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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
A New Era of Govt-Controlled Business?
By Lawrence Kudlow
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
March 31, 2009
Team Obama fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner Sunday afternoon, just a short time after Treasury man Tim Geithner told the television talk shows that some banks will need large amounts of new TARP-money government assistance -- even though the bankers don't want it. Does this smack of big-time government planning and industrial policy? Another lurch to the left for economic policy?
Remember, as bad as Wagoner's performance has been over the years, it was the federal government -- not shareholders or the board of directors -- that threw him under the bus. (By the way, GM's board is being thrown under that same bus.) And I'm not arguing in favor of Wagoner or his board; they've made a zillion mistakes. But I am wondering if we've officially entered a new era of government-controlled business.
Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), probably the most knowledgeable man in Congress about the car bailout, and someone who argued months ago in favor of a pre-planned government-sponsored bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler, calls the Wagoner firing "a major power-grab by the White House on the heels of another power-grab from Secretary Geithner, who asked last week for the freedom to decide on his own which companies are 'systemically' important to our country and worthy of taxpayer investment, and which are not." Corker calls this "a marked departure from the past," "truly breathtaking," and something that "should send a chill through all Americans who believe in free enterprise."
Mr. Corker has hit the nail on the head. And I think his idea of "a truly breathtaking" government departure from American free enterprise -- whether it's the banks or the bankrupt Detroit carmakers -- is exactly what caused stocks to plunge 250 points on Monday.
Incidentally, most of the big bankers who met with President Obama in the White House last Friday want to pay back their TARP money, not take more of it. But the Treasury is conducting stress tests that could stop the TARP pay-downs and force the banks to take more taxpayer funds in return for even more federal control.
The big bankers say they are profitable. And with an upward-sloping Treasury yield curve and some market-to-market accounting reform coming from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the outlook for banks should be getting better, not worse. So why is the Treasury jamming more TARP money down bankers' throats, especially after announcing a new plan to use private capital to clean up bank balance sheets and solve the toxic-asset problem?
It kinda sounds like the Treasury doesn't want to let go of its new uber-regulator status.
As for Detroit, the carmakers should have been in bankruptcy months ago. And it is a bankruptcy court that should have fired GM's Wagoner and his board. Along with some serious pain for bondholders, bankruptcy would have broken the high-cost labor contracts with the UAW as well as carmaker contracts with dealers across the country. That's what bankruptcy courts are for. They're part of the free-market capitalist system.
Former SEC chair Richard Breeden is arguing against a systemic uber-regulator for banks, and in favor of special financial bankruptcy courts. Once again, the story is court-ordered restructuring, not government control by political bureaucrats who like their power so much they want to keep running the various companies in question.
And why isn't Obama's special auto task force ordering a replacement for Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW's president? Weren't their oversized pay and benefit packages a big part of the problem? Well, that's never gonna happen. The election power of the union is too strong. But this does reveal the political nature of these government bailout operations.
Incidentally, in President Obama's speech on Monday about the Wagoner firing, as well as in Treasury term sheets for GM and Chrysler, there are multiple references to "the next generation of clean cars," to new CAFE-standard mileage increases, and to green power-train developments. All this is a big green climate-change priority for the new administration.
But the simple fact is, small, tinny, and expensive green cars just don't work for consumers. And even if those cars are designed better, the cost structure of the carmakers will have to be brought down so far that UAW wages will be forced below those of the non-union shops in Detroit south (including Honda, Toyota, and other foreign carmakers who are now producing in the United States).
So add the green revolution to the industrial-policy plans of the White House. Expect a big increase in CAFE fuel standards, even though small cars are simply not profitable. And plan on bailout nation taking a new left-turn toward the kind of central planning that has held down economic growth in Europe and Japan for so very long.
Lawrence Kudlow is host of CNBC's The Kudlow Report and co-host of The Call. He is also a former Reagan economic advisor and a syndicated columnist. Visit his blog, Kudlow's Money Politics.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
March 31, 2009
Team Obama fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner Sunday afternoon, just a short time after Treasury man Tim Geithner told the television talk shows that some banks will need large amounts of new TARP-money government assistance -- even though the bankers don't want it. Does this smack of big-time government planning and industrial policy? Another lurch to the left for economic policy?Remember, as bad as Wagoner's performance has been over the years, it was the federal government -- not shareholders or the board of directors -- that threw him under the bus. (By the way, GM's board is being thrown under that same bus.) And I'm not arguing in favor of Wagoner or his board; they've made a zillion mistakes. But I am wondering if we've officially entered a new era of government-controlled business.
Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), probably the most knowledgeable man in Congress about the car bailout, and someone who argued months ago in favor of a pre-planned government-sponsored bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler, calls the Wagoner firing "a major power-grab by the White House on the heels of another power-grab from Secretary Geithner, who asked last week for the freedom to decide on his own which companies are 'systemically' important to our country and worthy of taxpayer investment, and which are not." Corker calls this "a marked departure from the past," "truly breathtaking," and something that "should send a chill through all Americans who believe in free enterprise."
Mr. Corker has hit the nail on the head. And I think his idea of "a truly breathtaking" government departure from American free enterprise -- whether it's the banks or the bankrupt Detroit carmakers -- is exactly what caused stocks to plunge 250 points on Monday.
Incidentally, most of the big bankers who met with President Obama in the White House last Friday want to pay back their TARP money, not take more of it. But the Treasury is conducting stress tests that could stop the TARP pay-downs and force the banks to take more taxpayer funds in return for even more federal control.
The big bankers say they are profitable. And with an upward-sloping Treasury yield curve and some market-to-market accounting reform coming from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the outlook for banks should be getting better, not worse. So why is the Treasury jamming more TARP money down bankers' throats, especially after announcing a new plan to use private capital to clean up bank balance sheets and solve the toxic-asset problem?
It kinda sounds like the Treasury doesn't want to let go of its new uber-regulator status.
As for Detroit, the carmakers should have been in bankruptcy months ago. And it is a bankruptcy court that should have fired GM's Wagoner and his board. Along with some serious pain for bondholders, bankruptcy would have broken the high-cost labor contracts with the UAW as well as carmaker contracts with dealers across the country. That's what bankruptcy courts are for. They're part of the free-market capitalist system.
Former SEC chair Richard Breeden is arguing against a systemic uber-regulator for banks, and in favor of special financial bankruptcy courts. Once again, the story is court-ordered restructuring, not government control by political bureaucrats who like their power so much they want to keep running the various companies in question.
And why isn't Obama's special auto task force ordering a replacement for Ron Gettelfinger, the UAW's president? Weren't their oversized pay and benefit packages a big part of the problem? Well, that's never gonna happen. The election power of the union is too strong. But this does reveal the political nature of these government bailout operations.
Incidentally, in President Obama's speech on Monday about the Wagoner firing, as well as in Treasury term sheets for GM and Chrysler, there are multiple references to "the next generation of clean cars," to new CAFE-standard mileage increases, and to green power-train developments. All this is a big green climate-change priority for the new administration.
But the simple fact is, small, tinny, and expensive green cars just don't work for consumers. And even if those cars are designed better, the cost structure of the carmakers will have to be brought down so far that UAW wages will be forced below those of the non-union shops in Detroit south (including Honda, Toyota, and other foreign carmakers who are now producing in the United States).
So add the green revolution to the industrial-policy plans of the White House. Expect a big increase in CAFE fuel standards, even though small cars are simply not profitable. And plan on bailout nation taking a new left-turn toward the kind of central planning that has held down economic growth in Europe and Japan for so very long.
Lawrence Kudlow is host of CNBC's The Kudlow Report and co-host of The Call. He is also a former Reagan economic advisor and a syndicated columnist. Visit his blog, Kudlow's Money Politics.
The Icon and the Battle-Axe
At Large
By Joseph P. Duggan on 3.31.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens to explanations from the Rector of the Basilica de Guadalupe, Diego Monroy, during a visit to the Basilica in Mexico City, on March 26, 2009. (Getty Images)
MEXICO CITY -- Imagine an American Secretary of State one morning praying at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall and the next evening accepting a eugenics award named for Dr. Josef Mengele.
That is an apt analogy to the repugnant juxtaposition of gestures by Hillary Clinton during and following her brief visit to Mexico last week.
Color photographs and loud captions atop page one of the daily El Universal captured the Mexican public's sense of outraged bewilderment at Mrs. Clinton's visit March 26 to the Basilica of Guadalupe, Catholicism's second most visited shrine after St. Peter's in Rome. The Basilica rector, Monsignor Diego Monroy, stands with Mrs. Clinton and shows her the mestiza Madonna whose story is known to every Catholic schoolchild, an image believed to have been imposed miraculously on an Indian's cloak five centuries ago.
HILLARY CLINTON: Who painted it?
MONSIGNOR MONROY: God.
La Guadalupana is the archetypal icon of Latin American Catholicism. Catholics in the United States as well as in the Latin countries today invoke the Virgin of Guadalupe as the special patron of the pro-life movement.
Was Hillary's public diplomacy fiasco a calculated insult addressed to something she regards as a superstition, or simply the unrehearsed utterance of a person so soulless that she cannot fathom believers' sense of mystery?
A clue to the answer came in the traveling diplomat's next stop after Mexico, Houston, where she accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation.
In Houston, Hillary lauded the very evils that pilgrims to Guadalupe pray to overcome: liberalized abortion laws and making United States taxpayers pay for abortions and abortion propaganda in "developing" countries.
Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards, left, gives an award to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Planned Parenthood Gala Friday, March 27, 2009 in Houston. (AP Photo)
The comparison of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Josef Mengele (1911-1979) is not overdrawn. Even a cursory examination of her life's work and pronouncements shows Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, as one of the most strident and inhumane racists of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1932, for example, she wrote an article urging "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring." Eugenics was a fashionable social policy panacea at that time not only in Hitler's Germany, but also among powerful elites in the United States and other Western democracies.
Hillary Clinton provides the latest manifestation of what Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called "the deepest bias in the history of the American people" and "the only remaining acceptable prejudice" -- anti-Catholicism.
Secretary Clinton's words and actions in Mexico and Houston are elaborations of the disconcerting words of President Obama's Inaugural Address, his pledge to "restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs" and his gratuitous, unspecific slam against "worn out dogmas."
Nothing is more clear-cut than the chasm separating the Obama-Clinton ideology and programs from Christian faith and tradition and what Pope John Paul II, whose towering bronze image stands beside the Basilica here, called the Culture of Life.
(Mr. Duggan is writing and lecturing in Mexico City this spring.)
Joseph P. Duggan served in the Reagan State Department and as speechwriter to President George H.W. Bush. During the 1970s he was assistant managing editor of The American Spectator.
By Joseph P. Duggan on 3.31.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listens to explanations from the Rector of the Basilica de Guadalupe, Diego Monroy, during a visit to the Basilica in Mexico City, on March 26, 2009. (Getty Images)MEXICO CITY -- Imagine an American Secretary of State one morning praying at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall and the next evening accepting a eugenics award named for Dr. Josef Mengele.
That is an apt analogy to the repugnant juxtaposition of gestures by Hillary Clinton during and following her brief visit to Mexico last week.
Color photographs and loud captions atop page one of the daily El Universal captured the Mexican public's sense of outraged bewilderment at Mrs. Clinton's visit March 26 to the Basilica of Guadalupe, Catholicism's second most visited shrine after St. Peter's in Rome. The Basilica rector, Monsignor Diego Monroy, stands with Mrs. Clinton and shows her the mestiza Madonna whose story is known to every Catholic schoolchild, an image believed to have been imposed miraculously on an Indian's cloak five centuries ago.
HILLARY CLINTON: Who painted it?
MONSIGNOR MONROY: God.
La Guadalupana is the archetypal icon of Latin American Catholicism. Catholics in the United States as well as in the Latin countries today invoke the Virgin of Guadalupe as the special patron of the pro-life movement.
Was Hillary's public diplomacy fiasco a calculated insult addressed to something she regards as a superstition, or simply the unrehearsed utterance of a person so soulless that she cannot fathom believers' sense of mystery?
A clue to the answer came in the traveling diplomat's next stop after Mexico, Houston, where she accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation.
In Houston, Hillary lauded the very evils that pilgrims to Guadalupe pray to overcome: liberalized abortion laws and making United States taxpayers pay for abortions and abortion propaganda in "developing" countries.
Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards, left, gives an award to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Planned Parenthood Gala Friday, March 27, 2009 in Houston. (AP Photo)
The comparison of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Josef Mengele (1911-1979) is not overdrawn. Even a cursory examination of her life's work and pronouncements shows Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, as one of the most strident and inhumane racists of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1932, for example, she wrote an article urging "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring." Eugenics was a fashionable social policy panacea at that time not only in Hitler's Germany, but also among powerful elites in the United States and other Western democracies.
Hillary Clinton provides the latest manifestation of what Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called "the deepest bias in the history of the American people" and "the only remaining acceptable prejudice" -- anti-Catholicism.
Secretary Clinton's words and actions in Mexico and Houston are elaborations of the disconcerting words of President Obama's Inaugural Address, his pledge to "restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs" and his gratuitous, unspecific slam against "worn out dogmas."
Nothing is more clear-cut than the chasm separating the Obama-Clinton ideology and programs from Christian faith and tradition and what Pope John Paul II, whose towering bronze image stands beside the Basilica here, called the Culture of Life.
(Mr. Duggan is writing and lecturing in Mexico City this spring.)
Joseph P. Duggan served in the Reagan State Department and as speechwriter to President George H.W. Bush. During the 1970s he was assistant managing editor of The American Spectator.
In Praise of Capitalist Exploitation
By Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
For well over a century, socialists, progressives, and even many Christians have railed against the capitalist exploitation of workers. They denounce capitalists—whether the Carnegies and Fricks of yesteryear or the Nikes of today—for paying low wages for hard work.
Their antagonism toward individual and corporate targets is misplaced. The inexorable law of supply and demand, not greedy exploiters, determines wages. When the supply of labor exceeds capital’s demand for labor, wages are low. Carnegie could pay low wages because if Smith wasn’t willing to work for a pittance, Jones was. Why? Because those low wages were superior to Jones’ other options. The choice wasn’t between a carefree life in the country and hard labor for low wages. It was between regular income or destitution, misery, and too often an early death. That is why our ancestors took those jobs, and that is why, in poor countries today, when a sweatshop has openings, eager applicants line up for blocks.
The subsistence wages prevalent in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Capitalism impelled the classical economist David Ricardo to posit the “iron law of wages”—the theory that workers were doomed forever to earn subsistence wages. But a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual poverty. Ricardo (and indeed, all his contemporaries) did not foresee the rapid multiplication of wealth that capitalism would generate. Had they lived for another 50 years, they would have seen the law of supply and demand cuts both ways. When capital’s demand for labor exceeds supply, wages rise, which is exactly what happened as more and more capitalists began to “exploit” labor. The same phenomenon has been witnessed in China in this decade (before the recent global economic contraction). Chinese workers, who had been at the mercy of employers, demanded—and got—much better compensation, as employers competed for their labor.
It isn’t the Carnegies’ and Nikes’ fault when wages are low. They aren’t responsible for an area having a large pool of labor, nor are they to blame when there aren’t more capitalists competing to employ those workers. Where wages are low, the cause isn’t the presence of exploitative capitalist employers, but precisely the opposite: there aren’t enough capitalist employers to tilt the law of supply and demand to labor’s advantage.
There are two ways to shift the labor/capital ratio to raise wages—either reduce the supply of labor (after the bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, wages rose smartly for the survivors) or increase capital investment. Some radical environmentalists favor the former, but isn’t peaceful investment preferable to genocide?
