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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Atheism and Violence
Atheism and Violence
By Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
http://www.firstthings.com/
January 29, 2008
Books advocating atheism have recently been enjoying a modest boomlet. Sales are solid, book readings are sold out, and their authors grace the highbrow talk shows and op-ed pages in prestigious newspapers and periodicals. But their arguments are shopworn, stale hand-me-downs and threadbare heirlooms inherited from an era that was fading away even before the French Revolution had made the connection between atheism and violence clear to any fair observer. Yet these books read as if they came from authors who had never heard of the Reign of Terror or Robespierre.
Richard Dawkins
It is this blinkered ahistorical myopia that makes reading these books such a surreal experience. For like a “red thread” running through all their other arguments, each book has one central claim: Belief in God causes violence. The obvious corollary to this thesis is almost too absurdly risible to merit formulation, and some authors are just coy (or embarrassed) enough not to say it out loud; but others are bolder and shout it from the rooftops: If only atheism would take hold as the majority view throughout the globe, humans would lose their propensity for violence, lion would nestle beside the lamb, children would regain their long-lost happiness, swords would magically turn into plowshares, churches would empty and the resultant collapse in the market-price for incense would alone reverse global warming. Richard Dawkins, for example, opens his recent book The God Delusion with this hilariously naïve depiction of the Eschaton that awaits us if only we would cast off the security blanket of religion:
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ-killers,” no Northern Ireland “troubles,” no “honor killings,” no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (“God wants you to give till it hurts”). Imagine no Talban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.
The inevitable, even clichéd, response on the part of theists to this litany of woes is to ask: what about Hitler and Stalin? Yes, the question resorts to the hackneyed rhetorical ploy of et tu quoque (Latin for “So’s your old man”). But at least the question’s inevitability forces the atheist to show his hand. Thus Dawkins lamely avers that Hitler did believe in God (of sorts) and, hey, Stalin attended an Orthodox seminary in his youth! If that retort seems a tad desperate, England’s most pious unbeliever concludes with this wan distinction: “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” So it’s not atheism that’s the problem, only atheists! At this point you can probably already hear someone offstage lip-synching G. K. Chesterton: it’s not that atheism has been tried and found wanting, you see, it’s just never been tried at all in its pure form, a point that would not likely have consoled the Carmelite nuns as they were being killed by Republican forces during Spain’s civil war in the 1930s.
One would think that, given their insistence that faith and violence are inextricably linked, these authors would be a bit more circumspect about their own rhetoric. As it happens, one does not have to read too far into these books to see an underlying advocacy of violence animating their venom, an advocacy made most explicit in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which openly avows:
“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. . . . There is, in fact, no talking to some people. … We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” To which I can only respond with one of Blaise Pascal’s more mordant observations, “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.” Pascal called civil war the worst of all evils and openly admitted that no evil is greater than that committed under the guise of religion. If he were living today, I am sure his response to Harris would be: yes, Mr. Harris, you’re right, and the reason atheism brings so much violence in its wake is because it is its own kind of religion—and that’s your problem: your atheism is too religious.
Blaise Pascal
Pascal’s underlying point is that the clash between theism and atheism changes none of the constituents of the human condition. What Pope Benedict XVI said in Spe Salvi specifically of Karl Marx can be extended to most other atheists: “He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. . . . His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.” Or by establishing a polity based on an atheist worldview, the pope adds immediately. One of the great merits of this extraordinary encyclical is the way it deftly exposes the underlying dynamic of violence in the atheist project, at least in its doctrinaire Marxist variety:
Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, [nonetheless] the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.
Ironically, Benedict is far more respectful of certain varieties of unbelief than are the noisy new atheists like Dawkins and Harris of any form of belief whatever (except their own of course). In a fascinating passage dealing with the non-doctrinaire Marxists of the famous Frankfurt School, the pope shows how their own requirements for hope inevitably lead to an openness to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection:
This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice—true justice—would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” This would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead.
In other words, atheism is now coming undone by its own contradictions. In the ancient world, Epicurus scored belief in the gods for its fear-mongering; in the modern world, Enlightened and Marxist philosophers attacked religious belief for the opposite failing: for its attempt to extinguish an accessible and realizable happiness in the “real” world in favor of an imaginary happiness in the afterlife. But decades before such hopes for a this-worldly happiness would be dashed in the abattoir of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche had already exposed that illusion. What happiness? What “real” world? What improvement? What progress? Along with ignoring the French Revolution, one of the most telling features of the new books on atheism is their consistent refusal to engage Nietzsche, who, if read correctly, ought to make atheists squirm far more than he has ever caused discomfit to believers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
First, he turned the critical methods of the Enlightenment against their inventors and showed that Enlightened faith in progress was just as illusory as belief in an afterlife. Second, he demanded that a critical philosophy stop pretending to be a substitute religion (he shrewdly called Hegelian idealism “insidious theology”). Third, he insisted on the indissoluble bond between Christian doctrine and Christian morality and poured contempt on novelists like George Eliot for supposing otherwise: “In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay over there.”
In retrospect, it should not surprise the keen observer of these books that the new atheists do not attend to Nietzsche. As R. J. Hollingdale says in his fine biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, “Nineteenth-century rationalism was characterized by insight into the difficulty in accepting revealed religion, and obtuseness regarding the consequences of rejecting it.” As Nietzsche said so well of these foolish rationalists in his Twilight of the Idols:
They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency. . . . With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Whoever tries to peel off this fundamental idea—belief in God—from Christian morality will only be taking a hammer to the whole thing, shattering it to pieces.
Perhaps this why Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, “the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” For they at least, unlike Dawkins, Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, can see that after Nietzsche a moral critique of the Christian God has become impossible, for it denies the very presupposition that makes its own critique possible. Like Abraham asking if the Lord God of justice could not himself do justice, protest atheism must accept the very norms that Nietzsche showed are essential to the meaning of belief. In Nietzsche alone one reads what the world really looks like si Deus non sit. Only this godless author can tell us how pathetic man is without God, as here, in this passage from “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (one of the four essays that make up Untimely Meditations):
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star [sic] on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. . . . There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being—the philosopher—thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
To be sure, this passage occurs in one of his earliest books, and his later career showed that he could not consistently maintain such a bleak view, for in The Gay Science Nietzsche even flirts, however fleetingly, with Platonic idealism, recognizing as he does that science too is a moral activity that cannot account for its own moral purposes. If nature trumps knowledge at every turn, then science loses its point, and the essentially moral nature entailed in the search for truth is gone, along with the concept of truth itself:
Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by that same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. (Nietzsche’s emphases)
But no sooner is that concession made in the minor key, than it is taken away in the major, for the very next sentence reverts to the old Nietzschean specters: “But what if this [metaphysical faith] should become more and more incredible, what if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?” As most of his other books prove, that last sentence represents the real Nietzsche, however much he occasionally shrank from its implications. In his major premise, he’s right: Christian belief and Christian morality are indissolubly linked. But once he arrives at his minor premise, that faith in the Christian God is impossible, he could see no alternative but to propose a new—and decidedly violent—morality.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he said: “Far too many keep on living; they hang on their branches much too long. May a storm soon come to shake all this rotten and worm-eaten fruit from the tree!” In a section of The Gay Science entitled “Holy Cruelty” a Nietzschean “saint” advises a father to kill his disabled child, rhetorically asking, “Isn’t it crueler to allow it to live?” Twilight of the Idols includes a section entitled “Morality for Physicians” that calls sick people “parasites” who have no right to life and advocates the “most ruthless suppression and pushing aside of degenerate life.” And finally in his autobiography Ecce Homo, one of the last books he sent to the publisher before his collapse into insanity, he said: “If we cast a look a century ahead and assume that my assassination of two thousand years of opposition to nature and of dishonoring humans succeeds, then that new party of life [!] will take in hand the greatest of all tasks—the higher breeding of humanity, including the unsparing destruction of all degenerates and parasites.” Finally, in his posthumously published Will to Power he says:
The biblical prohibition “Thou shalt not kill” is a piece of naïveté compared with the seriousness of Life’s own “Thou shalt not” issued to decadence: “Thou shalt not procreate!”—Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no “equal right,” between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism. . . . Sympathy for the decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted—that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be anti-nature itself as morality!
Pope Benedict XVI
Compare those passages with Dawkins’s blinkered, thick-skulled “explanation” for the evils of Hitler and Stalin: “Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.” As if “dogmatic and doctrinaire” Marxism and “unscientific” eugenics had nothing to do with atheism! The connection between these two twentieth-century ideologies and the recession of the Christian God in the nineteenth is nearly seamless, as just this passage alone from Hitler’s Mein Kampf makes clear:
[My worldview] by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals. . . . By no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea if this idea is a danger to the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethics.
One need not claim that Hitler was a close student of Nietzsche’s writings (although he certainly named him as an inspiration) to see the obvious affinities here. Nor does one have to slur Nietzsche with the Nazi brush, as do those vulgarians who want to dismiss his witness entirely, since he obviously would have had nothing but contempt for Nazism (he once said that the opening line of the German national anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, was the stupidest line ever written, and he so loathed German culture that he asked to be buried in Poland). The point, rather, is that Nietzsche saw. However much he (usually) advocated what ought to be most abhorred, he at least recognized that true morality and Christian belief are siblings. Moreover, in tones redolent of Jeremiah he saw the consequences to civilization as a whole when its citizens lose their faith in God. For what will take the place of God will be only a passionate—and largely empty—politics:
For when truth enters the lists against the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes . . . the likes of which have never been dreamed. Then the concept of politics will be completely dissolved in a war between spirits, all authority structures of the old order will be blown into the air—one and all, they rest upon a lie; there will be wars the likes of which have never existed on earth. From my time forward earth will see Great Politics.
Such are the contradictions of atheism. With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness.
Against these realities, all that the new atheists can offer is only the most jejune, wan, and bloodless humanism: not Nietzsche’s Zarathustra but John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Not once do these books look at the dilemma into which liberalism has fallen. In that regard, I am reminded of a little known fact from the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Clarence Darrow was the progress-happy lawyer for the evolution-teaching defendant, and how much he has anticipated the new atheists! As Peter Berger dryly noted in his book A Rumor of Angels, Darrow was “an admirable man in many ways, but one dense enough sincerely to believe that a Darwinist view of man could serve as a basis for his opposition to capital punishment.” Such obtuseness is shared by most liberals today, who merrily fuse opposition to capital punishment, support for abortion and doctor-assisted suicide, condemnation of racism, and a vaguely appreciative acquaintance with evolutionary theory—without the least sense of the impossible dilemmas entailed in these contradictory positions.
Given these hopelessly confused and superficial arguments, it’s hard to take the new atheism seriously. Nietzsche was surely right when he said that serious Christians would come to appreciate his witness. But who can take seriously these recent tub-thumping accusations that believers are the sole source of violence, all coming from writers who themselves advocate violence in their next breath? That’s why these books from the new atheists can hardly represent a threat to believers. Pascal was already on to their game in the seventeenth century: “All those contradictions that seemed to take me furthest from the knowledge of any religion,” he said in the Pensées, “are what led me most directly to the true religion.”
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
References
The God Delusion
The End of Faith
Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
The Twilight of the Idols
Ecce Homo
Untimely Meditations
The Gay Science
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Will to Power
A Rumor of Angels
Pensées
By Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
http://www.firstthings.com/
January 29, 2008
Books advocating atheism have recently been enjoying a modest boomlet. Sales are solid, book readings are sold out, and their authors grace the highbrow talk shows and op-ed pages in prestigious newspapers and periodicals. But their arguments are shopworn, stale hand-me-downs and threadbare heirlooms inherited from an era that was fading away even before the French Revolution had made the connection between atheism and violence clear to any fair observer. Yet these books read as if they came from authors who had never heard of the Reign of Terror or Robespierre.
Richard Dawkins
It is this blinkered ahistorical myopia that makes reading these books such a surreal experience. For like a “red thread” running through all their other arguments, each book has one central claim: Belief in God causes violence. The obvious corollary to this thesis is almost too absurdly risible to merit formulation, and some authors are just coy (or embarrassed) enough not to say it out loud; but others are bolder and shout it from the rooftops: If only atheism would take hold as the majority view throughout the globe, humans would lose their propensity for violence, lion would nestle beside the lamb, children would regain their long-lost happiness, swords would magically turn into plowshares, churches would empty and the resultant collapse in the market-price for incense would alone reverse global warming. Richard Dawkins, for example, opens his recent book The God Delusion with this hilariously naïve depiction of the Eschaton that awaits us if only we would cast off the security blanket of religion:
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ-killers,” no Northern Ireland “troubles,” no “honor killings,” no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (“God wants you to give till it hurts”). Imagine no Talban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.
The inevitable, even clichéd, response on the part of theists to this litany of woes is to ask: what about Hitler and Stalin? Yes, the question resorts to the hackneyed rhetorical ploy of et tu quoque (Latin for “So’s your old man”). But at least the question’s inevitability forces the atheist to show his hand. Thus Dawkins lamely avers that Hitler did believe in God (of sorts) and, hey, Stalin attended an Orthodox seminary in his youth! If that retort seems a tad desperate, England’s most pious unbeliever concludes with this wan distinction: “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” So it’s not atheism that’s the problem, only atheists! At this point you can probably already hear someone offstage lip-synching G. K. Chesterton: it’s not that atheism has been tried and found wanting, you see, it’s just never been tried at all in its pure form, a point that would not likely have consoled the Carmelite nuns as they were being killed by Republican forces during Spain’s civil war in the 1930s.
