Culture in the Rye

By Selwyn Duke
http://www.americanthinker.com/
February 01, 2010

Many years ago, I was told a story by a woman I knew whose son had been diagnosed with "ADD." She said that she finally had to take from her boy a book a therapist had given him about how an ADD child acts. The problem? Her son was imitating the behavior of the child in it!

Then I remember when someone I know well told me about her thirteen-year-old's reaction to being confronted about his misbehavior. He said something to the effect of, "Well, Mom, you know I'm at that age." But how did he know he was at "that age"?

There is also all the anxiety adolescents are supposed to feel over the "changes in their body," and we're told about how tough it is to be a teenager. I don't know, but I remember my teen years well, and I experienced no such thing. I knew I was moving toward manhood and was happy about it. And whenever the topic might have arisen, it was apparent that my friends were happy about it, too. Why wouldn't we have been? If you think it's tough becoming bigger, stronger, faster, and better each and every day, try the other side of that hill, when you have to trade in the Rollerblades for a Rascal scooter.

This brings me to the book The Catcher in the Rye, which is in the news again after the death of its author, J.D. Salinger. Like so many others attending high school in the early 1980s, I had to read Catcher. Now, I guess I was "supposed" to relate to it, but I never did. I didn't experience teen "angst," and I didn't think everyone was a phony, either. Furthermore, if any of my friends related to the book, they certainly never said anything about it. Nor did any of my friends -- or the teens I would work with later in life -- exhibit angst or a preoccupation with the phoniness of others. In fact, I think the young are better epitomized by a starry-eyed idealism, where they expect some virtue, heroism, and idealism in others. For sure, the millions of youths who chanted "yes, we can!" in 2008 expected those things (although it's rumored that many have now become Holden Caulfield).

Now, mind you, I don't imply that Catcher tells us nothing about people in their adolescence. I simply say that its popularity -- just like the other social phenomena I mentioned -- tells us even more about a civilization in its twilight.

For one thing, there was a time when telling kids how they were "supposed" to behave meant drawing from Sunday school or the Bible, not the Kinsey Institute or the DSM-IV. We taught the morals we expected, not the misbehavior to be expected (and, by inference, accepted). This makes sense, too, as morality needs to be taught. Problems just happen naturally.

Unfortunately, they can also be induced unnaturally. I believe that much (though not all) of the modern narrative about the problems of youth is the projection of adults. It doesn't reflect teens as a group because it reflects only certain former teens as individuals -- people who, though now grown, may sometimes just be repressed adolescents themselves. Even insofar as Catcher goes, who really made it popular? Do you think kids would be reading it today if educators hadn't made it a staple of curricula? Of course, in all fairness to Salinger, he did write the book for adults -- and those adults then made it popular among the kids.

Ironically, while Catcher was once the bane of traditionalists, it now finds a few foes even among the left. For example, Oberlin College English professor Anne Trubek is quoted as saying that the work is "not so contemporary anymore" and that "most American teenagers will find rather tame and sort of laughable the things that were once considered so controversial." She says that Holden Caulfield is not such a "universal voice for American teenagers" because he's an "upper-class white man." Then, echoing the last point I made, she opined that since all classics are man-made, there's "[no] reason why we couldn't do the same with some of the things that have been written in the last 10 years." Yeah, hey, why not get with the times? Or is the problem that we've long been getting with the times and away from the Truth?

If this sounds oh-so-absolutist, understand that for all our modern talk about letting kids spread their wings and not imposing values, we certainly do preach messages. We diagnose children with ADD and then tell them how ADD kids "should" act, or we tell adolescents how they "should" feel about their changing bodies. We say it is a given that they'll be rebellious and angst-ridden. We create a blockbuster movie with strong anti-corporate, anti-Western, and pro-feminist themes. And we preach messages for a very simple reason: It's almost impossible to do otherwise. Society and its art and literature will always project values, either explicitly or implicitly. The only question is, what should those values be?

This brings us to an important point: Moderns have lost sight of the purpose of art and literature. And this is why, for instance, people will offer that tired old defense of rap music and say, "Hey, they're just tellin' you what's goin' on out there [in the streets]." Now, I could point out that this standard would justify the showing of porn and snuff films to kids, too; after all, sex and serial killing are "goin' on out there" also. But the point is this: If something is supposed to tell you what's going on out there, it's not called art.

It's called news.

And there is a reason why people complain about the news: It's not exactly uplifting. Yet one of the purposes of art is to do just that: uplift man, not degrade him. Is this disputable? Do we want our art to lower us morally?
Our lips will answer no, but our actions say otherwise. The art we create today seems not just like the fruits of Holden Caulfield, but of seventh-grade ne'er-do-wells who mock the straight-laced A-student until he crumbles or sinks to their level. G.K. Chesterton alluded to this with a quip that could be applied to all the arts, "Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. But the artists find it harder."

In point of fact, anything wholesome today is mocked as a goody-goody (G rating?) work and dismissed as simplistic. For instance, consider the remarks of an aging and quite liberal Stephen Talbot, the fellow who played tow-headed troublemaker Gilbert Bates on Leave it to Beaver. Obviously very embarrassed by his association with the show, he took pains to emphasize that it contained stereotypes and was completely unrealistic. Unrealistic? Perhaps, but what work is completely realistic? Is the current practice of consistently bucking stereotypes -- of portraying thoroughly anomalous characters (e.g., masculinized women) -- realistic? The point is that artistic license exists and should be used responsibly. This means to promote good, not evil -- to elevate, not degrade.

So realism is a poor excuse for degradation. After all, in real life, we all must answer nature's call, but does this mean we must show television characters using the toilet? Yet we seem to believe that we must show them washing their dirty laundry. And the end result of this philosophy is that Hollywood is using the whole world as a toilet.

So what is the purpose of art? To entertain? That's fine, but its higher calling is to teach lessons about good and evil and to encourage virtue. It is supposed to reflect Truth.

Once this is understood, it becomes clear why moderns can benefit from reading millennia-old Greek classics, works about long-dead people written in antiquated ways. Truth transcends time, place, and people. And this brings us to our problems today.

