Thursday, November 30, 2006
PROPS. Sometimes Jacob Sullum strikes me as John Stossel for people who can read and write, but his quick analysis today of the Baker-Hamilton Report is too good to ignore:Here's an Iraq update for those of us (including me) who stopped paying close attention because the whole thing was too damned depressing:
1. Most Americans, including some prominent supporters of the war, now agree it was a mistake to invade.
2. We can't just leave, because (even more) chaos would ensue.
3. We have to leave, because otherwise the Iraqis will never take responsibility for their own security and make the difficult political compromises necessary for stability.
In light of these facts, the wise elder statesmen in the Iraq Study Group have come up with the perfect solution: pretend to leave... Way to cut to the chase, guy. Even better is the tag: "Update: It looks like Bush is not falling for it. Who told?"
11:57 AM by roy edroso
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ATTABOY, ATATURK. When I saw the title on this Crunchy Con post -- "Jape on Christians and Turkey" -- I thought, ooh, I love japes, -- japes, quips, and bagatelles! And the subject was promising.
Alas, it was just Rod Dreher quoting with approval some guy named Jape. And what he said, regarding Christians in Turkey, was less than cheering:Moll ends with an American missionary in Turkey who comments breezily that “we are relatively free and we are tolerated now.”
If this is the sum and substance of western missionary zeal these days -- to be free and tolerated -- (and I fear that all to often it is), then Christians have good reason to question the compromises with Liberalism they are wont to make. My nostrils twitched especially at that last part, so I went back to the source and found that, yes, Jape is indeed one of those guys who says "the structures of secular politics and economics tend to have a corrosive and colonizing effect on what passes these days for 'strong faith'" like it's a bad thing.
Also, he complains that, when Turkey tried to pass a law against adultery, the godless EU pressured them not to.
I am sympathetic to persecuted Christians -- which in my admittedly old-fashioned lexicon means Christians harrassed and assaulted for their faith -- but I notice that, like all other conservative types these days, conservative Christians have broadened their definition of persecution to include being disagreed with, and not being allowed to practice their own variants of sharia in host countries that, were they less "liberal," even in Jape's perjorative sense, would have marched them into the sea.
The whole Benedict Turkey trip, for all the feel-good man-of-peace rhetoric, is really just one powerful mobster cooking up a big takeover with another. I hope the ghost of Ataturk is knocking over their water glasses at least.
10:23 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
WORDS WITH "K" IN THEM ARE FUNNY. I lack ambition, I guess. I tend to hide my light under a bushel. I don't ask to be put on blogrolls, or for links. Certainly not like the pros do:UPDATE: Sullivan responds to this post without linking to it. Great. I guess you want to make it hard for your readers to see what I actually said. He prefers to link to the Instapundit post that links to this. What's that all about? How many times is he going to print my name over there and talk about me without linking to me? It's really unfair! It flaunts unfairness!...
And you, Andrew Sullivan, refuse to engage with the serious argument I am making here. If you linked to the posts you talk about and cut way down, your readers would have a fair chance to see what I am saying. I have obviously agreed with your basic definition but called you on your overuse of it and the air of hostility toward religious people you're giving off. Why don't you deal with my argument fairly, including links to me, and why don't you treat me as an individual instead of lamely and inaccurately merging me with Glenn Reynolds? Glenn and I have taken different positions on this, and I'm the main blogger writing about the subject, so why are you linking to him linking to me? andWhy does Andrew Sullivan keep talking about me without linking to me?
See the update on this post. It's getting ridiculous. I consider it a gross breach of blogging ethics. Emphasis added 'cause I think it's funny.
Maybe I'm misreading this. Maybe it's all actually some sort of elaborate joke. Her whole blog, I mean.
UPDATE. Why did I bother? A commenter mentions that Altmouse is back! What a hoot!
10:47 PM by roy edroso
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COME, LET US TREASON TOGETHER. I seem to remember days when The West Wing was derided as a liberal fantasy. At least that fantasy was relatively benign; apparently some conservatives are dreaming of something a little more rough.
