God and Obama at Notre Dame

The clash between Catholic culture and Catholic colleges.

by Joseph Bottum
The Weekly Standard
05/18/2009, Volume 014, Issue 33
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


All across campus, the flowers have begun to bloom, their dull Indiana roots stirred by the spring rain, and the grass is almost green again at Notre Dame. Beneath a 16-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin, the main administration building sits, as always, its gold dome sparkling in the warm spring sun.

Meanwhile, in the offices of the college chapel--some chapel: the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, with a 230-foot spire and the world's largest collection of 19th-century French stained glass--young couples are meeting with deacons to plan the alumni weddings that run nonstop through the spring and summer. The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes flickers with candles, lit by anxious students as they prepare for final exams. The 14-story mosaic of Jesus, arms in the air, signals a perpetual touchdown on the side of the Hesburgh Library. The girls wear shorts, the boys wear jeans, and the gossip is all about next year's football team.

Oh, and a small plane crisscrosses the sky above campus, dragging an enormous picture of a bloody fetus. The wild-eyed and news-hungry pro-life activist Randall Terry is being hauled away by the police for trespassing. Graduate students from the theology department, their faces twisted red in fury, are screaming "Torturer!" at former Bush-speechwriter William McGurn as he tries to give a campus lecture on abortion. The local bishop has declared he will boycott the graduation ceremonies, the Secret Service has announced its fears of violence, and the university's president has retreated in a snit to his office--venturing out only to make snide remarks about his fellow Catholics before he closets himself again. The official Notre Dame website has dealt with the circus by featuring a desperately uncontroversial photograph of the school's annual Eucharistic Procession, a kind of pathetic little lie that, really, there's nothing much happening here in South Bend, Indiana: No, sir, no need to worry. No need to worry, at all.

Welcome to 2009 at the most famously Catholic school in America. Welcome to Catholic education in the 21st century.

What's causing all the noise at Notre Dame is the announcement that President Barack Obama will be receiving an honorary law degree at commencement on May 17. There's not much use in pretending that Obama doesn't support legalized abortion. This is the man, after all, who voted against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act when it was in the Illinois state legislature--the man who, by rescinding the Mexico City policy three days after he took office, now has American tax dollars paying for abortions in foreign countries, and the man who used a televised campaign appearance at an evangelical church to dismiss the moral question of abortion as "above my pay grade." Who was he kidding? He told the world flat out where he stands when he said he wouldn't want any daughter of his who made a mistake to be "punished" with a child.

For that matter, there's not much use in pretending that Catholic legal analysis isn't opposed to abortion. Do all the casuistry you want. Bring in the sharpest canon lawyers from Marquette, and the cleverest Catholic ward-heelers from Chicago, and the slipperiest Jesuits from Georgetown. Sit them all down and show them again the tape of Mario Cuomo's 1984 speech about abortion at Notre Dame--you remember, the famous "personally opposed, but publicly supportive" speech that has provided Catholic politicians with talking points for 25 years--and let them spin the president's May 17 visit to campus as hard as they can. Still, there's something peculiar about the honoring of Barack Obama with a Catholic law degree. Couldn't they have made it a degree in sociology or something?

Ah, well, an honorary doctorate of law it is, and now the Catholic faithful are up in arms across the nation. A couple thousand of them are camped out in South Bend, parading past the campus gates with rosaries and placards. A tiny Catholic group called the Cardinal Newman Society jumped on the story and in just over a month collected more than 350,000 signatures for a petition denouncing Notre Dame. Another website announced that it had received, in a single week, pledges to withhold from the school $8.2 million in planned donations.

Of course, the protesters are not the only ones angry. Obama has plenty of Catholic supporters: He won 54 percent of the Catholic vote in the last election, after all, and at least 45 percent of the vote of Mass-going Catholics. A once fairly respectable Catholic law professor named Douglas Kmiec had committed nearly every sin short of mopery to make Mitt Romney the 2008 Republican nominee, but when that campaign stumbled and fell, he took to Slate magazine to declare, "Beyond life issues, an audaciously hope-filled Democrat like Obama is a Catholic natural."

And maybe even without going beyond the life issues: Two months before Election Day, Kmiec published Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Questions about Barack Obama--a book in which he insisted that Obama, in the secret places of his heart, is actually against abortion, and, anyway, unlike the evil John McCain, he wants to help the poor, and when the poor aren't poor anymore, they'll stop having abortions, so the pro-choice Obama is more objectively pro-life than any pro-life Republican could possibly be.

Unsurprisingly, Douglas Kmiec is not happy with the protesters at Notre Dame: "Jesus' method was one of inclusion, teaching with generosity, forgiveness, and truth--not snubbing those in high office," he recently observed, forgetting, perhaps, Jesus' encounter with that high-officeholder Pontius Pilate. And Obama's other Catholic admirers are equally irate. The left-leaning Jesuit magazine America, for instance, harrumphed its support of "Catholic intellectuals who defend the richer, subtly nuanced, broad-tent Catholic tradition."

Something in that adjectival pile-up--ah, the rich, subtle nuance!--makes it sound more like wine tasting than ecclesiology, but America was soon joined by the other old-line American Catholic magazine, Commonweal, which could not bring itself to express the least sympathy for the protesters. On the First Things website, a young woman named Lacy Dodd published an account of her pregnancy during her senior year and the pressure her boyfriend applied to talk her into an abortion. "Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama," she reasonably asked her alma mater, "the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?" Commonweal put a notice of the article on its own website, and 83 comments later, the young woman had been called everything but a slut. Her story was "flimsy," "manipulative," "hardly fair," a "negative stereotype," "polemical"--and she was just "a horny kid," one of the "victims of the Russian roulette moral theory of premarital sex" so rampant in the protesters' troglodyte version of Catholicism.

Even some conservatives, Obama's natural opponents, took the school's side and denounced Mary Ann Glendon for refusing this year's Laetare Medal, Notre Dame's annual honor for service to the Church and society. A Harvard law professor, author of the widely cited Rights Talk, and the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Glendon is well known for her basic niceness and her well-mannered willingness to join attempts at coalition building between left and right.

Her decision was no personal caprice. Back in 2004, the American bishops reached a compromise between their own left and right contingents and issued a carefully worded document called "Catholics in Political Life." "Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles," the bishops agreed [emphasis in the original]. "[Such people] should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions." In part, this explains why, at the present moment, not a single American bishop is supporting Notre Dame in its clash with the bishop of South Bend, John D'Arcy--and bishops from 68 of the 195 American dioceses have publicly chastised the school. What was the point of all that careful work by the bishops if Catholic institutions are simply going to ignore it?

Anyway, Glendon had first accepted the invitation to receive the medal back in December. In March came the announcement of Obama's honorary degree, and then the school's lashing out at critics, and then the leaking of Notre Dame's official talking points, which instructed the university's spokesmen to reply to complaints: "President Obama won't be doing all the talking. Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, will be speaking as the recipient of the Laetare Medal." Glendon decided she didn't much like being a makeweight, so she wrote on April 27 to decline the medal, saying that Notre Dame's refusal even to speak with its local bishop threatened a "ripple effect" that could lead "other Catholic schools . . . to disregard the bishops' guidelines." The university's president, Fr. John Jenkins, had ratcheted the situation up, and up, and up, until even the gracious Mary Ann Glendon was forced to choose between the bishops and Notre Dame. What made them imagine she could possibly choose Notre Dame?

That wasn't how some saw it, of course. The comments about Glendon left, for example, on the libertarian law professors' blog The Volokh Conspiracy are well worth reading: a hilariously incoherent recital of a hundred years' worth of anti-Catholic tropes--mashed together with the thin-skinned reaction of Obama's supporters to any criticism of their leader and spiced with a conservative complaint that Glendon is childishly picking up her ball and going home, retreating into irrelevance instead of fighting the good fight.

What all these critics of Glendon share is a sense that Catholic unhappiness with Notre Dame must be about politics. "There is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison," Fr. Kenneth Himes, chairman of the theology department at Boston College, complained to the Boston Globe. As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal noted, this was the same Fr. Himes who in 2006 wrote the faculty a letter objecting to an honorary degree for Condoleezza Rice--a letter that read, "On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice's approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College's commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university's work."

