The Imperial President . . . . . . and His Discontents

Transcription

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July 9, 2012
FO
O ST
N
E
B R
S
$4.99
LOU CANNON on Rodney King
The Imperial
President . . .
. . . and His
Discontents
John Yoo
Andrew C. McCarthy
Jonah Goldberg
Kevin D. Williamson
$4.99
0
74820 08155
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6
www.nationalreview.com
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Contents
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
ON THE COVER
|
V O L U M E L X I V, N O . 1 3
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 15
The Immigration Proclamation
Lou Cannon on Rodney King
With his recent change of immigration
p. 22
policy, President Obama once again has
brushed aside the founding principles
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
that hold our Constitution together. His move
has pushed executive power beyond all
38
constitutional limits—even in the view of this
writer, an academic defender of a vigorous
presidency. John Yoo
40
ARTICLES
by John Yoo
President Obama may not ignore laws he dislikes.
17 LEAKER-IN-CHIEF
43
by Andrew C. McCarthy
by Jonah Goldberg
44
Why Mitt Romney should run against our 43rd president.
21 REFORMED SWINGER
by Kevin D. Williamson
46
by Lou Cannon
Three myths about the beating that changed the world.
25 STEPPING IN IT
THE STRUGGLES OF ANNA
Florence King reviews Lots of
Candles, Plenty of Cake:
A Memoir, by Anna Quindlen.
Pennsylvania is a Democratic state, but Romney could win it.
22 RODNEY KING REMEMBERED
STILL GUILTY
Kevin D. Williamson reviews Alger
Hiss: Why He Chose Treason,
by Christina Shelton.
Voters should hold the administration accountable for its dangerous disclosures.
20 THE BUSH-OBAMA YEARS
AMERICA’S ILIAD
Tracy Lee Simmons reviews
Fateful Lightning: A New
History of the Civil War
and Reconstruction,
by Allen C. Guelzo.
COVER: ROMAN GENN
15 THE IMMIGRATION PROCLAMATION
THE 51ST STAR
Jay Nordlinger reviews Political
Woman: The Big Little Life of
Jeane Kirkpatrick, by Peter Collier.
FILM: HOSTILE CREATORS
Ross Douthat reviews Prometheus.
47
by Daniel Foster
Does technology make a post-bulls**t world possible—or desirable?
CITY DESK:
TO THE SCAFFOLD!
Richard Brookhiser considers the
sidewalk shed.
FEATURES
28 SEX AND THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST
by Ramesh Ponnuru
SECTIONS
Will the Left debate marriage honestly?
30 QUESTIONS ON TAIWAN
by Jay Nordlinger
The wonderfulness and anxiety of a little-known country.
33 MONSTROSITY BY THE MALL
by Catesby Leigh
Washington, D.C., deserves a better Eisenhower memorial.
2
4
36
37
42
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
Poetry . . . . . . . Daniel Mark Epstein
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
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letters--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/20/2012 2:10 PM Page 2
Letters
Questionable Questions
JULY 9 ISSUE; PRINTED JUNE 21
I was surprised to notice that, in the June 11 issue of NR, The Week touted the
EDITOR
necessity of the American Community Survey. This survey is unconstitutional.
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Political Reporter Robert Costa
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
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Executive Secretary Frances Bronson
Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace
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Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg
Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin
Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi
Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne
David B. Rivkin Jr. / Reihan Salam
Yes, according to the federal courts, the Census Bureau may ask questions on
its decennial survey that go beyond a mere enumeration of the individuals in the
United States, as long as those questions asked are necessary and proper for the
performance of the government’s obligations. But the American Community
Survey is distinct and separate from the decennial census that the Constitution
authorizes. First, the American Community Survey is taken every year, while
the law requires the U.S. Census to be taken every ten years. And second, the
ACS is barred from being used for reapportionment, which is the purpose of the
U.S. Census as outlined in the Constitution.
Failure to respond to this survey can result in serious fines. NR should not
have endorsed this unconstitutional imposition on citizens’ privacy.
Philip L. Cochran IV
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Trouble in Tomorrowland
Charles C. W. Cooke seems to have stumbled over an incident having to do with a famous writer.
In “Back to Tomorrowland” (May 28),
Mr. Cooke recounts the story of an
“unfortunate employee” who was
fired on his first day at Dis ney when he was overheard
joking about making a pornographic animated film. That “unfortunate employee” was none other than the much-awarded
Harlan Ellison, a writer a good number of
your readers and staff should be familiar with.
He has written across many genres, including science
fiction, fantasy, mystery, and nonfiction. He has also written for the movies,
television, and comics. Mr. Ellison told the story of his firing in Stalking the
Nightmare.
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The Week
n Not that those work permits are going to be of much use . . .
See page 14.
n During a press conference, President Obama said that the
private sector was “doing fine.” Republicans hooted, and
Democrats claimed the words were taken out of context.
Obama was expressing his theory of the economy perfectly
clearly: The main drag on the economy is cutbacks in state and
local government. In a speech in Cleveland, he elaborated on
his views. Governor Romney, he said, wants to slash regulations, cut taxes on the wealthy, and “strip down government to
national security and a few other basic functions.” This platform, he argued, amounts to repeating the policies of the
George W. Bush administration: policies that led to wage stagnation and then an economic crisis. Now of course Romney
will not, and Bush certainly did not, try to create a nightwatchman state. No sane person believes that Bush’s tax cuts
caused the financial crisis, although Obama skillfully seeks
to foster that impression. The vast majority of job losses have
come from the private sector. Obama’s argument, it should be
immediately clear to anyone paying attention, is equal parts
caricature, non sequitur, and spin. Lucky for him a lot of people are not paying attention; even luckier for him how many of
them are journalists.
ROMAN GENN
n Obama has through executive fiat enacted a law rejected by
Congress: the DREAM Act, which would confer legal status
on certain illegal immigrants and provide them with work permits. As policy, this is unwise; as process, it is unconstitutional. The president does not have the power to create an amnesty
program under his own authority: Congress writes the laws,
and the president enforces them. We have the president’s own
word on that, of course: A year ago he told the Spanishlanguage TV network Univision that he did not have the power
to act on his own in such matters, and “that for me to simply
through executive order ignore those congressional mandates
would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” He
knew better then. He knows better now. Congress was right to
reject amnesty earlier, but even those in Congress who support
the underlying policy should not let this arrogation of power
stand.
n Mitt Romney responded to President Obama’s lawless suspension of immigration laws by lamely complaining that it had
blocked a long-term legislative solution. He is speaking softly
because his team wants to court Hispanics and accepts the
view that the way to do that is to moderate on immigration. It’s
a reductive way of looking at Hispanics, and treats them as
an interest group rather than fellow citizens. It’s also shortsighted, since those Hispanics who think of themselves as part
of an ethnic interest group are the ones least likely to vote
Republican. We think the best policy is to reduce the illegalimmigrant population through enforcement at the border and
4
|
the workplace, and only after security is established to tackle
the question of what to do about those illegal immigrants still
here. The policy question is, however, somewhat beside the
point right now. What Romney should have said—should still
say—is that the president has a constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws, that this president has abandoned his post,
and that the next president won’t.
n Jeb Bush appeared to suggest that today’s Republican party
would not nominate Ronald Reagan—a claim previously made
most prominently by Barack Obama—and praised his father’s
tax-hiking budget deal of 1990. A few days earlier he had
urged Republicans to stop pledging to oppose all tax increases,
reasoning that this pledge would block even a budget deal that
included ten dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of new
taxes. For Republicans to take Bush’s advice on taxes would
be to adopt a strange negotiating strategy. The time to think
through a response to a budget deal with 10:1 spending cuts for
tax increases is when such a deal is actually on the table: which
is not now, and not any time in the foreseeable future. Bush’s
line about Reagan is perverse, treating Reagan’s success in
pulling the Republican party rightward as a repudiation of him.
And just a few weeks ago the party gave its presidential nomination to a man whose record is less conservative than . . . that
of Jeb Bush, come to think of it. It is Bush’s impressive record
that will keep conservatives thinking highly of him even as we
disagree with his recent remarks.
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THE WEEK
n Whoever is leaking about President Obama’s nationalsecurity programs should be tapped to write the president’s
authorized biography. When reports appeared in the press about
secret programs during the Bush administration, they usually
had a disapproving tone. The sources were identified as discontented insiders. If the Obama leakers are discontented, it is only
because they want the president to get more political credit for
what they consider his tough-minded effectiveness. Bipartisan
outrage at the revelation of so much classified information
forced Eric Holder to ask U.S. attorneys serving under him to
hunt down the leakers. Good luck. Republicans including Mitt
Romney are calling for a special prosecutor. They don’t trust
Holder’s picks. They also know that the best way to cut a
swath of destruction through an administration is to subject it to
the tender mercies of a special prosecutor. As Andy McCarthy
argues elsewhere in this issue, such prosecutors—accountable
to no one and standing outside the executive branch—are an
offense against the constitutional order. In the end, there is
only one condign punishment for the president’s destructively
boastful team: to chase the lot of them out of Washington in
November.
n Attorney General Eric Holder is facing new calls for his
resignation, along with a House vote to hold him in contempt of
Congress, for failing to turn over documents that could assist an
investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. That’s the program
in which agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives deliberately allowed drug cartels to traffic more
than 1,000 guns into Mexico, and made no attempt to track the
weapons as they changed hands. Two of the guns from Fast and
Furious were later found at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s
murder. For a brief while, Holder negotiated with Representative Darrell Issa, who is leading the investigation, to avoid
contempt charges. Then President Obama invoked executive
privilege to shield the documents. Operation Drag Out and
Dissemble continues.
n Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), speaking
at the American Enterprise Institute, stood up for political participation and against the Obama administration’s attempts to
silence its critics with tactics the senator rightly described as
Nixonian. “The campaign has rifled through one donor’s
divorce records,” he said in a pre-speech interview. “They’ve
got the IRS, the SEC, and other agencies going after contributors, trying to frighten people and intimidate them out of exercising their rights to participate in the American political
discourse.” Obama strategist David Axelrod recently echoed
Nancy Pelosi’s call for undercutting First Amendment pro tections for political speech. The Democrats are particularly
exercised by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave gen erously to Newt Gingrich’s campaign and who promises to
fund nonprofit groups critical of the president and his agenda,
and by Charles and David Koch, the libertarian philanthropists
who have supported worthy projects ranging from the Cato
Institute to FreedomWorks. Senator McConnell specifically
defended the Koch brothers, and Adelson deserves praise for
his commitment to public affairs as well. A republic needs
active citizens—and politicians are looking to silence some
of them when they speak balefully of the influence of “big
money.”
6
-
|
n When the conference of Catholic bishops opposed Obamacare
because it would provide taxpayer funding for abortions, the
Catholic Health Association (CHA) enthusiastically endorsed the
law. CHA, which tends to prioritize “social justice” over spiritual orthodoxy, also reacted warmly to the president’s proposed
accommodation (really an accounting trick) on Obamacare’s
contraception and abortifacient mandate. But all CHA offered
was encouraging statements; it never accepted the “accommodation,” and has now officially rejected the proposal as “unduly
cumbersome” and “unlikely to adequately meet the religious
liberty concerns” of its members. With this, even the most liberal of formal Catholic institutions has denounced the mandate.
Of all President Obama’s accomplishments, bringing Catholics
together across the political divide has to be the unlikeliest.
n It’s no longer cool to call
Obama cool, says Angela Rye,
executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus: “The
term cool could in some ways
be deemed racial.” She cited
as evidence the new American
Crossroads ad, “Cool,” which
juxtaposes Obama’s celebrity
status with his administrative
incompetence. Rye, of course,
did not mention that the Obama
team has spent the last four
years cultivating exactly this
“cool” image—whether in the
Angela Rye
pages of Ebony, where Obama
was hailed as one of the “25 Coolest Brothers of All Time,” or in
the mansions of Hollywood stars such as George Clooney and
Sarah Jessica Parker. Earlier this month, the first lady called
Obama “a pretty cool dad.” Do not judge Mrs. Obama too harshly: These code words can be awfully tricky.
n Sometimes the mask slips, or falls thuddingly to the ground—
and we are better off for it. In the first week of June, Les Moonves, the head of CBS News, attended a fundraiser for Barack
Obama in Beverly Hills. He said that “ultimately journalism has
changed” and that “partisanship is very much a part of journalism
now.” The rest of the mainstream media shares Moonves’s politics, just not his candor.
n To poetically inclined members of the Occupy movement,
T. S. Eliot’s 1925 prediction that the world would end “not with
a bang but a whimper” must seem apposite. After all of the
rhetoric and the repeated promise of a spring return, the vanguard
of the revolution has hit the north side of the karmic cycle.
Declaring its own movement dead, the Canadian anti-capitalist
group Adbusters addressed an open letter to the “wild cats, dogooders and steadfast rebels out there,” in which it labeled
Occupy a counterrevolutionary force, “seduced by salaries,
comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash, and minor celebrity status”: “There has been a [sic] unfortunate consolidation of power
in #OWS.” Adbusters hopes that “the next big bang to capture the
world’s imagination could come not from a thousand encampments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams.” This could
be the stuff of parody, but it’s legit, and it points to a deeper truth:
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THE WEEK
The movement is not yet ready to face the fact that the American
public is not interested in what it has to sell.
n The federal government’s quota on imported sugar raises
prices for consumers—Americans pay nearly twice the global
price—for the benefit of well-connected producers. The Senate
narrowly rejected a bill to end the quota, with 16 Democrats voting for it and 16 Republicans against. Senator Marco Rubio, disappointingly, was one of the Republicans against. Forced to
decide between old-style Florida politics and the values of the
Tea Party, he made the wrong choice.
n Almost every Congress passes a “miscellaneous tariff bill” to
suspend duties on products that U.S. companies use when there
is no American maker of those products and the duties raise little
revenue. Senator Jim DeMint has objected to this practice not
because he is a fan of tariffs but because it reminds him of
earmarks: The direct benefits of lifting the tariffs go to specific
companies. Some business groups have been concerned about
DeMint’s stance. Senate Republican leaders have found an ingenious solution: Instruct the International Trade Commission to
review its tariffs to find ones that meet the criteria for suspension—no domestic maker, not much revenue—and recommend
The Storm Approaches
W
8
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Take Japan. The Japanese government needs to permanently increase revenues or reduce spending by 10.5
percent of GDP in order to put its finances on a glide path
to the target debt-to-GDP ratio. The authors’ assumption
that the Japanese government will implement policies to
contain spending on health care and pensions is particularly relevant, given Japan’s graying population.
Some European countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland, have already taken steps to curb their deficits and
have little or no work to do. Others, such as those in
southern Europe, do not expect dramatic increases in
entitlement spending, so their long-run picture is not as
bleak as might be expected.
Consider, finally, the United States. It is in a different
situation from that of the Europeans, but not in the way
we would hope for. Our fiscal gap is the third highest, following Japan’s and New Zealand’s. As bad as things are
in Europe, the chart suggests that there is no European
nation in worse shape than the United States over the
long run. Not Spain. Not Italy. Not Greece. The crisis looks
set on crossing the Atlantic after all.
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Fiscal Gaps
Required change in government finances to reduce debt
to 75 percent of GDP by 2050
12
10
Percent of GDP
Greece in turmoil, Spain not much better off,
and the rest of Europe on edge, the U.S. has
been sitting on the periphery of a major European
crisis in a manner that is reminiscent of the period preceding World War II. As then, many Americans seem convinced that European troubles will never spread across
the Atlantic Ocean.
At its core, the crisis is one of investor confidence, and
it comes in response to sober analysis of the finances of
southern-European countries. Their deficits are large;
their future looks bleak because so many of them have
enacted entitlement programs that grow without bound,
and because the recent financial crisis put overwhelming
strains on their near-term budgets.
As economists struggle over the design of reforms to
restore stability to international financial markets, their
starting point is to define the problem. While there can be
much debate about how to achieve balanced budgets,
the question of how much balancing is needed—and in
which countries—is a matter of arithmetic.
A recent series of papers from the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) explores the relevant calculations. One study, by economists Rossana Merola and Douglas Sutherland, focuses
on long-term projections for OECD member countries.
The authors calculate fiscal gaps—the immediate and
permanent changes in the governments’ financial position that are required to ensure that debt meets a specific
target by a certain time. When assessing how much “fiscal consolidation” is needed, the authors estimate the
potential effects of threats to smooth budgetary reform,
such as unexpected shocks or rapidly aging populations.
The nearby chart presents one of their scenarios,
which takes into account an increase in spending on
health-care programs and pensions but assumes that
certain policies will be in place to control for these quickly rising expenditures. The chart shows the change required to stabilize debt at 75 percent of GDP in 26 OECD
countries by 2050. Whether this target is high or low, it
unquestionably represents a circumstance far superior to
the current trajectory.
ITH
8
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lia ia m da lic rk nd ce ny ce ry nd ly an ea rg ds nd nd al lic in en nd m es
ra tr iu a b a la n a e ga la Ita Jap Kor bou lan ala ola rtug pub Spa ed rla gdo tat
st Aus elg Can epu enm Fin Fra erm Gre un Ire
m er Ze P Po Re
Sw itze Kin ed S
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SOURCE: MEROLA, R. AND D. SUTHERLAND (2012), “FISCAL CONSOLIDATION:
PART 3. LONG-RUN PROJECTIONS AND FISCAL GAP CALCULATIONS,” OECD
ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT WORKING PAPERS, NO. 934, OECD PUBLISHING
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THE WEEK
that Congress suspend all of them. Abolishing those tariffs would
be better than suspending them, but the bill is a good idea, and it
has DeMint’s blessing.
n An Obama campaign ad claims that the president’s policies
have resulted in the creation of 2.7 million green jobs. What
exactly is a “green job”? At a recent congressional hearing,
Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) got Labor Department
officials to admit that the term includes, among other occupations, bus drivers, science teachers, bike-shop employees, and
even, believe it or not, sellers of antiques and used clothes (it’s
recycling!). This means the tally should be increased by two,
since Obama created jobs for himself and Joe Biden by recycling worn-out economic theories. Unfortunately for them, just
as was true with Solyndra and many similar fiascos, lavish
expenditures of government cash may not be able to stave off the
pink slips.
n James Lovelock is in bad odor with the environmentalist
movement, and the smell is wonderful. The 92-year-old
British scientist is the inventor of the Gaia theory and widely regarded as the father of modern environmentalism. He
has long been a proponent of nuclear power. And he calls
wind turbines “ugly and useless.” He has now made some
interesting comments to the Guardian. “It’s just the way the
humans are that if there’s a cause of some
sort, a religion starts forming around it. It
just so happens that the green religion
is now taking over from the Christian
religion. I don’t think people have
noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of
terms that religions use. The greens use
guilt. You can’t win people round by
saying they are guilty for putting
CO2 in the air.” Lovelock is
discovering another similarity: the condemnation of heretics.
n Charles Barron, an aging black radical and demagogue, is on
the verge of winning the Democratic primary for New York’s
8th congressional district. The retiring incumbent, Ed Towns,
has endorsed him, and so have several of New York’s most
powerful unions. If he wins the primary, it is almost certain he
will win the general election in this safe Democratic district.
Barron has a long history of hateful rhetoric: He has compared
Israel to Nazi Germany, derided Jews in his own community,
and supported Moammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe. Some
local Jewish Democrats have condemned him, but the Dem ocratic party’s leadership has remained silent. Prominent
Republicans and the national GOP worked, with some success,
to stop the rise of racist David Duke. Is it too much to ask
Democrats to do the same with their own bigots?
n Representative Bob Turner (R., N.Y.) introduced legislation in
June to rename the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center
in Queens after former New York senator James Buckley. It
would be a fitting tribute: Buckley co-sponsored the bill in 1972
10
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that created the wildlife refuge and the entire 26,000-acre preserve it belongs to. Though Buckley is usually thought of as a
stalwart political conservative, he was also what he termed a
“conservative conservationist,” with a particular love for nature
and bird-watching. In a 1979 speech, he defended his view of
environmentalism by citing Edmund Burke’s admonition that we
are but “temporary possessors and life-renters.” We join his six
children in thinking a James L. Buckley Visitor Center would be
a “wonderful and appropriate honor.”
n The fight for supremacy between the Egyptian army and
the Muslim Brothers will decide much else in the Middle
East. They are the only organized forces in the country. The
former is secular, the latter religious; and they are equal in the
black arts of mobilizing power. The Muslim Brothers and
their ideological allies won a majority in parliamentary elections. A special parliamentary committee looked about to
draft a new Islamist constitution, and this would have broken
forever the army’s grip. The first response of the generals on
the military council was to try to railroad into office a president with powers superior to those of parliament. Having
contrived reasons why popular Muslim Brother candidates
could not run for election, they arranged what was supposed
to be a foregone contest for the presidency between Muhammad Mursi, a rather colorless Islamist, and Ahmed Shafiq,
one of their own. Just to be on the safe side, the military
council has detected small illegalities and used them as a pretext for closing parliament altogether and threatening to
arrest anyone who tries to enter its building. Should their man
Shafiq emerge as president, he will have reserved executive
and legislative powers enabling him to draft a constitution
favorable to the military. Should the Muslim Brothers’ candidate Mursi, on the contrary, prove the winner, more craft
and even stronger measures are bound to follow, up to and
including civil war. One thing is certain: What has been celebrated as the Arab Spring turns out to be a classic exhibition
of Third World power politics.
n The Obama administration is working its way through various iterations of wishfulness on Syria. First, there was the
Annan Plan, the handiwork of former U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, who had supposedly gotten Bashar Assad’s
assent to a cease-fire. U.N. observers were last seen fleeing
Syria because of the violence. Then there was the Yemeni Solution, premised on getting Russian support to ease Assad out
of power but leave the governing structure intact, as occurred
when President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in Yemen.
