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14 March, 2004
All Compassion and No Feeling
President George W. Bush likes the sound of the word
compassion. But he doesn't feel that it's wrong to exploit the
many personal losses of September 11, 2001, for his own political
gain. President Bush likes the sound of the words compassionate
conservatism. But he doesn't feel that it's wrong to let poor people
carry both the burden of fighting and dying in Iraq and the burden of
paying for the war while people in his own set enjoy a large tax cut.
He just doesn't feel it. A lifetime of wealth and
security has taught him that self-reliance and toughness are great
things. He has all of the non-compassionate conservative's obsession
with the abstract idea of creeping socialism — how public programs like
Social Security or Medicare might somehow, in theory, at the end of time,
lead to the loss of freedom. He has none of the compassionate thinker's
feeling for people here in the physical world who see their lives stretching
out far beyond their ability to support themselves, beyond any savings
they could possibly have put by during ordinary working lives, into
chronic illness and helpless infirmity.
President Bush's compassionate-conservative attitudes
recall a piece of financial advice dispensed by the humorist Will Rogers: "Don't gamble. Take all your savings
and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it.
(Pause.) If it don't go up — don't buy
it." The compassionate conservative might say, "If you're going to live a
long time and need lots of medical care, don't be poor. Don't make any financial
mistakes or suffer any setbacks along the way. Be able to afford plenty of
private health insurance." For some conservatives, it's a knowingly
cynical attitude. Apparently not for Mr. Bush, but to say that he's not
really a hard man is only to say that he's not a man who thinks beneath the
verbal surface of things. Having said a word, he believes he's created a
fact. He acts very much like a hard man but carries the stated idea of compassion as a
talisman to ward off attacks of conscience. He probably believes that he
is compassionate, the way small
children believe that they're being careful if they keep repeating the words "Be careful"
while playing with pins.
In presiding over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Mr. Bush has shown that his lapel-button compassion leaves him plenty of
room for callousness about loss of human life. Through it all, there
has been something missing from his conduct as a wartime President that
America's public commentators have generally failed to note except in an
indirect way. Those who observe him at first hand often come back and
report that this is a President who knows where he wants to go, who
believes that he's doing God's will, and who is therefore free from
mental anguish. What they don't say is that to be free from mental
anguish about sending people to kill and die is to be devoid of moral
sense. Abraham Lincoln had good reason to believe that he was right in
waging war. He was President at a time when it was unremarkable to sing
of one's own armies as God's "terrible swift sword." But he was heavily
weighed down and rapidly aged by his unhappy duties as a wartime
President. People have a right to expect such anguish of their national
leader, both as an example of moral consciousness and as a safeguard
against rushing carelessly into one war after another.
Bob Woodward wrote his bestseller Bush at War
with close access to President Bush's inner circle during the approach to
war in Afghanistan. While the book doesn't go far in criticizing the
mentality of that circle, it allows the President to reveal himself as a
man who is long on anger and short on gravity; long on superficial
decisiveness and short on contemplation of the things he decides; and
very short indeed on feeling for sufferers past or future. Here's a
sample:
Black faced Bush, who was at the head of the table.
"But you've got to understand, people are going to die. And the worst
part about it, Mr. President, Americans are going to die — my
colleagues and my friends.
"So there should be no misunderstanding that
this is going to be a bloodless activity."
"That's war," Bush said.
"We've got to accept that we're going to lose people in this deal. How
many, I don't know. Could be a lot."
"All right," the president said.
"Let's go. That's war. That's what we're here to win."