You could cut the irony with a knife: It's only demonizing when conservatives do it. Still Fr. Himes joins Douglas Kmiec, and America, and Commonweal, and the administration of Notre Dame, and most of the newspaper columnists who've weighed in on the controversy, and a surprising number of conservatives. They all look at the Notre Dame protests and think it must be about politics. Bad politics or good politics, take your pick. But politics all the way down.

As it happens, they're wrong. Politics has very little to do with the mess. This isn't a fight about who won the last presidential election and how he's going to deal with abortion. It's a fight about culture--the culture of American Catholicism, and how Notre Dame, still living in a 1970s Catholic world, has suddenly awakened to find itself out of date.

The role of culture is what Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame and many other presidents of Catholic colleges don't quite get, and their lack of culture is what makes them sometimes seem so un-Catholic--though the charge befuddles them whenever it is made. As perhaps it ought. They know very well that they are Catholics: They go to Mass, and they pray, and their faith is real, and their theology is sophisticated, and what right has a bunch of other Catholics to run around accusing them of failing to be Catholic?

But, in fact, they live in a different world from most American Catholics. Opposition to abortion doesn't stand at the center of Catholic theology. It doesn't even stand at the center of Catholic faith. It does stand, however, at the center of Catholic culture in this country. Opposition to abortion is the signpost at the intersection of Catholicism and American public life. And those who--by inclination or politics--fail to grasp this fact will all eventually find themselves in the situation that Fr. Jenkins has now created for himself. Culturally out of touch, they rail that the antagonism must derive from politics. But it doesn't. It derives from the sense of the faithful that abortion is important. It derives from the feeling of many ordinary Catholics that the Church ought to stand for something in public life--and that something is opposition to abortion.

Fr. Himes went on to tell the Boston Globe, "Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and, consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation." Of course, here, too, there's a level of irony: Out at Notre Dame, the president, Fr. Jenkins, has defended his choice of Obama on the grounds of "conversation," but, now in full-lock down mode, the school hasn't actually scheduled any conversations or debates on the topic. They did invite the 82-year-old Judge John T. Noonan to take Mary Ann Glendon's place on the platform, and he is not, by any means, an unfaithful Catholic or a supporter of abortion. He has the reputation, however, of being one of the dullest speakers in captivity, and the school can't really expect him to provide much "conversation partnership," as Notre Dame calls it, for Barack Obama and his quicksilver rhetoric.

Still, in a peculiar way, Himes is right that "some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue." It is a horrifying fact, in many ways, that Roe v. Wade has done more to provide Catholic identity than any other event of the last 50 years. Still, for American Catholics, the Church is a refuge and bulwark against an ambient culture that erodes morality and undermines families. Catholic culture is their counterculture, their means of upholding the dignity of the human person and the integrity of family--and, in that context, the centrality of abortion for American Catholic culture seems much less arbitrary than it first appeared.

This is what the leaders of Notre Dame need to grasp. They do not necessarily have bad theology when they equate the life issues with other concerns. They do not necessarily have bad faith just because they say that war and capital punishment outweigh the million babies killed every year in this country by abortion. But they lack the cultural marker that would make them Catholic in the minds of other Catholics. Abortion is not the only life issue, but it is the one that bears most directly on the lives of ordinary Catholics as they swim against the current to preserve family life. And until Catholic universities understand this, they will not be Catholic--in a very real, existential sense.

Out in Indiana, the flowers are still blooming, the dome is still sparkling, and the protests are still going. Randall Terry promised, "We will make this a circus," and he has certainly tried. Alan Keyes has announced his own Notre Dame protest, complete with his plans to be arrested. "There are unintended consequences to this kind of angry, vituperative language about their opponents," a liberal Catholic named Patrick Whelan grandly told the San Jose Mercury News. "By making themselves pawns of the conservative right, the bishops are playing into a cycle of decline for our Church." And on the South Bend circus goes.

Any Catholic with an ounce of awareness knew this fight was coming. The ordinary Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges were bound to clash, and it's a little unfortunate that it actually spilled into public view with a visit of the president of the United States to the campus of Notre Dame. A better place to make all this public might have been the Sacred Heart University dinner this spring, which honored the pro-abortion activist Kerry Kennedy. Or the Xavier University commencement, which is honoring the pro-abortion political strategist Donna Brazile. Or the University of San Francisco graduation, which is honoring the pro-abortion district attorney (and prominent Proposition 8 opponent) Kamala Harris.

For that matter, the fight should have been held in April, when Georgetown University accommodated President Obama's handlers by covering up the IHS, the monogram for Jesus, on the wall behind the rostrum when Obama spoke on campus. You'd think this really would mark the end for Georgetown. The school typically shrugs off criticism of its lack of Catholicism by proudly declaring its "Jesuit Tradition," but the IHS monogram was the symbol for the Jesuits that St. Ignatius Loyola himself chose when he founded the society in the 16th century.

There are reasons, however, that the struggle over Catholic culture broke into open battle over a visit of Barack Obama to Notre Dame. In part, it's simply because Obama is the president and a whole lot more prominent than Kerry Kennedy or Donna Brazile or Kamala Harris. But in greater part, it's because Notre Dame is, well, Notre Dame: home of the gold dome, the basilica, the grotto, and Touchdown Jesus. If Georgetown doesn't appear Catholic to ordinary Catholics, that's just Georgetown. But if Notre Dame is shaky--if the most identifiably Catholic place in America doesn't seem Catholic--then the old connection between Catholic culture and Catholic institutions and the Catholic Church really is broken beyond repair. And where will Catholics send their children to school then?

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the editor of First Things.

Today's Tune: Steve Earle - Fort Worth Blues

(Click on title to play video)

Freeing a Mentor From His Mythology

By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
May 10, 2009

WOODSTOCK, N.Y.

SINCE he released his first album in 1968, and especially since his death in 1997, the country songwriter Townes Van Zandt has been a prototypical cult figure. Though his songs have been recorded by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and the Cowboy Junkies, Van Zandt never sold many records himself, and he battled addiction and depression for decades. His songs, at once lyrical and unsentimental, depicted love, and life itself, as experiences to be enjoyed free from all (inevitably disappointed) expectations. In the world of alternative country and beyond, to announce yourself as one of Van Zandt’s fans helps establish your critical discernment — and, by implication, indicts an undiscerning public that allowed a genius to die essentially unknown.


Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Steve Earle, above in Greenwich Village, has a new album of songs by his mentor Townes Van Zandt.

The singer-songwriter Steve Earle is having none of that. Something of a cult figure himself, he was Van Zandt’s protégé and remains one of his most ardent champions. But he is not interested in sustaining the myth of Van Zandt as a beautiful loser. “When somebody’s as good as Townes Van Zandt was and more people don’t know about it, it’s Townes’s fault,” Mr. Earle said at his home here. “For whatever reasons, he shot himself in the foot every damn chance he got. ”

Mr. Earle has put himself in a tough emotional spot. Recording “Townes” (New West), an album of songs by Van Zandt set for release on Tuesday, forced him to confront the tangled history he shared with his idol. After all, Mr. Earle is one reason why the adjective “legendary” clings to Van Zandt as if it were his first name. On a promotional sticker on one of Van Zandt’s albums Mr. Earle declared, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

That statement embarrasses Mr. Earle today. “Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan?” he asked wearily. “No.” For Mr. Earle, Van Zandt was both an inspiring and bedeviling model, a man who put his art above all other considerations but who sometimes seemed to regard success itself as inherently compromising. Though far from a superstar, Mr. Earle has earned two gold albums and two Grammy Awards, and he views such recognition as a valuable reward for hard work. “I don’t think Townes was a victim,” Mr. Earle stated. “Part of him didn’t consider himself worthy of anything.”