One would think that, given their insistence that faith and violence are inextricably linked, these authors would be a bit more circumspect about their own rhetoric. As it happens, one does not have to read too far into these books to see an underlying advocacy of violence animating their venom, an advocacy made most explicit in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which openly avows:
“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. . . . There is, in fact, no talking to some people. … We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” To which I can only respond with one of Blaise Pascal’s more mordant observations, “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.” Pascal called civil war the worst of all evils and openly admitted that no evil is greater than that committed under the guise of religion. If he were living today, I am sure his response to Harris would be: yes, Mr. Harris, you’re right, and the reason atheism brings so much violence in its wake is because it is its own kind of religion—and that’s your problem: your atheism is too religious.
Blaise Pascal
Pascal’s underlying point is that the clash between theism and atheism changes none of the constituents of the human condition. What Pope Benedict XVI said in Spe Salvi specifically of Karl Marx can be extended to most other atheists: “He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. . . . His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.” Or by establishing a polity based on an atheist worldview, the pope adds immediately. One of the great merits of this extraordinary encyclical is the way it deftly exposes the underlying dynamic of violence in the atheist project, at least in its doctrinaire Marxist variety:
Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, [nonetheless] the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.
Ironically, Benedict is far more respectful of certain varieties of unbelief than are the noisy new atheists like Dawkins and Harris of any form of belief whatever (except their own of course). In a fascinating passage dealing with the non-doctrinaire Marxists of the famous Frankfurt School, the pope shows how their own requirements for hope inevitably lead to an openness to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection:
This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice—true justice—would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” This would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead.
In other words, atheism is now coming undone by its own contradictions. In the ancient world, Epicurus scored belief in the gods for its fear-mongering; in the modern world, Enlightened and Marxist philosophers attacked religious belief for the opposite failing: for its attempt to extinguish an accessible and realizable happiness in the “real” world in favor of an imaginary happiness in the afterlife. But decades before such hopes for a this-worldly happiness would be dashed in the abattoir of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche had already exposed that illusion. What happiness? What “real” world? What improvement? What progress? Along with ignoring the French Revolution, one of the most telling features of the new books on atheism is their consistent refusal to engage Nietzsche, who, if read correctly, ought to make atheists squirm far more than he has ever caused discomfit to believers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
First, he turned the critical methods of the Enlightenment against their inventors and showed that Enlightened faith in progress was just as illusory as belief in an afterlife. Second, he demanded that a critical philosophy stop pretending to be a substitute religion (he shrewdly called Hegelian idealism “insidious theology”). Third, he insisted on the indissoluble bond between Christian doctrine and Christian morality and poured contempt on novelists like George Eliot for supposing otherwise: “In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay over there.”
In retrospect, it should not surprise the keen observer of these books that the new atheists do not attend to Nietzsche. As R. J. Hollingdale says in his fine biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, “Nineteenth-century rationalism was characterized by insight into the difficulty in accepting revealed religion, and obtuseness regarding the consequences of rejecting it.” As Nietzsche said so well of these foolish rationalists in his Twilight of the Idols:
They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency. . . . With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Whoever tries to peel off this fundamental idea—belief in God—from Christian morality will only be taking a hammer to the whole thing, shattering it to pieces.
Perhaps this why Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, “the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” For they at least, unlike Dawkins, Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, can see that after Nietzsche a moral critique of the Christian God has become impossible, for it denies the very presupposition that makes its own critique possible. Like Abraham asking if the Lord God of justice could not himself do justice, protest atheism must accept the very norms that Nietzsche showed are essential to the meaning of belief. In Nietzsche alone one reads what the world really looks like si Deus non sit. Only this godless author can tell us how pathetic man is without God, as here, in this passage from “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (one of the four essays that make up Untimely Meditations):
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star [sic] on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. . . . There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being—the philosopher—thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
To be sure, this passage occurs in one of his earliest books, and his later career showed that he could not consistently maintain such a bleak view, for in The Gay Science Nietzsche even flirts, however fleetingly, with Platonic idealism, recognizing as he does that science too is a moral activity that cannot account for its own moral purposes. If nature trumps knowledge at every turn, then science loses its point, and the essentially moral nature entailed in the search for truth is gone, along with the concept of truth itself:
Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by that same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. (Nietzsche’s emphases)
But no sooner is that concession made in the minor key, than it is taken away in the major, for the very next sentence reverts to the old Nietzschean specters: “But what if this [metaphysical faith] should become more and more incredible, what if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?” As most of his other books prove, that last sentence represents the real Nietzsche, however much he occasionally shrank from its implications. In his major premise, he’s right: Christian belief and Christian morality are indissolubly linked. But once he arrives at his minor premise, that faith in the Christian God is impossible, he could see no alternative but to propose a new—and decidedly violent—morality.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he said: “Far too many keep on living; they hang on their branches much too long. May a storm soon come to shake all this rotten and worm-eaten fruit from the tree!” In a section of The Gay Science entitled “Holy Cruelty” a Nietzschean “saint” advises a father to kill his disabled child, rhetorically asking, “Isn’t it crueler to allow it to live?” Twilight of the Idols includes a section entitled “Morality for Physicians” that calls sick people “parasites” who have no right to life and advocates the “most ruthless suppression and pushing aside of degenerate life.” And finally in his autobiography Ecce Homo, one of the last books he sent to the publisher before his collapse into insanity, he said: “If we cast a look a century ahead and assume that my assassination of two thousand years of opposition to nature and of dishonoring humans succeeds, then that new party of life [!] will take in hand the greatest of all tasks—the higher breeding of humanity, including the unsparing destruction of all degenerates and parasites.” Finally, in his posthumously published Will to Power he says:
The biblical prohibition “Thou shalt not kill” is a piece of naïveté compared with the seriousness of Life’s own “Thou shalt not” issued to decadence: “Thou shalt not procreate!”—Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no “equal right,” between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism. . . . Sympathy for the decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted—that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be anti-nature itself as morality!
Pope Benedict XVI
Compare those passages with Dawkins’s blinkered, thick-skulled “explanation” for the evils of Hitler and Stalin: “Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.” As if “dogmatic and doctrinaire” Marxism and “unscientific” eugenics had nothing to do with atheism! The connection between these two twentieth-century ideologies and the recession of the Christian God in the nineteenth is nearly seamless, as just this passage alone from Hitler’s Mein Kampf makes clear:
[My worldview] by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals. . . . By no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea if this idea is a danger to the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethics.
One need not claim that Hitler was a close student of Nietzsche’s writings (although he certainly named him as an inspiration) to see the obvious affinities here. Nor does one have to slur Nietzsche with the Nazi brush, as do those vulgarians who want to dismiss his witness entirely, since he obviously would have had nothing but contempt for Nazism (he once said that the opening line of the German national anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, was the stupidest line ever written, and he so loathed German culture that he asked to be buried in Poland). The point, rather, is that Nietzsche saw. However much he (usually) advocated what ought to be most abhorred, he at least recognized that true morality and Christian belief are siblings. Moreover, in tones redolent of Jeremiah he saw the consequences to civilization as a whole when its citizens lose their faith in God. For what will take the place of God will be only a passionate—and largely empty—politics:
For when truth enters the lists against the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes . . . the likes of which have never been dreamed. Then the concept of politics will be completely dissolved in a war between spirits, all authority structures of the old order will be blown into the air—one and all, they rest upon a lie; there will be wars the likes of which have never existed on earth. From my time forward earth will see Great Politics.
Such are the contradictions of atheism. With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness.
Against these realities, all that the new atheists can offer is only the most jejune, wan, and bloodless humanism: not Nietzsche’s Zarathustra but John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Not once do these books look at the dilemma into which liberalism has fallen. In that regard, I am reminded of a little known fact from the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Clarence Darrow was the progress-happy lawyer for the evolution-teaching defendant, and how much he has anticipated the new atheists! As Peter Berger dryly noted in his book A Rumor of Angels, Darrow was “an admirable man in many ways, but one dense enough sincerely to believe that a Darwinist view of man could serve as a basis for his opposition to capital punishment.” Such obtuseness is shared by most liberals today, who merrily fuse opposition to capital punishment, support for abortion and doctor-assisted suicide, condemnation of racism, and a vaguely appreciative acquaintance with evolutionary theory—without the least sense of the impossible dilemmas entailed in these contradictory positions.
Given these hopelessly confused and superficial arguments, it’s hard to take the new atheism seriously. Nietzsche was surely right when he said that serious Christians would come to appreciate his witness. But who can take seriously these recent tub-thumping accusations that believers are the sole source of violence, all coming from writers who themselves advocate violence in their next breath? That’s why these books from the new atheists can hardly represent a threat to believers. Pascal was already on to their game in the seventeenth century: “All those contradictions that seemed to take me furthest from the knowledge of any religion,” he said in the Pensées, “are what led me most directly to the true religion.”
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
References
The God Delusion
The End of Faith
Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
The Twilight of the Idols
Ecce Homo
Untimely Meditations
The Gay Science
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Will to Power
A Rumor of Angels
Pensées
Thomas Sowell: A 'Stimulus Package'?
January 29, 2008
http://www.realclearpolitics.com
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi(R) and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson talk about some of the specifics of the proposed economic stimulus package during a news conference in Washington, DC. President George W. Bush on Friday urged Congress to approve "as soon as possible" an economic stimulus plan of some 150 billion dollars negotiated with congressional leaders aimed at avoiding a recession.
(AFP/Getty Images/File)
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.
That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.
A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.
The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government could do to make things better in the economy.
Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do.
Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international trade.
Some people even believe that whenever there is "market failure," the government ought to step in.
Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?
No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports than when discussing politics.
US President George W. Bush(R) speaks alongside Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the economic stimulus package. Bush on Friday urged Congress to approve "as soon as possible" an economic stimulus plan of some 150 billion dollars negotiated with congressional leaders aimed at avoiding a recession.
(AFP/File/Saul Loeb)
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
There are too many examples of government interventions that made things worse, the Great Depression of the 1930s being the most tragic.
Those on the left love to believe that the stock market crash of 1929 showed the failure of the free market and that the New Deal interventions in the 1930s saved the day.
But the stock market crash of 1987 was just as big and Ronald Reagan resisted loud calls for him to intervene. The result was not another Great Depression but the beginning of a decades-long period of prosperity.
Before Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt came along, there was no expectation that the federal government would intervene when the stock market crashed or when there was a downturn in the economy.
Previous stock market crashes and previous downturns in the economy worked themselves out faster and less painfully than the Great Depression of the 1930s, just as the 1987 crisis did.
The track record of government intervention is far less impressive than its rhetoric.
One of the biggest problems with government intervention in the economy is that politicians usually have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to intervene at the right time.
Bruce Bartlett has pointed out that most government intervention in an economic downturn comes too late. That is, the problem it is trying to solve has already worked itself out and the government intervention can create new problems.
More fundamentally, markets readjust themselves for a reason. That reason is that people pay a price for their misjudgments and mistakes.
Government interventions are usually based on trying to stop them from having to pay that price.
People who went way out on a limb to buy a house that they could not afford are now being pictured as victims of a heartless market or deceptive lenders.
Just a few years ago, people who went out on that limb made money big-time in a skyrocketing housing market. But now that they have been caught in the ups and downs that markets have gone through for centuries, the government is supposed to bail them out.
Solving short-run problems, especially in an election year, often means creating long-run problems. Pumping money into the economy can help many problems, but do not be surprised if it also leads to inflationary pressures and financial repercussions around the world.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi(R) and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson talk about some of the specifics of the proposed economic stimulus package during a news conference in Washington, DC. President George W. Bush on Friday urged Congress to approve "as soon as possible" an economic stimulus plan of some 150 billion dollars negotiated with congressional leaders aimed at avoiding a recession.(AFP/Getty Images/File)
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.
That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.
A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.
The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government could do to make things better in the economy.
Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do.
Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international trade.
Some people even believe that whenever there is "market failure," the government ought to step in.
Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?
No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports than when discussing politics.
US President George W. Bush(R) speaks alongside Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the economic stimulus package. Bush on Friday urged Congress to approve "as soon as possible" an economic stimulus plan of some 150 billion dollars negotiated with congressional leaders aimed at avoiding a recession.
(AFP/File/Saul Loeb)
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
There are too many examples of government interventions that made things worse, the Great Depression of the 1930s being the most tragic.
Those on the left love to believe that the stock market crash of 1929 showed the failure of the free market and that the New Deal interventions in the 1930s saved the day.
But the stock market crash of 1987 was just as big and Ronald Reagan resisted loud calls for him to intervene. The result was not another Great Depression but the beginning of a decades-long period of prosperity.
Before Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt came along, there was no expectation that the federal government would intervene when the stock market crashed or when there was a downturn in the economy.
Previous stock market crashes and previous downturns in the economy worked themselves out faster and less painfully than the Great Depression of the 1930s, just as the 1987 crisis did.
The track record of government intervention is far less impressive than its rhetoric.
One of the biggest problems with government intervention in the economy is that politicians usually have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to intervene at the right time.
Bruce Bartlett has pointed out that most government intervention in an economic downturn comes too late. That is, the problem it is trying to solve has already worked itself out and the government intervention can create new problems.
More fundamentally, markets readjust themselves for a reason. That reason is that people pay a price for their misjudgments and mistakes.
Government interventions are usually based on trying to stop them from having to pay that price.
People who went way out on a limb to buy a house that they could not afford are now being pictured as victims of a heartless market or deceptive lenders.