Because the West has fallen victim to moral relativism, it no longer believes in transcendent Truth. Thus, stripped of the eternal yardstick that should govern art and curricula, we use emotion as the yardstick and try to provide what makes a given group "feel" good. This is why we hear about how something isn't relevant to most because it's about an "upper-class white man" or was penned by "dead white males." It's why we try to give each group its particular flavor, such as feminism for girls and afro-centrism for blacks. It's why we talk about the times and not Truth, saying that a work is no longer "contemporary." It's why education has degenerated to a point wherein all we can do is give everyone a lie that, supposedly, he can relate to. But this tragically misses the point: Everyone needs the same thing, and that is Truth. Thus should our goal be to relate it -- and help everyone to relate to it.

Doing otherwise is pointless. After all, if morals are relative, how could it be wrong to not be contemporary or sensitive to feelings, or to be provincial? More significantly, though, if we accept the relativistic lie that all is taste and we each have our own flavor, we'll never be able to relate to the same things or, tragically, to each other.

Thus does relativism yield division. If you want brotherhood, seek Truth.

Contact Selwyn Duke.

48 Comments on "Culture in the Rye"

Unholy Alliance: Zinn, Chomsky, Bin Laden

by Peter Collier
http://frontpagemag.com/
February 3, 2010


Every so often we experience what Jung called synchronicity—the sudden perception of a possibly meaningful pattern in apparently unrelated events. I had one of these moments myself last week.

The first element was the passing of Howard Zinn. I believe as much as the next guy that every man’s death diminishes me, but to be honest, in this case I was hard pressed to feel a sense of loss. Matt Damon might regard him as Parkman’s equal, but in truth Zinn was a savage parody of a historian, one of those radical hacks whose every word subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.

The best and worst that can be said of his People’s History of the United States is that it has benumbed the faculties of many young people over the last couple of decades. It is perhaps the best example in recent years of the way in which some of the fecal matter thrown onto the wall of our intellectual culture not only sticks but becomes a lasting act of defacement.

In checking out the obits on the internet, I ran into Amy Goodman’s tribute to Zinn at democracynow.org. She interviewed by telephone Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky. Predictably, all three remembered Zinn as a rebel truth teller to the end, someone whose passing embodied the kitschy defiance of Joe Hill’s last words: “Don’t mourn, organize.” But the Chomsky’s interview appeared to have a little something more.

To digress for a moment, I should say that while many of my friends have tried to deconstruct the complex intellectual pathology behind Chomsky’s lifelong effort to affirm the transcendent evil of America, I’ve always thought of him simply as someone with a truth problem—not only in what he says but even more in what he says about what he has said. He associated himself with a rancid group of French Holocaust deniers, for instance, but when called on it claimed he was only defending their rights to free speech. Long after the fact, he continued to supply backup for Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, but when called on this, he said that his detractors were just a bunch of neo-Nazis out to get him (a compartmentalized response that ignores his support for exactly such neo-Nazis in the Holocaust denial matter.)

When it comes to the truth, in other words, Noam Chomsky is slipperier than a whole school of fish. Lying for him is an art form, a squid’s ink which he emits and then uses as cover to escape from responsibility for what he has just said.

Even so, it was a shock to see Chomsky’s response when Goodman asked him about Zinn’s 1967 book The Logic of Withdrawal. Chomsky replied that it was brilliant and that Zinn, because the reviewing establishment was ignoring it, asked him to write about it in Ramparts, which he did. According to the transcript of the interview on Goodman’s website, Chomsky went on to describe Ramparts as “a left wing journal I was running then.” (See here.)

Chomsky never “ran” Ramparts. He was a distant voice in the years I was an editor at this premier magazine of the New Left–someone a coast away who tended to repeat over and over again criticisms he initially made in the New York Review of Books of the intellectual elite that ran the Vietnam War. My strongest memory of him is from 1967. I solicited an article more or less on what had become his standard topic. It arrived poorly written and requiring considerable work. Because he didn’t like the changes I made, Chomsky told me that he would never again write for Ramparts and in fact did not for several years. (I recently reviewed the Ramparts experience here.)

Claiming to have run a publication that kept him at arm’s length would have been an odd lie, even for a mendacity addict like Chomsky. My colleague David Swindle found a link to the audio of the Goodman show. I listened to it and Chomsky appears actually to have said “a left wing magazine that was running then,” without the “I.” Vile phrasing for someone who is accounted to be an expert in language, but not the bald faced lie that the printed transcript suggests and not the synecdoche that it first appeared for the body of lies which comprises Chomsky’s oeuvre since the ’60s.

But back to the rush of synchronicity I alluded to above. It came a day after the Goodman interview, when Osama bin Laden spoke up from whatever dreary cave in which he is presently immured. After attacking the Great Satan for causing climate change in a diatribe that called up a possible Jon Stewart monologue (“…the arch terrorist provided a kiss of death for global warming theory today by offering his unqualified support for it just as the East Anglia Climategate was calling the whole deal into question…”), bin Laden got down to the business of blackguarding America as a global terror state. And who did he cite as proof for this theorem? None other than Chomsky himself. Bin Laden had praised him two years earlier for showing how public opinion is “manufactured” by decadent democracies; now he gave it up again for his hero: “Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. polices to those of the Mafia.”

Bin Laden, Zinn, and Chomsky. How synchronous their harmonies. How collaborative the ideas in their weave. How much they deserve each other.

The Pickup Artist

The Nation's Pulse

By Christopher Orlet on 2.3.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

After "the people's seat," the most memorable line from the Massachusetts Senate race came when Scott Brown took umbrage at President Obama's disparaging comments about his truck: "Mr. President, you can criticize my record, you can talk about the positions I have, but don't ever start criticizing my truck."

As in all campaigns, there was a surfeit of throwaway lines, but truck lines are always keepers. Brown's retort was more evidence of the continuing importance of cultural artifacts like the pickup, which the Republican candidate made one of the focal points of his campaign -- even endowing his GMC Canyon with Hollywoodesque star power. "I love this old truck, it's brought me closer to the people of this state," Brown said in a popular television commercial. One result was that Canyon sales have soared as high as Brown's poll numbers.

So when President Obama came to Massachusetts in the 11th hour of the campaign, and said Brown's "truck may not get you where you want to go," it caused one wag to quip: "Like Teddy Kennedy's car?" Meanwhile, television host Neil Cavuto excoriated the president for "badmouthing" a "hardcore" truck made by one of the companies he had recently rescued with taxpayer money.