One can't help thinking that even many lesser
Presidents than Lincoln would have taken a moment to acknowledge the
weight of the decision being made. Time and again in Woodward's account,
President Bush glides through weighty decisions — even in matters of
certain death for other people — chirping "That's war" or "You bet" or
similar offhand remarks. In explaining his Presidential style to Woodward, he cites
the influence of his temperament: "Sometimes that's the way I am — fiery. ... I can be an
impatient person." Since he can't mean to depict himself as
dangerously impetuous, it seems that he's trying to make a virtue of
sheer, unthinking drive. Of
course he is. It should be clear by now that the trumpeting of Mr. Bush's
"decisiveness" and "peace of mind" is a spin operation designed to
control an awful spectacle: the leader of the Free World skating as fast as
he can over the thin ice of his own competence.
President Bush doesn't know how to do anything but
make snap decisions and speak bold words. And so he abuses better
and wiser people than himself by sending them to their deaths with a brusque
"That's war." As for the exploitation of September 11 in his personal
advertising campaign, that's politics. You bet.
2 March, 2004
Coming to a Young Woman Near You
Predictably (and
as predicted here), dropping women
into the warrior pool has meant condemning them to face an uncontrolled
risk of being raped. News of widespread rape among America's Persian Gulf
forces and elsewhere in the military is causing a sensation in Washington
this week.
Now here's another prediction: Few if any of the
commentators who react to this outrage will
confront both (1) the risk of rape that women face in the armed
forces and (2) the political push to include women in any future military
draft. The people behind the push are mostly men, such as Congressman
Charles Rangel (D-NY). However, many women who are active in liberal politics and
punditry in the US seem to have been silenced by a feeling that this has
to do with asserting equality between the sexes, although it's unequal on
the face of it. It calls
to mind Anatole France's ironic remark, "The law, in its majestic
equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to
beg in the streets, and to steal bread." Nobody will stoop to the
sophistry of saying, "The draft subjects men as well as
women to the danger of molestation," but many people will keep quiet and
let the sophistry say itself. That silence isn't possible without an
underlying layer of very old-fashioned class
prejudice.
The privileged Americans who theorize about these
things seem to feel, in spite of their
lively consciences, that the women one finds in
the military are less sensitive to rape than the women one knows; and
this vaporous prejudice hasn't yet hit the cold glass separating
voluntary service from compulsory, universal service. The politicians who've taken
up the current scandal are already talking nearly as much about
counseling victims and punishing offenders as about preventing rape in
the first place. It's not wrong to talk about those things, but talking
about them from the outset implies a readiness to contain and
institutionalize the problem without ever facing its full significance.
There are no bureaucratic "measures" that will make the potential rapist other than he
is. A serious attitude toward rape prevention starts with the
understanding that a woman's freedom of association can't be abridged
like a man's.
In civilian life, women can practice a degree of
self-protection by prudently choosing among people, places, and times. In
the military, choice is a civilian heresy. The self is a joke. You go
where you're sent, and if you think you'll limit yourself to obeying
lawful orders, you don't know the remoteness and tardiness of the law.
When a sexual threat is clear enough to justify saying No, the scene has
already been set for inescapable violence. The law may come along later
to tidy up, but that's about it.
In civilian life, women also have the support of
people who genuinely care what happens to them. In the military those
people are far away, rigidly barred from interfering by a kind of authority
which most Americans can't comprehend till they come up against it. Even
getting answers to questions can be surprisingly hard. Getting a life put
back the way it was is impossible.
Since the start of the Iraq War, many supposedly
liberal commentators in the US have written enthusiastically about
removing the last vestige of discrimination between men and women in
military obligation and type of duty. That's currently the progressive
line on the subject. Unless the universal draft is a
fraud, it will mean stripping all young women of personal and social
defenses against rape. Seeing that happen may give perverse satisfaction
to somebody somewhere. It probably will. But the only people who can see
it as a step toward a more just society are those whom sex or age or
childlessness has freed from giving it much thought.
28 February, 2004
The Way Outward (1)
Many people who call themselves progressives are in
need of a different spatial metaphor. The direction in which they — we —
really want to go isn't forward along some ideological railroad track,
but outward, cross-country to an alternative path with a different
destination and a very different way of traveling. As a rough outline of
those differences, here are some suggestions to progressives and
particularly to those active in Democratic Party politics in the United
States. This is a
working list. It's one note that's certain to grow and develop.
