Archive for the 'art, culture' Category

Panem et circenses

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Though it may be true that a new administration will find areas in which to cut spending by 25%, that may be the exception rather than the rule. Generally speaking, we expect that it will be a neck and neck race among the most fun new spending initiatives we may get in the coming years. For example, the Global Poverty Act seems like a rollicking good time for US taxpayers, but we think the new Department of Peace and Non-Violence takes first prize. The Corner:

The DPN-V would house such vital new agencies as The Office of Peace Education & Training, the Office of Domestic Peace Activities, the Office of International Peace Activities, the Office of Technology for Peace, the Office of Arms Control and Disarmament…, the Office of Peaceful Co-Existence and Non-Violent Conflict Resolution, and, of course, the Office of Human Rights and Economic Rights.

Funny thing about those who prattle on about peace and the “peace-loving people of the world” and so forth. Their own countries don’t appear to do very well. Perhaps it’s inevitable that America would flirt with such foolishness. We’ve had it so prosperous for so long that many — certainly the young people — have no idea about the hard past we’ve so recently left behind. As the man said: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Sad but true.

Notes from the campaign trail

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

Iowahawk has some embellished comments from the Democratic presidential candidate, but we think the original statements about the McCain campaign and Republicans are noteworthy in themselves:

I’m not making this up, you can’t make this up. It’s like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ routine…I’m skinny but I’m tough…Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he’s president he’ll take on — and I quote — ‘the old boys network in Washington.’ I’m not making this up. This is somebody who’s been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign. And now he tells us that he’s the one who’s going to take on the old boys network. The old boys network. In the McCain campaign that’s called a staff meeting. Come on…

I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face. And if they tell you that, ‘Well, we’re not sure where he stands on guns.’ I want you to say, ‘He believes in the Second Amendment.’ If they tell you, ‘Well, he’s going to raise your taxes,’ you say, ‘No, he’s not, he’s going lower them.’ You are my ambassadors. You guys are the ones who can make the case.

And the Vice President in waiting had some good material too (as well as some not so good material). The NYT reports:

“John is so out of touch, he just has no idea,” charged Mr. Biden…who called his “old, dear friend” someone who “just doesn’t think,” who is behaving in a repugnant manner and who is peddling “Republican garbage,” and malarkey. The older woman who introduced him at a rally here called…Sarah Palin of Alaska, a “bucket of fluff,” and he rewarded the woman as he took the microphone with an “I love you” and a gentle kiss on the head. “If I sound angry, it’s because I am angry,” Mr. Biden told a few hundred people…he sounds angry, yelling through his stump speeches, flailing his arms and telling a (supportive) member of the audience to “Shush up, will you?” (“I’m kidding,” he added, but did not sound it.)…

Mr. Biden made an improvisational stop at a diner, shook a bunch of hands and walked out into the sun holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “I’m dripping here, man,” Mr. Biden said to a well-wisher as he headed across the street to a carousel. “Am I too old to get on it?” he asked no one in particular, then headed back to his campaign bus. “Anyone need a ride?” he asked some people standing nearby. “I’ve got a nice bus.”

“Saturday Night Live?” “Get in their face?” “I’ve got a nice bus?” Questions: (a) why does this campaign season often seem more like a reality TV program than a presidential election? (b) would a Clinton-McCain contest have sounded this way? (c) does the way that the Democratic candidates comport themselves suggest that they are ahead or trailing in the election?

Quite a day — what will the Lehman Chapter 11 bring?

Monday, September 15th, 2008

So much for inflation. The underlying trend in many major asset categories has been deflationary for a while, fundamentally on account of ever-restricting credit standards in the marketplace. This has been masked by the speculative bubble in commodities, which would appear to be over. If it isn’t over yet, the (necessary but sad) Chapter 11 filing of Lehman Brothers, the shotgun wedding of Merrill and BofA, and the meltdown of AIG, are all moving us further and further down that path. Oil is now off $50 from its high, and in our view may well have the better part of another $50 yet to fall. WSJ:

Light, sweet crude for October delivery was recently down $5.40, or 5.3%, at $95.78 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. October Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange, which expires Monday, was down $5.24 to $92.34 a barrel. Nymex crude earlier fell to $94.13 a barrel, the lowest price since Feb. 14

Meanwhile, China is trying to address future anemic growth through easing lending restrictions, which as we have said many times, probably won’t be enough to keep growth where it needs to be in that country.

