| Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 14 2008, 08:48 PM (2,176 Views) | |
| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 14 2008, 08:48 PM Post #1 |
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NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED When asked by friends to write an autobiography, Albert J. Nock (see my avatar) balked: I have led a singularly uneventful life, largely solitary, have had little to do with the great of the earth, and no part whatever in their affairs or for that matter, in any other affairs. Hence my autobiography would be like the famous chapter on owls in Bishop Pontoppidan's history of Iceland. The good bishop wrote simply that there are no owls in Iceland, and that one sentence was the whole of his chapter. Nock eventually relented. His “intellectual” autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, has ever since its publication in 1943 charmed thousands of readers who--perhaps because they, too, could call on no escapades in the Foreign Legion on which to expand in their diaries—readily assented to Nock’s conclusion that “it is certainly true that whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it, or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind.” Like some of his critics, I think Nock paid insufficient attention to that enigma we call “character.” Although character may itself be influenced by books and teachers, it is much more (and sometimes much less) than the product of their convergence in one’s noggin. Indeed, some have argued that one’s character plays gatekeeper, admitting only those intellectual notions already agreeable to a mind whose predilections are far less matters of choice or ratiocination than we’d like to think. Nevertheless, and whether or not the chicken works it out with the egg, we can hardly avoid acting as if what we think (or how we justify what we think) matters. Liestoppers would be an exercise in futility were this not so. The success of Liestoppers highlights another fact of modern life that Nock, who died in 1945, could not have foreseen: the average American spends many more hours before a glowing monitor than before a printed page. One monitor in particular, the one tied to a computer, facilitates “interactivity,” which itself has created something altogether new in the world—namely, cyberfriends. Many members of this board have become cyberfriends of one another. Of my own cyberfriends, the most consequential are the original Blog Hooligans, because they have relentlessly pursued justice where others—some perhaps even more intelligent or eloquent—have faltered. But, alas, these admirable hooligans have finally stumbled, for they have set aside this thread for my ramblings. At first I wondered if the offer were but a clever variation on that story of the perfect host—you know, the fellow who at his parties always sported a garish shirt, thereby guaranteeing that no guest would be the worst-dressed person in the room. After being reassured by Tony Soprano and Joan Foster that I was not to construe myself as that host or the other posters at Liestoppers as those guests, and after also winning from them a promise that hooligan-archivist Maggief would never release the full text of the letter I penned to my mother confessing shock at having just learned that the tooth fairy did not exist (I was then a sophomore in college), I agreed to give this thread a try. In this space I hope principally to amuse and distract, sometimes to enlighten (myself as well as you), and occasionally to provoke. Because I have not yet escaped the financial wars, I cannot promise to post here on any regular schedule. My unpaid (indeed, non-existent) research staff persists in being unreliable. Expect no consistent themes or topics on which I’ll comment. Do expect a point of view. Above all, try not to approach this thread with “worm in the spaghetti” prejudice; although I can’t help staying with me even after gagging on something I previously wrote, you have choice in the matter, which I hope you’ll graciously exercise in my favor especially after I’ve disgorged a howler—or, worse yet, driven you to cleaning out your already clean garage. In order to improve your opportunities for finding earlier postings of mine on which you can then commit unnatural acts, the board administrator intends to make this thread “read only.” If you wish to comment on my entries, please do so in an “interactive” thread below. Members of Liestoppers may also communicate with me by “private message.” Non-members may send me e-mails at Dukeparent2004@gmail.com. Note that Google has provided me an enhanced “Delete” button for that address, which the Blog Hooligans have suggested I use without hesitation should any of you nefariously overwhelm my in-box with sweet songs of devotion.  Edited by Duke parent 2004, Aug 31 2008, 10:06 AM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 17 2008, 07:59 PM Post #2 |
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THE RATIONAL VOTER I see that the newly released movie Swing Vote, starring Kevin Costner, has failed to overwork cash registers at box offices around the country. I have not seen the movie. And as I rarely prefer swapping my comfortable living room for the local multiplex, where one risks being enfeebled by picking up “Like, you know . . . “ from every one of the thousand teenagers in the joint, you now have a second good reason for asking someone else to give you his take on the film. (I reserve the right, of course, to slink off to the cinema if the only other entertainment my clever wife will permit of an evening is to watch a Barbara Walters special or a re-run of Dances with Wolves.) At any rate, I’ve seen enough from the previews of Swing Vote to gather that it’s a comedy built on a highly improbable scenario: Costner finds himself the “deciding” voter in a presidential election. I’m blathering here about a movie I haven’t seen, because its premise takes me back thirty-five years to a spirited debate, in which I got trounced. “Steve,” the winner of that debate, was an assistant professor of political science at the same university in which I was then hiding out as a graduate student. A graduate of Cal Tech who had earned a master’s degree in physics before completing a doctorate in political science at Yale, Steve was the department’s specialist in quantitative methods. I was particularly drawn to him because he was anything but a true believer in the wholesale application of mathematics to the problems and concerns of political science. Indeed, he had only recently set off a bomb by publishing in the discipline’s flagship journal an article that shredded the work of several of the most highly regarded “quant” scholars in the field. One day Steve happened on a bunch of us in the student lounge as we were arguing vehemently for our favorite candidates in an upcoming election. He immediately suggested we not sacrifice friendship to politics, that only the foolhardy would risk losing friends over an election in which our votes couldn’t possibly be of consequence. I believe I was the first graduate student to break the stunned silence. “How can you say such a thing?” I protested. “How can you impugn the very foundation of our democracy? You are speaking nonsense.” Steve responded most decorously by summarizing the best of the recent literature, to which he himself had contributed, on “the rational voter.” Here mathematics was appropriate, he averred. In a statewide or national election, one stood a very much better chance of getting injured on the way to the polls than of changing the outcome of the vote. Because the “deciding vote” meant by definition the vote that would give the winner a one-vote victory, the likelihood of ever seeing an election reduced to that one single outcome was vanishingly small. At all of 5’ 8” tall, I should sooner expect to be paid a million bucks by an NBA team to step into the circle for the opening center jump. For every objection I raised, Steve countered persuasively. When I asked him to imagine the scene were many “rational” voters thereby to abstain from voting, he responded that many already were abstaining and, yet, the count of those still going to the polls was more than large enough to sustain the mathematics. When I blustered that abstaining from voting would be un-American, he replied that good reasons could still be adduced for voting, but that among them should not be an expectation of changing the outcome. When I challenged