All of this came after Sen. John Kerry had warmed up the Prius and Volvo-owning crowd with more anti-pickup rhetoric: "I've got news for you, Scott: George Bush drove a truck, too, and look where it got us." Probably not something you want to say to a substantial and loyal percentage of the voting public. (That special bond between pickups and their drivers was mirrored in a 2009 poll of truck owners, of whom 64 percent said their truck is a reflection of their personality.)

Republican senatorial candidate Scott Brown arrives in his truck to cast his vote in the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy in Wrentham, Massachusetts January 19, 2010. Brown, who won the election and is now Senator-elect, crisscrossed the state in his 2005 GMC Canyon pick-up truck, with almost 200,000 miles on the odometer, and pressed the flesh at rallies in jeans and brown work-jacket. Picture taken January 19, 2010. (Reuters)

Sen. Kerry was right about one thing: George W. Bush did indeed tool around his Crawford ranch in a "Texas Cadillac," a white Ford F-250, not infrequently with Tony Blair or Vladimir Putin riding shotgun, and doubtless a cooler of Lone Stars on the seat between them.

No wonder some Republicans and Independents believe pickup truck ownership is a prerequisite for good leadership. Sen. Fred Thompson once charged his Democratic opponent was out of touch because he hadn't "spent enough time in a pickup truck."

OUT-OF-TOUCH CYNICS maintain the pickup is a symbol of male virility, or a lack thereof, though, in fact, pickups are the automotive equivalent of the old workhorse or mule. Our neighbors' pickups come equipped with truck bed rail-to-rail toolboxes. Often the beds are full of engine parts, scrap metal, or firewood. In other words, they are used to haul things. I am reminded of the scene from the movie Paper Moon when the flim-flam man, played by Ryan O'Neal, is fleeing the cops and attempts to swap his fancy roadster for an old rusted pickup. What good is a car, the yokels ask, when you "can't haul nothing with it?"

The pickup's place in American cultural history is noteworthy, in particular its supporting role in a number of iconic films. Who can forget the pickup-driving crackers in Easy Rider who send the hippies Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to hell? Or the old pickup Sonny and Dewayne take on a road trip to Mexico in The Last Picture Show? Country music would be even more depressing without the pickup. Imagine Tom T. Hall's bittersweet classic "Pamela Brown" without the lines: "I guess the guy she married was the best part of my luck. She dug him 'cause he drove a pickup truck"? Or the Steve Goodman/David Allen Coe hit "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," where the ex-con narrator pulls out all the country clichés, including driving his pickup to the train station to meet his mother, only to find that she'd "got runned over by a damned old train." As for great American literature, there is novelist Larry Brown's entire oeuvre, while Michael Perry's idyllic Truck: A Love Story is an inspirational tale of midlife crisis, late-blooming love, deer-hunting, farming, country music, Roland Barthes, and, if that weren't enough, restoring a 1951 International Harvester pickup.

Just who gets credit for creating the first pickup remains a matter of conjecture and intense drink-fueled debate. The top contenders are Gottlieb Daimler (1896) and Henry Ford (1900). Of course, few American pickup owners want to accept that a foreigner invented the pickup, but upon further consideration one remembers that Germans also invented beer and the world's best acoustic guitars, and what good would a pickup truck be without beer and guitars? I say, we let the Krauts have it: when you drive an American-made pickup you can afford to be generous.

Christopher Orlet is a freelance writer based in Columbia, Illinois.

Tebow's Super Bowl ad isn't intolerant; its critics are

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 2, 2010; D01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

I'll spit this out quick, before the armies of feminism try to gag me and strap electrodes to my forehead: Tim Tebow is one of the better things to happen to young women in some time. I realize this stance won't endear me to the "Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep," otherwise known as DOLL, but I'll try to pick up the shards of my shattered feminist credentials and go on.

As statements at Super Bowls go, I prefer the idea of Tebow's pro-life ad to, say, Jim McMahon dropping his pants, as the former Chicago Bears quarterback once did in response to a question. We're always harping on athletes to be more responsible and engaged in the issues of their day, and less concerned with just cashing checks. It therefore seems more than a little hypocritical to insist on it only if it means criticizing sneaker companies, and to stifle them when they take a stance that might make us uncomfortable.


Tim Tebow's 30-second Super Bowl ad has already provoked plenty of criticism. (Dave Martin/Associated Press)

I'm pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I've heard in the past week, I'll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the "National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time." For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow's 30-second ad hasn't even run yet, but it already has provoked "The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us" to reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually "pro-choice" so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn't be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn't.

There's not enough space in the sports pages for the serious weighing of values that constitutes this debate, but surely everyone in both camps, pro-choice or pro-life, wishes the "need" for abortions wasn't so great. Which is precisely why NOW is so wrong to take aim at Tebow's ad.

Here's what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren't embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too -- and they should step up to that.

"Are you saving yourself for marriage?" Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.

"Yes, I am," he replied.

The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.

"I think y'all are stunned right now!" he said. "You can't even ask a question!"

That's how far we've come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn't shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him.

Obviously Tebow can make people uncomfortable, whether it's for advertising his chastity, or for wearing his faith on his face via biblical citations painted in his eye-black. Hebrews 12:12, his cheekbones read during the Florida State game: "Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees." His critics find this intrusive, and say the Super Bowl is no place for an argument of this nature. "Pull the ad," NOW President Terry O'Neill said. "Let's focus on the game."

Trouble is, you can't focus on the game without focusing on the individuals who play it -- and that is the genius of Tebow's ad. The Super Bowl is not some reality-free escape zone. Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn't just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers -- who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW.

Let me be clear again: I couldn't disagree with Tebow more. It's my own belief that the state has no business putting its hand under skirts. But I don't care that we differ. Some people will care that the ad is paid for by Focus on the Family, a group whose former spokesman, James Dobson, says loathsome things about gays. Some will care that Tebow is a creationist. Some will care that CBS has rejected a gay dating service ad. None of this is the point. CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants, and Tebow has a right to express his beliefs publicly. Just as I have the right to reject or accept them after listening -- or think a little more deeply about the issues. If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Tebow's ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it's apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life." This is what NOW has labeled "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning." But if there is any demeaning here, it's coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren't real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.

