn't even come within his notice at all. Pick your changes, in chronological order or out of it. The opening of the West. The Civil War (did you lose a brother, a husband, a son? Five sons?). The presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who also tried and greatly succeeding in laying the foundations of Barack Obama's eternally statist, planned American economy, on the grounds that there shouldn't be unfairness. On an individual, human scale, my grandfather lost his post as Republican precinct captain when FDR won office, and that was that.

And we have all survived, though who can say what's been lost. I was struck recently by the old movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in the 1940s but set largely in pre-World War I America. The characters are show business people, who travel the country performing and who consider a steady job of two or three weeks' salary a godsend. They live in boarding houses in the meanwhile, and when they are low on money, they sit at the bottom of the communal table and are served only noodles and maple syrup until they can pay their rent. When they can pay, they are welcome to some goulash. It's fiction, but it reflects circumstances that must once have been true. They are on their own, free (gulp) in ways that we now would not tolerate. What's been lost, if anything?

What makes Obama different and more threatening from a lot of previous American movers and shakers is not only his having bigger, more ignorant, more absurdly expensive plans, and a downright vengeful Democratic Congress willing to help him implement those plans -- and these Democrats do include people like my own Senator Dick Durbin, who viciously compared American troops in Iraq to Nazis -- but his election by a voter base that may stay untroubled by the dirt clinging to him. I believe they may remain untroubled by anything he ever says or does. His church membership and his terrorist friends didn't bother them. Now his inability in economics to add two and two, or rather his cynical relish in not adding it, does not bother them either. Some pundits think his followers will wake up when they at least realize that he has his hand in their wallets, too. I'm not so sure. I fear he may be creating the Presidency as an emotional office that only he can fill. I wonder if his voter base would notice or care if he suspended elections, "because folks are struggling, and this great country needs ... ," etc., etc.

And what makes him and his swoony voter base still more threatening is that he is imposing plans that can unravel the nation as a Western power quickly, you might say a Western-proud power, unravelled following the model of a socialist and hyper-taxed Europe, poleaxed in addition by waves of non-Western immigrants who have taken Europe up on its offers of compassion, asylum, religious tolerance, jobs possibly, but free state money forever, definitely. It's a whole world of circumstances that our man's voters do not know or care about. If someone observing Europe and liking what he saw wanted to think out a formula to quickly transform the United States into its mirror, he could hardly have come upon a more pitch-perfect scenario than this. Let the nation, well meaning and deluded, exhaust itself vomiting out imaginary money on problems that are made worse by more imaginary money; let the state control all, on the grounds that only the state can fund fairness. Let our man, freely and joyously elected, be of Muslim descent with a Muslim middle name, just for sheer irony's sake and nothing else.* A few years ago Mark Steyn wrote a book called America Alone, all about the U.S. being the last non-Muslim, un-jihadi-fied bastion on the planet. How strange to think the book could now be nearly obsolete, simply as a result of election day, 2008, and the changes thereby made. America alone? Not so much. America as a jihadi state, led by President-for-life Obama? No. (Fiction is not my strong point.) America joins the world? More likely yes, but not in a good way.

Yes. Well. In the meantime, people live, as they have with luck lived through changes before. Goth and Zoroastrian, sans-culotte and Civil War widow. Yowling and infantile though it may seem, I do think this interesting situation prompts the question, what else do you do with life when things on a grand scale are not going as you'd like?

It sounds like an idiotically selfish, whiny little question. The left preens itself on its patient George W. Bush hatred, and no doubt regards everything from Obama's blessed Inauguration Day onward as mere payback, with plenty more to come. And the end, you know, has not quite come yet. Goth and Zoroastrian and Civil War widow would not even bother to scoff at me. They would be too busy living. And who knows, in a year or two our man may have so far overreached himself that pundits who now fear him, or adore him, will be astonished at the depths of impotence to which he has fallen. Expect the unexpected, not only in the White House but in life and in history too.

Meanwhile what do you do, privately, publicly, when it looks like an entire system of liberty and prosperity whose greatest vulnerability is its need to rest on a populace educated in those things, may be bumped off that foundation by an opposing ideology that mimics the system's purposes (freedom, fairness) but can't achieve them and can't admit it? What do you do? -- write your congressman? Garden? Philosophize? There's a Roman lady in Tacitus, therefore by definition living through interesting times, who spends her time "beautifying her fish ponds at Baiae." Senator Durbin writes back, after a lag of a month or two, congratulating me on agreeing with him and explaining why it's so important to stop global warming. Before he moved up in the world, Senator Obama did the same. Senator Burris hasn't gotten around to replying -- or, to be fair, was he the one whose email link didn't work?