According to Marxist-Leninist dogma, capitalists are economic bloodsuckers, enriching themselves while impoverishing their employees. The fallacy in this assertion is evident in the indisputable fact that most of the world’s capital is invested in the rich, developed countries, not in poor countries. It is no coincidence that the United States has both the most invested capital and the most wealth. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel “exploited” or victimized. However, I suspect that millions of people around the world wish they were so exploited.
Critics of sweatshops apply a static rather than dynamic analysis. They take a mental snapshot of a rich company making large profits while paying meager wages. From this picture, anti-capitalist critics perceive sweatshops as the end-result of capital investment. That is an error. Life is a motion picture, not a snapshot. In country after country that has made its peace with profit-seeking capitalists, grim working conditions have been a transitional phenomenon, marking the early stages of a society’s emergence from lethal poverty to improved standards of living and longevity.
Sweatshops comprise the first couple of grim rungs on the ladder of economic development. While no humane person would wish sweatshops to be a permanent condition for a society, neither should any humane person wish to cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic progress and condemn a society to remain permanently poor.
Those who condemn sweatshops categorically for being “harsh” should specify “harsh relative to what?” Harsh by our standards, indeed, but often an improvement over work standards prevalent in those countries and far less harsh than the conditions those workers would face without those jobs. Nike gets bashed for allegedly paying “low wages,” but that is only true by the standards of a developed country. In Vietnam, Nike pays workers twice a teacher’s salary and more than government-employed doctors make; in Honduras, Nike’s starting wage is above the average per capita income, etc., etc.
Over the course of human history, profit-seeking business leaders—scorned as “greedy capitalists”—have done more to preserve human life and lift human beings out of poverty than all the churches, charities, and government welfare programs combined. That isn’t to argue the self-evident absurdity that all capitalists have been decent or well-intentioned individuals; nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that capitalists, as a group, have done far more to benefit the human race than anyone else. It is economic ignorance or, in a minority of cases, warped character, that impels critics to vilify society’s benefactors. These benefactors deserve our gratitude and praise, for without them, there would be a lot fewer people alive today and a lot more poverty.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
For well over a century, socialists, progressives, and even many Christians have railed against the capitalist exploitation of workers. They denounce capitalists—whether the Carnegies and Fricks of yesteryear or the Nikes of today—for paying low wages for hard work.Their antagonism toward individual and corporate targets is misplaced. The inexorable law of supply and demand, not greedy exploiters, determines wages. When the supply of labor exceeds capital’s demand for labor, wages are low. Carnegie could pay low wages because if Smith wasn’t willing to work for a pittance, Jones was. Why? Because those low wages were superior to Jones’ other options. The choice wasn’t between a carefree life in the country and hard labor for low wages. It was between regular income or destitution, misery, and too often an early death. That is why our ancestors took those jobs, and that is why, in poor countries today, when a sweatshop has openings, eager applicants line up for blocks.
The subsistence wages prevalent in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Capitalism impelled the classical economist David Ricardo to posit the “iron law of wages”—the theory that workers were doomed forever to earn subsistence wages. But a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual poverty. Ricardo (and indeed, all his contemporaries) did not foresee the rapid multiplication of wealth that capitalism would generate. Had they lived for another 50 years, they would have seen the law of supply and demand cuts both ways. When capital’s demand for labor exceeds supply, wages rise, which is exactly what happened as more and more capitalists began to “exploit” labor. The same phenomenon has been witnessed in China in this decade (before the recent global economic contraction). Chinese workers, who had been at the mercy of employers, demanded—and got—much better compensation, as employers competed for their labor.
It isn’t the Carnegies’ and Nikes’ fault when wages are low. They aren’t responsible for an area having a large pool of labor, nor are they to blame when there aren’t more capitalists competing to employ those workers. Where wages are low, the cause isn’t the presence of exploitative capitalist employers, but precisely the opposite: there aren’t enough capitalist employers to tilt the law of supply and demand to labor’s advantage.
There are two ways to shift the labor/capital ratio to raise wages—either reduce the supply of labor (after the bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, wages rose smartly for the survivors) or increase capital investment. Some radical environmentalists favor the former, but isn’t peaceful investment preferable to genocide?
According to Marxist-Leninist dogma, capitalists are economic bloodsuckers, enriching themselves while impoverishing their employees. The fallacy in this assertion is evident in the indisputable fact that most of the world’s capital is invested in the rich, developed countries, not in poor countries. It is no coincidence that the United States has both the most invested capital and the most wealth. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel “exploited” or victimized. However, I suspect that millions of people around the world wish they were so exploited.
Critics of sweatshops apply a static rather than dynamic analysis. They take a mental snapshot of a rich company making large profits while paying meager wages. From this picture, anti-capitalist critics perceive sweatshops as the end-result of capital investment. That is an error. Life is a motion picture, not a snapshot. In country after country that has made its peace with profit-seeking capitalists, grim working conditions have been a transitional phenomenon, marking the early stages of a society’s emergence from lethal poverty to improved standards of living and longevity.
Sweatshops comprise the first couple of grim rungs on the ladder of economic development. While no humane person would wish sweatshops to be a permanent condition for a society, neither should any humane person wish to cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic progress and condemn a society to remain permanently poor.
Those who condemn sweatshops categorically for being “harsh” should specify “harsh relative to what?” Harsh by our standards, indeed, but often an improvement over work standards prevalent in those countries and far less harsh than the conditions those workers would face without those jobs. Nike gets bashed for allegedly paying “low wages,” but that is only true by the standards of a developed country. In Vietnam, Nike pays workers twice a teacher’s salary and more than government-employed doctors make; in Honduras, Nike’s starting wage is above the average per capita income, etc., etc.
Over the course of human history, profit-seeking business leaders—scorned as “greedy capitalists”—have done more to preserve human life and lift human beings out of poverty than all the churches, charities, and government welfare programs combined. That isn’t to argue the self-evident absurdity that all capitalists have been decent or well-intentioned individuals; nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that capitalists, as a group, have done far more to benefit the human race than anyone else. It is economic ignorance or, in a minority of cases, warped character, that impels critics to vilify society’s benefactors. These benefactors deserve our gratitude and praise, for without them, there would be a lot fewer people alive today and a lot more poverty.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Doubling Down on the Welfare State
Get ready to pay twice for everything.
by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/06/2009, Volume 014, Issue 28
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.
You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke. How do you know you are a member of the penurious plutocracy? Take this simple test: See if you pay double for everything.
The financial bailout, for example. Pay for it once with your IRA and 401(k) plan investments. Now pay for it again with your tax dollars.
Ditto with the economic stimulus. Write checks to cover your mortgage payment, utilities, insurance premiums, car loan, basic cable, high-speed Internet access, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express bills, and turn your teens loose in the Old Navy store. Think you're done stimulating the economy? I think not. You've also lent President Obama a godzillion dollars to go on an economically stimulational shopping spree of his own. For collateral the Bank of Obama is using a mortgage on that home of yours called America and a lien on all the future earnings of your children.
How about the new car you've paid for with government largesse to GM and Chrysler? They didn't even send a thank you note containing a scratch-and-sniff card with that new car smell. If you want a car that's visible in your driveway, you'll have to--you guessed it--pay double.
Of course paying double for everything didn't start with the Meltdown of '08. It's an integral part of the modern welfare state.
Beginning with welfare. Your tax dollars pay for federal, state, and local welfare programs. Then you pay for your daughter to pursue a career in "holistic dance liberation." You pay for your son's Internet start up idea--"Buttbook," a website where everybody is an enemy. Plus there's your bum of a brother-in-law, drunk in the double-wide, watching Cartoon Network on the widescreen high-definition television you paid for.
Same with schools. Your school taxes pay for Sara Jane Olson Public High School--conveniently right down the street, inconveniently full of methamphetamine and 9mm handguns. So you also pay tuition at Friar Torquemada Parochial High.
At school, home, or work, the most important purpose of government is to protect your person and property. That's what the police department is for. And you get to pay the police and pay for burglar alarms, private security patrols, and guard dogs, such as our family guard dog, Pinky-Wink. (For the information of any prospective robbers of the O'Rourke house, Pinky-Wink isn't really a Mexican Hairless. He's . . . um . . . a Rhodesian Ridgeback, weighing 100 . . . make that 150 . . . pounds. Uh, the kids named him. Stop yapping, Pinky-Wink.)
The second most important purpose of government is trash pickup. Municipal garbage collectors pick up the trash from your house. But not until you've sorted it into its proper recycling bins--which you do by picking up the trash from your house. What you don't pay double for in money you pay double for in time and effort.
But usually it's money. When you pay a hospital bill you're really paying two hospital bills--one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital. Your tennis elbow underwrites the Sara Jane Olson Public High School student's 9mm handgun wound.
And never is paying double as doubly troubling as it is in the matter of retirement. You have to pay into Social Security and into your IRA and your 401(k) plan and put some more money in your savings account too. You have to pay Medicare tax and buy Medicare supplemental insurance and contribute to a medical savings account and make doctor bill co-payments besides. And the funding for Social Security and Medicare is so under-financed and actuarially shaky that you cannot be certain those programs will exist at all by the time you're eligible for them. And you're 64.
Would you like to know what ordinary taxpayers are getting out of this deal? You and me both. How do we benefit from this twinning, this twoing, this duality? Damned if I can figure it out. Barkeep, make that a double.
P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/06/2009, Volume 014, Issue 28
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke. How do you know you are a member of the penurious plutocracy? Take this simple test: See if you pay double for everything.
The financial bailout, for example. Pay for it once with your IRA and 401(k) plan investments. Now pay for it again with your tax dollars.
Ditto with the economic stimulus. Write checks to cover your mortgage payment, utilities, insurance premiums, car loan, basic cable, high-speed Internet access, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express bills, and turn your teens loose in the Old Navy store. Think you're done stimulating the economy? I think not. You've also lent President Obama a godzillion dollars to go on an economically stimulational shopping spree of his own. For collateral the Bank of Obama is using a mortgage on that home of yours called America and a lien on all the future earnings of your children.
How about the new car you've paid for with government largesse to GM and Chrysler? They didn't even send a thank you note containing a scratch-and-sniff card with that new car smell. If you want a car that's visible in your driveway, you'll have to--you guessed it--pay double.
Of course paying double for everything didn't start with the Meltdown of '08. It's an integral part of the modern welfare state.
Beginning with welfare. Your tax dollars pay for federal, state, and local welfare programs. Then you pay for your daughter to pursue a career in "holistic dance liberation." You pay for your son's Internet start up idea--"Buttbook," a website where everybody is an enemy. Plus there's your bum of a brother-in-law, drunk in the double-wide, watching Cartoon Network on the widescreen high-definition television you paid for.
Same with schools. Your school taxes pay for Sara Jane Olson Public High School--conveniently right down the street, inconveniently full of methamphetamine and 9mm handguns. So you also pay tuition at Friar Torquemada Parochial High.
At school, home, or work, the most important purpose of government is to protect your person and property. That's what the police department is for. And you get to pay the police and pay for burglar alarms, private security patrols, and guard dogs, such as our family guard dog, Pinky-Wink. (For the information of any prospective robbers of the O'Rourke house, Pinky-Wink isn't really a Mexican Hairless. He's . . . um . . . a Rhodesian Ridgeback, weighing 100 . . . make that 150 . . . pounds. Uh, the kids named him. Stop yapping, Pinky-Wink.)
The second most important purpose of government is trash pickup. Municipal garbage collectors pick up the trash from your house. But not until you've sorted it into its proper recycling bins--which you do by picking up the trash from your house. What you don't pay double for in money you pay double for in time and effort.
But usually it's money. When you pay a hospital bill you're really paying two hospital bills--one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital. Your tennis elbow underwrites the Sara Jane Olson Public High School student's 9mm handgun wound.
And never is paying double as doubly troubling as it is in the matter of retirement. You have to pay into Social Security and into your IRA and your 401(k) plan and put some more money in your savings account too. You have to pay Medicare tax and buy Medicare supplemental insurance and contribute to a medical savings account and make doctor bill co-payments besides. And the funding for Social Security and Medicare is so under-financed and actuarially shaky that you cannot be certain those programs will exist at all by the time you're eligible for them. And you're 64.
Would you like to know what ordinary taxpayers are getting out of this deal? You and me both. How do we benefit from this twinning, this twoing, this duality? Damned if I can figure it out. Barkeep, make that a double.
P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Film Review: "Gomorrah"
By Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
February 23, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
The first thing you should know about “Gomorrah” is that no fewer than three members of its cast have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities. There could be no more unimpeachable testament, surely, to the integrity of Matteo Garrone’s film, which is about organized crime in Naples. Many of the actors were recruited from the area, presumably on the basis that they already knew the ropes, not to mention the Kalashnikovs.
Salvatore Abruzzese as a boy who gets caught up in the Neapolitan Mafia.
You might say that the project smelled of trouble from the start. It began as a nonfiction book by the journalist Roberto Saviano, published in 2006, entitled “Gomorra”; one letter less gave more weight to the pun, yoking the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, with a place of Biblical folly. The book, which opens with frozen Chinese corpses falling out of a shipping container on an Italian quayside—a small matter of human trafficking gone awry—was so detailed, and so incensed, in exposing the venalities of the Mob that Saviano now lives in hiding, under police protection. It was hard to picture his writhing tales of revenge being unpicked and sorted into cinematic sense, but somehow Garrone, working with a clan of screenwriters (including Saviano), has brought order to the sprawl. Even so, the result demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone’s mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, the author’s courageous toil.
There are five stories, layered and stuck together, raising the possibility that Garrone modelled the whole thing on a lasagna verde. We get them morsel by morsel, and the brisk dicing between them can catch the viewer unprepared. There is Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), age thirteen, who spies a dropped gun in the street, returns it to local thugs, and, in reward, becomes a mini-mule in the drug trade. There is a pair of teen-agers, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), fools in love with a gangsterish ideal; “I’m No. 1! Tony Montana!” they cry, acting out their pantomime of “Scarface” in an empty tenement, where a sunken, unused bath echoes not just old Brian De Palma movies but much older tubs, in the balneae of Pompeii, across the bay. There is Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), whose name hints at potency, but who is, in fact, a frightened hireling in a cheap blouson, distributing cash to those families who exist on the say-so of the Camorra. There is Franco (Toni Servillo), the most accomplished gentleman on view, and the one most at ease with evil; aided by a reluctant sidekick, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), he arranges for the disposal of industrial waste. That sounds like a filmmaker’s convenient symbol, but, if you live in certain parts of southern Italy, the poisoning of the land is right in front of your nose, and under your skin.
Last, and best, of the central figures is Pasquale, played by Salvatore Canta-lupo. (Has any bunch of actors had better names?) Pasquale is a Thurberish drone, keeping his head down but unable to stop lifting up his eyes to resplendent things. He is a tailor, working his fingers off in the service of couture, or, rather, of its speedy, backroom simulacrum. In a bid to earn more, he accepts a secret offer to tutor Chinese immigrants in his delicate art, and what follows is a touching nocturnal farce. Bundled into the trunk of a car, he arrives not at some dripping sweatshop but at a spotless workplace, lined with eager apprentices who applaud his entrance as though he had come to conduct them: “They called me Maestro!” he whispers to his wife, creeping back at dawn. Moments like this achieve what so few American movies seem to be doing just now: they take on a big subject, unwieldy and unglamorous—in this case, the illegal economies that thrive under globalization, and on which we unwittingly feed—and dig out from it a cluster of private dramas that are highly specific (some Italian audiences required subtitles for “Gomorrah,” so parochial is the Neapolitan dialect), and yet which could, you feel, find an answering gleam almost anywhere on the planet. Toward the close, at a truck stop, Pasquale glances at a TV and sees a clip of a radiant Scarlett Johansson parading at a movie première, wearing a dress that he himself ran up at cut price, or perhaps its costlier identical twin; the expression on the tailor’s face is, you might say, his final master class, proving the beauty of ruefulness.