Except the Russians are sending helicopters to Syria and show
no interest in tossing Assad overboard—if that’s even in their
power. Granted, there are no good, easy options in Syria. If
Assad is overthrown, Sunni hard-liners may take power, and
the country’s Christians have reason to fear their fate. Yet it
is hard to see how anyone could be worse than Assad, in terms
of both our interests and humanitarian considerations. He is
part of a hostile Iran-Hezbollah-Russia axis, and has embarked on a murderous bout of repression that is on the verge
of becoming a full-blown campaign of ethnic cleansing (he is
an Alawite governing a Sunni country). Whether we like it or
not, a proxy war is already raging in Syria between pro-Assad
Iran and the country’s anti-Assad Sunni neighbors. We should
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
THE WEEK
seek to maximize our influence and empower the best elements of the chaotic opposition by training and equipping
rebel fighters we consider worthy of our support. Ultimately,
we should want to tip the scales against a dictator aligned with
our enemies. FDR called Somoza “our son of a bitch.” Assad
is theirs.
n In the People’s Republic of China, horrors occur daily, and
quietly. But occasionally something leaks out. This is particularly true in the age of the Internet and social media. A woman
named Feng Jianmei was discovered pregnant. Seven months.
She already had a child. So she was obliged to pay $6,300 for
this second. She did not have the money. So she was kidnapped,
beaten, and dragged to a hospital, where she was given injections that killed and induced delivery of her baby. Photos made
it onto the Internet showing the mother on her hospital bed with
the corpse. Forced abortion and sterilization are routine in the
PRC. This was the cause against which Chen Guangcheng, the
“blind peasant lawyer,” crusaded. These horrors will not end
until the Communist Party’s lock on power does.
n In July, the Canadian parliament voted to repeal Section 13
of the Human Rights Act, which bans “hate speech” on the Internet. The bill was brought forward by Conservative MP Brian
Storseth, who argued that Section 13 directly contravened the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the provision in Canadian law
he had trouble remembering the names of obscure U.N. bodies:
He simply called them all the Ad Hoc Committee for Screwing
Israel.
n A Russian court has upheld a law that bans gay-pride
parades in Moscow anytime in the next 100 years. The term
does seem excessive; surely 80 or 90 years would have done the
trick. But setting that aside, along with those pesky freedom-ofspeech issues, the ban is both bad and good for conservatism.
On one hand, it’s bad, because there are few more effective
arguments against gay marriage than a gay-pride parade:
“We’re here, we’re queer, and never mind those lesbian bikers
and whip-wielding transsexuals gyrating in bikinis to 30-yearold Grace Jones hits, we’re regular family-values types, just
like you.” But to see the good side, consider this comment
from an Atlantic blogger: “I can see the G8 meeting protest rallies, the UN General Assembly events, the websites taunting
Putin and his judges, and more. The gay crowd will harrass
[sic] and torment and undermine and prevail over those trying
to repress them. This ban is a gift.” At last, we know what it
takes to get the Left to condemn Russia. Better half a century
late than never.
n In an eccentric anti-state outcry, a 70-year-old Scot wrote a
letter to the editor of his local newspaper against the imminent
passage of the Olympic torch through his area, suggesting that it
Like a divorcé who won’t stop talking about his ex,
the folks at HBO are embarrassingly obsessed
with Republicans.
that guarantees freedom of speech. The bill passed by a slim
majority. Repeal was just. As it stood, the Human Rights Act
operated as a dangerous invitation for frivolous cases and warranted the intrusion of civil servants into an area that is properly
served by judges and lawyers. But not everyone was happy with
the outcome. Randall Garrison of the New Democratic party
complained that to remove the provisions would strip the humanrights commission of its power to “educate” Canadians and to
shut down undesirable websites. There could be no stronger case
for repeal.
n An Economist reporter recently noted the existence of a United
Nations body bearing the eclectic name of Open-ended Ad Hoc
Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and
Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major
United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and
Social Fields. Our first reaction on reading this was probably the
same as yours: Good thing it’s Open-ended, because if the end
were closed, it just wouldn’t work at all. (It’s times like these that
make you wish you were Angela Merkel, because in German the
name would all be one word.) Anyway, when this item made the
Internet rounds (via blogs and e-mail; it’s too long for Twitter),
U.N. hands rushed to defend the Open-ended Ad Hoc Working
Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated . . . well, let’s
just call it the OAHWGGAICIFM . . . ah, the hell with it. For
brevity’s sake, we will adopt a friend’s solution for times when
12
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was a fascist symbol and alluding to its Nazi origins. The irony is
that his protest of a benign tradition actually incited an encounter
with a more threatening species of government overreach: Two
plainclothes police officers came to his home to inform him that
he shouldn’t write things of that nature when the Olympics are
involved. He simply laughed at them. “I just found it completely
daft that a letter to the Courier had led to this,” he told the paper.
He should be careful, talking like that.
n Like a divorcé who won’t stop talking about his ex, the folks
at HBO are embarrassingly obsessed with Republicans. First
HBO’s medieval fantasy show Game of Thrones included a scene
in which George W. Bush’s severed head appears, fleetingly and
obliquely (and with a bad haircut), impaled on a stick. The show’s
creators admit that the head is modeled after the former president
but explain that they needed a head for the scene and just
happened to have a Bush model lying around. Meanwhile, Alan
Ball, the creator of HBO’s vampire series True Blood, says this
year’s story line was inspired by the Republican primaries, and
he has added a character based on Rick Santorum. Ball says of
Santorum: “What’s terrifying is how many people agree with
him.” For a guy who writes about vampires all day, he sure is
easily frightened.
n The New York Post covered a story emblematic of modern
America—a story out of Coney Island, that iconic place. At P.S.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
90, children in five kindergarten classes practiced for months to
sing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” at their graduation. (Whether kindergartners should have graduation is another matter.) It was to be their big finale. They were going to wave
little American flags. But the principal “marched in on a recent
rehearsal and ordered a CD playing the anthem to be shut off,
staffers said. She told the teachers to drop the song from the
program. ‘We don’t want to offend other cultures,’ they quoted
her as explaining.” The principal substituted a Justin Bieber
song, “Baby.” (“Are we an item? Girl, quit playing.”) After an
uproar, the principal yanked that song, too. An America that will
not permit kindergartners to sing “God Bless the U.S.A.”
because it would “offend other cultures” is an America on
very shaky ground. But there’s a silver lining to this story:
Apparently, immigrant parents of P.S. 90 kids—men and women
who hail from Pakistan, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere—love
the song.
ADIDAS
BRADBURY: LENOX MCLENDON/AP
n Adidas likes to do oddball things with
sneakers: It has attached puffy wings to them,
applied giant logos in 216-point type, and
collaborated with the avant-garde Japanese
fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto on a line
of high-style kicks. Ace race-hustler Jesse
Jackson has of course found an angle
on this, describing a pair of Adidas
sneakers recently created by American designer Jeremy Scott as an
exercise in human degradation.
The offending sneaks feature a bright
orange anklet connected to a thoroughly
ugly purple shoe by a plastic chain. The Reverend Jackson
regarded this as a racist evocation of slavery because . . .
because black guys like sneakers, we guess. The shoes had
nothing at all to do with slavery, but nonetheless have been driven from the market by the spurious campaign against them.
Design is one of the few economic sectors in which the United
States remains an undisputed world leader, and the farther away
the icy finger of politics is kept from it, the better. (The fashion
world would do well to return the favor, incidentally. Looking
at you, Anna Wintour.) And it appears that the Reverend
Jackson is losing his touch: The ethnic minority associated with
Adidas is Asians, not blacks, yet somehow nobody thought to
associate the shoes with debt peonage among 19th-century railroad coolies and the bitter memory of the Anti-Chinese League.
Asians have managed without a Jesse Jackson of their own. So
could everybody else.
n They say every guy looks handsome in a tuxedo—but that’s
no guarantee that he’s a gentleman, especially if he’s a penguin.
Recently revealed notes taken by George Murray Levick, the
medical officer on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910–13 Antarctic
expedition, show him shocked to the bottom of his Edwardian
soul by the penguins’ insatiable eagerness to mate, with their
vigor matched by a lack of selectivity: “This afternoon I saw a
most extraordinary site [sic]. A Penguin was actually engaged
in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its
own species.” (Levick went on to provide a play-by-play
description of the act.) Later he witnessed “another act of astonishing depravity,” the rape of an injured female who was unable
to resist. Pedophilia, autoeroticism, homosexuality—Levick
recorded it all, sometimes detailing the gamier bits in Greek.
“There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins,” he
lamented, then drew a moral lesson: “When nature intends them
to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.”A couple of decades later George Orwell wrote, “It is not
easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.”
Clearly he never went to Antarctica.
n Rodney King did a great deal of damage to the world before
he became famous. He was a serial miscreant and a felon who
led Los Angeles police on a freeway chase in order to avoid
punishment for drunk driving and thereby suffering the revocation of his parole on an earlier robbery conviction. He resisted
arrest, and the police beat him savagely. A videotape of the episode became an incendiary grenade in the hand of the grievance
industry, and the officers’ acquittal resulted in riots that killed
55 people, injured thousands more, and destroyed hundreds of
millions of dollars’ worth of property. Enraged at an injustice
suffered by a black man, at the hands, chiefly, of white police,
rioters launched an anti-Korean pogrom, the reverberations of
which are felt to this day among Koreans in Los Angeles. King
would go on to a long career of substance abuse, vehicular
chaos, and crime, among other things striking his wife with a
car. His misdeeds were a personal disgrace; what followed
them was a national one. Dead at 47. R.I.P.
n As a boy, Ray Bradbury went to a carnival, where a magician
pointed an electrified sword at him and shouted, “Live forever!”
That didn’t happen—Bradbury died on June 5 at the age of 91—
but the words he wrote in short stories such as “The Pedestrian,”
“A Sound of Thunder,” and “All Summer in a Day” will survive
as long as people read. (Before buying the latest iGadget for
your kids, be sure to look over “The Veldt.”) The value of great
literature was an important theme of his work. Fahrenheit 451,
his popular early novel, is about firemen who burn books. In a
commonly overlooked detail, the reason for the burning in
Bradbury’s dystopia isn’t an overbearing government but rather
an apathetic public. A villain explains what happened, in words
that approach prophecy: “School is shortened, discipline
relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English
and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely
ignored. . . . No wonder
books stopped selling.” Brad bury wrote to the end, and his
latest piece appeared in The
New Yorker just before his
death. It was a brief memoir, in which the man who
wrote The Martian Chronicles reached back to his boyhood, as he so often did, and
recalled his fondness for the
Tarzan and John Carter tales
of Edgar Rice Burroughs: “I
would go out to that lawn
on summer nights and reach
up to the red light of Mars
and say, ‘Take me home!’”
R.I.P.
13
EUROPE
No Greek Rescue
UroPEAN politicians in mid-June were rejoicing that
stability had been restored both to international markets and to European Union politics by the Spanish
“bailout.” That rejoicing lasted less than half a day. By the
closing of Wall Street on the day after the Greek elections, the
markets were again demanding punitive interest for lending
to Spain.
The initial response to the Greek election results—a victory
for the pro-euro-zone New Democracy party—was a modest
rise in Europe’s stock markets and a slight rally in the bond
markets, with Spanish, Italian, and Greek yields all falling
slightly, in that last case to 25.38 percent. on arriving at a G20
meeting, Italy’s “technocratic” prime minister, Mario Monti,
commented buoyantly: “This allows us to have a more serene
vision for the future of the European Union and for the euro
zone.” An hour later, the markets were demanding ever-higher
interest rates from both Spain (the highest level so far at 7.1
percent) and Italy (6.1 percent and rising), and those paid to
predict future trends were all saying that the news from
Athens had changed nothing.
They were wrong. The Greek elections were the worst possible outcome for the euro and for financial stability. A victory of
the left-wing Syriza party would almost certainly have forced
Greece out of the euro. Its policy stance—staying in the euro,
refusing to pay back loans, demanding more of them from
Germany—was so plainly absurd that it would have enabled
German chancellor Angela Merkel to maneuver Greece out
(with or without a bribe to go). That exit would have strengthened the remaining euro, given German voters some excuse for
Berlin’s continued shelling-out of subsidies to Spain, Italy, and
other weak sisters, and—as a bonus—derailed the Euro-Left’s
campaign, led by French president François Hollande but largely inspired by Syriza, to replace austerity with “growth” as the
EU’s new economic “strategy.”
“Growth” in the mouth of the Left is a synonym for more
public spending. It offers no real prospect of stimulating the
greater productivity that alone causes growth without inflation. It cannot possibly surmount the barrier represented by
the massive currency overvaluation of Mediterranean countries inside the euro. But when all the economic indicators are
down, it would certainly be attractive to voters, and it might
enjoy a brief illusory “success” before it ran into higher inflation and investor flight.
Syriza’s usefulness to conservatives is its candor. It voices
the primitive instincts of Europe’s Left. As John o’Sullivan
wrote in a recent issue of NATIoNAL rEvIEW, it translates into
policy the fun-anarchism of Italian playwright Dario Fo:
“Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!” No government within hailing
distance of reality can endorse that. But Hollande, newly
strengthened with a parliamentary majority, actually proposes
a diluted and more respectable version of it. others on the
left—for instance, Labour’s Ed Miliband in Britain—are rallying to his banner. At best, therefore, the EU is likely to be
divided and maybe paralyzed over broad economic policy for
some time, probably until Hollande’s policy either collapses
or is abandoned behind a smokescreen of cultural-Left gestures.
ORESTIS PANAGIOTOU/EPA/NEWSCOM
E
14
|
Antonis Samaras, leader of Greece’s victorious New Democracy party
Meanwhile, the euro problem will remain unfixed while the
Greek tragicomedy staggers on for a few more acts. Let us
assume that a new multi-party government is formed under the
leadership of New Democracy, which then negotiates a slight
loosening of the terms of its relationship with Berlin—an extended debt-repayment schedule, perhaps. That would not even give
it breathing space. Greece’s main problem is that its currency
overvaluation within the euro is on the order of 30 percent or
more. No new government—however successful at restoring the
nation’s public finances—can possibly improve the productivity
of Greek workers by one-third in any space of time. The more the
EU softens the terms of its assistance, moreover, the less incentive Athens will have for trying. And the harder it tries, the more
likely it is to provoke social unrest, to strengthen Syriza, and to
weaken the commitment of the main center-left party, Pasok, to
its governing partners and the deal with the EU.
None of these developments will make Greece more attractive to investors. So the euro-crisis will sputter along until
Greece leaves the euro. Ideally, there would eventually be a
managed departure not only of Greece but also of other
Mediterranean countries suffering from overvaluation; maybe
a neat split into “northern” and “southern” euros. Failing that,
there could be a turbulent collapse of the whole system amid
sovereign-debtor defaults, banking chaos, and a wider crisis
for the EU. Those who are most committed to keeping the euro
in its present state, with all its current members, in the name
of “ever closer” union, are those most responsible for magnifying the risks.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW
will appear in three weeks.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
The Immigration
Proclamation
President Obama may not ignore laws he dislikes
BY JOHN YOO
BARACk OBAMA once
again has brushed aside the
founding principles that hold
our Constitution together. His
signature health-care scheme depends on
the claim that the Constitution places no
limits on Congress’s power to regulate.
Fearing that the Supreme Court would
overturn that law, he attacked this spring
the very power of judicial review—the
Court’s right to refuse to enforce laws that
violate the Constitution. In just a few
short years, he has disregarded the central
functions of two of the three branches of
government.
With his recent change of immigration
policy, President Obama has now gone
a perfect 0-for-3. The Department of
Homeland Security will no longer enforce
P
RESIDENT
Mr. Yoo, who served in the Bush Justice Department
from 2001 to 2003, is a law professor at the
University of California at Berkeley and a visiting
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the
author, most recently, of Taming Globalization:
International Law, the U.S. Constitution,
and the New World Order.
immigration laws against illegal aliens
who meet certain criteria: They came to
the United States at an age younger than
16 and are currently under 30, have not
committed any major crimes, are in school
or have graduated or served in the armed
forces, and have resided in the U.S. for at
least five years. Such aliens—who may
number as many as 800,000—may now
seek work permits for two-year periods
without fear of deportation. “It makes
no sense to expel talented young people
who for all intents and purposes are
Americans,” the president said at a Rose
Garden press conference. Obama no
doubt acted from a variety of policy and
political motives, some of them likely
admirable. But his move has pushed executive power beyond all constitutional
limits—even in the view of this writer, an
academic defender of a vigorous presidency and a Justice Department lawyer in
the Bush administration.
There is a broad consensus that Amer ica’s immigration regime cries out for
fundamental reform. Unlike most other
nations of the world, the United States
remains a country formed of immigrants—there is no American people with
a shared race, history, and culture that
existed before and independent of the
United States. Deportation of every illegal
alien not only would turn the nation’s
back on this unique character, but would
take years, consume valuable resources,
and cripple the economy. On the other
hand, the United States cannot condone
rampant disregard of the rule of law and
must exercise control of its borders. Our
immigration laws strike a balance that
pleases no one and results in bizarre
absurdities: For example, the uneducated
sneak across the border with relative
impunity while scientists who receive
Ph.D.s at American universities must go
home.
A sensible beginning for reform might
include a fast path to citizenship for alien
children brought here illegally by their
parents. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida,
a rising Republican star, supports a provision along these lines; another version
appears in the DREAM Act, which would
grant residency status for two years to illegal aliens who came to the U.S. as minors
and have graduated from high school.
Their status would ripen into permanent
residency if they completed two years of
college or served in the military. The bill
failed to overcome a Senate filibuster,
however, so President Obama—surely
seeking to secure Hispanic support for
his reelection—decided to evade the congressional logjam and impose his own
version.
But a basic constitutional obstacle
stands in his way. Article I, Section 8
gives Congress, not the president, the
authority “to establish a uniform rule of
naturalization”—the process by which
aliens become citizens. Although the
Constitution does not explicitly assign
border control and immigration to any
branch of government, the Supreme
Court inferred in the Chinese Exclusion
Cases (1889) that these authorities also
reside with Congress. The extensive Immigration and Naturalization Act sets out
grounds for deportation and defines the
limited cases in which the executive
branch may suspend the deportation of
illegal aliens (extreme hardship, for example). It does not give the president
authority to interrupt the deportation
of whole classes of illegal aliens, and
certainly not in numbers approaching
800,000 people.
15
ROMAN GENN
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2012 10:17 PM Page 15
According to the Supreme Court’s
decision in Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952),
a case in which the Court blocked President Truman’s attempt to prevent a strike
of the nation’s steel mills during the
Korean War, a choice by Congress to
grant the executive only a narrow power
over a domestic matter makes presidential
reaching for broader power unconstitutional. While I believe that Youngstown
does not control the president’s exercise
of his commander-in-chief authority in
wartime, it certainly applies to domestic
affairs exclusively controlled by Congress, such as immigration.
President Obama’s claim that he may
defer the deportation of so many aliens at
once rends the fabric of the Constitution
and is incompatible with the rule of law.
Under Article II, Section 3, the president
has the duty to “take Care that the Laws
be faithfully executed.” The Framers in cluded this provision to make sure that the
president could not simply cancel legislation he didn’t like, as had the British king.
use of either of these constitutional powers here.
A president may decline to carry out a
congressional command in only two situations. First, the president may and should
refuse to execute congressional statutes
that violate the Constitution, because the
Constitution is the highest form of law. If
federal officials had to enforce every congressional enactment, they “must close
their eyes on the constitution, and see only
the law,” as Chief Justice John Marshall
wrote in the Supreme Court’s Marbury v.
Madison decision (1803) recognizing the
power of judicial review. “This doctrine
would subvert the very foundation of
all written constitutions.” In the War on
Terror, the Bush administration argued
that the president could refuse to execute
laws that infringed on the executive’s
constitutional national-security powers.
Otherwise, a Congress with a different
view of foreign policy could order the
military to refuse to carry out the president’s orders as commander-in-chief.
immigration laws is tantamount to the
Bush administration’s claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act could
not limit the interception of terrorist emails and phone calls. But there is a world
of constitutional difference between refusing to enforce laws that violate the
Constitution and impede the executive’s
response to a national-security emergency
(Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements with Congress
over policy (Obama).
The second exception to executive
enforcement of federal law is prosecutorial discretion. Discretion recognizes that
limited time and resources prevent the
executive from pursuing every violation
of federal law. The Justice Department
must choose priorities and prosecute the
cases that cause the most harm, have the
greatest impact, deter the most dangerous
criminals, and so on. The Obama administration has raised prosecutorial discretion as cover for its rewriting of the
immigration laws. “Our nation’s immi-
Obama’s claim that he may defer the deportation of so
many aliens at once rends the fabric of the Constitution
and is incompatible with the rule of law.
Since the days of Machiavelli, through
Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu to the
Framers, executing the laws (along with
protecting national security) has formed
the very core of the executive power.
As Alexander Hamilton explained in
Federalist 75: “The execution of the laws
and the employment of the common
strength, either for this purpose or for
the common defense, seem to comprise
all the functions of the executive magistrate.”