UPDATE

Oops, the day got a little worse. WSJ:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which languished with a loss between 200 and 300 points for most of the day, saw its losses accelerate in the last hour of trading. It ended down by 504.48 points, off 4.4%, at 10917.51. All 30 of its components fell, led by a 60.8% plunge in American International Group. The Federal Reserve on Monday asked Goldman Sachs Group and J.P. Morgan Chase to help make $70-$75 billion in loans available to the company, according to people familiar with the situation…

Bank of America was also a big decliner among Dow stocks, off 21.3%…Goldman was off 12.1%, while Morgan Stanley fell 13.5%…Washington Mutual tumbled 26.7% as investors feared it wouldn’t be able to find a buyer…”We’ve re-established ‘moral hazard,’” a person involved in the Lehman talks told the Journal…”Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We’re about to find out.”

One hopes that, in allowing the failure of Lehman Brothers and the stampede that followed, the current crop of regulators is steering a course to avoid some of the really devastating mistakes of the past.

Katrina and Gustav

Monday, September 1st, 2008

A leading Democrat observed: “Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven…To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention.” Actually, Gustav hasn’t worked out badly for the GOP at all, at least so far. Katrina was another story, and the media narrative has become a legend in part at odds with the facts:

It is worth remembering that many of the problems of Katrina were not the fault of the federal government. People had ample time and warning to Get Out! before the hurricane struck. President Bush called Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco well before the storm hit and asked her to force a mandatory evacuation of low lying areas, but Blanco dallied. Indeed, days after the storm hit she still tried to keep the feds away, and inexplicably refused to authorize aid from others for New Orleans.

We continue to wonder if Governor Blanco’s disastrous response to Katrina was possibly part of a Democratic strategy to make the Bush administration look bad (”All the National Guardsman are in Iraq so they can’t help,” etc.) — a plan that spun wildly out of control because the storm turned out to be so bad. How else to explain that, days after the hurricane struck, Mayor Nagin was more than willing to give control of New Orleans to the federal government, but Governor Blanco said she still “needed 24 hours to make a decision.” Maybe complete incompetence would also be an adequate explanation.

As for Gustav, the divine intervention eliminated both Messrs. Bush and Cheney from speaking roles at the convention, producing a “huge sigh of relief by most party strategists.” The media were deprived of the split screen pictures they wanted to show — happy revelers and the drenched, homeless poor. Louisiana’s GOP Governor Bobby Jindal got to show that he is on the ball and up to the task. FEMA and the Bush administration seem to be “100% better prepared” this time around. And Senator McCain got to look somber and adult and overact for the media: “We are facing a great national challenge’.” All in all, not a bad outcome so far.

A fair point

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Senator Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC drew rave reviews from America’s leading political commentators. It featured this line which caught our attention:

I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.

He’s got a point. The near-religious adulation accorded to a fellow with a thin résumé is most understandable in the context of the will to believe, the ardent desire of so many for a Messiah to save them. In a country that has seen numerous religious revivals and spasms of romanticism like Prohibition, underestimating the power of such yearnings is a mistake.

The coolest machine ever?

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to begin operating this year to test the validity and limitations of the Standard Model. (Among the questions: Where has all the anti-matter gone? Does the Higgs boson exist?) The collider is currently being cooled to its operating temperature of 1.9K, which is pretty darn cold. Here are some great pictures from Boston.com of this huge, awesome machine, located in Switzerland and France.

The music video above by science writer Kate McAlpine tries to put the LHC’s mission into layman’s terms. The LHC should be pretty cool — at least if it doesn’t destroy the universe. (HT’s: LGF, LHC Blog)

An unhealthy symbiosis

Friday, July 25th, 2008

A presidential candidate who speaks in messianic terms, and media disciples who worship him, offering both praise and gold, is not a healthy combination in a democracy. Howard Kurtz describes a politician who has become a gladiator in addition to being the messiah:

Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan’s Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes. But even as the likes of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Jake Tapper rose to press the Democratic candidate on Tuesday, television viewers back home heard nothing but faint voices in the wind. The journalists weren’t miked; only Obama’s answers came through loud and clear.