Just a few years ago, people who went out on that limb made money big-time in a skyrocketing housing market. But now that they have been caught in the ups and downs that markets have gone through for centuries, the government is supposed to bail them out.
Solving short-run problems, especially in an election year, often means creating long-run problems. Pumping money into the economy can help many problems, but do not be surprised if it also leads to inflationary pressures and financial repercussions around the world.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Christopher Hitchens: Fool Me Thrice
It should be no surprise that the Clintons are playing the race card.Slate.com
Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 11:59 AM ET
Former US President Bill Clinton speaks at an auditorium in the Colleton Center January 24, 2008 in Walterboro, South Carolina. Hillary Clinton admitted Sunday her husband Bill's hard-charging campaign tactics had gone overboard, but chalked the ex-president's fiery broadsides up to love and a chronic lack of sleep.(AFP/File/Eric Thayer)
How can one equal Bill Clinton for thuggery and opportunism when it comes to the so-called "race card"? And where does one even start with the breathtaking nastiness of his own conduct, and that of his supporters, in the last week? Barack Obama carries South Carolina having made no sectarian appeal to any specific kind of voter, and the best Clinton can say is that this is no better than Jesse Jackson managed to do. Really? Did Jackson come south having already got himself elected the senator from Illinois? And, come to think of it, was Jackson so much to be despised and sneered at when he was needed as Clinton's "confessor," along with Billy Graham, during the squalor of impeachment?
This calculated willingness to shop on both sides of the street of racial politics was actually analyzed quite shrewdly by Dick Morris, the former consigliere of the gruesome twosome, in conversation with Sean Hannity last week. The Clintons, he thought, would be quite happy to lose big to the "black vote" in South Carolina. It would enable them to signal that they were the ones to stem the flow of the color tide. Morris' host protested that this seemed a touch cynical. Morris jovially assured him that he knew the people he was talking about.
As indeed he did. It was Hillary Clinton who insisted on recalling Morris to the embattled White House, notwithstanding his various disgraces and notwithstanding the fact that he had been the adviser and strategist for Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Why am I saying "notwithstanding"? It was because he had performed so well for Helms, including helping him with the famous "white hands" ad that showed a white man crumpling up a letter that told him of preference for "minorities" in hiring, that Morris was thought of by the then-first lady as such a guru.
I never quite understand how the Clintons' initial exploitation of racism was overlooked the first time around and has been airbrushed from the record since. After falling behind in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and after being caught lying about the affair with Gennifer Flowers to which he later confessed under oath, Clinton left the campaign trail and flew home to Arkansas to give the maximum publicity to his decision to sign a death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black inmate on death row who had shot himself in the head after committing a double murder and, instead of dying as a result, had achieved the same effect as a lobotomy would have done. He never understood the charge against him or the sentence. After being served his last meal, he left the pecan pie on the side of the tray, as he told the guards who came to take him to the execution chamber, "for later." Several police and prison-officer witnesses expressed extreme queasiness at this execution of a gravely impaired man, and the prison chaplain, Dennis Pigman, later resigned from the prison service. The whole dismal and cruel and pathetic story was told by Marshall Frady in a long essay in The New Yorker in 1993 and is also recounted in a chapter titled "Chameleon in Black and White" by your humble servant in his book No One Left To Lie To. For now, I just ask you to imagine what would have been said if a Republican governor, falling in the polls, had gone out of his way to execute a mentally incompetent African-American prisoner.
Or leaf back, if you will, to the New York Times of March 23, 1992, and the jolly headline, "Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Ways of Old South." Yes indeedy, the Country Club of Little Rock had 500 members, all of them white, and the aspirant candidate had himself photographed there more than once until Jerry Brown made an issue of it. It was then announced by Clinton's people that "the staff and facilities" at the club were "integrated"—a pretty way of stating that the toilets were cleaned by black Arkansans. Yet all this was forgiven by credulous liberals who were sure that they had discovered a New Democrat who was a Southerner to boot.
Many of these same people do not like it now that they see similar two-faced tactics being employed against "one of their own." Well, tough. And many of the most prominent and eloquent black columnists—Bob Herbert, Colbert King, Eugene Robinson—are also acting shocked. It's a bit late. I have to say that Bob Herbert shocked even me by quoting Andrew Young, who said that his pal Clinton was "every bit as black as Barack" because he'd screwed more black chicks. How is Hillary Clinton, or Chelsea Clinton, supposed to feel on hearing that little endorsement? One gets the impression, though, at least from the wife, that anything is OK as long as it works, or even has a chance of working. When Toni Morrison described Clinton as "black" on the basis of his promiscuity and dysfunction and uncertainty about his parentage, she did more than cater to the white racist impression of the African-American male. She tapped into the sort of self-hatred that is evidently more common than we might choose to think. Say what you will about Sen. Obama (and I say that he's got much more charisma than guts), he is miles above this sort of squalor and has decent manners. Say what you will about the Clintons, you cannot acquit them of having played the race card several times in both directions and of having done so in the most vulgar and unscrupulous fashion. Anyone who thinks that this equals "change" is a fool, and an easily fooled fool at that.
Homosexuals Squelch Facts About MRSA Outbreak, Conservatives Say
By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
January 28, 2008
(CNSNews.com) - Conservative groups say the truth about a new "multi-drug resistant microbe" prevalent among homosexual men is not being presented to the public because of political correctness.
Almost two weeks ago, researchers announced they have isolated a new form of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, an infection that is spreading through San Francisco's homosexual community and could spread to the general community.
"These multi-drug resistant infections often affect gay men at body sites in which skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activities," said Binh Diep, the University of California-San Francisco scientist who led the team that made the finding.
In fact, the researchers determined that this variant of MRSA infection is 13 to 14 times more prevalent in homosexual men than for the general population.
But the media are now obscuring that fact, according to Matt Barber, director of cultural policy for Concerned Women for America (CWA).
"The real story here is the way that the media have whitewashed this outbreak," Barber told Cybercast News Service. "It is amazing to see what they've done with this."
Barber said the initial reporting of the outbreak was "pretty solid" and news accounts related the facts "as is," but the coverage began to change after conservative groups like CWA noted that this variant is primarily spread by men having anal sex.
"The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other organizations began to jump up and down a bit and scream, and The New York Times and other organizations started to backpedal," Barber said.
"The story was no longer the dangers associated with the outbreak - and the behaviors associated with it," said Barber. "The story now became about how groups like mine were supposedly misrepresenting the outbreak as some sort of 'new gay plague' or 'the new AIDS' - things we never said."
Indeed, HRC accused CWA and others of being "anti-gay bigots" for recommending that one way to stop this outbreak of the infection is for homosexual men to curtail having anal sex - at least for a while.
"Serious medical issues deserve serious consideration, not wildly off-the-mark press releases from anti-gay groups trying to capture media attention," HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a news release.
"We saw this kind of hysteria in the early 1980s around HIV/AIDS, and I'll be damned if we will sit idly by in 2008 and let them perpetrate that type of anti-gay hysteria without calling them out on it," he said.
Since the homosexual backlash, the University of California-San Francisco has apologized for the fact that the study mentions homosexual men.
"We regret that our recent news report (1-14-08) about an important population-based study on MRSA USA300 with public health implications contained some information that could be interpreted as misleading," the university's Web site said.
"We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns, and we will be working to ensure that accurate information about the research is disseminated to the health community and the general public," it added.
Even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken a somewhat politically correct line. In a statement issued recently on the new outbreak, the government agency said it is "not a sexually transmitted disease in the classic sense" - and that spread of the bacteria could be stopped by washing hands and covering open wounds.
"We never suggested that it was a sexually transmitted disease," CWA's Barber countered. "We only talked about the specific behaviors that are causing this infection to spread."
Facts, not ideology, needed
Internationally known infectious disease specialist Dr. John Diggs is siding with the conservatives. The Massachusetts-based physician said treating any infection in a politically correct manner could be dangerous. Treating MRSA that way could prove fatal.
"This outbreak is especially troubling because it is a community-based form of MRSA," said Diggs, who is an executive committee member of the Physicians Consortium. "Until recently, MRSA has typically been confined to hospitals. The implications are very serious, because we don't know exactly where this is going to go."
Medically speaking, any break in the skin that is exposed to the organism can then set off an infection, which can destroy "a lot of tissue" before it's brought under control, Diggs said.
"You can take something that was relatively isolated in a small place, and suddenly, when it spreads to the general population, things such as school wrestling matches, or football games or basketball games or other sporting events, can take on a specter - they can become deadly," he added.
The fact is, the epicenter for this outbreak is among men who are having sex with men, Diggs told Cybercast News Service. Researchers identified the rates of drug resistance on the basis of ZIP codes, not ideology.
"The particular ZIP codes they looked at were ones that were associated primarily with men who were having sex with other men," he said, "the Castro district in San Francisco and also a healthcare center called the Fenway, here in Massachusetts, in Boston."
Diggs noted that the study itself pointed out that the infection manifests as "an abscess in the buttocks, genitals or perineum" and concluded that it "probably started out in San Francisco, and has been disseminated by the frequent cross-coastal travel" of homosexual men traveling from San Francisco to Boston.
"Men who practice anal sex, men who have promiscuous sex, men who have multiple partners in short periods of time are much more likely to spread this disease," he said. "It's not because of who they are. It's because of that they do."
"Now I know that a lot of people have attacked those who have brought this to people's attention as being homophobic, but the real issue - and you have to face the facts - is that men who have sex with men have very high rates of sexually transmitted disease," Diggs said.
"When you face that reality, then you have to start taking a serious look and deciding that the best public health intervention is to discourage behavior that causes the infection to spread."
The biggest problem with this new strain - as with any variant of MRSA, Diggs said, is that it is increasingly difficult to find drugs that will effectively combat the problem.
The study appears in the online version of The Annals of Internal Medicine.
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
January 28, 2008
(CNSNews.com) - Conservative groups say the truth about a new "multi-drug resistant microbe" prevalent among homosexual men is not being presented to the public because of political correctness.
Almost two weeks ago, researchers announced they have isolated a new form of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, an infection that is spreading through San Francisco's homosexual community and could spread to the general community.
"These multi-drug resistant infections often affect gay men at body sites in which skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activities," said Binh Diep, the University of California-San Francisco scientist who led the team that made the finding.
In fact, the researchers determined that this variant of MRSA infection is 13 to 14 times more prevalent in homosexual men than for the general population.
But the media are now obscuring that fact, according to Matt Barber, director of cultural policy for Concerned Women for America (CWA).
"The real story here is the way that the media have whitewashed this outbreak," Barber told Cybercast News Service. "It is amazing to see what they've done with this."
Barber said the initial reporting of the outbreak was "pretty solid" and news accounts related the facts "as is," but the coverage began to change after conservative groups like CWA noted that this variant is primarily spread by men having anal sex.
"The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other organizations began to jump up and down a bit and scream, and The New York Times and other organizations started to backpedal," Barber said.
"The story was no longer the dangers associated with the outbreak - and the behaviors associated with it," said Barber. "The story now became about how groups like mine were supposedly misrepresenting the outbreak as some sort of 'new gay plague' or 'the new AIDS' - things we never said."
Indeed, HRC accused CWA and others of being "anti-gay bigots" for recommending that one way to stop this outbreak of the infection is for homosexual men to curtail having anal sex - at least for a while.
"Serious medical issues deserve serious consideration, not wildly off-the-mark press releases from anti-gay groups trying to capture media attention," HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a news release.
"We saw this kind of hysteria in the early 1980s around HIV/AIDS, and I'll be damned if we will sit idly by in 2008 and let them perpetrate that type of anti-gay hysteria without calling them out on it," he said.
Since the homosexual backlash, the University of California-San Francisco has apologized for the fact that the study mentions homosexual men.
"We regret that our recent news report (1-14-08) about an important population-based study on MRSA USA300 with public health implications contained some information that could be interpreted as misleading," the university's Web site said.
"We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns, and we will be working to ensure that accurate information about the research is disseminated to the health community and the general public," it added.
Even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken a somewhat politically correct line. In a statement issued recently on the new outbreak, the government agency said it is "not a sexually transmitted disease in the classic sense" - and that spread of the bacteria could be stopped by washing hands and covering open wounds.
"We never suggested that it was a sexually transmitted disease," CWA's Barber countered. "We only talked about the specific behaviors that are causing this infection to spread."
Facts, not ideology, needed
Internationally known infectious disease specialist Dr. John Diggs is siding with the conservatives. The Massachusetts-based physician said treating any infection in a politically correct manner could be dangerous. Treating MRSA that way could prove fatal.
"This outbreak is especially troubling because it is a community-based form of MRSA," said Diggs, who is an executive committee member of the Physicians Consortium. "Until recently, MRSA has typically been confined to hospitals. The implications are very serious, because we don't know exactly where this is going to go."
Medically speaking, any break in the skin that is exposed to the organism can then set off an infection, which can destroy "a lot of tissue" before it's brought under control, Diggs said.
"You can take something that was relatively isolated in a small place, and suddenly, when it spreads to the general population, things such as school wrestling matches, or football games or basketball games or other sporting events, can take on a specter - they can become deadly," he added.
The fact is, the epicenter for this outbreak is among men who are having sex with men, Diggs told Cybercast News Service. Researchers identified the rates of drug resistance on the basis of ZIP codes, not ideology.
"The particular ZIP codes they looked at were ones that were associated primarily with men who were having sex with other men," he said, "the Castro district in San Francisco and also a healthcare center called the Fenway, here in Massachusetts, in Boston."