But then “Gomorrah” is a beautiful movie. That may sound perverse, given its welter of drive-by shootings and toxic dumps, but what is most impressive about Garrone is his refusal to let his style be bulldozed by the runaway violence of his subject. This is organized crime. Not for him the panicky, catch-me-if-you-can approach of a film like “City of God”—or, indeed, like “Slumdog Millionaire,” which next to “Gomorrah” seems like an adventure vacation. The mobsters may be trigger-frenzied, but the movie takes constant care, with a kind of appalled wonder, to survey the arenas of their mayhem. Don Ciro does the rounds of Scampia, a northern suburb of Naples, where people live and die in tower blocks that look like ruined ziggurats. Most of the camerawork is handheld, but now and then we pull back for a lofted view: a panorama as unruffled as an Andreas Gursky photograph. Meanwhile, Totò and other kids, in some murky shell of a building, take turns to strap on a makeshift bulletproof vest, get shot in the chest, struggle to their feet, and thereby prove themselves as men-in-waiting; as each vanishes into the gloom to receive his blow, we could be watching a parable of the ancient underworld. Few recent films have been as timely as “Gomorrah,” yet time itself seems to melt around the action; when an ambushed car crashes into an array of mock-classical statuary, you think, Is that the fate of the Roman past? To be cracked into plaster dust by the antics of modern hoodlums?
Garrone’s film is less furious than Saviano’s book, which has the tang of personal nausea, and for that reason, I suspect, it will prove more enduring. (It failed to make the nominations for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards: the usual travesty.) As I watched various Scampians being slain or spared on a whim, I felt borne along not so much by reportage, however well dramatized, as by a fierce meditation on the vagaries of fate—and thus, oddly enough, by the pull of comedy. When Franco, in a cathedral-size quarry, needs a new set of truck drivers to shift his drums of corrosive chemicals, whom does he call? Local children, who perch on cushions to see through the windshield; in a way, they make better mafiosi than the adults, yielding with less caution and complaint to their instinctual urges. There is a terrible numbness to the grownups, spun in the endless cycle of revenge; “We don’t know anything” is the conclusion of one group, which agrees to press ahead with murder, for want of another plan. I’m not sure that, after this movie, I will be able to take quite such unquestioning pleasure in the suave, all-knowing dons of the “Godfather” trilogy, let alone the stylized brutality of “Scarface”; the spoiled earth of “Gomorrah” is the ground zero of Mob cinema, burning away the sleekness and self-congratulation of the genre. The movie ends on a beach, every bit as haunting as those deserted strands unveiled by Antonioni in “The Girlfriends” and “Beyond the Clouds.” We could, in short, be watching the loveliest of art-house films, were it not for the dead bodies being scooped off the sand by a digger. When human beings become flotsam, all that art can do is stand and look.
The New Yorker
February 23, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
The first thing you should know about “Gomorrah” is that no fewer than three members of its cast have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities. There could be no more unimpeachable testament, surely, to the integrity of Matteo Garrone’s film, which is about organized crime in Naples. Many of the actors were recruited from the area, presumably on the basis that they already knew the ropes, not to mention the Kalashnikovs.
Salvatore Abruzzese as a boy who gets caught up in the Neapolitan Mafia.
You might say that the project smelled of trouble from the start. It began as a nonfiction book by the journalist Roberto Saviano, published in 2006, entitled “Gomorra”; one letter less gave more weight to the pun, yoking the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, with a place of Biblical folly. The book, which opens with frozen Chinese corpses falling out of a shipping container on an Italian quayside—a small matter of human trafficking gone awry—was so detailed, and so incensed, in exposing the venalities of the Mob that Saviano now lives in hiding, under police protection. It was hard to picture his writhing tales of revenge being unpicked and sorted into cinematic sense, but somehow Garrone, working with a clan of screenwriters (including Saviano), has brought order to the sprawl. Even so, the result demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone’s mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, the author’s courageous toil.
There are five stories, layered and stuck together, raising the possibility that Garrone modelled the whole thing on a lasagna verde. We get them morsel by morsel, and the brisk dicing between them can catch the viewer unprepared. There is Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), age thirteen, who spies a dropped gun in the street, returns it to local thugs, and, in reward, becomes a mini-mule in the drug trade. There is a pair of teen-agers, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), fools in love with a gangsterish ideal; “I’m No. 1! Tony Montana!” they cry, acting out their pantomime of “Scarface” in an empty tenement, where a sunken, unused bath echoes not just old Brian De Palma movies but much older tubs, in the balneae of Pompeii, across the bay. There is Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), whose name hints at potency, but who is, in fact, a frightened hireling in a cheap blouson, distributing cash to those families who exist on the say-so of the Camorra. There is Franco (Toni Servillo), the most accomplished gentleman on view, and the one most at ease with evil; aided by a reluctant sidekick, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), he arranges for the disposal of industrial waste. That sounds like a filmmaker’s convenient symbol, but, if you live in certain parts of southern Italy, the poisoning of the land is right in front of your nose, and under your skin.
Last, and best, of the central figures is Pasquale, played by Salvatore Canta-lupo. (Has any bunch of actors had better names?) Pasquale is a Thurberish drone, keeping his head down but unable to stop lifting up his eyes to resplendent things. He is a tailor, working his fingers off in the service of couture, or, rather, of its speedy, backroom simulacrum. In a bid to earn more, he accepts a secret offer to tutor Chinese immigrants in his delicate art, and what follows is a touching nocturnal farce. Bundled into the trunk of a car, he arrives not at some dripping sweatshop but at a spotless workplace, lined with eager apprentices who applaud his entrance as though he had come to conduct them: “They called me Maestro!” he whispers to his wife, creeping back at dawn. Moments like this achieve what so few American movies seem to be doing just now: they take on a big subject, unwieldy and unglamorous—in this case, the illegal economies that thrive under globalization, and on which we unwittingly feed—and dig out from it a cluster of private dramas that are highly specific (some Italian audiences required subtitles for “Gomorrah,” so parochial is the Neapolitan dialect), and yet which could, you feel, find an answering gleam almost anywhere on the planet. Toward the close, at a truck stop, Pasquale glances at a TV and sees a clip of a radiant Scarlett Johansson parading at a movie première, wearing a dress that he himself ran up at cut price, or perhaps its costlier identical twin; the expression on the tailor’s face is, you might say, his final master class, proving the beauty of ruefulness.
But then “Gomorrah” is a beautiful movie. That may sound perverse, given its welter of drive-by shootings and toxic dumps, but what is most impressive about Garrone is his refusal to let his style be bulldozed by the runaway violence of his subject. This is organized crime. Not for him the panicky, catch-me-if-you-can approach of a film like “City of God”—or, indeed, like “Slumdog Millionaire,” which next to “Gomorrah” seems like an adventure vacation. The mobsters may be trigger-frenzied, but the movie takes constant care, with a kind of appalled wonder, to survey the arenas of their mayhem. Don Ciro does the rounds of Scampia, a northern suburb of Naples, where people live and die in tower blocks that look like ruined ziggurats. Most of the camerawork is handheld, but now and then we pull back for a lofted view: a panorama as unruffled as an Andreas Gursky photograph. Meanwhile, Totò and other kids, in some murky shell of a building, take turns to strap on a makeshift bulletproof vest, get shot in the chest, struggle to their feet, and thereby prove themselves as men-in-waiting; as each vanishes into the gloom to receive his blow, we could be watching a parable of the ancient underworld. Few recent films have been as timely as “Gomorrah,” yet time itself seems to melt around the action; when an ambushed car crashes into an array of mock-classical statuary, you think, Is that the fate of the Roman past? To be cracked into plaster dust by the antics of modern hoodlums?Garrone’s film is less furious than Saviano’s book, which has the tang of personal nausea, and for that reason, I suspect, it will prove more enduring. (It failed to make the nominations for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards: the usual travesty.) As I watched various Scampians being slain or spared on a whim, I felt borne along not so much by reportage, however well dramatized, as by a fierce meditation on the vagaries of fate—and thus, oddly enough, by the pull of comedy. When Franco, in a cathedral-size quarry, needs a new set of truck drivers to shift his drums of corrosive chemicals, whom does he call? Local children, who perch on cushions to see through the windshield; in a way, they make better mafiosi than the adults, yielding with less caution and complaint to their instinctual urges. There is a terrible numbness to the grownups, spun in the endless cycle of revenge; “We don’t know anything” is the conclusion of one group, which agrees to press ahead with murder, for want of another plan. I’m not sure that, after this movie, I will be able to take quite such unquestioning pleasure in the suave, all-knowing dons of the “Godfather” trilogy, let alone the stylized brutality of “Scarface”; the spoiled earth of “Gomorrah” is the ground zero of Mob cinema, burning away the sleekness and self-congratulation of the genre. The movie ends on a beach, every bit as haunting as those deserted strands unveiled by Antonioni in “The Girlfriends” and “Beyond the Clouds.” We could, in short, be watching the loveliest of art-house films, were it not for the dead bodies being scooped off the sand by a digger. When human beings become flotsam, all that art can do is stand and look.
The Longest Run
An old band whose new songs always get the most applause.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
The New Yorker
April 6, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
While most rock bands flirt with the allure of destruction and the charms of sin, U2 has kept its eye on that corniest of feelings: uplift.
In thirty-three years of existence, U2 has sold more than a hundred and forty million albums. Its “Vertigo” tour made $389 million, second only to the Rolling Stones for a single-tour gross. In 2005, I saw the band on that tour, at Madison Square Garden. Its mastery of rock theatre was obvious. A simple but gorgeous stage set flanked the performers with big curtains of circular pendants that formed an illuminated screen. Even better, the stage flared into a big oval walkway limned with red lights that lit up as Bono ventured out along the loop, which gave the impression that he was on the rim of a volcano (without doing anything so crass as employing a mechanical volcano). Bono can stalk a sports arena like nobody else, shrinking the space by pulling you into the struggle he’s engaged in while emphasizing how big the room is by throwing back his head and hollering to the rafters.
The bit that distracted me from the triumphant performance was the moment the band began to play “City of Blinding Lights,” from “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” The crowd went berserk, as it had been doing fairly consistently all night. (Many big arena shows hit a perceptible longueur somewhere around Hour 2, but U2’s don’t.) The audience was going perceptibly more berserk for this particular song. I realized that I was hearing, for the third or fourth time, the evening’s loudest applause for a recent single. When the band played the first U2 song I ever encountered, 1980’s “I Will Follow,” the crowd seemed fairly happy, though in a slightly polite way. (This is the inverse of the “Satisfaction” effect, easily witnessed at any Stones show.) What other band, three decades into the game, gets its most intense audience reaction with new songs? There is no need to stage a legend Olympics between U2 and AC/DC and the Eagles and the Allman Brothers and the Stones—plenty of bands are holding up well into their rock-and-roll winter. But the only band of this vintage consistently generating new hits that bring in a younger crop of fans every five years is U2. What U2 song do my pre-teen sons know? “Vertigo,” from 2004.
The band’s first (but not its sole) legacy is its sound, easily identified within a few bars: a high, chiming guitar figure, usually simple in structure but fleshed out by the ringing of open strings and the doubling effect of a delay unit; a charging, near-military beat and bass line stretched out with a little extra swing; and singing that is defiant and loud and slightly weird. Yes, the band’s most famous member is the least technically gifted, and the most influential, the guitarist David Evans, a.k.a. the Edge, is the least likely to pipe up in public. (Today, so many bands sneak little Edge motifs into their music that you can’t keep count of the citations; it happens practically any time a guitarist goes high up on the neck and turns a brief ad-lib into the core of a song.)
For all his limitations—he’s one of the last vocalists you can imagine making a solo record—Bono is the only singer who could possibly make U2’s music succeed. The band has done relatively few cover versions, a tacit acknowledgment that its gift is peculiar and limited, despite its potency. Bono’s voice can sound strained fairly quickly and isn’t in the same league of instruments as that of Michael Stipe or Robert Plant, men with rich, deeply textured voices. Bono’s gift is the ability to sound utterly immersed in and committed to whatever his band is proposing. He backs down from nothing that the band starts. That is how the band has held its place while teetering for decades on the cusp between self-righteous (perhaps the most common insult hurled at it, and at Bono) and euphoric.
The twelfth, and newest, studio album, “No Line on the Horizon,” is something of an impromptu class reunion; U2’s first three albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite, who ended up co-producing this album, joining in about a year into the process. The core of the album was produced and co-written with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who have been working with the band since “The Unforgettable Fire,” in 1984. After accepting an invitation to attend a festival of sacred music in Morocco, Bono asked the band and Eno and Lanois to come along and begin working together. The six-piece version of the band set up a studio in the open-air courtyard of a building in Fez, and began recording. Eighteen months later, after more recording and mixing in Dublin, London, and New York, the album was finally finished.
It’s not surprising, then, that “No Line” is an album with no single sound or unifying theme. And, to a certain chunk of their fan base, the band’s exploratory urges are what you sit through to get to the barn-burning songs like “Beautiful Day” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Vertigo.” But, in collaboration with Lanois and Eno, U2 has created its consistent brand of big hurrahs while also enthusiastically goofing around. Some of the band’s biggest and best numbers have nothing to do with the flag-waving, wall-levelling part of its sound. In a U.K. poll conducted several years ago, the band’s slower, spiritual song “One,” which is so basic it sounds almost like a traditional ballad, was voted the greatest song ever recorded. It isn’t, but it’s a model of simplicity and unfussy positivity, which is the band’s real signature. Partisans credit Bono’s Christianity, though that doesn’t account for the way the band—and it plays very much as a band—manages to make both the hurrahs and the goofs sound like moral victories, even if the song is about a town where the streets have no name. While almost every rock band flirts with the allure of destruction and the charms of sin, U2 has kept its eye on that corniest of feelings: uplift.
You’d have to be somewhat Grinchy to resist the optimism at the heart of even a wobbly U2 album like “No Line on the Horizon.” The first single, “Get On Your Boots,” is a sort of adorable blunder. The fun parts are the fairly obvious main riff, which could have been lifted from any blues-rock band in the seventies, and a gauzy, psychedelic chorus that could have been stolen from any of the band’s eighties contemporaries. (Siouxsie and the Banshees come to mind.) The rest of the song is Bono speed-reading a mishmash of lyrics to the cadence of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” What is it all about? Perhaps just sexy boots? Fine—it will fit in nicely between two slower numbers.
Many of the missteps on “No Line” can be attributed to odd choices of lyrics. “Unknown Caller” is in the mode of U2’s more hushed work, like “The Joshua Tree,” with Bono inching into a more restricted, less chest-beating style. Then, perhaps at the urging of Eno, who is credited with co-writing the song’s lyrics, the band starts to chant phrases from digital life, all together: “Force quit! And move to trash! . . . Password! You enter here!” It has the unfortunate feeling of Dad forwarding a page of e-mail jokes. (Yes, Dad, those are all computer words. Yes, I had seen them before, but I really liked reading them again.)
The pleasure of “No Line” is the richness of the stuff itself. The rock-solid “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” from 2000, felt like a greatest-hits album before the fact, focussed on songs that wasted no moves and kept close to the tracks. “No Line on the Horizon” has both the what-the-hell feeling of the nineties albums that channelled bits and pieces of dance music and the meditative, warm sound of the late-eighties albums that made U2 enormous in the first place. Only a few songs feel like future hits.
The title track is a wonderfully rowdy combination of Larry Mullen’s drumming, as looped by Eno, and cascading guitars and piano that set up a sneaky, low chorus that inverts the U2 buildup, leaving the verse as the mightier of the two parts. “White as Snow” is a gentle, modest gem that sets the imagined thoughts of a dying soldier to a variation of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and “Moment of Surrender” is Bono in the emotional moment that is genuinely his now: scrabbling after some kind of clarity with enough determination to keep going for hours, though you know he’ll stop before it goes on too long. (Seven minutes, however, is pretty long for recent U2.) “No Line” works precisely because it doesn’t try too hard to add to the band’s pile of epic moments. This album is a long dinner with old friends, all of whom love each other, most of whom are born talkers, and some of whom hold the floor for too long. Not every anecdote holds up, and some of the food belongs, untouched, on the edge of your plate. But it would be small-minded to leave before the whole warm, rambling night is over.