That may have been unintentional, but it underscored the degree to which Obama has controlled the message — and, more important, the pictures — during his exhaustively chronicled trek across the Middle East and Europe. Obama meeting the troops, meeting the generals, meeting prime ministers and kings, drawing a huge crowd in Berlin yesterday — the images trump whatever journalists write and say…

“The pictures bring people into the story,” says Jerry Rafshoon, who was President Jimmy Carter’s media adviser. “In the television age, the more people who can see him in the role of commander in chief, the better it is for him.” By contrast, Rafshoon says, when John McCain was seen riding around Kennebunkport in a golf cart with former president George H.W. Bush, “you’re seeing him with his generation, the older generation. They looked like the past.”

Dorrance Smith, President Bush’s former Pentagon spokesman and a onetime ABC News producer, agreed that “the pictures have dominated. . . . In a campaign, that’s as good as gold. The pictures would have broken through whether there was a one-camera pool or every anchor in the world.” Beyond the images, most journalists and pundits have depicted the trip as an unalloyed triumph. “A slam-dunk success,” in the words of Time’s Joe Klein; “a real grand slam,” as Salon Editor Joan Walsh put it on “Hardball.”

Meanwhile, from IBD: “An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans…235 journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10-to-1. An even greater disparity, 20-to-1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.”

“Anybody who’s been a ninth grade boy understands this species of love”

Friday, July 25th, 2008

The thing speaks for itself:

We think the soundtrack of the ad could be better. How about this? Suddenly it’s the sixties again.

A little slow on the uptake

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers notices something that has been pretty evident for a while, that the media are totally in the tank for Senator Obama:

Tomorrow, CBS’s Katie Couric will interview Barack Obama from Jordan. On Wednesday, ABC’s Charlie Gibson will chat with him from Israel. And on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams will do the honors from Germany. Call it the presidential campaign equivalent of Shooting the Moon…Is the Media Trying to Elect Obama?

Duh. Howard Kurtz noticed it (”Obama’s excellent adventure”) too.

UPDATE

In an interview which deserves its own post, and belies a bit the hagiography referred to above, Katie Couric did a good job of letting Senator Obama make his (in our opinion incomprehensible) case against the surge, and, in turn, letting Senator McCain make his argument. A good debate by proxy, not that many Americans apparently care about such serious foreign policy issues anymore..

A catalogue of changed positions

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Dick Morris created a list of Senator Obama’s changes of position: “Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate — who we don’t really yet know very well — reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues”:

After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.
• Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.
• Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
• Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn’t mean it.
• From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.
• For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.
• Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.
• During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers — but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.
• After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.

So far none of the Obama flip flops seemed to have gained purchase with the general public, and Democrats don’t seem to mind a bit, at least for the most part. Morris says that gas prices could be a different story. “Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas…If Obama softens his aversion to drilling, it may be the final straw for some of his liberal supporters.”

One can only hope that McCain will not let this great opportunity to attract regular folks and potentially cause a rift among Democrats slip by.

Postscript: do voters pay much attention to the substance of political campaigns anymore, or has politics become a silly TV show, or even just a cartoon in this increasingly unserious country?

Like England in the 1970s?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Some Democrats are apparently proposing nationalization of at least part of the US oil industry, which seems to follow in the footsteps of British governments of the post-WWII era:

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)…We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.

And Congresswoman Maxine Waters wants to nationalize the rest of the industry. Much mischief appears to lie ahead in 2009, if these worthies are serious about plans to make America look like the decaying, fraying Great Britain of the 1970’s.