Under this understanding of presidential power, President Obama may not
refuse to carry out an act of Congress
simply because he disagrees with it. The
Framers gave the president only two tools
to limit unwise laws. First, the president
has a qualified veto over legislation,
which, Hamilton argued in Federalist 73,
would not just serve as a “shield to the
executive” but also “furnish[ ] an additional security against the enaction of
improper laws.” Second, the Framers
gave the president the right of pardon,
which he could use to free those unjustly
convicted. President Obama has not made
16
|
When Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Frank lin
Roosevelt refused to enforce a law, they
did so because it violated their executive
powers under the Constitution or the individual rights of citizens. Upon assuming
office, for example, Jefferson dropped all
prosecutions under the Sedition Act
(which made criticism of the government
a crime) and pardoned anyone convicted
under “a law unauthorized by the Con stitution, and therefore null.” President
Lincoln refused to obey a writ of habeas
corpus to release Confederate prisoners
issued by Chief Justice Roger Taney
(author of the Dred Scott decision),
because it intruded on his power as
commander-in-chief to respond to the
outbreak of the Civil War.
The executive’s right to ignore unconstitutional legislation cannot include
Obama’s immigration scheme. No one can
claim with a straight face that Congress’s
command that the government deport illegal aliens—regardless of their age—violates the Constitution. Democrats may well
argue that Obama’s refusal to enforce the
gration laws must be enforced in a firm
and sensible manner,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a
press release. “But they are not designed
to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances
of each case. Nor are they designed to
remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or
even speak the language. Discretion,
which is used in so many other areas, is
especially justified here.”
But discretion means deciding whether
to enforce federal law in particular cases.
A president acting in good faith cannot
invoke discretion to cancel a law—especially if the executive branch is enforcing
the rest of the laws governing the relevant
policy area (as the administration is doing
with respect to immigration). Imagine the
precedent. A President Mitt Romney could
repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to
fine or prosecute health insurers who
failed to sell policies that met federal
demands, or consumers who failed to buy
policies as required by the individual mandate. He could lower tax rates simply by
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
declining to prosecute anyone who refused to pay capital-gains or income
taxes above Bush-tax-cut levels. he
could give industry a boost by ordering
the ePA to stop enforcement of environmental laws.
What is to be done? We should not expect any resistance from the media and
academic elites who spent the Bush years
complaining about the return of the imperial presidency and the shredding of the
Constitution. They have been silent when
confronted with Obama signing statements identical in kind to those they
decried under the Bush administration, or
the use of drones to kill American citizens
abroad.
Instead, opponents of President Obama’s immigration unilateralism should
place their hopes in Congress and the
political process. Congress could pass
legislation overriding the Obama plan and
enacting the beginnings of its own immigration reform. Admittedly, this is a tall
order. But even if no such legislation is
passed, Congress could cut the funding
and personnel of the Immigration and
Customs enforcement agency involved in
the Obama program, refuse to confirm
political appointees to the Department of
homeland Security, and hold oversight
hearings.
Meanwhile, states could require that
businesses continue not to employ illegal
immigrants, even those with an Obama
work permit. The permits have no authorization in federal law, and so cannot preempt state regulations. This option may
gather support if the Supreme Court upholds Arizona’s immigration law, which
seeks to enforce federal immigration law
where the Obama administration would
not. And if Mitt romney wins in November, he could reverse the Obama policy on
his first day in office simply by ordering
the Department of homeland Security to
enforce the federal immigration laws
properly.
It is right to feel compassion for the
blameless children of illegal immigrants,
but we should not show it by setting aside
the Constitution that has served our nation
so well. The president is refusing to en force a federal law simply because he disagrees with a policy choice by Congress. It
is an abuse of power incompatible with the
vision of the Constitution’s Framers, and
one that even the most stalwart defenders
of an energetic executive should not
support.
Leaker-inChief
Voters should hold the administration
accountable for its dangerous disclosures
BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY
T
is about as much reason
to investigate the Obama administration’s leaks of classified information to the New
York Times as there is to investigate who
won the last Super Bowl. This is not a
whodunit calling for meticulous gumshoe work. We can just read the newspaper’s fawning accounts of Obama at war
instead.
By now we’re familiar with the legendmaking tales: of the peerlessly erudite
commander-in-chief thumbing through
Aquinas and Augustine with one hand
while flipping through his “kill list”
(enemy combatants he designates for
death) with the other; of a Barack Obama
who had the courage to continue the
cyber-war sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program, an effort begun by George W. Bush
(whose administration had the good
sense to keep it secret). What is note worthy is that, when it comes to disclosing sources, the Times reporters can’t help
themselves. They name names: current
administration insiders such as nationalsecurity adviser Thomas Donilon, and
Obama intimates such as former White
house chief of staff William Daley, who
has transitioned seamlessly to the Obama
reelection effort. even when the Times
withholds names, we are treated to firsthand accounts of critical meetings in
which the president and a handful of top
intelligence officials deliberate over the
most sensitive matters of national de fense.
The Times’s disclosures about the
“Stux net” computer worm deployed
against Iran were drawn from reporter
David Sanger’s new work of hagiography, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s
Secret Wars and Surprising Use of
American Power. In it, Sanger acknowledges that he followed “the practice of
the Times in reporting on national security” by approaching “senior government
officials” regarding “the potential risks of
publication of sensitive information.”
here
Based on that routine consultation, he
“withheld a limited number of details.”
Translation: The administration asked the
Times not to publish some information
but gave the green light on the trove that
was published. Indeed, Sanger thanks the
administration’s press team for “setting
up interviews with all levels of the White
house staff” and brags that “almost every
senior member of the president’s national
security team” sat for interviews, “some
more than once.”
The leaked information got out because Obama wanted it out—perhaps
because, in a time of crushing long-term
unemployment and staggering debt, he is
unable to campaign on his economic and
legislative record. having hewed to the
very Bush/Cheney counterterrorism tactics he decried as a candidate in 2008,
Obama can stand as Slayer of Osama and
all-around anti-terrorist tough guy.
Instead, the leaks have tarnished the
president. And that, at bottom, is the
point. The relevance of the leak scandal is
not the potential of criminal liability for
officials who exposed national-defense
secrets. The scandal is about political
accountability. It is about a president who
has spawned a culture of recklessness
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with classified information, politicizing
its disclosure to a shocking degree.
The recent, sensational Times stories
are far from singular. At the dawn of the
administration, the president and his
attorney general, Eric Holder, authorized
the release of classified memoranda outlining the CIA’s Bush-era “enhancedinterrogation program.” Obama could
simply have ended the program (or, more
precisely, reaffirmed its end, since the
harsh tactics, rarely used in any event, had
been on ice for years). But Obama needed
to satisfy his anti-Bush base, to whom a
“reckoning” on “torture” had been promised during the campaign. Nonpartisan
intelligence professionals strenuously ob jected that such revelations could only
strengthen America’s enemies, who train
for what they are likely to encounter in the
event of capture. The White House turned
a deaf ear.
The administration was similarly rash
when it came to the killing of bin Laden
and the seizure from his compound of
an intelligence trove: It publicized these
occurrences before much of that information could be exploited against our enemies, by cooperating extensively in the
publication of Obama’s Wars, another flattering account of the president’s prowess,
this time by Washington Post reporter Bob
Woodward. In sum, throughout Obama’s
tenure, intelligence has been placed in the
service of politics; security consequences
have been secondary.
This pattern has outraged leading
Senate Republicans, as well as the occasional Democrat, such as Senator Dianne
Feinstein (D., Calif.). A drumbeat has
thus begun for the appointment of an
independent counsel to probe the latest,
brazen administration leaks of defense
secrets. But this would be foolish, for a
number of reasons.
Several years back, Congress wisely
bade good riddance to the sunsetting
independent-counsel law. The institution
of “independent counsel” (or “special
prosecutor”) is an unconstitutional monstrosity. Put aside the horror of a lawyer
with boundless resources and subpoena
power whose only task is to make a case,
any case, against a suspect: something
that has damaged the capacity to govern
of every administration from Reagan to
Bush 43. More fundamentally, as Su preme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explained 24 years ago in his brilliantly
prescient dissent from the high court’s
18
|
upholding of the independent-counsel
statute (in Morrison v. Olson), special
prosecutors violate the separation-ofpowers doctrine. The Constitution endows the president with all executive
power. The police power any federal
prosecutor exercises is thus the president’s, not his own; that power cannot be
taken away from the president and vested
in an independent actor. Consequently, if
a prosecutor is independent, he is legally
illegitimate.
Yet if the prosecutor is dependent on
the president’s indulgence, he is too politically compromised to conduct an investigation with integrity. So it is that
congressional Republicans have scoffed
at Holder’s assignment of the leak investigation to two U.S. attorneys and a team
of lawyers from the Justice Department’s
national-security division. These investigators report to Holder and, ultimately,
Obama. One of the U.S. attorneys selected to conduct the investigation is a longtime Obama donor who helped the 2008
campaign vet potential running mates. In
theory, it is conceivable that an administration could draft into service a lawyer
of such rectitude that he would proceed
objectively despite conflicts of interest
and while reporting directly to the attorney general. It is beyond laughable,
though, to imagine such a scenario in this,
the most politicized Justice Department
in American history.
Even if the constitutional and political
objections to a special prosecutor were
not insuperable, there is yet another legal
hurdle: the president’s plenary authority
over classified information. The intelligence community and its work product
belong to the executive branch. The president has the power to approve the declassification of any intelligence he
chooses to disseminate, for any reason or
no reason. This is why it matters who is
president. If, as patently appears to be the
case, Obama authorized his underlings to
discuss national-defense secrets with the
press, and if the administration officials
who did so reasonably understood themselves to be acting with the approval of
their chain of command, there would be
no prosecutable case.
The criminal law does not concern
itself with how irresponsible a government official is. For a prosecutor, the only
question is whether there has been a
knowing, willful violation of statutes
proscribing the unauthorized disclosure
of classified information. So while the
Times stories lionize him for bringing his
keen lawyer’s mind to counterterrorism
policy, Obama can bring his lawyer’s
mind to press conferences, cynically taking umbrage at the mere suggestion that
his administration could possibly have
leaked secret intel while knowing very
well that his reckless disclosures are not
legally actionable.
Finally, there is a practical problem: A
criminal investigation is a gold-plated
invitation for relevant witnesses to decline to cooperate with Congress in
examining and exposing the administration’s heedlessness. Once prosecutors
start spouting about the requirements of
grand-jury secrecy and potential witnesses rebuff congressional inquiries “on the
advice of counsel” owing to the ongoing
Justice Department probe, the issue goes
dark—certainly until months after the
election.
That is exactly what the administration
wants, and it would be a terrible outcome.
To be sure, public dread about the economy will dominate the campaign. National
security, however, is the president’s principal obligation. Indeed, it is the main
rationale for the federal government’s
existence. The shameful exposure of defense secrets puts the lie to Obama’s posturing as a stalwart commander-in-chief.
It not only endangers the lives of intelligence sources and informants who have
taken grave risks in our behalf; it exposes
intelligence methodology, putting enemies on notice of their vulnerabilities.
Just as alarmingly, the inability to keep
secrets enrages allies on the cooperation
of whose intelligence services we de pend. Without the information they provide, the government cannot as effectively
protect American lives; and they will not
provide it if they think talking to the U.S.
administration is no different from talking
to the New York Times.
National-security leaking should be a
salient issue in the 2012 election. It will
not be if Congress sloughs off its oversight responsibilities and consigns the
matter to the black hole of a pointless
criminal investigation. In the unlikely
event that there have been provable violations of law, the five-year statute of
limitations leaves plenty of time for a
Romney Justice Department to indict
criminals down the road. For now, the
only thing that matters is political accountability.
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The BushObama Years
Why Mitt Romney should run
against our 43rd president
BY JONAH GOLDBERG
f you agree with the approach I
just described, if you want to give
the policies of the last decade
another try, then you should vote
for Mr. Romney,” declared President
Obama in his June 14 economic address
in Cleveland. “We can’t afford to jeopardize our future by repeating the mistakes
of the past,” he added. “Not now, not
when there’s so much at stake.”
Obama hammered in his point: Mitt
Romney is George W. Bush, and a vote
for Romney is a vote for a return to Bush.
And Bush was bad, very, very bad.
This wasn’t exactly a daring new line
of reasoning from President Obama. If
you’ve missed it, I hope your coma or
solitary confinement was otherwise pleasant. from the start of his presidency,
Obama has had a tendency to blame his
predecessor for most of his and, more
important, our problems. Blaming Bush is
Obama’s sweet spot, his comfort zone,
and his obsession all at once. It is where
he goes whenever he is confronted about
his own shortcomings. When his audiences consent to let him be clear, Obama
is clear about this: Bush is the problem.
And it’s not just Obama himself. The
president’s entire entourage of advisers
reflexively blame Bush for all of their
woes. Obama did everything right—all
credible economists agree! Team Obama’s
only mistake was underestimating how
much damage Bush did.
Intriguingly, the White House tends to
make this argument most forcefully precisely where it is most stupid: on the issue
of spending. White House press secretary
Jay Carney recently did it at his daily
press briefing. Bill Clinton had mischievously bragged about how he was the last
president to preside over a budget sur plus. Asked about this, Carney offered a
familiar liberal history lesson: Clinton
bequeathed Bush surpluses, and Bush
squandered them.
“Eight years later, when President
Obama took office, handed the Oval
‘I
20
|
Office by his predecessor, a Republican
president, we had the largest deficits in
history up to that time,” Carney continued. “Now, something happened in those
eight years, and it was not fiscal responsibility. And that is unfortunate. We had a
situation in eight years where record surpluses were turned into record deficits.”
Even leaving out all the objections
about circumstances beyond Bush’s control (September 11, for instance, and the
Democrats’ capturing Congress in 2006),
this makes no sense. The implication is
that because Bush left Obama with record
deficits, Obama is free to smash the
records and blame it on Bush.
But just because what Obama and his
surrogates do with the facts is ludicrous
doesn’t mean the facts are wrong. And the
simple truth is that Bush—or, to be more
generous, the GOP under Bush—did
spend an enormous amount of money in
the 2000s. Under Bush, the federal government spent more than 3 percent of
GDP on anti-poverty programs for the
first time. Education spending rose 58
percent faster than inflation. Medicare
Part D—the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society (until
Obamacare)—was a top Bush priority.
Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley, created a
whole new cabinet agency (the Department of Homeland Security), and was the
originator of the bailouts, TARP, and the
first stimulus program.
And there’s simply no reason Mitt
Romney shouldn’t say so. He is running
as the “grown-up” intent on restoring
order and fiscal sanity to Washington and
growth to the economy. He should make
his indictment of Washington’s profligacy bipartisan. After all, if he becomes
president, his job won’t be just to stop
Obama’s overspending, but to stop
Washington’s. Making the case that Bush
and the GOP were part of the problem
gives that effort—and Romney—credibility.
He doesn’t have to be rude about it.
There are defenses—some good, some
not so good—of what Bush did. But it’s
important to appreciate the nature of the
moment we’re in on the right. The Tea
Party began in no small part as a delayed
Bush backlash. Many conservatives were
deeply frustrated with Bush’s presidency
but felt compelled to defend him given the
asininity of his most vocal critics, particularly during a war. And then, to compound
the problem, they were asked to vote for
John McCain.
Those frustrations were exacerbated in
the twilight of Bush’s presidency as he
responded to the financial crisis with even
more seeming apostasies (some of which
may in fact have been necessary). Newt
Gingrich noticed this very early in the
Obama presidency. Here he is at the
Conservative Political Action Conference
in 2009: “The great irony of where we are
today is that we have a Bush-Obama bigspending program that was bipartisan in
its nature. Last year, the Bush-Obama
plan had a $180 billion stimulus package
in the spring—which failed. It came back
with a $345 billion housing package in the
summer—which failed. It then had a $700
billion Wall Street spending package in
October—which failed. It had a $4 trillion
federal Reserve guarantee—which failed.
The Bush-Obama plan was continued.
We didn’t get real change.”
Gingrich was wrong in one important
respect. We did get real change—for the
worse. President Obama likes to say that
Romney is Bush “on steroids.” But from
a conservative fiscal perspective, it’s
Obama who is Bush on steroids. Obama
got a huge surge in one-time spending in
2009 to deal with the financial crisis and
then turned it into the “new normal” in
budgetary terms. Between the end of
World War II and Obama, federal spending had never exceeded 23.5 percent of
GDP. The average for the Bush years was
19.6 percent. In 2009, thanks to measures
begun by Bush and expanded by Obama,
spending broke 25 percent, and it has
stayed above 23.5 percent for Obama’s
entire presidency. In the last four years
we’ve added $6.3 trillion in federal debt,
with $5 trillion of it fully on Obama’s
watch. In 2008, debt held by the public
was 40.5 percent of GDP. It’s now 74.2
percent and growing.
Remember, Bush appointed Ben Bernanke, and Obama reappointed him.
Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner were
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
Bush-administration officials whose policies were carried forward and expanded
by Obama.
Of course, there are important differences between Bush and Obama, and
between their records and philosophies.
But Mitt Romney is under no obligation
to bring them up if they do not bolster his
effort to defeat President Obama.
Aside from the fact that it’s true, the
beauty of this argument is that it rips away
Obama’s main political identity. Obama
still poses as an outsider in Washington,
stymied by entrenched interests and the
Bush legacy. It’s a bizarre posture for a
president who got pretty much his entire
agenda enacted before the end of his second year in office. By arguing that Obama
is Bush on steroids, Romney would peg
Obama as part of the problem with
Washington. Independents, who still dislike Bush but are increasingly weary of
Obama, would be heartened to have their
cognitive dissonance resolved.
The key is to make Bush’s spending,
not his tax cuts, the salient issue. Thanks
to a complaisant media, Obama and the
Democrats have been successful in casting the Bush tax cuts as the sum total of
Bush’s domestic and economic policy
(and they don’t even give him credit for
the cuts that go to the middle class, which
Obama wants to keep—more continuity!). Right now, Obama has Romney the
rich guy defending tax cuts for rich guys.
Wouldn’t it be better to have Obama
the big spender defending big spending?
A bipartisan indictment of Washington
would bring about just that.
There’s little reason to expect a Republican backlash to this tactic. By stressing continuity while pointing out how
much worse Obama has made things,
Romney would avoid needlessly antagonizing Republicans who still have warm
feelings for Bush. And he need not spare
the congressional GOP, which was in
many respects the greater scoundrel.
This critique is perfectly consonant with
what you hear on conservative talk radio
every day, and with the themes of the
Tea Party. Indeed, Romney is behind the
curve. The current Republican congressional leadership got this message years
ago. “I believe we did not just lose our
majority, we lost our way,” Representative
Mike Pence famously said. Boehner,
Cantor, Ryan, and the rest of the leadership have made similar statements. Why
shouldn’t Romney?
Reformed
Swinger
Pennsylvania is a Democratic state,
but Romney could win it
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
n Philadelphia, a very grand old gentleman is taking friends to lunch at the
Union League. “This club is going to
hell,” he says, his eyes darting around
the dining room. “They let Democrats join
now. Can you imagine? And I hear they
even let”—here he casts sidelong conspiratorial glances around the table—“I hear
they even let Jews in.” This last bit is delivered in a pro-grade stage whisper that
leaves nearby businessmen squirming. He
doses his snapper soup with sherry, a twinkle of gleeful malice in his eye. It’s his little joke: As everybody in the room knows,
the grand old gentleman is himself Jewish,
in precisely the style that William F.
Buckley Jr. was Irish-American, which is
to say about a half a degree below Ralph
Lauren on the WASPiness scale. He has
performed this ritual before, and presumably it is his way of letting the Establish ment of which he is a pillar know that
things forgiven are not necessarily things
forgotten.
The Union League may be the citadel
of Philadelphia Republicans, but their
heartland is in the suburbs and their spine
is the Main Line, the vestigial accretion
of enmansioned old money congealed
west of the city along the tracks of the
old Pennsylvania Railroad. These are at
best Chamber of Commerce Republicans,
and their conservatism is for the most
part a conservatism of manners. If you
thought country-club Republicans were
fair-weather friends, the cricket-club Re publicans are bound to disappoint you. As
they have, over and over.
Every four years, there is a little act of
political theater that unfolds like this:
Pundits proclaim that the presidential election might very well be decided in Penn sylvania, and that Pennsylvania will be
decided in the four suburban counties
ringing Philadelphia: Bucks, Montgom ery, Delaware, and Chester. Pennsyl vania’s status as a perennial swing state is
proclaimed. And then Pennsylvania votes
for the Democrat. There are millions of
I
Americans today who are voting and
legally imbibing alcoholic beverages who
had not been born the last time Pennsylvania gave its Electoral College votes
to a man with an “R.” next to his name.
Pennsylvania can put a Club for Growth
man in the Senate and a pro-life Republican in the governor’s mansion, but can’t
quite see its way to endorsing a Bob Dole,
a George W. Bush, or a John McCain for
the White House.
Main Line Republicans may be the last
of the unreconstructed pre-Gingrich GOP.
“Republican voters in the Philadelphia
suburbs are more liberal on guns, gays,
and abortion than Democrats are in the
rest of the state,” says Terry Madonna, the
highly regarded scholar of politics at
Franklin and Marshall College. “Obama’s
moves on gay rights, his talking about
contraception—that’s popular.” But this is
not going to be a guns-gays-abortion election. In the gloaming of the economy, the
sunshine promises of Barack Obama are
dim memories, even within sight of the
polo field in Bryn Mawr and the mansions of Villanova (average family income
$366,904). Along Lancaster Avenue, the
main business thoroughfare through the
suburban townships of Lower Merion and
Radnor, vacant storefronts document the
unfulfilled promise of Pennsylvania’s anemic recovery.