PHOTOGRAPH: DYLAN MARTINEZ/REUTERS/LANDOV
by Sasha Frere-Jones
The New Yorker
April 6, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
While most rock bands flirt with the allure of destruction and the charms of sin, U2 has kept its eye on that corniest of feelings: uplift.In thirty-three years of existence, U2 has sold more than a hundred and forty million albums. Its “Vertigo” tour made $389 million, second only to the Rolling Stones for a single-tour gross. In 2005, I saw the band on that tour, at Madison Square Garden. Its mastery of rock theatre was obvious. A simple but gorgeous stage set flanked the performers with big curtains of circular pendants that formed an illuminated screen. Even better, the stage flared into a big oval walkway limned with red lights that lit up as Bono ventured out along the loop, which gave the impression that he was on the rim of a volcano (without doing anything so crass as employing a mechanical volcano). Bono can stalk a sports arena like nobody else, shrinking the space by pulling you into the struggle he’s engaged in while emphasizing how big the room is by throwing back his head and hollering to the rafters.
The bit that distracted me from the triumphant performance was the moment the band began to play “City of Blinding Lights,” from “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” The crowd went berserk, as it had been doing fairly consistently all night. (Many big arena shows hit a perceptible longueur somewhere around Hour 2, but U2’s don’t.) The audience was going perceptibly more berserk for this particular song. I realized that I was hearing, for the third or fourth time, the evening’s loudest applause for a recent single. When the band played the first U2 song I ever encountered, 1980’s “I Will Follow,” the crowd seemed fairly happy, though in a slightly polite way. (This is the inverse of the “Satisfaction” effect, easily witnessed at any Stones show.) What other band, three decades into the game, gets its most intense audience reaction with new songs? There is no need to stage a legend Olympics between U2 and AC/DC and the Eagles and the Allman Brothers and the Stones—plenty of bands are holding up well into their rock-and-roll winter. But the only band of this vintage consistently generating new hits that bring in a younger crop of fans every five years is U2. What U2 song do my pre-teen sons know? “Vertigo,” from 2004.
The band’s first (but not its sole) legacy is its sound, easily identified within a few bars: a high, chiming guitar figure, usually simple in structure but fleshed out by the ringing of open strings and the doubling effect of a delay unit; a charging, near-military beat and bass line stretched out with a little extra swing; and singing that is defiant and loud and slightly weird. Yes, the band’s most famous member is the least technically gifted, and the most influential, the guitarist David Evans, a.k.a. the Edge, is the least likely to pipe up in public. (Today, so many bands sneak little Edge motifs into their music that you can’t keep count of the citations; it happens practically any time a guitarist goes high up on the neck and turns a brief ad-lib into the core of a song.)
For all his limitations—he’s one of the last vocalists you can imagine making a solo record—Bono is the only singer who could possibly make U2’s music succeed. The band has done relatively few cover versions, a tacit acknowledgment that its gift is peculiar and limited, despite its potency. Bono’s voice can sound strained fairly quickly and isn’t in the same league of instruments as that of Michael Stipe or Robert Plant, men with rich, deeply textured voices. Bono’s gift is the ability to sound utterly immersed in and committed to whatever his band is proposing. He backs down from nothing that the band starts. That is how the band has held its place while teetering for decades on the cusp between self-righteous (perhaps the most common insult hurled at it, and at Bono) and euphoric.
The twelfth, and newest, studio album, “No Line on the Horizon,” is something of an impromptu class reunion; U2’s first three albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite, who ended up co-producing this album, joining in about a year into the process. The core of the album was produced and co-written with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who have been working with the band since “The Unforgettable Fire,” in 1984. After accepting an invitation to attend a festival of sacred music in Morocco, Bono asked the band and Eno and Lanois to come along and begin working together. The six-piece version of the band set up a studio in the open-air courtyard of a building in Fez, and began recording. Eighteen months later, after more recording and mixing in Dublin, London, and New York, the album was finally finished.
It’s not surprising, then, that “No Line” is an album with no single sound or unifying theme. And, to a certain chunk of their fan base, the band’s exploratory urges are what you sit through to get to the barn-burning songs like “Beautiful Day” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Vertigo.” But, in collaboration with Lanois and Eno, U2 has created its consistent brand of big hurrahs while also enthusiastically goofing around. Some of the band’s biggest and best numbers have nothing to do with the flag-waving, wall-levelling part of its sound. In a U.K. poll conducted several years ago, the band’s slower, spiritual song “One,” which is so basic it sounds almost like a traditional ballad, was voted the greatest song ever recorded. It isn’t, but it’s a model of simplicity and unfussy positivity, which is the band’s real signature. Partisans credit Bono’s Christianity, though that doesn’t account for the way the band—and it plays very much as a band—manages to make both the hurrahs and the goofs sound like moral victories, even if the song is about a town where the streets have no name. While almost every rock band flirts with the allure of destruction and the charms of sin, U2 has kept its eye on that corniest of feelings: uplift.
You’d have to be somewhat Grinchy to resist the optimism at the heart of even a wobbly U2 album like “No Line on the Horizon.” The first single, “Get On Your Boots,” is a sort of adorable blunder. The fun parts are the fairly obvious main riff, which could have been lifted from any blues-rock band in the seventies, and a gauzy, psychedelic chorus that could have been stolen from any of the band’s eighties contemporaries. (Siouxsie and the Banshees come to mind.) The rest of the song is Bono speed-reading a mishmash of lyrics to the cadence of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” What is it all about? Perhaps just sexy boots? Fine—it will fit in nicely between two slower numbers.
Many of the missteps on “No Line” can be attributed to odd choices of lyrics. “Unknown Caller” is in the mode of U2’s more hushed work, like “The Joshua Tree,” with Bono inching into a more restricted, less chest-beating style. Then, perhaps at the urging of Eno, who is credited with co-writing the song’s lyrics, the band starts to chant phrases from digital life, all together: “Force quit! And move to trash! . . . Password! You enter here!” It has the unfortunate feeling of Dad forwarding a page of e-mail jokes. (Yes, Dad, those are all computer words. Yes, I had seen them before, but I really liked reading them again.)
The pleasure of “No Line” is the richness of the stuff itself. The rock-solid “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” from 2000, felt like a greatest-hits album before the fact, focussed on songs that wasted no moves and kept close to the tracks. “No Line on the Horizon” has both the what-the-hell feeling of the nineties albums that channelled bits and pieces of dance music and the meditative, warm sound of the late-eighties albums that made U2 enormous in the first place. Only a few songs feel like future hits.
The title track is a wonderfully rowdy combination of Larry Mullen’s drumming, as looped by Eno, and cascading guitars and piano that set up a sneaky, low chorus that inverts the U2 buildup, leaving the verse as the mightier of the two parts. “White as Snow” is a gentle, modest gem that sets the imagined thoughts of a dying soldier to a variation of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and “Moment of Surrender” is Bono in the emotional moment that is genuinely his now: scrabbling after some kind of clarity with enough determination to keep going for hours, though you know he’ll stop before it goes on too long. (Seven minutes, however, is pretty long for recent U2.) “No Line” works precisely because it doesn’t try too hard to add to the band’s pile of epic moments. This album is a long dinner with old friends, all of whom love each other, most of whom are born talkers, and some of whom hold the floor for too long. Not every anecdote holds up, and some of the food belongs, untouched, on the edge of your plate. But it would be small-minded to leave before the whole warm, rambling night is over.
PHOTOGRAPH: DYLAN MARTINEZ/REUTERS/LANDOV
Ike and Israel: The Apogee of Neutrality
By Jason Maoz, Senior Editor
The Jewish Press
Posted Mar 25 2009
http://www.jewishpress.com/
Much has been written in recent weeks of the Obama administration's possible tilt toward a more evenhanded U.S. Middle East policy. Contrary to popular perception, however, if such a change were indeed implemented, it would constitute not so much a new and revolutionary approach as it would an old and reactionary one.
It would, in fact, be several giant steps backward to the approach pursued by the U.S. for the first decade and a half of Israel's existence, never more faithfully than during the eight-year tenure of Dwight Eisenhower, who died 40 years ago this week at the age of 78.
Everyone, as the popular slogan went, liked Ike - everyone, that is, but the majority of American Jews, who in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 overwhelmingly preferred his Democratic opponent, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.
President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles (1956)
To all outward appearances, Eisenhower was the personification of the typical American at mid-century: a non-ideological moderate uncomfortable with extreme partisans of any ideology; a genial sort whose greatest concerns centered on improving his golf score and reeling in a really big fish.
That might have been the Eisenhower image, but it belied a shrewd political mind and a stubborn streak that vexed friend and foe alike. As would be true of Ronald Reagan three decades later, Eisenhower was often slighted for being nothing more than a jocular pitchman whose aides saw to the serious side of government. Disdain for Ike was a fact of life in academic and literary circles during his presidency and for years after he left office.
Gradually, historians began to develop a new appreciation for Eisenhower. Nostalgia for a more innocent time in America, even among cynical intellectuals, may have contributed to this changed perception. But what really opened eyes in the mid- and late-1970s was the declassification of Eisenhower-era government documents.
Scholars discovered that Ike had been the master of what the historian Fred Greenstein dubbed the "hidden-hand presidency"; that behind the smiling, grandfatherly exterior there lived a highly-competent chief executive who was indeed his administration's ultimate decision-maker.
It follows, then, that the Eisenhower administration's attitude toward Israel - one that can only be described as irritable ambivalence straining for proper cordiality - must have come directly from the man at the top.
* * *
Eisenhower remarked on more than one occasion that, had he been president in the late 1940s, he would not have supported the creation of Israel. He added, however, that since the Jewish state was now a reality, he wished it well. And though it is impossible in all fairness to question the sincerity behind the latter sentiment, the record of the Eisenhower administration toward Israel does at least call it into question.
In the summer of 1952, Senator Richard Nixon, whom presidential candidate Eisenhower had just chosen as his running mate, was only too prescient when he remarked to some friends active in Jewish organizational life that in the event of an Eisenhower victory in November, it would be a mistake to expect Ike's likely secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to be friendly toward Israel.
Dulles (who would serve as Eisenhower's secretary of state from 1953 until his death in 1959) and his brother Allen (who headed the CIA during the same period) were pillars of the American foreign policy establishment, a rarefied club of well-born WASPs who moved in the kind of circles where the mere sighting of a Jew was an unusual occurrence.
Reports through the years about the extent of their anti-Semitism have often been unreliable, with some of the more negative stories coming from anonymous or questionable sources. But one can say with a reasonable amount of certitude that the welfare of the Jewish people was not something to which the Dulles brothers devoted a great deal of thought.
As for Eisenhower, no serious allegation of personal anti-Semitism has ever been leveled against him. Though he was not known to have had any close Jewish friends - growing up in Abilene, Kansas, he certainly had no contact with Jews in his formative years - he was not a man given to trafficking in casual ethnic or religious slurs.
Eisenhower was genuinely horrified by what he saw when Allied troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps. "The visual evidence of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering," he said about one such camp. "I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.' "
Long after the war he reminisced about his standard procedure in those days for dealing with officers who made anti-Jewish remarks: The offending individual would be sent on a detailed tour of Dachau or Auschwitz - "and that," said Eisenhower, "would cure him."
* * *
Relations between the Eisenhower administration and Israel got off on the wrong foot soon after Ike assumed the presidency in January 1953. That summer, Israel undertook an ambitious effort to divert water from the Jordan River to irrigate the arid Negev. The project was loudly denounced by Jordan and Syria as an act of thievery that would cost them their share of the river's water.
The United Nations, with the U.S. in full agreement, demanded an immediate halt to the project. The Israeli government refused, and the tone in U.S.-Israel relations was set for the next eight years. The Eisenhower administration, from that early skirmish on, viewed Israel as an unpredictable nuisance at best, a threat to the region's stability at worst.
It was a negative assessment that would be reinforced in the midst of the Jordan River controversy as Israel stumbled into a public relations disaster entirely of its own making.
Incursions into Israel by Arab saboteurs had been going on for several years, and retaliation by the Israeli army was a given. Because these attacks and counterattacks were relatively small-scale operations, carried out not in Israel's cities but in and around the country's borders, they hardly drew the attention of the outside world. That would all change with what happened in an Arab village called Qibya.
In October 1953, a unit of Israeli commandos, under the leadership of a young colonel named Ariel Sharon, crossed over the border into Jordan after Arab terrorists killed an Israeli mother and her two young children. In Qibya, which had been a base for terrorists preparing attacks against Israel, Sharon's men blew up a number of buildings thought to be empty. When it was over and dozens of civilians were found dead in their demolished homes (hundreds of other residents had been allowed to leave the area), international condemnation quickly rained down on Israel. Even the country's staunchest defenders found it difficult to explain away the tragedy.
Rather than leave bad enough alone, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "instructed Ambassador [Abba] Eban to tell Washington and the UN that the raiders had not been Israeli soldiers but enraged farmers and settlers."
The story was too obvious a concoction. "No one," write Raviv and Melman, "believed that tale, and it only fueled the Eisenhower administration's anger."
The deadly violence in Qibya and the clumsy attempt at deflecting blame, following so closely on the heels of the water diversion dispute, led to the first-ever suspension of U.S. financial aid to Israel. Feeling the pinch, Ben-Gurion finally agreed to put a stop to the water project, and the aid was restored.
Relations between the two countries would be distant though not particularly unfriendly for the next few years, with Washington's attention focused on winning the support of the Arab world in the global fight against Communism.
The Eisenhower administration's main foreign-policy objective was the containment of Soviet expansionism, which in the Middle East meant keeping the Russians away from the oil resources so critical to the West.
For much of Ike's first term the U.S. attempted, with mixed results, to create coalitions of like-minded nations in regions deemed geographically and politically strategic. The linchpin of any such regional alliance in the Middle East was Egypt, and the Americans went out of their way to solicit the affections of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
But Nasser played hard to get, tacking pro-U.S. one day and pro-Soviet the next. Eisenhower, tiring of Nasser's penchant for playing off East against West, decided in early 1955 to back the formation of the Baghdad Pact - a defensive alliance comprised of Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. Nasser countered by entering into a large arms deal with Czechoslovakia, and the Communists had their first real link with the Arab world.
By flirting with Nasser while naively underestimating his determination to restore Egyptian pride and Arab unity, the U.S. had made a terrible miscalculation.
* * *
On the home front, the Middle East receded from the headlines in the mid-1950s. Americans, when not distracted by the new plaything called television, were focused on the ongoing dramatics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who since 1950 had been mesmerizing the country with charges of Communist subversion in high places.
McCarthy wasn't entirely wrong, but he was a blustery, boozy opportunist prone to exaggeration, and as such was an unfortunate spokesman for the anti-Communist cause.
One thing McCarthy apparently was not, though some of his enemies tried to portray him as one, was an anti-Semite. As historian David Oshinsky notes in A Conspiracy So Immense, "[McCarthy] never engaged in anti-Semitic diatribes or made the loaded connection between Jews and left-wing radicalism. Despite the unrelenting hostility of organized Jewry to his crusade, McCarthy still praised the state of Israel [and] condemned the Soviet persecution of Jews. "
"[T]he McCarthyites," concurs Benjamin Ginsberg in The Fatal Embrace, his study of the historical relationship between Jews and government, "had no use for anti-Semitism as a political weapon. Indeed, several of McCarthy's most important aides ... were themselves Jews."