Some statistics to consider about oil

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Demand for oil is tanking, but for some reason that fact seems completely disconnected from price. We continue to be wrong about the euphoria that continues to grip the oil market. WSJ:

The IEA…said it sees world oil demand growing just 0.9%, or 800,000 barrels a day this year in a market of 86 million barrels a day. The original forecast last July was for growth of 2.18 million barrels a day…

In the U.S…Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles in March versus the same month a year ago – the sharpest monthly drop since the government began collecting such data in 1942 and the first contraction in that month since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That…was well before pump prices reached a nationwide average of $4 a gallon last week. At current prices, some economists say fuel expenditures as a percentage of workers’ take-home pay is now as high as it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s…

the IEA has dropped its forecast for China’s oil demand this year to 5.5%…from 6.1% last July. It cautioned that Chinese consumption may get an extra kick later this year as areas of the country are rebuilt following the devastating earthquake…

the biggest drop in gasoline demand is coming from the developed world. In Japan, brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. says passenger car miles were down between 3% and 5% in 2007 – roughly the same amount that bus and rail miles were up. Businesses are axing work days, travel and opting for teleconferencing to beat high oil costs.

The International Air Transport Association, which represents 230 airlines globally, says premium travel for business and first-class services suffered its biggest drop in five years in March and that economy travel growth slowed to less than 1% at the end of the first quarter…

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is dealing with its second worst PR disaster of this decade by holding an oil conference of producers and consumers on June 22. It’s hard to believe that this is going to work, given the previous self-serving and cynical statements of OPEC members.

(Finally, a question: is it in fact immoral for the Democrats in Congress not to allow drilling in ANWR and other places, when the foolish policy of a lack of such E&P activities, as well as biofuels mandates, have arguably resulted in the poverty and even death of children around the world?)

A provocative point

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Edward Luttwak in the NYT raises an interesting issue about Senator Obama, which, by and large, the media have chosen to ignore or deny. We note that this is not the only story in the NYT to address the question of Senator Obama and his family’s religious background:

it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith. As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.) It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states)…

another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing. At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House.

This matter would appear to be non-trivial. We have witnessed great intensity of feeling as to what constitutes justice in the situations of other apostates, and the situation of the President would appear to be a special and highly visible case. Criminalizing apostasy ought itself to be a crime, but that, unfortunately, lies far in the future.

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips has quite a bit more to say on this and related topics.

Pro and con on Mr. Ayers and Senator Obama

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Elizabeth Wurtzel has had a lot of problems in her life, as well as some kooky opinions, and has not been shy about sharing them in her books, including Prozac Nation. She said this about the WTC falling on 9/11 for example: “I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought: ‘This is a really strange art project.’ It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance…People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.” For some reason, the WSJ decided to ask her opinion about Senator Obama and his friends:

As for Mr. Obama’s friends, the Weathercouple: By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know…the senator’s relationship with his radical Hyde Park neighbors is actually quite warm, even close.

Well, that’s one way to see things. Perhaps as a counterpoint to the attractive characterization of Mr. Ayers, Hillary Clinton supporter Larry Johnson (yes, that Larry Johnson) has posted a picture of the “unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely” Mr. Ayers trampling the American flag (similar photo here):

According to the caption, Mr. Ayers is said to be stomping on the American flag in 2001, some six years or more into his political relationship with Senator Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primaries. (HTs: Larwyn, Jules Crittenden, and Tom Maguire)

The framework is dead. Long live the framework!

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

James Ceaser, who spends quite a bit of time thinking about ideology and political parties, has a number of interesting observations on the 2008 election. He notes that the candidates of each party may be tied to a tired ideology, but is doing nothing to alter it to the circumstances of today.

Since Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency 28 years ago, all of the presidential elections have been fought within the same ideological framework. Candidates have come and gone, party fortunes have risen and fallen, and the world order has undergone a complete transformation; but the basic structure of the debate between liberalism and conservatism has remained unchanged. During the past two elections, the two camps have dug in, solidifying and consolidating their positions. The result has been an era of strong polarization accompanied by the political equivalent of trench warfare.