In a way, however, Van Zandt’s reward was the legend that followers like Mr. Earle helped foster. To this day he is the subject of tales that are told and retold, embellished and laughed over, whenever anyone who met him has a willing audience. There was the time, for example, when Van Zandt, frustrated that Mr. Earle was fooling with a .357 Magnum during a get-together, picked up a pistol himself, put a couple of bullets in the chamber and spun it around, pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger twice. The gun didn’t fire, but Van Zandt had made his point about bravado.

Such stories established Van Zandt as a doomed romantic figure. Throughout his life he wandered among Tennessee, Colorado and his home state of Texas, often calling no particular place his home. His live performances could be riveting. On good nights he seemed to disappear into chronicles of existential joy and agony like “To Live Is to Fly,” “Waiting ’Round to Die” and “Tower Song,” gently delivering irreducible truths summed up in lines like, “Everything is not enough/And nothing is too much to bear.” On bad nights he would fall off his stool onstage, too drunk or high to get through a set.

With “Townes” Mr. Earle attempts both to pay a debt and to extricate his idol’s songs from the mythology surrounding his life. Mr. Earle, who first made his mark in the 1980s with smart country-rock albums like “Guitar Town” and “Copperhead Road,” has endured devastating struggles with addiction, was jailed for drugs and weapons possession and nearly died. The romance of Van Zandt’s problems long ago lost whatever allure they may once have had for him.

Mr. Earle’s house here, which he purchased last year with his wife, the country singer Allison Moorer, includes a sleek electric wine cooler left by the previous owners. Mr. Earle displays it prominently by the counter in his kitchen. You won’t be served a hard drink here. Bottles of seltzer and diet soda stock the cooler. Mr. Earle’s rule is that if you bring an alcoholic beverage into the house, you must carry the container out when you leave. “I don’t underestimate my disease,” he said.

The years between 1990 and 1994 that Mr. Earle essentially lost to heroin and crack cocaine constituted a “vacation in the ghetto,” as he has described it, during which he gradually abandoned writing, recording and even playing. That unproductive period has instilled a ferocious work ethic in him. “Townes” is the ninth studio album he has released since he sobered up and got out of jail in late 1994. He has also published a collection of short stories, written and produced a play, performed hundreds of shows, produced albums by other artists and become an outspoken political activist.


Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Van Zandt in 1995.

He’s now finishing a novel called “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” which is loosely based on the life of Hank Williams. The urge to complete that book, which he has intermittently been working on for eight years, led indirectly to the “Townes” project. “I’ve talked about doing it for a long time,” he said about recording an album of Van Zandt’s material, “and since I didn’t have to write the songs, I thought I could make this record, turn it in and then finish the book.”

The duality of that motivation — expediency partnering neatly with heartfelt desire — suggests some of the complexity of Mr. Earle’s relationship with Van Zandt. Mr. Earle, who was raised in Texas, moved to Nashville and now primarily lives in Greenwich Village, first met Van Zandt in the early 1970s. At the time Van Zandt was the leading light on a Texas music scene that floated between Austin and Houston on a sea of alcohol, drugs and artistic conviction. Now 54, Mr. Earle was a teenager at the time, and Van Zandt was roughly a decade older. Mr. Earle was a well-read high school dropout who believed that in the wake of the Beatles and Bob Dylan it was possible to create songs that might be “literature that you can consume while driving in your car,” as he said at a recent event. Van Zandt’s hard-bitten, eloquent songs lived up to that standard and he was near at hand.

“I met him at his absolute peak artistically,” Mr. Earle recalled. “He had a really horrible reputation because of his behavior, but I also knew that he had made a decision to write songs at a certain level, that how good the songs were was primarily important to him. I committed to making art whether I ever got rich or not by Townes’s example.”

To all but a handful of his closest friends Van Zandt was a remote, elusive figure, apt to disappear and turn up with equal unpredictability. As mentor to Mr. Earle he was hardly a steady, guiding hand, and he was much too stoic to dispense sage advice about songwriting or anything else. The premise of their relationship was something like, if I didn’t think you were good enough to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. He did, however, recommend that Mr. Earle always put the top back on the bottle so that the alcohol wouldn’t spill when it inevitably got kicked over and, when injecting drugs, to use clean needles every time.

He also instructed Mr. Earle to read “War and Peace,” though Van Zandt had not read the book himself, as Mr. Earle discovered to his surprise when he dutifully returned with questions about it. “I just thought you should,” Van Zandt idly told him.

Beyond that, like so many protégés, Mr. Earle was expected to reflect well on, but certainly not to exceed, the master, as he eventually did, at least in terms of commercial success and visibility. To this day Mr. Earle retains an eager, puppyish quality that the softer side of Van Zandt could enjoy. In his cool detachment, though, Van Zandt also understood that withholding his approval would always bring an admiring Mr. Earle back for more. Distance can breed desire, and perhaps Mr. Earle took his mentor’s remove as a challenge; in any case being part of Van Zandt’s circle was important validation for Mr. Earle.

“As in a lot of these kinds of relationships, the hero is the tor-mentor,” said Justin Townes Earle, Mr. Earle’s oldest son and a recording artist in his own right. The origins of his middle name are obvious. “From the day my father met Townes, Townes tortured him,” he continued, alluding to how Van Zandt mercilessly heckled his father from the audience the first time he saw him perform, repeatedly insisting that he play “The Wabash Cannonball.” “Then he became the noogie songwriter who put my dad in a headlock.” Justin suggested that his father may be irked “that Townes never said to him, ‘Great record.’ ”

“Maybe he did,” he added, “but I think if he had, my dad would have told me.”

“Townes will always be bigger than life in his head,” the younger Earle concluded. Steve Earle admitted that Van Zandt never really saw him as an adult. “I was the kid,” he said. “I understand that, and I’m cool with it. But he could be brutal with me. ”


Jim Herrington

Steve Earle, left, with Townes Van Zandt in the 1990s. Both once shared a taste for hard living.

The two men saw each other infrequently after Mr. Earle’s descent into the drug underworld, though Van Zandt once visited him in the depths of his addiction at the request of mutual friends. “I must be in trouble if they’re sending you,” Mr. Earle remarked. Once Mr. Earle became sober, he began recording and touring with a vengeance, and Van Zandt continued his peripatetic ways. But they remained friends, even performing together at a Nashville benefit in 1995. When Van Zandt died of a heart attack at 52, Mr. Earle wrote the ballad “Fort Worth Blues” for him on his album “El Corazón.” “See you when I get there maestro,” reads Mr. Earle’s dedication.

So, given that complicated emotional history, how effective a tribute is “Townes”? In a sense it is the Townes Van Zandt album that Van Zandt couldn’t or wouldn’t make himself, but should have. With rare exceptions, most notably “Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas,” Van Zandt’s overproduced recorded work betrays the extraordinary quality of his songwriting. Mr. Earle sought to remedy that.

“It is a form of channeling at its best,” said Mr. Earle, who recorded most of the album in his Greenwich Village apartment. “What I tried to do is sit in a room by myself for 12 of the 15 tracks and play them as close to the way I remember him playing them.” Van Zandt classics like “Pancho and Lefty,” “To Live Is to Fly” and “No Place to Fall” sit comfortably next to worthy, if lesser known, songs like “(Quicksilver Dreams of) Maria” and “Where I Lead Me.”

Completing a generational journey, Mr. Earle and his son Justin duet on “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” the dense, troubled gambling story-song that Mr. Earle performed nearly 30 years ago to impress Van Zandt the first time he saw Mr. Earle perform. Like the album itself, it’s a tribute that demands respect from its subject.

“Townes’s inability to promote himself and put his dukes up for his own art failed him over and over again,” Mr. Earle said. “But none of us is whole. We all do some things better than others. As a songwriter, you won’t find anybody better. I hope this record will make it a little more apparent just how good these songs are.”

Capitalism Goes Out Of Tune

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Sunday, May 10, 2009

From Oct. 18 to Dec. 3, 1961, 116,000 people visited New York's Museum of Modern Art before anyone noticed that Henri Matisse's painting "Le Bateau" had been hung upside down. Modernity is supposed to "transgress" standards of the traditional, which is why Paul Hindemith, while rehearsing one of his dissonant orchestral compositions, said to the musicians, "No, no, gentlemen -- even though it sounds wrong, it's still not right."

