Archives for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Recent Media Mentions
In a review for the Orange County Register, J.H. Huebert says Cult is “one of the most important books of the year.”
Doug Bandow has a nice, comprehensive write-up of Cult at Antiwar.com.
Alexander Cockburn quotes from my Reason piece in “The Hope-Giver,” his column for the June 25 issue of the Nation.
George Will on Cult of the Presidency
From this week’s Newsweek:
[R]hetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year’s most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” by Gene Healy of Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute.
Wow.
“Man Is a Toad-Eating Animal”
In 1819, William Hazlitt, the great radical essayist, snarled that “Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.”
If you’re in the mood for some Hazlitt-style misanthropy, today’s Times has a fairly horrifying article about what campaign 2008 looks like, as seen from the rope line.
While campaign events are largely stage-crafted, the frenzied flesh-pressing that candidates engage in afterward offers something more raw and unpredictable. You see and hear things on rope lines. Get a whiff of things, too. (“I got to smell him, and it was awesome,” raved Kate Homrich, caught between Mr. Obama and a woman trying to hug him in Grand Rapids.)….
A lot can happen on a rope line, which make them both unnerving and unpredictable, and something of a culture unto themselves. Look at the faces — not of the candidates, but of the rope-liners themselves, with arms and fingers extended, their eyes bugged and sometimes tearful.
“Best experience of my life,” said Bonnie Owens, who got her fingers pinched by Mr. Obama after a rally in Louisville last week.
“I couldn’t believe she picked me out of a crowd,” said Jeff Justice after a rope-line encounter with Mrs. Clinton after a rally in Charleston, W.Va. Mrs. Clinton probably picked him out because he fainted in front of her. He was back on his feet after she gave him a bottle of water and, more important, she signed a photograph for him.
This sort of thing is embarrassing enough when it involves sweatsuit-clad Americans waiting outside the NBC studios, praying for a glimpse of Matt Lauer. When it involves people who aspire to power, it’s far, far worse.
Hazlitt had a lot to say about humanity’s need to anoint and venerate a leader. From my book (buy it, damn you):
In his essay “On the Spirit of Monarchy,” Hazlitt noted that, as savages, we fashioned “Gods of wood and stone and brass,” but now, thinking ourselves above superstition, “we make kings of common men, and are proud of our own handiwork.” As Hazlitt saw it, behind that impulse lies a craven desire to dominate others, even if only vicariously: “each individual would (were it in his power) be a king, a God: but as he cannot, the next best thing is to see this reflex image of his self-love, the darling passion of his breast, realized, embodied out of himself in the first object he can lay his hands on for the purpose.”
But Hazlitt wasn’t immune from the original sin he criticized. As if illustrating his own warnings about man’s tendency toward hero-worship, Hazlitt penned a hagiographic “Life of Napoleon Buonaparte” that took “a sentimental view of Caesarism.” None of us are immune. Liberty requires upon rising above the weakness of the Flesh, resisting our temptation to worship Power, fighting it with a political culture that contains healthy doses of scorn and irreverence.
“Bonnie Owens,” “Jeff Justice,” and the like would no doubt resent that perspective, but as Hazlitt wrote in one of his better moments:
“Would it not be hard upon a little girl, who is busy in dressing up a favorite doll, to pull it in pieces before her face in order to show her the bits of wood, the wool, and rags it is composed of? So it would be hard upon that great baby, the world, to take any of its idols to pieces, and show that they are nothing but painted wood. Neither of them would thank you, but consider the offer as in insult.”
Nobody likes a cynic. But civilization depends on cynicism.
Therapist-in-Chief
My college friend Jerry Russello, author of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, has an interview with me running on the website of the Kirk Center’s University Bookman.
I write a little bit about Kirk in the section of the book labeled “How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imperial Presidency.” Kirk, to his credit, was never really able to stop worrying. Search his name on the Heritage Foundation website and you’ll find some stuff that would get Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh to cry treason. Here’s Kirk in the wake of Gulf War I:
it would be ruinous for the Republicans to convert themselves into a party of high deeds in distant lands and higher taxes on the home front. Such a New World Order, like the Pax Romana, might create a wilderness and call it peace; at best, it would reduce the chocolate ration from thirty grams to twenty. And in the fullness of time, the angry peoples of the world would pull down the American Empire, despite its military ingenuity and its protestations of kindness and gentleness — even as the Soviet Empire is being pulled down today, thanks be to God.