Even with the employment and investment boom associated with the Marcellus
Shale, employment in Pennsylvania is
growing at half the national average, and
the national average stinks.
And that is Mitt Romney’s opening
here, if he has one. “We’ve elected some
of the most liberal Democrats,” Madonna
says. “Ed Rendell was very liberal socially and spent out of his mind—$4 billion in
community development on top of everything else. But in 1990 we reelected Bob
Casey Sr. by 1 million votes, in spite of the
voters’ knowing about him being not only
pro-life but wildly pro-life. We’re capable
of electing liberals and conservatives of
all kinds. Tom Corbett is pro-life, and he
won by nine points. It all depends on
what’s happening in any particular election.” Or on what’s not happening: strong
economic growth.
“Young people coming out of college—
the opportunities just plain aren’t there,”
says Robert Godshall, a 50-year veteran
of Pennsylvania politics who represents
upper Montgomery County in the state
legislature. “Our overall unemployment
21
has dropped, and it’s less than the national
average, but that’s only because of the
Marcellus Shale. If that weren’t in play at
this point, we’d be up there, maybe higher
than the national average.” His advice to
Romney: Keep hitting energy. “The EPA
is not friendly,” he says, “and people in the
industry know that. This is going to be
tougher for Obama than people think—it
isn’t automatic.” Tom Smith, a coal-mine
operator from the western part of the state
who is challenging Bob Casey Jr. for his
Senate seat, has made federal energy regulation the centerpiece of his campaign.
But it’s still an uphill fight for Romney.
When Pennsylvania went for John F.
Kennedy in the presidential election of
1960, the Main Line went for Richard
Nixon two to one. Montgomery County,
once heralded by President Nixon as the
nation’s model Republican operation,
today has more registered Democrats than
Republicans, as does neighboring Bucks
County. Chester and Delaware counties
remain Republican, but are less robustly
so than in the past, and in the suburbs as a
whole there is less strong party identification and more independent voting behavior.
“It used to be the case that all you
needed was an ‘R.’ in back of your name,”
Godshall says. “It was automatic.” In
Delaware County, legend had it that if you
weren’t registered as a Republican your
trash wouldn’t be picked up. That’s the
kind of clout that transcends local politics.
“Philadelphia used to come out with a
250,000 Democratic majority in the presidential elections, but we could wipe
that out in the suburbs,” Godshall recalls.
“Today, it’s a little different.” Barack
Obama’s advantage over McCain in Philadelphia in 2008 was nearly 500,000
votes, and the suburbs don’t hang together
politically any longer. Governor Corbett
lost Montgomery and Delaware counties
but won Bucks and Chester. Senator
Toomey split the counties and came out
of the suburbs with a 22,000-vote deficit
that he made up in the Lehigh Valley and
elsewhere.
President Obama won those four counties by more than 200,000 votes in 2008
and is not taking them for granted this time
around: He has opened field offices left
and right and already has aired two television ads. Romney says he’s “all in” in
Pennsylvania, but it is not clear by “all in”
he means what President Obama means
by “all in.”
22
|
“In 2008 we were the second-mostadvertised-to and third-most-visited state,”
Madonna says. “And Romney’s coming
through on this little bus, while his campaign has not spent a nickel on a commercial. The Obama campaign is spending, to
say nothing of the PACs. Romney has to
explain what he will do different from
Obama and be more specific about what
he’ll do. You can go a long way on just
criticizing an incumbent during a recession. But, unlike Reagan, who had a fullscale conservative platform, Romney’s a
blank slate.”
Reagan also had a more conservative
electorate when he Godzilla’d his way
through Pennsylvania in 1980 and 1984.
In subsequent years, the Philadelphia Left
grew more militant and more effective,
which, along with a city wage tax and a
crime problem, drove a great many urban
liberals out into the suburbs—where they
promptly began voting for the same politicians and policies that rendered much of
Philadelphia unlivable in the first place.
That along with a dose of blueblood disdain for George W. Bush transformed the
suburbs: Lower Merion, in which Democrats had never controlled the local government, swung all the way over, and
Republicans now occupy a mere four of
the 14 seats on the board of commissioners. They have lost control of the school
board, too. The nearby town of Narberth
elected the first Democratic mayor in its
history. To no one’s great surprise, Lower
Merion school taxes doubled following
the Republicans’ collapse—in a township
in which nearly half of the children attend
private schools. Today the township of
57,000 has nearly a half-billion dollars in
municipal debt including its residents’
share of county obligations. Republicans
had a good year in 2010 in the Philadelphia suburbs, in part because of national tea-party momentum but also because it
was the first election in which it became
excruciatingly obvious even to wealthy
suburbanites that they were paying for
more local government than they could
afford.
Like 2010, 2012 is going to be an election about what we can afford. Economic
stagnation is the headline issue, and the
related question of burdensome government debt and incontinent government
spending is much on Americans’ minds.
That may not be enough to deliver Pennsylvania to Mitt Romney, but it ought to be
enough to get him in the fight.
Rodney King
Remembered
Three myths about the beating that
changed the world
BY LOU CANNON
FTER Rodney King drowned in
his backyard swimming pool
in the quiet suburban city of
Rialto, Calif., he was memorialized as a victim of police brutality.
Every television viewer who saw the
March 3, 1991, videotaped beating of
King by LAPD officers has a visual memory of the incident—and memories, also,
of Los Angeles burning a year later after
the officers were acquitted by a jury in
suburban Simi Valley. Few know what
really happened.
In reporting King’s death at the age of
47, the New York Times called him a
“symbol of the nation’s continuing racial
tensions.” The Los Angeles Times, which
in the wake of the beating called King an
“African-American motorist,” with hindsight described him as a “drunk, unemployed construction worker on parole
[who] careened into the city’s consciousness in a white Hyundai.” The Reverend
Al Sharpton said King was “a symbol of
civil rights [who] represented the antipolice-brutality and anti-racial-profiling
movement of our time.” All of these views
have something to recommend them. But
all of them also ignore—or actually perpetuate—the many myths associated with
the beating of King.
The overriding myth is that the officers
made no attempt to take King into custody peacefully and beat him with their
heavy batons for no reason except that
they were white and King was black. But
there is no evidence in the audiotape that
the officers used any racial slur, and prosecutors acknowledged in two criminal trials that the officers made a considerable
attempt—lasting more than eight minutes—to take King into custody without
striking a blow.
King was chased down by a husbandand-wife California Highway Patrol team
A
Mr. Cannon is the author of Official
Negligence: How Rodney King and the
Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.
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after a 7.8-mile pursuit that reached a
speed of 115 mph on the freeway and
85 mph on city streets. When the chase
ended, an obviously intoxicated King
mocked Officer Melanie Singer and ig nored her order to exit his car and put his
hands behind his back. Singer advanced
on King with pistol drawn—a practice that
the LAPD prohibits because of the danger
that the weapon could be knocked out of
the officer’s hand. LAPD sergeant Stacey
Koon waved Singer off and instructed two
other LAPD officers to jump on King and
handcuff him. King threw them off his
back. Koon then fired two electronic darts
from his stun gun at King. Each dart delivers 50,000 volts of electricity and immobilizes most people. King fell to the ground
which King appeared to be attacking an
officer. Unfortunately, Holliday’s footage
of King’s charge was blurry.
Myth No. 2 about the King beating was
that it was shown repeatedly on television. In fact, only part of it was shown,
and this part omitted the blurred footage.
Holliday, who was not at all political,
called a police station to tell them about
his tape. The desk officer brushed him
off. Holliday took the tape to KTLA, his
favorite local station, which accepted it
but was in no hurry to air it. The station
manager showed it to the LAPD to determine that it was not a hoax. A producer
then edited out the blurry footage and
aired the remainder of the tape the next
day in a news program. An 81-second
ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP/GETTY/NEWSCOM
Rodney King in 1992
after being hit but clambered to his feet
immediately and advanced on one of the
officers. His behavior convinced Koon
that he probably had been using the drug
PCP, though he had not been.
Most of what the world knows about
the King beating occurred after these
events. George Holliday, the manager of
a small plumbing company, had been
asleep in an apartment across the street
from where the officers were trying to
arrest King. He was awakened by the
noise of sirens and a police helicopter.
Holliday was the proud owner of a brand
new Sony camcorder. He went to his balcony, saw the police cars across the street,
and began videotaping. But he was still
learning to use the camcorder, which he
steadied just as King, back on his feet, ran
toward Officer Laurence Powell, who
swung wildly with his baton and struck
King in the face. It was the first of 55
baton blows, but the only one before
24
|
videotape, the only record of an arrest that
had taken more than nine minutes, had
become a 68-second videotape. The announcer did not pass judgment on the officers but also did not mention that the tape
was partial.
I’m convinced from interviews I conducted that KTLA, which was not hostile
to the LAPD, made the edits for technical
reasons. The producer abhorred blurry
footage—so much, said one technician,
that he would probably have resisted
showing the first moon landing. KTLA
shared the edited tape with other stations.
Most of these stations, and their networks,
used the tape without even knowing of the
cuts.
Myth No. 3 is that the officers were
acquitted in police-friendly Simi Valley
because of the composition of the jury,
which contained no black Americans.
The jury was conservative, to be sure,
but my interviews with the jurors suggest
that something else was at work. That
something was the unedited videotape,
which jurors were seeing for the first time.
Prosecutors often present evidence that
could be damaging to their case before
the defense can, so they can put their own
spin on it. At Simi Valley, prosecutors
showed the unedited videotape in their
opening statement and bluntly admitted
to the jurors that King had set off the beating by charging an officer. I watched the
jurors as they saw the unedited tape. They
were aghast. Three jurors told me after the
trial that they had suspected there was
more to the videotape than they had seen
on television.
This isn’t to say there were no problems
with holding the trial in Simi Valley, a
popular bedroom community for police
officers. Legal experts generally agree
that the trial should not have been held
there. The defense attorneys were pleasantly surprised when an appeals court,
defying precedents, granted the change of
venue they had sought. The chief judge of
this court told me ruefully after the riots
that she had feared the trial and its media
coverage might fan political passions in
Los Angeles, where Mayor Tom Bradley
and police chief Daryl Gates were engaged in a feud while the city simmered.
Stanley Weisberg, the trial-court judge to
whom the case had been assigned, complied with the appellate ruling by deciding
to hold the trial in Ventura County, which
had a new courthouse in Simi Valley within easy driving distance of his home.
Though the appeals court had specifically
ordered that the trial be moved outside of
the L.A. media market, residents of Simi
Valley watch the same television news
and read the same newspapers as residents of Los Angeles.
Weisberg did take one action that could
have helped the police contain the rioting.
He gave the contending attorneys and the
LAPD a two-hour warning once the jury
had reached its decision before allowing
the verdicts to be announced in court. But
the LAPD wasted these two hours. The
underlying reason for their inaction was
that Los Angeles authorities, beginning
with Gates and Bradley, were certain that
all or some of the four officers would be
convicted.
With the police unprepared, the worst
elements in South Los Angeles took over,
burning and looting to an extent unimagined during the 1965 Watts riots. Swaths
of the city were set on fire, with the damJ U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
age amounting to more than a billion dollars. worse, 55 people lost their lives and
another 2,000 were injured. at the height
of the riots, which began on april 29,
1992, and lasted a week, rodney King
made a tearful appearance in which he
pleaded: “Can we all get along?” The
National Guard was deployed in force.
President George H. w. Bush, trying to
calm the mobs, pledged “justice” in Los
angeles. His promise led to a second trial
of the officers, on charges of having violated King’s civil rights. Koon and Powell
were convicted and sent to prison, and the
other two officers were again acquitted.
Looking back on these events, many
commentators have criticized the Simi
Valley jury and praised the federal jury in
Los angeles. In truth, the context of both
trials was disturbing. during the second
trial, Southern California feared there
would be another riot if the officers were
again acquitted. This fear seeped into the
jury room. The foreman of this sequestered jury would look out on the city from
his hotel room. once he quipped to a fellow juror that at least the city wasn’t burning yet.
after the federal trial, a third trial was
held, this a civil affair that awarded
rodney King $3.8 million in damages
while absolving the individual officers of
responsibility for his injuries. King was
wealthy for the rest of his short life, but he
was not a happy man. He was repeatedly
arrested, usually for drunk driving but
also for domestic violence. Twice he was
sent briefly to rehabilitation facilities for
parole violations, but he was not charged
with crimes. No one in Los angeles had
the stomach for another rodney King
case.
I interviewed King and found him
likeable and sympathetic. That’s the way
he usually was when he was sober. It was
another story when he was under the
influence of drugs or alcohol, as he was
much of his life.
King was a human being who had a
poor start and did not deal well with his
demons. He seemed on the brink of happiness last year, when he became engaged
to Cynthia Kelley, the forewoman of the
civil jury that awarded him damages.
Kelley was skillful in bringing a jury
together but an admittedly poor swimmer.
when she found King at the bottom of his
pool at 5 a.M., she did not dive in but
instead called 911. By the time the medics
arrived, King was dead.
Stepping
In It
Does technology make a post-bulls**t
world possible—or desirable?
BY DANIEL FOSTER
T
oward the end of this piece, I
am going to make a dry but
mercifully brief argument for a
corollary of technological neutralism I arrogantly (and probably unjustifiably) dub “Foster’s Corollary.”
Viz., contra the optimists who think the
Information revolution is ushering in a
new era of truth and transparency, notably
in politics, there is no new mode of information dissemination that isn’t also a
mode of information dissimulation.
But before I do that, a few fun bits of
trivia:
did you know that the only majorleague catcher ever to have a 30/30
season—30 home runs and 30 stolen
bases—was Iván “Pudge” rodríguez,
who did it in the early aughts as a detroit Tiger?
did you know that Marilyn Monroe,
perennial paragon of american pulchritude, tipped the scales at about a buck fifty
and wore a size-16 dress?
did you know that, during development, Lockheed test-mounted a 20mm
cannon on the Sr-71 Blackbird but had to
scrap the idea after the Mach 3+ spy plane
caught up to and was struck by its own
rounds?
Bet you didn’t know any of those
things. and neither, as it turns out, did I,
because none of them is true.
More precisely, each of them is
bulls**t: Pudge rodríguez is the only
catcher ever to have a 20/20 season, and he
did it in his 1999 MVP campaign while
still a Texas ranger. Marilyn Monroe
weighed anywhere from 118 to 140
pounds, and at her buxomest would
have probably worn a size 10, had not
nearly all of her clothes been custommade. (a pause, here, of appreciation: Per
the records of Marilyn’s dressmaker, she
stood five-foot-five-and-a-half, and measured a Platonic 36-22-36, the kind of figure you could set your hourglass by.) The
tall tale of the overtaken bullets is told not
of the (unarmed) Blackbird, but of its
experimental predecessor, the YF-12,
which was developed as an interceptor.
and because of various truths of physics
having to do with parabolas, friction, and
gravity, it is highly unlikely to have ever
happened at all.
I was called out on my bulls**t, respectively, by a guy in my fantasy-baseball
league, a girl at a party worrying over an
extra pound, and a friend with whom I was
marveling over the unrivaled badassery of
the american war machine. of course,
none of these inquisitors embarrassed me
unaided. To a one, each expressed an initial dubiousness about the proposition
I’d just put forth and turned to his or her
hip pocket for adjudication in the form of
the dread “smartphone.” Sixty years after
computer scientists and futurists started
writing about “cybernetics” and the possibility of “intelligence amplification” by
wedding human minds to information
technology, here we were, my every anecdote questioned by a species of skeptical
Borg fact-checking me with their iPhones.
when it comes to making friends at a
cocktail party, the ability to remember (or
misremember) trivia like this is as valuable
as wearing a Purple Heart on your lapel. at
least it used to be until al Gore invented the
Internet and Steve Jobs shrunk it to the size
of a pack of cigarettes and issued it to every
man, woman, and child on the face of the
Earth. Now the most casual of conversations stands in danger of derailment by any
amateur sleuth with opposable thumbs.
(and I don’t think I’m the only victim here:
The top auto-complete for a Google search
that begins “what size . . .” is “. . . was
Marilyn Monroe.”)
But does the fact that my anecdotes
turned out to be bulls**t mean I was lying
when I relayed them? Hardly. I wouldn’t
have put any of those statements into a
sworn affidavit, but I wasn’t cutting them
from whole cloth, either. and in any event,
my intention was never to mislead. It was
merely to demonstrate that I was an interesting person with something to add to
the conversation.
This is the essence of the bulls**tter,
and what separates him from the liar. The
liar, like the truth-teller, is concerned with
what is the case: Specifically, he is concerned with conveying its opposite. But
the bulls**tter doesn’t care about the truth
one way or the other. His intention isn’t to
make you believe something about the
world, it’s to make you believe something
about him—that he is charming or trust25
SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS
Wore a size 16? Nope.
worthy, worthy or wise—and his method
is not deception but rather the stitching of
a rich tapestry of guesstimation, rumor,
embellishment, urban legend, and halfremembered factoids.
That bulls**t is intentional (that a statement qualifies as bulls**t not just by virtue
of its content but also by virtue of the state
of mind of its utterer), and that it falls short
of full-blown lying, are features first identified by the Princeton philosopher Harry
Frankfurt in a 1986 essay entitled, simply
enough, “On Bullshit.”
Frankfurt also captured that which
makes bulls**t distinct from proffered
synonyms such as “balderdash,” “claptrap,” “hokum,” “drivel,” “imposture,” and
“quackery.” “Balderdash” suggests incoherence, “claptrap” and “hokum” the dust
of ancient superstitions. “Drivel” implies
triviality, and “imposture” and “quackery”
are hallmarks of the confidence man.
Ordinary bulls**t is both more innocuous
than all that and far more pervasive.
By way of example, Frankfurt serves up
the concept of the bull session: a group—
usually male, usually sequestered—en gaged in noncommittal talk, often about
sensitive subjects such as politics, religion,
and sex. Think lager-toting dads of in determinate politics gathered around a
charcoal grill to diagnose the country’s
problems. The point of thus “shooting the
bull” is not, on Frankfurt’s analysis, to
offer sincere avowals or considered beliefs, but to test-drive various thoughts and
attitudes without committing to them, to
feel out social boundaries and identify
potential commonalities and differences,
and above all to make conversation.
26
|
Bulls**t at its best is creative, engaging,
a means of enlivening and, as it were, fertilizing human interaction—as harmless
as telling a joke in the first person. And in
everything from small talk and first-date
banter to diplomacy and the parenting of a
young child, we see the manifold ways in
which bulls**t can soften a reality with a
lot of sharp edges. In all these respects the
reign of bulls**t has been a happy one,
and its rude interruption by the know-italls with the 4G connections is a mixed
bag at best.
But while our “intelligence amplification” may be firming up the rule of brute
facts—the sorts of things you can look up
in indexes and almanacs—at cocktail parties, there remains another, more pernicious species of bulls**t, which proves
even more resistant to technological mitigation. You won’t be surprised to hear that
we find it in public affairs, and especially
under the heading of “identity politics.”
Exhibit A is Elizabeth Warren, who has
been able to withstand a barrage of documentary evidence casting doubt on her
claim to be part American Indian by
anchoring that claim not in genealogical
fact but in family lore—in other words, by
answering the charge that her Cherokee
identification is probably false with the
tacit admission that it is definitely
bulls**t. Exhibit B is President Obama,
who did us the favor of admitting up front
that his 1995 autobiography is, at least in
part, bulls**t, but who has managed to
escape focused interrogation on this point
eight years into his public life and threeplus years into his tenure as leader of the
free world.
That identity politics is as festooned
with bulls**t as a cow pasture in the full
ardor of spring wouldn’t be so bad if identity politics weren’t also a powerful currency. I’m not referring just to the material
benefits, in the form of professional distinction and book sales, respectively, that
the successful marketing of Warren’s and
Obama’s self-conceptions has accrued.
Rather I have in mind things like the classic bulls**t move of calling a piece of
legislation primarily about tort law the
“Paycheck Fairness Act” and implying
that it would somehow make it more illegal than it currently is for employers to
discriminate against women in the workplace. Or the tortured bulls**ttery of what
was billed as the president’s “reversal” on
gay marriage. (Any statement that begins
with “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for
me to go ahead and affirm that I think . . .”
probably isn’t oriented toward truth.)
Politics as a whole is lousy with
bulls**t, but what makes these avowals of
identity politics the merde de la merde is
that they are so blatantly intended to affect
an audience’s beliefs not about the world
but about the speaker—to demonstrate
that the speaker is worldly or subaltern,
that he cares deeply about women or gays,
etc.—which, you will recall, is the primary motive of the bulls**tter. At the same
time, there is nothing especially notable
about these examples save their recentness. And though I write this, as it were,
from right to left, there are undoubtedly
countless examples of similar phenomena
among conservatives. Everybody poops.
None of this is going to be sorted out
with an iPhone, or a Wikipedia entry, or
the gimmicky “Truth-o-Meter” of some
fact-checking website. That’s because
there is no new mode of information dissemination that isn’t also a mode of information dissimulation. There is nothing, in
the relevant aspects, about the Internet that
makes it any different from Gutenberg’s
printing press, which was after all every
bit as useful to propagandists as it was to
truth-seekers. Technology is bulls**tneutral. Lo, so many paragraphs ago I
tentatively dubbed this thesis “Foster’s
Corollary,” a name I’ll continue to use
until some nerd with a BlackBerry points
to an earlier elucidation of the same concept.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going
to go edit the Wikipedia entry on Iván
Rodríguez.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
You deserve a factual look at . . .