On gun control: a breakout position. Public opinion
polls have long shown solid support for stricter gun control (roughly
two-thirds of respondents), but people can't be mobilized by arguments
about registration or corporate liability alone. Move the issue far out
in front of this dust cloud at once. Open a national debate about
banning private ownership of handguns, not to mention assault rifles and
the like. It's not as if a home arsenal were useful for anything but
terrorism anymore. Make common cause with the nation's police officers
and local government officials. Let people get used to hearing and thinking about
real, common-sense action on guns. Let the opposition run to catch up.
Never look back, and before long others will stop looking back, too.
On the family: a new departure. Recognize the
family-centered society as the one real alternative to the corporate
society. This is not about re-education or mythmaking. It's about
cooperation for mutual defense among people who know what's important to
them. Effective cooperation starts with respect and goodwill. Don't
wander off into theoretical Marxian (or Millian)
objections to the family as a set of power imbalances, or intellectual
contempt for the "family values" of middle-class morality. Look at real people struggling to
take care of those they love. Note the family's social function as a
nurturer of
compassionate personalities and its
political function as a subversive cell, a dissident center of
loyalty and ethical grounding that tends against mass delusions. Recognize allies among families, work
with them. Help them defeat the forces that would effectively dissolve
them and turn their members into so many manageable worker-consumers.
Never mind the composition of the family. Just swing down from the belfry
of liberal thought and rescue this issue from the Right.
On homosexuality: a thoughtful attitude.
Dispense with liberal creationism about the nature of homosexuality.
Avoid the false dichotomy of arguing whether it's a chosen lifestyle or
an inborn trait (ask a clinical psychologist, and you may hear that it's
neither). Instead, emphasize the value of each human being regardless of
sexual orientation. Same-sex marriage? Let the interested parties fight
that battle themselves, outside the electoral arena. This issue has just
recently come up and will still be in the raw-emotion stage in November.
In other words, it's made to order for the Right. In the elections of
2004, Democrats will be fighting for the future of American democracy.
There will be much at stake that should take precedence over this
sensational issue. Democrats' stand on same-sex marriage should be that
it's an inappropriate subject for a Constitutional amendment, and that
they intend to listen to the American people during the long debate
that's just now beginning. That's enough. If some people therefore feel
that they can't turn out to help defeat the Bush Republicans in 2004,
wish them a nice day.
Additions to this working list will attend to the
glaring omissions of war and wealth, as well as other subjects.
Note: The second installment, on wealth, can be found
here.
15 February, 2004
The String
George W. Bush has one thing in common with a lot of
us: a bad habit of learning only what he already knows.
About a week ago came confirmation from an inside source that although
Mr. Bush looks at several newspapers each day, he avoids those parts that
disagree with his thinking. That's dangerous behavior in the President of
the United States, especially when his better half does the same.
As she was the inside source, speaking to The New York Times, it
must be true — or if it's a canard, the Bushes are behind it themselves.
So much for the hope that the President was receiving curtain lectures on
the plight of the human race.
A habit that's bad in one transient politician is
worse when millions of people take it up. The Internet opens
a great vault of information and opinion to us. Let's not use it merely as a
polemical armory to be ransacked for weapons, or a pantry
where we can sit on the floor and gratify our ideological cravings. If
President Bush won't pay attention to alternatives, some of the rest of
us had better be in the habit of doing it for him — not only alternatives
to the President's settled notions, but to our own as well. For example,
if you're accustomed to the view of Henry Kissinger as a high priest of
American tyranny, you can enjoy something a little different by reading further down this page. There's no need to start liking the man, but you
may find the contradiction refreshing in itself.