I like this one, too (and quote it in the book):
The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. in every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good–so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.
Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web-of restraints upon will and appetite–these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order.
Man, remember conservatives? They used to believe stuff like that. Some of them still do, but they’re few and far between. Today Heritage’s Russell Kirk lecture goes to the likes of John Yoo. Seriously.
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.
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.
“A Cause Greater”
John McCain courted controversy recently with a new campaign slogan that some saw as a thinly veiled attack on Barack Obama’s eclectic background and upbringing. I don’t know if that interpretation is right, but McCain’s new tagline sounds like something out of Team America or Steven Colbert: “The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For” (And So Can You!).
Less ridiculous, and perhaps more unsettling, are McCain’s repeated appeals to “a cause greater than self-interest,” and his attacks on “cynicism,” which, as a determined cynic, I take very personally.
In his speeches, McCain periodically sneers at American opulence and suggests that leaving Americans alone to pursue their own visions of happiness is a narrow and ignoble goal for government. As I point out in my new book (buy it, for the love of God!) that’s a common sentiment among the American intelligentsia, and one that’s been used repeatedly to concentrate power in the executive branch:
Like intellectuals the world over, many American pundits and scholars, right and left, view bourgeois contentment with disdain. Normal people appear to like “normalcy,” Warren Harding’s term for peace and prosperity, just fine. But all too many professional thinkers look out upon 300 million people living their lives by their own design and see something impermissibly hollow in the spectacle.
McCain’s campaign speeches reflect that theme. Here he is in a recent speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, telling his audience that if you “sacrifice for a cause greater than yourself, [you'll] invest your life with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.” Here he is on his campaign webpage, insisting that “each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our own self-interest.”
I’m not a Randian, so I’m not inclined to condemn this stuff as whim-worshipping altruism. In the abstract, I agree with the statement that when you turn away from your own self-interest, narrowly construed, and adopt a higher purpose than your own pleasure (which purpose need not, and ought not, have anything to do with service to the state), “your self-respect [will be] assured.” But why is any of this McCain’s business? The president is supposed to be a limited constitutional officer, not a national life coach-cum-self-help guru.
Making the case for “a cause greater” in the Naval Academy speech, McCain declared that
when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee.
Oh my, not “designer coffee”! The reflexive contempt for peace and prosperity McCain displays here is the essence of National Greatness Conservatism, and, as Matt Welch has pointed out in Myth of a Maverick, his devastating critique of the Arizona senator, John McCain is to National Greatness Conservatism as Barry Goldwater was to conservatism proper: the electoral standard bearer for the philosophy.
In his book, Welch quotes a May 1999 commencement address McCain gave at Johns Hopkins University, warning that America was threatened by a “pervasive public cynicism” toward government “as dangerous in its way as war and depression have been in the past.” In the same speech McCain mused, “With every new Dow Jones record, something gnaws at my conscience that we should not be lulled into unfeeling contentment.” (There’s a bright side to our current economic woes I guess: McCain’s conscience is spared that old gnawing feeling.)
McCain’s sometime ideological guru and op-ed page cheerleader, David Brooks, expresses similar themes in his writings. Even in Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s foray into “comic sociology,” he warns darkly of “the temptations that accompany affluence.” “The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.” (As a young man, Brooks served abroad with the Wall Street Journal Europe.)
Designer coffee, oversized kitchens, Belgian beer, and iPods–you might embrace such things because they make life more pleasant, but as Brooks and McCain point out, that’s precisely the problem. These products of prosperity are the lures that plague us, the temptations that make us soft and weak, that keep us from true National Greatness.
What can we Bobos do to make ourselves tougher, to save ourselves from the wonderful distractions capitalism continually creates? John McCain provided an answer in a little-noticed article in the Washington Monthly, written shortly after 9/11. In it, McCain called for a quasi-militarized domestic national service corps as a way to address a “spiritual crisis in our national culture.” What Senator McCain envisioned was, well, rather creepy–a sort of jackbooted Politics of Meaning.
McCain praised City Year, an AmeriCorps initiative operating in 13 cities: “City Year members wear uniforms, work in teams, learn public speaking skills, and gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall.” He also endorsed the National Civilian Community Corps, “a service program consciously structured along military lines,” in which enrollees “not only wear uniforms and work in teams… but actually live together in barracks on former military bases.” McCain calls for expanding these two initiatives and “spread[ing] their group-cohesion techniques to other AmeriCorps programs.”