him to imagine his own regret were he not to vote in an election that did in fact turn on just one vote, he laughed while assuring me that no such outcome could persist, for the public would demand recounts until the margin of victory proved to be something more “acceptable” than one vote. So how had we all managed to fool ourselves for so long? Steve noted that most voters carried over, often from their youth, experiences in voting that were not applicable to state and national elections. We had voted for club and class presidents, officers of sororities or fraternities, and perhaps for friends or neighbors in local elections. In these settings it made sense to take our vote seriously. I then remembered the very first governmental election in which I cast a ballot. It also happened to be the first election in which I campaigned for one of the candidates, who happened to be my father. In an election decided by only five votes, my father, in his first try, won a seat in the county legislature. But there were fewer than 200 ballots cast in that contest! Perhaps Steve was on to something. The more I weighed Steve’s argument, and the deeper I got into the literature to which he pointed me, the more enamored I became of Edmund Burke’s small battalions and Alexis de Tocqueville’s celebration of America as the land of intermediary associations. I’ve tested my growing preference for the local in matters political by asking friends and acquaintances a simple question: Are you more likely to cross party lines in a national election or in a local one? The more thoughtful, and honest, among them usually nod in favor of the local. After all, they might know, know somebody who knows, or even work with that candidate from the other party. And the opportunities for meeting, conversing with, and even lambasting the local candidate or officeholder are far more attractive than is the case with those big-shot pols slavered over by the television networks. Yes, in local elections the fate of the free world is not at stake. But for at least this voter, that’s quite alright. |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 21 2008, 12:17 AM Post #3 |
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THE BEST OF THE BEST Roger Kimball, co-editor of The New Criterion and indefatigable scourge of the politically correct academy, has begun an amusing contest on his blog. Here’s the announcement he made on August 18 (at http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/08/18/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-or-fukuyama-as-antigonus/): The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate. To get things going, Kimball offers “global warming” as a worthy contender, and then his own favorite, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which dates from an essay Fukuyama published in 1989 in The National Interest. Kimball has yet to say whether he’ll award a prize other than fifteen seconds of fame at his blog. Nor has he given his prize a name. Were George Orwell’s name not already attached to an award for distinguished political writing, I’d vote for “Ignis Fatuus Prix d’Orwell”--not only because Orwell railed against using foreign words in English prose but also because he was fond of saying that some ideas were so outrageous that only inmates of universities could have generated them. Also a shame is Kimball’s restricting his time period to just the past twenty-five years. For while watching the Olympic Games this week, I concluded that had Kimball given me another ten years with which to work, I’d immediately submit as my own entry in his contest that humdinger of professorial deep thinking—namely, affirmative action. So what do the Games have to do with affirmative action and silly academics, you ask? In December of 1980, I wrote a newspaper op-ed in response to a wire-service story that featured a Dr. Waldrip, the administrator of desegregation for the Cleveland public schools. Herr Waldrip had just immortalized himself by ordering both his high-school principals and his basketball coaches to “recruit white students to play basketball. At least 20 percent of each basketball team should be white.” Waldrip contrived quotas for other sports as well; for example, half the baseball players were to be black. One of Waldrip’s colleagues, the director of athletics at Cleveland’s John F. Kennedy High School, spoke up for all those poor slobs, the unlettered masses, when he tilted at the new dispensation: “It is ridiculous when you don’t choose players on a team by ability.” I, of course, sided with the athletic director, even though he worked at a school named for a rake who had won a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by someone else. Affirmative action was very much at full throttle twenty-eight years ago. Just two years earlier, the U. S. Supreme Court had in its ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke failed to shut the door on affirmative-action ideologues determined to allocate precious spaces in professional schools (in this instance a place in the entering class of a medical school) to persons who, were it not for their race, would not have been admitted. So despite the absurdity of Dr. Waldrip’s directives, I thought it still necessary to draw on the reservoir of good sense in everyone who loved sports: A few years ago . . . the philosopher Sidney Hook asked the proponents of goals and quotas whether they could seriously envisage applying their formulas to sports. At the time, neither Hook nor his interlocutors were in doubt about the answer. Indeed, Hook used sports to show how deeply and rightly imbedded in the American way is the notion that ability and merit ought to prevail. Of course, everyone should get a chance to show his stuff. But only the best should make the varsity, even if nature “unfairly” gave some persons advantages—for example, tallness. The duffers and the also-rans could always romp in intramurals or pick-up games or try out for coxswain. Over the past thirty years, the affirmative-action steamroller has encountered increasingly stiff resistance. Thanks to the efforts of warriors such as Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and John McWhorter (all of them black men, by the way); thanks to organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars; thanks to judges who still take seriously the U. S. Constitution and the explicit language of statutes (e.g., the 1964 Civil Rights Act); and thanks to the explosion onto the scene of the Internet, which, paraphrasing Carl Becker, has made of “everyman his own broadcasting station,” proponents of affirmative action have needed to add "bob and weave" and even “retreat” to their lexicon of war. But to my mind the biggest thanks of all should go to the world of sports. Although I’ve not seen any study that shows a positive correlation between professors at universities who wish to reduce the role of athletics on campus and those who push for ever more affirmative action, I’d not be surprised if there were such a correlation. Although I myself think that athletics gets too much money and attention at many universities, I’ll not say it too loudly lest I inadvertently boost the ranks and clout of the affirmative-action bigots on campus, especially those who despise their own middle-class students and particularly the athletes among them. I know that an unfailing “stake through the heart” that I’ve used in debates with quota-meisters over the years has been a simple question: Why aren’t you campaigning for more white guys in the NBA? I know that every four years millions, if not billions, of people around the globe look forward to two weeks of watching the world’s greatest athletes compete without wondering whether those athletes resulted from a rigged selection like that endorsed by a full professor of history at Johns Hopkins University: “I’m not saying they [faculty members] should be actively discriminating in their favor, but I do feel . . . that to enforce affirmative action properly, there are cases in which we should go for the next-best candidate who is a woman or black, provided they are still more than competent to do the job, that the edge between the candidate and the top choice is only slight.” So to sprinter Usain Bolt, a black man from Jamaica who these past few days set world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, and to swimmer Michael Phelps, a white man from the United States who in winning an unprecedented eight gold medals also broke seven world records, I say without reservation, “You are, indeed, the best of the best—and even better than you know.” Edited by Duke parent 2004, Aug 21 2008, 04:01 PM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 24 2008, 04:39 PM Post #4 |