THE SEDUCTIONS OF DECLINE

Mark Steyn on America
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Tuesday, 02 February 2010

From the January 25th issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.


'The Sacking of Rome 455' by Karl Briullov (1836)

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, send me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is an illusion – and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more importantly, national decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ‘em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half-a-century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language, and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. Even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late 20th century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such an alien fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California became the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 per cent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” – the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something”, the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

But that’s to cast decline in its least favorable light, after it’s had a couple of generations to work its dark magic. As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire bust up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants… Who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? You benefit from all the accumulated capital of the past without being troubled by any of the tedious responsibilities. Have another coffee and a piece of strudel and watch the world go by. To be sure, everything new – or, at any rate, everything new that works – is invented and made elsewhere. But genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and farmland wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering whether global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Dordogne remains to be seen. Yet in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table – Britain and France are members of the UN Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts – and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it: It’s no surprise to find the post-great powers of Europe are the noisiest promoters of every fashionable nostrum from the iniquities of the Zionist Entity to the perils of “climate change”. The European Union has attitudes rather than policies. A couple of years back, Bret Stephens, then editor of The Jerusalem Post, opened his mail to find a copy of something called "Conclusions of the European Council", a summary of the work done during the six months of Ireland’s “Euro-presidency”. A braver man than I, he read it, at least as far as Item 80:

“The European Council expresses its deep concern at the recent events in the Eastern Congo, which could jeopardise the transition process."

And that and a couple Euros will get you a café au lait. The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” – whoops, “deep concern” - over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another – like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo Di Caprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

And when you put it like that, what’s the downside?

Okay, since you ask, here’s my prediction: American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s. For one thing, we don’t appreciate how unusual the last transfer of power was. If you’re not quite sure when that took place, the British historian Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised – although it was hardly “devised” at all. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency but it has a US military base – just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From US naval bases in Bermuda to the ANZUS alliance Down Under to NORAD close to home, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic progeny is one of the smoothest transfers of power in history – and unlikely to be repeated.

Now look beyond the anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few Nato members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of expenditure on defense fell from 24 per cent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 per cent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford? Cut back on nanny-state lollipops? Or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise – see the Franco-Prussian, the Austro-Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars and many others. But those were the days when traditional great power rivalry was resolved on the battled. Today we have post-modern post-great power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario – because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is because America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to share common interests.

There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (seven million), Norway (four million) and Singapore (three million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule, because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. In research and development, it spends more than the rest of the planet put together. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire left and an increasing chunk of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefitted from a unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the west” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows, but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty – you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod – but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to older political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’ jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder."

Caulfield and the Librarians

Another Perspective

By Tom Bethell on 2.2.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

We all know about J.D. Salinger's young hero, Holden Caulfield, and the three days he spends in New York City. We know that beneath Holden's youthful bluster and swear words -- he says "goddam" on every page, almost, and when he sees "F[--]ck you" scrawled on a wall, he tries to erase it -- he has a heart of gold, if you really want to hear the truth of it.

Despite his inner goodness, the librarians of America saw things differently. They "censored" the book. Between 1961 and 1982, according to a Wikipedia entry, Catcher in the Rye became "the most censored book in high school libraries in he United States."

Censored! Holden Caulfield? Doesn't that just go to show what narrow-minded people librarians really are. Stereotype confirmed!

But maybe the librarians knew something that the rest of us have overlooked.

Late in the book, Caulfield decides to visit his old high school English teacher, a Mr. Antolini. He was by then married and living in "a swanky apartment over in Sutton Place," a pretty good place for a high school English teacher from Elkton Hills to land up.

Anyway, Caulfield and Antolini talk for a while, and Antolini has several highballs. Holden thinks that his old teacher is in danger of becoming an alcoholic. They keep on talking, but Holden is tired. He has been up for two days without sleep. Mr. Antoloni says he can sleep on the couch, and Holden says okay. They make up the couch and Holden goes to sleep. Then he is rudely awakened. His old teacher has crept back into the room and and is ruffling his hair. "He was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head," Holden says.

He sprang to his feet. "What the hellya doing?"

Holden is alarmed because he knows "more damn perverts than anybody you ever met."

Antolini, it turns out, is a pervert, "perverty." Something "perverty" had happened, Holden decides. So he bolts for the apartment door. Antolini was a "flit." He had been making a "flitty pass at me."

Antoloni tries to get him to stay and go back to his couch. But Holden leaves anyway, goes to Grand Central Station, and gets in touch with his much-loved sister, "old Phoebe."

So there you have it. Holden talks about perverts and flits, in a book published by Little Brown in 1951, and reprinted a million times since then.
A Back Bay paperback edition reappeared in 2001.

Is it allowed, in the 21st century, to use words like that? Notice that the New Yorker refused to published Catcher in the Rye, but they did publish Salinger's unreadable story "Hapworth 16, 1924." So maybe Harold Ross at the New Yorker was alert to these nuances of political incorrectness long, long ago.

I probably shouldn't reveal this, because it is inside information. But the librarians have known all along that Catcher was an "incorrect" book, and it wasn't because of all the superfluous goddams and the (rare) four letter words. And get this. Now that its famous author is dead they are planning to mount a huge censorship raid and remove this prejudiced volume from library shelves across the land.

Do they have the blessing of the Human Rights Commission? You had better believe that they do.

When I asked a source at Little Brown if they would allow a book to appear today in which a gay man is called a "pervert" or a "flit," he laughed openly.

"The question answers itself," he said.

If you haven't read Catcher in the Rye yet, better get a hold of it soon.

Because it is likely to disappear from the shelves before you can say flit.

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).

Link: Caulfield and the Librarians

McGwire Is Testing a Loyal Baseball Town

By BEN SHPIGEL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 2, 2010


Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

Mark McGwire, the Cardinals' new hitting coach, speaking Jan. 17 after the team's Winter Warm-Up event, at which he received a standing ovation.