What do you do? I've done a few new things, lately. I've skimmed over The Federalist Papers, which I never thought to do. Did you know they were short articles, originally published in a newspaper, and each designed to answer a specific complaint about the new Constitution? They are pretty digestible. I've learned to put in words, if only for my own satisfaction, why it's not true that of course one must acknowledge and support the great leftist, progressive credo that there are "two sides to every story." No, there are not. There is the truth, which you or I may not find today -- Socrates admitted he couldn't necessarily find it, today -- but which is not the same thing as humbly agreeing it can't be known, thus inhaling the left's debate-snuffing anaesthesia so they can loudly keep the field.

Even knowing that, do you then continue beautifying your fish ponds at Baiae? I believe there is a school of thought, a human tendency, to give up (or become wise) and say that in the great unfolding pageant of human folly, no matter whatsoever the grand stupid men are doing above you, the time sometimes comes when after all, what you are doing for your own happiness in your tiny corner of the universe turns out to be the loftiest thing of all. It's the only thing you do that affects -- that pleases or displeases -- you, so you may as well carry on.

A wise reaction, mature and sophisticated, deeply Old World? Or surrender? Lin Yutang wrote books throughout the mid-twentieth century, claiming that Chinese civilization for one had long since learned to avoid the blind alleys of moral righteousness, religious certainty, of, I suppose, taking on too much personal trouble over great national ch-ch-changes. He delighted in stories of famed Chinese sages retreating to the mountains to sip tea and write poetry. When they got visitors from the folly-filled world, they would leap up and run to the nearest stream to wash the filth of the News of the Day out of their ears -- and the wisest of all could tell when the water outside his hut had been polluted by the sage upstream, already washing the News of the Day out of his own ears.

Or is such behavior indeed surrender? After all, wise and chastened and sophisticated nations full of poetic sages still have not done all we've done. And -- Rush is correct -- nothing is different about us as human beings except that we have a political and economic system which allows us to do all we can or wish to do in the pursuit of happiness. It's all worked amazingly well. As the economist Thomas Sowell emphasizes (in Basic Economics for a start), "wealth saves lives," just for a start, and there's no doubt about our wealth. There is far more to the good, for more people, going on here than can be wisely and sadly represented by the image of the innocent lady tending her fish ponds, long divorced from any concern for the fools in Rome. So why loathe and desire to change our system?

Perhaps because the most intractable human folly of all is the passion for power over one's fellow men, especially the lower orders. A system which gives them power, which incidentally doesn't tell funny stories about sages' exiling themselves and leaving government to do as it likes, is totally anathema to any human spirit that wants power. "What in the world can we do with the Napoleonic -- heroic ambition or military glory?" Allan Bloom asked in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He meant "we" who live in a "gray," "commercial" liberal democracy, we who have made a good system, but one that lacks what democratic revolutions tear down forever: the "nobility, brilliance, and taste," nurtured by a leisured aristocracy, the "depth, seriousness, and sacredness" of a state religion. Re-reading Bloom leads to the suspicion that he and Mr. Limbaugh would not get on.

Incidentally I'd hardly call President Obama Napoleonic. He only wants to remake a country to which he has contributed nothing, as per instructions from shrivelled little academic souls he respects, and he does feed on worship. Otherwise, one can't imagine him crossing the Alps, still less winning battles. But perhaps he is a sort of little Napoleon, a little answer to Bloom's wonderment at "what we're going to do" with this aspect of the human personality that can't be kept in check all the time. What are we going to do with it? Well, occasionally it seems we're going to lose our heads and elect it to the White House, not least because we're so unused to seeing the type in action that we've forgotten it exists and that it loves to tell lies, too. Perhaps future historians will say that, right about now, two hundred or so years after the American founding, intellectuals and other grand people began fully to realize that the American system, unchanged, could leave them in a desert of impotence forever. Imagine being wise and educated, imagine knowing what's best for Bodo the peasant, or Bodo the NASCAR fan, and never, ever, being able to impose it on him because he votes in the same dreary old system year after year, because he has money and more than enough to eat, and possibly a gun. You can almost hear the roar of frustration, from a large segment of humanity. What to do? The answer, historians may notice, was for the roarers to fall down in joy before a little Napoleon, and work like mad to see him re-open closed doors and reforge old chains, before Bodo fully grasped the malice bubbling in the situation.