Diggs noted that the study itself pointed out that the infection manifests as "an abscess in the buttocks, genitals or perineum" and concluded that it "probably started out in San Francisco, and has been disseminated by the frequent cross-coastal travel" of homosexual men traveling from San Francisco to Boston.
"Men who practice anal sex, men who have promiscuous sex, men who have multiple partners in short periods of time are much more likely to spread this disease," he said. "It's not because of who they are. It's because of that they do."
"Now I know that a lot of people have attacked those who have brought this to people's attention as being homophobic, but the real issue - and you have to face the facts - is that men who have sex with men have very high rates of sexually transmitted disease," Diggs said.
"When you face that reality, then you have to start taking a serious look and deciding that the best public health intervention is to discourage behavior that causes the infection to spread."
The biggest problem with this new strain - as with any variant of MRSA, Diggs said, is that it is increasingly difficult to find drugs that will effectively combat the problem.
The study appears in the online version of The Annals of Internal Medicine.
Book Review: Sins of the Assassin
Islamic States of America: the saga continues
By Adam Woog
Special to The Seattle Times
January 25, 2008
Three or four decades from now, the former United States will be a profoundly different place. Or so Kirkland novelist Robert Ferrigno's audacious "Sins of the Assassin" (Scribner, 400 pp., $24.95) would have us believe.
It's 2043. Most of the country, in the wake of devastating nuclear attacks and civil war, has experienced a religious conversion and has become a moderate Islamic republic. (The attacks were initially, but wrongly, thought to be the work of Israeli agents.)
New Orleans is completely gone, wiped out in a massive flood. San Francisco is called New Fallujah. And standing in bitter opposition to the Islamic Republic is the Bible Belt, a huge, anarchic swath of radical Christianity.
In Seattle, the Islamic Republic's new capital, Rakkim Epps, an ex-elite soldier, is tapped for a mission. A Bible Belt warlord known as the Colonel is searching deep in Kentucky's mountain caves for an antique but potentially over- powering weapons system. It must be found before the Colonel can sell it to the Chinese or Brazilians. And so Rakkim infiltrates enemy territory, leaving behind his wife and child and reluctantly bringing with him Leo, a nerdy but brilliant teen who may hold the key to the treasure's secrets.
Ferrigno has always had a gift for writing vivid characters, especially bad guys; his villains tend to be both really, really bad and highly charismatic. This new book has some humdingers, including the Colonel's genuinely nasty right-hand man and a shadowy, fanatical Muslim billionaire who pulls global strings from aboard his luxury yacht.
Ferrigno also has an eye for the kinds of detail that bring a setting to life. Here, he has a lot of fun inventing these touches, such as the site of the Branch Davidian disaster in Waco. It's now a tourist attraction with re-enactments of the siege and plenty of souvenirs for the kids.
This provocative, unpredictable and nuanced book — part thriller, part speculative fiction, part political novel — is the second in a projected trilogy. For the first, which was a New York Times best-seller, Ferrigno created a clever Web site, republicworldnews.com. He has since expanded this site into a compendium of fake news full of sly touches.
One faux article, for instance, states that the Islamic Music Project is finally being built here in town after years of bickering: "Traditionalists wanted the building to resemble a mosque, while avant-garde designers wanted it to be a deviation from the dome-and-minaret design that dominates Seattle's skyline." And be sure to check out the site's phony ads for such products as Pilgrimage Breakfast Cereal ("Every bite contains pistachios from Arabia!").
The first book in the trilogy, "Prayers for the Assassin," suffered slightly from the amount of exposition needed to explain Ferrigno's bold setting. (His other thrillers, including "The Horse Latitudes" and "The Wake-Up," are noirish crime novels that use the more familiar background of contemporary Southern California.) "Sins of the Assassin" integrates the futuristic setting more smoothly into Ferrigno's story, along with flashes of his mordant wit. The result is terrific — all killer, no filler.
Among Ferrigno's ongoing themes in his "Assassin" books have been the nature and value of faith. Now all we have to do is pray, to whoever or whatever, that our future doesn't really look as bad as his imaginings.
Seattle writer Adam Woog's column on mystery and crime fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Seattle Times.
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Bill Plaschke: Brady is just Johnny come lately
Patriots' leader is a three-time Super Bowl champion, but he seems more a quarterback for his time than for all time. In other words, he's no Unitas.
Los Angeles Times
January 27 2008
John Unitas
The first thing you notice about Tom Brady is, well, nothing.
He doesn't have a nick on his face because today's referees won't allow it.
He doesn't have a growl to his voice because today's huddles don't require it.
He doesn't have fire in his eyes because today's teams don't need it.
Tom Brady is fantastic, but he's formula. He's a champion, but he's a creation. And to anoint him as the best quarterback ever would be to forget that his position was invented, inspired and made famous by those who were neither.
If Brady leads the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl win over the New York Giants next Sunday, everyone will celebrate his four world championships.
They will forget that Otto Graham won seven league championships.
Everyone will marvel at Brady's 15-2 postseason record.
They will forget that Bart Starr was 9-1 in the postseason with a record 104.8 passer rating.
Everyone will wax about how, in two Super Bowls, Brady led his team on late fourth-quarter game-winning field-goal drives.
Tom Brady
They will forget that, in one of his four Super Bowl championships, Joe Montana drove his San Francisco team 92 yards for a last-second, game-winning touchdown.
Everyone will applaud Brady for his tough defender's mentality.
They will forget that Slingin' Sammy Baugh actually played defense, picking off 31 passes in his career, which is more than he threw in his last three seasons combined.
Everyone will predict that Brady's 92.9% completion rate in the playoffs against Jacksonville is a record that will never be broken.
They will forget that Johnny Unitas once threw touchdown passes in 47 consecutive games, a record that will truly never be broken.
Yeah, everyone will forget Johnny Unitas.
He invented the two-minute drill. He invented the rhythm passing game. He invented the quarterback as a leader, calling all of his plays, something today's quarterbacks haven't done for more than a decade.
He was the catalyst in the 1958 championship game between his Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, an overtime victory by the Colts that changed pro football forever.
He was the first true quarterback of the modern era, setting the bar for toughness and accountability.
"You can look at all the numbers you want," said Dan Fouts, former San Diego Chargers great. "But to me, being a quarterback is all about a feeling."
John Unitas
Nobody illustrated that feeling better than Unitas. He was football's Babe Ruth, and Bart Starr was its Lou Gehrig, and Sammy Baugh was its Ty Cobb, and Joe Montana was its Joe DiMaggio.
Tom Brady is football's, well, um, Alex Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is great, he's headed for the Hall of Fame, but he will retire as neither the greatest third baseman nor shortstop in history.
Put him in the history books. But put him in context. Same goes for Brady.
"I hear all these people talking about Tom Brady and I just sort of smirk," said John Unitas Jr., the late quarterback's son. "It's an entirely different game. I'm biased, but what my father did, you can't compare it to anything today."
Start with the snap.
While Brady is famous for his "decision making," many of those decisions have actually been made for him by his offensive coordinators.
The Patriots' game plan is more homework than instinct, more science than scrabble.
Unitas, meanwhile, was renowned for once telling offensive coordinator Don McCafferty to "Sit back and enjoy the game, I won't need any help."
"My father never had a microphone in his helmet," said Unitas Jr. "He would study film two hours every night in the basement, figuring out his own plays."
Next, the pocket.
Brady has been blessed with rules that prohibit defenders from taking cheap shots at the quarterback. This, combined with a strong offensive line, has allowed him to stand in the backfield poring over possible receivers for what seems like hours.
Have you ever seen Brady with blood? Have you ever seen him wearing even so much as a grass stain?
The ancient quarterbacks survived with no such rules, with defenders hitting them every play, smaller guys than today, but hits nonetheless.
There is a reason that one of most famous quarterback photos is not of Tom Brady pumping his fist into the air, but of Y.A. Tittle kneeling with blood trickling down his head.
"The beating those guys took was tremendous," Unitas Jr. said.
Finally, there is the pass.
Brady's receivers are protected by today's rules, to the extent that defensive backs cannot even accidentally graze them.
The ancients' receivers were routinely tackled. The mere act of putting the ball in the air was a gamble.
"My father played when there were mostly running offenses," Unitas Jr said. ''My father was the other way."
In 1959, Unitas' league-leading total of 32 touchdown passes was more than 50% higher than his closest competitor, Pittsburgh's Bobby Layne, who threw for 20.
Brady threw for a record 50 touchdowns this season, but he is playing in an era when career and season passing records are falling faster than Green Bay snow.
Brady is playing in an era when the following scenario would never happen:
Playing in overtime for the league championship, having driven his team to his opponent's eight-yard line, a quarterback decides to pass.
That was Unitas, 50 years ago. His Colts were in position to kick a field goal to beat the Giants for the title. Yet he saw a hole in the defense and threw a seven-yard pass to Jim Mutscheller to set up Alan Ameche's one-yard touchdown run.
From 1997: Johnny Unitas at home with his youngest child Paige, 15. (Sun photo by Linda Coan / September 11, 2002)
"My father controlled the game," said John Unitas Jr. "He stuck it all out there."
It is a game that no longer exists, and he is the kind of quarterback who no longer exists.
Today, Tom Brady stands alone. In this history of professional football, he stands in line.
Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.
Los Angeles Times
January 27 2008
John Unitas
The first thing you notice about Tom Brady is, well, nothing.
He doesn't have a nick on his face because today's referees won't allow it.
He doesn't have a growl to his voice because today's huddles don't require it.
He doesn't have fire in his eyes because today's teams don't need it.
Tom Brady is fantastic, but he's formula. He's a champion, but he's a creation. And to anoint him as the best quarterback ever would be to forget that his position was invented, inspired and made famous by those who were neither.
If Brady leads the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl win over the New York Giants next Sunday, everyone will celebrate his four world championships.
They will forget that Otto Graham won seven league championships.
Everyone will marvel at Brady's 15-2 postseason record.
They will forget that Bart Starr was 9-1 in the postseason with a record 104.8 passer rating.
Everyone will wax about how, in two Super Bowls, Brady led his team on late fourth-quarter game-winning field-goal drives.
Tom Brady
They will forget that, in one of his four Super Bowl championships, Joe Montana drove his San Francisco team 92 yards for a last-second, game-winning touchdown.
Everyone will applaud Brady for his tough defender's mentality.
They will forget that Slingin' Sammy Baugh actually played defense, picking off 31 passes in his career, which is more than he threw in his last three seasons combined.
Everyone will predict that Brady's 92.9% completion rate in the playoffs against Jacksonville is a record that will never be broken.
They will forget that Johnny Unitas once threw touchdown passes in 47 consecutive games, a record that will truly never be broken.
Yeah, everyone will forget Johnny Unitas.
He invented the two-minute drill. He invented the rhythm passing game. He invented the quarterback as a leader, calling all of his plays, something today's quarterbacks haven't done for more than a decade.
He was the catalyst in the 1958 championship game between his Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, an overtime victory by the Colts that changed pro football forever.
He was the first true quarterback of the modern era, setting the bar for toughness and accountability.
"You can look at all the numbers you want," said Dan Fouts, former San Diego Chargers great. "But to me, being a quarterback is all about a feeling."
John Unitas
Nobody illustrated that feeling better than Unitas. He was football's Babe Ruth, and Bart Starr was its Lou Gehrig, and Sammy Baugh was its Ty Cobb, and Joe Montana was its Joe DiMaggio.
Tom Brady is football's, well, um, Alex Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is great, he's headed for the Hall of Fame, but he will retire as neither the greatest third baseman nor shortstop in history.
Put him in the history books. But put him in context. Same goes for Brady.
"I hear all these people talking about Tom Brady and I just sort of smirk," said John Unitas Jr., the late quarterback's son. "It's an entirely different game. I'm biased, but what my father did, you can't compare it to anything today."
Start with the snap.
While Brady is famous for his "decision making," many of those decisions have actually been made for him by his offensive coordinators.
The Patriots' game plan is more homework than instinct, more science than scrabble.
Unitas, meanwhile, was renowned for once telling offensive coordinator Don McCafferty to "Sit back and enjoy the game, I won't need any help."
"My father never had a microphone in his helmet," said Unitas Jr. "He would study film two hours every night in the basement, figuring out his own plays."
Next, the pocket.
Brady has been blessed with rules that prohibit defenders from taking cheap shots at the quarterback. This, combined with a strong offensive line, has allowed him to stand in the backfield poring over possible receivers for what seems like hours.
Have you ever seen Brady with blood? Have you ever seen him wearing even so much as a grass stain?
The ancient quarterbacks survived with no such rules, with defenders hitting them every play, smaller guys than today, but hits nonetheless.
There is a reason that one of most famous quarterback photos is not of Tom Brady pumping his fist into the air, but of Y.A. Tittle kneeling with blood trickling down his head.
"The beating those guys took was tremendous," Unitas Jr. said.
Finally, there is the pass.
Brady's receivers are protected by today's rules, to the extent that defensive backs cannot even accidentally graze them.
The ancients' receivers were routinely tackled. The mere act of putting the ball in the air was a gamble.
"My father played when there were mostly running offenses," Unitas Jr said. ''My father was the other way."
In 1959, Unitas' league-leading total of 32 touchdown passes was more than 50% higher than his closest competitor, Pittsburgh's Bobby Layne, who threw for 20.
Brady threw for a record 50 touchdowns this season, but he is playing in an era when career and season passing records are falling faster than Green Bay snow.