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WHO'S #1? You know summer is winding down when talk picks up about the top ten in the college ranks. No, I’m not alluding to the AP or USA Today football polls and those breathless wonks who have already begun their talmudic analysis on ESPN. I am, instead, speaking of the annual “America’s Best Colleges” issue of U. S. News & World Report. This year will probably see a rise in church attendance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the first time since 1996, Harvard finds itself at the top of the rankings for national universities, just edging out the perennial champ, Princeton. Although not among the starting five, Duke still gets to practice with the first team, as it tied Columbia and the University of Chicago for eighth place. Among the top sixteen schools in the rankings are all eight Ivy League universities—despite their enjoying some of the least pleasant climates and harboring some of the most malevolent professors in the United States. No public university cracked the top twenty, unless one puts an asterisk next to 14th-place Cornell, which somehow manages to enfold its four private undergraduate colleges and its three “contract colleges” funded by the State of New York. For many years, now, I have eagerly awaited the new rankings—but not because they reveal life-changing truths. They don’t. Rather they charge my batteries, and those of other peace-loving parents whose kids have moved beyond the college years, with the mini-amps of schadenfreude. What can be better than imagining the anxieties undergone by the “elite” colleges as they sweat slipping a place or two from last year’s Order of the Anointed? After all, are these not the same schools that in hyping their spurious excellence have every spring tripped the anxiety circuit-breakers of thousands of households across America? Are these not the same schools that while exhorting parents and prospective students not to impute too much significance to the rankings don’t hesitate to point their alumni to them when good old alma mater “moves ahead” of one or more of its rivals? U. S. News & World Report unfailingly acknowledges the limitations of its rankings. How could it do otherwise? There cannot be playoffs of the March Madness variety. But although the magazine cannot deny a certain arbitrariness in the ratings criteria it employs and the weightings it gives them, it is less willing to confront the deeper problems imbedded in some of them. For example, a high mark in “Retention,” which counts for 20% of a school’s score, it deems very good: The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services students need to succeed. This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and freshman retention rate (20 percent). Yet many of us, much to our benefit, got pushed into adulthood sooner rather than later partly because the colleges we attended just a few decades ago never apologized for low retention ratios and could not have imagined being diminished by them. Recalling his undergraduate days in the late 1950s at the University of Chicago, Joseph Epstein, for example, notes the grudging pride his classmates took in saying that although Harvard was tougher to get into, Chicago was tougher to get out of (with a degree, that is). Other criticisms of the U. S. News rankings abound. Not uncommon is the charge that the rankings simply feed a peculiarly American brand of snobbery—a notion that rings true especially to those parents who have come down with shingles after enduring one or more admissions-sweepstakes seasons. Almost two-hundred years ago and long before our colleges evolved into the engines of hubris we tolerate today, Tocqueville predicted that the ostensibly equal citizens of large democracies, precisely because they were not constrained by birth to preordained places in the social order, would succumb to an irresistible urge for “distinction,” for any and every way to elevate themselves and their own above the common ruck. Harvard, the oldest and richest of America’s colleges, plays to this weakness in our natures better than any other school. The letter of acceptance Harvard sent to its prospective freshman class of a few years ago was accompanied by a “Certificate of Admission to Harvard College” that that paragon of humility noted was “suitable for framing.” The competition among the colleges stoked by the U. S. News annual rankings has engendered a different kind of competition as byproduct. Other publications are now jumping into the game, touting their own rankings of the schools as more useful and less arbitrary. Forbes, the latest entrant, argues that “for too many years, information about the quality of American higher education has been monopolized by one publication, U.S. News & World Report.” Adopting methods developed by economist Richard Vedder and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Forbes released its own (and its first) list of the best colleges only days before U. S. News unveiled its latest rankings on the Internet. The discrepancies are many and bold. For example, Duke falls to #80 in the Forbes study. Yes, that is fur you see flying by your window. If you are a parent whose children have yet to subject you to the sclerosis-inducing joy inseparable from getting them into the “best” colleges you can afford and they can survive, relax. The more rankings that are thrown your way, the less significant they will, and ought to, become. Relying on rankings should never supplant using your own judgment and taking into account practical considerations. My own parents gave me an early lesson in how to apply the practical. While attending high school in the 1960s in upstate New York, I announced to them one day that my guidance counselor wanted me to apply to his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, but that the counselor’s wife, from whom I was then taking American history, was pushing me to apply to Allegheny College (Meadville, PA), from which she had graduated. My father immediately relieved my anxiety. Because he had six children to educate (I was the second in line) and because I had won a New York State Regents Scholarship, which in those days paid the entire tuition at all the state schools and even at many of the private colleges in the Empire State, I would attend a college, as would his other children if comparably qualified, within our state. All six of his children eventually won the Regents Scholarship, all six used that scholarship at one or another college within the state, and all six still revere their father. For those young parents among you unwilling to kowtow to today’s snobbery rankings or to resort to force majeure, keep smiling. There are many roads to success. As almost all of them are more easily traveled when illuminated by enthusiasm, trash nothing vital, not even this perspective of a poster at the on-line site of the U. S. News best-colleges story: The rankings of the top schools should include the football polls and "Party Schools" as that is where the real electricity of a campus life can be found...and obviously Georgia is #1! Suck it Gators Tigers and Vols...GOOOOOOO Dawgs! Edited by Duke parent 2004, Sep 27 2008, 03:18 PM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 28 2008, 12:10 AM Post #5 |