The fact, however, that Jews were over-represented in radical and Communist circles was an uncomfortable reality in 1950s America. Though no anti-Semitic backlash materialized in reaction to the trial and execution of the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or to the preponderance of Jews called to testify at hearings conducted in Washington by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), many Jews still worried that they were considered less than loyal by non-Jewish Americans - a fear that couldn't help but contribute to a reticence among Jewish groups in confronting the Eisenhower administration over its Mideast policies.
* * *
Eisenhower vowed that his approach to the Middle East would never be dictated by political pressure, which was a polite way of saying he wasn't about to be influenced by the Jews (or, as he so euphemistically put it in his diary, "our citizens of the Eastern seaboard emotionally involved in the Zionist cause").
Unlike Truman in 1948, Ike in 1952 had not needed Jewish votes and knew he would not need them in 1956. He was not shy about pointing to that domestic political reality when Republicans would voice concern about his handling of Israel.
Eisenhower's disregard for domestic politics was more than evident in October 1956, just a month before the presidential election. Egypt's Nasser, in response to the retraction by the United State of an offer to refinance work on the Aswan Dam, had nationalized the Suez Canal Company, which was under British and French ownership. The prime ministers of Britain and France hatched a complicated plan to retake control of the canal by force and somehow convinced Ben-Gurion to have Israel join in.
The operation was doomed from the start. Each of the countries involved had its own motives; the coordination of the actual attack was bungled every which way; and the Soviets threatened to take military action in defense of Egypt while the Americans, furious at Britain, France and Israel, remained silent in the face of Russia's threats.
The Israelis, for their part, had managed to capture the entire Sinai, and enormous pressure was now brought to bear on them to withdraw. Ben-Gurion refused at first, but Eisenhower, who felt Israel had launched an unprovoked attack on Egypt simply because Britain and France were providing a convenient cover, wouldn't stand for it.
The U.S. suspended all financial and technical aid to Israel, and when Ben-Gurion still balked at withdrawing, the administration let it be known it was ready to support a United Nations plan for sweeping sanctions that would cripple Israel's economy in a matter of weeks. There was also talk of ending the tax-deductible status of charitable contributions to Israel by American Jews.
Ben-Gurion finally buckled, and on March 1, 1957, four months after the ill-conceived and short-lived Franco-British-Israeli alliance, the official announcement was made that Israeli troops would leave the Sinai.
(In 1965 Eisenhower would admit to Jewish organizational leader and Republican fundraiser Max Fisher that he had come to "regret what I did. I should never have pressured Israel to vacate the Sinai.")
Secretary of State Dulles boasted that most Americans supported the Eisenhower policy, adding: "I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to have a foreign policy not approved by the Jews. I am going to try to have one."
It should be noted that those remarks were made at a time when Israel was receiving from Washington a relatively small amount of financial assistance and no military aid at all; a time when Israel existed behind the precarious 1949 armistice lines and Jordan and Egypt controlled, respectively, the West Bank and Gaza; a time when Jewish organizations were keeping a considerably lower profile than would be the case years later (AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations were formed in the mid-1950s, AIPAC to better present Israel's case to U.S. lawmakers, the Presidents Conference to give the Jewish community a more unified voice).
* * *
The final years of Eisenhower's second term were relatively quiet with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Relations between the U.S. and Israel, which had come close to unraveling in late 1956 and early 1957, gradually returned to where they were pre-Suez, which is to say not particularly close but relatively free of tension and mutual mistrust.
There would be better times ahead in the U.S.-Israel relationship, but it would be years before the two countries could, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as actual friends rather than, at best, friendly acquaintances.
The Jewish Press
Posted Mar 25 2009
http://www.jewishpress.com/
Much has been written in recent weeks of the Obama administration's possible tilt toward a more evenhanded U.S. Middle East policy. Contrary to popular perception, however, if such a change were indeed implemented, it would constitute not so much a new and revolutionary approach as it would an old and reactionary one.
It would, in fact, be several giant steps backward to the approach pursued by the U.S. for the first decade and a half of Israel's existence, never more faithfully than during the eight-year tenure of Dwight Eisenhower, who died 40 years ago this week at the age of 78.
Everyone, as the popular slogan went, liked Ike - everyone, that is, but the majority of American Jews, who in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 overwhelmingly preferred his Democratic opponent, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.
President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles (1956)
To all outward appearances, Eisenhower was the personification of the typical American at mid-century: a non-ideological moderate uncomfortable with extreme partisans of any ideology; a genial sort whose greatest concerns centered on improving his golf score and reeling in a really big fish.
That might have been the Eisenhower image, but it belied a shrewd political mind and a stubborn streak that vexed friend and foe alike. As would be true of Ronald Reagan three decades later, Eisenhower was often slighted for being nothing more than a jocular pitchman whose aides saw to the serious side of government. Disdain for Ike was a fact of life in academic and literary circles during his presidency and for years after he left office.
Gradually, historians began to develop a new appreciation for Eisenhower. Nostalgia for a more innocent time in America, even among cynical intellectuals, may have contributed to this changed perception. But what really opened eyes in the mid- and late-1970s was the declassification of Eisenhower-era government documents.
Scholars discovered that Ike had been the master of what the historian Fred Greenstein dubbed the "hidden-hand presidency"; that behind the smiling, grandfatherly exterior there lived a highly-competent chief executive who was indeed his administration's ultimate decision-maker.
It follows, then, that the Eisenhower administration's attitude toward Israel - one that can only be described as irritable ambivalence straining for proper cordiality - must have come directly from the man at the top.
* * *
Eisenhower remarked on more than one occasion that, had he been president in the late 1940s, he would not have supported the creation of Israel. He added, however, that since the Jewish state was now a reality, he wished it well. And though it is impossible in all fairness to question the sincerity behind the latter sentiment, the record of the Eisenhower administration toward Israel does at least call it into question.
In the summer of 1952, Senator Richard Nixon, whom presidential candidate Eisenhower had just chosen as his running mate, was only too prescient when he remarked to some friends active in Jewish organizational life that in the event of an Eisenhower victory in November, it would be a mistake to expect Ike's likely secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to be friendly toward Israel.
Dulles (who would serve as Eisenhower's secretary of state from 1953 until his death in 1959) and his brother Allen (who headed the CIA during the same period) were pillars of the American foreign policy establishment, a rarefied club of well-born WASPs who moved in the kind of circles where the mere sighting of a Jew was an unusual occurrence.
Reports through the years about the extent of their anti-Semitism have often been unreliable, with some of the more negative stories coming from anonymous or questionable sources. But one can say with a reasonable amount of certitude that the welfare of the Jewish people was not something to which the Dulles brothers devoted a great deal of thought.
As for Eisenhower, no serious allegation of personal anti-Semitism has ever been leveled against him. Though he was not known to have had any close Jewish friends - growing up in Abilene, Kansas, he certainly had no contact with Jews in his formative years - he was not a man given to trafficking in casual ethnic or religious slurs.
Eisenhower was genuinely horrified by what he saw when Allied troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps. "The visual evidence of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering," he said about one such camp. "I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.' "
Long after the war he reminisced about his standard procedure in those days for dealing with officers who made anti-Jewish remarks: The offending individual would be sent on a detailed tour of Dachau or Auschwitz - "and that," said Eisenhower, "would cure him."
* * *
Relations between the Eisenhower administration and Israel got off on the wrong foot soon after Ike assumed the presidency in January 1953. That summer, Israel undertook an ambitious effort to divert water from the Jordan River to irrigate the arid Negev. The project was loudly denounced by Jordan and Syria as an act of thievery that would cost them their share of the river's water.
The United Nations, with the U.S. in full agreement, demanded an immediate halt to the project. The Israeli government refused, and the tone in U.S.-Israel relations was set for the next eight years. The Eisenhower administration, from that early skirmish on, viewed Israel as an unpredictable nuisance at best, a threat to the region's stability at worst.
It was a negative assessment that would be reinforced in the midst of the Jordan River controversy as Israel stumbled into a public relations disaster entirely of its own making.
Incursions into Israel by Arab saboteurs had been going on for several years, and retaliation by the Israeli army was a given. Because these attacks and counterattacks were relatively small-scale operations, carried out not in Israel's cities but in and around the country's borders, they hardly drew the attention of the outside world. That would all change with what happened in an Arab village called Qibya.
In October 1953, a unit of Israeli commandos, under the leadership of a young colonel named Ariel Sharon, crossed over the border into Jordan after Arab terrorists killed an Israeli mother and her two young children. In Qibya, which had been a base for terrorists preparing attacks against Israel, Sharon's men blew up a number of buildings thought to be empty. When it was over and dozens of civilians were found dead in their demolished homes (hundreds of other residents had been allowed to leave the area), international condemnation quickly rained down on Israel. Even the country's staunchest defenders found it difficult to explain away the tragedy.
Rather than leave bad enough alone, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "instructed Ambassador [Abba] Eban to tell Washington and the UN that the raiders had not been Israeli soldiers but enraged farmers and settlers."
The story was too obvious a concoction. "No one," write Raviv and Melman, "believed that tale, and it only fueled the Eisenhower administration's anger."
The deadly violence in Qibya and the clumsy attempt at deflecting blame, following so closely on the heels of the water diversion dispute, led to the first-ever suspension of U.S. financial aid to Israel. Feeling the pinch, Ben-Gurion finally agreed to put a stop to the water project, and the aid was restored.
Relations between the two countries would be distant though not particularly unfriendly for the next few years, with Washington's attention focused on winning the support of the Arab world in the global fight against Communism.
The Eisenhower administration's main foreign-policy objective was the containment of Soviet expansionism, which in the Middle East meant keeping the Russians away from the oil resources so critical to the West.
For much of Ike's first term the U.S. attempted, with mixed results, to create coalitions of like-minded nations in regions deemed geographically and politically strategic. The linchpin of any such regional alliance in the Middle East was Egypt, and the Americans went out of their way to solicit the affections of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
But Nasser played hard to get, tacking pro-U.S. one day and pro-Soviet the next. Eisenhower, tiring of Nasser's penchant for playing off East against West, decided in early 1955 to back the formation of the Baghdad Pact - a defensive alliance comprised of Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. Nasser countered by entering into a large arms deal with Czechoslovakia, and the Communists had their first real link with the Arab world.
By flirting with Nasser while naively underestimating his determination to restore Egyptian pride and Arab unity, the U.S. had made a terrible miscalculation.
* * *
On the home front, the Middle East receded from the headlines in the mid-1950s. Americans, when not distracted by the new plaything called television, were focused on the ongoing dramatics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who since 1950 had been mesmerizing the country with charges of Communist subversion in high places.
McCarthy wasn't entirely wrong, but he was a blustery, boozy opportunist prone to exaggeration, and as such was an unfortunate spokesman for the anti-Communist cause.
One thing McCarthy apparently was not, though some of his enemies tried to portray him as one, was an anti-Semite. As historian David Oshinsky notes in A Conspiracy So Immense, "[McCarthy] never engaged in anti-Semitic diatribes or made the loaded connection between Jews and left-wing radicalism. Despite the unrelenting hostility of organized Jewry to his crusade, McCarthy still praised the state of Israel [and] condemned the Soviet persecution of Jews. "
"[T]he McCarthyites," concurs Benjamin Ginsberg in The Fatal Embrace, his study of the historical relationship between Jews and government, "had no use for anti-Semitism as a political weapon. Indeed, several of McCarthy's most important aides ... were themselves Jews."
The fact, however, that Jews were over-represented in radical and Communist circles was an uncomfortable reality in 1950s America. Though no anti-Semitic backlash materialized in reaction to the trial and execution of the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or to the preponderance of Jews called to testify at hearings conducted in Washington by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), many Jews still worried that they were considered less than loyal by non-Jewish Americans - a fear that couldn't help but contribute to a reticence among Jewish groups in confronting the Eisenhower administration over its Mideast policies.
* * *
Eisenhower vowed that his approach to the Middle East would never be dictated by political pressure, which was a polite way of saying he wasn't about to be influenced by the Jews (or, as he so euphemistically put it in his diary, "our citizens of the Eastern seaboard emotionally involved in the Zionist cause").
Unlike Truman in 1948, Ike in 1952 had not needed Jewish votes and knew he would not need them in 1956. He was not shy about pointing to that domestic political reality when Republicans would voice concern about his handling of Israel.
Eisenhower's disregard for domestic politics was more than evident in October 1956, just a month before the presidential election. Egypt's Nasser, in response to the retraction by the United State of an offer to refinance work on the Aswan Dam, had nationalized the Suez Canal Company, which was under British and French ownership. The prime ministers of Britain and France hatched a complicated plan to retake control of the canal by force and somehow convinced Ben-Gurion to have Israel join in.
The operation was doomed from the start. Each of the countries involved had its own motives; the coordination of the actual attack was bungled every which way; and the Soviets threatened to take military action in defense of Egypt while the Americans, furious at Britain, France and Israel, remained silent in the face of Russia's threats.
The Israelis, for their part, had managed to capture the entire Sinai, and enormous pressure was now brought to bear on them to withdraw. Ben-Gurion refused at first, but Eisenhower, who felt Israel had launched an unprovoked attack on Egypt simply because Britain and France were providing a convenient cover, wouldn't stand for it.
The U.S. suspended all financial and technical aid to Israel, and when Ben-Gurion still balked at withdrawing, the administration let it be known it was ready to support a United Nations plan for sweeping sanctions that would cripple Israel's economy in a matter of weeks. There was also talk of ending the tax-deductible status of charitable contributions to Israel by American Jews.
Ben-Gurion finally buckled, and on March 1, 1957, four months after the ill-conceived and short-lived Franco-British-Israeli alliance, the official announcement was made that Israeli troops would leave the Sinai.
(In 1965 Eisenhower would admit to Jewish organizational leader and Republican fundraiser Max Fisher that he had come to "regret what I did. I should never have pressured Israel to vacate the Sinai.")
Secretary of State Dulles boasted that most Americans supported the Eisenhower policy, adding: "I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to have a foreign policy not approved by the Jews. I am going to try to have one."
It should be noted that those remarks were made at a time when Israel was receiving from Washington a relatively small amount of financial assistance and no military aid at all; a time when Israel existed behind the precarious 1949 armistice lines and Jordan and Egypt controlled, respectively, the West Bank and Gaza; a time when Jewish organizations were keeping a considerably lower profile than would be the case years later (AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations were formed in the mid-1950s, AIPAC to better present Israel's case to U.S. lawmakers, the Presidents Conference to give the Jewish community a more unified voice).
* * *
The final years of Eisenhower's second term were relatively quiet with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Relations between the U.S. and Israel, which had come close to unraveling in late 1956 and early 1957, gradually returned to where they were pre-Suez, which is to say not particularly close but relatively free of tension and mutual mistrust.
There would be better times ahead in the U.S.-Israel relationship, but it would be years before the two countries could, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as actual friends rather than, at best, friendly acquaintances.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
NFL should abandon idea of longer season
By Tim Cowlishaw
The Dallas Morning News
09:34 PM CDT on Saturday, March 28, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/
Getty Images
TAMPA, FL - FEBRUARY 02: NFL Commisioner Roger Goodell speaks to the media during the Post Super Bowl XLIII Coach's Press Conference on February 2, 2009 in Tampa, Florida.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell favors expanding the league's regular season. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones likes the idea of an 18-game schedule.
I think it's a big mistake.
NFL owners discussed shortening the preseason and lengthening the regular season at owners' meetings last week and are expected to discuss the topic again in May. It's a popular concept.
As salaries have increased through the years, teams have grown increasingly reluctant to play their starters any meaningful number of plays in the exhibition games. As a result, fans have grown bored by the contests and are angered that 20 percent of the cost of their season tickets goes to games that don't count.
Switching to two preseason and 18 regular-season games sounds like a win-win scenario for everyone. It isn't.