What an extraordinary thing that Bodo's major hobby these days has turned out to be the internet, with all the opportunities for independent news-gathering, fact-checking, scathing commentary, and protest planning it affords. It would be as if Hussite and Wycliffite and Roundheads all had a thousand printing presses at once. What do you do -- what does he, Bodo, do -- with individual life when things on a grand scale aren't going as he'd like? Just as there seems to be a personality type that retreats wisely into the mountains to contemplate plum blossoms and folly, there is another that does not. There is another that, in its own way, may be just as infected with the lust for personal power, power over its own person, as is its better, its Napoleonic counterpart. The comfort of this thought might be ruined by its triteness, were it not for the fact that we can cite a powerful text in support of it. Who was it who said something like "I have never believed that one part of mankind was born to be ridden?" No, it went like this: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." And dear me, the speaker was none other than Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, he was talking about an official priesthood. But then, of what else are we talking?

**************

*"Obama would fail security clearance," Daniel Pipes.org, Oct. 21, 2008.

On trying terrorist masterminds in New York

Even though I understand it is intuitively grotesque to put "KSM" -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, master planner of September 11 -- on trial as a mere criminal in New York, and even though I understand the insult to all of us in granting alien warriors our constitutional rights, and the damage to our intelligence efforts the "bonanza" of required sensitive information from military and intelligence services would prove to do, all of it spilling out as a result of the accused having the right to face his accusers -- granted, a lot of "even thoughs" -- still I think there may be one silver lining in this cloud. (The darkest part of the cloud is that the people who want to bring KSM to trial want to do so for absolutely malicious reasons, I am sure. They, from President Obama on down, want to grotesquely insult the nation and endanger its future, but I daresay we are almost getting used to that. And their guaranteeing that KSM will be convicted and will get the death penalty also, of course, renders the whole thing a show trial, another blow to the very appearance of justice that they pretend to tout. In addition to that, I feel sure they'd be delighted if he were acquitted. We have some utterly brutish little children at the helm of this ship. Are we getting used to it?)

Anyway the silver lining is that in trying Muslim terrorists in a civilian court, we may deny them their ability to define jihad. The smart commentators are saying just the opposite, that it's grotesque for KSM to be given this forum by which to preach and recruit. I wonder.

I think back to the movie Braveheart, in which Mel Gibson plays the medieval Scottish warlord William Wallace. When Wallace, battling back against England's conquest of Scotland, is captured by his English foes, he is brought to London for his execution. The crime he is charged with is treason against the English king. The punishment is hanging, drawing, and quartering.

By no stretch of the imagination could Wallace, morally (at least in the movie) be considered a traitor to his nation's conqueror. To be charged so is a cruel and of course deliberate slur to him and to the truth and the reality of his warfare. If his side had won, things would have turned out very differently and no king would have had the power to tell him he was a rebel. But Wallace dies the death of a convicted traitor: the English crowds watch and move off, and Scotland is still conquered, or at least seems well on its way to being. He has lost. His knowing, and his people's knowing, that he is in the right in some lofty sphere, with God perhaps, does no one any service in the end.

And, outrageous as it is to bring the terrorists of September 11th to Manhattan to be "tried" as if for some extremely serious legal faux pas of which they are still yet presumed innocent, nevertheless it does also treat them as the king of England treated William Wallace. It denies them their ability to define themselves, their ability to say what their actions were about. Considering that their motive was jihad, one of the cornerstones of Islam for 1400 years and something laid down by Mohammed himself (the "perfect man"), our chloroforming that motive in a Western courtroom, our saying instead -- no, this was a crime in our Western sense, may prove to be unintentionally wise.

Revised May 16, 2010

Did you know? (Obama helps the UN shield Islam from criticism)

This article comes from The International Free Press Society, October 22, 2009:

"On October 1, 2009, the Obama administration in conjunction with the Egyptian government, introduced an anti-free speech measure to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council (HRC). It was adopted the next day without a vote.

"Earlier this year, when the United States sought a seat on the HRC, it was a controversial decision. Many who found the HRC neither credible nor useful, opposed the move. Yet, others were more optimistic that America could change the HRC from within. Perhaps the U.S. could spur debate stemming from its opposition to China, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia on critical human rights votes.

"Little evidence suggests that Americans on either side of the aisle contemplated the US entering the ring and supporting the opposition’s anti-freedom measures. Yet now, the current administration has done worse: it’s leading the charge.

"The draft resolution, misleadingly titled 'Freedom of Opinion and Expression' includes two troubling components. First, it calls on nation states to take 'effective measures' to address and combat 'any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence'. It expresses concern and condemnation of 'negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups'. It further attempts to construe this as an international human rights law and obligation. Second, it recognizes the media’s 'moral and social responsibilities' and the 'importance' that its potential voluntary code of conduct could play in combating intolerance.