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HENRY THE GREAT Ah, the spectacle of it all. The lights have hardly cooled from the closing ceremony of the 29th Olympiad. Just enough time for a pit stop, and, lo, Denver takes the baton from Beijing, the lights go bright again, the Democratic National Convention is underway! I’ll not get to clean the popcorn machine for a few more days. Where is H. L. Mencken when we need him? Imagine what the Sage of Baltimore would do with such a lucky sequence of the Games and the Circus Maximus. Although the Olympics were almost always held every four years during the first half of the 20th Century, when Mencken stamped American journalism with his incomparable wit, they garnered nothing close to the publicity or interest we’ve taken for granted this past half century. And although the two national party conventions did draw big crowds and swarms of reporters in Mencken’s day, those shindigs, too, of late have been boosted by television and the Internet into a prominence that would have startled and amused the Curmudgeon of the Chesapeake. Mencken made an art form of ridiculing politicians and their hangers-on, the worst of whom inhabited that former swamp just forty miles down the road: “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” Like other mountebanks, our elected representatives gave their constituents what they wanted, but what Mencken could only deride as that fool’s gold—“uplift”: “The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.” When writing of the common man, Mencken let the good times roll: “No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” And in toasting American democracy, he almost ascended into heaven: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.” For Henry Louis Mencken, a national political convention—“fascinating as a revival or a hanging”--was a grand opportunity for sidling up to boatloads of fustian and pish-posh, hooey and balderdash. Where else could one see so many hacks and ward heelers--"on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes”--and other invertebrates snorting and snuffling and never failing to give buncombe ever more amusing meanings at predictable four-year intervals? And what better example than a national convention to flesh out Mencken’s notion that “[t]he real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of”? With no loss of punch, Mencken could have substituted “national party conventions” for the final word in his answer to the question why he bothered staying in the United States, a land he deemed so unworthy of reverence: “Why do men go to zoos?” About sports Mencken had far less to say, primarily because it played a far less consequential role in American (and world) civilization in his time than it has come to play in our own. In Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography, he did say this: All that the Y.M.C.A.’s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine. Yet sportsmanship itself appealed to Mencken: “What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance—in brief, what is commonly called sportsmanship.” So if he were still with us, Mencken might have celebrated the athletes of the just concluded Olympiad—no small concession given his reluctance to praise anyone or anything dear to the common man, who for Mencken was eleven times out of ten either a dupe or a Philistine. But the politically driven overseers of the Games Mencken would have skewered just as ferociously and gleefully as he pilloried politicians and other assorted jackasses. Mencken was a man of almost legendary energy. In 1948, in his 68th year, and just months before he suffered a debilitating stroke that ended his career as a writer, Mencken covered all three major conventions (Henry Wallace and the Progressives having hit the big time). Perhaps those three debauches proved too much for the cigar-smoking, beer-swilling, invective-radiating man whom Walter Lippman saluted in 1926 as “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.” So as I contemplate the lights about to go on in St. Paul for the Republicans as the Democrats in Denver reach for the push brooms, I wonder if even the great Mencken would have been up to the task of covering, seriatim, Chinese dissimulation, Democratic huckstering, and Republican bloviating—and all within the space of four weeks. Then my doubts evaporate. I imagine Mencken marshalling his resources for one more go at the most stupendous trifecta of our age. I imagine how much more memorable (yes!) would be the achievements of Usain “Lightning” Bolt and hometown hero Michael Phelps if conveyed in print by Mencken. (Of television’s early days, Mencken wrote: “'Altogether, I would not give ten cents for an hour of such entertainment, even if it showed a massacre.”) I imagine how much smaller would be Ted, and Hillary, and Bill, and Joe, and Barack, and then John, and Dick, and even George after being painted by the wittiest, and deadliest, journalist ever produced by America: “Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.” And, finally, I imagine how much better off the rest of us would be, for nothing more effectively routs quackery and bombast than a good horse laugh. |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 30 2008, 05:07 PM Post #6 |
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HALF A LOAF . . . “I knew a very interesting . . . lady last winter, but now she is married." (Percy Bysshe Shelley) In selecting Sarah Palin to be his running mate, John McCain may deserve even more credit than he’s getting from his friends and neighbors. McCain’s announcement came the morning of the “first day” of the long Labor Day weekend. The television Janes and Johnnies are now running their mouths at NASCAR speeds, and the bloggers appear to be working ‘round the clock either celebrating or eviscerating the governor of Alaska. All this intense activity should translate into fewer folks heading to the beach for summer’s last hurrah. Or if they’re going anyway, perhaps they’ll spend more time in front of monitors than on waverunners or in motorboats. Presto! Consumption of gasoline drops, greenhouse-gas emissions abate. Who said McCain and the Republicans don’t care a lick about the environment? Mrs. Palin is an energetic woman who has packed into her forty-four years a range of interests, activities, and responsibilities that, in a just world, would win the respect of even the most virulent of her political opponents. Her friends and (newfound) boosters have already transcended mere respect; they are advancing Palin as the ideal synthesis of Annie Oakley, Laura Ingraham, and Phyllis Schlafly—in short, as the feisty all-American bombshell who will revitalize the enervated Republican Party and confound the nefarious schemes of the Obama-Biden Democrats. The Democrats will need little encouragement to disparage Palin, for her freshness and high spirits pose a substantial threat to their “audacity of hope” mantra that every day reveals itself to more voters as just another empty slogan. Let’s assume that the Democrats, enfeebled by their shock at McCain’s selection of Palin, fail to slow the momentum of the juiced Republican ticket, that McCain and Palin roll to victory in November. Do not fret, my Democratic friends. You haven’t lost as badly as you fear, for the victorious Republicans will have once again fought the battle on your terms, terms that have been in play since no later than1913, when the 16th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified. The thirty words of that amendment empowered the Congress to tax incomes. The expansion of the central government that inevitably ensued naturally expanded our expectations of the leviathan to which we send ever more of our dollars. Should it surprise anyone that we’ve also come to expect more of our elected officials, that we ask them to do for us what we once asked, if at all, only of our families and sometimes of our best friends, that we look for qualities and character in our politicians that our grandparents hoped to find more appropriately in bishops and generals? Long before “bloated government” became a redundancy, Americans rarely mistook politicians for saints or miracle-workers. Even at the local level, officeholders often needed to defend themselves from charges of serving the devil rather than their constituents. Libertarians applied the ambient skepticism to the institutions of government itself, which either conveniently accommodated already corrupt men or abetted the corrupting of innocents exposed to the public trough for the first time. Here, for example, is Albert Nock discharging his cannon in an essay from the 1920s: It was once quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of having some one of a somewhat different type “amongst those damned rascals down there.” “Yes, but,” I said, “don’t you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so—a very short time, anyway—before I should be a damned rascal, too?” Much has changed since Nock’s time--but in ways that hardly undermine his misgivings. For example, who would argue that politicians have become more modest and the perquisites of office less tempting? How many voters still ask the question that Friedrich Hayek and others asked decades ago: What sort of men (and women) seek office in the expanding central governments that have become the rule since the Second World War? Before you answer, consider these two questions