Proponents of today's world-turned-upside-down economic policies say the policies might seem wrong but really are boldly modern in their rejection of markets in favor of pervasive government intervention in economic life. Hence New York, which until eight months ago was the financial capital of the world, is no longer even the financial capital of the United States.
Washington is.

So says Ian Bremmer in "State Capitalism Comes of Age: The End of the Free Market?" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. It should be read by Americans who are dismayed by the blurring of the line between public and private sectors.

Most Americans assume -- and are encouraged to do so by those doing the blurring -- that the government is doing this reluctantly and is eager to find an "exit strategy" to "unwind" its interventions. Bremmer, president of the consulting firm Eurasia Group, believes that although the governments of many developing nations have made "a strategic rejection of free-market doctrine," governments of developed countries do not intend to "manage" their economies "indefinitely." About the former, he is correct. About the latter, his wish may be the father of his thought.

Among the myriad signs that many nations are developing systems "in which the state functions as the leading economic actor," Bremmer notes that the 13 largest oil companies are owned and operated by governments and that governments in the developing world control three-quarters of the world's energy reserves. Privately owned multinational companies produce just 10 percent of the world's oil and own just 3 percent of its proven reserves. In many developing nations, large companies that remain in private hands are only nominally private: They are government appendages in that they depend on government patronage for credit, contracts and subsidies. "Sovereign wealth funds" -- state-owned investment portfolios -- already account for one-eighth of global investment, double the figure just five years ago. The largest such funds are those of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and China, with Russia's rising. The only democracy operating one of the 10 largest funds is Norway. The combined assets of all such funds exceed the assets of all the world's hedge funds.

Bremmer says, correctly, that state capitalism "has introduced massive inefficiencies into global markets and injected populist politics into economic decision-making," that "deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth," and that politicians tend to develop stimulus packages with their constituencies, not economic efficiencies, in mind.
Therefore, he says, the state must eventually retreat. He probably is wrong because he underestimates the pleasure politicians derive from using their nation's wealth as a slush fund for purchasing political advantage.

In 1937, columnist Walter Lippmann, deploring the rise of "authoritarian collectivism," lamented that in order to be taken seriously, a politician or theorist had to have "proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs." Paul A. Rahe, a historian and political philosopher at Hillsdale College, in his new book "Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift," notes that, long before 1937, we were warned.

In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated people being governed by "an immense, tutelary power" determined to take "sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate." It would be a power "absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle," aiming for our happiness but wanting "to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness." It would, Tocqueville said, provide people security, anticipate their needs, direct their industries and divide their inheritances.
It would envelop society in "a network of petty regulations -- complicated, minute and uniform." But softly: "It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them" until people resemble "a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

So what today seems as modern as Matisse once seemed was foreseen 17 decades ago. Like Hindemith's music, what is happening seems wrong. And it is.

georgewill@washpost.com

Dom DiMaggio Dies at 92; Played in His Brother’s Shadow

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
May 9, 2009

Dom DiMaggio, a perennial All-Star with the Boston Red Sox and one of the finest center fielders of his era though he played in the shadow of his brother Joe, the Yankee icon, died Friday at his home in Marion, Mass. He was 92.

His death was announced by the Red Sox.

Joe DiMaggio was the Yankee Clipper and Joltin’ Joe, the personification of power and grace. Dom DiMaggio was the Little Professor, slight of build and bespectacled at a time when ballplayers rarely wore eyeglasses.


Scott Martin/Associated Press

Boston’s Dom DiMaggio, in glasses, with his brother Joe and his teammate Ted Williams at the 1941 All-Star Game.


But Dom DiMaggio was an intense, aggressive player and a superb fielder, possessing great range and a powerful throwing arm. He led the American League twice in runs scored and once in triples, batted .300 four times and had a career average of .298 over 11 seasons, all with the Red Sox. He was a seven-time All-Star.

Bleacher fans at Fenway Park hyped their DiMaggio with a little tune:

“Oh, Dominic DiMaggio!

He’s better than his brother Joe.”

Ted Williams, playing left field at Fenway, got an earful from fans who marveled at Dom’s sparkling play in center.

“The wolves in left field were always yelling how he was playing his position and mine,” Williams recalled in his autobiography, “My Turn at Bat,” written with John Underwood. “He was a great outfielder.”

Dominic Paul DiMaggio was born on Feb. 12, 1917, in San Francisco, the youngest of nine children of Sicilian immigrants. His two oldest brothers, Mike and Tom, worked on fishing boats with their father, Giuseppe. But his brothers Vince and Joe starred in the outfield for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League.

Dom was signed by the Seals for the 1937 season, when Joe was in his second year with the Yankees and Vince was a rookie outfielder for the Boston Braves. The San Francisco newspapers ran a DiMaggio Digest, reporting daily how the brothers had fared. In his three seasons with the Seals, Dom became a local star in his own right. He hit .360 in 1939, when he was named most valuable player in the Pacific Coast League, having filled out to all of 5 feet 9 inches and 168 pounds.


Scott Martin/Associated Press

Dom DiMaggio, center, throws out the honorary first pitch surrounded by, from left, Frank Robinson, Bobby Thigpen, Earl Weaver and Rich 'Goose' Gossage before the game between the Chicago White Sox and Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Tropicana Field in 2000.


The Red Sox bought DiMaggio and he hit .301 as a rookie. Then came the epic 1941 season when Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Williams batted .406. Dom finished third in the American League that year in runs scored, with 117, behind Williams and his brother Joe.

He enlisted in the Navy after the 1942 season, then returned to the Red Sox in 1946, hitting .316. Boston won the American League pennant by 12 games over the Detroit Tigers.

DiMaggio had a moment of exhilaration, but then intense disappointment in Game 7 of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park.

In the eighth inning, he hit a two-run double that tied the game at 3-3, but he injured a hamstring rounding first base. The Cardinals scored the winning run of the Series in the bottom of the inning on Enos Slaughter’s “mad dash” from first base, when Leon Culberson, having replaced DiMaggio in center, made a weak relay to shortstop Johnny Pesky after fielding Harry Walker’s drive to left center. Pesky did not turn and get his throw home in time.

“Slaughter would never have scored if I’d been in center field,” DiMaggio maintained in “When the Boys Came Back,” a history of the 1946 season by Frederick Turner. “In fact, I might have had a play on him at third base because I’d have played that much farther over, and I’d have been charging the hell out of that ball.”

DiMaggio batted safely in 34 straight games in 1949, a Red Sox record, and had his best season in 1950, when he batted .328, led the American League in runs scored with 131 and in triples with 11.

He retired in May 1953 after Manager Lou Boudreau benched him in favor of a rookie, Tom Umphlett. He later owned a company that manufactured carpeting and upholstery for automobiles.

DiMaggio is survived by his wife, Emily; his sons Dominic Jr., of Atkinson, N.H., and Peter, of Westford, Mass.; his daughter, Emily DiMaggio of Wayland, Mass.; and six grandchildren.

Joe DiMaggio died in 1999. Vince DiMaggio, who played 10 seasons in the major leagues and was twice an All-Star, died in 1986.

Dom DiMaggio became estranged from the Red Sox after joining a group that sought unsuccessfully to buy the franchise in 1977 after the death of the longtime owner Tom Yawkey. But he appeared at Fenway Park with his ex-teammates Bobby Doerr and Pesky among a host of former Red Sox stars who helped unfurl a banner in honor of the team’s 2004 World Series championship, which ended an 86-year title drought.

When Joe DiMaggio played his last game, an exhibition in Tokyo on Nov. 10, 1951, between touring major leaguers and a Japanese squad, Dom was in the lineup with him. Joe homered in his last at-bat, in the eighth inning. Dom tripled in the ninth. It seemed another instance in which Dom performed superbly but was second best to Joe.

