Legacy Hunting
In the new Atlantic (not online yet), Ross Douthat makes the case that history–or historians, at any rate–may end up being a lot kinder to President Bush than he deserves. Douthat writes that judging by the periodic presidential rankings issued by presidential scholars:
Americans tend to forgive their leaders for the crimes and errors of the moment…. we’ve forgiven Teddy Roosevelt his role in the bloody and disgraceful occupation of the Phillipines. It’s why we’ve pardoned Woodrow Wilson for the part his feckless idealism played in unleashing decades of strife and tyranny in Europe. It’s why we’ve granted Harry Truman absolution for the military blundering that prolonged the Korean War and brought us to the brink of nuclear conflict…. These well-respected presidents have benefited as well, from the American tendency to overvalue activist leaders. So a bad president like Wilson is preferred, in our rankings and our hearts, to a good but undistinguished manager like Calvin Coolidge…
Douthat’s absolutely right that the presidential rankings reflect a bias toward activism, a preference for those presidents who dream big and dare great things, even when they leave wreckage in their wake. As I point out in The Cult of the Presidency:
Social psychologist Dean Keith Simonton used regression analysis to examine the factors that the rankers reward, demonstrating that, besides years in office, years at war are most strongly correlated with higher standing. Another scholar who, like Simonton, ran the numbers on presidential greatness, concluded that “Without the compelling urgency of war… a great individual will have considerable difficulty in gaining recognition as a great president.” In 2005, conservative law professor Eric Posner suggested that the academic consensus proved that “imperial presidents perform better than limited-power republican presidents.” Posner looked at the 2000 presidential poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist Society (the first to control for the rankers’ political affiliation) and categorized each of the presidents ranked in the poll as either “republican” or “imperial.” The high status of the imperialists led Posner to conclude that there was a powerful argument for unleashing the Imperial Presidency: “much of the structure of the presidency—especially in foreign affairs—is hampered by 18th-century restrictions that were motivated by fears of monarchy. By pushing against these restrictions, Bush… is further modernizing the office of the presidency and preparing it for the challenges ahead.”….
In the perverse calculus that governs the presidential rankings, a man’s worth is measured not by how much harm he avoided, not by how well he presided over domestic peace, but by how skillfully he exploited catastrophes to spur revolutionary change. Is it any wonder, then, that presidents, who walk the halls with the portraits of past greats, sometimes long for an enormous crisis in which to prove themselves? Should we be surprised if they’re tempted to resort to militarism when the impossible tasks they’ve signed up for—“managing” the economy, keeping Americans safe from every sort of harm—up to and including spiritual “malaise”—prove difficult to fulfill? If presidents are too quick to invoke the war metaphor, if they find themselves drawn toward sweeping theories of executive power and an exalted, quasi-religious view of their station, then perhaps that’s because the people who fill out their report cards reward such behavior.
Buy the book, already.
One Thing at a Time
(Or none). In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” Walter Kirn explains why the only time I really seem to get anything done anymore is when I’m crammed into a tiny coach seat, forbidden to use electronic devices, and faced with the choice between doing some work and watching a Katherine Heigl movie.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.
Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.
The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.
This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.
Speaking of flying/multitasking: about a week ago, I was in the bathroom at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, when a guy comes in quacking away on his bluetooth device, sidles right up next to me at the urinal, and continues talking (apparently to an assistant/employee) about an upcoming meeting, treating his associate to a cascading liquid symphony punctuated by autoflushes.
Politics and Prose
If you’re around, come out to Politics and Prose, where I’ll be speaking at 1 PM today.
New Cory Maye Video
…over at Reason.tv. See here for background on the Cory Maye case. Very well-produced, powerful stuff–you’d have to be one numb SOB not to be angry by the end of it. Watch it and spread the word.
Eternal Vigilance, Inc.
The Style section of today’s Washington Post features a terrific article about the National Security Archive, the nonprofit group dedicated to unearthing goverment secrets. The privately funded group, about 35 strong, uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect about 75,000 documents a year, which staffers analyze and then post on the website. The Archive’s greatest hits (see, e.g., here and here) demonstrate that as Patrick Henry put it, one should “never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.” Don’t trust: verify.
One of my favorite documents on the site is the Operation Northwoods Memo, prepared by the Pentagon in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster:
titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” [the memo] was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.
Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but thanks to FOIA and the National Security Archive, you can check for yourself [.pdf]. But if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had had their way, you couldn’t. As top aides to Gerald Ford 34 years ago, they urged the president to veto amendments strengthening FOIA (he did, and Congress overrode his veto). The Archive has the documents on that too.