Brady is playing in an era when the following scenario would never happen:
Playing in overtime for the league championship, having driven his team to his opponent's eight-yard line, a quarterback decides to pass.
That was Unitas, 50 years ago. His Colts were in position to kick a field goal to beat the Giants for the title. Yet he saw a hole in the defense and threw a seven-yard pass to Jim Mutscheller to set up Alan Ameche's one-yard touchdown run.
From 1997: Johnny Unitas at home with his youngest child Paige, 15. (Sun photo by Linda Coan / September 11, 2002)
"My father controlled the game," said John Unitas Jr. "He stuck it all out there."
It is a game that no longer exists, and he is the kind of quarterback who no longer exists.
Today, Tom Brady stands alone. In this history of professional football, he stands in line.
Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.
Long-Forgotten Perfection by the Lake
Sports of The Times
By DAVE ANDERSON
The New York Times
Published: January 27, 2008
Browns quarterback Otto Graham and coach Paul Brown celebrate after the Browns 38-14 victory over the Los Angeles Rams. The win gave the Browns the 1955 NFL championship in the final game of Graham's career. While Graham was guiding the Browns, Cleveland played in 10 straight title games and had four AAFC and three NFL championships.
(Plain Dealer File Photo)
During the Patriots’ journey to their Super Bowl XLII opportunity for a record 19-0 season, they upstaged the N.F.L.’s only other unbeaten and untied team, the 1972 Dolphins, who were 17-0. But buried in a forgotten pro football graveyard is a forgotten unbeaten and untied team, the 1948 Cleveland Browns.
Those early Browns, named for Coach Paul Brown and led by quarterback Otto Graham, went 14-0 during the regular schedule, then routed the Buffalo Bills, 49-7, in the All-America Football Conference championship game for a 15-0 sweep in the midst of what would be a 29-game unbeaten streak (with two ties) over three seasons.
The All-America what? Surely you mean the American Football League?
No, the A.F.L. didn’t arrive until 1960, a decade after the All-America Football Conference had vanished after four seasons following World War II, mostly because the Browns were so good. They had wrecked the league’s competitive balance. The Browns won all four titles, compiling a 47-4-3 regular-season record, winning a playoff game and going 4-0 in championship games, including two with the New York Yankees.
In the truce that ended the N.F.L.’s expensive duel for players with the A.A.F.C., the N.F.L. absorbed the Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts.
It also took the best players from the other five franchises, notably defensive tackle Arnie Weinmeister and defensive back Tom Landry, who joined the Giants after having starred for the New York Yankees, who played at Yankee Stadium.
Unlike the N.F.L.’s later acceptance of all A.F.L. team and player records in their 1966 merger agreement, the N.F.L. refused to recognize the All-America Football Conference statistics. The current Browns media guide still lists the team’s results and starting lineups for 1946 through 1949, but the N.F.L. tossed all those names and numbers into an unmarked grave, as if they never existed.
Browns quarterback Otto Graham, second from left, is joined in 1955 by three members of the original 1946 Browns, from left, Dante Lavelli, Frank Gatski and Lou Groza. (Plain Dealer File Photo)
In 1950, the Browns’ first season in the N.F.L., they proved they existed. They stunned the two-time reigning champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, 35-10, in the opener, posted a 10-2 record (both losses to the Giants), nipped the Giants, 8-3, in an East Division playoff at Cleveland, then rallied to defeat the Los Angeles Rams, 30-28, in the championship game on Lou Groza’s 16-yard field goal with 28 seconds left.
Over a 10-year stretch, the Browns, who also captured the 1954 and 1955 championships, won 7 N.F.L. and A.A.F.C. titles and 10 division titles. But to Brown, his unbeaten and untied ’48 Browns were the best Browns team of all.
•
“Even greater than the 1950 N.F.L. championship squad, and probably the greatest pro football team ever up to that time,” he wrote in his 1990 book, “PB: The Paul Brown Story” in collaboration with Jack Clary. “Since we didn’t play in the N.F.L., it didn’t count. I know this, though: the Browns, 49ers and Yankees were better than any of the N.F.L. teams that year, and we beat those other two teams twice.”
In addition to Brown, who later guided the Cincinnati Bengals to two Super Bowl appearances as general manager, six early Browns are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Graham (one of four quarterbacks on the N.F.L.’s all-time team along with Sammy Baugh, Johnny Unitas and Joe Montana), fullback Marion Motley, wide receiver Dante Lavelli, center Frank Gatski, middle guard Bill Willis and Groza, who was a kicker and offensive tackle.
“The real measure of our ’48 team,” Brown wrote, “was its ability to play and win three games within eight days, something no football team before, or since, ever has been asked to do.”
Associated Press
The great Marion Motley about to be tackled by the Giants' Jim Duncan, foreground, at the Polo Grounds in October 1950. It was just the sixth N.F.L. game for the Browns, who went on to win the league title.
All three games were on the road. On a Sunday in New York before 52,518 at the Stadium, the Browns beat the Yankees, 34-21; boarded a 16-hour flight to Los Angeles, where they stopped the Dons, 31-14, before 60,031 in the Coliseum on Thanksgiving Day; then edged the 49ers, 31-28, three days later before 59,785 at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
“The main thing about Paul Brown,” Lavelli said from his home in the Cleveland area, “was how articulate he was and how everything had to be perfect.”
Lou Saban, a linebacker on the ’48 Browns who later coached the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, recalled asking Brown why he made his players create a new playbook every year at training camp when it was mostly the same plays.
“When you write it, you remember it,” Brown said.
•
Around that time, Brown turned running back Dub Jones into what most historians consider football’s first flanker back.
“I had been the man in motion, but one day, Paul just told me to set out there on either side,” Jones said.
Mike Brown, Paul’s son, who is the Bengals’ president, hung around the ’48 Browns as a 13-year-old. The only Browns photograph in his office is the 1948 team photo. And he keeps hoping that someday, the N.F.L. will insert all those All-America Football Conference statistics into its record book.
“It would be a fitting reminder of how great those Browns teams were,” he said.
Especially the forgotten ’48 Browns, who were 15-0 long before the Dolphins were 17-0 and six decades before the Patriots would be shooting for 19-0.
By DAVE ANDERSON
The New York Times
Published: January 27, 2008
Browns quarterback Otto Graham and coach Paul Brown celebrate after the Browns 38-14 victory over the Los Angeles Rams. The win gave the Browns the 1955 NFL championship in the final game of Graham's career. While Graham was guiding the Browns, Cleveland played in 10 straight title games and had four AAFC and three NFL championships.
(Plain Dealer File Photo)
During the Patriots’ journey to their Super Bowl XLII opportunity for a record 19-0 season, they upstaged the N.F.L.’s only other unbeaten and untied team, the 1972 Dolphins, who were 17-0. But buried in a forgotten pro football graveyard is a forgotten unbeaten and untied team, the 1948 Cleveland Browns.
Those early Browns, named for Coach Paul Brown and led by quarterback Otto Graham, went 14-0 during the regular schedule, then routed the Buffalo Bills, 49-7, in the All-America Football Conference championship game for a 15-0 sweep in the midst of what would be a 29-game unbeaten streak (with two ties) over three seasons.
The All-America what? Surely you mean the American Football League?
No, the A.F.L. didn’t arrive until 1960, a decade after the All-America Football Conference had vanished after four seasons following World War II, mostly because the Browns were so good. They had wrecked the league’s competitive balance. The Browns won all four titles, compiling a 47-4-3 regular-season record, winning a playoff game and going 4-0 in championship games, including two with the New York Yankees.
In the truce that ended the N.F.L.’s expensive duel for players with the A.A.F.C., the N.F.L. absorbed the Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts.
It also took the best players from the other five franchises, notably defensive tackle Arnie Weinmeister and defensive back Tom Landry, who joined the Giants after having starred for the New York Yankees, who played at Yankee Stadium.
Unlike the N.F.L.’s later acceptance of all A.F.L. team and player records in their 1966 merger agreement, the N.F.L. refused to recognize the All-America Football Conference statistics. The current Browns media guide still lists the team’s results and starting lineups for 1946 through 1949, but the N.F.L. tossed all those names and numbers into an unmarked grave, as if they never existed.
Browns quarterback Otto Graham, second from left, is joined in 1955 by three members of the original 1946 Browns, from left, Dante Lavelli, Frank Gatski and Lou Groza. (Plain Dealer File Photo)
In 1950, the Browns’ first season in the N.F.L., they proved they existed. They stunned the two-time reigning champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, 35-10, in the opener, posted a 10-2 record (both losses to the Giants), nipped the Giants, 8-3, in an East Division playoff at Cleveland, then rallied to defeat the Los Angeles Rams, 30-28, in the championship game on Lou Groza’s 16-yard field goal with 28 seconds left.
Over a 10-year stretch, the Browns, who also captured the 1954 and 1955 championships, won 7 N.F.L. and A.A.F.C. titles and 10 division titles. But to Brown, his unbeaten and untied ’48 Browns were the best Browns team of all.
•
“Even greater than the 1950 N.F.L. championship squad, and probably the greatest pro football team ever up to that time,” he wrote in his 1990 book, “PB: The Paul Brown Story” in collaboration with Jack Clary. “Since we didn’t play in the N.F.L., it didn’t count. I know this, though: the Browns, 49ers and Yankees were better than any of the N.F.L. teams that year, and we beat those other two teams twice.”
In addition to Brown, who later guided the Cincinnati Bengals to two Super Bowl appearances as general manager, six early Browns are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Graham (one of four quarterbacks on the N.F.L.’s all-time team along with Sammy Baugh, Johnny Unitas and Joe Montana), fullback Marion Motley, wide receiver Dante Lavelli, center Frank Gatski, middle guard Bill Willis and Groza, who was a kicker and offensive tackle.
“The real measure of our ’48 team,” Brown wrote, “was its ability to play and win three games within eight days, something no football team before, or since, ever has been asked to do.”
Associated Press
The great Marion Motley about to be tackled by the Giants' Jim Duncan, foreground, at the Polo Grounds in October 1950. It was just the sixth N.F.L. game for the Browns, who went on to win the league title.
All three games were on the road. On a Sunday in New York before 52,518 at the Stadium, the Browns beat the Yankees, 34-21; boarded a 16-hour flight to Los Angeles, where they stopped the Dons, 31-14, before 60,031 in the Coliseum on Thanksgiving Day; then edged the 49ers, 31-28, three days later before 59,785 at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
“The main thing about Paul Brown,” Lavelli said from his home in the Cleveland area, “was how articulate he was and how everything had to be perfect.”
Lou Saban, a linebacker on the ’48 Browns who later coached the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, recalled asking Brown why he made his players create a new playbook every year at training camp when it was mostly the same plays.
“When you write it, you remember it,” Brown said.
•
Around that time, Brown turned running back Dub Jones into what most historians consider football’s first flanker back.
“I had been the man in motion, but one day, Paul just told me to set out there on either side,” Jones said.
Mike Brown, Paul’s son, who is the Bengals’ president, hung around the ’48 Browns as a 13-year-old. The only Browns photograph in his office is the 1948 team photo. And he keeps hoping that someday, the N.F.L. will insert all those All-America Football Conference statistics into its record book.
“It would be a fitting reminder of how great those Browns teams were,” he said.
Especially the forgotten ’48 Browns, who were 15-0 long before the Dolphins were 17-0 and six decades before the Patriots would be shooting for 19-0.
Venice, O Venice!
Beauty, history, and a shelf of murder mysteries.By Michael Novak
http://www.nationalreview.com/
January 25, 2008
For five of the past six Novembers, my wife Karen and I have spent a long weekend in Venice. I go to attend the Venice Talks, a two-day conference that brings together representatives of Europe’s center-right parties to discuss matters political, economic, and cultural. Karen and I then spend two extra days exploring the Queen City of the Adriatic, where the setting is always more than we had remembered. The hotels on the Grand Canal, discreetly updated as they now are, have a 19th-century splendor about them still, and they serve huge, warming breakfasts and luxurious dinners.
What Karen and I most enjoy is walking the twisting, often dead-end walkways, trying to master a baffling labyrinth of footbridges that arch up over dark, green-grey canals (whose water looks so thick that small animals might walk across it). Very often, despite the fact that we could see quite clearly where we wanted to go by means of steeples and towers, we couldn’t get there from here.
No matter: it is quite delicious to walk narrow Venetian streets in the bitter winds of November, ducking inside every so often for a cappuccino or a hot chocolate, or seeking sanctuary from the cold within a darkly shadowed old church whose bygone magnificence stuns the imagination.
One of our favorite little shelters — we try to stop by at least once a day, sometimes twice — is the church of San Zaccaria. There we dwell for a few moments at the foot of the single most beautiful painting in Venice — one of the greats anywhere in the world — by Giovanni Bellini: the Mother of God enthroned in a small temple of most marvelous perspectival precision, and in brilliant and subtly shadowed colors. I had never fully appreciated Bellini before, but he has moved far up my short list of the most thrilling painters.
Bellini- The Mother of God
Every church in Venice seems to shelter at least one artistic masterpiece, some three or four. One can spend an entire week visiting only the churches, apart from the justly famous and in some ways unmatched museums, guild halls, scuole, and public buildings.