A contradiction is often a valuable discovery. People
with complex tastes in knowledge are valuable people, and never more so
than when single-minded fanaticism is rampant. As you must have noticed,
it's rampant now. We're in the lair of the Minotaur these days. What's
worse, there's something in here with us stalking both the Minotaur and
ourselves: a gaping, insensate thing that would pacify the world by
consuming it. We have to fight, and so we write. But like Theseus in the
Labyrinth, we need more than a weapon for survival. We also need a trail
of string leading back to civilization, or, shall we say, to the hope of
civilization. In times past, such strings have generally consisted of
three strands: knowledge, reason, and humanity. All three depend on
self-doubt. We desire knowledge because we doubt the adequacy of the
knowledge we possess; we submit to reason because we doubt the intuition of
any human being; and we loosely bind the two with humanity because we
doubt whether we could stand rigid justice.
12 February, 2004
Springtime for Kissinger
Forgettable fact: Henry Kissinger spoke for the sane while the Bush Administration dreamed of conquering
Iraq. When he and Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of
State, appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 26
September, 2002, Senator Russell Feingold asked their advice about
managing the aftermath of an invasion, in which American troops might be
endangered "for months on end." Dr. Albright attempted a cautiously
analytical reply that deteriorated into incoherence and barely left her
committed to the opinion that many factors remained unknown. Dr.
Kissinger replied, in part, as follows:
"I am bitterly opposed to a prolonged occupation of a
Muslim country at the heart of the Muslim world by Western nations who
proclaim the right to re-educate that country. That seems to me
essentially a very difficult undertaking and therefore I would believe
that that should be turned over to some kind of an international group
that can be formed in which we would have a very major role. Therefore
it's very difficult to talk about this in the abstract."
To appreciate those words fully, you need to have seen
the look on the speaker's face. It was a look of appalled incredulity at
the suggestion that anyone would try to do what President Bush has now
been trying to do for almost a year. The latter words straggled out in
that slow, circumspect way of Dr. Kissinger's when he's straining to
let only his eyes speak of idiocy. He might have earned more credit if he'd
simply stopped talking sooner. But in the darkness of a reputation such
as his, even a little credit gleams like purest gold.
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Topical notes
Look on the Dim Side
For supporters of John Kerry and that somewhat larger group, opponents of George W. Bush, there is no bright side to the prospect of having Mr. Bush in power for four more years. However, there is a dim side, a less-dark side dotted with lights at the ends of certain tunnels. Since the tunnels and the pitfalls they contain are of Mr. Bush's making, and since the lights emanate from fires into which Mr. Bush has cast all our chestnuts, it's only right that he should plunge down those tunnels first. The events of the next four years should happen on his watch. ... [More]
Body Bluster
Commentators writing about Bob Woodward's latest book on the Bush White
House, Plan of Attack, have noted President Bush's fascination with
body language. ... There it was again, after he and Vice President Cheney
spoke with the 9/11 Commission the other day. There was the stride that's
a shade too brisk and bold, like that of a whistler in the dark. And then
the trick of starting to talk just a millisecond before the body comes to
rest at the microphones, as if to suggest a paratrooper hitting the ground
with gun blazing. This is body language that screams "I'm in control" so
loudly it makes you feel like listening from across the street. ... [More]
Inside Saddam
and Beyond Bush
A Saddam who is thought to have terrible weapons, and missiles with which
to deliver them, is a notable actor on the world stage and a very big man
to his own people. A Saddam who is known to have scrapped his WMD arsenal
under pressure from foreigners is much less big. Like a Mafia boss, a
Baath boss can ill afford to show signs of losing his nerve. And so Saddam
Hussein seems to have played a game that followed this logic: ... [More]
All
Compassion and No Feeling
President George W. Bush likes the sound of the word compassion.