!
Arab Christianity, for centuries a dominant force in Middle East culture, religion and politics, now faces extinction in nearly every country
in the region. Discrimination and persecution by Muslim governments, as well as murderous attacks by Islamic extremists, are driving
Christians from their homelands by the millions. In fact, the only country in the Middle East in which Christians are safe—and where
their numbers are growing—is Israel.
Muslims, Iraqi Christians live in deathly fear and must pray in
private. They now account for 40% of Iraq’s refugees.
The Middle East now has the fewest number of Christians and
Syria. While Syria’s one million Christians enjoyed some
the smallest share of the population that is Christian of any major
stability under the Assad regimes, civil unrest has now caused the
geographic region. A review of the deadly treatment faced by
country’s Christians to fear for their lives. Indeed, some 100
Christians in nearly every Middle East nation reveals the reasons
Christians have been killed and many kidnapped since the unrest
why:
began. Islamic militants have begun the ethnic cleansing of
Egypt. Coptic Christians have lived in Egypt since 451 C.E. and
Christians in the Syrian city of Homs, and at least 90% of
now number 5-8 million. But for decades they have suffered
Christians living there—as many as
church burnings and murder at the
50,000 people—have been driven from
hands of radical Muslims who want
Murderous attacks by Islamic
their homes, according to the Dutch aid
Egypt free of religious minorities.
Under President Mubarak the military extremists are driving Christians from group, Church in Need.
West Bank and Gaza. Since the
protected Christians and jailed
their homelands by the millions.
Islamic terrorist group Hamas violently
extremists, but since Mubarak’s
seized Gaza in 2007, half its tiny Christian community has fled.
overthrow attacks by Muslim radicals have increased, and the
Crucifixes and Christmas decorations are forbidden. Following a
military has refused to make arrests. On New Year’s Day 2011, 21
December 2010 exhortation by Hamas officials to murder
Christians were slaughtered and 79 were injured; during a protest
Christians, Rami Ayyad, the owner of Gaza’s only Christian
in Cairo, 27 were killed and 300 injured by Egyptian police. An
bookstore was killed and his store torched. In the West Bank, the
estimated 100,000 Copts have recently fled the country.
Christian population has plummeted as well, decreasing from 15%
Iran. Under Iran’s ultra-conservative theocracy, it’s practically
of the population in 1950 to less than 2% now—only about 60,000
against the law to be Christian. In recent years, hundreds of
souls. Before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Ramallah’s
evangelical Christians have been arrested for “crimes against the
population was 90% Christian and Bethlehem’s was 80%. Today,
order,” including Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was condemned
Ramallah and Bethlehem are largely Islamic cities. After the
to death because he refused to renounce his faith. Likewise, a
Palestinian Authority took over Bethlehem in 1995, Palestinian
Christian convert who started a “house church” was recently
gunmen attacked Christian homes and in 2002 seized and defiled
sentenced to two years in prison for “anti-Islamic propaganda.”
the Church of the Nativity. Today, Christians make up only a fifth
Saudi Arabia. In Wahabist Saudi Arabia, Christian prayer, even in
of the city’s population.
private, is against the law—as is importing a Bible. Recently
Israel. During Jordan’s occupation of Jerusalem, from 1948 to
officials strip-searched 29 Christian women and assaulted six
1967, the city’s Christian population shrank by 50% to only
Christian men after arresting them for holding a private prayer
12,646. Today, under Israeli rule, that Christian community is
meeting. They’ve had no trial and remain imprisoned with no
growing, as is Israel’s entire Christian population—up
word on their fate. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz
dramatically since 1948 to 154,000, about 2% of Israel’s total
bin Abdullah, recently decreed that it is “necessary to destroy all
population. Christians serve in Israel’s legislative Knesset, its
the churches of the region,” referring to the entire Arabian
foreign ministry and on its Supreme Court. Israeli Arab Christians
Peninsula.
are on average extremely well educated and relatively affluent. In
Iraq. Iraq’s Christian population, which once numbered 1.5
short, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christians
million, has shrunk to less than 250,000. No wonder: In the wake of
feel safe and can flourish.
church burnings, kidnappings and the slaughter of Christians by
The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, holds that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and
religion.” Yet discrimination directed at Christians—as well as murder and ethnic cleansing—have always been a threat in the Arab
Muslim world. It’s time our media stop whitewashing “clashes between Muslims and Christians” and start honestly reporting the
outright ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities by Muslim radicals. It’s also time U.S. legislators start denying financial aid to Middle
East nations that refuse to halt state-sponsored bias and Muslim violence against Christians.
This ad has been published and paid for by
Facts and Logic About the Middle East
P.O. Box 590359 San Francisco, CA 94159
Gerardo Joffe, President
FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its
purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments
in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the
interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your taxdeductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals
and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We
have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational
work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail.
To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org
133
Sex and the Social Scientist
Will the Left debate marriage honestly?
S
has spoken: That’s what judges, professional
associations, and journalists have said about the effects
on children of being raised by same-sex couples. It
turns out, though, that science spoke with unwarranted
cIence
certainty.
In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued
a statement saying that “the evidence to date suggests that home
environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as
those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth.” There was “not a single study” to
find the children of gay and lesbian parents “to be disadvantaged
in any significant respect.”
The chief justice of the Iowa supreme court, throwing out the
state’s law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman,
relied on the same evidence. He wrote that “sexual orientation
and gender have no effect on children raised by same-sex couples,
and same-sex couples can raise children as well as opposite-sex
couples.” The view that children need a mother and a father is
“largely unsupported by reliable scientific studies.”
Federal judge Vaughn Walker produced a similar, but even
more confident, “finding of fact” in the course of throwing out
a california voter initiative codifying the standard definition of
marriage: “children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely
as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is
28
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accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology.”
Social Science Research, an academic journal, has now quite
effectively demonstrated that the debate is alive and well. Its July
2012 edition includes two papers by sociologists that explode the
bien-pensant consensus. The first, by Loren Marks of Louisiana
State University, criticizes the body of research purporting to
demonstrate that children of same-sex couples do just as well as
other children. The second, by Mark Regnerus of the University
of Texas, provides new evidence that they do not. Along with
these papers the journal has published critical comments and the
authors’ responses.
Marks zeroes in on the APA’s 2005 statement, finding it to be
“not empirically warranted.” The APA cited 59 published studies:
an impressive number masking the non-definitiveness of each
one. More than three-quarters of the studies, Marks points out,
“are based on small, non-representative, convenience samples of
fewer than 100 participants.” Twenty-six of the studies used no
heterosexual comparison groups. Of the 33 remaining studies, 13
compared same-sex couples with single parents as child-rearers.
Few of the studies examined the children’s rates of criminality,
drug abuse, or suicide. Almost none of them looked at outcomes
for older adolescents or young adults who were raised by samesex couples. Marks notes, finally, that none of the 59 studies had
statistical power: That is, they stood a significant chance of failing
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
DARREN GYGI
BY RAMESH PONNURU
to find differences between populations even when they existed.
Marks’s conclusion: “Not one of the 59 studies referenced . . .
compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay
parents and their children with a large, random, representative
sample of married parents and their children.”
Regnerus’s research, funded by two conservative nonprofits
(the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation), avoided
many of the flaws of these earlier studies. It examined a large, random sample of young American adults. It used intact biological
families as a comparison group. And it checked outcomes such as
rates of crime, sexually transmitted infections, and drug abuse.
The chief limitation of the study—the one that its critics have
seized on—is that not many same-sex couples have been raising
children continuously. Regnerus therefore grouped together people who reported that they had a parent who had been involved in
one or more same-sex relationships.
The results were depressing. Young adults who reported that
their fathers had had same-sex relationships were more likely than
any of the other groups studied to be involved in crime; those who
said their mothers had had such relationships were second most
likely. Those who had lesbian mothers (defined, again, as mothers
who had had same-sex relationships) were almost four times more
likely than those raised by still-married biological parents to be on
public assistance. They were more likely to receive such assistance even than people who had been raised by single parents.
shows that young adults who had parents in same-sex relationships did worse, on average, than other young adults across a
range of variables. He does not show, or attempt to show, that
they had these worse outcomes because they had gay parents. He
suggests, in his response to his academic commenters, that his
main finding seems to be the superiority of the intact biological
family compared with all tested alternatives. He suggests further
that household instability may play the leading causal role in
generating divergent outcomes. It may be, that is, that the chief
advantage of biological families over those with parents who
had been in same-sex relationships was the greater stability of the
former.
These qualifications did not spare Regnerus a ferocious reaction from liberals. Four gay-rights groups issued a joint press
release trashing his study as “a flawed, misleading, and scientifically unsound paper that seeks to disparage lesbian and gay parents.” Evan Wolfson, the head of one of those groups, Freedom to
Marry, added, “The 2 million kids being raised by 1 million gay
parents in this country are doing great, and would do even better
if their parents didn’t have to deal with legal discrimination such
as the denial of the freedom to marry, and ongoing attacks such as
this kind of pseudo-scientific misinformation and the disinformation agenda that’s funding it.”
Liberal journalists had similar reactions. An article by E. J.
Graff in The American Prospect denounced the study as “dan-
Regnerus suggests that his main finding seems to be
the superiority of the intact biological family
compared with all tested alternatives.
They were, not surprisingly given that result, also the group
most likely to be unemployed. They had the lowest educationalattainment level of any of the groups.
Young adults with gay fathers were five times as likely as those
raised by their biological parents to report having recently had
suicidal thoughts; those with lesbian mothers were more than
twice as likely. Rates of sexually transmitted infections were
much higher for those with gay or lesbian parents. Those with
lesbian mothers reported that as children they were touched sexually by adults at a rate more than 11 times as high as the rate
among those raised by their biological parents—and a rate almost
twice as high as that of the next-highest group, those raised in
stepfamilies. They also reported the highest rate of any group for
being forced to have sex against their will. Those with gay fathers
ranked second. As usual, children raised by their biological parents had the best statistics.
The emotional outcomes followed the same pattern. Those with
lesbian mothers reported having felt the lowest degree of safety as
children; those with gay fathers were the next-lowest. Kids raised
by gay or lesbian parents grew up to have the highest rates of de pression of all of the groups. People who had gay fathers reported
the lowest levels of satisfaction with their current romantic relationships. People with lesbian mothers reported a rate of infidelity
in their current relationships three times higher than that of people
raised by still-married biological parents.
Regnerus notes that his findings do not establish causality. He
gerous” (three times). She wrote that the social conservatism of
Regnerus and his funders “tells all you need to know about
Regnerus’s motivations,” and concluded that “Slate’s editors
should be ashamed” of having let Regnerus summarize the study
in an article for it. Molly Redden asked in The New Republic:
“Will this embarrassing piece of statistical acrobatics mark the
beginning of the end of Mark Regnerus’s credibility with respectable news outlets?” Her answer: “Here’s hoping that more
news outlets will decide that his isn’t a voice we need at all.”
These hyperbolic reactions are in marked contrast to those of
the academic specialists who commented on the Regnerus study.
Paul Amato, a professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State
University, made it clear where his sympathies lie, writing, “It
would be unfortunate if the findings from the Regnerus study
were used to undermine the social progress that has been made in
recent decades in protecting the rights of gays, lesbians, and their
children.” He makes several arguments against the idea that this
research undermines the case for same-sex marriage. He does
not, however, dismiss the work as pseudoscience, instead calling
it “probably the best that we can hope for, at least in the near
future.”
Cynthia Osborne, a professor of public affairs at the University
of Texas, also cautions against basing marriage policy on the
Regnerus study, but she nonetheless allows that it “is more scientifically rigorous than most of the other studies in this area.” The
Marks and Regnerus papers, she writes, “push forward the field of
29
family studies.” activists and journalists who favor same-sex
marriage may hate the Regnerus study, but academics in the
field, regardless of their views on marriage, have been taking it
seriously.
The research cannot settle the argument over same-sex marriage and does not purport to do so. Consider the argument of
william Saletan, a writer for Slate who supports same-sex marriage. He has been an honorable exception among liberal journalists in attempting to learn from the study rather than bury it. He
suggests that the poor outcomes associated with parents in samesex relationships are the result of the instability that those of their
households in the study tended to exhibit.
increasingly positive social attitudes about same-sex parents,
and improvements in their legal status, might yield greater stability in the future. The kids being raised today by same-sex parents
might thus have better outcomes—and the ones who will be raised
tomorrow might have better ones still if governments agree to
recognize same-sex marriages. One counterargument to Saletan’s
thesis, though, can also find support in the data: Outcomes did
not appear to vary based on the “gay-friendliness” of the state in
which the children of gay men and lesbians were raised.
Other supporters of same-sex marriage might argue thus:
Recognition of same-sex marriage will not increase the number of
kids being raised by same-sex couples, but it will confer social
and legal benefits on those kids. Or: Refusing to recognize samesex marriage is unjust discrimination regardless of the statistics.
Osborne notes that we do not outlaw large families just because
studies find that they fare worse than smaller ones in some
respects. amato concurs, writing that “too much attention” has
been given to social science in the litigation over same-sex marriage.
Perhaps so. Yet there is no denying that the Regnerus and Marks
papers strengthen the case against same-sex marriage. if they are
treated with the seriousness they deserve, they especially strengthen the case against judges’ declaring same-sex marriage constitutionally mandatory. Judges cited the studies purporting to show
that on average same-sex couples raise children just as well as
other parents in order to claim that legislators were not just wrong
to distinguish between such couples and marriages but had no
rational basis for doing so. Judges have found laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman unconstitutional on
the theory that they discriminate against same-sex couples for no
rational reason. That case just got harder to make, and it will get
harder still if other studies replicate Regnerus’s results.
The liberal reaction to Regnerus has, for the most part, exhibited a kind of intolerance and closed-mindedness that can only
impede the pursuit of knowledge. (The liberal reaction to
Marks—silence—has not been much better.) Recall that Evan
wolfson, the activist, said that the 2 million children being
raised by same-sex couples are doing great. all of them? How
does he know? That it might be politically advantageous, emotionally satisfying, or intellectually convenient to suppose something is so does not mean that it is so in reality, or that those who
deny that it is so should be shouted down. Liberalism has been
growing increasingly committed to the cause of same-sex marriage, and that trend seems certain to continue. it matters a great
deal whether it will be committed to it in an increasingly illiberal way. The Regnerus study may end up being even more im portant for the future of intellectual inquiry than for the future
of marriage.
30
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Questions on
Taiwan
The wonderfulness and anxiety of
a little-known country
BY JAY NORDLINGER
Taipei, Taiwan
is one of the most admirable countries in the
world, but that does not mean it is a well-known country. Say “Taiwan” to people, and they might well
respond, “Thailand?” Taiwanese diplomats in the west
hear this all the time. Their country, however, is a model. it left
behind dictatorship to become a liberal democracy, with a free
economy, flourishing. a Chinese dissident i know says Taiwan
is his “favorite place.” if Taiwan can have freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, an independent
judiciary, the rule of law, multiparty elections, rotation in office,
human rights—why not China?
i have called Taiwan a “country,” but this is a fighting word
to some. it is definitely a fighting word to China’s ruling
Communists. To them, Taiwan is a Chinese island, a renegade
province, to be brought to heel sooner or later, in some manner.
Chen-Shen Yen, a Taiwanese political scientist, sometimes
appears on Chinese television. when he refers to Taiwan’s
leader as “President Ma,” the Chinese censor beeps out the word
“President.” This word carries the unfortunate connotation of
Taiwanese sovereignty, or nationhood.
Most of the people i encounter, here in Taiwan, consider
Taiwan a “country” or “nation.” Some are startled that the question is even asked. Some will tell you that “Taiwan” is merely a
geographical label—a word denoting an island. “The country is
the Republic of China.” Others like the idea of Taiwan, or
Taiwanness—and they dream of a Republic of Taiwan, independent of the “People’s Republic.”
in her excellent book Why Taiwan Matters, Shelley Rigger, an
american professor, reports an interesting story. There is a web
game called “ClickClickClick.” You click on a button, and this
action registers a click for your country. The country with the
most clicks, in a set period, wins. in 2007, this game swept
Taiwan—and Taiwan, an island with 23 million people, won.
This suggests a certain hunger for nationhood, or international
recognition, or something.
One of the commonest questions here is, “Do you feel
Taiwanese, or Chinese, or both?” Journalists have asked it,
and pollsters have asked it, for years. a person’s answer
depends on his family background, his own experience, his
politics, his emotions—many things. One answer i hear a lot
is, “i used to feel both Taiwanese and Chinese, but now i’m
feeling more and more Taiwanese.” Polls show that this is a
national trend. Two decades ago, about a quarter of people
considered themselves Chinese; now that number is maybe 5
percent. Thirty percent considered themselves Taiwanese;
T
aiwan
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
now that number is around 50. A Taiwanese consciousness is
being shaped.
What almost everyone shares is resentment at being excluded
from international organizations. The word “isolated,” we might
reflect, comes from “island.” Taiwan is denied a seat at the U.N.,
of course. It cannot even get observer status, such as the PLO
has. More amazingly, Taiwanese journalists can’t get credentials
to cover the U.N. China will not permit it—or, more accurately,
the world’s countries permit China not to permit it. Taiwan
would like access to the most modest and uncontroversial of
bodies, such as the International Civil Aviation Organization.
But China and the world say no. Taiwan is allowed to compete
in the Olympics under the awkward name “Chinese Taipei.”
Taiwanese womanhood is allowed to compete in beauty pageants under the same name. Otherwise . . . not much.
As Chong-Pin Lin, another political scientist here, says,
China is bent on “the strangulation of our international space.”
The PRC wants Taiwan to be a nonentity—a non-person, so
to speak—in the world. (By the way, Lin is a protégé of Jeane Kirkpatrick.) Diane Ying, the founder and publisher of CommonWealth magazine, says that Taiwanese businessmen may well
have a better acquaintance of the world than do Taiwanese government officials. They have more contacts, more opportunities.
They’re apt to look down on government officials, whereas
before it was the other way around.
I ask many Taiwanese what they would have America do for
them. Almost uniformly, they answer, “Help us get into international organizations. Decrease our isolation in the world. Allow
us to develop and participate like a normal country.” (The other
help they desire: advanced F-16 fighter jets.)
Though they may long for international recognition, and something like normality, Taiwanese do not necessarily long for independence. Or rather, they are unwilling to declare independence
if it will mean a Chinese attack. “Status quo” is a byword on this
island. People are content with the way things are, for the foreseeable future. Better to live in a kind of limbo—“What are
we?”—than to risk losing the current freedom. We cannot predict
the course of human events. There may come a day when the
Taiwanese feel impelled to “assume among the powers of the
earth” the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature
and of Nature’s God entitle them.” But that day is not at hand.
T
terms “Left” and “Right” don’t make much sense in
Taiwanese politics. But “Blue” and “Green” do. The Blues
are the Kuomintang (KMT), now in power, and the Greens
are the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The former is more
unification-minded—certainly more cautious, where China
is concerned—and the latter is more independence-minded.
Whoever is in power, “the government must walk a tightrope,”
as Mab Huang says. (He too is a political scientist, once a student of Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek.) The government must
keep China at bay, clutch it close, assert Taiwan’s rights, not be
too loud about it, satisfy the United States—walk a tightrope
while juggling guavas.
Since 2008, Taiwan and the PRC have signed 16 agreements
with each other. These agreements concern such matters as trade
and travel. In previous times, you couldn’t fly directly from
Taipei to, say, Shanghai. You had to go in a roundabout way—
via Hong Kong, for example. But now you can fly directly, in
He
about an hour and a half. There is a stream of Chinese tourists to
Taiwan. The PRC places restrictions on who can come—not just
any citizen of the People’s Republic can up and visit Taiwan—
but plenty do (more than a million last year).
By many accounts, the favorite activity of Chinese tourists
here is TV-watching. They stay in their hotel rooms, glued to the
political talk shows. They marvel at the robust, sometimes wild
back-and-forth. They see the government criticized, examined,
slammed. This is something alien to their experience. Visiting
the Taiwanese capital’s great skyscraper, Taipei 101, they see
Falun Gong practitioners, protesting the PRC’s persecution of
their fellows. This, too, is alien.
Obviously, there are benefits to closer, warmer cross-strait
relations. Taiwan can exercise its “soft power,” as an official
tells me. Chinese can get to know Taiwan, find out about a different way of life. Most important, the risk of war is reduced. But
there is a negative side to closer, warmer relations. “Absorption”
is another byword, or buzzword. Will the PRC absorb Taiwan?
Lin notes that “buying Taiwan is cheaper than attacking it.”
Take the case of A-mei, Taiwan’s most popular singer. She
sang the national anthem at the 2000 inauguration of President
Chen Shui-bian, of the DPP. China banned her for more than a
year. Coca-Cola, in the finest tradition of American capitalism,
dropped her as a spokesman. Other entertainers in Taiwan got
the message, loud and clear. Patriotism is well and good, but
who wants to be stuck in Taiwan’s market of 23 million, when
there’s China’s market of a billion-plus?
A great many are concerned about the compromising of
Taiwan’s media. The independent media have been a jewel in
Taiwan’s crown, since the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s.
But China throws its weight and money around, and both are
considerable. Recently, a TV-station owner wanted to expand
into China (or so the story goes). He fired one of his talk-show
hosts, who was strongly critical of the PRC and in favor of Taiwanese independence. This was a gesture of goodwill to Beijing.