ST. LOUIS — The night Mark McGwire slugged his record-breaking 62nd home run, Bob Beumer was cheering from the upper reaches of the old Busch Stadium. That ticket stub is on display in his basement, where it joins some photographs, a few autographed baseballs and other McGwire mementos from the home run chase in 1998 that gripped the nation and revived the sport. Now, though, for Beumer and many other Cardinals fans, those days seem a bit less triumphant.

“It’s like when you find out your favorite grandfather didn’t turn in his income taxes,” Beumer said of McGwire, the Cardinals’ new hitting coach, who recently admitted using performance-enhancing drugs for most of his career. “You didn’t like him any less, but you squint at him and look at him a little funny because you wish he wouldn’t have done that.”

Beumer, 62, is the former owner of Hamilton Jewelers, which was a stalwart advertiser and sponsor of the Cardinals for more than three decades.

“The best way I can describe it,” Beumer said, “is that he’s brought a very big uneasiness to Cardinals baseball.”

That is a popular sentiment in this grand baseball town, where for the last three weeks they have gone crazy, folks, gone crazy trying to reconcile their feelings about the most divisive local baseball issue of their time. Should McGwire be forgotten or forgiven, jeered or cheered? Is he a villain or merely a product of his era? What is more relevant, the imprint his four and a half seasons in Cardinals red left on their lives, or the black mark it left on the record books?

Everyone and no one seems to know for sure.

The minute-long standing ovation McGwire received at the Cardinals’ annual Winter Warm-Up event Jan. 17, his first public appearance since admitting to steroid use, less than a week earlier, represented only a small cross section of the fan base. Bernie Miklasz, a longtime sports columnist at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, likened it to the reception Sarah Palin or President Obama received at their parties’ nominating conventions.

“If you get away from the hardcore base, there’s been a legitimate and powerful debate whether this is a good thing or not,” said Miklasz, referring to McGwire’s taking over as the hitting coach. “People are talking about the past, they’re arguing about the past.”

Miklasz, who also hosts a weekday radio show on WXOS-FM, said that in 25 years working here, he had never seen or heard the community divided about anything involving the Cardinals. “Everyone just wants to know whether the family is ever going to get back together again,” he said.

St. Louisans are not accustomed to controversy swirling around their sports heroes. From Stan Musial to Albert Pujols, Kurt Warner to Marshall Faulk, iconic players have largely excelled on the field and lived clean lives off it. In a sense, fans here have been mentally preparing for McGwire’s admission since 2005, when he dodged questions about steroid use before Congress.

When McGwire ultimately confessed, during an orchestrated series of interviews Jan. 11, including one with The New York Times, many of those same fans were left with a hollow feeling. Despite several opportunities, McGwire repeatedly dismissed any link between performance-enhancing drugs and his remarkable power. If McGwire had acknowledged even receiving an inadvertent benefit from taking steroids, Miklasz said he thought a majority of local fans would forgive him.

“This is a very loyal town, but people are having a very hard time processing all of this,” said Tom Burke, 53, a lawyer from Town and Country, Mo. “For most people, that just isn’t complete enough of a story. It’s not realistic enough. To me, it seems like the Cardinals underestimated the fallout that was going to occur.”


Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

Shortly after he admitted steroid use, Mark McGwire drew a crowd at the Winter Warm-Up in St. Louis.

First and foremost was the recent criticism of McGwire by several members of the Cardinals family. Adolphus Busch IV, scion of the family that once owned the team, said in a statement that McGwire “deliberately cheated the game,” “stole its most coveted records” and “was paid millions while perpetrating a fraud.” Jack Clark, a popular first baseman on two pennant-winning teams in the 1980s, said that seeing McGwire in uniform made him want to throw up and that McGwire, like all steroid users, should be barred from baseball forever.

Perhaps the most resonant criticism came from Whitey Herzog, a beloved former manager, who at a dinner in Appleton, Wis., said he could not fathom how McGwire received a standing ovation at the Winter Warm-Up and that Clark was roundly booed. “Now what the hell is the matter with society when that happens?” Herzog said.

Herzog, whose Hall of Fame plaque will depict him wearing a Cardinals cap, did not want to revisit that topic when he was approached last week in the driveway of his suburban St. Louis home. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said, closing the garage door behind him.

“Their voices represent an important part of the Cardinals, which is their storied past,” said Tom Ackerman, the sports director and a morning anchor at KMOX-AM. “St. Louis people love this team, but they also love what it has represented, and there’s a lot of respect for the people who have put the team together and have helped build the franchise into what it is today. Whether people agree or disagree, they’re listening.”

One person who appreciated Herzog’s reaction in Wisconsin was Rick Kordenbrock, a high school social studies teacher from Ladue, Mo. Kordenbrock said he felt “duped and hoodwinked” into thinking that McGwire’s prodigious power was all natural.

“All these great players like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays and Frank Robinson — that’s who McGwire cheated,” Kordenbrock, 55, said. “He cheated the history of the game.”

The Cardinals realized the public-relations risk involved in bringing back McGwire, who has been out of baseball since retiring in 2001, but their general manager, John Mozeliak, said in an interview that Manager Tony La Russa still would have been granted permission to hire McGwire had they known about his steroid use. Asked about the outcry from Herzog and Clark, Mozeliak said he respected their opinions and added that he was encouraged that other Cardinals icons, like Red Schoendienst, have expressed their support, as have other Hall of Famers like Aaron, Ernie Banks and Mike Schmidt.

“Our ownership and I are of the mind-set that steroid use shouldn’t ban you from the game of baseball for life,” Mozeliak said. “It’s a mistake, but if you own up to it, you should be forgiven and should be allowed to be work in the game and do whatever you like.”

The former Cardinals great Bob Gibson has also come out in support of McGwire. He said Monday on the Post-Dispatch Web site that it was time to move on, an echo of what many fans have said. Gibson also took issue with Herzog and Clark.

“Those two aren’t in the Cardinals family,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with anybody other than between McGwire and them — which it probably should be. I don’t think it’s their place to criticize him the way they did.”

McGwire has begun working with some Cardinals hitters in Huntington Beach, Calif., and is scheduled to arrive at the team’s spring training complex in Jupiter, Fla., in about two and a half weeks. Burke said he hoped that once the daily rhythms of baseball resume, the chatter on sports-talk radio would focus exclusively on more important things — like the Cardinals’ search for a reliable fifth starter or contract extension talks with Pujols — and that McGwire’s presence would not become more of a distraction.