“It’s been a struggle all my life,” The Boston Globe quoted Dom DiMaggio as having said. “I was always Joe’s kid brother. I never encouraged my two sons to get into baseball. I knew it would be twice as hard on them as it was on me. The Joe DiMaggio legend was just too strong.”

Yet Dom DiMaggio remembered moments when he prevailed over Joe.

“I made two or three catches on Joe that were quite important to him,” he told The New York Times at an old-timers’ game at Yankee Stadium in August 1982 in which he appeared with brother Joe. “One year he was battling Hank Greenberg for the league lead in runs batted in and I caught a long one with the bases loaded for the third out.

“Coming in to the dugout after that catch, I half-glanced at Joe on his way to center field and I could feel the daggers flying my way. Joe always gave me terrible looks when I did something like that, but when he croaked me, he never apologized.”


'Underrated' Quiet Star DiMaggio Dies

Overshadowed by brother Joe, forged his own legacy

By Mark Feeney, Boston Globe Staff
http://www.boston.com/sports/
May 9, 2009


Red Sox star Dom DiMaggio stood with brother Joe in July 1949. Dom hit safely in 34 consecutive games, a Red Sox record, that year. (Ray Howard/Associated Press /File)

Dom DiMaggio - who, despite having to share an outfield with Ted Williams and a name with his older brother Joe, became a diamond standout in his own right, earning All-Star status seven times in 11 seasons with the Red Sox - died yesterday of complications of pneumonia. He was 92.

The late author David Halberstam once described Mr. DiMaggio as "probably the most underrated player of his day."

Playing in the shadow of the era's two biggest superstars made that inevitable, perhaps. But neither of his great contemporaries failed to appreciate Mr. DiMaggio's talents. Williams considered him "the best leadoff man in the American League," and his older brother called him "the best defensive outfielder I've ever seen."

Mr. DiMaggio died in his Marion home while watching the replay of Thursday night's 13-3 Red Sox victory over the Cleveland Indians. "I was there, and we were watching it together," said his son Dominic Paul DiMaggio Jr. of Atkinson, N.H. "It was peaceful."

Elected to the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 1995, Mr. DiMaggio spent his major league career in Boston, playing for the Sox from 1940-42, then from 1946-53. He lost three seasons to wartime service in the US Navy.

"Dom DiMaggio was a beloved member of the Red Sox organization for almost 70 years," John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox, said in a statement. "Even after his playing days, Dom's presence at Fenway Park, together with his teammates Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky on numerous occasions reminded us all of a glorious Red Sox era of years past."

Pesky said he was in bed when the phone rang with news of Mr. DiMaggio's death.

"I'm very sad; I've been in tears all day," he said. "With Ted and Dom and Bob, we were like family. Dominic and I, we hit one-two in the lineup ahead of the great Ted. Dom and I would be on base for Ted, and Ted used to call us his pals. We had so many good times together."

Mr. DiMaggio, who stood 5-feet-9 and wore eyeglasses, was nicknamed "the Little Professor," a tribute to his intelligence on the field, as well as his scholarly mien and slight stature. Along with canniness, Mr. DiMaggio brought quickness and speed to the Red Sox lineup. He led the American League in stolen bases in 1950, with 15 (the lowest figure ever to lead either major league in that category). He also led the league that year in triples, with 11.

Mr. DiMaggio had a lifetime batting average of .298. He scored more than 100 runs seven times, twice leading the American League in that category. He hit safely in 34 consecutive games, a Red Sox record, in 1949. Two years later, he hit safely in 27 consecutive games.

His skill as a hitter inadvertently helped create one of the darkest moments in Red Sox history, their defeat at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals in the seventh and deciding game of the 1946 World Series. In the top of the eighth inning, he doubled home two runs to tie the game at 3-3, but pulled a hamstring on the way to second base.

Leon Culberson replaced him in center field. In the bottom of the eighth, with two outs, the Cardinals' Enos Slaughter tried to score from first on a single. Culberson was slow to field the ball, then made a mediocre throw to shortstop Pesky, whose throw home was too late. Slaughter was safe, giving the Cardinals the lead and, half an inning later, the championship.

"If they hadn't taken DiMaggio out of the game," Slaughter later said of his daring sprint, "I wouldn't have tried it."

Mr. DiMaggio, who had started in baseball as a shortstop, played the outfield like an infielder. He specialized in charging balls hit through the infield and using his powerful throwing arm to cut down advancing runners. (Slaughter had good reason to be leery of Mr. DiMaggio: He threw out three runners in the 1946 Series.) He was also celebrated for his range, using his quickness to get a good jump on the ball and positioning his body to face left field rather than home plate, which he felt saved him a step on balls hit in front of him.

"He was the easiest outfielder I ever played with," Williams said. "When he yelled, 'Mine!' you didn't have to worry about the rest of that play."

The slugger was uniquely qualified to comment on Mr. DiMaggio's fielding ability. It was often said that because of his teammate's slowness afoot Mr. DiMaggio had responsibility for both his own center field position and Williams's in left.

According to Halberstam, many of Mr. DiMaggio's teammates felt that batting leadoff for the Sox was "the hardest job in baseball," because that meant that back in the dugout he had to face a barrage of questions from Williams, who batted third: "What was he throwing, Dommy? Was he fast, was he tricky, was he getting the corners? Come on, Dommy, you saw him."

But the highly analytical and driven Williams found his match in the highly analytical and composed Mr. DiMaggio.

One of Williams's closest friends, Mr. DiMaggio begrudged the Splendid Splinter neither his interrogations nor his preeminence with the Red Sox. Relations with his brother were more charged.

Mr. DiMaggio never suggested he was the superior ballplayer. "I can do two things better than he can," he would say when asked to compare himself with Joe, "play pinochle and speak Italian."

He did, however, resent those who saw him only in terms of Joltin' Joe. "Yes, he's my brother - and I'm his brother," Mr. DiMaggio liked to say. "It's been a struggle all my life. . . . It followed me all through my major league career. I was always Joe's kid brother. . . . I never encouraged my two sons to get into baseball. I knew it would be twice as hard on them as it was on me. The Joe DiMaggio legend was just too strong."

The two DiMaggios played the same position (as did an older brother, Vince, who spent 10 seasons playing in the National League). They played for teams that were each other's fiercest rival.

Joe's most famous achievement was hitting safely in 56 consecutive games. Having hit safely in 34 straight games, Dom found his own streak ended when Joe made the put out on his final at-bat of what would have been the 35th game.

"Oh, Joe DiMaggio was a great player, but Dominic's got all the brains in the family," his wife, Emily (Frederick) DiMaggio, said in a 1971 interview.

Born in San Francisco Feb. 12, 1917, Dominic Paul DiMaggio was the son of Giuseppe Paola DiMaggio, a fisherman, and Rosalie (Mercurio) DiMaggio. He was the youngest of nine.

"I think Pop's pride and joy was Dom," Joe DiMaggio once said. "When Dominic was in short pants, Pop wanted him to become a lawyer, because 'he wears glasses.' "

Instead, Mr. DiMaggio wanted to be a chemical engineer. His athletic talents soon made him alter that ambition, though, and he followed in the footsteps of Joe and Vince.

Though Mr. DiMaggio started out as a shortstop, managers feared that a bad hop might break his glasses, so he was switched to the outfield.

Mr. DiMaggio's exploits with the minor league San Francisco Seals drew the attention of major league scouts, and the Red Sox signed him in 1939. Starting out in right field, he demonstrated such prowess with his glove that the team traded its All-Star center fielder, Doc Cramer, to open up that position for him. He finished the season with a .301 batting average.

Mr. DiMaggio enlisted in the Navy in 1942. Gathering no rust while in the service, he batted .316 in his first season back. He did, though, suffer an eye injury in 1943 while stationed on the West Coast that would develop into chorio-retinitis and force his retirement in 1953. The eye trouble led manager Lou Boudreau to bench Mr. DiMaggio. He retired two months into the season.

"I didn't want to hang around if I couldn't play regularly," he said in a 1987 interview about his decision to end his career.


Dom and his oldest brother, Vince DiMaggio, met as rivals in this undated photo. Vince started his Major League baseball career as a member of the Boston Bees.