There is also the danger of self-censorship. Say you’re a
Taiwanese news outlet, eyeing Chinese ad dollars. You think
you might pull some punches?
One outlet that is not much for punch-pulling is the Apple
Daily, in whose lobby sits a bust of Hayek. That lets you know
where its sympathies lie. (Beneath the bust is a quotation from
the great economist’s Nobel lecture: “The recognition of the
insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the
student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him
against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society.”) The paper’s editor, Wei-Min Ma, confirms something I have already heard: As planes from Taiwan land in China,
flight attendants warn passengers to leave their copies of the
Apple Daily behind. PRC authorities would not be happy to see
them.
In any case, Taiwan can set an example, a democratic example, for China. Professor Yen says that the more sophisticated
Chinese tell him, “You need to remain outside China for a while,
to push us for democratic reform. If you become part of China,
like Hong Kong, there will be no incentive for us to reform.” The
above-mentioned Taiwanese official, who is involved in crossstrait relations, says, “We can show them three things: that
democracy is possible in Chinese culture; that democratization
and economic growth can go hand in hand; and that democracy
need not mean chaos.”
31
Taipei 101
TOP PHOTO/CORBIS
T
hERE was a time, says Yen, when many Taiwanese emigrated, leaving their homeland for the United States,
Canada, Australia (all “Anglospheric” countries, interestingly enough). But emigration has greatly slowed. Why? One
reason, says Yen, is that there is less fear of a military confrontation with China. People are breathing easier. I can’t help thinking
of what some Israelis say: If the Iranians acquire nuclear
weapons, they don’t really have to use them to wreck Israel. The
psychological effect will be devastating. People will stop coming, and will leave.
Yen says that Taiwan is something like Georgia, the ex–Soviet
republic: close to its adversary and far from its help. he jokes that
Taiwan should trade places with Cuba: It would be cozy to the
United States, and thousands of miles from the PRC. Plus, “we
have similar weather, we both love baseball.”
Taiwanese may fear war less, but the PRC still has 1,500 missiles pointed at them. That concentrates the mind, and hurts the
heart. There are Taiwanese who are deeply resentful of those missiles pointed at them, by their “brother Chinese.” The question of
the United States and its support of Taiwan is a sensitive and
important one here. For decades, the U.S. has followed a policy of
“strategic ambiguity”: “Will we or won’t we?” Will the United
States come to Taiwan’s defense, in the event of a Chinese attack,
or not? Early in his presidency—April 2001—George W. Bush
departed from this policy, saying that the U.S. would do “whatever it takes” to defend Taiwan. he later denied that he intended
any change. I asked a White house national-security official, “Did
the president simply slip, or was he trying to establish an American
commitment?” The official gave me an amused look and, citing an
old ad slogan, said, “Only his hairdresser knows for sure.”
I ask many Taiwanese the terrible question: “If China attacks,
do you think the U.S. will defend Taiwan? Will Washington lift
a finger?” A few say, hopefully, “I don’t know.” A few say, “It
depends”—for example, on whether Taiwan “provoked” the
attack by declaring independence. A few say, “I doubt it,” or, “Increasingly unlikely.” Someone says, “You’ll send us arms, but
not men.” Most say, flatly and somberly, “No.” One woman says,
“Particularly after Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t think you’ll do
anything.” Almost everyone goes on to say that China could gobble Taiwan quickly, presenting the world with a fait accompli.
But the Taiwanese official involved in cross-strait relations
says, “Don’t forget that Taiwan is of some strategic value to the
32
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United States. Yes, we share political values, such as democracy,
capitalism, and human rights. But Taiwan means something to
the U.S. strategically too.” The Apple Daily’s Ma says that Taiwanese have the feeling that their country is just a pawn, a pawn
in a grand game of East Asian chess, played by others. But
Americans might remember something, he says: “Taiwan is as
pro-American a country as there is. We are your friends. Taiwan
is a model for China, and if China becomes democratic, that will
be a great benefit to the United States. So, for more than one reason: Don’t abandon us.”
Charles Krauthammer has said that Israel’s survival depends
on two things: the will of the people to live and the support of the
United States. Some Taiwanese tell me that their own country’s
survival, as a liberal democracy, depends on the support of the
United States. The Taiwanese certainly have a will to live: Taipei
is one of the most vibrant cities you will ever see. There are important differences between Taiwan and Israel, not least in military standing: Israel is stronger against its (many) enemies than
Taiwan is against China. But the similarities are worth pondering.
Both countries wish for normality in a world that won’t give it
to them. Both countries find themselves isolated in the “world
community.” There are American scholars and analysts who
say—not so bluntly, of course—“Let’s throw Taiwan to the
wolves, because our relationship with the PRC is so much more
important. Why should this one little island disrupt relations with
a coming superpower? The tail must not wag the dog.” There are
many who would be happy, or at least willing, to throw Israel to
the wolves too—a tiny country in the vast Middle East, bringing
on headache after headache.
Taiwan and Israel are small and vulnerable democracies, not
able to count on other democracies to back them up. They are
potential Czechoslovakias: feedable to the tiger, in the hope that
the tiger will get full.
These are dark thoughts, but Taiwan is too booming, too boisterous, and too wonderful to allow dark thoughts for long. I will
paraphrase that Taiwanese official: The ultimate disposition of
Taiwan, or of the ROC–PRC relationship, is some distance into
the future. Our children or grandchildren will have to handle the
endgame. In the meantime, let us do all we can to achieve harmony across the Strait. Let us keep violence at bay, hang on, and
keep going, until such time as the danger passes and we can get
on with life.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
Monstrosity
By the Mall
Washington, D.C., deserves a better
Eisenhower memorial
BY CATESBY LEIGH
B
ack in 2004, the National Gallery of art hosted a schol-
arly symposium to explore the wonders of its East
Building, which earlier that year the american Institute
of architects had honored with a Twenty-Five-Year
award, for being a building that had stood the test of time. Or had
it?
The schematically non-orthogonal geometries of I. M. Pei’s
East Building are decidedly unpopular by comparison with the
harmonious form and detail of John Russell Pope’s West Build ing, completed in 1941. More to the point, by the time the gallery
published the proceedings of the academic powwow in a lavishly illustrated volume, the East Building was experiencing a major
structural failure. The marble cladding system Pei designed—the
illustrious architect had once proclaimed it “a technological
breakthrough for the construction of masonry walls”—was buckling, with two-by-five-foot marble panels tilting out as their
anchors came unstuck from the building’s load-bearing concrete
frame. Now all 16,200 marble panels are being reinstalled, at a
cost of $85 million.
Who’s footing the bill? You are, dear reader, in your cherished
capacity as a U.S. taxpayer.
Predictably, devotees of cutting-edge architecture have preferred to ignore the lessons of Pei’s failure. Some are now singing
the praises of Frank Gehry’s even more unpopular design for an
oversized, unfocused, and very expensive memorial to Dwight D.
Eisenhower, to be erected a stone’s throw from Washington’s
Mall. But the Gehry scheme, and the competition process by
which he won the commission, are being questioned by a handful of congressmen, including Darrell E. Issa (R., calif.), the
powerful chairman of the House committee on Oversight and
Reform. One of Ike’s granddaughters, Susan Eisenhower, meanwhile has emerged as the public face of opposition to the design.
The “technological breakthrough” in Gehry’s memorial
design consists of gargantuan, billboard-like metallic scrims,
most likely to be fabricated in a translucent pattern showing
photograph-based representations of the rural kansas landscape
of Ike’s childhood. Elevated 20 feet above ground level, these
scrims will hang from towering cylindrical shafts, 80 feet tall
and 11 feet in diameter. The ten shafts will be clad in limestone.
at least 80 percent of the four-acre memorial’s extravagant $142
million price tag will be covered by taxpayers. and so, of course,
will the cost of the scrims’ maintenance or repair, the need for
which will arise from guano smudges and windblown trash and
Mr. Leigh is an art and architecture critic based in Washington, D.C.
dirt or, quite possibly, more serious problems involving structural deterioration.
Not that you should worry about that. Gehry is rigorously
testing his scrims’ metallic fabric, whose vertical warp of
widely spaced stainless-steel wires is welded to a textured weft
of stainless-steel cables—just as Pei tested a mock-up of his
brave new wall system. Forget about the Stata center, the “$300
million fixer-upper,” as a Boston Globe columnist dubbed
Gehry’s quirky, leaky computer-science building at MIT, where
multiple mishaps led to a lawsuit against the starchitect that was
settled out of court. Forget about the piles of snow and ice rolling
off Gehry’s business-school building at case Western Reserve
University in cleveland, or the hundreds of reflective cladding
panels that had to be sanded down at his Walt Disney concert
Hall in Los angeles to relieve the acute thermal discomfort of
people living nearby.
Trust him.
a
long as he’s not being paid with your tax dollars, that
is. Frank Gehry is, after all, an experimental architect.
His histrionic, quasi-sculptural deconstructivism represents a viral reaction against the postwar epidemic of functionalist boxes littering city and suburb alike, not only in the United
States but the world over.
It so happens that this epidemic of visual sterility manifested
itself most conspicuously, so far as our nation’s capital is concerned, in the vicinity of Gehry’s proposed Ike memorial. We’re
talking about a veritable wasteland—ugly federal office buildings, a tangle of freeways, railway tracks running along the rightsof-way of what should be Maryland and Virginia avenues—in
Washington’s southwest quadrant, a forlorn district that is mainly
the creation of misguided midcentury redevelopment under the
banner of “urban renewal.” The wasteland extends right up to
the south side of Independence avenue, which is lined with
bureaucrat-container-boxes for the Departments of Education,
Transportation, Energy, and Health and Human Services, along
with the Voice of america’s moderne Wilbur J. cohen Building—
a somewhat less depressingly simplistic structure.
Before Gehry’s involvement with the project, the congressionally chartered Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial commission
(EMc) decided to consolidate the drab forecourt and rather
messy streetscape in front of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building into a bloated, urban-renewal-scale
memorial site. Bad idea.
The site lies between the Johnson Building to its south and
Independence avenue. a portion of Maryland avenue that
currently merges with Independence in front of the Johnson
Building will be eliminated. The longest of Gehry’s stainlesssteel “tapestries” will filter rather than block views of the relentlessly dull, rectilinear Johnson Building, whose front spans two
full blocks across the avenue from the Smithsonian air and Space
Museum. The two shorter metal scrims, set perpendicular to
the Johnson Building, will define the Eisenhower Memorial
precinct. The Maryland avenue right-of-way, which is situated
on a diagonal axis with the capitol building, will be planted with
grass. Trees will frame northeasterly views of the capitol.
a memorial to a great american military commander and
statesman such as Ike should be monumental. It should be imposing in its structural and anthropomorphic character, whether it be
S
33
GEHRY PARTNERS, LLP
Gehry’s stainless-steel ‘tapestries’ by day and night
a sculptural or an architectural creation, or both. A good statue or
relief sculpture would convey a sense of the anatomical structure
beneath the figure’s clothing instead of settling for a photographic likeness. Whether abstract or figurative, a monument to Ike
should have a powerful, magnetic presence. Its effect should be
direct, inspirational, and immune to factoidal trivialization
masquerading as historical “interpretation.”
Gehry, now 83, hasn’t designed a monument. He has designed
a stage set decked out with sculptural and landscape elements
and a bevy of inscriptions. Against the quasi-photographic backdrop of leafless sycamore trees and farm buildings provided by
the scrims, the current design concept includes a statue of Ike
as a military cadet—substituted for a statue of Ike as a barefoot
farmboy, to mollify the Eisenhower family and other critics—
looking out into the memorial space, with its photo-derived
sculpture groups of Ike exhorting troops on D-day and, after his
two-term presidency, examining a globe. The statuary will be
situated amid lithic piles that might or might not be intended to
evoke ruins.
Gehry’s entire design, in other words, is diffuse, scenographic,
and pictorial as opposed to focused, symbolic, and monumental.
The architect in fact collaborated with theater artist Robert
Wilson on “creating a scene,” as Wilson put it, that would encapsulate the essential Ike. The Kansas-landscape scrims and the
farmboy statue resulted from that collaboration, and it is clear
they represent the heart and soul of Gehry’s deeply inadequate
vision of the memorial. On the other hand, it is the EMC’s fault,
not Gehry’s, that the memorial program includes a Web-based
“electronic companion memorial” involving a downloadable
mobile-device application—an infotainment feature intended to
“engage and enthrall” visitors by allowing them “to view historical footage, speeches, and events in the context of the physical
34
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memorial through augmented reality.” It’s as if the EMC anticipated that the dispiriting “reality” of its new-paradigm, ever-so21st-century presidential memorial would require high-tech
“augmentation.”
G
EHRy, then, has fallen into the obvious trap of designing
not a memorial in a park but a bling-laden memorial
theme park. To be sure, the site was chosen partly on thematic grounds. The bureaucratic or museological occupants of
the adjacent container-boxes were deemed significant because
Ike created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
the Interstate Highway System, and the Federal Aviation
Administration while nurturing the nation’s space program and
the Voice of America. But the mere fact that a site can be themed
to Ike’s political career doesn’t mean it’s the best place for this
memorial. And plopping down a memorial park the size of four
football fields next door to the Mall—itself an enormous green
space extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and
connected to a spacious riverfront park system—is an exercise in
overkill.
That reality leaves two alternatives: A different site should
have been chosen, or intelligent redevelopment of the selected
site should have been part of the memorial program. In the latter
case, a simple Ike memorial would have been the focus of a small
public square or piazza whose intimate scale would have provided a welcome contrast to the titanic expanse of the Mall and the
low-grade urban fabric south of Independence Avenue. That
small square would have been spatially defined by new mixeduse buildings that would have introduced much-needed groundlevel retail—shops, an outdoor café, restaurants—into the Mall’s
immediate vicinity. The commemorative and commercial comJ U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
ponents of such redevelopment at the site would have played
mutually reinforcing roles in attracting people.
This approach to the selected site is refreshingly evident in one
of the designs submitted in the Ike-memorial counter-competition
sponsored last year by the National Civic Art Society and the
Institute of Classical Architecture and Art. (I am a co-founder of
the NCAS and retired from its board of directors in 2008.) The
architect, Francisco Ruiz, came up with an overly complicated
sculptural and architectural program for the memorial, including
a freestanding classical column and a pair of temple-pavilions
connected by an arcade. But he grasped the essence of the site
problem: the need for new space-shaping buildings, including
mixed-use structures, which he situated along the Maryland
Avenue axis. Ruiz’s urbanistic concept, incompatible with the
EMC’s neo-urban-renewal memorial program, could easily be
reconciled with a simpler monumental design, perhaps a fountain
surrounding a portrait statue of Ike atop a high pedestal adorned
with allegorical reliefs symbolizing his roles as president, general, and citizen (he served as president of Columbia University in
the last capacity). Such a design was in fact submitted in the
NCAS-ICAA counter-competition by architect Milton Grenfell
and architect and sculptor Brian Kramer.
The official memorial competition is another sticking point, as
there are doubts that Gehry emerged victorious from a level playing field. First of all, EMC chairman Rocco Siciliano—a decorated World War II vet, Eisenhower-administration official, and
retired business executive—is a Gehry fan who was a member of
the Los Angeles Philharmonic building committee that oversaw
the Disney Concert Hall project. Siciliano started dropping
Gehry’s name at the very first EMC meeting, back in 2001, and
informed the commission of the architect’s interest in the memorial project long before the competition. The competition process
the commission established has fostered suspicion that the objective was to maximize Gehry’s chances of winning.
The competition was administered under the Design Excellence Program of the General Services Administration (GSA),
a program that is supposed to line up talented, experienced
architects for federal building projects. Announcement of the
competition was therefore restricted to the Federal Business
Opportunities website. Notices also appeared on the websites of
the EMC, GSA, and the main professional associations for architects and landscape architects. In addition, GSA sent letters to 30
architectural or landscape-architectural offices to notify them of
the competition. At this first stage, the competition involved not
the submission of memorial designs but rather the submission of
portfolios of previous work. A paltry total of 44 submissions
resulted. These were reduced to a short list of seven design teams,
which were invited to submit non-binding visions of the form
an Ike memorial might take. Then four finalists were asked to
further refine those visions.
It should be noted that David Eisenhower, one of Ike’s four
grandchildren, vouched for the integrity of the competition
process after Gehry came out on top in March 2009. (Eisenhower
resigned from the memorial commission last December.) Still, at
best, the commission and GSA found an extremely unsatisfactory way to run what should have been an open competition involving maximum publicity as well as the submission of memorial
designs in the first stage—and by artists as well as architects. Had
the winning entry been submitted by an inexperienced artist or
architect, the EMC could have paired him or her with veteran
professionals capable of ensuring sound execution of the chosen
design.
The Eisenhower family is now united in opposition to Gehry’s
design, and specifically to the metal scrims. Representative Issa
is waiting for GSA to turn over documents pertaining to the
memorial competition, and this has delayed review of the Gehry
scheme by the National Capital Planning Commission—one of
two key review boards, along with the Commission of Fine
Arts—until the fall. Fine Arts has already fallen for Gehry’s
memorial concept like a ton of bricks, and left to its own devices,
NCPC will probably approve it as well. Siciliano and other EMC
members—including vice chairman Senator Daniel K. Inouye
(D., Hawaii), who was awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in
World War II—are sounding the “Greatest Generation” theme in
favor of the memorial’s speedy realization before that generation
is entirely gone. But the Greatest Generation already has plenty
of World War II memorials—abroad as well as in the United
States, on the Mall and, of course, at Arlington National Cemetery, the biggest war memorial of all.
I
T’S
possible, if not likely, that disaster will be averted.
Several Republican congressmen, along with Northern
Virginia Democrat Jim Moran, have come out against the
design or even called for a new competition. No opposition has
emerged in the Senate, at least partly because both Kansas senators serve on the EMC and have stood by Gehry. In the executive
branch, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar—who controls the
National Park Service, which will own and operate the Ike
memorial—has come out in favor of taking the time “to get it
right.”
Salazar could wind up brokering a compromise between
the EMC and the Eisenhowers whereby Gehry’s scrims are
scrapped—or at least significantly downsized. If his scrims go,
that would mark the bitter end of the architect’s original concept,
leaving a residual pastiche of stone, statuary, and inscriptions.
Such a compromise might be politically appealing because
Congress has already appropriated over $60 million for the
memorial, of which the EMC has spent a significant portion. The
temptation to pour good money after bad could prove well-nigh
irresistible, but so could the political pressure not to. Here’s
hoping Congress will just say no.
To get the memorial right, there should be a new competition
with a commonsense program. The goal should be to secure a
simple, sustainable, dignified design for the memorial as a means
of enhancing the vitality and value, both cultural and economic,
of its site—whether that turns out to be the space in front of the
Johnson Building or not. The Ike-memorial program, in other
words, should be conceived in holistic terms, in the spirit of the
L’Enfant Plan (1791) for Washington, which so lucidly embraces
the synergies between the practical and the symbolic realms
involved in building great cities.
Unlike the EMC-sponsored charade, the new competition
should allow classical as well as modernist designers a fair shot
at winning, with design professionals from both camps constituting a minority on a jury consisting mainly of laymen. Of course,
there is no guaranteeing that a great memorial would result from
such a process. But it is a good deal more likely that a decent
memorial, at least, would. In this instance, that would be cause
for celebration.
35
longview--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2012 10:23 PM Page 36
The Long View
Bethesda Mental
Health Clinic
Doctor’s Notes
moments. Just close your eyes and
imagine that you’re wrong, that we’re
on the wrong track, that what you’ve
done isn’t working.”
Patient’s eyes remain open. He is
frozen in place. Suggestive of cognitive
brain lock.
Patient immovable for rest of session. Secret Service detail carries him
to presidential limo.
6/12
Had first session with new patient.
Always difficult to start a new series of
treatments, this time slightly more difficult due to the presence of Secret
Service personnel in session room. Very
hard to get patient to focus on his current delusional self-image and do the
hard work of seeing himself as real and
human and flawed when he’s surrounded and protected by armed guards.
When asked to wait outside, the Secret Service detail complied, which
allowed patient and doctor precious
moments to connect. When queried as
to the key issues that the patient feels
need attention, he just shrugged. It’s all
going well, no problems, all good, etc.
Patient is clearly delusional. Potential for malignant narcissism. Uphill climb. Medication not indicated as
per 25th Amendment to the Constitution according to clinic’s in-house
attorney.
6/19
Patient arrives in golf attire, which
seems oddly cavalier. In an attempt to
jumpstart transference, doctor asks
about the round—patient proudly
shows his card—and then doctor mentions, in passing, that doctor’s net worth
has declined 65 percent since patient
took office. Meant to rattle his cage a
bit, did the opposite. Patient launches
into a highly detailed rebuttal, suggesting that doctor’s net worth has actually
increased in the past four years “if you
look at it right.” Doctor remains unconvinced, and asks patient to engage in
a thought experiment.
“What if you’re wrong?” doctor
asks. “Just go with me here for a few
36
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6/22
Patient arrives unscheduled. He has just
seen a series of poll results suggesting
a dismal outcome in November. Patient
is slightly unnerved by this “new” information.
Doctor painstakingly reviews the
events of the past three years using the
Internet. As he and patient review the
information, patient becomes increasingly agitated. “Where did all this
come from?” patient demands. Patient
is dumbfounded to discover high unemployment, sluggish economic growth,
discontented voters. Patient clicks
through the Web in increasing rage.