first: How important is your privacy and that of your family? How much of your past would you wish to see sliced and diced on national television and on innumerable websites? I suspect most of us put a premium on privacy, or we would be posting at Liestoppers under our real names. And if you’re at all like me, you’d not want political operatives dredging up those two arrests for shoplifting items of intimate apparel. (Of course, if you’re the newly installed governor of New York, you just divulge your dirt yourself on day one, proving to all what a trustworthy fellow you must be.) Oh, yes, I almost forgot: What sort of person would subject members of his or her family to dramatically increased risk of physical harm from all the nuts and nobodies lurking in the shadows? Back to the beginning. . . . Long before television and the Internet became ubiquitous, long before Google searches came to unearth first-grade love letters--and restroom security cameras to distinguish those who wash their hands from those who don’t, Hayek gave to his question this answer: second-rate. On the “VP Sarah Palin” thread of the “Current Events” section of Liestoppers, a poster laments: There should be some function whereby the American electorate can call for a "mulligan," a do-over. We should be able to say "these people all suck, suggest someone else." Instead, the overly entrenched and combative political parties decide who will make some pathetic attempt to lead us. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Whenever possible, I prefer laughing. But understand, dear reader, that more times than not I’m laughing at myself, typically for lapsing into some reverie of exalted “leadership” that should be alien to any self-governing people. I wish Sarah Palin the very best. I’ll almost certainly vote for her in November. Should she win, I hope this mother of five manages to work just one miracle: remain to her children a very good mother. Should she win, I hope her children don’t resent losing to their mother’s ambition a settled life among friends and familiar surroundings. Should she win, I hope that substituting “elected” for “married” in Shelley’s witticism at the top of this essay will blunt the point of that barb. But should all my hopes for her be dashed, I’ll most assuredly not be surprised. Edited by Duke parent 2004, Oct 18 2008, 10:47 AM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Sep 3 2008, 07:54 PM Post #7 |
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I HAVE A DREAM A well-informed insider tells me that the big “October surprise” that’s been the stuff of rumor these past few days at several influential blogs will shake the political establishment to its foundations. Apparently the campaign of our own Joan Foster, attack poetess and Blog Hooligan extraordinaire, has reached escape velocity. By the first week of next month, my source tells me, the polls will show Joan overtaking both Obama and McCain. I’d like to remind Joan that I stand firm on my offer to serve as Secretary of the Treasury in her new administration. (See http://s1.zetaboards.com/Liestoppers_meeting/single/?p=54725&t=579715.) If lucky enough to get the nod, I’ll promptly do what any self-respecting bureaucrat with a budget and a mandate would do: I’ll create a new agency within Treasury—namely, the Department of Rectifying Kooky Solecisms (D.O.R.K.S.), and I’ll appoint myself temporary director. Because everything is somehow connected to money, I see no reason why Treasury shouldn’t take the lead in safeguarding the language, which like the currency itself has been wantonly debased these past few decades. D.O.R.K.S. will, of course, be charged with fining professional writers who insult the English language. (Let’s get that boring objection of the strict constructionists out of the way—you know, that business about the federal government’s overstepping its bounds. Both of the courageous professors at the Duke Law School have assured me that the Constitution’s interstate-commerce clause—“old reliable” to the cognoscenti--will once again legitimize federal authority in this matter.) Enabling legislation will broadly define a professional writer as anyone who gets paid for putting his thoughts before the public. Writing subject to departmental review will include articles, notes, and letters posted on the Internet. With few exceptions, posters at Liestoppers will not come under the dominion of D.O.R.K.S. By contrast, oodles of professors and administrators at research universities will find themselves in the cross hairs. My authorized biographer insists on my getting out of the blocks very quickly after I take the oath; those first one-hundred days make all the difference. So expect the usual barbarisms to be targeted early in my directorship. Here are just a few examples of the many infelicities that D.O.R.K.S. will censure: “Disinterested” mistakenly used for “uninterested.” “General consensus” inflating “consensus.” (Can a consensus be other than general?) “To beg the question,” a notion in logic, confused with “to invite the question.” “Diversity” doing duty for “racial heterogeneity.” “Underrepresented minorities” inserted for “unqualified aspirants.” Enough for now. Stay tuned, for next January D.O.R.K.S. will start cranking out bulletins that will give writers at least a week’s notice of solecisms to be added to the Index. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a preview of the first bulletin. Because I cannot think of a better way to jump-start D.O.R.K.S. than to go after a word that has caused more mischief of late than just about any other, a word whose misuse has contributed mightily to the need for Liestoppers itself, that first bulletin will devote itself to the use and abuse of “expertise.” Where would we be, after all, if Tara Levicy hadn’t pushed an expertise she laughably lacked? And what about Mike Nifong’s pretensions to prosecutorial and even investigatory expertise? Can we do justice to the politburo of the Group of 88 without weighing its self-proclaimed expertise in matters of race, class, and gender? Didn’t Comrade Lubiano somewhere chastise the unwashed for daring to enter a domain in which only credentialed academic “experts” were fit to dispute—as if our talking about fairness, decency, and the presumption of innocence were akin to interrupting physicists arguing the merits of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? Although “expertise” doesn’t even please the ear, we’ll leave the question of euphony open for now. But we’ll not walk away from the very important matter of spelling. So until the larger question is resolved, until, that is, D.O.R.K.S. issues final regulations on the proper uses of “expertise,” the January bulletin will include a preliminary injunction against using the current spelling. (If “task force” were not itself long overdue for a spanking, I’d appoint one to study the issue.) To protect an otherwise unsuspecting and vulnerable public during the interregnum, and to give everyone an obvious indicator of the trap that is that loaded word, I shall announce on January 25 that, henceforth, professional scribblers will buy grace only as long as they adopt the spelling “expertease.” January 25, 2009: Book it, Danno. |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Sep 10 2008, 05:54 AM Post #8 |