A Thousand Years of Islam
This year, the Ducal Palace hosted a special exhibit on the 1,000-year history of wars, competition, trade, and mutual imitation between Islamic culture and Venice. The influence of Islamic design and architectural forms is seen throughout the older neighborhoods of Venice — in the shape of the windows, and in some of the cursive designs on the walls of old palaces. The façade of the Ducal Palace itself perfectly reflects the very Muslim influence its exhibit celebrated.
The Venetian fleet played a decisive role in one of the greatest battles of Western (and global) history, the preemptive Battle of Lepanto in 1571. So it is no surprise that whole gigantic walls in the Ducal Palace, in more than one room, bear huge and sumptuous oil paintings of the furies of that battle. Miguel de Cervantes was wounded in that all-day struggle for life or death. He called Lepanto the greatest sea battle of all time. The time was propitious for the Turks: The European powers were divided by the still-young Reformation. The battle settled very little, but it did bar the Turks from what looked to be their great sea invasion of Italy, which would have cut off Northern Europe from its Mediterranean roots.
Vicentino- Battle of Lepanto, 1603
In Venice, one always has the sense of striding across history. Centuries ago, no other city of Europe matched Venice as a seafaring power, trading with the Middle East and sending merchants to the Far East. Venice has lived a lot and seen a lot. Visiting the city, one can feel strong tides of cynicism, ambition, betrayal, moral ambiguity, sensuality, and also a kind of serene moral striving. One does not leave Venice without having one’s sense of “progress” and “the triumph of goodness” plunged into cold, murky, green-gray waters.
Murder in Venice
I have been intending to write about Venice for many weeks, without being able to seize an opportunity. Over the long New Year’s weekend, however, I decided to take a break from writing altogether. For five days, I mainly sat and read — well, aside from watching several hours of great football, and several more thumbing through the economic tables of the 2008 World Almanac, to refresh my memory on a few facts that are contrary to the conventional wisdom. Mostly, though, in a kind of delicious gluttony, I sat with a series of crime novels set in and around Venice that my sister had recommended to me. I was hooked, and read straight through three of them and into a fourth — and intend to read them all.
The author, Donna Leon, is an American woman, born in New Jersey, who has lived a great many years in the Middle and Far East, and now for some 20 years in Venice. Ms. Leon writes with the painter’s eye for Venice’s humble neighborhoods, rendering homespun descriptions often as sharp as the noonday sun. Her protagonist is a police officer whose title — Commisario — is not easily rendered into English, and whose winsome name is Guido Brunetti. Brunetti is an uxorious, smart, gutsy, and tenacious man, with a deep sense of his region’s honor. In his commonsense principles, he is a child of Cicero, a servant of justice — more exactingly, a servant of truth. Even when Brunetti collects more than enough evidence to bring a killer to justice, he is not satisfied until he understands every detail of the matter. Brunetti has that dogged common touch and common sense Aristotle’s children find most satisfying in their detectives. He is happily married to Paola, a no-nonsense Professoressa of English literature at the local university. Paola matches toughness of mind with affection and good humor.
Donna Leon and the Bridge of Sighs
How can we not be moved by Brunetti’s pertinacious love for clues he can see and hold in his hand, and his unceasing quest for a commonsense understanding of events? He has a profound regard for the people he works with. He is considerate and kind, and most of those who work with him reciprocate (though not his boss). When he pays a physical and spiritual price for his repetitive encounters with the bloody underside of Venice, his good wife deftly places balm on the wounds in his soul: a hot bowl of soup in winter, a cold glass of wine in the summer, in silence a hand through his hair.
Acqua Alta was the first of Ms. Leon’s novels I read, set in that wintry season in Venice when the high tides suddenly roll in, barely anticipated by wailing sirens. In the past, I had several times walked on high wooden platforms over the swirling “high water,” watching in awe as it surged over the embankments and into the piazzas, even up through the front doors of elegant hotels, and ultimately over the below-street-level tiles of the Basilica di San Marco. Even so, I had not quite imagined the difficulties brought to wintertime Venice by “acqua alta.”
The ferocity of a violent beating of a woman in the opening pages of Acqua Alta captured my horrified attention, I confess. There followed the quiet satisfactions of page after page of exact portrayal of Venetian gestures (the bent finger twisting into the cheek), and Venetian attitudes (a matter-of-fact cynicism about the police, the universities, the government, the press, and the church). And the plot and the detective work were gripping. So I picked up another volume. And then another. Each as good as, or better than, the earlier one.
So today, I looked up Donna Leon on Amazon. I did not count, but there must now be at least 15 of her novels in print. They seem to have won just about every prize for mystery novels awarded in Europe.There is one thing I did not really admire in Ms. Leon’s novels: she is tone-deaf to religion and, to boot, shows a mild contempt for it. Mostly, Ms. Leon keeps this passion out of sight; I ran into only one extended stretch of it about three pages long. But this habit of pent-up contempt is not foreign to certain circles in Italy, and thus belongs in these novels. And in a later novel (my wife assures me) she does depict the touch of real holiness one sometimes encounters in the Veneto.
There are few people quite so pagan as former Catholics, who, having lost their ear for transcendence, sometimes cut creation down to life’s meaningless absurdities, and exude a tired cynicism. Yet some of these same people exercise remarkable stoic virtues of the sort ancient Rome honored, before the coming of Christ. The church towers and bronze statues of saints of Ms. Leon’s Venice set the two streams of this declining civilization in chiaroscuro radiance.
Since I love to have my memory and imagination stirred by vividly drawn scenes of Venice — some from neighborhoods and surrounding islands I have yet to visit myself — and since I enjoy true literary talent, endowed with a sharp eye for human angularity, I look forward to many more days and nights reading the whole series of Ms. Leon’s novels.
Except — where am I going to find the time?
P.J. O'Rourke: Letter to Our European Friends
Everything you need to know about our presidential campaign.
The Weekly Standard
02/04/2008, Volume 013, Issue 20
http://www.weeklystandard.com
America is in the midst of an all-important electoral campaign. But, talking to Europeans, I've discovered that there is puzzlement and misinformation on your continent about what's happening on ours. Europeans feel an understandable confusion when faced with a political system consisting of two houses of Congress and a White House, and nobody is home in any of them.
Senator Barack Obama made his appearance at the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network Conference (April 21, 2007).
Also, America's political parties are indistinguishable to the European eye. A British journalist once described the situation thus: "America is a one-party state, but just like Americans they've got two of them." (I forget which British journalist said that. But there are so many British journalists who should be forgotten. Maybe it was Alexander Cockburn.)
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the "high school sex promise": I'll pull out in time, honest!
There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans, race and religion. You, of course, don't have any religion. Except every now and then someone who came to Europe lately and is a Muslim blows himself to bits. But I understand that you have EU funding to address these social problems and help Muslims build bombs that release fewer pollutants and less carbon dioxide, reducing the threat of global warming.
Mitt Romney
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States. The majority of Americans are Christians, and Christians can be divided into two kinds, the kind who think you should get Jesus and the kind who think Jesus is going to get you. Mike Huckabee is one of the latter. Then there are the Mormons such as Mitt Romney who believe some unusual things--things that no sensible European like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Benito Mussolini, Karl Marx, Emanuel Swedenborg, or Cherie Blair would ever believe.
The question of race in America is supposed to be a matter of what one looks like. But it is difficult to comprehend how a political interest group that contains both Al Sharpton and Halle Berry could be based on looks. Barack Obama looks like he was raised in Hawaii. He may have just a good tan.
The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."
A man can be a Democrat to the core, going into the voting booth to pull the lever with the donkey label no matter what. Then he sees Hillary's name on the ballot. And it all comes back to him . . . the first marriage . . . the time he came home a little late, it wasn't even midnight, and he'd only had four or five beers, and she threw his bowling ball down the storm sewer.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
The Republicans will have a hard time coming up with someone who can't beat Hillary Clinton. But I don't put it past them. You may remember Senator Bob Dole in 1996.
At the moment Republicans seem inclined to John McCain. Everyone loves John McCain. Everyone respects John McCain. He's tough. He's consistent. He's wrong. Not that I personally agree with you Europeans that John is wrong, but the voters do. John thinks the war in Iraq is a good idea. The electorate doesn't. John's campaign slogan is "Strong and Wrong."
Mitt Romney is supposed to be my own type of candidate, a true conservative. But Mitt was governor of Massachusetts. This is like applying to be pope and listing your prior job experience as "Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem."
Mitt Romney is also the "corporate candidate," promising to bring the organizational skills and fiscal discipline of corporate America to Washington. But we are in the midst of a global credit collapse and all the air is hissing out of the world's equity market balloons. We've had big corporate scandals--Enron, WorldCom, Tyco--in the not too distant past. We may have a deep recession in the not too distant future. Is this the moment to be pitching the voters on "business savvy"?
Rudy Giuliani is a wonderful person to have around during a tragedy. His campaign promise is that there will be a tragedy every week.
As for Fred Thompson, he didn't have much impact. Yes, he's a Republican who was seen on TV a lot. But so was Scooter Libby.
Mike Huckabee lost some support among the hard-core fundamentalists when Bible Belt denizens realized that John McCain was the only candidate with enough guts to really handle rattlesnakes at church. The rest of the public remains alert to the fact that evangelical Christianity, as a movement, has two faces--the Moral Majority face and the Tammy Faye Bakker face.
Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee
Let us not forget Ron Paul who is very popular--with people who stay up all night in Ayn Rand chatrooms, bury Krugerrands in the yard, and think the Trilateral Commission causes sub-prime mortgage foreclosures.
Incidentally, there's a balanced position that all of America's presidential candidates could take on the controversial abortion issue. If they want votes they shouldn't campaign to make abortion illegal or legal. They should campaign to make it retroactive. If a kid reaches 25 and he or she is still jobless, feckless, and sitting around Starbucks acting like a--no offense--European, then whack.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic field, Barack Obama may be altering our national political equation. Obama is an indication that America has reached an important benchmark in race relations. In America it is now officially more important to be cute than to be white. Barack Obama is cute, and he's nice. It's been a long time since any political party in America had the cute, nice vote sewn up. Rudy Giuliani? Not so nice. Bill Clinton? Don't get cute.
The problem for Obama is that, as yet, he doesn't have much political stature. However, there is a "Disney factor" is American politics. Think of America's politicians as the Seven Dwarves. They're all short--short on ethics, short on experience, short on common sense, short on something. But we keep thinking that one of these dwarves is going to save our snow white butt.
We've got Dopey right now. We had Sleazy before him. Grumpy lost in '04. Sleepy was great in the 1980s, but he's dead. How about Obama?
Who else do the Democrats have? There is, of course, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Al Gore. May I ask you Europeans, are your Norwegians crazy? What does the Nobel Peace Prize have to do with global warming? Did Al forge a truce in the war with the penguins? I'm trying to lead a carbon-neutral lifestyle myself. I've given up cigars. I think Al Gore should give up blowing smoke out his . . .
John Edwards is a personal injury lawyer, the sort of fellow who covers North Carolina with billboards reading, "Y'all May Have Been Malpracticed on by a Doctor and Not Even Know It. Call (800) S-H-Y-S-T-E-R." One of the remaining virtues of European civilization is that you aren't overrun with his ilk. John Edwards should go sue Krispy Kreme doughnuts for making his supporters too fat to get into the voting booths.
Dennis Kucinich and his wife, Elizabeth
Dennis Kucinich swept the Mars caucuses.
Then there are the Democrats who're actually qualified to be president--Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd. All three have dropped out of the race. Before they did, they managed, between them, to raise almost $1,000 (2.79 euros) for their campaigns.
This leaves the Democrats with Hillary Clinton. She's going to reform America's health care system. Memo to Hillary: You already reformed America's health care system, 15 years ago. Just the outline of Hillary's 1993 health care plan was 1,400 pages long, almost as long as that equally successful reform document, the EU constitution.
Many political analysts say that the failure of Hillary's health care plan almost destroyed Bill Clinton's first term. You'll recall that Bill Clinton had to seek help from a different woman to almost destroy his second term.
But no matter who is elected America's next president--whether Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or even Ron Paul--it is important that Europeans be reassured that ordinary Americans will not change the way they think about Europe. They will continue to think they aren't sure where it is on the map.
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The Weekly Standard
02/04/2008, Volume 013, Issue 20
http://www.weeklystandard.com
America is in the midst of an all-important electoral campaign. But, talking to Europeans, I've discovered that there is puzzlement and misinformation on your continent about what's happening on ours. Europeans feel an understandable confusion when faced with a political system consisting of two houses of Congress and a White House, and nobody is home in any of them.
Senator Barack Obama made his appearance at the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network Conference (April 21, 2007).
Also, America's political parties are indistinguishable to the European eye. A British journalist once described the situation thus: "America is a one-party state, but just like Americans they've got two of them." (I forget which British journalist said that. But there are so many British journalists who should be forgotten. Maybe it was Alexander Cockburn.)
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the "high school sex promise": I'll pull out in time, honest!
There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans, race and religion. You, of course, don't have any religion. Except every now and then someone who came to Europe lately and is a Muslim blows himself to bits. But I understand that you have EU funding to address these social problems and help Muslims build bombs that release fewer pollutants and less carbon dioxide, reducing the threat of global warming.
Mitt Romney
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States. The majority of Americans are Christians, and Christians can be divided into two kinds, the kind who think you should get Jesus and the kind who think Jesus is going to get you. Mike Huckabee is one of the latter. Then there are the Mormons such as Mitt Romney who believe some unusual things--things that no sensible European like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Benito Mussolini, Karl Marx, Emanuel Swedenborg, or Cherie Blair would ever believe.