Directed, at first, at Patient J. Biden (see
“BIDEN, J”: presents with Tourette’s;
medication crucial for functioning af fect) and then at all others, including
(and especially) doctor.
This is of course normal. Patients
often identify the doctor as the source
of the problem. Blame-shifting is in
fact a positive sign—it suggests that
the delusional bubble is being burst;
patient understands that there is, in fact,
a problem.
Once the delusional and psychotic
cognition is removed, patient’s natural
malignant narcissism will reemerge.
Probably next week.
6/25
Patient arrives early for scheduled session, accompanied by members of the
press. Joe Klein (also a patient) serves
as unofficial spokesman for the group,
which includes several New York Times
reporters, assorted bloggers, and the
editorial staff of The New Republic.
BY ROB LONG
Patient refuses to engage, merely directing all questions and conversational gambits to his “entourage.”
Patient entirely confrontational. Refuses to engage doctor on any level. In
fact, patient insists on sitting on several
cushions to maintain his higher eyelevel position vis-à-vis doctor. Entourage gathers around patient’s feet,
staring adoringly.
In an attempt to break down patient’s
reinforced narcissism, doctor begins
asking about the economy and unemployment. Doctor is rebuffed by the
journalists, who demand to inspect
the doctor’s credentials. Further, they
insinuate that the doctor is somehow
“in the pay” of “Big Pharma” and “agitating” against what they accuse doctor
of calling “Obamacare.” When doctor
reminds them that he already works for
the government, in a sense—Bethesda
Clinic is a Navy-run organization—
they scoff and suggest that it’s racism.
Doctor is on the one hand pleased—
patient came to him delusional and out
of touch, and is now returned to his static psychosis of malignant and reinforced narcissism.
On the other hand, patient is no
closer to facing reality than he was
before, and repeated suggestions for
medication and/or more invasive therapies are totally ignored.
6/30
Patient arrives on time and looking
good. Patient speaks in affable and
pleasant tones, and convinces doctor
that patient is, in fact, quite healthy both
mentally and physically. Further, patient lays out a compelling vision for
the future of America, as well as a
thoughtful and sobering analysis of
the problems that the patient inherited
from his predecessors.
Doctor please help me recommends
that patient please help me he’s watching me write this cease all treatment
he’s watching me write this and making
me say these things because he’s so
amazingly healthy and well-balanced
please help me.
Patient ceases all treatment.
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Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Uncle Sam Meets Aunt Jemima
He Voyager spacecraft has reached the edge of the
solar system, and is now poised to become an
undocumented resident of the galaxy beyond.
Impressive! It contains a record that has a small
speech by Jimmy Carter. depressing. It’s like imagining
aliens discovering a ruined earth in the distant future and
finding a can of Billy Beer as the sole evidence of civilization. Horrible to think that it might crash on a primitive
planet, and centuries from now we find a civilization that
worships a toothy deity in a sweater and imagines the devil
as a killer rabbit.
That’s if anyone finds it: The spacecraft will reach the
nearest star in 40,000 years, or roughly half the length of
President Obama’s recent Ohio speech about the economy,
and even then they may not be able to read it, unless someone can dig out an old turntable.
It is a remarkable accomplishment, and demonstrates that
gummint is awesome so let’s have a lot more, okay? That
was the message from the president’s Ohio peroration, in
which he cited the Hoover dam and the moon shot as things
We did together via the nimble digits of federal authority.
A stern rebuke to all those tea-party types who quiver in a
constant state of agitation over the prospect of a useful
hydroelectric project.
So, we’re going to Mars, Mr. President? No. We need to
focus on the things we need to do today, like expanding
syrup awareness.
Let’s back up. Hoover dam? Hah! Just try to build one
today. environmentalists—who hate any dam not constructed by a buck-toothed aquatic mammal—would discover that
the project would have a disparate impact on the breeding
habits of the red-speckled amoeba, without which the entire
biosphere would collapse so quickly Jon Corzine would
issue a low whistle of admiration. We might be able to return
to the moon, but this whole “one step for mankind” business
is ableist and sexist. It would have to be an inclusive voyage,
with elizabeth Warren riding down a wheelchair ramp to
the moon’s surface.
The Interstate Highway System was an example of We
doing something big, but highways encourage the suburbs,
which are bad because constant exposure to lawn-mower
exhaust turns people into Republicans, and because freeways
encourage gasoline consumption, which leads directly to
polar bears drowning and the Atlantic Ocean lapping at 42nd
Street. (Any day now.) The only big things left to construct,
in Obama’s view, are invisible bureaucratic apparatuses that
control your life. That’s pretty cool, but they make for bad
photo ops. The laws and regulations of the Good Things for
everybody Act of 2014 may barely fit on a 2-terabyte hard
drive, but it’s a lousy backdrop for a speech.
Some of these big things contain a multitudinous array of
wonders. Let us consider the Agriculture Reform, Food, and
T
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
Jobs Act of 2012, which does not reform agriculture, grow
any food, or create any jobs. Hence the name. Be assured it
contains impenetrable passages, probably along the lines of
this:
The floor price of a soy bean, soy-related, or soy-adjacent
substance as defined by the Agriculture Nomenclature Clari fication Act of 1934 (as amended by the Obfuscation Protocols
of 1974 and 1984) shall be no less than 90 percent of the baseline established by the optimal price as averaged between A.d.
1112 and 2011, unless the peak per-bushel market rate advanced on a weekly basis by less than 12 percent per shoobity
floobity doobity (see also, Cosby amendments), etc.
Translation: Here’s a check.
But what about pancake topping? you ask. does the bill
address rich, delicious fluids that enhance our pancake experience? Rest easy. The Hill reports that Chuck Schumer has
added an amendment that specifically addresses the gaping,
shrieking hole in the nation’s syrup-awareness problems:
“The amendment allows the secretary of Agriculture to introduce grants to states and tribal areas in an effort to promote
maple syrup production through education and research, natural resource sustainability within the maple syrup industry,
market production and efforts to expand maple sugaring
activities.”
Thank heavens there’s education and research, so we don’t
fall behind China, which plans to put a maple tree on the
moon in 2017.
Popcorn gets a handout, too: The Market Access Program,
a $200 million Ag department subsidy, gives $250,000 to
the Popcorn Board, which raises awareness about popcorn,
possibly to locate the one person in America who is unaware
of popcorn, and thinks Orville Redenbacher was a World
War I flying ace. It’s possible that the government may tie
this into some anti-bullying initiative that promotes popcorn
awareness while addressing self-image problems of gay
adolescents, and fund some videos under the theme “It Gets
Butter.” You could oppose it, if you’re a homophobe who
hates farmers.
So that’s us, then? Once a nation that flung objects into
deep space, now a broke and bloated society that dribbles
dollars around to tell people popcorn is nutritious and delicious? It’s easy to say we don’t do anything big anymore, but
who’s this we, really? Take away the declinists and defeatists
and the anti-exceptionalist transnationalists who regard the
country as a big hunk of dumb wood in need of some whittlin’ down, and you’re left with the people who do things like
put a tiny computer in everyone’s pocket that not only
phones for pizza and takes high-def movies but downloads
the most recent photos from our craft on Mars. That changed
the way we live. That is a big thing.
We have a car on Mars, you know. That’s rather American.
And if it finds a giant lake of syrup, we’ll send humans! If
only to prop up the price.
37
books7-9_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/19/2012 8:19 PM Page 38
Books, Arts & Manners
The 51st
Star
J AY N O R D L I N G E R
Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, by Peter Collier (Encounter,
368 pp., $25.99)
W
illiam F. Buckley Jr. said
of Jeane kirkpatrick, “She
ought to be woven into the
flag as the 51st star.” When
i was introduced to kirkpatrick, i quoted
this remark. She said, “That was the nicest
thing anybody has ever said about me.” i
said, “it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever
said about anybody.”
She was u.S. ambassador to the united
Nations during President reagan’s first
term. But she was much more than that:
She stood for a point of view. This view
was anti-communist, pro-american, proWest. She was the kind of Democrat
who was mortified by american weakness abroad and american weakness at
home. She was an intellectual, an academic, with a taste for political combat. and
she was unafraid. William Safire wrote
that she had “the courage of ronald reagan’s convictions.”
Once, i interviewed lincoln DiazBalart, the cuban-american politician,
about his journey, intellectual and political. He was one of those Democrats who
crossed over into the republican party.
He said, “Jeane kirkpatrick was my soulmate.” many of us could say something
similar.
She now has a biography, Political
Woman, by Peter collier. it is a superb one
(from a writer who has proven himself as
38
|
a biographer many times over). kirkpatrick made halting attempts to write
an autobiography. She is better off with
this book by collier. apparently, she was
reluctant to write in a personal vein. collier has given us the woman in full. His is
an admiring biography, but he lets her
have it, when she deserves it.
Jeane Duane Jordan was born in 1926
in Duncan, Okla. Duncan is where erle P.
Halliburton started his oil company. in
the first decade of the 21st century, his
name would be a hate-word of the left.
Jeane’s father worked in the oil industry.
Journalists, writing about her, often referred to her dad as a “wildcatter.” collier
reports that she objected to this, indignantly: Her dad had been a driller—a contract
worker, not a speculator. Get it right.
The family moved to illinois when she
was twelve. But she would always consider herself a westerner. and she saw
reagan, an illinoisan who settled in california, as a fellow westerner.
She was something of a queer one,
Jeane Jordan. To buy her first book, she
saved up her allowance: The book was a
thesaurus. in high school, a boy asked
her to go to the movies. She said, “No, i’m
going to stay home tonight and read
The Federalist Papers.” Her family was
strongly Democratic, and she would be
the same, for as long as she could. Her
father joked—if it was a joke—that she
could bring home any boy she wanted, as
long as he wasn’t a republican.
after high school, she went to Stephens
college in missouri, and then to Barnard
in New york. Her field of choice was
political science. She may have been a
Democrat, but, even then, she was a different kind of Democrat: She knew that
Hiss was a liar. During the 1948 campaign, she attended a Wallace for Presi dent rally, at which Pete Seeger played the
banjo. (He’s still at it—i saw him at an
event last month.) She did not like what
she saw and heard at the rally. She voted
for Truman. Forty years later, she wrote, “i
am retrospectively proud of myself for
having resisted, at 21, the temptation of
radical politics.”
She learned about the Holocaust, and
would be forevermore a staunch friend of
the Jews. She learned about totalitarianism
in general. She spent the rest of her life
wondering about two questions. as she
put it, they were, “How could people do
this?” and “How could other people let
them?”
Smitten by France, she went to that
country, where she was an eyewitness to
the great struggle between Sartre and his
supporters and camus and his. Sartre was
by far the more popular, of course, but she
was definitely with camus. For one thing,
she liked “his elevation of the human
dimension over the political one; his focus
on the impact of ideas and the personal
consequences of ideologies.”
along the way, she met the man who
would become her husband, evron kirkpatrick, called “kirk.” He was a political
scientist and Democratic activist. collier
calls him “the Pygmalion who would intellectually sculpt” Jeane Jordan. He was
married when they met—to a woman
named evelyn, who had just had a baby.
He had been married before, too, to a woman named Doris, with whom he had
also had children. But he had “outgrown”
Doris, collier writes, and his marriage to
evelyn was “disintegrating.” So . . .
in this book, Doris and evelyn play the
role that discarded spouses are supposed
to play: They are hustled off the stage so
that the show can go on, with the stars in
place. No one will ever write a book
about Doris or evelyn. Jeane had trouble
acknowledging her husband’s first marriages, as people do.
after having three sons, Jeane took
her Ph.D. from columbia. This was in
1968—a terrible year for the country and
world, from the kirkpatrick point of
view. in 1967, The New York Review of
Books had printed its infamous cover,
showing how to make a molotov cocktail.
kirkpatrick wrote the editors, “Please do
not ever send me another issue of your
revolting rag.” She was alarmed by mcGovernism. She thought that america’s
abandonment of South Vietnam was “the
most shameful display of irresponsibility
and inhumanity in our history.” She
thought carterism a disaster. She was
ready for reagan.
richard V. allen, reagan’s first nationalsecurity adviser, told collier, “Jeane and
margaret Thatcher were the only two
women who made Nancy nervous. The
president had an intellectual spark with
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
both of them.” He was happy to send
Kirkpatrick to the U.N. She was still a
Democrat, but he had been one too, until
he was over 50.
Kirkpatrick’s tenure at the U.N. was
electrifying—even some who despised
her had to concede this. Collier brings it all
back to life. The Soviets, those tricksters,
forged a letter from the South African
intelligence chief to Kirkpatrick, expressing “gratitude.” They did this kind of
thing: When Sakharov won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1975, they forged a telegram of congratulations from Pinochet.
In a saner world, Kirkpatrick would
have been lionized by feminists: She had
risen from the oil patch to the commanding heights of U.S. foreign policy. But
her views were wrong (“wrong”). She
told Collier, “Gloria Steinem called me a
female impersonator. Can you believe
that? Naomi Wolf said I was ‘a woman
without a uterus’—I who have three kids
while she, when she made this comment,
had none.” I am reminded of a bumper
sticker that appeared during the 2008
Ronald Reagan had given her . . . and
seemed to want to put it around her neck.”
She died in 2006, on a significant date:
December 7.
For several years, starting in about
1998, I called her every chance I got, on
any pretext: to solicit her opinion, to ask
her to write for NATIoNAl REvIEW, which
she did. (Being uncertain of her byline, I
asked, “Are you Jeane Kirkpatrick or
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick?” “Ouf,” she said, “I
suppose I can do without the ‘J.’ at this
point.”) She had a wonderful voice: sometimes haughty and didactic, sometimes
purring, even sexy. People such as the
Saturday Night Live gang mocked her
looks as mannish and severe. They could
be. But she could be very attractive, and
she knew it, I think.
In writing this biography, Peter Collier
has written an intellectual history and a
political history of America in the second
half of the 20th century. But it’s a biography too, worthy of the life. If you loved
Kirkpatrick, you will fall in love all over
again. You will hear her and see her
Kirkpatrick’s tenure at the U.N. was
electrifying—even some who despised
her had to concede this.
presidential campaign, alluding to Sarah
Palin: “She’s not a woman, she’s a Republican.”
Would you like a statement that is
pure Kirkpatrick, nothing but? She told
an interviewer, sometime in the ’80s,
“Having and raising babies is more interesting than giving speeches at the United
Nations. Believe me.”
So much time did the Reagan people
spend fighting one another, it’s a wonder
they had time for the Cold War. Even tually, Kirkpatrick was shoved out of the
administration. But she remained a big
deal, from coast to coast. She finally be came a Republican, in 1985. It was a
wrenching experience for her, as it is for
some. “I would rather be a liberal.” Her
fans wanted her to run for president in
1988, and she flirted with the idea, but ultimately stood aside.
Her last 15 years are somewhat painful
to read about, for Kirkpatrick wrestled
with family problems, health problems,
other problems. Collier paints a striking
picture of her on her deathbed: “She sometimes held the Medal of Freedom that
(with her “repertory of tics,” in Collier’s
phrase). If you didn’t love her, you may
gain new respect for her. And if she is
unknown to you—what a treat you have in
store!
Two or three years ago, I gave a talk
in which I cited Kirkpatrick. Afterward,
a mother and daughter came up to me.
“My daughter knows Jeane Kirkpatrick’s
grandson,” said the mother. The daughter
said that someone—I forget who it was, I
hope not a teacher—had told the grandson, “Jeane Kirkpatrick was a terrorist.”
That was appalling, of course. But, honestly, I was just slightly pleased: After
all this time, she can still get under their
skin.
Kirkpatrick said that, in the 1960s and
’70s, America did something like try to
commit suicide. But “the suicide attempt
failed.” She was one of those who thwarted it. Years ago, she had some advice for
a friend of mine, who was just starting
out in the work world: “Try to make your
employment relate to the life of your
times.” Kirkpatrick herself did, and she
made a wonderful dent.
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39
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
America’s
Iliad
TRACY LEE SIMMONS
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War
and Reconstruction, by Allen C. Guelzo
(Oxford, 592 pp., $19.95)
E
generation christens
its own favored Civil War
book, almost by clockwork.
Twenty-five years ago, James
McPherson brought forth his richly
awarded and eminently readable Battle
Cry of Freedom, just as—some 25 years
earlier—the Bruce Catton volumes were
scaling the bestseller lists, and just as—a
couple of decades before that—Ste phen vincent Benét’s epic poem John
Brown’s Body treated the years between
1859 and 1865 with sweep and lyricism
for a more literary readership. All three
labors garnered a Pulitzer Prize. When
it comes to the Civil War, we Americans
have chosen not to skimp; we take it in
bracing drafts. People who can scarcely
muster the attention required to read a
meaty magazine article happily commit to long, elaborate, detail-drunken
tomes on the struggle that has made
us who we are today, from the grandeur
of the Thirteenth Amendment to Gone
with the Wind to tacky (and misshapen)
Confederate-battle-flag car plates.
The thirst never gets slaked. We pine
for the perfect history of a war that
refuses to loosen its hold on our imaginations and, here and there after all these
years, loyalties. Still, we cannot have
too many Civil War books because we
cannot have too many appraisals and
vERY
Mr. Simmons is the author of Climbing
Parnassus. He is currently writing a book on
Thomas Jefferson.
40
|
reappraisals. And the Civil War industry
ensures that they keep coming. Only a
few weeks ago, we learned of a new estimate of the accidentally or deliberately
underplayed number of those killed,
raised from the 600,000 figure we all
grew up with to 720,000.
Now, as if on cue, a new book appears. Allen C. Guelzo, professor of history at Gettysburg College and author of
other nutritious works on the period,
joins the heady roster of scholars and literary men who have set out to recount
meticulously and pronounce upon magisterially the greatest, most sustained
catastrophe in the annals of the United
States. Like its worthy predecessors,
Fateful Lightning can claim a compact
completeness (no small feat), but unlike
them, it can also claim the benefit of an
ever-burgeoning pool of the latest information, which is another reason we hit
a reset button every few years—there’s
always more to account for: new facts
to digest, new interpretations to vet. Yet
this book is comprehensively economi-
ments, hardware, provisions, disease
mortality, civilian opinion, and the
aftershocks of Reconstruction, and
offers a newly minted evaluation of
ways we ought to think about the cataclysm?
Guelzo’s ambitions are imperial.
While avid to tell the entire story of the
war as a war, blood and gore and gunpowder and dust and dysentery and all,
he has opted mostly for the second,
broader course, and he has, against the
odds, produced a book smoothly accessible to any curious adult who lacks a
deeper knowledge of the time.
He employs a long runway into the
story, springboarding poignantly, as
others have done, from the chilly day
of Lincoln’s second inaugural. But his
excursion immediately takes us back
much farther, to the fallible age of the
Founders, and moves forward to the
days when the seeds of sectional dissent were sown and a bitter crop grew
as the decades progressed toward Fort
Sumter. Here he shows himself a deft
Allen C. Guelzo has, against the odds,
produced a book smoothly accessible
to any curious adult who lacks a
deeper knowledge of the time.
cal, as exactingly accurate as scholarship allows, and, befitting its subject,
sober.
Any historian out to pen a full account of the Civil War must decide
what kind of book to write. Should it
be a grand catalogue of colossal battles
and the brave, saucy characters that
flooded the ranks on both sides, with
all the drama ready-made for spirited
retelling for the sake of a predominantly self-captivated audience? (Shelby
Foote’s capacious three-volume narrative history—a fine literary achievement if ever there was one, which took
four times as long to write as it took the
war to be waged—is of this type, and
the approach requires no defense. It’s
Homer’s.) Or should the book be an
academic disquisition on larger sig nificance and historical meaning, on
the multiple causes and effects of the
war, political and otherwise, one that
methodically factors in up-to-date
findings on things like troop move-
reader of crafty politicking, exploring
with precision the flawed strategy of
the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and
the failure of Henry Clay with the
Great one of 1850, showing how the
balances all seemed doomed to go out
of kilter as soon as they were created.
Slavery, both as an inherited engine of
economic power and as a powder keg,
is dealt with as it ought to be—directly, evidentially, unsentimentally, uncomfortably.
Eventually, the principals take the
stage—Lincoln, Lee, McClellan, Sherman, Joe Johnston, Stonewall Jackson,
Ulysses S. Grant. Personalities prance
and strut. The war itself, with all its battles, bivouacs, night marches, and terror,
gets played out with the necessary
detail, though Guelzo the historian is
concerned with context and truth before
theater, with how the wins and losses on
the field fit into the larger puzzle of the
conflict, altering for example the revolving shades of sympathy and antipathy of
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
STEYN CLASSICS July 9 2012 issue_all books 1 page april 2004.qxd 6/19/2012 7:55 PM Page 1
STEYN CLASSICS
O R D E R
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Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade looks back
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the British and the French toward the
Confederacy.
Guelzo assembles the story ably, but
he injects no adrenaline into the reader;
his manner isn’t breathless. But neither
is it exactly that of a dry lecturer. “No
one in American history,” he tells us,
“has ever looked less like a great general
than Ulysses Grant,” and then explains
simply and efficiently how such an unlikely figure won a war. All the familiar
figures get woven nicely into the tapestry. Asides on passing characters rarely
fail to pull up tasty nuggets, spicy bits of
information we either forgot or, more
likely, never knew, yet all of which keep
a sometimes knotty, intricate tale rolling
apace.
Perhaps the book’s strongest points,
though, lie in the realm of explication
and illustration, in the work that the
professional historian can best do. This
is a book not of history alone but of
historiography as well: It’s not only
about the tales but also about the
tellers and elucidators who have, over
time, determined how we view the war.