“Group cohesion” and calisthenics in front of city hall reflect a version of patriotism, to be sure, albeit one that seems more North Korean than American. But all in all, the article provides further evidence of Welch’s claim that McCain has an essentially “militaristic conception of citizenship.”
Some have compared McCain to JFK, and there’s something to that comparison. But Milton Friedman said everything that needs to be said about the notion that service to the state ought to be the lodestar of presidential politics. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman wrote that neither half of JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” “expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.” As Friedman put it:
To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
All of which gives us another reason to admire Milton Friedman: before National Greatness Conservatism was invented, Friedman was against it.
Trumpet of Idiocracy
Now here’s a book I’m looking forward to (and may review): The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush by Elvin T. Lim.
The title might suggest an anti-Bush screed, but having read some of Lim’s work on presidential rhetoric, I have no doubt it’s sober and scholarly. Though it’s probably dryly amusing as well, as suggested by this article, which touches on some of themes in the new book. In the article, Lim writes:
Thus, whereas William Henry Harrison likened liberty to “the sovereign balm for every injury which our institutions may receive” in his inaugural address, George Bush simply likened it to a kite: “Freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze,” he proclaimed.
Here’s a description of the new book:
How is it that contemporary presidents talk so much and yet say so little, as H. L. Mencken once described, like “dogs barking idiotically through endless nights?” In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin Lim tackles this puzzle and argues forcefully that it is because we have been too preoccupied in our search for a “Great Communicator,” and have failed to take presidents to task for what they communicate to us.
To alert us to the gradual rot of presidential rhetoric, Lim examines two centuries of presidential speeches to demonstrate the relentless and ever-increasing simplification of presidential rhetoric. If these trends persist, Lim projects that the State of the Union addresses in the next century could actually read at the fifth-grade level. Through a series of interviews with former presidential speechwriters, he shows that the anti-intellectual stance was a deliberate choice rather than a reflection of presidents’ intellectual limitations. Only the smart, he suggests, know how to “dumb down.”
Because anti-intellectual rhetoric impedes, rather than facilitates communication and deliberation, Lim warns that we must do something to recondition a political culture so easily seduced by smooth-operating anti-intellectual presidents. Sharply written and incisively argued, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency sheds new light on the murky depths of presidential utterances and its consequences for American democracy.
Of course, Mencken also said:
As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
You Had Me at “Live Lobsters”
So my dad, who, like me, is a fan of pulpy noir detective novels and shows, sends me an email telling me to set my Tivo for this. I click the link and read:
In the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, corrupt cop Brendan McCabe is being drowned in a tank of live lobsters.
That is perhaps the best sentence I’ve ever read.
“Rods from God”
A few months back, Thomas Sowell speculated wistfully about the possibility of a military coup. His latest column suggests brightening up those live TV car chases by having snipers in police helicopters whack the driver [h/t SN!]
When there is a police helicopter overhead, a shot straight down would have little chance of hitting some innocent bystander. Maybe the speeder is just someone out joy-riding but that does not make a reckless driver any less dangerous.
Moreover, this would not have to happen more than a few times before leading the police on a high-speed chase would lose a lot of its attractions — and some of those hundreds of innocent lives lost every year as a result of high-speed chases could be saved.
Now, maybe you read this and thought, how sad. This is the guy who wrote A Conflict of Visions and Knowledge and Decisions and other great books. But that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, this would be even crazier and more entertaining if he’d said we should take care of this problem with TUNGSTEN RODS dropped from OUTER SPACE!
Which in turn reminded me of possibly the funniest Trekcentralstation article of all time. And perhaps the funniest blogpost ever:
Jon Kyl [Mona Charen]
Sen. Jon Kyl is giving a speech right now at Heritage and it’s on C-SPAN radio. He’s discussing space weapons. Draft Kyl for President?
01/29 12:28 PM
Hey, why not, at this point?
Reading Is Hard
Back in the day, a credulous reporter bought JFK’s assertion that he read 1200 words a minute, and apparently no one else questioned the young prince’s supergenius powers. Sure, why not? And then in his spare time, like Mao, he went out to instruct the nation’s surgeons on better technique.