But he doesn't feel that it's wrong to exploit the many personal losses of
September 11, 2001, for his own political gain. President Bush likes the
sound of the words compassionate conservatism. But he doesn't feel
that it's wrong to let poor people carry both the burden of fighting and
dying in Iraq and the burden of paying for the war while people in his own
set enjoy a large tax cut. ... Those who observe him at first hand often
come back and report that this is a President who knows where he wants to
go, who believes that he's doing God's will, and who is therefore free
from mental anguish. What they don't say is that to be free from mental
anguish about sending people to kill and die is to be devoid of moral
sense. ... [More]
Coming to a
Young Woman Near You
Predictably, dropping women into the warrior pool has meant condemning
them to face an uncontrolled risk of being raped. Now here's another
prediction: Few if any of the commentators who react to this outrage will
confront both (1) the risk of rape that women face in the armed forces and
(2) the political push to include women in any future military draft. ...
In civilian life, women can practice a degree of self-protection by
prudently choosing among people, places, and times. In the military,
choice is a civilian heresy. The self is a joke. You go where you're sent,
and if you think you'll limit yourself to obeying lawful orders, you don't
know the remoteness and tardiness of the law. When a sexual threat is
clear enough to justify saying No, the scene has already been set for
inescapable violence. The law may come along later to tidy up, but that's
about it. ... [More]
The
Way
Outward (1)
Here are some suggestions to progressives and particularly to those active
in Democratic Party politics in the United States. On gun control: a
breakout position. On the family: a new departure. On homosexuality: a
thoughtful attitude. ... Public opinion polls have long shown solid
support for stricter gun control (roughly two-thirds of respondents), but
people can't be mobilized by arguments about registration or corporate
liability alone. Move the issue far out in front of this dust cloud at
once. Open a national debate about banning private ownership of handguns,
not to mention assault rifles and the like. ... Recognize the
family-centered society as the one real alternative to the corporate
society. This is not about re-education or mythmaking. It's about
cooperation for mutual defense among people who know what's important to
them. ... Dispense with liberal creationism about the nature of
homosexuality. Avoid the false dichotomy of arguing whether it's a chosen
lifestyle or an inborn trait (ask a clinical psychologist, and you may
hear that it's neither). Instead, emphasize the value of each human being
regardless of sexual orientation. Same-sex marriage? Let the
interested parties fight that battle themselves, outside the electoral
arena. ... [More]
The Way
Outward (2)
On wealth: a return to
basics. ... Rich people make profitable use of poor people during their
working lives. This is obviously true of corporate entities (which are, in
essence, morally insulated extensions of rich people). It's especially
true in times like these, when employers squeeze employees for a maximum
of work in return for a minimum of pay and benefits. It's also true in the
everyday lives of rich people. Every time they use products and services
provided by low-wage labor, they save money and gain convenience: they
profit. It's not revolutionary to suggest that they should reciprocate by
helping finance the health care and old-age support of the people who must
live on those low wages. It simply means there's no free lunch for
anybody, including the rich. ... [More]
Springtime for
Kissinger
Forgettable fact: Henry Kissinger spoke for the sane while the Bush
Administration dreamed of conquering Iraq. When he and Madeleine
Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, appeared before the US
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 26 September, 2002, Senator Russell
Feingold asked their advice about managing the aftermath of an invasion,
in which American troops might be endangered "for months on end." Dr.
Albright attempted a cautiously analytical reply that deteriorated into
incoherence and barely left her committed to the opinion that many factors
remained unknown. Dr. Kissinger replied, in part, as follows: ... [More]
Can the US Do in Iraq What Israel
Can't Do In Israel?