The question of race in America is supposed to be a matter of what one looks like. But it is difficult to comprehend how a political interest group that contains both Al Sharpton and Halle Berry could be based on looks. Barack Obama looks like he was raised in Hawaii. He may have just a good tan.
The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."
A man can be a Democrat to the core, going into the voting booth to pull the lever with the donkey label no matter what. Then he sees Hillary's name on the ballot. And it all comes back to him . . . the first marriage . . . the time he came home a little late, it wasn't even midnight, and he'd only had four or five beers, and she threw his bowling ball down the storm sewer.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
The Republicans will have a hard time coming up with someone who can't beat Hillary Clinton. But I don't put it past them. You may remember Senator Bob Dole in 1996.
At the moment Republicans seem inclined to John McCain. Everyone loves John McCain. Everyone respects John McCain. He's tough. He's consistent. He's wrong. Not that I personally agree with you Europeans that John is wrong, but the voters do. John thinks the war in Iraq is a good idea. The electorate doesn't. John's campaign slogan is "Strong and Wrong."
Mitt Romney is supposed to be my own type of candidate, a true conservative. But Mitt was governor of Massachusetts. This is like applying to be pope and listing your prior job experience as "Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem."
Mitt Romney is also the "corporate candidate," promising to bring the organizational skills and fiscal discipline of corporate America to Washington. But we are in the midst of a global credit collapse and all the air is hissing out of the world's equity market balloons. We've had big corporate scandals--Enron, WorldCom, Tyco--in the not too distant past. We may have a deep recession in the not too distant future. Is this the moment to be pitching the voters on "business savvy"?
Rudy Giuliani is a wonderful person to have around during a tragedy. His campaign promise is that there will be a tragedy every week.
As for Fred Thompson, he didn't have much impact. Yes, he's a Republican who was seen on TV a lot. But so was Scooter Libby.
Mike Huckabee lost some support among the hard-core fundamentalists when Bible Belt denizens realized that John McCain was the only candidate with enough guts to really handle rattlesnakes at church. The rest of the public remains alert to the fact that evangelical Christianity, as a movement, has two faces--the Moral Majority face and the Tammy Faye Bakker face.
Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee
Let us not forget Ron Paul who is very popular--with people who stay up all night in Ayn Rand chatrooms, bury Krugerrands in the yard, and think the Trilateral Commission causes sub-prime mortgage foreclosures.
Incidentally, there's a balanced position that all of America's presidential candidates could take on the controversial abortion issue. If they want votes they shouldn't campaign to make abortion illegal or legal. They should campaign to make it retroactive. If a kid reaches 25 and he or she is still jobless, feckless, and sitting around Starbucks acting like a--no offense--European, then whack.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic field, Barack Obama may be altering our national political equation. Obama is an indication that America has reached an important benchmark in race relations. In America it is now officially more important to be cute than to be white. Barack Obama is cute, and he's nice. It's been a long time since any political party in America had the cute, nice vote sewn up. Rudy Giuliani? Not so nice. Bill Clinton? Don't get cute.
The problem for Obama is that, as yet, he doesn't have much political stature. However, there is a "Disney factor" is American politics. Think of America's politicians as the Seven Dwarves. They're all short--short on ethics, short on experience, short on common sense, short on something. But we keep thinking that one of these dwarves is going to save our snow white butt.
We've got Dopey right now. We had Sleazy before him. Grumpy lost in '04. Sleepy was great in the 1980s, but he's dead. How about Obama?
Who else do the Democrats have? There is, of course, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Al Gore. May I ask you Europeans, are your Norwegians crazy? What does the Nobel Peace Prize have to do with global warming? Did Al forge a truce in the war with the penguins? I'm trying to lead a carbon-neutral lifestyle myself. I've given up cigars. I think Al Gore should give up blowing smoke out his . . .
John Edwards is a personal injury lawyer, the sort of fellow who covers North Carolina with billboards reading, "Y'all May Have Been Malpracticed on by a Doctor and Not Even Know It. Call (800) S-H-Y-S-T-E-R." One of the remaining virtues of European civilization is that you aren't overrun with his ilk. John Edwards should go sue Krispy Kreme doughnuts for making his supporters too fat to get into the voting booths.
Dennis Kucinich and his wife, Elizabeth
Dennis Kucinich swept the Mars caucuses.
Then there are the Democrats who're actually qualified to be president--Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd. All three have dropped out of the race. Before they did, they managed, between them, to raise almost $1,000 (2.79 euros) for their campaigns.
This leaves the Democrats with Hillary Clinton. She's going to reform America's health care system. Memo to Hillary: You already reformed America's health care system, 15 years ago. Just the outline of Hillary's 1993 health care plan was 1,400 pages long, almost as long as that equally successful reform document, the EU constitution.
Many political analysts say that the failure of Hillary's health care plan almost destroyed Bill Clinton's first term. You'll recall that Bill Clinton had to seek help from a different woman to almost destroy his second term.
But no matter who is elected America's next president--whether Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or even Ron Paul--it is important that Europeans be reassured that ordinary Americans will not change the way they think about Europe. They will continue to think they aren't sure where it is on the map.
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The Failure of Normality
The unhappy lessons of the Thompson campaign.
by Andrew Ferguson
The Weekly Standard
02/04/2008, Volume 013, Issue 20
In his recent memoir, Alan Greenspan says he's been pushing a constitutional amendment of his own devising. It reads: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office." If the Greenspan amendment is ever enacted, it will at last clear the field for Fred Thompson, who might then become president. But not until then.
Thompson withdrew from the presidential race last week. He ended his campaign as he had conducted it, with a minimum of fuss and no wasted words. He released a withdrawal statement over the Internet. It was three sentences long, and he hasn't been heard from since. My guess is we'll be missing him dreadfully by spring.
The charge against Thompson, who entered the campaign last September when polls showed him a favorite among Republican voters, was repeated so often it became a cliché. Like most clichés it tells us more about the people who used it than about the state of affairs it was supposed to describe. His campaign lacked "energy." He didn't get out enough on the campaign trail, and, when he did, he didn't hold enough events. His speaking style was too low-key, and his speeches were too long, and more often than not his "performance" in televised debates was lackluster. He just didn't have the fire in the belly.
Fire in the belly: For those of us who suffer from acid reflux, this is a phrase full of meaning. In the world of politics, however, the meaning is vaguer. William Safire's New Political Dictionary defines "fire in the belly" as "an unquenchable thirst for power or glory; the burning drive to win a race or achieve a goal." It's bad, apparently, not having fire in the belly. The premise seems to be that vein-popping ambition, unrestrained avidity, is a necessary if not sufficient quality for someone who wants to hold the highest political position in a democratic country. Thompson himself seemed puzzled by the phrase and the premise underlying it. He was asked about it at a town hall meeting in Burlington, Iowa, in late December.
"Nowadays, it's all about fire in the belly," he said, with a touch of sarcasm. "I'm not sure in the world we live in today it's a terribly good thing that a president has too much fire in his belly."
He pointed out that he'd made financial sacrifices to run for president--he quit his various high-paying jobs and went without income for nearly a year--which should, he said, demonstrate his earnestness about the task before him.
And yet: "I'm not consumed by this process. I'm not consumed with the notion of being president. I'm simply saying I'm willing to do what's necessary to achieve it, if I'm in synch with the people and if the people want me or somebody like me. . . . I'm only consumed by very, very few things and politics is not one of them."
Thompson didn't give off the usual political vibe: the gnawing need to please, the craving for the public's love. A few voters and journalists found this refreshing, many more found it insulting. Some just found it fascinating, in a clinical sort of way: What kind of politician isn't consumed by politics--and what kind of campaign would such a politician run? Well, now we know. If Thompson could plausibly avoid an overnight campaign trip, he did, preferring to return home to his wife and children in suburban Virginia. He spent an inordinate amount of time with his briefing books. And his response to the chore of raising money--the chief occupation of every office-seeker in this era of campaign finance reform, which was intended to reduce the role of money in politics--seemed nearly pathological. Fundraising events scheduled to last two or three hours often guttered out when the candidate departed after twenty minutes. High-end donors complained of being uncourted, unpampered, unloved--even unphoned. At one party in a private home last year, Thompson made the rounds of money-shakers, delivered brief remarks, and then slipped into a bedroom to watch a basketball game on TV by himself.
Having become famous as an actor in TV and movies, Thompson might have been expected to be a showman. But he was resolutely prosaic. Only with the greatest reluctance did he agree to a photograph with the Iowa State Fair's "Butter Cow," and when a fireman in Waverly asked him to wear a helmet, he said he didn't wear "silly hats." As the critics charged, his public speeches really were unusually long, even at drop-bys along the trail, because he insisted on mentioning details of his plans to recalibrate the benefit formulas for Social Security, inject private incentives into Medicare, and develop an optional, two-tiered flat tax. So nobody should have been surprised that when it came time to film his final pitch to voters before the Iowa caucuses, the broadcast speech ended up being 17 minutes long--Homeric by the standards of political ads. Crowds did not go wild.
Now, you can overstate the intellectual heft of a campaign that was launched by the candidate during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was a different kind of candidate but not an incompetent one. Indeed, his finest moment came in a debate before the Iowa caucuses, when the moderator asked the assembled candidates for a show of hands if they believed human activity caused climate change.
"Well, do you want to give me a minute to answer that?" Thompson said. When the moderator said she didn't, he said: "Well, then I'm not going to answer it. You want a show of hands, and I'm not going to give it to you."
The moderator looked as though Thompson had suddenly sprouted daffodils from his ears. So did his fellow candidates. After a stunned silence, they all courageously announced their refusal to show hands, too. They looked like the Little Rascals, hitching up their britches and flexing their biceps after Alfalfa clocked the neighborhood bully.
It's telling that his most notable moments were negative--marked by his refusal to follow some custom of the modern campaign. (From another debate: "Should government step in and help Chrysler and the other auto makers?" Thompson: "No.") Asked about education reform, he said: "It would be easy enough for someone running for president to say: I have a several-point plan to fix our education problem. It's not going to happen. And it shouldn't happen from the Oval Office." When journalists and candidates, with their typically childlike enthusiasm, suddenly began gumming the word "change" after the Iowa caucuses, Thompson pointed out the obvious: "Change has been part of every election since the dawn of elections, if you weren't an incumbent." He noted how easy it was "to demagogue" the issue of federal spending by dwelling on relatively insignificant earmarks: "All these programs that we talk about in the news every day are a thimbleful in the ocean compared to the entitlement tsunami that's coming to hit us."
Views like these might have earned another candidate a reputation for "straight talk"--maybe even the title of "maverick." But Thompson was more subversive than that; he was an existential maverick, and his campaign was an implicit rebuke to the system in its entirety. He was a man out of his time. With its reduced metabolism and procedural modesty, his campaign still might have served as an illustration of what politics once was like and--if we have the audacity to hope--might be again. After all, by the standards of a century ago, Thompson was a whirligig.
Political campaigns have always been boisterous affairs, but candidates themselves rarely took center stage till well into the 20th century. The first presidential candidate even to make an appearance on his own behalf was William Henry Harrison in 1840. When he showed up in Columbus, Ohio, to give a speech extolling his (exceedingly thin) record, the political world was scandalized. An opposition paper, the Democratic Globe, counted his uses of the pronoun "I"--there were 81 of them in his text--and pronounced the speech "a prodigy of garrulous egotism." The Cleveland Adviser, a nonpartisan paper, asked: "When was there ever before such a spectacle as a candidate for the Presidency, traversing the country advocating his own claims for that high and responsible station? Never!"
"The precedent thus set by Harrison," concluded the Adviser's editorialist, "appears to us a bad one."
But it wasn't much of a precedent. Active campaigning didn't catch on for another half century or more. (The exception was Stephen A. Douglas in 1860, the only one of the four presidential candidates that year to leave town to deliver a speech.) Candidates stayed home, receiving visitors and maintaining a quiet dignity while occasionally uncorking a speech in the neighborhood so the newspapers had something to report. Meanwhile surrogates scattered around the country, leading parades, holding rallies, and telling lies for which the candidates themselves couldn't be held responsible. Even the appalling Theodore Roosevelt, who would smooch babies at a train wreck if he thought it would get him votes, managed to contain himself and keep off the hustings when he ran for reelection in 1904. Eventually barnstorming became marginally acceptable, but only as the last recourse of candidates who, like Harry Truman in 1948, were so far behind they could risk looking desperate and undignified.
As late as the 1970s, the constant motion that modern presidential candidates subject themselves to was still of recent enough vintage that Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, in their great book Presidential Elections, felt the need to account for it. "Everybody does it because it is the fashion," they wrote, "and the spectacle of seeing one's opponent run around the country at a furious pace without following suit is too nerve-wracking [for a candidate] to contemplate. It is beside the point that no one knows whether all this does any good."
The traditional restraint of old-time presidential candidates wasn't arrogance or sanctimoniousness, the twin accusations that wised-up politicos made against Thompson during the campaign. There was a philosophical component to it too: By not seeming overeager--no matter how eager they were--candidates paid tribute to the democratic idea that political power is best sought, taken on, and used reluctantly. It was also a matter of seemliness, and Thompson, alone among recent candidates, felt its pull. In his stump speech he often mentioned George Washington, once a staple of political rhetoric for his willingness to walk away from the power that was thrust upon him. Today Washington's restraint seems nothing more than an archaism. And by extolling it Thompson sounded merely odd.