The NFL should be wary of adding games to the schedule.
As it is, the NFL is the one sport that leaves its fans wanting more when the season is over.
Major League Baseball plays too many games. It already seems as if spring training has gone on forever, and this year's World Series won't end until November.
The NBA and the NHL? Too many games.
For that matter, 36 Sprint Cup races in a NASCAR season that runs from February through November?
The NFL went from 12 to 14 games in 1961, from 14 to 16 in 1978. It doesn't need to go up again.
First of all, there are some owners, including the Pittsburgh Steelers' Art Rooney II, who think a 17-game season would be fine. That won't work at all.
How do you have some teams getting nine home games and others getting eight? In the NFC East last year, the teams were 23-9 at home. Tell me how fair it is one season that the Giants and Redskins get nine home games and the Cowboys and Eagles get eight.
So then you have to talk about reducing the pre-season to two games and creating the 18-game regular season that Jones wants.
That's simply too many regular-season games.
Attrition already is a huge factor in the NFL. Put two more weeks of wear and tear on linemen's bodies.
You won't need much beyond injury reports to pick the champions.
Running backs' careers already are becoming shorter and shorter. You want to ask Marion Barber to play 18 to 19 games a year? You really think that's a good idea for anybody?
An expanded schedule also means playing regular-season games in August (not likely) or finishing the regular season in the middle of January and playing the Super Bowl in mid-February. Super Bowl aside, the league just can't have that many cold weather games determining playoff winners.
A 16-game schedule has a perfect balance, breaking the season up into four quarters, much like a game. Teams play their division opponents twice (six games) plus two other divisions (eight games) plus two more based on the previous season's standings.
There's a fairness to that.
I know owners and players both see big dollar signs when they think about an 18-game schedule. Obviously the NFLPA would have to sign off on it and salaries would be increased. Both sides need to study the trouble signs as well.
Players' bodies are broken down at the end of the season as it stands.
Another eight quarters of collisions for each team is going to shorten careers and has a chance to dilute America's favorite sporting product.
NFL owners just spent a week voting in favor of four new rules designed to promote safety and reduce injuries.
Adding two regular-season games to the schedule will do far more to increase the length of the league's injury list than those rules can ever do to reduce it.
The Dallas Morning News
09:34 PM CDT on Saturday, March 28, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/
Getty Images
TAMPA, FL - FEBRUARY 02: NFL Commisioner Roger Goodell speaks to the media during the Post Super Bowl XLIII Coach's Press Conference on February 2, 2009 in Tampa, Florida.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell favors expanding the league's regular season. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones likes the idea of an 18-game schedule.
I think it's a big mistake.
NFL owners discussed shortening the preseason and lengthening the regular season at owners' meetings last week and are expected to discuss the topic again in May. It's a popular concept.
As salaries have increased through the years, teams have grown increasingly reluctant to play their starters any meaningful number of plays in the exhibition games. As a result, fans have grown bored by the contests and are angered that 20 percent of the cost of their season tickets goes to games that don't count.
Switching to two preseason and 18 regular-season games sounds like a win-win scenario for everyone. It isn't.
The NFL should be wary of adding games to the schedule.
As it is, the NFL is the one sport that leaves its fans wanting more when the season is over.
Major League Baseball plays too many games. It already seems as if spring training has gone on forever, and this year's World Series won't end until November.
The NBA and the NHL? Too many games.
For that matter, 36 Sprint Cup races in a NASCAR season that runs from February through November?
The NFL went from 12 to 14 games in 1961, from 14 to 16 in 1978. It doesn't need to go up again.
First of all, there are some owners, including the Pittsburgh Steelers' Art Rooney II, who think a 17-game season would be fine. That won't work at all.
How do you have some teams getting nine home games and others getting eight? In the NFC East last year, the teams were 23-9 at home. Tell me how fair it is one season that the Giants and Redskins get nine home games and the Cowboys and Eagles get eight.
So then you have to talk about reducing the pre-season to two games and creating the 18-game regular season that Jones wants.
That's simply too many regular-season games.
Attrition already is a huge factor in the NFL. Put two more weeks of wear and tear on linemen's bodies.
You won't need much beyond injury reports to pick the champions.
Running backs' careers already are becoming shorter and shorter. You want to ask Marion Barber to play 18 to 19 games a year? You really think that's a good idea for anybody?
An expanded schedule also means playing regular-season games in August (not likely) or finishing the regular season in the middle of January and playing the Super Bowl in mid-February. Super Bowl aside, the league just can't have that many cold weather games determining playoff winners.
A 16-game schedule has a perfect balance, breaking the season up into four quarters, much like a game. Teams play their division opponents twice (six games) plus two other divisions (eight games) plus two more based on the previous season's standings.
There's a fairness to that.
I know owners and players both see big dollar signs when they think about an 18-game schedule. Obviously the NFLPA would have to sign off on it and salaries would be increased. Both sides need to study the trouble signs as well.
Players' bodies are broken down at the end of the season as it stands.
Another eight quarters of collisions for each team is going to shorten careers and has a chance to dilute America's favorite sporting product.
NFL owners just spent a week voting in favor of four new rules designed to promote safety and reduce injuries.
Adding two regular-season games to the schedule will do far more to increase the length of the league's injury list than those rules can ever do to reduce it.
The coming nuclear renaissance
By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com
March 29, 2009
Thirty years ago this month, an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania inflamed public opposition to nuclear power. The mishap - a loss of coolant that caused the reactor core to overheat - caused no known deaths or diseases, and it exposed area residents to only a negligible amount of radiation. But it fueled an antinuclear frenzy that soon brought the expansion of the industry to a halt. Dozens of planned reactors were canceled. In the years since Three Mile Island, not a single nuclear plant has been ordered and built in the United States.
Yet far from being washed up, atomic power seems poised for a renaissance. Consider:
According to a new Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans favor nuclear energy - a new high - and 27 percent say they strongly favor it. The attitude is bipartisan, with majorities of both Republicans and Democrats supporting nuclear power.
Other surveys have found even higher levels of support. According to a 2008 Zogby poll, 67 percent of Americans favor the construction of new nuclear facilities, and are much more likely to back a nuclear-powered electric plant over one fueled by natural gas, coal, or oil.
In the recent presidential campaign, both candidates expressed support for nuclear power. John McCain made a point of praising the French, who derive nearly 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear plants. Though more measured, Barack Obama agreed that "we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix," as he declared in an early Iowa debate.
While Obama has said little about nuclear power since becoming president, his energy secretary has been unequivocal. "The nuclear industry has to be part of our energy mix," physicist Steven Chu said during his confirmation hearings. "It's 20 percent of our [total] electricity production today, but it's 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity we produce."
Accenture, the consulting giant, reports growing worldwide support for nuclear energy. In a survey it conducted of more than 10,000 people in 20 nations, 69 percent wanted their countries to begin or expand the use of nuclear power. Pronuclear sentiment was strongest in India (67 percent), China (62 percent), and the United States (57 percent).
In recent months, Italy and Sweden have reversed longstanding policies against nuclear power; both are drawing up plans to construct new plants. Meanwhile, dozens of nuclear reactors are already under construction in other countries, including China, Russia, and Finland. "Among those contemplating building their first ones," reports The Economist, "are Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Belarus."
In the last two years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received 17 applications for 26 nuclear reactors. Proposals for six additional reactors are pending.
There is no small irony in this turnabout. Nuclear power used to be the environmentalist's ultimate pariah, thanks mostly to overblown claims about the dangers of reactor meltdowns and nuclear waste. But now the green movement has a new pariah - fossil fuels and their carbon dioxide emissions. To many environmentalists alarmed about global warming, nuclear power has an irresistible appeal: It releases no greenhouse gases. Indeed - another irony - nuclear power plants don't even release as much radiation as coal-fired plants, since coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
As a result, some of the world's most ardent Greens have come around to embracing nuclear power.
"Only nuclear power can now halt global warming," wrote James Lovelock, the father of the celebrated Gaia theory, which regards the Earth and life on the planet as one complex, interacting "organism," in 2004. In Wired magazine the following year, a much-discussed article - "Nuclear Now!" - made the case that only "clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming."
The problems with nuclear energy have not vanished. To build a nuclear plant is an expensive undertaking, the disposal of spent fuel rods remains politically contentious, and at least some environmental activists will continue to do what they can to exacerbate fear of nuclear power's dangers.
But 30 years after Three Mile Island, the nuclear future looks brighter than it has in a long time. Right now, 104 commercial reactors generate 20 percent of America's electricity. As the war against the atom continues to wind down, expect to see those numbers go up.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com
March 29, 2009
Thirty years ago this month, an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania inflamed public opposition to nuclear power. The mishap - a loss of coolant that caused the reactor core to overheat - caused no known deaths or diseases, and it exposed area residents to only a negligible amount of radiation. But it fueled an antinuclear frenzy that soon brought the expansion of the industry to a halt. Dozens of planned reactors were canceled. In the years since Three Mile Island, not a single nuclear plant has been ordered and built in the United States.
Yet far from being washed up, atomic power seems poised for a renaissance. Consider:According to a new Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans favor nuclear energy - a new high - and 27 percent say they strongly favor it. The attitude is bipartisan, with majorities of both Republicans and Democrats supporting nuclear power.
Other surveys have found even higher levels of support. According to a 2008 Zogby poll, 67 percent of Americans favor the construction of new nuclear facilities, and are much more likely to back a nuclear-powered electric plant over one fueled by natural gas, coal, or oil.
In the recent presidential campaign, both candidates expressed support for nuclear power. John McCain made a point of praising the French, who derive nearly 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear plants. Though more measured, Barack Obama agreed that "we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix," as he declared in an early Iowa debate.
While Obama has said little about nuclear power since becoming president, his energy secretary has been unequivocal. "The nuclear industry has to be part of our energy mix," physicist Steven Chu said during his confirmation hearings. "It's 20 percent of our [total] electricity production today, but it's 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity we produce."
Accenture, the consulting giant, reports growing worldwide support for nuclear energy. In a survey it conducted of more than 10,000 people in 20 nations, 69 percent wanted their countries to begin or expand the use of nuclear power. Pronuclear sentiment was strongest in India (67 percent), China (62 percent), and the United States (57 percent).
In recent months, Italy and Sweden have reversed longstanding policies against nuclear power; both are drawing up plans to construct new plants. Meanwhile, dozens of nuclear reactors are already under construction in other countries, including China, Russia, and Finland. "Among those contemplating building their first ones," reports The Economist, "are Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Belarus."
In the last two years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received 17 applications for 26 nuclear reactors. Proposals for six additional reactors are pending.
There is no small irony in this turnabout. Nuclear power used to be the environmentalist's ultimate pariah, thanks mostly to overblown claims about the dangers of reactor meltdowns and nuclear waste. But now the green movement has a new pariah - fossil fuels and their carbon dioxide emissions. To many environmentalists alarmed about global warming, nuclear power has an irresistible appeal: It releases no greenhouse gases. Indeed - another irony - nuclear power plants don't even release as much radiation as coal-fired plants, since coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
As a result, some of the world's most ardent Greens have come around to embracing nuclear power.
"Only nuclear power can now halt global warming," wrote James Lovelock, the father of the celebrated Gaia theory, which regards the Earth and life on the planet as one complex, interacting "organism," in 2004. In Wired magazine the following year, a much-discussed article - "Nuclear Now!" - made the case that only "clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming."
The problems with nuclear energy have not vanished. To build a nuclear plant is an expensive undertaking, the disposal of spent fuel rods remains politically contentious, and at least some environmental activists will continue to do what they can to exacerbate fear of nuclear power's dangers.
But 30 years after Three Mile Island, the nuclear future looks brighter than it has in a long time. Right now, 104 commercial reactors generate 20 percent of America's electricity. As the war against the atom continues to wind down, expect to see those numbers go up.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Twilight Chic
Our pop culture has turned the vampire from monster to hip Other.
By Tony Woodlief
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 27, 2009, 0:00 p.m.
It probably all turns on what happens when the fangs touch your throat. Not that vampires are real, so far as I know. This means you must imagine the moment of penetration — a phrasing which, in our Freud-besotted culture, is fraught with suggestion. So maybe it’s Freud’s fault that vampires turned sexy. A substitution of modern movies for old novels is also to blame. This is the only explanation for Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan’s suggestion — in her December review of that teeny-bopper vampire sensation, the Twilight series — that Lucy and Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula were enthralled, in a sexual manner, by the smooth-talking count. It’s a common misreading of the novel these days that has yielded an art-imitates-lit-theory phenomenon currently manifested in the Twilight movie. It sold three million DVDs the first day of its release this week , and the book may receive a Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award this weekend. Most adults have tacitly assented to the notion that vampires are hot, and it’s so little wonder our kids have followed suit.
That Dracula was a monster rather than a masher, however, was apparent to Stoker’s contemporaries. The Bookman called him an inhuman villain, and the Daily Mail called Stoker’s novel a “weird, powerful, and horrorful story.” Letting your weak-kneed aunt read Dracula, intoned the Pall Mall Gazette, “would be manslaughter.” It took decades of creative interpretation to alter this common-sense reading.
It’s a little-disputed assertion today, of course, that Victorians had sex on the brain. Stoker may have intended, as he explained in his notes, to render a demonic monster, but we know what he was really thinking when he turned that long-toothed sex fiend from the old country loose on England’s cream-skinned virgins. It’s an article of faith, now, that any story about vampires must, as Flanagan asserts, really be a story about sex. Literary theorists love this angle, penning breathless articles like “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Their pop-oriented counterparts, meanwhile, churn out novels like Dead until Dark, a bloodsucking mystery/bodice-ripper in which vampires “come out of the coffin.” Vampires, in these modern novels, are like gays and lesbians — people just like you and me who are marginalized only because of their sexual tastes.
It’s not surprising then that vampires, transmogrified into sexual beings by numerous modern film adaptations of Dracula (one of the most egregious of which is Francis Ford Coppola’s misleadingly titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula), have now become vegetarians and — in the Twilight series — even abstainers from premarital relations. The genius of Twilight author Stephanie Meyer was to make them suitable for children. Never mind that Meyer can’t write “worth a darn,” as horror master Stephen King puts it. She has invented a kinder, gentler vampire — the kind you’d let your daughter date.
We have fully reversed the symbolism of Stoker’s vampire, who represented a demonic assault on a virtuous community. Today’s vampire is the hip Other, and the community around him is either bungling, intolerant, or simply a source of comedic relief (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and Fright Night, for example). The modern vampire is in touch with his sexuality, but the community suppresses it. The modern vampire is coming to take away your girlfriend, and she kind of likes it. The modern vampire is the guy you wish you had been in high school, or the guy you wish you’d dated in high school, and Meyer has turned that into gold.
The trouble with this evolution is that fictional monsters serve a valuable cultural purpose. They remind us that we live in communities, and that our communities must be defended from those who would rend them asunder. Though he is no conservative ideologue, Stephen King always seemed to fathom this intuitively. His stories and books featuring vampires made them evil through and through. The difference between his Salem’s Lot and Stoker’s Dracula is that King is also a bit of a dystopian, so while the community in Stoker’s novel worked together in the end to stop the menace, King lets the community fall. Still, he’s wise enough to know that creatures lacking in fundamental attributes of humanity don’t make for good neighbors.
By inverting the traditional vampire tale, so that the community is predatory and the monster an object of empathy if not admiration, we have found one more avenue along which to push the tired idea that community is, rather than a source of life and happiness, a locus of oppression. The Twilight series simply carries our modern love affair with the undead to its natural conclusion; the lovelorn vampire and the object of his infatuation get married and make a baby.