These are some of the things that pop into Burke’s mind on those occasions when he travels along the Mark McGwire Highway, a stretch of Interstate 70 near the city limits. He says he expects to attend about 25 Cardinals games this season, and at some point, probably during batting practice, McGwire will amble onto the field, and Burke may be moved to respond.

“Booing isn’t part of my repertoire, but I’m hardly in the standing ovation category, either,” Burke said. “Maybe a mild golf clap. Or maybe just no reaction at all. That might be best.”

Lack of Intelligence

Why didn’t the Obama administration interrogate the Christmas bomber?

By Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
February 8, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 20
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

On January 27, the secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, was roundly criticized at a meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee. She had ducked the hearing, which was about the Christmas Day terrorist attack, and lawmakers were animated. The surprise was that it was Democrats doing most of the attacking.

“She was invited to testify at this very important hearing, and she should have been here,” said Jane Harman, Democrat from California. “I am very personally disappointed that she isn’t here.”

Chris Carney, from Pennsylvania, was more direct. “I am very dismayed that the secretary herself isn’t here,” he said. “I mean it’s probably fair to ask: ‘Where the hell is Secretary Napolitano?’ ”

Napolitano, who had been scheduled to be overseas, was in town and that evening was seen on national television at the State of the Union address. But she chose not to attend the congressional hearing.

Who can blame her? Immediately after the attack, the White House dispatched her to make its case on the Sunday talk shows, where Napolitano claimed that “the system worked.” At a press briefing on the attack, Napolitano said that she was surprised Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was showing so much “determination” to strike in the United States and acknowledged that she did not expect the group to send individuals—as opposed to groups—to conduct attacks. And earlier last month, at a Senate hearing on the same subject, she was roundly castigated for those comments and for the fact that she was not a part of the decisionmaking process that resulted in the terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, being mirandized fewer than 12 hours after he was detained.

Napolitano is a convenient scapegoat. After all, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also claimed on national television that the system worked. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, left for vacation the day after the attack. Top White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told him to go. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair did not know that the elite interrogation unit proposed by the White House— the high-value detainee interrogation group (HIG)—does not yet exist. And the president, three days after interrogators supposedly elicited valuable intelligence about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Abdulmutallab, claimed that the attack was the work of “an isolated extremist.”

That last claim was the subject of an exchange between Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, and the NCTC’s Michael Leiter at the January 27 hearing.

Asked how the president could have made such a claim, Leiter made it clear that the intelligence community had told the White House about Abdulmutallab’s involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—something the bomber acknowledged in his initial interview with the FBI.

I will say that on the night, on Christmas night we advised the White House, and I think the White House immediately said, that we believe this was an attempted terrorist attack. I will also add that during this entire look back—an ongoing investigation, as you know—different pieces of information have come forward which have made it more and more clear, I think, each day of his connections to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

King pressed Leiter: “Who would have allowed him to say ‘isolated extremist’ when he was not isolated?”

“Congressman, I know that the National Counterterrorism Center and others were providing intelligence to the White House on an ongoing basis,” replied Leiter. “I simply don’t know how those statements were produced.”

The White House hasn’t been any more forthcoming. Asked for details on the handling of Abdulmutallab, Gibbs has provided little information. At a White House briefing, he was asked about a media report that Abdulmutallab had been interrogated for fewer than 50 minutes before FBI agents read him his rights. Gibbs claimed that he did not know how long the interrogation lasted. But in an earlier appearance on Fox News Sunday, Gibbs had not disputed a claim from Chris Wallace that the interrogation lasted just 50 minutes. Gibbs further claimed that FBI interrogators “were able to get all that they could out of him.”

That, of course, is nonsense. Several sources confirm that Abdulmutallab’s interview lasted 50 minutes. And while Abdulmutallab did share some information about his time in Yemen, sources say that intelligence professionals, particularly those who have been tracking Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, are furious that they did not have any opportunity to learn more from a person who might have fresh knowledge about the group and its leaders. One source told me that there is virtually no one in the intelligence community who will defend the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab after talking to him for less than an hour.

The failure to obtain more from Abdulmutallab is all the more significant because intelligence officials are conducting fewer interrogations today than at any time since the 9/11 attacks. There are three reasons: (1) The administration has dramatically changed U.S. interrogation policy, sources say, and there is widespread confusion about what is permissible; (2) the HIG, which is supposed to conduct interrogations, does not yet exist; and (3) there are fewer terrorists to interrogate because the administration prefers to kill them with drone strikes rather than capture them on the ground.

The administration never misses a chance to make the last point—indeed, President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union address. But you cannot interrogate a dead terrorist, which makes it all the more imperative that you get everything you can from any terrorists you do capture.

“The determination to place Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab into the U.S. civilian court system was made without the input or knowledge of the director of National Intelligence, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, or the secretary of Homeland Security,” said Senator Susan Collins, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

This mistake likely foreclosed the collection of additional intelligence information and may have prevented the collection of valuable intelligence about future terrorist threats to the United States. We know that interrogations of terrorists can provide critical intelligence, but our civil justice system, as opposed to military detention, encourages terrorists to “lawyer-up” and stop answering questions.

That was the case here. Abdulmutallab had provided some information to law enforcement officials immediately after his capture, and we surely would have obtained more if we had treated this foreign terrorist as an enemy belligerent and placed him in the military tribunal system instead.

Abdulmutallab sits in jail today with intelligence that we could be using to prevent future attacks. Top administration and intelligence officials—including Blair, FBI director Robert Mueller, and CIA director Leon Panetta—will have an opportunity to explain that fact at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee this week.

If they show up.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Film Review: 'Edge of Darkness'

The Current Cinema

Life and Death Matters
by Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
February 8, 2010

Running at more than five hours, over six episodes, “Edge of Darkness” was a tense eco-drama—not something you see every day—which appeared on British television in 1985. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who, a quarter of a century later, is revisiting the fray. In the interim, he has made one lusty Zorro movie, one limp Zorro movie, two of the most propulsive James Bond films, “GoldenEye” and “Casino Royale,” and, lest we forget, “Vertical Limit,” which sounds like a biopic of Tom Cruise but is, in fact, an enjoyably stupid thriller about mountaineers. Now Campbell has redirected “Edge of Darkness,” trimming it to less than two hours, moving the action from Yorkshire to Boston, and taking on board, as his screenwriters, Andrew Bovell and William Monahan—something of a Boston specialist, what with his Academy Award for “The Departed.”