Behold Orson Scott Card's new novel, Empire, summarized thus by Publisher's Weekly:When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card's heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation... You can read the first five chapters here. I did, with great, great pleasure. The heroic Army Man action figures speak a dialect that's half Ralph Peters and half Sgt. Rock:"You look pissed off," said Malich.
"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."
"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."
"I bet they're already 'advising' Americans that this is where our military 'aggression' inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."
"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."
"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."
"You're forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich. Sound kind of like bloggers, don't they? Also worth mentioning: Army Man #1's wife is a brilliant liberal, but "unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan." We are let to know that she bakes cookies.
Pretense of Moral Superiority Disclosure: I would never judge a book by its cover story, five chapters is not enough for summary judgement, Card may have something up his sleeve, and I was not kidding when I said reading the excerpt gave me great pleasure. Hell, this could be my Novel of the Year. I mean, what's the competition?
But we can legitimately have fun with Mr. Card, who, again according to Publisher's Weekly, ends the novel with "an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the 'national media elite' and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left." Like Cessy, Card considers himself a political moderate, though (as we have shown here) he is the sort of moderate who believes that Democrats are evil wimps and that homosexuality should be punished with jail time. Again reserving judgement, it would seem Card's fantasy of treacherously-used liberals finally brought to heel by Red State wolverines reflects this highly unusual definition of political moderation.
Even better, Card has been taken up by the Ole Perfesser, who perfesses to share the author's moderate views and hopes "that both the people and the press will make some conscious efforts to moderate the tone, and make that approach less effective." That's pretty funny coming from Mr. "Not Anti-War -- Just On The Other Side." But my favorite part is this:I've noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks -- and reignites -- such conflicts elsewhere. It is amazing that the Perfesser made it through Yale without hearing anything about Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil Rights Movement, etc. Or maybe he sent nanobots into his brain to scrub this knowledge away. This blind spot gains an added layer of piquancy when you realize that Card's fantasy reeks a bit of Afro-6, Trespass, and other speculations of black power ascendant from the 60s and 70s. Once they feared Panthers, now they fear Donkeys. You may adjust your hilarity meters accordingly.
UPDATE. Didn't know but should have that Bradrocket got there firstest with the mostest.
UPDATE II. Nitpicker has some more recent-vintage OSC that helps clarify his moderate views.
10:08 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
NOW THAT YOU MENTION IT... Back in March, Professor Althouse said of South Park, "Thank God somebody's willing to mock religion!"
Now she's pissed because Andrew Sullivan showed pictures of Mormon underwear.
This weekend I saw For Your Consideration, which has many beauties, though it should have been trimmed of more of its improvisational excesses, which dissipate its satiric force. A pleasure as always was Jennifer Coolidge, who as usual plays dumb with great brio ("Someone's killed their children and made them into cookies, and I want to see that!" and, especially, "What is the theme?").
Hey... wait a minute...
1:10 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, November 27, 2006
DISPLACIA. The right-wing world feasts -- or, rather, eats crumbs and calls it a feast -- on the idea that the MSM gives all the credit for good economic news to the newly-elected Democrats. If it were so, of course, it would only be fair, as Democrats (and their closely-aligned subspecies, liberals) also get the blame for everything.
Victor Davis Beauregard Methusaleh Hanson has one thing to say about the Litvinenko assassination:So don’t expect the world’s liberal conscious to weigh in much on the latest poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko... it is much easier for a European or Middle East journalist to concentrate on the purported misdemeanors of a Donald Rumsfeld than the known felonies of a Vladimir Putin. Yeah, most of the MSM coverage has been pretty pro-assassination (and pro-abortion, if you use your secret decoder ring) -- and such key European anti-war figures as Tony Blair have been slow to follow Hanson over the ridge.
Hanson describes a World Gone Mad, and mutters things like "Or is it a deeper malaise that modern liberal internationalism is neither liberal nor international" (maybe it has something to do with the liberal "conscious"). It would appear from the Hansonian point of view that the American government of the past six years has had no effect on world affairs. The world has been guided to its current, terrible state by an international liberal cabal.