I’m all for multiculturalism, but this is too much. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the Other isn’t a cool countercultural rebel who puts a thrill up your leg, he is a monster who wants to suck your blood or, if he is technologically savvy and has a religious ax to grind, blow up your kids’ school bus. I’m not worried that the modern vampire movie will lead filmgoers to agitate for reconciliation with Osama bin Laden just because the terror master of 9/11 is also pale, has a funny accent, lives in a cave, and is a bloodthirsty egomaniac. But I do think there is value in entertainment that draws a clear line between good and evil.
While many parents are fine with having their youngsters read the Twilight series and watch the accompanying movies, I think there might be some merit in recent fare like the horrifically bloody (and financially less successful) Thirty Days of Night, in which vampires descend on a remote town in Alaska once they know daylight won’t return for a month. These creatures devour throats with viciousness, and the few townspeople who survive are saved only by the voluntary self-sacrifice of their leader. On the surface, Twilight might be more suitable for preteens, but maybe they could use reminding that creatures that prey on communities don’t often make cool boyfriends. Because there are monsters, Virginia, and sometimes they just need killing.
— Tony Woodlief writes about faith, parenting, and sometimes even vampires at http://www.tonywoodlief.com/.
By Tony Woodlief
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 27, 2009, 0:00 p.m.
It probably all turns on what happens when the fangs touch your throat. Not that vampires are real, so far as I know. This means you must imagine the moment of penetration — a phrasing which, in our Freud-besotted culture, is fraught with suggestion. So maybe it’s Freud’s fault that vampires turned sexy. A substitution of modern movies for old novels is also to blame. This is the only explanation for Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan’s suggestion — in her December review of that teeny-bopper vampire sensation, the Twilight series — that Lucy and Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula were enthralled, in a sexual manner, by the smooth-talking count. It’s a common misreading of the novel these days that has yielded an art-imitates-lit-theory phenomenon currently manifested in the Twilight movie. It sold three million DVDs the first day of its release this week , and the book may receive a Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award this weekend. Most adults have tacitly assented to the notion that vampires are hot, and it’s so little wonder our kids have followed suit.That Dracula was a monster rather than a masher, however, was apparent to Stoker’s contemporaries. The Bookman called him an inhuman villain, and the Daily Mail called Stoker’s novel a “weird, powerful, and horrorful story.” Letting your weak-kneed aunt read Dracula, intoned the Pall Mall Gazette, “would be manslaughter.” It took decades of creative interpretation to alter this common-sense reading.
It’s a little-disputed assertion today, of course, that Victorians had sex on the brain. Stoker may have intended, as he explained in his notes, to render a demonic monster, but we know what he was really thinking when he turned that long-toothed sex fiend from the old country loose on England’s cream-skinned virgins. It’s an article of faith, now, that any story about vampires must, as Flanagan asserts, really be a story about sex. Literary theorists love this angle, penning breathless articles like “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Their pop-oriented counterparts, meanwhile, churn out novels like Dead until Dark, a bloodsucking mystery/bodice-ripper in which vampires “come out of the coffin.” Vampires, in these modern novels, are like gays and lesbians — people just like you and me who are marginalized only because of their sexual tastes.
It’s not surprising then that vampires, transmogrified into sexual beings by numerous modern film adaptations of Dracula (one of the most egregious of which is Francis Ford Coppola’s misleadingly titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula), have now become vegetarians and — in the Twilight series — even abstainers from premarital relations. The genius of Twilight author Stephanie Meyer was to make them suitable for children. Never mind that Meyer can’t write “worth a darn,” as horror master Stephen King puts it. She has invented a kinder, gentler vampire — the kind you’d let your daughter date.We have fully reversed the symbolism of Stoker’s vampire, who represented a demonic assault on a virtuous community. Today’s vampire is the hip Other, and the community around him is either bungling, intolerant, or simply a source of comedic relief (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and Fright Night, for example). The modern vampire is in touch with his sexuality, but the community suppresses it. The modern vampire is coming to take away your girlfriend, and she kind of likes it. The modern vampire is the guy you wish you had been in high school, or the guy you wish you’d dated in high school, and Meyer has turned that into gold.
The trouble with this evolution is that fictional monsters serve a valuable cultural purpose. They remind us that we live in communities, and that our communities must be defended from those who would rend them asunder. Though he is no conservative ideologue, Stephen King always seemed to fathom this intuitively. His stories and books featuring vampires made them evil through and through. The difference between his Salem’s Lot and Stoker’s Dracula is that King is also a bit of a dystopian, so while the community in Stoker’s novel worked together in the end to stop the menace, King lets the community fall. Still, he’s wise enough to know that creatures lacking in fundamental attributes of humanity don’t make for good neighbors.
By inverting the traditional vampire tale, so that the community is predatory and the monster an object of empathy if not admiration, we have found one more avenue along which to push the tired idea that community is, rather than a source of life and happiness, a locus of oppression. The Twilight series simply carries our modern love affair with the undead to its natural conclusion; the lovelorn vampire and the object of his infatuation get married and make a baby.
I’m all for multiculturalism, but this is too much. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the Other isn’t a cool countercultural rebel who puts a thrill up your leg, he is a monster who wants to suck your blood or, if he is technologically savvy and has a religious ax to grind, blow up your kids’ school bus. I’m not worried that the modern vampire movie will lead filmgoers to agitate for reconciliation with Osama bin Laden just because the terror master of 9/11 is also pale, has a funny accent, lives in a cave, and is a bloodthirsty egomaniac. But I do think there is value in entertainment that draws a clear line between good and evil.While many parents are fine with having their youngsters read the Twilight series and watch the accompanying movies, I think there might be some merit in recent fare like the horrifically bloody (and financially less successful) Thirty Days of Night, in which vampires descend on a remote town in Alaska once they know daylight won’t return for a month. These creatures devour throats with viciousness, and the few townspeople who survive are saved only by the voluntary self-sacrifice of their leader. On the surface, Twilight might be more suitable for preteens, but maybe they could use reminding that creatures that prey on communities don’t often make cool boyfriends. Because there are monsters, Virginia, and sometimes they just need killing.
— Tony Woodlief writes about faith, parenting, and sometimes even vampires at http://www.tonywoodlief.com/.
Government's grasp going global
Obama and Geithner want to eliminate any haven from regulation.
By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, March 27, 2009
Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, President Barack Obama fell back on one of his favorite rhetorical tics: "But I also know," he wrote, "that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people."
Really? For the moment, it's a "false choice" mainly in the sense that he's not offering it: "a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is not on the menu, which leaves "an oppressive government-run economy" as pretty much the only game in town. How oppressive is yet to be determined: To be sure, the official position remains that only "the richest five percent" will have taxes increased. But you'll be surprised at the percentage of Americans who wind up in the richest five percent. This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 percent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade. But to talk about it in percentages of this and trillions of that misses the point. It's not about bookkeeping, it's about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control. No matter how small your small business is – plumbing, hairdressing, maple-sugaring – the state will be burdening you with more permits, more paperwork, more bureaucracy.
And don't plan on moving. Ahead of this week's G20 summit in London, Timothy Geithner, America's beloved Toxic Asset, called for "global regulation." "Our hope," said Toxic Tim, "is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight."
"Global oversight": Hmm. There's a phrase to savor.
"We can't," he continued, "allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints."
Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don't want to be subject to the punitive "oversight" of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn't you be "allowed" to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?
Borders give you choices. Your town has a crummy grade school? Move 10 miles north, and there's a better one. Sick of Massachusetts taxes? Move to New Hampshire, as thousands do. To modify the abortionists' bumper sticker: "I'm Pro-Choice And I Vote With My Feet." That's part of the self-correcting dynamism of capitalism: For example, Bono, the global do-gooder who was last in Washington to play at the Obama inauguration, recently moved much of his business from Ireland to the Netherlands, in order to pay less tax. And good for him. To be sure, he's always calling on governments to give more money to Africa and whatnot, but it's heartening to know that, when it comes to his wallet as opposed to yours, Bono, like Secretary Geithner, has no desire to toss any more of his money into the great sucking maw of the government treasury than the absolute minimum he can get away with. I'm with Bono and Tim: They can spend their money more effectively than hack bureaucrats can. We should do as they do, not as they say.
If you listen to the principal spokesmen for U.S. economic policy – Obama and Geithner – they grow daily ever more explicitly hostile to the private sector and ever more comfortable with the language of micromanaged government-approved capitalism – which, of course, isn't capitalism at all. They'll have an easier time getting away with it in a world of "global oversight" where there's nowhere to move to. Unfortunately, even then it won't work. Think about it: It takes extraordinary skill to create and manage a billion-dollar company; there are very few human beings on the planet who can do it. Now look at Obama and Geithner, the two men currently "managing" more money than any individuals in human history: not billions but trillions.
Notwithstanding the Treasury secretary's protestations that the Yes/No prompt buttons of Turbo Tax were too complex for a simple soul such as himself, it's no reflection on the hapless Geithner that he's unable to fix the planet. When the Bolsheviks chose to introduce Russians to the blessings of a "command economy" 90 years ago, they were dealing with a relatively simple agricultural society largely contained within national borders. Obama and Geithner are trying to do it with a sophisticated global economy in which North American consumers, European bankers, Asian suppliers, Saudi investors and Chinese debt-holders are more tangled than an octopuses' orgy. Even with "global oversight" – with the Toxic Tims of Germany, Argentina and India all agreeing on how to fix the game – it can't be done.
Barack Obama, even when he's not yukking it up on "60 Minutes," barely disguises his indifference to economic matters. He is not an economist, a political philosopher, a geopolitical strategist. He is the President as social engineer, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief. His plan to reduce tax deductions for charitable giving, for example, is not intended primarily to raise revenue, but to advance government as the distributor of largesse and diminish alternative sources of societal organization, such as civic groups. Likewise, his big plans for socialized health care, a green economy, universal college education: they're about extending the reach of the state.
Unfortunately, all of it costs money he doesn't have. So he has to borrow it, in your name. Where does the world's hyperpower go to borrow more dough than anyone's ever borrowed in human history? More to the point, given that, partly at the behest of Obama and Geithner, almost every other Western government is ramping up national debt to cover massive bank bailouts and other phony-baloney "stimuli," is there enough money out there to buy up the debt that's already been run up? Last week, at the official British Treasury auction, investors failed to buy the full complement of so-called "gilt-edged" 40-year bonds. Two such auctions have already failed in Germany. The U.S. Treasury, facing similar investor reluctance to snap up $34 billion of five-year notes, was forced to increase the interest it will pay on them. The Chinese and the Saudis have long taken the view that it's to their advantage to own as much of the Western world as they can snaffle up, but it's unclear whether even they have pockets deep enough for what America and the many Bailoutistans of Europe are proposing to spend.
In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth, and your children's future. What began as an economic crisis is now principally a political usurpation. And, to return to the president's "false choice," that "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is exactly what we need right now. It's the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most efficient route to economic stabilization and renewal. A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all.
©MARK STEYN
By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, March 27, 2009
Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, President Barack Obama fell back on one of his favorite rhetorical tics: "But I also know," he wrote, "that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people."Really? For the moment, it's a "false choice" mainly in the sense that he's not offering it: "a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is not on the menu, which leaves "an oppressive government-run economy" as pretty much the only game in town. How oppressive is yet to be determined: To be sure, the official position remains that only "the richest five percent" will have taxes increased. But you'll be surprised at the percentage of Americans who wind up in the richest five percent. This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 percent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade. But to talk about it in percentages of this and trillions of that misses the point. It's not about bookkeeping, it's about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control. No matter how small your small business is – plumbing, hairdressing, maple-sugaring – the state will be burdening you with more permits, more paperwork, more bureaucracy.
And don't plan on moving. Ahead of this week's G20 summit in London, Timothy Geithner, America's beloved Toxic Asset, called for "global regulation." "Our hope," said Toxic Tim, "is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight."
"Global oversight": Hmm. There's a phrase to savor.
"We can't," he continued, "allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints."
Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don't want to be subject to the punitive "oversight" of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn't you be "allowed" to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?
Borders give you choices. Your town has a crummy grade school? Move 10 miles north, and there's a better one. Sick of Massachusetts taxes? Move to New Hampshire, as thousands do. To modify the abortionists' bumper sticker: "I'm Pro-Choice And I Vote With My Feet." That's part of the self-correcting dynamism of capitalism: For example, Bono, the global do-gooder who was last in Washington to play at the Obama inauguration, recently moved much of his business from Ireland to the Netherlands, in order to pay less tax. And good for him. To be sure, he's always calling on governments to give more money to Africa and whatnot, but it's heartening to know that, when it comes to his wallet as opposed to yours, Bono, like Secretary Geithner, has no desire to toss any more of his money into the great sucking maw of the government treasury than the absolute minimum he can get away with. I'm with Bono and Tim: They can spend their money more effectively than hack bureaucrats can. We should do as they do, not as they say.
If you listen to the principal spokesmen for U.S. economic policy – Obama and Geithner – they grow daily ever more explicitly hostile to the private sector and ever more comfortable with the language of micromanaged government-approved capitalism – which, of course, isn't capitalism at all. They'll have an easier time getting away with it in a world of "global oversight" where there's nowhere to move to. Unfortunately, even then it won't work. Think about it: It takes extraordinary skill to create and manage a billion-dollar company; there are very few human beings on the planet who can do it. Now look at Obama and Geithner, the two men currently "managing" more money than any individuals in human history: not billions but trillions.
Notwithstanding the Treasury secretary's protestations that the Yes/No prompt buttons of Turbo Tax were too complex for a simple soul such as himself, it's no reflection on the hapless Geithner that he's unable to fix the planet. When the Bolsheviks chose to introduce Russians to the blessings of a "command economy" 90 years ago, they were dealing with a relatively simple agricultural society largely contained within national borders. Obama and Geithner are trying to do it with a sophisticated global economy in which North American consumers, European bankers, Asian suppliers, Saudi investors and Chinese debt-holders are more tangled than an octopuses' orgy. Even with "global oversight" – with the Toxic Tims of Germany, Argentina and India all agreeing on how to fix the game – it can't be done.
Barack Obama, even when he's not yukking it up on "60 Minutes," barely disguises his indifference to economic matters. He is not an economist, a political philosopher, a geopolitical strategist. He is the President as social engineer, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief. His plan to reduce tax deductions for charitable giving, for example, is not intended primarily to raise revenue, but to advance government as the distributor of largesse and diminish alternative sources of societal organization, such as civic groups. Likewise, his big plans for socialized health care, a green economy, universal college education: they're about extending the reach of the state.
Unfortunately, all of it costs money he doesn't have. So he has to borrow it, in your name. Where does the world's hyperpower go to borrow more dough than anyone's ever borrowed in human history? More to the point, given that, partly at the behest of Obama and Geithner, almost every other Western government is ramping up national debt to cover massive bank bailouts and other phony-baloney "stimuli," is there enough money out there to buy up the debt that's already been run up? Last week, at the official British Treasury auction, investors failed to buy the full complement of so-called "gilt-edged" 40-year bonds. Two such auctions have already failed in Germany. The U.S. Treasury, facing similar investor reluctance to snap up $34 billion of five-year notes, was forced to increase the interest it will pay on them. The Chinese and the Saudis have long taken the view that it's to their advantage to own as much of the Western world as they can snaffle up, but it's unclear whether even they have pockets deep enough for what America and the many Bailoutistans of Europe are proposing to spend.
In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth, and your children's future. What began as an economic crisis is now principally a political usurpation. And, to return to the president's "false choice," that "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is exactly what we need right now. It's the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most efficient route to economic stabilization and renewal. A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all.
©MARK STEYN
Friday, March 27, 2009
Star search can corrupt
By Bob Ryan, Boston Globe Staff
http://www.boston.com/sports/
March 27, 2009
Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun speaks during a news conference at the men's NCAA college basketball regional tournament in Glendale, Ariz. , Friday, March 27, 2009. Connecticut will play Missouri in a college basketball regional final Saturday. (AP)
The people who really know the turf say this University of Connecticut recruiting thing is bad news for Jim Calhoun.