Electoral analysts from across the political spectrum have begun to argue that this structure is ready to crumble–a prognosis that seems about half right. There is now strong evidence that significant segments of the electorate are no longer much concerned with the old liberal-conservative divide. In Michael Barone’s words, “we have entered a period of open-field politics” in which voters are moving around and “there are no familiar landmarks.” This diagnosis applies especially to younger and newer voters, for whom Ronald Reagan is a distant figure from another age. The change is sufficiently large that most campaign strategists, Karl Rove among them, have counseled abandoning the 2004 battle plan of appealing chiefly to a committed base, and adopting instead a strategy that tries to appeal to those at the margin who are less tightly moored. Nonetheless, it is not true that the ideological edifice inherited from the Reagan era is in immediate danger of collapse. It remains intact–no alternative ideological way of thinking having yet been offered as a viable replacement.

From this perspective, the most noteworthy aspect of the current campaign is surely something that has not taken place. Neither party will select a candidate who has campaigned on the basis of a call to alter or reconfigure the party’s ideological position…

The absence of new thematic thinking certainly does not mean that ideological controversy will disappear. Just the opposite may be true. In the general election, each party’s candidate will be pushed by the opposition to defend a version of the existing party philosophy, perhaps even more faithfully for not having a philosophical platform of his (or her) own. Much time, of course, still remains before the fall campaign to develop new themes, but leopards do not easily change their spots, and dramatic changes in the contenders’ ideological thinking are unlikely at this point.

If a new turn in thinking is not what the candidates bring to the table, there is something else they do offer: themselves. All three of the candidates stand out dramatically in relation to their party, especially as non-incumbents. (Elections involving a sitting president inevitably have a strong emphasis on him personally, if only because the opposition may focus obsessively, as in 1996 and 2004, on what it cannot abide in his mannerisms and character.) What experts dryly call the “personal factor,” meaning the voters’ evaluation of the candidates’ individual attributes and style, seems certain to play a much larger role than usual in the upcoming election. The choice of the person, as Alexander Hamilton envisaged, will loom large.

Let’s add Michael Barone to the mix and see what we get: “Most people’s views of the world are shaped by the times in which they came of age. That’s why we speak of a baby boom generation or a Generation X. But some people miss out on the formative experiences of most of their peers. That’s the case, I think, with the Republicans’ certain nominee and the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. John McCain missed the 1960s. Barack Obama missed the 1980s.”

Interestingly, America’s problems today are somewhat like the needs of the 60’s and the 80’s. We believe that there is a need for a new American optimism about the future, but the prerequisite for that is a renewed sense that Americans can be and are in control of more of their nation’s destiny. Our unnecessary overdependence on foreign oil is one issue that is not seriously confronted by the political establishment. As well, Americans want to shop at Wal-Mart, where almost everything comes from China, but they justifiably worry that their job may go overseas. Neither of these issues is solved by a deranged populism, but both of them should be confronted.

Moreover, the mission (never coherently stated nor put to a vote) that has formed “the heart of the Bush presidency” — reforming the alien politico-religious structure of far off foreign lands — has surely not contributed to a sense that America is in very good control of its destiny.

Finally, the US would appear to be in a somewhat different position than it was in the last century. When FDR was elected, Americans numbered 122 million and were over 6% of the planet’s relatively tiny population. Now the population of this crowded world is almost 7 billion, and the relative US share of its population has fallen by almost a third to the 4% range. Americans are awash in a sea of other humans, and, if they are not going to run this big world, they at least want to control what goes on within their own borders. From control of the country’s borders, to better control of economic sovereignty, there are data that show that a majority of Americans want sensible measures that enhance an American sense of better control of the country’s destiny. We’ll have to see who, if any of the above, can rise to these challenges.

UPDATE

We’d support the Victor Davis Hanson 10 Point Platform as an excellent approach for the next administration. (HT: GS)

If next year is 1961

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

If next year starts the new sixties, full of hope and dreams, will there be a new Tom Lehrer and a new Vaughn Meader? Who will be the new Pablo Casals playing at the White House? Will there be a new IGY (even though that was a fifties thing)? Will the New, New Frontier feature some new kind of Fallout Shelter? Will it need to?

A new Messiah for America, or the hula hoop, fifty years later?