They're never to blame for anything, are they?
12:58 PM by roy edroso
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EXTRA HELPING OF GRATITUDE. In my end is my beginning. After my Lileks pre-Thanksgiving throwaway, I find myself returning to the subject as the Mailer of the Mall of America lets fly a stinging denunciation of... Happy Feet. You know, that cartoon with the dancing penguins.
To be fair, the Art Police at Redstate got there first, and it appears Fox News has attacked the cartoon as well (leading to an interesting meditation of "the conservative crusade against cartoon characters" at The Carpetbagger Report).
But there is a categorical difference between the right-wing Zhdanovite squads and Lileks. The first group are mere sentinels of wrongthink; the stiffness of their reports shows that they don't have any real interest in or enthusiasm for the lively arts -- they are here on a political mission from which aesthetics can only distract, so they shoot first and have epiphanies later.
Lileks, on the other hand, loves all kinds of artsy-fartsy stuff and even allows himself to show off his erudition in matters of form and content. Jimbo knows architecture ("...I sat in the grass and consulted a small cigar, reading an interesting piece about a local architect who’s come up with a new paradigm for pre-fab housing. Is this the future of architecture? The article asked. Short answer, from me: nope"). Jimbo knows aesthetics ("Because they’ll all be white. Because they’ll all have an Apple logo, which already has that high-tech cool aura. Because they will look like they were designed to work together. In other words, aesthetics count"). Jimbo knows not so much about theatre, which he keeps mispronouncing, but he can see eternity in a matchbook. He has some kind of feeling for the arrangements of sounds and shapes that beguile him; he knows, albeit dimly, that art is not just audio-visual medicine for the restoration of his ichor, nor a series of propaganda opportunities which can be wrenched in the right direction if we can sneak our people into some high-level appointments in the artsifartsy industry.
So though he sometimes puts on the rusty armor of the culture warrior (which fits him so badly even he must recognize it), usually when a work of artsifartsiness conflicts with his own notion of the Way Things Ought to Be, he does not pretend to be talking about art: He goes straight to sub-urbane dad mode:So now we have to apologize for serving fargin’ fish sticks, eh. Hell with it. Veal daily from now on. Veal for breakfast. Veal-O-Bits swimming in whale blubber.
I remember when animals were used as stand-ins for humans, to shed light on human behaviors and foibles; now animals are stand-ins for creatures more ethically advanced than humans. (See also, The Ant Bully. Or rather don’t; that movie said it was okay to be an individual as long as you were part of a collective, and no one ever had competing goals or ideas. Muddle-headed twaddle...) When someone as proud of his verbal skills as Lileks starts spitting rank foam like this, a charitable interpretation is possible. In this case, I think he is trying to protect art from himself. When directly discussing even so modest a specimen as Happy Feet, he will not betray any signs of cultural authority, which might deceive some innocent souls into a misunderstanding about art; he will rave and shake his fist and instantaneously sprout elbow patches and a big blue vein on his big pink forehead, so that only fellow fist-shakers will be caught up in his spell, and the innocent will walk away, little realizing how close they came to corruption! It's kind of noble in a way, like Cagney at the end of Angels with Dirty Faces, Bill Hurt at the end of Altered States, Jeff Goldblum at the end of The Fly...
Hell, I don't know. Maybe he's just nuts. But coming back from Thanksgiving, it struck me that some of the folks I consider and treat as nuisances are actually something to be grateful for. Could I have, by myself, come up with a character like The Ole Perfesser, or the Crazy Jesus Lady, or Ann Althouse, or Lileks? It doesn't matter -- to me they are characters now. I realize, for example, there is a real person named Glenn Harlan Reynolds somewhere out there in the sticks, but though I know his writings, I don't know him: his words suggest the shape of a character, upon whose motivations and behaviors I am privileged to speculate. Maybe, with a little luck and ambition, I can detach these characters from their humble real-life avatars, and find for them some small measure of immortality. They certainly deserve it, after all the pleasure they've given me.
10:19 AM by roy edroso
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