"This resolution appears to stem from, and constitute a step toward, the Organization of Islamic Conference’s resolution to 'combat defamation of religions'. The OIC’s resolution would ban outright the 'defaming' of religions, speech critical of religion (even if accurate), and open discussion about any negative consequences resulting from the implementation of religious beliefs (such as Sharia law).

"Though both resolutions mention 'religions' generally, the context and references of the resolutions make them almost certain to apply only or disproportionately to Islam. Indeed, the defamation of religions resolution singles out treatment of Islam. Yet not surprisingly, the OIC has blatantly refused to curtail hate speech against Jews or Israel.

"Further, it is the nature of religion to include a component of exclusivity, thus making it impossible to express one’s theology accurately without making 'defamatory' remarks against another theology. For example, merely preaching that Jesus is the son of God can be viewed as an inflammatory remark and an affront to Islam. Additionally, the wording of this resolution makes its violation subjectively determined and comes dangerously close to outlawing certain emotions, such as hostility toward Islam or Muslims.

"Critically important is the resolution’s attempt to internationalize norms on speech, potentially usurping fundamental constitutional rights. Strict constructionists of the US constitution view the constitution as 'the supreme law of the land' (as the constitution expressly states), whereas those who view the constitution as 'a living, breathing document' might not. But even under a strict construction, when the US signs a treaty, the treaty becomes binding on the US. Though this UN resolution does not constitute a treaty, it is fair to presume that because it is a US-led initiative, the US should be bound by it.

"Also problematic is the resolution’s attempt to make the restriction of free speech a human right. In fact, it is free speech that constitutes a human right and not its restriction. Ideologies, ideas and religions do not, and should not be afforded 'human rights'. They should be fair game for criticism, analysis, open debate and discussion. Religions and ideologies cannot be 'defamed'. Once ideologies are afforded protection from criticism, it is in direct contradiction to individual human rights."

Continue reading the full article here.

Sometimes, scenes of fiction flash through my mind: don't you think, if all his plans and policies had gone beautifully -- and they still may succeed, and far more of them have gone far more beautifully than any one could have imagined a year ago -- don't you think the triumphant young god-President would have loved to take his second oath of office on a Koran and not a Bible?

The messianic Left

Now that the health tax bill, Pelosi-care, has passed the House in a Saturday night vote, the commentators, most of them I think genuinely distressed, are falling all over themselves to try to understand what it really means, and to predict what will happen next. They have been doing this since early summer when the fiasco emerged from under its rock -- from Harry Reid's desk drawer, or from the "liberal wet dream" where socialized medicine has always suppurated, Rush Limbaugh says. They are saying: it's a Democrat triumph, or no it isn't. If Queen Pelosi couldn't keep 39 of her minions from bolting and voting against it, then she's got nothing to be proud of. The party is still unraveling. One wise man at National Review Online even opines that now the bill is definitely dead; it will never pass the Senate because they will fear the wrath of the voter, even if the House can safely pretend not to. Wise people who are not that optimistic nonetheless agree the bill still might not pass the Senate, or if it does, then these Democrats will join all the others risking hell for it at the polls next November, and the rollback will begin. The commentators are saying, as they have said and wondered since early summer, do Democrats value being retained in their seats more than they do this bill, or don't they? Are they are so committed to it ideologically that they will vote for a ghastly abstraction they think is noble -- one that will be very hard to undo -- and accept being booted from office, so long as they can feel they have imposed a glorious legacy on us all? Is the left's will to power that intense?

The longer I watch politics, the more convinced I am that all of it boils down to something a professor of mine said many years ago. He said, you can have either freedom or equality, but you can't have both. He was not talking about equality before the law, but rather about the left's version of equality: everything will be somehow "fair" (and, depending on who defines this kind of equality, some pigs will be very much more equal than others). Individual commentators, distressed or not, can keep track of fast-moving events and important people better and faster than I can, which is why Jennifer Rubin and Michelle Malkin have careers doing it and I don't. (It's okay. As Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character growls, "A man's got to know his limitations.") But at a time like this, when all our lives and futures have been essentially mortgaged by a few hundred indoctrinated fools in Washington, the professional commentators are no better off than I am. They are essentially saying, please God, there has to be a way in which this is not atrocious news. And there has to be a way for me to figure it out.