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

This is the 50th anniversary of the hula hoop fad that swept America in 1958. We seem to have a new version of the same phenomenon today in the Obama craze that has gripped the media and a good chunk of the populace. John Dickerson, Mark Steyn, and Tom Maguire contribute a few more stories and quips in the Ehrenreich genre of ethereal unreality about America’s current instant messiah, King of Kings, and Man of Steel who will save the planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men:

Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page…Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you…on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors…heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?”…

Many spiritually advanced people I know…identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul…

John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”…On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along…

There was the woman in New Hampshire who compared him with Christ. There was Maria Shriver’s comparison of the candidate with the state of California, with the rhetorical fervor usually seen only after a preacher shouts, “You are healed!”…

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”…

“Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.”

Questions: (a) the 1958 hula hoop craze lasted two years — how long will this one last? (b) if today’s fad politician is the hula hoop, who will be the frisbee (the second fad invented by Wham-O in the late fifties)? (c) and finally, what’s the deal with all the women who faint at the Senator’s rallies and rather disturbing revival meetings — is it real or is it something else entirely? (The list of these suspicious fainting spells seems to be getting longer and longer.)

A change of tone

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

As we discussed below, Sentator Obama seems to have decided he is running against something more than Senator Clinton. AP:

Obama told the former first lady he was helping unemployed workers on the streets of Chicago when “you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.”

Moments later, Clinton said that she was fighting against misguided Republican policies “when you were practicing law and representing your contributor…in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.”

Obama seemed particularly irritated at the former president, whom he accused in absentia of uttering a series of distortions to aid his wife’s presidential effort. “I’m here. He’s not,” she snapped. “Well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” Obama countered.

Hillary’s reference to Antoin “Tony” Rezko, whose name was omitted from the AP piece, seems apt. The WSJ noted: “Mr. Obama admitted he ‘did about five hours of work’ on a property case involving Mr. Rezko when he was a junior lawyer in Chicago. Mr. Obama has donated most of the money he received from Mr. Rezko to charity.”

Whatever the particulars of the matter, it is amusing to see Hillary take up the theme of organized crime. Not only have some wags called her Michael to her husband’s Vito, but the Clinton machine even went out of its way to create a Sopranos video starring them. Kneecapping and other hijinx are perhaps sure to follow.

Runs in the family

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

Sonny boy:

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful…The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak…We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players)…

Gramps:

“I am as certain as I am dictating these words that the stoniest German heart will melt [if only the Jews] adopt active non-violence. Human nature…unfailingly responds to the advances of love. I do not despair of his [Hitler's] responding to human suffering even though caused by him.”

They say all human traits are heritable. Maybe so.

How close are genius and madness?

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Pretty close, if Bobby Fischer serves as the test case. The strangeness and outrageousness of his life are recounted in this NYT obituary. But let’s leave that aside for the moment and think of his 1972 match against Boris Spassky, the first time since 1948 that someone from outside the USSR had won:

The world championship match against the elegant Spassky was an unforgettable spectacle, the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place. Mr. Fischer’s characteristic petulance, loutishness and sense of outrage were the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted the remaining games be played in an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet. There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12½ to 8½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point, a draw a half-point for each player.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

As early as 1958, the New York Times noted, “playing chess is the best way to communicate with Bobby. But this way is not uncomplicated.” We have seen it speculated in several places that Fischer had Asperger syndrome, and some of the symptoms seem to fit. Certainly, what the NYT recorded in 1958 as the dialogue of the 15 year old Fischer, just off the plane from a tournament in Europe, is somewhat disturbing:

“I had to sign hundreds of autographs. Terrible,” he added.
And then, glancing at Mr. Monath’s side of the chessboard: “I think you have an inferior position.”
And to his mother, trying on her new silk scarf: “That’s very Continental.”
“Say, do you know what my name is in Yugoslavia — ‘Bowbee Feesah’.”

So, in our opinion, from an early age, many people knew not only that Fischer could play chess like a demon, but also seemed to have some strange spirits roaming the interiors of his mind. So here are the questions: would it have been better to have treated young Fischer with psychoactive drugs if the cost was the loss of his chess ability? If you were Fischer, what would you have chosen? Or could you have chosen? Some things to think about on a day when some will choose to portray this troubled life as a caricature.