In 1940, Hall of Famer Ty Cobb had said, "Dom's a throwback to the kind of players we used to have."

In many ways, though, Mr. DiMaggio was more a forerunner than throwback: the athlete as business professional. Toward the end of his playing career, he served as American League player representative in negotiations between players and owners. After retiring, he founded two highly successful manufacturing firms. One made carpeting for automobile interiors; the other made foam padding for automobile seats.

An example of Mr. DiMaggio's business success was his membership in the original ownership group of the Boston Patriots. He purchased 10 percent of the team in 1960 for $25,000 and sold it six years later for $300,000. That same year, he made unsuccessful overtures to Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey about buying the team. He also headed a syndicate that tried to purchase the team in 1977, after Yawkey's death.

Emily Colette DiMaggio of Wayland said her father "was such a great teacher of how to live a life and to love and pass it on."

She recalled that growing up in Wellesley, neighborhood children flocked to the DiMaggio house because there was always extra equipment for games. One day when the children couldn't find a ball, she said, they went into Mr. DiMaggio's study and borrowed one covered with signatures, a pennant ball, perhaps.

Upon arriving home in the evening, Mr. DiMaggio spied the ball, now sporting grass stains and smudged names, and asked, "What is this?"

"We told him we used it for the neighborhood ballgame with the kids," his daughter said. "We were waiting for the reaction, and he said, 'So, did you win?' That's who he was, an incredible dad."

In addition to his wife, son, and daughter, Mr. DiMaggio leaves another son, Peter Joseph of Westford, and six grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Paul Church in Wellesley. Burial will be in Newton Cemetery in Newton.

Bryan Marquard of the Globe staff contributed to this obituary.

Conservatives always face uphill climb

The Left's devotion to government gives it a unity of purpose the Right can't match.

By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, May 8, 2009

Is conservatism over?

Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell says so. "The Republican Party is in deep trouble," Gen. Powell told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this kind of incisive insight. "Americans do want to pay taxes for services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less."

Whether or not they want it, they're certainly going to get it. And, if you like big government now, just think how big it'll be once both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You'll recall that Gen. Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly stiffing his "beloved friend" John McCain, after years of more discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his not so beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of more government and more taxes is as near as we've ever got to a coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this refreshingly candid platform.

One of Powell's more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: "We do deserts, we don't do mountains." Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush's decision, at Powell's urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shia to whom it never occurred that the world's superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purposes of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: that's an interesting glimpse of what it's like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell's much-vaunted "moderation."

So I have no great regard for Powell's strategic thinking, at home or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican Party ought to be a "big tent": Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few "mean-spirited" and "divisive" talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the Democrat tent, they've got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben Affleck: diversity on parade.

In fact, the GOP's tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians' insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don't get the warhawks' obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can't see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: in the Democrat parade, whatever your bugbear government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet… Last November, even with the GOP's fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector's "October surprise," even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

OK, it's not 51 percent. But still: Obama's 53 percent isn't a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it is.

To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican Party is in the desert, when, in fact, it's climbing a mountain. All things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It's up against significant members of its own party. It's up against a media for whom the Democrat positions are the default positions on almost anything that matters. Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in The New York Times back in 2002:

"Mr. Powell's approach to almost all issues – foreign or domestic – is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action."

So supporting "internationalism," "multilateralism," abortion and racial quotas means you're "moderate" and "nonideological"? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely. The aim of a large swath of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate speech" prohibitions, activist judges' more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position – even when, in many cases, the "extreme" position is supported by a majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it's Ann Coulter who's "vicious," not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who blow up Western troops in Iraq to America's Minutemen and gets rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic Convention.

It's a mountain, and it's getting steeper. Promises of "free" government health care will make more voters susceptible to the blandishments of the nanny state. The Democrats have plans for talk radio and the Internet that will diminish conservative voices. Another retirement on the Supreme Court, and the First and Second Amendments will start getting nibbled away. Obama's buddies at ACORN, already under investigation in multiple states over fraudulent voter registration, will have a prominent say in the 2010 Census.

But, when the going gets tough, you don't, as Gen. Powell advises, "move toward the center." You move the center toward you, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did. It's harder to do it that way, but if it's a choice between more government and more taxes, or more liberty and more opportunity, I'll stick with the latter, and so should the Republican Party – however difficult it is. Unlike Colin Powell, conservatism does do mountains.

©MARK STEYN

Israel Today, the West Tomorrow

By Mark Steyn
Commentary Magazine
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
May 2009

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, a group of just under 100 people—Londoners and a few visitors —took a guided tour of the old Jewish East End. They visited, among other sites of interest, the birthplace of my old chum Lionel Bart, the author of Oliver! Three generations of schoolchildren have grown up singing Bart’s lyric:


Consider yourself

At ’ome!

Consider yourself

One of the family!


Those few dozen London Jews considered themselves at ’ome. But they weren’t. Not any more. The tour was abruptly terminated when the group was pelted with stones, thrown by “youths”—or to be slightly less evasive, in the current euphemism of Fleet Street, “Asian” youths. “If you go any further, you’ll die,” they shouted, in between the flying rubble.

A New Yorker who had just moved to Britain to start a job at the Metropolitan University had her head cut open and had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel, causing her to miss the Holocaust Day “interfaith memorial service” at the East London Central Synagogue. Her friend, Eric Litwack from Canada, was also struck but did not require stitches. But if you hadn’t recently landed at Heathrow, it wasn’t that big a deal, not these days: Nobody was killed or permanently disfigured. And given the number of Jewish community events that now require security, perhaps Her Majesty’s Constabulary was right and these Londoners walking the streets of their own city would have been better advised to do so behind a police escort.

_____________


A European Holocaust Memorial Day on which Jews are stoned sounds like a parody of the old joke that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. According to a 2005 poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 percent of Germans “are sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews”—which is a cheerfully straightforward way of putting it. Nevertheless, when it comes to “harping on,” these days it’s the Jews who are mostly on the receiving end. While we’re reprising old gags, here’s one a reader reminded me of a couple of years ago, during Israel’s famously “disproportionate” incursion into Lebanon: One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.

“Israel is unfashionable,” a Continental foreign minister said to me a decade back. “But maybe Israel will change, and then fashions will change.” Fashions do change. But however Israel changes, this fashion won’t. The shift of most (non-American) Western opinion against the Jewish state that began in the 1970s was, as my Continental politician had it, simply a reflection of casting: Israel was no longer the underdog but the overdog, and why would that appeal to a post-war polytechnic Euro Left unburdened by Holocaust guilt?

Fair enough. Fashions change. But the new Judenhass is not a fashion, simply a stark reality that will metastasize in the years ahead and leave Israel isolated in the international “community” in ways that will make the first decade of this century seem like the good old days.

A few months after the curtailed Holocaust Day tour, I found myself in that particular corner of Tower Hamlets for the first time in years. Specifically, on Cable Street—the scene of a famous battle in 1936, when Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, in a crude exercise of political muscle, determined to march through the heart of Jewish East London. They were turned back by a mob of local Jews, Irish Catholic dockers, and Communist agitators, all standing under the Spanish Civil War slogan: “No Pasaran.” They shall not pass.

From “No Pasaran” to “If you go any further, you’ll die” is a story not primarily of anti-Semitism but of unprecedented demographic transformation. Beyond the fashionable “anti-Zionism” of the Euro Left is a starker reality: The demographic energy not just in Lionel Bart’s East End but in almost every Western European country is “Asian.” Which is to say, Muslim. A recent government statistical survey reported that the United Kingdom’s Muslim population is increasing ten times faster than the general population. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and many other Continental cities from Scandinavia to the Côte d’Azur will reach majority Muslim status in the next few years.

Brussels has a Socialist mayor, which isn’t that surprising, but he presides over a caucus a majority of whose members are Muslim, which might yet surprise those who think we’re dealing with some slow, gradual, way-off-in-the-future process here. But so goes Christendom at the dawn of the third millennium: the ruling party of the capital city of the European Union is mostly Muslim.