Mel Gibson, who looks and sounds not a day over sixty-five, plays a policeman named Thomas Craven. The name is a joke, since the movie insists, time and again, that he has all but dispensed with fear. Warned by a fellow-officer that “someone armed and dangerous” is on the loose, Craven replies, “What do you think I am?” This is delivered not with a wink and a wild grin—we are not, thank Heaven, in “Lethal Weapon” territory—but with a pared-down, dead-eyed plainness, which goes with Craven’s salty hair, thinning at the back, and the frown lines carved across his forehead like rifts in a relief map. He wears a loose-fitting suit that he might have picked up at a morgue. “I’m the guy with nothing to lose who doesn’t give a shit,” he says. You’re telling me.

As a rule, Gibson’s characters look stranded unless they have sins to atone for, or frustrations to vent. Craven smiles when his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic)—a scientific researcher home on a visit—arrives at the train station, but the smile is awkward and shifty, as if he were anticipating trouble. And here it is: a masked gunman at his front door, presumably aiming at Craven but hitting Emma by mistake. She dies in his arms, the only child of a single man, and from this point Craven is set on his vengeful path—weirdly calm, in the confident knowledge that blood will have to be spilled. The most rousing sequence comes much later, as a hit-and-run driver, having already picked off an innocent woman, turns the car around and comes back to flatten Craven, too. And does he flee, or dodge, or hurl himself aside? No, he takes his gun and marches firmly toward the oncoming vehicle, as if the road beneath his feet were the dust of the O.K. Corral, firing at the windshield as he goes. It’s been thirty years since “Mad Max,” but, when it comes to man vs. machine, Gibson is still up for a fight.

The original plot has not been altered much, though perhaps it should have been. In both cases, Craven soon discovers that Emma was the intended victim, and that she had been an activist, bent on exposing the crimes of the nuclear industry. In the Britain of 1985, riven by a miners’ strike and by continuing unease over the siting of American nuclear weapons on British soil, “Edge of Darkness,” all downpours and dour moods, felt true to its title. (And people were haunted by the Eric Clapton score.) To nudge it closer toward documentary, Campbell showed us Emma, on her final night, chairing a political meeting that was addressed by a real-life Member of Parliament. The new film, unrolling in a prosperous city, and released at a time when some environmentalists are arguing in favor of nuclear power, settles for the stale conceit of an honest soul confronting a venal private sector. Emma worked at Northmoor, a firm that conducts nuclear research under government contract while quietly building a few weapons, for foreign buyers, on the side. (Not, I would venture, the most plausible part of the story.) We know this before being told, because Northmoor’s chairman is played by Danny Huston, who, being a Huston, is so lofty, fine-mannered, and molasses-voiced that he might as well wear a T-shirt with the words “Do Not Trust This Man” picked out in plutonium.

In short, where the old “Edge of Darkness” was an ordeal, digging up surreal images from the conspiratorial murk, the reboot is an adventure—an efficient, politically inert fantasy that uses the hammer blow of violence to palm itself off as pertinent and gritty. The Craven of twenty-five years ago, searching through his daughter’s bedroom after the murder, found a vibrator, a gun, and a Teddy bear; the Craven of 2010 comes up with just the gun. That says it all. As if in deference to the story’s roots, we also get a mysterious and dapper Cockney (Ray Winstone), who is brought in—by whom, we never find out—with the sole purpose, as he admits, of making everything unintelligible. Well, mate, you done that all right. I liked the pace and the pulse of the film, but it launches no genuine surprise and, despite being irradiated with scenes of sickness and morbid one-liners, has little afterglow. Compare a work like Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat,” which also showed a cop and his loved one assailed by the forces of grand corruption; where Lang left his anxious viewers in no doubt that society could chew up the best of them, Campbell leaves us thrilled yet reassured. One man, it seems, can stanch the flow of evil—not difficult, perhaps, when the evil isn’t half as forbidding as the man. Gibson is the best thing about “Edge of Darkness,” at once despairing and decisive, although I’m not sure he was wise to agree to the scene where Craven says to a bigwig, “You’d better decide whether you’re hanging on the cross or banging in the nails.” Sorry, Mel. That was the other movie.


REVIEW: ‘Edge of Darkness’ Takes You to the Edge of Boredom
by John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
January 29, 2010

It’s sure nice to have Mel Gibson back on the big screen carrying a gun, seeking revenge for the death of a loved one and quivering with righteous rage. But after seven years off-screen what a shame he couldn’t find a better script. “Edge of Darkness” is a mess. Convoluted, poorly structured and lacking in the important emotional turning points and character moments necessary to make this kind of thriller work.

Gibson plays Boston Police Detective Thomas Craven, an honest cop and inattentive but loving father whose 24-year old daughter Emma comes home for a visit. Things are warm, if a bit strained between them, but she’s ill — violently ill — and on their way out the front door to the hospital she’s shotgunned in a drive-by shooting that was meant to kill him. Or was it?

The plot’s entirely too ambitious, involving defense contractors, corrupt Senators, leftist activists and a gentle yet menacing wine-sipping government fixer named Jedburgh (The Mighty Ray Winstone) whose loyalties shift all-too obviously when the plot requires a nudge — when the screenwriters are stuck. In the “Austin Powers” trilogy he would’ve been called Agent Exposition.

Wintsone continues his perfect record of making everything he’s in better, and Jedburgh is a very interesting character. You do want to know more about him. The problem is that there’s no natural place for him in the film’s narrative. He reminds me of Liev Schreiber’s mysterious John Clark in “The Sum of All Fears.” Another movie where a mysterious supporting player in a disappointing film comes off as though he’s visiting from a much better movie.

The “reluctant” witnesses are just as poorly crafted as exposition machines as Jedburgh. They’re only reluctant enough to come off as reluctant in that contrived kind of way that tells the audience Big Scary Things Are Afoot. Of course they all eventually talk, with their only motivation seeming to be the need for a plot turn.