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SAY WHO? THOUGHTS ON ANONYMITY John Gross created quite a stir in 1974 when as editor of the Times Literary Supplement he introduced bylines to what until then had been “one of the last bastions of anonymity in the English literary world.” So I was not surprised to see Gross as reviewer in the Wall Street Journal (September 4) of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, by John Mullan. (See Gross’s “In All But Name” at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122049160679797631.html) Noting Mullan’s decision to lump together anonymous and pseudonymous publication, Gross congratulates Mullan for “reminding” the reader that many English classics first appeared without authorial attribution. Examples include Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Jane Austen’s novels, as well as Walter Scott’s. Moreover, Charlotte Brontë enjoyed attending literary parties when she visited London but insisted on keeping up the pretense that she hadn’t written “Jane Eyre”—the only reason why she had been invited. Separate editions of “In Memoriam” were still appearing anonymously at the time of Tennyson’s death, even though the poem had already been included in collected editions of his work. Among the drivers of anonymity were modesty, mischief-making, mockery (Byron wanted to “keep his enemies guessing”), and--particularly in the case of political writings—self-preservation (Locke, who lived in very dangerous times, published most of his tracts anonymously.). Hardly consequential today but not so in earlier centuries were conventional obstacles put before aspiring female writers. Among the eventually famous ladies to adopt pseudonymity in order to circumvent them were Mary Anne Evans—as George Eliot—and Charlotte Brontë—as Currer Bell. Although Gross does not explicitly discuss the perils of anonymity as employed on the Internet (I cannot speak for Mr. Mullan), he does deliver a verdict against the cloak: In the age of celebrity culture, it is hard not to look back fondly on the sober charms of Anon. But we shouldn’t allow nostalgia to mislead us. In the end, anonymity does more harm than good. It allows the worst critics, Mr. Puff and Mr. Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles. I’m not confident that Gross’s strictures would, or should, apply to blogs such as Liestoppers—although we stand to gain much by thinking about the mixed bag that is anonymous posting. (I, too, shall lump pseudonymous with its sibling.) With few exceptions, the posters here are not professional writers. Many still work at jobs completely unrelated to their blogging or to writing in general. (Anonymity might be especially important to garrulous posters still drawing paychecks!) I suspect from the frequency and timing of their contributions that many posters are either retired or homemakers. I’m guessing that more than a few are self-employed, for whom anonymity is preferred to alienating clients or customers who might soil themselves if confronted by over-the-top (or even penetrating) opinions expressed openly by the entrepreneur. Even when writing on their own time, some posters might need to bow to the protocols of their professions or their employers—either explicit or implicit—that frown on their taking “public” positions on the controversies of the day. Anonymity clearly facilitates the expression of opinions that a poster might otherwise be reluctant to broadcast, either because the opinions themselves are too bold for normal attribution or because the poster—fearing his inadequacy at the keyboard—prefers not to embarrass himself or (more nobly) to compromise the thought itself by risking dismissals of the sort, “Let’s move on; it’s only so and so fumbling again.” (Using just one pseudonym will not insure a poster against this “fumbling risk.”) Just as clearly, anonymity enables posters to go beyond bold, to venture into irresponsibility, and even to flirt with libel. Very few of the posters at Liestoppers blog with their real names. Some have been posting pseudonymously for so long that I suspect they forget how asymmetrical their relationship must be to their named targets. For example, Duke’s Coach K has been roundly criticized on this board for not more vigorously supporting Mike Pressler and the lacrosse team during the darkest days of the hoax. Yet how many of Coach K's critics would be willing to sign their real names to the same reprimands? Reluctance to “step up” seems far more salient, and blameworthy, in named others than in our cloaked selves. We can become so accustomed to the comfort and ease of posting pseudonymously that we sometimes forget that those not operating under such camouflage must take into account the effects of their utterances on their families, their friends, and their colleagues. A pseudonymous poster more closely resembles a nineteen-year-old soldier charging a machine-gun nest than that soldier’s commanding officer. The Internet has spawned more blogs than there are America-bashers in Europe. So “everyman” can now take flights of fancy into cyberspace. The good news: A connection to the Net opens the discussion to folks from all over the world. The bad news: Some of these folks are malevolent beings who should never be allowed near young children or happy dogs. Because creeps cannot be trusted not to use Google and other search engines to dredge up evidence of the dirty magazines we bought during our middle-school years, posting anonymously still makes good sense to those of us who wish to keep the stalkers and nut-jobs in their own little corners of the Matrix. I close with a note about my own predicament, which presents an especially embarrassing boost to the case for anonymity. It also calls to mind Matthew Arnold’s famous chiding of his countrymen for their absurd surnames (see Culture and Anarchy), for I have carried these many years a name so unprepossessing, so hard on the ear and unfriendly to the tongue, that common decency and a regard for the aesthetic sensibilities of mankind require my abandoning it whenever and wherever practicable. You, too, dear reader, would prefer “Duke parent 2004” to Philander Ellsworth Wartley. Edited by Duke parent 2004, Sep 10 2008, 06:11 PM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Sep 23 2008, 05:18 AM Post #9 |
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On the degradation of the academic dogma (originally posted June 12, 2008) The lamentable conduct of the Duke faculty and the Duke administration these past two years saddens me. But it does not surprise me. For at least the past hundred years, men of great learning and perspicacity have been writing a long obituary of the higher learning in America. Few of these men would likely gag at the modern stink, as the symptoms of disease and decline they described in their own day were already pronounced. Among the most eloquent of these curmudgeons was Albert Jay Nock (see my avatar). In 1931, Nock delivered the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, published the following year as The Theory of Education in The United States. At the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, Nock reminded his audience of how alien the university of the first half of the 20th Century would have been to Jefferson, whose plan for public education in the State of Virginia Nock ably summarized as follows: -------- Every child in the State should be taught reading, writing and common arithmetic; the old-fashioned primary-school course in the three Rs. Each year the best pupil in each primary school should be sent to the grammar schools, of which there were to be twenty, conveniently located in various parts of the State; they were to be kept there for one or two years, and then dismissed, except “the best genius of the whole,” who should be continued for the full term of six years. “By this means,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, “twenty of the best geniuses shall be raked from the rubbish annually.” I venture to call your attention to these rather forceful words, as showing how far this great believer in equality was from anything like acceptance of our official assumption that everybody is educable. But this is not all. At the end of six years the best ten out of the twenty should be sent to William and Mary College, and the rest turned adrift. Mr. Jefferson’s plan appears selective with a vengeance in our eyes, accustomed as they are to the spectacle of immense hordes of inert and ineducable persons slipping effortlessly through our secondary schools, colleges, universities, on ways that seem greased for their especial benefit. -------- Jefferson’s plan never stood a chance, not least because the author of the Declaration of Independence had himself delivered the immortal dictum that “All men are created equal . . . ,” which despite his intention to apply it to matters political proved irresistible to inveterate partisans of equality and overheated enemies of elitism in all fields of human conduct. As the 18th Century gave way to the 19th, as America became the destination of huddled masses from around the world, as the industrial revolution kicked into high gear, the traditional classical curriculum continued giving ground to “practical studies.” The Morrill Act of 1862, which jump-started the land-grant universities that today are spread across the fruited plain, provided funds to be used by each State for “the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” Emblematic of these new universities was Cornell, whose motto to this day remains Ezra Cornell’s “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” (a notion, by the