"If people really want in their president a super type-A personality," Thompson said at that Iowa town hall meeting, "someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night thinking for years about how they could achieve the presidency of the United States, someone who could look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning--I ain't that guy."
But does "super type-A personality" really describe the kind of person who runs for president nowadays? It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one. Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.
From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology. You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.
There's no rest, because there's not a moment to waste: The handful of minutes away from the kaleidoscope are spent chatting with the scorpions of the press, the ill-dressed, ill-mannered reporters from the prints and the pretty, preening peacocks of TV, each of them either a know-it-all or a cynic or a dope, take your pick, and each of whom, for professional and other reasons, will deploy all his energies and cleverness to the task of trapping you into a misstatement or ungenerous remark or expression of irritation so he can convey to his editors and the world that--at last!--you've made a gaffe; and if you won't make a gaffe then he will convey to his editors and the world how "scripted" and "over rehearsed" you sound; kind of slick, almost robotic, inauthentic.
When the scorps are dismissed, in the seconds before you pass from the freezing van to the overheated gym or boardroom, a sycophant whose name you can't remember hands you a cell phone that connects you to a rich man whose face you dimly recall from another boardroom last summer and you beg him to give you money, or more often--considering the grinding pressure you feel for cash, always for cash--you beg him to assemble a circle of other rich men that he can beg on your behalf, and when you sign off you don't have time to be grateful. There will be more calls before dinner and after dinner, and dinner is a cold thigh of chicken in a sump of clotted gravy served from a steam table in a freezing cinderblock banquet room at the Lions Club, and a hundred pairs of eyes fix themselves on you--a celebrity, someone they've seen on TV--as you dribble the gravy on your shirtfront. And after you release the same words and hear the same complaints you go to bed in a Hampton Suites for five hours of sleep on starchy sheets with dimly visible stains whose origins are impossible to discern, and from the corner the digital display on the microwave flashes 12:00 12:00 12:00 . . .
And you do all this so you can wake up the next morning and do it again. Because you like it.
The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people"). The case is made, in defense of the contemporary campaign, that this is an efficient if unlovely way to choose leaders: It winnows out those who lack the stamina and discipline necessary to lead a rich, large, powerful, and complicated country. By this argument, Thompson failed because he deserved to.
But the opposite case is easier to make--that the modern campaign excludes anyone who lacks the narcissism, cold-bloodedness, and unreflective nature that the process requires and rewards. In his memoir -Greenspan remarks that of the seven presidents he has known well, the only one who was "close to normal" was Jerry Ford. And, as Greenspan points out, Ford was never elected.
Fred Thompson probably feels terrible at the moment, but he should be honored to be in Ford's company.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
by Andrew Ferguson
The Weekly Standard
02/04/2008, Volume 013, Issue 20
In his recent memoir, Alan Greenspan says he's been pushing a constitutional amendment of his own devising. It reads: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office." If the Greenspan amendment is ever enacted, it will at last clear the field for Fred Thompson, who might then become president. But not until then.Thompson withdrew from the presidential race last week. He ended his campaign as he had conducted it, with a minimum of fuss and no wasted words. He released a withdrawal statement over the Internet. It was three sentences long, and he hasn't been heard from since. My guess is we'll be missing him dreadfully by spring.
The charge against Thompson, who entered the campaign last September when polls showed him a favorite among Republican voters, was repeated so often it became a cliché. Like most clichés it tells us more about the people who used it than about the state of affairs it was supposed to describe. His campaign lacked "energy." He didn't get out enough on the campaign trail, and, when he did, he didn't hold enough events. His speaking style was too low-key, and his speeches were too long, and more often than not his "performance" in televised debates was lackluster. He just didn't have the fire in the belly.
Fire in the belly: For those of us who suffer from acid reflux, this is a phrase full of meaning. In the world of politics, however, the meaning is vaguer. William Safire's New Political Dictionary defines "fire in the belly" as "an unquenchable thirst for power or glory; the burning drive to win a race or achieve a goal." It's bad, apparently, not having fire in the belly. The premise seems to be that vein-popping ambition, unrestrained avidity, is a necessary if not sufficient quality for someone who wants to hold the highest political position in a democratic country. Thompson himself seemed puzzled by the phrase and the premise underlying it. He was asked about it at a town hall meeting in Burlington, Iowa, in late December.
"Nowadays, it's all about fire in the belly," he said, with a touch of sarcasm. "I'm not sure in the world we live in today it's a terribly good thing that a president has too much fire in his belly."
He pointed out that he'd made financial sacrifices to run for president--he quit his various high-paying jobs and went without income for nearly a year--which should, he said, demonstrate his earnestness about the task before him.
And yet: "I'm not consumed by this process. I'm not consumed with the notion of being president. I'm simply saying I'm willing to do what's necessary to achieve it, if I'm in synch with the people and if the people want me or somebody like me. . . . I'm only consumed by very, very few things and politics is not one of them."
Thompson didn't give off the usual political vibe: the gnawing need to please, the craving for the public's love. A few voters and journalists found this refreshing, many more found it insulting. Some just found it fascinating, in a clinical sort of way: What kind of politician isn't consumed by politics--and what kind of campaign would such a politician run? Well, now we know. If Thompson could plausibly avoid an overnight campaign trip, he did, preferring to return home to his wife and children in suburban Virginia. He spent an inordinate amount of time with his briefing books. And his response to the chore of raising money--the chief occupation of every office-seeker in this era of campaign finance reform, which was intended to reduce the role of money in politics--seemed nearly pathological. Fundraising events scheduled to last two or three hours often guttered out when the candidate departed after twenty minutes. High-end donors complained of being uncourted, unpampered, unloved--even unphoned. At one party in a private home last year, Thompson made the rounds of money-shakers, delivered brief remarks, and then slipped into a bedroom to watch a basketball game on TV by himself.
Having become famous as an actor in TV and movies, Thompson might have been expected to be a showman. But he was resolutely prosaic. Only with the greatest reluctance did he agree to a photograph with the Iowa State Fair's "Butter Cow," and when a fireman in Waverly asked him to wear a helmet, he said he didn't wear "silly hats." As the critics charged, his public speeches really were unusually long, even at drop-bys along the trail, because he insisted on mentioning details of his plans to recalibrate the benefit formulas for Social Security, inject private incentives into Medicare, and develop an optional, two-tiered flat tax. So nobody should have been surprised that when it came time to film his final pitch to voters before the Iowa caucuses, the broadcast speech ended up being 17 minutes long--Homeric by the standards of political ads. Crowds did not go wild.
Now, you can overstate the intellectual heft of a campaign that was launched by the candidate during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was a different kind of candidate but not an incompetent one. Indeed, his finest moment came in a debate before the Iowa caucuses, when the moderator asked the assembled candidates for a show of hands if they believed human activity caused climate change.
"Well, do you want to give me a minute to answer that?" Thompson said. When the moderator said she didn't, he said: "Well, then I'm not going to answer it. You want a show of hands, and I'm not going to give it to you."
The moderator looked as though Thompson had suddenly sprouted daffodils from his ears. So did his fellow candidates. After a stunned silence, they all courageously announced their refusal to show hands, too. They looked like the Little Rascals, hitching up their britches and flexing their biceps after Alfalfa clocked the neighborhood bully.
It's telling that his most notable moments were negative--marked by his refusal to follow some custom of the modern campaign. (From another debate: "Should government step in and help Chrysler and the other auto makers?" Thompson: "No.") Asked about education reform, he said: "It would be easy enough for someone running for president to say: I have a several-point plan to fix our education problem. It's not going to happen. And it shouldn't happen from the Oval Office." When journalists and candidates, with their typically childlike enthusiasm, suddenly began gumming the word "change" after the Iowa caucuses, Thompson pointed out the obvious: "Change has been part of every election since the dawn of elections, if you weren't an incumbent." He noted how easy it was "to demagogue" the issue of federal spending by dwelling on relatively insignificant earmarks: "All these programs that we talk about in the news every day are a thimbleful in the ocean compared to the entitlement tsunami that's coming to hit us."
Views like these might have earned another candidate a reputation for "straight talk"--maybe even the title of "maverick." But Thompson was more subversive than that; he was an existential maverick, and his campaign was an implicit rebuke to the system in its entirety. He was a man out of his time. With its reduced metabolism and procedural modesty, his campaign still might have served as an illustration of what politics once was like and--if we have the audacity to hope--might be again. After all, by the standards of a century ago, Thompson was a whirligig.
Political campaigns have always been boisterous affairs, but candidates themselves rarely took center stage till well into the 20th century. The first presidential candidate even to make an appearance on his own behalf was William Henry Harrison in 1840. When he showed up in Columbus, Ohio, to give a speech extolling his (exceedingly thin) record, the political world was scandalized. An opposition paper, the Democratic Globe, counted his uses of the pronoun "I"--there were 81 of them in his text--and pronounced the speech "a prodigy of garrulous egotism." The Cleveland Adviser, a nonpartisan paper, asked: "When was there ever before such a spectacle as a candidate for the Presidency, traversing the country advocating his own claims for that high and responsible station? Never!"
"The precedent thus set by Harrison," concluded the Adviser's editorialist, "appears to us a bad one."
But it wasn't much of a precedent. Active campaigning didn't catch on for another half century or more. (The exception was Stephen A. Douglas in 1860, the only one of the four presidential candidates that year to leave town to deliver a speech.) Candidates stayed home, receiving visitors and maintaining a quiet dignity while occasionally uncorking a speech in the neighborhood so the newspapers had something to report. Meanwhile surrogates scattered around the country, leading parades, holding rallies, and telling lies for which the candidates themselves couldn't be held responsible. Even the appalling Theodore Roosevelt, who would smooch babies at a train wreck if he thought it would get him votes, managed to contain himself and keep off the hustings when he ran for reelection in 1904. Eventually barnstorming became marginally acceptable, but only as the last recourse of candidates who, like Harry Truman in 1948, were so far behind they could risk looking desperate and undignified.
As late as the 1970s, the constant motion that modern presidential candidates subject themselves to was still of recent enough vintage that Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, in their great book Presidential Elections, felt the need to account for it. "Everybody does it because it is the fashion," they wrote, "and the spectacle of seeing one's opponent run around the country at a furious pace without following suit is too nerve-wracking [for a candidate] to contemplate. It is beside the point that no one knows whether all this does any good."
The traditional restraint of old-time presidential candidates wasn't arrogance or sanctimoniousness, the twin accusations that wised-up politicos made against Thompson during the campaign. There was a philosophical component to it too: By not seeming overeager--no matter how eager they were--candidates paid tribute to the democratic idea that political power is best sought, taken on, and used reluctantly. It was also a matter of seemliness, and Thompson, alone among recent candidates, felt its pull. In his stump speech he often mentioned George Washington, once a staple of political rhetoric for his willingness to walk away from the power that was thrust upon him. Today Washington's restraint seems nothing more than an archaism. And by extolling it Thompson sounded merely odd.
"If people really want in their president a super type-A personality," Thompson said at that Iowa town hall meeting, "someone who has gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night thinking for years about how they could achieve the presidency of the United States, someone who could look you straight in the eye and say they enjoy every minute of campaigning--I ain't that guy."
But does "super type-A personality" really describe the kind of person who runs for president nowadays? It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one. Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.
From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology. You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.
There's no rest, because there's not a moment to waste: The handful of minutes away from the kaleidoscope are spent chatting with the scorpions of the press, the ill-dressed, ill-mannered reporters from the prints and the pretty, preening peacocks of TV, each of them either a know-it-all or a cynic or a dope, take your pick, and each of whom, for professional and other reasons, will deploy all his energies and cleverness to the task of trapping you into a misstatement or ungenerous remark or expression of irritation so he can convey to his editors and the world that--at last!--you've made a gaffe; and if you won't make a gaffe then he will convey to his editors and the world how "scripted" and "over rehearsed" you sound; kind of slick, almost robotic, inauthentic.
When the scorps are dismissed, in the seconds before you pass from the freezing van to the overheated gym or boardroom, a sycophant whose name you can't remember hands you a cell phone that connects you to a rich man whose face you dimly recall from another boardroom last summer and you beg him to give you money, or more often--considering the grinding pressure you feel for cash, always for cash--you beg him to assemble a circle of other rich men that he can beg on your behalf, and when you sign off you don't have time to be grateful. There will be more calls before dinner and after dinner, and dinner is a cold thigh of chicken in a sump of clotted gravy served from a steam table in a freezing cinderblock banquet room at the Lions Club, and a hundred pairs of eyes fix themselves on you--a celebrity, someone they've seen on TV--as you dribble the gravy on your shirtfront. And after you release the same words and hear the same complaints you go to bed in a Hampton Suites for five hours of sleep on starchy sheets with dimly visible stains whose origins are impossible to discern, and from the corner the digital display on the microwave flashes 12:00 12:00 12:00 . . .
And you do all this so you can wake up the next morning and do it again. Because you like it.
The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people"). The case is made, in defense of the contemporary campaign, that this is an efficient if unlovely way to choose leaders: It winnows out those who lack the stamina and discipline necessary to lead a rich, large, powerful, and complicated country. By this argument, Thompson failed because he deserved to.
But the opposite case is easier to make--that the modern campaign excludes anyone who lacks the narcissism, cold-bloodedness, and unreflective nature that the process requires and rewards. In his memoir -Greenspan remarks that of the seven presidents he has known well, the only one who was "close to normal" was Jerry Ford. And, as Greenspan points out, Ford was never elected.
Fred Thompson probably feels terrible at the moment, but he should be honored to be in Ford's company.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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