When Saddam Hussein came out of the ground,
pundits in Washington and beyond were quick to call it the beginning of
the end of terrorist resistance in Iraq, with the rest of the end soon
to follow. Of course they were wrong. Of course they'll go on being wrong
as long as the US has a presence in Iraq, and then some. After all, the
government of Israel has failed for ten years to stop suicide bombings on
its home ground, a parcel of land much smaller than Iraq inhabited mainly
by people who take the Intifadah personally. ... [More]
Combat
Pay for the Action-figure
President
In America's recent wars there have been officers, stationed at rear
bases or at the Pentagon, who would fly into the war zone just long
enough to qualify for combat pay. Then they'd fly back to the security
of their usual duties. ... [More]
The Wrong Reason to
Leave
For once, let's hope the Bush Administration is able to keep on with its
adventure in Iraq a while longer. Not until those halcyon days
when Iraq will have become a suburb of America's corporate metropolis, for
no such days are coming, but only until the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse
scandal has melted back into the greater scandal of the war itself. After
doing so much present and future harm, America's neoconservatives must be
made the great losers in this war. They must be discredited so thoroughly
that they will never rise to lead any generation of Americans again. Abu
Ghraib could become their lifeline. ... [More]
Essays
The Den of Forgetfulness
... The problem with Mr. Bush's notorious remark, "Bring 'em on," is not a
question of style. To understand what the problem is, it's necessary only
to consider that America's Commander-in-Chief is no Agamemnon or Alexander
leading armies in battle, but an executive who sends others into battle
from the security of a mansion far away. ... He ought to cut short his
"working vacation" down on the ranch and spend the summer in Iraq
inspiring the troops with his toughness. He wouldn't have to do much,
really: just walk the streets of Baghdad crying, "Bring 'em on!"
... The elder George Bush never ate his broccoli,
and the son never gave his native language the attention it needed if he
meant to lead millions of people and not merely pose as an iconic Regular
Guy.
... It's another convention of the den to point
out, in Mr. Bush's defense, that intellectuals have not made especially
effective Presidents — forgetting, here, that the issue is not the bookish
quality of intellectuality, but mental curiosity, discipline, and energy.
... The careless invasion of Iraq, the banished subject of environmental
protection, the fiscal drive into darkness: all suggest an indolent
non-thinker acting on fixed ideas and faith in pre-ordained success. Even
the meaning of "success" may not be clear in Mr. Bush's mind. ...
[More]
Hitler Between Them
... It's safe to say that there was only one Adolf Hitler. No combination
of character traits, personal experience, and events is ever repeated, and
yet one feels that Hitler does exist around us in pieces; even in pieces
large enough to worry about. Several of the more obvious pieces seem to
have been present in the makeup of Saddam Hussein. ...
That still leaves some important pieces missing.
... If they're nowhere to be found in today's world, all well and good.
But what makes them dangerous is their transparency to the moral optics of
many normal people: a quality that contributes to that deadening and
ultimately damning effect which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.
... Mr. Bush and his associates seem to have
grasped a phenomenon at the theoretical level and put it to work in a
systematic way, as Hitler did. It goes like this: Most people today reside
partially in a media community that exists in parallel with the real
community of personal experience. They don't confuse the two, as some
media critics have supposed; on the contrary, they let the two remain
strangely separate. In reality truth is established by some kind of
process, investigative or constructive, that requires factual, logical, or
moral integrity. In the mass media it's established by a narrative
process, and what is required is emotional or aesthetic integrity. ...
... His propaganda specialists understand that this allows them to
overshadow the truth of reality with an illusory media truth. Their kind of fabrication could go by various names, such as the Big
Lie in Little Pieces or the Cheesy Screenplay Lie, but to keep this
concept from being lost to history (till one of them writes a book) let's
give it a more dignified name: the Parallel Lie. ... [More]
Rallying Round the Mechanism
... It may be only natural that wartime tends to become a time of national
solidarity. ... Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policies made him both
the most loved and the most hated President of the twentieth century, but
war made him one of the world's three big Good Guys along with Churchill
and, er, Stalin. In the election of 1944, it made him the horse that one
does not change in midstream.
The Vietnam War was more complicated, but it was
not the exception that it may seem in distant retrospect. ... It's hard to
believe that Kennedy, had he lived, would have seen his Presidency damaged
as decisively as Johnson's was by the Vietnam War: a war to which Kennedy
had committed the country and for which his brother Robert, as Attorney
General, had toured the world drumming up support. He at least would not
have had that same brother dogging his footsteps as a charismatic peace
candidate, and it's all but impossible to imagine America's college-bred
youth chanting, "JFK, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" in front of
the White House. ...