Promote Others
If you’re in DC tomorrow (register and) come on down to Cato for a forum on Bill Kauffmann’s new book Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. I’d say “great new book,” but I don’t have it yet, so I can’t. But I’ve read other Kauffman books and his one-page history column in the old American Enterprise magazine was a consistent gem (or maybe a raisin), so I’m sure it’s great. You’ve gotta love a guy who retroactively opposes the interstate highway system, not just on constitutionalist grounds, but because it made America ugly. From the event flyer:
Conservatives love war, empire, and the military-industrial complex. They abhor peace, the sole and rightful property of liberals. Right? Wrong.
According to Bill Kauffman, true conservatives have always resisted the imperial and military impulse: it drains the treasury, curtails domestic liberties, breaks down families, and vulgarizes culture. From the Federalists who opposed the War of 1812, to the striving of Robert Taft (known as “Mr. Republican”) to keep the United States out of Korea, to the latter-day libertarian critics of the Iraq war, there has historically been nothing unusual about anti-war activists on the political right. And while these critics of U.S. military crusades have been vilified by the party of George W. Bush, their conservative vision of a peaceful, decentralized, and noninterventionist America gives us a glimpse of the country we could have had—and might yet attain. Passionate and witty, Ain’t My America is an eye-opening exploration of the forgotten history of right-wing peace movements—and a clarion call to anti-war conservatives of today.
Tyler Cowen recommends the book, though he suggests (by linking to a picture of kimchi) that antiwar conservatives were wrong to question our undeclared, conscript-fought war in Korea. I know, I know, the kimchi part’s a joke.
It’s All About Me
As you can see over there to the right, I have the cover story in Reason this month. The article is a succinct summary of the book, so spend the $3.50 to see if you want to buy the book. I grew up reading Reason, so it’s a real kick to be on the cover.
Also, Glenn Greenwald has kind words about Cult today on his blog, in the midst of a nice dissection of McCain’s speech of yesterday on judicial nominations.
Finally, if you’re sick of the self-promotion, I’ll leaven it with a little self-criticism. In the Reason article, I spend a few paragraphs talking about the political aftermath of Katrina, and how the president pushed for, and got, vast new powers to use the military to keep order domestically in the wake of a natural disaster. Very few people noticed the provision when it was slipped into a defense authorization bill signed the same day as the Military Commissions Act, but the new exception to the Posse Comitatus Act was significant, and a great example of how presidents are driven to seek new powers when faced with a public that holds them responsible for acts of God. Yeah, well, very few people–including me–noticed it when Sen. Patrick Leahy helped get that provision repealed a few months back. I didn’t know that–since the changes were technically to the Insurrection Act, they didn’t come up in my Google News Alert for “Posse Comitatus”–and I wrote those paragraphs as if the law was still in force. So, sorry about that. Congress. It screws me even when it’s doing something good.
It’s a great piece otherwise, I swear, and a great issue that includes rats, drugs, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream
John Derbyshire, author of, among other things, a very fine novel on a Chinese emigre’s obsession with our most Taoist of presidents, reviews Cult of the Presidency today on NRO. He likes it, and quotes from it liberally. Riffing off the book’s discussion of sycophantic White House staffers, he writes:
I have not so far heard that White House functionaries walk backwards away from the Presidential Presence, as is done in the royal courts of Britain and Japan, or get down on their knees and knock their heads on the floor in a full formal kowtow, as was the rule in Imperial China, but surely such protocols cannot be many years away.
That republican manners have decayed to a level of servility that would have embarrassed Elagabalus, is bad enough. That modern conservatives have accepted, even helped enable the process, is very depressing indeed. The belief in existential danger is no excuse. Even if we are all going to be murdered by fanatical terrorists, which I don’t for a moment believe, let’s at least die like free citizens of a free republic.
Derbyshire also writes
The thing most painful to recall is that when George W. Bush was running for the presidency in 2000, many of us believed and hoped that he would be an inconsequential president in the style of those bewhiskered late 19th-century snoozers. Bush’s affable mediocrity seemed well suited to another long spell of peace and prosperity.
I know exactly what he means. Part of me thinks there’s an alternate universe somewhere where the Twin Towers are standing, and George W. Bush became the sort of president about whom you could say, as Mencken did of Coolidge “he had no ideas and was not a nuisance”–that is, a great president.
Expert Opinion
It’s a hell of a thing when you can’t even count on liberal media bias anymore. The back page of the Week in Review section of yesterday’s NYT features a symposium on “How to See This Mission Accomplished,” in which the Times asked nine experts to address problems going forward in Iraq. Since at least five of the nine were enthusiastic backers of the war — and three work for the American Enterprise Institute — this is something like asking the captain of the Exxon Valdez* for his considered judgment on how best to conduct the cleanup. Hey NYT: next time, why not consult someone who got it right?