I was reminded of that story when I read Slate’s excerpt from Robert Draper’s new book on GWB. In a late 2006 interview, the president brags that so far he’d read 87 books that year.
Is there any American with an IQ above room temperature who actually believes that? I am a fast reader. I’ve only gotten faster since law school. I like to read more than is good for me. When I come across that old bon mot that “some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” I inwardly giggle nervously. And I’m reasonably sure that most years I have more uninterrupted reading time than the president of the United States. But I don’t think I’ve ever read 87 books a year, even when I was doing mostly fiction.
It’s odd when you think about it, that it was Al Gore who got in trouble for all the little innocent “I rule” sort of white lies.
My Avatar Is So Rude
I just checked my long-half-dead hotmail account. I guess somehow a few years ago in a moment of weakness I signed up for a Linkedin account, which is free, and which, as I understand it, is for people who want to “network” in a professional sense, instead of post risque pictures of themselves online and announce that “Kirsten is feeling chartreuse today,” or meet for some virtual toetapping in that Great Airport Bathroom of the Cybersphere or whatever it is that you goddamned kids do. In any event, if I haven’t responded to your Linkedin invitation, it wasn’t because I think your pixels smell or because I thought you were too puny to help me achieve my dreams of Real Ultimate Power. It was because I don’t check my hotmail and the whole Linkedin thing was a mistake.
Craig Cop, Cont.
An offhand line by Yglesias makes me think of the French Connection (Maybe it’s supposed to). Dave Karsina as Popeye Doyle: “Do you tap your feet in Minneapolis? Hey! Do you tap your feet in Minneapolis?? You did, didn’t you? You sat in that stall and you tapped your feet in Minneapolis!”
This Is Not My Beautiful Life
It may be the last vestiges of my former identity as a Republican sympathizer, but I feel very sorry for Larry Craig. Of whatever nightmares he harbored about exposure of his double life, this has to be the worst, and he and his family are living it.
I don’t feel sorry for the cop exactly. He’s engaged in a practice I find about as noble as scoping out New York City bars to see if anybody’s left out an ashtray in violation of the Bloomberg Codes. Can you really feel good about yourself after a day spent arresting and humiliating people who represent less of a threat to the social order than the squeegee guy? (Maybe this is the broken-window theory of policing.)
I don’t want to see or hear anybody having sex in an airport bathroom, but police procedure in this case is pretty aggressively preemptive. When I have to visit an airport bathroom, I’m generally more worried that there will be enough urine on the floor to make my shoes stick than I am that somebody may hit on me, let alone in a code I was unaware of until last week. Rather than spend tax dollars on this, can they get an extra guy to push a mop?
Be that as it may, there is a certain pathos to arresting officer Dave Karsina’s situation as well. On both ends of this arrest, this is a story about the many disappointments life may have in store for you. From the police report:
at about 1200 hours, I was working a plain-clothes detail involving lewd conduct in the main men’s public restroom of the Norhtstar Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal.
That is just about the worst job I could imagine, and I’ve spent time as a big firm lawyer. Most of us do all we can to avoid spending more than a couple of minutes in an airport bathroom standing up, to say nothing of sitting there all day, busting foot-tappers. What exactly did Karsina do to convince his superiors to foist the shit detail on him? Even Serpico wasn’t punished like this.
I’m reminded of Dana Priest’s groundbreaking story on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which reveals that:
Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip.
Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution had some fun with the story when it first came out, in a post called “The Part They Don’t Tell You about James Bond.”
And you do wonder: did the guy who made his career in the Agency, who worked his way up to a prestigious covert action spot–did he have other dreams? Was his head filled with John Le Carre and Ian Fleming as he made the sacrifices necessary to get that job? All to end up in a Ninja suit carrying a warm rubber bag. “When I heard about wet work, I didn’t picture this, goddamnit.”
And what inspired Dave Karsina to join the force as a young man? Did he do it to Serve and Protect, and occasionally administer rough justice to a perp who had it coming? Was he inspired by countless cop shows and movies where the grizzled lead guy is ornery, unorthodox, and yes, sometimes brutal–though goodhearted and loyal under it all–and gets called out on the carpet by the pencil pushers who run the precinct? Did the theme from “Hill Street Blues” echo through Karsina’s head as he sat there in the main restroom of the “Northstar Crossing” at Lindbergh Terminal in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, listening to other people crap? Or was there instead a silent scream: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”?
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