way, justly impugned by Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy). By Nock’s time, Greek and Latin were in full retreat. To accommodate swelling enrollments, the universities continued diluting the curriculum in many other ways. Perhaps surprising to those not familiar with these developments, even academic subjects that today are presumed to be core components of the traditional liberal arts established themselves quite recently--despite animadversions from far-sighted and incisive critics such as Nock himself. Here, for example, is Nock on what today is often the most popular major on campus--namely, English: -------- I therefore say only that there are a great many such courses [in English], whereas forty years ago no such thing was known. Why should this be so? Forty years ago, our English-speaking students learned English quite informally; it was our own tongue, we were bred to a native idiomatic use of it, such a use as none but a native can ever possibly acquire. To say that English was not taught in our higher institutions means merely that everybody taught it. No matter what the stated subject under discussion might be, if we expressed ourselves inaccurately, loosely, unidiomatically, we heard about it at once and on the spot, and in terms that forcibly suggested a greater carefulness in the future. As for English literature, it was our literature, our concern with it was proprietary, everything in it was open to us, and the critical judgment, the standards of taste and discrimination that we applied to it, were such as had been bred in us by our long acquaintance with the literatures of Greece and Rome. No one dreamed of teaching English literature; indeed, I do not see how it can be effectively taught in any formal fashion . . . . Why, then, is it that “courses in English” should hold so large a place in the newest type of institutional organization? They do so for a very simple reason. Under the conditions that we have been describing, great masses of ineducable people come into our institutions. They must be kept there, and most nominally be busy with something or other as a pro forma justification for keeping them. . . . One thing they [the ineducable] can do, albeit after a very poor fashion, is to read; that is to say, they can make their way more or less uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore “courses in English” have come into their present extraordinary vogue. -------- Fast forward seventy-five years. Imagine what Nock would say about “courses in English” today. Shakespeare, Milton, and even Dickens have yielded to surveys of pop culture and, mirabile dictu, to blather about movies. And even these exercises in low-wattage inanity bow humbly to those ne plus ultra haunts of the ignorant, the bumptious, and the indolent that go by the names of deconstructionism and lit-crit. Only in America, that riot of democracy, could a person still be deemed educated while talking rot about a “subject” that in the first instance needed to slap on the rouge in order to gain admittance to the salon. Nock died in 1945, not too early for a cultivated man taking the pulse of the higher learning. For with the advent of the Cold War, the federal government became the great enabler of the rout. In boosting the ranks of the aspiring, the GI Bill ineluctably swelled those of the time-servers as well, and the colleges and universities happily accommodated the unwashed with ever new courses in increasingly inappropriate topics. After Sputnik, the feds picked up the pace, throwing megabucks at the universities and encouraging them to establish ever more institutes and programs to address the pressing social issues of the day. The human condition, about which writers in the great tradition of the liberal arts had delivered themselves in the very classics that Nock and his compadres among the “saving remnant” revered, devolved into a nest of “problems” that demanded “solutions”—solutions, not surprisingly it was averred, that could be advanced primarily by the ready and copious application of government monies--and the training of cadres of engaged academics who would show the physical scientists and the engineers that the right stuff could be found in their ranks as well as in those charged with putting a man on the moon. Government money comes, of course, with government controls and restrictions, typically advanced first as recommendations, exhortations, or admonitions. When in doubt, and fearing the loss of funds upon which so many now depended for the continued production and promulgation of so much not worth knowing, the universities beefed up their administrations, creating new deans of affirmative action, provosts of diversity, vice-presidents of governmental relations—and sundry other apparatchiks for activities and “areas” that could only further divert the higher learning from its traditional mission of transmitting the precious heritage of our civilization to the young—and occasionally adding to that heritage through the efforts of teachers more in love with learning than with themselves or the opinions of their students. Those of us who came of age in the ‘60s pretty much know “the rest of the story.” Many of us, sad to say, are debased products of the debased universities to which we still reflexively make annual donations. Some of us draw our paychecks from these institutions that misrepresent themselves daily to so many students, who themselves naturally lack the culture to distinguish the meretricious from the real deal. Scholars of the old stamp can still be found on campus, but their numbers decline with each passing year. At any rate, they rarely mistake themselves for soldiers in the defense of the higher learning; after all, a polemical bent rarely consorts with the temperament that drew them to their fields of study in the first place. Their busy-body juniors, though, are another story altogether. Poorly schooled from the get-go and often hostile to venerable understandings of what it means to be educated, they readily fly to the ramparts, foisting their political nostrums and jejune “agendas” on both deferential students ill-equipped to parse the pish-posh and diffident administrators themselves recruited from the ranks of the new ignoranti. What, then, is to be done? Not much, I’m afraid. I concur with the sentiments recently elaborated by Alan Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE), and co-author ten years ago with Harvey Silverglate of that blockbuster, The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (which, incidentally, in its exposure of the “water buffalo” incident at the U. of Pennsylvania brought “fame” if not fortune to the lovable Larry Moneta). In the May 2008 issue of The New Criterion, Kors concludes his “On the Sadness of Higher Education” (available on the website of the Wall Street Journal here) with this cri de coeur: -------- One still can protect a few individuals and keep a hint of pluralism alive by means of honest exposure, shame and ridicule, but this is work—vital and moral, and an end in itself—that affects only the margins. The sad bottom line is that there are no incentives for administrators to offer a different product, such as a niche of high-quality education, equal treatment, liberty and merit. Parents invest understandably in the value of degrees, not in the quality of curriculum and faculty. A model of higher education that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to "seize" a major university for such an experiment, though the vision of what could be accomplished by one great alternate model is mesmerizing. Until then, we only can work to protect the innocent, expose what the media are willing to expose, and await a generational shift in administrators and the professoriate. Such a shift, alas, not only is not on the horizon, but also recedes ever further from view given the bigotry against intellectual difference and pluralism, the incentives for conformity, the disincentives for courage and independence of mind, and the willingness, indeed eagerness, of society to subsidize those who have contempt for the very culture and values that make both that subsidy and that tolerance of derision and condescension possible. The academic world that I entered is gone. I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success. --------- To bear witness in our time to the travesty that has become the modern university is a duty hardly to be taken lightly.
Edited by Duke parent 2004, Sep 25 2008, 03:25 PM.