Mr. Bush himself, and not only his staff, began
soon after the September 11 attacks to talk as if an open-ended age of war
had begun. ... He'd had little to recommend him as a leader except to
those who wished to see mediocrity vindicated. Then came the national
crisis, and a wave of patriotism lifted his boat high above the rocks of
normal consequences for a mediocre President. How could he help but wish
to ride the wave as far as possible? It's an understandable impulse, but
one that has to be resisted. If the President won't resist the impulse,
the American people have to resist the President. George W. Bush has shown
no sign of resisting the impulse since his first chance to preside over a
nation unified, or psychologically controlled, by patriotism and anxiety. ... [More]
Friends of Anne Frank
... Even schoolchildren in places far removed from the old haunts of the
Nazis get a good chance to steer clear of bigotry by learning Anne's story
... If there's one thing we'll never do,
it's let them send Anne Frank to Bergen-Belsen.
... Passive bigots, being essentially normal
people, don't relish the persecution of the weak and innocent. But if they
can be made to see an aggrieved accuser in place of a persecutor, and if
the proposed victims are a tribe which they themselves consider altogether
too powerful, why, that's another matter.
... And it doesn't follow from the opportunistic
behavior of France's President and Foreign Minister that "those French"
deserve to become unpersons with an unculture and an uncuisine. What, no
foie gras in George W. Bush's America? No Marie Antoinette economic
doctrine? When the We-They Mentality gets loose, anyone may suffer.
... It's sad but true that racism, now as ever, is the shame of American
society. It's equally true, and sadder, that racism is not the shame of
many other societies because not many other societies have developed a
capacity for shame about such things. ... [More]
Where Will All the Women Go?
... Those young girls would pose a difficulty for many political liberals
today, if they were to rear their pretty heads outside the elegiac world
of the song and tell us what it is that makes them important. Ever since
the first heyday of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" pacifism has been,
for many people in the industrialized countries, a twofold thing: a
heartfelt abhorrence of war, yes, but also part of a conventional set of
shibboleths by which one is known as an enlightened, progressive sort of
person and not just some gun-shy troglodyte. ...
Human beings have always lived in a cycle of war
and peace which is, for the survivors, an ebb-and-flow of sanity. Men go
to war and derange themselves. They come back knowing they have done so,
uneasily accustomed to things morbid and mad, doubting their own humanity.
Women, meanwhile, have kept the sane part of the world intact. They've
preserved it for everybody by keeping to it themselves. Man returns, and
woman teaches him to be human again. This is not simply a matter of
resuming the old routines of peace. Woman is able to give man heart for
another try at sanity only because she is reliably sane herself. There
must be a principle in the world that is the very antithesis of war, if
the human race is to improve. In most societies until now, woman has been
that principle. ... [More]
The Mohammedan Candidate
... There are three modes of applying the thesis of The
Manchurian Candidate to George W. Bush. The most pleasurable mode is
to imagine him as the witting agent of political Islam, a convert under
deep cover who has, with great subtlety, cultivated the persona of a
vacuously dogged superpatriot. ... However, the most accurate mode is
probably the third: recognizing George W. Bush not as the witting agent of
political Islam, nor as its unwitting tool, but as the half-witting agent
of something akin to it. ...
Mr. Bush and his associates seem in a hurry to
prove the wisdom of Lord Acton's words, "Power tends to corrupt and
absolute power corrupts absolutely." No proof is needed. Absolute power
corrupted the Caliphs. It corrupts the rulers of theocracies in the world
today. The very thought of it corrupts anybody who imagines himself to be
the hand of God, and when his own hands hold the levers of enormous power
over human affairs, one may say that the outlook is grim. ... [More]
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