Movies can survive these kinds of problems, though. The secret is to keep a strong hold on the trajectory of your protagonist, and that’s where “Edge” fails most. The required moments don’t exist to bring this story to life. Craven discovering his daughter was the real target should’ve hit like a ton of rocks that turned the entire narrative on its head. Instead the realization arrives courtesy of a standard A to B to C police procedural.

The other moment most unforgivably missing (that the film’s trailer promises) is when Craven’s pushed to the point where he stops being a cop, starts serving out a violent reckoning, and never looks back. Instead these unsatisfying action bits come in maddening fits and starts. In once scene Craven’s kicking a little ass, in the next he’s a cop again. You keep waiting for that vicariously satisfying turning point where Mel Gibson does what Mel Gibson does best but all you get is one long frustrating tease.

Director, Martin Campbell, the competent helmer of “Goldeneye” and the splendid Bond-reboot “Casino Royale,” adapted “Edge” from a five hour Australian miniseries of the same name that he directed back in 1986. And that may be the problem. Cramming five hours of intrigue into two hours was a mistake and the end result is too much plot at the expense of the simplicity these kinds of films require:

Daughter’s killed. Find killers. Begin Rampage.

“Taken” it is not. There’s not even a single memorable action scene, and for a Mel Gibson film it’s surprisingly humorless. The only comedy comes from how hard the plot strains to let the audience know the villains are bi-partisan – both Democrats and Republicans.

But, hey, Mel’s back. And that is one very welcome turning point.

Tags: 'Edge of Darkness', Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, mel gibson, Ray Winstone
Posted Jan 29th 2010 at 6:15 pm in Featured Story, Film, Reviews

Rigging the Numbers

We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 1, 2010 4:00 A.M.

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.

The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases.

No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game.

“We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”

That 195 number is making the rounds. It is both false and an exercise in hypocrisy.

The figure is mined from “In Pursuit of Justice,” a report published by Human Rights First (HRF) in May 2008 and updated last July (available here). But the report does not claim that 195 international terrorists have been convicted. Rather, it says that 195 defendants have been convicted so far in 119 cases that have some connection, however attenuated, to terrorism. (See the report’s preface.)

HRF goes on (at page 5) to explain its methodology. It examined prosecutions that were in some way “related to Islamist extremist terrorist organizations” (emphasis added). It should be obvious enough that this does not mean the people prosecuted were necessarily “international terrorists,” or that the cases involved actual terrorism charges. But the report makes the obvious explicit:

In building our data set of terrorism cases, we have attempted to capture prosecutions that seek criminal sanctions for acts of terrorism, attempts or conspiracies to commit terrorism, or providing aid and support to those engaged in terrorism. We have also sought to identify and include prosecutions intended to disrupt and deter terrorism through other means, for example, through charges under “alternative” statutes such as false statements, financial fraud, and immigration fraud. [Emphasis added.]

This explanation makes clear that the cases HRF is talking about are, in the main, cases that no one disputes can be handled safely and efficiently by the civilian courts. For example, let’s say the FBI is investigating al-Qaeda and it interviews a person suspected of having relevant information. That person lies during the interview, so the prosecutors indict him for making false statements, and he pleads guilty. Under the HRF’s standards, that gets tallied as a conviction in a “terrorism case.” But it hardly means the defendant is an international terrorist, let alone a KSM.

The same holds true for crimes like financial fraud and material support. These often involve people in the U.S. who are not themselves terrorists. Instead, they either contribute money and other assets to the jihadist cause (e.g., by contributing money to “charities” that are actually fronts for al-Qaeda or Hamas), or else help terrorists surreptitiously move their funds from place to place.

To be sure, this is not always the case. As I recounted back in May, the Obama Justice Department gave a sweetheart deal to Ali Al-Marri. He was a hardcore terrorist, yet prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of material support to terrorism. As a result, he got an absurdly short sentence rather than the life-imprisonment term he’d have gotten if convicted on an actual terrorism charge. Al-Marri, however, is an unusual result. At least up until 2009, if a person could be proved to have committed terrorism crimes, he was almost always charged with terrorism crimes.

No opponent of civilian trials for enemy combatants is claiming that everyone who is connected in any way to a terrorism case should be transferred to the military courts. The quarrel here is over how to handle real operatives of al-Qaeda (and its components, like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). We are talking about jihadists who are captured plotting, carrying out, or having carried out attacks against the United States — not just anyone who happens to get ensnared in the broad net of a terrorism investigation.

A handful of the 195 convicted defendants counted by HRF really were terrorists, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are better ways than civilian trials to try enemy combatants. Calling a prosecution “successful” just means that we convicted the defendant; it does not mean that national security was well served. If, because of civilian due-process rules, we had to reveal national-defense information that we could have kept secret in a military commission — or if we had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to address security concerns that could have been obviated by having a military trial in the safety of Gitmo — then the country would have been better off getting the same result in a military commission. That is common sense.

The numbers rigging, moreover, is a bit rich coming from left-wing lawyers. They spent the seven years after 9/11 accusing the Bush Justice Department of artificially inflating its numbers to convey a false sense of counterterrorism effectiveness. How? By opening cases as terrorism investigations but disposing of them without terrorism charges — especially through the immigration laws (i.e., deporting suspected terrorists and facilitators).

That’s right: When the Bush administration used the immigration laws to boot terror suspects out of the country, the Left and its fellow travelers like CAIR claimed this was racial profiling masquerading as counterterrorism. Now, in the age of Obama, we learn from HRF that “immigration fraud” counts as a “terrorism case” — so the group can boost the numbers and claim that the same Justice Department (under the Bush administration for most of the period covered in the report) has done a great job of combating terrorism in civilian court.

In any event, the fact that Umar Farouk Whoever can safely be handled in civilian federal court for procuring his green card by fraud hardly means Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should be brought to civilian federal court for a wartime mass-murder strike targeting nearly 300 Americans — or that we should bestow on KSM the same Bill of Rights protections no longer enjoyed by the nearly 3,000 Americans he slaughtered in a wartime attack.

It’s time to cook up a new plan. Cooking the books is not going to cut it.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).