There are generally two responses to this trend: The first is that it’s like a cast change in Cats or, perhaps more precisely, David Merrick’s all-black production of Hello, Dolly! Carol Channing and her pasty prancing waiters are replaced by Pearl Bailey and her ebony chorus, but otherwise the show is unchanged. Same set, same words, same arrangements: France will still be France, Germany Germany, Belgium Belgium.

The second response is that the Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks’ abolition of children’s “piggy banks” to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

Fifty-nine percent? What the hell’s wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the “moderate” Arab world—79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven’t re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.

To be sure, there are occasional arcane points of dispute: one recalls, in the wake of the July 7 bombings, the then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s somewhat tortured attempts to explain why blowing up buses in Tel Aviv is entirely legitimate whereas blowing up buses in Bloomsbury is not. Yet these are minimal bumps on a smooth glide path: The more Europe’s Muslim population grows, the more restive and disassimilated it becomes, the more enthusiastically the establishment embraces “anti-Zionism,” as if the sinister Jewess is the last virgin left to toss in the volcano—which, given the 13-year old “chavs” and “slappers” face down in pools of their own vomit in most British shopping centers of a Friday afternoon, may indeed be the case. For today’s Jews, unlike on Cable Street in 1936, there are no Catholic dockworkers or Communist agitators to stand shoulder to shoulder. In post-Christian Europe, there aren’t a lot of the former (practicing Catholics or practicing dockers), and as for the intellectual Left, it’s more enthusiastic in its support of Hamas than many Gazans.

To which there are many Israelis who would brusquely reply: So what? Pity the poor Jew who has ever relied on European “friends.” Yet there is a difference of scale between the well-established faculty-lounge disdain for “Israeli apartheid” and a mass psychosis so universal it’s part of the air you breathe. For a glimpse of the future, consider the (for the moment) bizarre circumstances of the recent Davis Cup First Round matches in Sweden. They had been scheduled long ago to be played in the Baltiska Hallen stadium in Malmo. Who knew which team the Swedes would draw? Could have been Chile, could have been Serbia. Alas, it was Israel.

Malmo is Sweden’s most Muslim city, and citing security concerns, the local council ordered the three days of tennis to be played behind closed doors. Imagine being Amir Hadad and Andy Ram, the Israeli doubles players, or Simon Aspelin and Robert Lindstedt, the Swedes. This was supposed to be their big day. But the vast stadium is empty, except for a few sports reporters and team officials. And just outside the perimeter up to 10,000 demonstrators are chanting, “Stop the match!” and maybe, a little deeper into the throng, they’re shouting, “We want to kill all Jews worldwide” (as demonstrators in Copenhagen, just across the water, declared just a few weeks earlier). Did Aspelin and Lindstedt wonder why they couldn’t have drawn some less controversial team, like Zimbabwe or Sudan? By all accounts, it was a fine match, thrilling and graceful, with good sportsmanship on both sides. Surely, such splendid tennis could have won over the mob, and newspapers would have reported that by the end of the match the Israeli players had the crowd with them all the way. But they shook ’em off at Helsingborg.

Do you remember the “road map” summit held in Jordan just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq? It seemed a big deal at the time: The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. president, all the A-list dictators of the Arab League. Inside the swank resort, it was all very collegial, smiles and handshakes. Outside, flags fluttered—Jordan’s, America’s, Saudi Arabia’s, Egypt’s, Palestine’s. But not Israel’s. King Abdullah of Jordan had concluded it would be too provocative to advertise the Zionist Entity’s presence on Jordanian soil even at a summit supposedly boasting they were all on the same page. Malmo’s tennis match observed the same conventions: I’m sure the Swedish tennis wallahs were very gracious hosts behind the walls of the stockade, and the unmarked car to the airport was top of the line. How smoothly the furtive maneuvers of the Middle East transfer to the wider world.

_____________


When Western governments are as reluctant as King Abdullah to fly the Star of David, those among the citizenry who choose to do so have a hard time. In Britain in January, while “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were permitted to dress up as hook-nosed Jews drinking the blood of Arab babies, the police ordered counter-protesters to put away their Israeli flags. In Alberta, in the heart of Calgary’s Jewish neighborhood, the flag of Hizballah (supposedly a proscribed terrorist organization) was proudly waved by demonstrators, but one solitary Israeli flag was deemed a threat to the Queen’s peace and officers told the brave fellow holding it to put it away or be arrested for “inciting public disorder.” In Germany, a student in Duisburg put the Star of David in the window of an upstairs apartment on the day of a march by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, only to have the cops smash his door down and remove the flag. He’s now trying to get the police to pay for a new door. Ah, those Jews. It’s always about money, isn’t it?

Peter, the student in Duisberg, says he likes to display the Israeli flag because anti-Semitism in Europe is worse than at any other time since the Second World War. Which is true. But, if you look at it from the authorities’ point of view, it’s not about Jew-hatred; it’s a simple numbers game. If a statistically insignificant Jewish population gets upset, big deal. If the far larger Muslim population—and, in some French cities, the youth population (i.e., the demographic that riots) is already pushing 50 percent—you have a serious public-order threat on your hands. We’re beyond the anti-Semitic and into the ad hoc utilitarian: The King Abdullah approach will seem like the sensible way to avoid trouble. To modify the UN joke: Whom won’t we play? Israel, of course. Not in public.

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group wearing “BOYCOTT ISRAEL” T-shirts entered a French branch of Carrefour, the world’s largest supermarket chain, and announced themselves. They then systematically advanced down every aisle examining every product, seizing all the items made in Israel and piling them into carts to take away and destroy. Judging from the video they made, the protesters were mostly Muslim immigrants and a few French leftists. But more relevant was the passivity of everyone else in the store, both staff and shoppers, all of whom stood idly by as private property was ransacked and smashed, and many of whom when invited to comment expressed support for the destruction. “South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products,” one elderly lady customer said. “So what you’re doing, I find it good.”

Others may find Germany in the ‘30s the more instructive comparison. “It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities,” the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote. “Don’t count heads; count decibels. All entities—the United States, the Western world, the Arab street—have prevailing moods, and it’s prevailing moods that define aggregates at any given time.” Last December, in a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing power and wealth, Pakistani terrorists nevertheless found time to divert one-fifth of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If this was a territorial dispute over Kashmir, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Because Pakistani Islam has been in effect Arabized. Demographically, in Europe and elsewhere, Islam has the numbers. But ideologically, radical Islam has the decibels—in Turkey, in the Balkans, in Western Europe.

And the prevailing mood in much of the world makes Israel an easy sacrifice. Long before Muslims are a statistical majority, there will be three permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, France, Russia—for whom the accommodation of Islam is a domestic political imperative.

_____________


On the heels of his call for the incorporation of Sharia within British law, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview to the Muslim News praising Islam for making “a very significant contribution to getting a debate about religion into public life.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. The urge to look on the bright side of its own remorseless cultural retreat will intensify: Once Europeans have accepted a not entirely voluntary biculturalism, they will see no reason why Israel should not do the same, and they will embrace a one-state, one-man, one-vote solution for the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

The Muslim world has spent decades peddling the notion that the reason a vast oil-rich region stretching thousands of miles is politically deformed and mired in grim psychoses is all because of a tiny strip of turf barely wider than my New Hampshire township. It will make an ever more convenient scapegoat for the problems of a far vaster territory from the mountains of Morne to the Urals. There was a fair bit of this in the days after 9/11. As Richard Ingrams wrote on the following weekend in the London Observer: “Who will dare to damn Israel?”

Well, take a number and get in line. The dust had barely settled on the London Tube bombings before a reader named Derrick Green sent me a congratulatory e-mail: “I bet you Jewish supremacists think it is Christmas come early, don’t you? Incredibly, you are now going to get your own way even more than you did before, and the British people are going to be dragged into more wars for Israel.”

So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli “disproportion.” For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today—it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora—the Jewish presence in the wider world—will shrivel.