But should anyone be surprised? It's hardly the first time in the Calhoun era UConn has been accused of malfeasance, NCAA impropriety, or whatever you'd like to call it, and it certainly isn't the first time Calhoun has gotten involved with a young man of dubious character.
You can't win without great players, you know.
Calhoun, like countless other coaches, including perhaps - who knows? - one or two of his counterparts at the NCAA Regionals, will do what he has to do to attract and maintain the eligibility/availability of players to put the best possible team on the floor. Any fan who doesn't comprehend this is probably as shocked as Inspector Renault was to discover that gambling was taking place at Rick's Café.
The NCAA attempts to perpetuate the notion that all the young people wearing Division 1 basketball uniforms are exemplary individuals whose eventual career choices, should the NBA not prove to be a viable option, will include law school, medical school, and becoming an international relief worker in Darfur. Hence the laughable insistence about what the members of these teams should be called.
At every press conference run by the NCAA, the participants must be referred to by the moderators as "student-athletes." You or I would call them, you know, "players." That's because they are, you know, players. Players. P-l-a-y-e-r-s. This is not a derogatory term. It's a perfectly legitimate designation for someone who happens to, you know, play on a basketball team.
This insistence on referring to the players as "student-athletes" is stunning in its pomposity, and, as many people know, it is, on more occasions than most people realize, 100 percent inaccurate. In the modern world of collegiate sport, we have encountered the phenomenon of the "one-and-done" players who enter school in the fall, play one college basketball season, then declare for the NBA draft. In some schools, I am told, it is possible to arrange the player's situation so he never has to go to class.
"Student-athlete," huh? How about "Hired Hessian"?
And even if the players do attend class and turn out to be legitimate students, when they are presented for interview purposes it is because they have been, or are about to be, playing a game. I don't believe I've ever heard anyone say that so-and-so was "student-athleting" a game.
So where were we? Ah, yes, the supposed shenanigans at Connecticut.
What strikes me about these allegations is the recklessness involved. The fascinating volume of "impermissible" phone calls and texts to the recruit in question by Calhoun and his staff over a two-year period (more than 1,500) doesn't bother me, because it's a silly rule and, frankly, I really don't care.
But I do care that Calhoun was foolish enough to get involved in the recruitment of Nate Miles as long as the player was personally involved with sports agent Josh Nochimson, a former UConn student manager. According to Adrian Wojnarowski and Dan Wetzel, the Yahoo! writers who broke the story, Calhoun knew the NCAA officially considered Nochimson a "representative of UConn athletic interests," and was therefore prohibited from "contacting the player, or giving him anything of value."
Calhoun's continued involvement in the recruitment of Miles was beyond stupid in terms of risk-reward. The only way to rationalize this would be if Miles were the next LeBron James, in which case it might be worth taking a chance and hoping you wouldn't get caught. Now maybe it's because I had never heard of Miles before yesterday, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state categorically that he is not the next LeBron James. So by that reasoning, Calhoun's involvement in anything connected with Nochimson is way beyond stupid. Did he think no one was going to notice?
What must be understood here is that this is simply rules violation case No. 2,786,543, give or take a thousand, in the oft-sordid history of college basketball recruiting. Coaches have always been willing to compromise themselves when the subject is the pursuit of the great young basketball talent.
Recruiting is a notoriously nasty business, and it's far worse now than ever before because the breeding ground for recruits is not necessarily the high school, as in olden days. Adolescent basketball has been hijacked by the loathsome AAU, which sinks its fangs into both boys and girls as they turn 13 and introduces them to a nonstop whirl of gifts, inducements, and far too many games played far away from home. Woe to the college coach who doesn't make nice with the coach of the local AAU juggernaut.
As a corollary, an amazing percentage of top-flight prospects change schools as readily as managers head to the pitching mound. Why? Well, it's not because of the math department, if you get my drift. Then throw in the proliferation of fly-by-night prep schools, many with quasi-religious trappings, who seem to exist solely to play basketball.
What emerges from all this are young people who: A) have never worked in their lives, and B) have no real sense of what's inherently right and wrong, cynical kids who have always been treated like commodities and who have been well-schooled in the art of Looking Out For No. 1.
Calhoun isn't the only one who gets involved with these seedy AAU leeches and messed-up kids. I can't say they all do, but among the teams who consistently show up in the Top 40, most of them do, however much they hold their noses when they decide they simply must have a particular play . . . oops, student-athlete. And I'm talking about colleges of every description, whether they are standard private schools, big state universities, or religiously oriented schools. They are all united in their quest for athletic excellence.
These coaches are not like you or me. Think about Calhoun. He has done the impossible by making Storrs, Conn., a destination. He has won two national championships and could very well be on his way to a third. He already is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. If he doesn't win another game, his legacy is secure.
So why would he risk the censure of the NCAA and the scrutiny he's getting now, for any one play . . . oops, student-athlete, let alone one entangled with the red-flagged Josh Nochimson?
So, Jim, Jim, Jim. What was the matter with you? Stupidity? Arrogance? Didn't you trust your superb coaching ability enough to think you still could win your fairly predictable 30 and make a run at the title if you had allowed someone else to have Nate Miles? Didn't you have some warning mechanism to let you know that it was time to back off?
Or is winning that powerful a drug?
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of the Globe's 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/sports/
March 27, 2009
Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun speaks during a news conference at the men's NCAA college basketball regional tournament in Glendale, Ariz. , Friday, March 27, 2009. Connecticut will play Missouri in a college basketball regional final Saturday. (AP)The people who really know the turf say this University of Connecticut recruiting thing is bad news for Jim Calhoun.
But should anyone be surprised? It's hardly the first time in the Calhoun era UConn has been accused of malfeasance, NCAA impropriety, or whatever you'd like to call it, and it certainly isn't the first time Calhoun has gotten involved with a young man of dubious character.
You can't win without great players, you know.
Calhoun, like countless other coaches, including perhaps - who knows? - one or two of his counterparts at the NCAA Regionals, will do what he has to do to attract and maintain the eligibility/availability of players to put the best possible team on the floor. Any fan who doesn't comprehend this is probably as shocked as Inspector Renault was to discover that gambling was taking place at Rick's Café.
The NCAA attempts to perpetuate the notion that all the young people wearing Division 1 basketball uniforms are exemplary individuals whose eventual career choices, should the NBA not prove to be a viable option, will include law school, medical school, and becoming an international relief worker in Darfur. Hence the laughable insistence about what the members of these teams should be called.
At every press conference run by the NCAA, the participants must be referred to by the moderators as "student-athletes." You or I would call them, you know, "players." That's because they are, you know, players. Players. P-l-a-y-e-r-s. This is not a derogatory term. It's a perfectly legitimate designation for someone who happens to, you know, play on a basketball team.
This insistence on referring to the players as "student-athletes" is stunning in its pomposity, and, as many people know, it is, on more occasions than most people realize, 100 percent inaccurate. In the modern world of collegiate sport, we have encountered the phenomenon of the "one-and-done" players who enter school in the fall, play one college basketball season, then declare for the NBA draft. In some schools, I am told, it is possible to arrange the player's situation so he never has to go to class.
"Student-athlete," huh? How about "Hired Hessian"?
And even if the players do attend class and turn out to be legitimate students, when they are presented for interview purposes it is because they have been, or are about to be, playing a game. I don't believe I've ever heard anyone say that so-and-so was "student-athleting" a game.
So where were we? Ah, yes, the supposed shenanigans at Connecticut.
What strikes me about these allegations is the recklessness involved. The fascinating volume of "impermissible" phone calls and texts to the recruit in question by Calhoun and his staff over a two-year period (more than 1,500) doesn't bother me, because it's a silly rule and, frankly, I really don't care.
But I do care that Calhoun was foolish enough to get involved in the recruitment of Nate Miles as long as the player was personally involved with sports agent Josh Nochimson, a former UConn student manager. According to Adrian Wojnarowski and Dan Wetzel, the Yahoo! writers who broke the story, Calhoun knew the NCAA officially considered Nochimson a "representative of UConn athletic interests," and was therefore prohibited from "contacting the player, or giving him anything of value."
Calhoun's continued involvement in the recruitment of Miles was beyond stupid in terms of risk-reward. The only way to rationalize this would be if Miles were the next LeBron James, in which case it might be worth taking a chance and hoping you wouldn't get caught. Now maybe it's because I had never heard of Miles before yesterday, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state categorically that he is not the next LeBron James. So by that reasoning, Calhoun's involvement in anything connected with Nochimson is way beyond stupid. Did he think no one was going to notice?
What must be understood here is that this is simply rules violation case No. 2,786,543, give or take a thousand, in the oft-sordid history of college basketball recruiting. Coaches have always been willing to compromise themselves when the subject is the pursuit of the great young basketball talent.
Recruiting is a notoriously nasty business, and it's far worse now than ever before because the breeding ground for recruits is not necessarily the high school, as in olden days. Adolescent basketball has been hijacked by the loathsome AAU, which sinks its fangs into both boys and girls as they turn 13 and introduces them to a nonstop whirl of gifts, inducements, and far too many games played far away from home. Woe to the college coach who doesn't make nice with the coach of the local AAU juggernaut.
As a corollary, an amazing percentage of top-flight prospects change schools as readily as managers head to the pitching mound. Why? Well, it's not because of the math department, if you get my drift. Then throw in the proliferation of fly-by-night prep schools, many with quasi-religious trappings, who seem to exist solely to play basketball.
What emerges from all this are young people who: A) have never worked in their lives, and B) have no real sense of what's inherently right and wrong, cynical kids who have always been treated like commodities and who have been well-schooled in the art of Looking Out For No. 1.
Calhoun isn't the only one who gets involved with these seedy AAU leeches and messed-up kids. I can't say they all do, but among the teams who consistently show up in the Top 40, most of them do, however much they hold their noses when they decide they simply must have a particular play . . . oops, student-athlete. And I'm talking about colleges of every description, whether they are standard private schools, big state universities, or religiously oriented schools. They are all united in their quest for athletic excellence.
These coaches are not like you or me. Think about Calhoun. He has done the impossible by making Storrs, Conn., a destination. He has won two national championships and could very well be on his way to a third. He already is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. If he doesn't win another game, his legacy is secure.
So why would he risk the censure of the NCAA and the scrutiny he's getting now, for any one play . . . oops, student-athlete, let alone one entangled with the red-flagged Josh Nochimson?
So, Jim, Jim, Jim. What was the matter with you? Stupidity? Arrogance? Didn't you trust your superb coaching ability enough to think you still could win your fairly predictable 30 and make a run at the title if you had allowed someone else to have Nate Miles? Didn't you have some warning mechanism to let you know that it was time to back off?
Or is winning that powerful a drug?
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of the Globe's 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.
Obama's Sights on Second Amendment
By Jan LaRue
http://www.americanthinker.com/
March 27, 2009
While campaigning for the U.S. Senate and then the presidency, Barack Obama said he believed in the individual right to bear arms. Those aware of his record and rhetoric reckoned he was referring to his wife's penchant for sleeveless attire, not the Second Amendment.
During his 2004 run for the Senate, Obama said
"I think that the Second Amendment means something. I think that if the government were to confiscate everybody's guns unilaterally that I think that would be subject to constitutional challenge."
No kidding.
He didn't say it would be unconstitutional, just "subject to constitutional challenge." Nor did he express any opposition.
During the presidential campaign, a case challenging Washington D.C.'s draconian gun laws was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. The laws banned all handgun registrations, prohibited handguns already registered from being carried from room to room in the home without a license, and required all firearms in the home, including rifles and shotguns, to be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.
In June, the Court released its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that the laws violate the individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected to service in a militia as secured by the Fourth Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, emphasized that the individual right to bear arms pre-exists, and is independent of, the Constitution:
Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment. We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it "shall not be infringed." As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), "[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed . . . ."
Obama admitted in a Feb. 11, 2008, interview that he supported the handgun ban, and that it was "constitutional." On June 26, he said he agreed with the Court's decision, but added that the right to bear arms is subject to "reasonable regulations." He never "explained" how an absolute ban on handguns is "reasonable," or how he can agree with the ruling, which said it was unreasonable. Obama's inconsistencies are numerous, as John R. Lott Jr has noted.
Obama continued to duck and cover by talking about getting illegal guns off the streets, background checks for children and the mentally ill, and attacking the NRA.
Since his election, finding mention of the Second Amendment on the White House Web site takes about as long as getting to the front of the line at a gun store. What is on the site could be engraved on a .22 shell casing.
WH: The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms. [Emphasis added.]
It's far from the high caliber opinion of the Court or those of the Founders who fought for and secured the right:
* "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." - James Madison, The Federalist 46
* "Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" - Patrick Henry
* "That the Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe on the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent "the people" of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams
* "A free people ought ... to be armed." - George Washington
* "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." - Thomas Jefferson
* "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state." - Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 28
Despite the Heller ruling and his professed regard for the Amendment, Obama will push legislation to make possession and purchase of guns and ammunition as burdensome as the constitutionally comatose congressional majority will enact.
We should heed the warning of James Madison, "Father of the Constitution":
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
Jan LaRue is Senior Legal Analyst with the American Civil Rights Union; former Chief Counsel at Concerned for Women; former Legal Studies Director at Family Research Council; and former Senior Counsel for the National Law Center for Children and Families.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
March 27, 2009
While campaigning for the U.S. Senate and then the presidency, Barack Obama said he believed in the individual right to bear arms. Those aware of his record and rhetoric reckoned he was referring to his wife's penchant for sleeveless attire, not the Second Amendment.During his 2004 run for the Senate, Obama said
"I think that the Second Amendment means something. I think that if the government were to confiscate everybody's guns unilaterally that I think that would be subject to constitutional challenge."
No kidding.
He didn't say it would be unconstitutional, just "subject to constitutional challenge." Nor did he express any opposition.
During the presidential campaign, a case challenging Washington D.C.'s draconian gun laws was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. The laws banned all handgun registrations, prohibited handguns already registered from being carried from room to room in the home without a license, and required all firearms in the home, including rifles and shotguns, to be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.
In June, the Court released its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that the laws violate the individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected to service in a militia as secured by the Fourth Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, emphasized that the individual right to bear arms pre-exists, and is independent of, the Constitution:
Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment. We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it "shall not be infringed." As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), "[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed . . . ."
Obama admitted in a Feb. 11, 2008, interview that he supported the handgun ban, and that it was "constitutional." On June 26, he said he agreed with the Court's decision, but added that the right to bear arms is subject to "reasonable regulations." He never "explained" how an absolute ban on handguns is "reasonable," or how he can agree with the ruling, which said it was unreasonable. Obama's inconsistencies are numerous, as John R. Lott Jr has noted.
Obama continued to duck and cover by talking about getting illegal guns off the streets, background checks for children and the mentally ill, and attacking the NRA.
Since his election, finding mention of the Second Amendment on the White House Web site takes about as long as getting to the front of the line at a gun store. What is on the site could be engraved on a .22 shell casing.
WH: The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms. [Emphasis added.]
It's far from the high caliber opinion of the Court or those of the Founders who fought for and secured the right:
* "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." - James Madison, The Federalist 46
* "Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" - Patrick Henry
* "That the Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe on the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent "the people" of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams
* "A free people ought ... to be armed." - George Washington
* "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." - Thomas Jefferson
* "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state." - Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 28
Despite the Heller ruling and his professed regard for the Amendment, Obama will push legislation to make possession and purchase of guns and ammunition as burdensome as the constitutionally comatose congressional majority will enact.
We should heed the warning of James Madison, "Father of the Constitution":
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
Jan LaRue is Senior Legal Analyst with the American Civil Rights Union; former Chief Counsel at Concerned for Women; former Legal Studies Director at Family Research Council; and former Senior Counsel for the National Law Center for Children and Families.
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