You can have either equality or freedom, Professor King said, but not both. It seems to me that all politics in the modern world boils down to two parties, two mindsets, perhaps to those two definitions of human nature which are also not my own discovery nor the Professor's, far from it: that either human nature is perfectible and can be schooled to know "fairness" by expanding knowledge, by expanding thought itself (whose?), or that human nature is everlastingly the same and needs, always, the hard-won guidance and merciful warnings of mankind's collected experience. The left stands on the side of equality, of perfectible human nature, and of schooling the ignorant to move forward bravely into a better future. Conservatives stand on the side of freedom, and of an infinite but healthily embittered respect for human nature, for what it is and what it is not. Hidden somewhere in here is the reason why the left increasingly loves group "rights," like homosexual "marriage," rather than individual rights. Creating new group rights helps create the conditions whereby humanity itself can be redefined, since, no matter what groups he has ever joined, no man has ever himself been a group -- and therefore no accumulated human wisdom can guide that. The door is open to the left, there. For them, there can be no end of fruitful new groups, as fruitful new sources of social experimentation, victimhood, and command. Where the individual resides, as of old, there resides human nature, much less tractable. Full of prejudice. Contrary. Unschooled.

It's hard to know what to call the left now. Perhaps "the left" has stuck because it is the purest term for them, probing directly back to their roots in the French Revolution and of course to their actual place in the debating chamber in Paris. It probes back to their determination to upend and recreate all human living, through violence if need be, to their rushing in to fill themselves the void in orthodox thinking and religious leadership that they created. It's no wonder that they, too, like the priestly hierarchy they displaced, still govern the arts, publishing, and the universities. (I'm indebted to Paul Johnson's Intellectuals for the idea that the modern leftist intellectual has replaced the cleric as self-appointed governor of all.) Jonah Goldberg calls them Liberal Fascists, and it's not a term he made up. It has a history. Some observers, I think, want to call them, more consistently than they have been, "progressives," to indicate their passion for progressing far beyond anything classic liberalism used to advocate. Indeed it's important to remember -- and one of the reasons we need a new word for them is -- that liberals used to espouse good things, things that mankind's collective experience has taught him were indeed very much worth striving for. The end of slavery is the great example.

But now they don't do good things anymore. They have outlived their usefulness. There are no more personal freedoms to get for anybody, unless they want to start doing things like extending the vote to children. As Calvin Coolidge said, “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” At this point, thinking of the absurd health care vote in the House last night, and the narcissistic, malicious, besoured little man in the White House now who is the exemplar of the creed, I would refer to the whole political phenomenon as simply the Messianic Left. These are people who will never tire of surging forward to a new world of glorious abstractions, mostly involving group rights and the state, that they will never have to pay for and that, they seem to trust, will all somehow prove to ennoble, to anoint their memories in the long distant end. They meant well. (That's the complaint Rush Limbaugh often and often voices about them, and about why they are never held to account for failure.) If they've literally got a charismatic messiah to lead them on their way, so much the better. He can even serve as a useful straw-man individual, to ward off criticisms about the creation of an endless new world of endless groups into which the individual man is ordered to fit as best he can.

And I think there is a reason why the messianic left finds it difficult to face and criticize radical Islam. (I turn to thinking of Islam because, brutal though it is to say, I suspect that the jihad at Ft. Hood this week was a godsend for the Democrats. If they were thinking of postponing the vote on the health care bill to Sunday or beyond, I believe it may well have changed their minds. It distracted enough attention from the party's losses in the elections also, and from the very fact of the health care vote coming up at all, to embolden them to carry on and do it.) If ever there were a religious creed that loves Equality, that wants all men to be the same -- all part of a group, as it happens -- it would be Islam. Of course there are many other reasons why the left shies away from this frightening thing. Open minded, perfectible people "don't make value judgments," as another professor of mine once said. Apparently it doesn't matter how much blood flows. But pound for pound and measure for measure, I think the left must at some deep level see in the faith very much the same human monolith that they are. Always surging toward a perfect future, preferably under messianic leadership, in which everyone is alike and everything is fair. And dissent is unthinkable. Dissent brings death.

And finally there's a reason why the messianic left's great enemy will also always be the United States. The founding fathers had the audacity, shall we say? -- to grant to future generations of individuals the right to govern themselves and to make their own decisions in almost all particulars. The soul of the born cleric, aching to plan, to control, to rise above his fellows and help them see the great sunny fields of common justice and joy lying just ahead, revolts in frustration at the idea of his fellows' not obeying him. And suppose behind their refusal lies the right to keep refusing, they and their children forever? The right enshrined in America's founding documents, in the actual Constitution, well thought out by extremely intelligent and educated men? It's a terrible prospect for group-messiahs, who care so much and mean so well, who used to have good and even heroic ideas about individual freedom, and who are accustomed to the fact that for a good couple of centuries now, they have shown they win in the end.



Duane Hanson, Couple with shopping bags (1976). Image from Surrealism & the body