* Ironically enough, the Valdez’s Wikipedia entry places one “Able Seaman Robert Kagan” at the helm during the crash. They’re everywhere.
Hosanna in the Highest
I’m back in DC in front of a computer again, and I see that George W. Bush recently returned to Greensburg, Kansas to speak at a high-school graduation, a year after he’d been there the first time. Greensburg, you may or may not recall, got pretty hard by a tornado a year ago. On his 2007 post-tornado visit(ation?), Bush declared:
I bring the prayers and concerns of the people of this country to this town of Greensburg, Kansas…. My mission is to — today, though, is to lift people’s spirits as best as I possibly can and to hopefully touch somebody’s soul by representing our country, and to let people know that while there was a dark day in the past, there’s brighter days ahead.
For years, I’ve been hearing conservatives say how “down to earth” the president is. But would a regular guy talk about himself as a prayer-bearing soul-toucher? Or maybe when they say “down to earth” they mean literally descended from on high?
The Fascinating Travelogue Continues
I really like Portland–it’s the perfect-sized city, the surroundings are beautiful, and so are a lot of the buildings. I’m staying in this super-cool hotel built in 1911 that has a “film classics” motif. Lana Turner is on my keycard. The light-rail is awesome since I didn’t have to pay for it (a guy I met last night called it something like “a multibillion dollar choo-choo for hipsters.”) But unless I’m walking all the wrong places, the city really seems to have a dearth of street-level retail. I don’t know what the explanation for that is. There are plenty of liberal cities with bustling commerce. But you go whole blocks downtown here where there’s nothing to buy. Gripped by man’s primal need for a New York Times, I walked for about 40 minutes this morning before I found a place that had it.
Tomorrow I hit the anti-Portland: Phoenix, for an event at the Goldwater Institute.
Portland
Just arrived in Portland. Had a pang of guilt while enjoying the ride in from the airport on the spiffy light-rail system. I’ll have to denounce myself at the next meeting of the Individualist Collective.
Also, I’ll be speaking tonight, for the America’s Future Foundation–at an Irish Pub. I’m so happy to type those words. But I’m not singing any Goddamned Unicorn song.
Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at an event sponsored by the good folks at the Cascade Policy Institute.
Misc.
Today I’m leaving a very fine conference put together by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, featuring a host of presidential scholars and, uh, me. Line of the day yesterday “I’m probably the only guy in the entire world who has a ‘Warren G. Harding’ Google News Alert,” and no, I didn’t say it. It’s supposed to be on C-Span, though I don’t know when.
An “author’s excerpt” from Cult is in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (scroll down).
Our Permanent Emergency
In the American Interest, John Mueller continues to talk sense about the age of terror:
[T]errorism and the attendant “war” thereon have become fully embedded in the public consciousness, with the effect that politicians and bureaucrats have become as wary of appearing soft on terrorism as they are about appearing soft on drugs, or as they once were about appearing soft on Communism.
Key to this dynamic is that the public apparently continues to remain unimpressed by several inconvenient facts. One such fact is that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks whatsoever in the United States since 2001. A second is that no true al-Qaeda cell (or scarcely anybody who might even be deemed to have a “connection” to the diabolical group) has been unearthed in this country. A third is that the homegrown “plotters” who have been apprehended, while perhaps potentially somewhat dangerous at least in a few cases, have mostly been either flaky or almost absurdly incompetent.
On that last point, see Monday’s Washington Post on the “Liberty City Seven” trial(s):
The Miami case revolved around a part-time contractor who gathered a loose band of men in a rented room in a downscale neighborhood known as Liberty City. The group, distantly affiliated with the Moorish Science Temple religion, talked about Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius and Buddha, and also practiced martial arts.
Its leader, Narseal Batiste, told his Yemenese grocer in October 2005 that he wanted to conduct jihad to overthrow the U.S. government. The grocer, an FBI informant who himself had a criminal record, told the bureau. The FBI then employed a second informant, this one an Arab from overseas who depicted himself as a representative of Osama bin Laden.
Batiste confided, somewhat fantastically, that he wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country.
Sounds like a plan!
It’s Chinatown, Jake
Incidentally, for anyone who happens to be in San Francisco tomorrow, I’m going to be speaking at a reception sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute, details here.
Man, this is a great city. Among other things, it has a real Chinatown, not like D.C.’s half-assed, two-block version with a Fuddruckers, a Ruby Tuesday’s, and a Hooters complete with a sign in Chinese characters (reading “Owl Restaurant,” apparently).
-
Search
Currently Consuming