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| Duke parent 2004 | Nov 10 2008, 07:27 AM Post #10 |
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OF MICE AND CHILDREN The morning following Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election, I received an e-mail from Frank, a friend a few years older than I. A graduate of an Ivy League university as well as a practicing lawyer for more than forty years, Frank could not contain his joy at the outcome of the vote. His note included these words of celebration from Le Monde columnist Robert Solé: Sorry. No column today. The keyboard is not responding. History is a page being turned. Three words on the screen: "Yes we can." While it is impossible to joke with genocide or disaster, it is equally impossible to joke with an event that makes you weep for joy. The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 needs more than a pirouette or an amused wink. At this moment - but for how long ? - we can say with far more conviction than on 11 September 2001 : we are all Americans. My friend is a decent man. Perhaps he knows me well enough to have bet that his touchdown dance would not draw a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct. In this wager, he was correct. But he would undoubtedly prefer drawing that flag to donning the jersey I’ve now set aside for him, a jersey that should be worn every four years by tens of millions of American voters on election day. Maestro, a fanfare, please, for Frank—the newest member of the Mickey Mouse Club. In concluding that innumerable voters are both perpetual children and credulous ignoramuses, I line up behind writers of distinction both here and abroad. In that latter group, Peter Hitchens (at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/11/the-night-we-wa.html) has just put himself on the Obama enemies-list with these bons mots: . . . . . . . Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead. The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. . . . . . . . And lest anyone not gather what Hitchens really thinks, he adds for good measure: "If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything." Closer to home, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute fesses up to remembering “the exact moment I realized there was something horribly wrong with the way Americans view the presidency.” That moment came as he watched the presidential debate of October 16, 1992. On stage were candidates Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot. From the audience arose “a lefty right out of central casting—a social worker with a ponytail.” This fellow, a Denton Walthall, directed these comments to the three candidates: The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children I work with . . . and not the wants of their parents. And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it? Healy was appalled by the question, as he was by the failure of the candidates to suggest “even politely—that, hey, buddy, the president is not your mommy or daddy.” His meager consolation came later, as he imagined “how presidents of old might have responded to a grown man burbling about national needs and comparing Americans to children”: Andrew Jackson, who fought dozens of duels in his life, probably would have grabbed Denton by the ponytail and started pistol-whipping him right there on national television. Silent Cal Coolidge, one of our truly great presidents, would have taken a different approach. He would have just sat there, staring coldly at Denton and shaming him through the awkward, awful silence. For Healy, sense and salvation hardly lie with the Republicans and their friends. After all, John McCain “worships Teddy Roosevelt, who is perhaps the most ridiculous and obnoxious figure ever to occupy the Oval Office.” McCain bows to Teddy because he expanded the powers of the presidency and “nourished the soul of a great nation.” But as Healy reminds us, the Framers “never thought of the president as the man who could solve all of your problems, let alone save your soul.” As Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist # 69, the president has “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.” Although the American voter today has more ready access to information than ever before, he is increasingly incapable of digesting it and relating it to the principles of limited government that animated the Framers. Indeed, those very principles are unknown to countless Americans. Our schools bear much of the responsibility here for the generations of their charges who have never read a single one of the Federalist Papers--or who think that Franklin Roosevelt saved the republic. The spankings administered by Hitchens and Healy seem almost decorous next to those of their illustrious predecessors. Long before television and the Internet began pumping bilge by the boatload into empty minds, H. L. Mencken railed against the bumptious American politician, more often than not a demagogue “who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” In his Notes on Democracy from 1926, Mencken elaborated on the pols and the idiots with a ferocity that, alas, could have been applied with cogency to the election just concluded: What [the masses] want principally are safety and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics under democracy consists in trading with them, i. e., in hoodwinking and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants, and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir, but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of democratic states. Do not expect, dear reader, to hear anytime soon from any national political personage the following announcement: “Children must now leave the pool.”
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| Duke parent 2004 | Nov 24 2008, 11:25 AM Post #11 |
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SOME HOLIDAY CHEER Here’s a parlor game I’ve dubbed “Robespierre” that will enliven almost any holiday gathering. First, stock a hat with slips of paper on which are written the names of each person who wishes to play, one name per slip. Feed a second hat with slips that indicate various activities or categories of thought. Whoever agrees to be the game’s Pat Sajak then selects from the players an “executioner.” Next, the moderator pulls a name from the first hat, announcing it to all. Finally, when the moderator reads aloud whatever appears on the slip he picks from the second hat, the executioner must blurt out the first words that come to mind as he associates the name with the activity. Whenever my own name finds itself conjoined with “politics,” the game often devolves into my trying to persuade my friends that I’m not really a fatalist, a reactionary, a cynic, or (my favorite) a man who has never forgiven God for allowing Mick Jagger to roam the earth these many decades. The more contrived and convoluted my efforts become, the more likely that at least one of my tormentors will remind me of my own oft-stated belief that getting my friends, all of whom are persons of years, to change their minds in matters of this sort enjoys miserable prospects--in fact, roughly those of getting George Will to concede that Metternich still walks amongst us in the person of Jimmy Carter. My good-natured critics do occasionally relent when I maintain that I’m a fatalist only in the sense that I acknowledge that life on this sorry ball will for all of us end in failure—that is, death. But when labeled a fatalist in the more specialized political sense, I comfortably, and truthfully, deny ever having been tempted to move my books and my carcass into anyone’s aging bomb shelter. I just as easily confess to yawning at all talk that celebrates living on mountain tops or with monks who deem light bulbs the work of the devil. Rather, I maintain—often with a warm glow radiating from my not unhandsome face—that although I’ll always approach “audacity of hope” ponytailed boomers with the resignation I show in the presence of the incurably ill, I wax almost Panglossian by contrast when discussing politics with their children—more precisely, that is, with those of their children still in their “formative” years. My own children, now in their twenties, present a special case. Although I’ve always been happy to talk with them about politics, I’m not confident they’ve been as pleased by these sessions as I’ve been. I’m willing to bet that when George Will talks to his own children about politics he strikes them as a great bore. One’s children almost always attend more closely to the pronouncements of teachers and even strangers than to the very same messages when delivered by their parents. Having recognized this unfortunate tendency many years ago, I adopted a program for my kids that I heartily recommend to parents groping for ways to enlighten their own children about politics and the world. I simply select the best “teachers” and “strangers” myself—in the form of books. When my children were younger, I avoided giving them books explicitly about politics. They knew too little about the history of western civilization to put such books in their proper places. So I resorted to what parents of former times routinely did: I gave them novels and collections of essays they could handle, written by men and women who conveyed in their fiction or their commentaries the astonishing complexity of the world, and the limitless possibilities of the human condition. Above all, I wanted my children to see that there is much more to life than getting and spending, and that the preoccupation of our own age with politics often pushes aside a more important desideratum—namely, a proper understanding of excellence. (Striving for such an understanding, if not for excellence itself, has been more than enough to keep me from that slough of despond that is political fatalism.) Now that my children are on their own and far beyond thinking that Bill O’Reilly and Jesse Jackson represent enlightened opinion, I’m comfortable giving them books more explicitly political—but political in the sense I’ve already alluded to. In short, the authors I advance typically decry the unwarranted penetration of politics into almost everything we say or do in our frenetic lives. So here are some of the titles that might appear under the tree on Christmas Day: In a Cardboard Belt! Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, by Joseph Epstein (2007); Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution . . . , by Thomas DiLorenzo (2008); The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, by Robert Conquest (2005); Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays, by Thomas Sowell (2006); Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus, by Mike Adams (2007); The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton (2008), with a tip of the hat to Bill Anderson, whose review at http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson222.html pointed me to this book in the first place; and The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Almost any edition of this American classic, first published in 1951, will do. In my own Christmas stocking I’d not be unhappy to find a subscription to Mad Magazine. One can do worse in this world than be reminded occasionally of the deep wisdom to be found in the motto of that magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” Happy Holidays!
Edited by Duke parent 2004, Nov 29 2008, 06:53 AM.
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11:20 PM Nov 29