And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel? There’ll still be a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainly for the pleasures it affords to chastise the new Nazis. As Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in 2005: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm—tattoo number A-25466—I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.” Jenin?

You can see why they’ll keep Holocaust Day on the calendar: In an age when politicians are indifferent or downright hostile to Israel’s “right to exist,” it’s useful to be able to say, “But some of my best photo-ops are Jewish.”

The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn’t that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another “pro-Palestinian” protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, “Run, run, you cowards!” and “Allahu akbar!” You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn’t about Gaza, this isn’t about the Middle East; it’s about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history’s bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews.


About the Author

Mark Steyn is the author of America Alone and a columnist for National Review. His piece on snark ran in our February issue.


© 2009 Commentary Inc.

Today's Tune: Keiran Kane and Kevin Welch - Something 'Bout You

(Click on title to play video)

We Need a Hero

My ideal platform may be right. But it is surely not popular.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 08, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

We conservatives are having one of our grand, knock-down, drag-out fights over the future of conservatism and the GOP. Should conservatives compromise on gay marriage or abortion rights? Should we jump on the environmental bandwagon? Are there ways to reform health care without abandoning our principles? What would Reagan do? What would William F. Buckley think? Would the Founding Fathers cry like that American Indian in the old anti-litter commercial?

Frankly, I love these arguments. I think they are healthy and good for conservatism and the country. One of the things I love about conservatives is that we have these internal debates more often than the Five Families went to war in The Godfather.

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama’s idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He’s open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives. Meanwhile, conservatism’s dogma remains forever in flux. We constantly debate the trade-offs between freedom and virtue, the conflicts between liberty and order.

See, I can’t stop myself from getting into this stuff.

But here’s the thing. One of the most important, yet most frequently violated, laws of punditry is that your own priorities and preferences aren’t always relevant. I would love it if the GOP dedicated itself to cutting government by two-thirds, leaving only a minimal social safety net, a big honking military, and a few other bells and whistles for promoting the general welfare. My ideal ticket in 2008 would have been Cheney-Gramm. That’s right, Dick Cheney and Phil Gramm: two old white guys who would crush our enemies and liberate our economy while shouting, “You kids get off my lawn!” at the filthy hippies who would inevitably accumulate outside the White House like so much bathroom fungus.

But you know what? It’s not about what I want. Gone are the days when a great but uncharismatic president like Calvin Coolidge could get elected because he promised to do as little as possible. (“Perhaps,” he observed, “one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”) My ideal platform may be right. (If I didn’t think it was, it wouldn’t be my ideal platform, now would it?) But it is surely not popular.

And that, I fear, may be the key word: “popular.” In my darker moods, I suspect that American politics, at least at the presidential level, is ultimately just a popularity contest. In the television age, the more personally charming guy wins — or, at minimum, has a monumental advantage.

Partisans on both sides tend to not like this argument for all sorts of reasons. For instance, they tend to like their candidates better than the other team’s. Of course, this is often just a rationalization. If you honestly believed that Michael Dukakis was a more likable guy than George H. W. Bush, or that Nixon would be a more entertaining drinking buddy than JFK, you should seek therapy, or a vigorous regimen of enemas, or both. The simple fact is that if John Kerry and Al Gore weren’t pompous human toothaches, they would have blown George W. Bush out of the water.

Also, partisans like to believe that whenever their guy wins, it’s because their ideas have been ratified by the American people, and whenever the other guy loses, they pronounce that the American people have resoundingly rejected this or that idea. Sometimes this is obviously true, but not nearly as often as we like to think. Obama, after all, promised over and over that his administration would provide a “net spending cut.” How’s that going?

Liberals bristled at — but didn’t really deny — the suggestion that voters preferred Bush because they’d rather “have a beer with him.” What they fail to fully appreciate is that many voters preferred Obama because they’d rather have a chardonnay with him than with that cranky John McCain. Obama’s winning personality and a widespread yearning for ill-defined “change” were probably more essential to Obama’s victory than his campaign proposals.

So what does this mean for conservatives? Well, it doesn’t mean that we should stop debating ideas. But it also probably means that we won’t have a chance to implement those ideas until the GOP finds a winning salesman or vessel for them, and that person doesn’t seem to exist right now. Again, I’m speaking to my fears, not my hopes.

On the bright side, nobody knew who the hell Barack Obama was the day before yesterday either.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Hamas 'Peace' Gambit

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, May 8, 2009

"Apart from the time restriction (a truce that lapses after 10 years) and the refusal to accept Israel's existence, Mr. Meshal's terms approximate the Arab League peace plan . . ."

-- Hamas peace plan, as explained by the New York Times

"Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

-- Tom Lehrer, satirist

The Times conducted a five-hour interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal at his Damascus headquarters. Mirabile dictu, they're offering a peace plan with a two-state solution. Except. The offer is not a peace but a truce that expires after 10 years. Meaning that after Israel has fatally weakened itself by settling millions of hostile Arab refugees in its midst, and after a decade of Hamas arming itself within a Palestinian state that narrows Israel to eight miles wide -- Hamas restarts the war against a country it remains pledged to eradicate.

There is a phrase for such a peace: the peace of the grave.


Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president (L) pledges funds to Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas.

Westerners may be stupid, but Hamas is not. It sees the new American administration making overtures to Iran and Syria. It sees Europe, led by Britain, beginning to accept Hezbollah. It sees itself as next in line. And it knows what to do. Yasser Arafat wrote the playbook.

With the 1993 Oslo accords, he showed what can be achieved with a fake peace treaty with Israel -- universal diplomatic recognition, billions of dollars of aid, and control of Gaza and the West Bank, which Arafat turned into an armed camp. In return for a signature, he created in the Palestinian territories the capacity to carry on the war against Israel that the Arab states had begun in 1948 but had given up after the bloody hell of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Meshal sees the opportunity. Not only is the Obama administration reaching out to its erstwhile enemies in the region, but it begins its term by wagging an angry finger at Israel over the Netanyahu government's ostensible refusal to accept a two-state solution.

Of all the phony fights to pick with Israel. No Israeli government would turn down a two-state solution in which the Palestinians accepted territorial compromise and genuine peace with a Jewish state. (And any government that did would be voted out in a day.) Netanyahu's own defense minister, Ehud Barak, offered precisely such a deal in 2000. He even offered to divide Jerusalem and expel every Jew from every settlement remaining in the new Palestine.

The Palestinian response (for those who have forgotten) was: No. And no counteroffer. Instead, nine weeks later, Arafat unleashed a savage terror war that killed 1,000 Israelis.

Netanyahu is reluctant to agree to a Palestinian state before he knows what kind of state it will be. That elementary prudence should be shared by anyone who's been sentient the last three years. The Palestinians already have a state, an independent territory with not an Israeli settler or soldier living on it. It's called Gaza. And what is it? A terror base, Islamist in nature, Iranian-allied, militant and aggressive, that has fired more than 10,000 rockets and mortar rounds at Israeli civilians.

If this is what a West Bank state is going to be, it would be madness for Israel or America or Jordan or Egypt or any other moderate Arab country to accept such a two-state solution. Which is why Netanyahu insists that the Palestinian Authority first build institutions -- social, economic and military -- to anchor a state that could actually carry out its responsibilities to keep the peace.

Apart from being reasonable, Netanyahu's two-state skepticism is beside the point. His predecessor, Ehud Olmert, worshiped at the shrine of a two-state solution. He made endless offers of a two-state peace to the Palestinian Authority -- and got nowhere.

Why? Because the Palestinians -- going back to the U.N. partition resolution of 1947 -- have never accepted the idea of living side by side with a Jewish state. Those like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who might want to entertain such a solution, have no authority to do it. And those like Hamas's Meshal, who have authority, have no intention of ever doing it.

Meshal's gambit to dress up perpetual war as a two-state peace is yet another iteration of the Palestinian rejectionist tragedy. In its previous incarnation, Arafat lulled Israel and the Clinton administration with talk of peace while he methodically prepared his people for war.

Arafat waited seven years to tear up his phony peace. Meshal's innovation? Ten -- then blood.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com