Perusing a good deal of literary material from books, tracts, and intellectual
periodicals of the day, Guelzo ranges
far as a cultural historian, into regions
of poetry and applied psychology.
Explaining how even the most reputable historians can fall victim to
stereotypes other historians before them
have advanced uncritically, he takes on
the supposition that politicians on both
sides fell victim to “irrational” thinking
and acting in the decade before the
shooting began:
BOBOLINK
You rise from dry meadowgrass
With a laborious flutter, more
Wing-action than the shortness of your flight
Would seem to call for
And so it seems obvious
Flying for you is a steep effort
Nature exacts, though not without amends,
Bobolink, reedbird;
The wiry tones of your song
Set forth a waltz in clear whistles
At first, so well-sustained! But then you break
Down the bars, stampede
Your notes into a reckless
Song fantasia piped at lightning speed
No one can follow—not the barn swallow
Who soars with such grace,
Not the bird-watcher stalking
The field, not blind Tom with all his skill
At sound-catching, his passion for filling
Darkness with music.
Ricebird, reedbird, bobolink,
Your song is the strained apology
For all of the weak-winged, condemned to sing,
Because we cannot fly.
—DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN
42
|
It seems only human nature to hang the
label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to
assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the
task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality
in what we are studying. For that reason
it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of
history . . . too quickly.
And with this we know we are in the
presence of a deliberative mind. How
easily, we’re reminded, can history as
we know it arise from idle speculating
and a hunger for convenient conclusions. Recounting battles with color and
dash is one thing, but thinking clearly
and cogently about the most incendiary
event in American history requires more
than a bit of caution and tact.
Guelzo is nothing if not tactful, and
he works with a vigilance made needful by the momentous investment of
passion the Civil War has inspired for
the past 150 years. Readers in search
of major revisionist departures from
orthodox thinking on the war will be
disappointed. But the author of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That
Defined America, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of
Slavery in America, and Abraham
Lincoln: Redeemer President has
earned the right to paint the wide panorama.
For those of us who prefer to take our
history as straight prose, the apparatus
of scholarship can become something
of an encumbrance, and the abundant
footnotes could have been ushered into
the back as endnotes so we wouldn’t
have to swat those gnats at the bottom
of the page from our peripheral vision.
But that’s less than a quibble. Fateful
Lightning could serve as foundation
reading in any college course on the
Civil War, though it’s too well composed to be deemed a textbook, as textbooks, in the humanities, anyway, tend
to be directed not to students eager to
learn but to academic consumers out
only to pass the test. This book was written to be read, not merely consulted, and
it can be read profitably by general readers, especially those wishing to probe
past the choreographed bromides of the
History Channel.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
Still
Guilty
KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason,
by Christina Shelton (Threshold,
352 pp., $26)
I
T is unlikely that we ever will have
a proper reckoning of the American
Left’s culpability in the worldwide
Communist enterprise—the gulags
and laogai, the Stasi, the Holodomor, the
100 million corpses. It is a testament to
the perversity of human nature that in
the two main political efforts to uproot
Soviet agents from U.S. institutions, the
villains in the popular mind are not those
who enabled the enslavement of entire
nations but the imperfect men who tried
to stop them. We never had a Nuremberg
trial for Communists—we would have
had to hang too many veterans of the
Roosevelt administration. Instead, we
had the perjury case of Alger Hiss. And
we keep having it.
Christina Shelton, a former analyst at
the Defense Intelligence Agency, has
produced a new study of the case. In the
course of her rigorous and carefully documented analysis, she offers a persuasive explanation not only of why Hiss
chose treason but of why so many others
did as well. It is a rare thing: a good
book about an important subject.
Shelton’s telling of the story is in a
sense Nixonian. Hiss was the archety pal East Coast liberal-establishment
man: son of an executive, Johns Hop kins, Harvard Law, a protégé of Felix
Frankfurter, law clerk to Oliver Wendell
Holmes, attorney at Choate, Hall, &
Stewart, State Department, United Nations. But Hiss was a member of the most
dangerous class: the barely-hanging-
on elite. His father’s suicide left the
Fortunately, she has a hell of a story to
family in a condition that biographer
tell and many illuminating details and
G. Edward White famously described
anecdotes to add. Like many liberals of
as “shabby gentility.” He was a highly
his time, Hiss seems to have been radiaccomplished student but, in the judgcalized in part by the Sacco and Vanzetti
ment of Whittaker Chambers, a medi - controversy, and he was drawn quickly
ocre mind. As a young man, he learned
to the subversive Left. Early in his
to sneer at business while availing himcareer in government, he joined Lee
self of every benefit to be derived from
Pressman—who would himself later
his wealthy and well-connected friends.
be outed as a Soviet spy—in defending
He was a member of the self-loathing
Franklin Roosevelt’s central-planning
elite.
ambitions. Throughout Shelton’s telling
Like most of his kind, Hiss drew preof the tale, one cannot but notice that
cisely the wrong lesson from the Great
Hiss’s fellow traitors not only shared his
Depression—that the state should atideological commitment but were in the
the
same
tempt to manage the economy—and
main
sort
of people. That latter
was, like most New Dealers, prepared
to endorse extraordinarily
authoritarian
steps to put that vision into action.
TRUST
identifies
Hiss’s
CAN
YOU
Shelton insightfully
NATIONAL
REVIEW?
support of Roosevelt’s
court-packing
indicator
of his scheme as a critical
Can
views:
W hyou trust National
i d Review?
f dl
Yes. Please do so when planning
Hiss’s advocacy of bypassing constituyour estate. Keep us standing
tional restraints and his open disregard
athwart history, yelling Stop.
for both the constitutional principle of
separation of powers and for the precedent of an independent, nonpoliticized
judiciary are astounding, and symptomatic of his leftist authoritarianism.
Using the judiciary as a political instrument of state power is a characteristic
feature of both Communist and Fascist
regimes. Hiss felt that “we were entitled
to think of ourselves—and we most certainly did—as a select few.” This claim
by Hiss reflects the recurring elitism
of a higher wisdom that is thoroughly
embedded in the ideologies of the left:
the “enlightened” know best; authoritative leadership is needed to direct the
masses; a vanguard is required to advance the revolution; and so on and so
forth. Alger saw himself and his colleagues as that vanguard.
Unhappily, the prose above is indicative of Shelton’s style when exploring
the political relevance of Hiss’s views
and activities—a bit clunky and blustery. Her tone and style are much more
sophisticated when she is engaged in
more straightforward reportage on the
intricacies of Hiss’s world. One suspects
that she is throwing in a bit of red-meat
boob bait for marketing purposes. Her
argument is well reasoned and often
compelling, but her performance is occasionally nine-fingered.
By remembering National Review
in your will, estate, or trust, you
will leave a legacy of continued
support for those conservative
causes and beliefs that will be as
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are to ours. Please contact:
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43
fact may be of more consequence than
the former. The confrontation between
Alger Hiss and Richard Nixon exposed
a cultural fault line, and those who have
been (and remain) sympathetic to Hiss
and his ilk seem to do so not out of any
sophisticated understanding of MarxistLeninist doctrine or midcentury history
but out of dread of aligning themselves
with the loathsome likes of Nixon. It is
unsurprising that Hiss, in the decades
after his release from prison, found himself enthusiastically welcomed at New
York’s New School for Social Research,
where, as Shelton reports, he was a regular lecturer, and at other elite institutions, including Brandeis and Columbia.
Nixon’s downfall coincided with a
refreshed interest in Hiss among liberals.
Hiss gave substantial cooperation,
including access to his papers, to historian Allen Weinstein, who began his
researches holding the conventional
liberal faith in Hiss’s innocence. The
evidence convinced him of the contrary,
and the publication of his book, Perjury, in 1978 was the occasion for a
sustained campaign by The Nation
and other leftist outlets to discredit
him. Tribal ties are highly resistant to
evidence (and apparently immune to
shame), and that is why the case of Hiss
continues to be newly litigated each
generation.
Shelton makes a sledgehammer of
a case that this is unnecessary. The
strongest section of the book is titled
simply “The Evidence,” and it is a sustained artillery assault: the GRU general
who fingered Hiss, the U.S. ambassador
who warned Roosevelt, the Soviet defectors who knew his secret, Whittaker
Chambers and the other turncoats, the
KGB operatives, the Communist-party
members who plotted alongside Hiss,
the U.S. State Department officials who
corroborated Chambers’s evidence, the
Daily Worker editor, the foreign intel ligence operatives: The question has
never been Hiss’s word against Cham bers’s and the Pumpkin Papers, but
Hiss’s word against a large and compelling body of evidence.
That evidence has in recent years
been supplemented by the declassified
Venona transcripts, by Hungarian intelligence documents, and, most damningly, by KGB documents. “Despite the
existence of overwhelming evidence
44
|
against Hiss,” Shelton writes, “there
are still those today who cannot bring
themselves to assimilate that evidence
and acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a
Soviet asset and guilty of espionage.
They focus on Hiss’s message, not his
actions.” Likewise, they focus on the
character defects of Richard Nixon and
Joseph McCarthy, apparently unable
to distinguish conventional if severe
human failings (Nixon’s megalomania,
McCarthy’s dipsomania) from the moral
depravity of men who were engaged in
the greatest campaign of mass murder
documented in the history of civilization.
It is just possible to understand the
sympathy for Russian Communism in
the context of the 1930s and the rise of
Nazi Germany. But Hiss’s embrace was
a broad and lasting one: As Shelton
notes, he was denying the crimes of Mao
and Castro as late as 1975. Hiss argued,
among other things, that the scale of
Mao’s killing must have been exaggerated, since so many Chinese opposed to
Communism had left the country as he
came to power, and therefore “the problem of liquidation which Mao would
have undertaken must have been minimized.” Here Shelton cannot avoid
a parenthetical: “Was Hiss really suggesting that Mao killed fewer people
because there were less available to
kill?” The Chinese who escaped the
chairman’s terror are blessed not to have
found out.
It is impossible to dispute Shelton’s
overall verdict. The word “treason” carries a great deal of emotional weight,
a sense of being the worst crime of
which one could be guilty. But it is not:
Benedict Arnold and Guy Fawkes were
traitors—Hermann Göring and Joseph
Goebbels were loyal to the end. Hiss and
his associates did in fact choose treason,
but treason was hardly the worst of their
crimes. They chose to further the work
of bloody-minded gangsters engaged in
the mass extermination of nations and
the permanent enslavement of the survivors. To make an average-sized gravestone for each of their victims would
require 900 times more marble than was
used in the dome of the Taj Mahal. They
were the very worst men that modern
civilization has produced, abetted by
those who may have been among our
brightest but were by no means among
our best.
The
Struggles
Of Anna
FLORENCE KING
Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir,
by Anna Quindlen (Random House,
208 pp., $26)
A
MEMoIR, while not hemmed
in by the strict classical rules
that define poetry, nonetheless
needs a certain amount of control to give it narrative thrust, a modicum
of suspense, and something resembling
an orderly timeline. Do not expect such
leisurely, reflective writing from Anna
Quindlen. She was born at the perfect statistical moment to experience firsthand the
death by a thousand choices inflicted on
American women by the feminist movement, and her memoir is a scattershot
overview of every conflict, emotion, experience, wish, regret, and opinion she has
ever had from her birth in 1952 to her publisher’s deadline for this manuscript.
The consummate child of her times,
Quindlen went along to get along, and she
has gotten along quite well. The prototyp ical Having-It-All feminist as well as the
Ur-Boomer, she made an ideal culturewatcher for the NewYorkTimes, churning
out op-eds packed with de rigueur “relevance” and a column called “Life in
the Thirties” that delivered bottomless
empathy to beleaguered career women
who, like Quindlen, had their children
later in life and got caught up in the guilty
conflicts of what she calls “manic motherhood.” Her commentary won her the pres-
Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113,
Fredericksburg, VA 22404.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
tigious empathy chair at the women’s college of hard knocks and led to a Pulitzer
Prize.
The daughter of an Italian-American
mother and Irish-American father, Quindlen, the oldest of five children, realized
early on that something wonderful would
inevitably be taken from her: the brownie
bowl that she was allowed to lick when
her mother baked. At first she had it all
to herself, but then came those times
when her mother went to the hospital
and returned a week later with a redfaced, wailing baby. As the younger children came along, they got first dibs on the
icing bowl, and Anna morphed into an
assistant mother who was expected to
help care for them.
“Where she was always felt like a
safe place,” she says of her mother, but
her love collided with the contempt for
housewives she imbibed as a teen in the
early feminist years. She came to look
down on her mother’s generation of wo men and vowed to be what the feminists
were calling “a person in her own right.”
But then, when she was 19, her mother
was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and her father ordered her to quit college and come home to care for her and
run the household for himself and the
younger children.
She reacted bitterly, blaming “the tradition of Irish-Catholic households to sacrifice their daughters. . . . I felt powerless,
trapped, enfeebled. . . . I was afraid of the
briars of housewifery . . . taking away
Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir
and leaving me with The Joy of Cooking,
Jacqueline Susann, and slipcovers.” She
was horrified to learn that her mother, who
was only 40, had consulted the doctor in
the first place because she assumed that
her ovarian symptoms meant that she was
pregnant. But the baby turned out to be a
cancer, and as the inoperable lump grew
bigger, the only clothes that would fit her
were her old maternity dresses. “A woman
who had spent the best years of her life
in maternity clothes, she sickened and
died in them as well.”
By the time her purgatory as woman
of the house was up, Quindlen had had it
with conformity, whether to Irish-Catholic
traditions, Italian-Catholic traditions, or
the traditions governing the hierarchy of
baking-bowl licking. While still in her
early twenties she asked a doctor to tie her
tubes so she would never have children.
But he refused, and so she wound up
having them in her early thirties when it
was the Boomer feminist thing to do.
This is a powerful story, or would be
if Quindlen had told it all in one place
instead of here and there throughout the
book. She seems torn between the need to
tell it and a reluctance to call our undivided attention to it. It would take a sturdy raft
to navigate her turbulent conflicts, but
here and there one comes across hints that
the “cake” in her title refers not to the centerpiece of her 60th-birthday party this
year, but to all those baking bowls of yore
that she never got to lick.
She blames children for women’s loneliness, which she calls the “girlfriend interregnum”—the years when busy mothers
have no real friends except other busy
mothers they just happen to be thrown
together with—and makes a case for
“someone not obliged by blood or marriage to support, advise, and love you.”
Such unequivocal revelations are not her
style, however. She tends to make her unintentional points by protesting too much,
as when, even today, “my head swivels
when a little voice cries ‘Mommy!’ in a
crowded supermarket.”
She also falls into the trap of unintentional humor: “I built my entire existence
around my children, wrote only during
school hours, didn’t write at all when there
was a school vacation or an ear infection,”
yet even now, years later, when the clock
moves close to 3 P.M., she claims she experiences “a spasm of loneliness.” If this is
supposed to tug at our heartstrings, it does.
It reminds me of Lassie, ears pricking up
as her primitive instinct tells her that it’s
time to go wait in the schoolyard.
This is one of the hardest books to review that has ever crossed my desk. It’s
divided into topical chapters, but they
mean nothing because everything is all
over the place, and mostly comes down to
Quindlen talking about herself and what it
means to be a Boomer. “My muscles are
tight but my skin is loose. I am physically
fit but forever infertile. My hair is still
thick, but much of it is gray.” And her dimples, “once tiny divots, are now deep furrows.” But not to worry, because Boomers
are going to be the generation that changed
what it means to be an old lady, just as they
changed what it means to be a lady. Proof?
Her own daughter, raised in the Madeleine
Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clin ton era, asked her, “Can a man be secretary
of state?”
Quindlen never walks, she “power-
walks,” and she attempts to write the same
way, by fashioning sentences that scream
“Quote Me!”: The women’s movement
was “the Industrial Revolution without
sweatshops.” “One of the useful things
about age is realizing that conventional
wisdom is often simply inertia with a
candy coating of conformity.” “And we do
have to make our peace with diminished
expectations, bit by bit, the road not taken,
the role not filled.” Her fierce objection to
the cliché that a person who dies “is in a
better place” inspires her defense of the
here and now, where clouds are always
“scudding” and waves become “swells.”
The only good part of this book is near
the end when, after scrupulously denying
that she is defending the Catholic Church,
she does just that. “For me, being Catholic
is like being Irish or Italian or Caucasian,
not a faith but an immutable, identifying characteristic with which I was born
and with which I will die.” Then, after
announcing that she has always used contraception, she continues: “[Catholicism]
is woven into the fabric of my self, in both
the warp and woof, so that it seems if you
pulled its threads, all the rest would unravel.”
If a stranger were to stop her on the
street and say, “The Lord be with you,”
she says, she would automatically reply
“And with your spirit,” or preferably, “Et
cum spiritu tuo, the Latin of the Church of
my childhood.” She follows this with a
firm denial that she is a language traditionalist opposed to making rituals understandable to the masses, then launches a
vigorous attack on the tin-eared translators
who changed no room at the inn to no
room at the place where travelers lodged.
“I cringed,” she writes. “It sounded as
though the Holy Family got shut out of a
cut-rate motel.”
She goes on in this vein, condemning
the Church for harboring pedophiles and
putting down women, then following her
condemnations with sentiments that come
very close to a defense of transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth. “Our grandparents were devout, our parents observant,
and we are haphazard,” she says wistfully. “Atheism is a game for younger people, who are so sure of what they’re sure
of.”
This whole tiresome, egocentric book is
about Anna Quindlen doing battle. First
she got her feminist up, then she got her
Boomer up, but she finally got her Irish
up, and it made me like her at last.
45
Film
Hostile
Creators
R O S S D O U T H AT
R
S cott’S Prometheus
seems to have been made as a
kind of rebuke to those publications that attempt to distill
their movie reviews down to simple letter
grades. if i were forced, whether by a
flamethrower-wielding charlize theron
or an ooze-dripping alien parasite, to assign such a grade to Scott’s return to the
universe he first explored in the original
Alien, i would have to give it a middling
mark: a c-plus, or if i were feeling generous a B-minus. But that sounds like a
idley
SCOTT-FREE PRODUCTIONS/FOX FILM CORP.
Noomi Rapace in Prometheus
grade suitable to a so-so romantic comedy
or a flabby superhero flick. Prometheus
deserves better, and it deserves worse:
this is a blockbuster that merits a flat-out
A for some of its components, and something between a c and a d-minus for
the rest.
the grade-A material starts with the
concept, which takes the primal dread
inherent in the Alien universe and blows it
up to cosmic proportions. From its opening sequences, the arc of Prometheus
offers a kind of pessimistic counterpoint
to the “why are we here?” yearnings that
animated terrence Malick’s Tree of Life
last year. like that film, Scott’s traces
mankind’s quest for understanding all the
way back to the fire and ice of a primor46
|
dial earth, opening his movie with shots
of glaciers and rocks and rushing, seething water on an as-yet-lifeless planet. But
in place of Malick’s hidden, inscrutable
Jehovah, Prometheus gives us a towering,
albino extraterrestial, who stands over
the fjord, drinks some sort of potion, and
lets his body fragment and dissolve, sowing the water with fragments of what
will presumably become our own human
dNA.
A few moments of screen time and
untold millennia of history later, we meet
our protagonists: two archaeologists, partners and perhaps lovers, whose excavations have revealed an image common to
every ancient civilization, showing a titanic figure being worshiped by our ancestors
even as he gestures toward a constellation
in the sky. this constellation, inevitably,
becomes the destination for an expedition—a purely scientific mission, insists
the female archaeologist (Noomi Rapace),
a missionary’s daughter who still wears
her father’s cross, but veterans of the Alien
franchise are well aware that the corporation paying for the ship and the crew may
be inclined to disagree.
that crew includes Rapace’s cocksure
partner (logan Marshall-Green), the
ship’s laid-back captain (idris elba), the
corporation’s icy representative (theron),
and a gaggle of geologists, biologists,
and mercenaries not long for this mortal
coil. it also has an android, the silky david
(Michael Fassbender), whose persona is
modeled on Peter o’toole’s t. e. lawrence (thanks to repeat viewings of david
lean’s epic during the long space voyage)
and whose formal obedience to his human
makers masks obscure and possibly sinister motives.
together, this cast—all of the performances, too, are A-grade—set out to explore the world they find awaiting them: a
planet of vast, mausoleum-like structures,
containing intimations, sculptural and
holographic, of the ancient race of “engineers” that the company is seeking, but no
sign (at least at first) of their actual fleshand-blood existence. What does exist, in
flesh and slime and acid, is Something
else, or maybe various Something elses:
not the familiar xenomorph of the original
Alien, but what might be its evolutionary
antecedents, which slither and burrow,
impregnate and destroy—until slowly,
slowly, it begins to dawn on our heroes
that the makers they seek might not exactly be our friends.
this stew of myth and science, action
and horror—Genesis and darwin, Chariots of the Gods and H. P. lovecraft,
Rosemary’s Baby and, well, Alien—is the
stuff of which great pop blockbusters are
made, and with Scott behind the camera
you know the movie will have the visual
style to live up to these aspirations.
What it lacks, though, is the scriptdoctoring necessary to make its story hold
together. in part, Prometheus suffers from
the horror-movie habit of featuring characters who behave so witlessly that the
audience finds itself rooting for the monster instead. elba’s pilot and theron’s
executive seem to be competing for an
award for Most oblivious leadership of a
trillion-dollar Mission to an extremely
dangerous Planet. their alien-fodder subordinates switch from blind, existential
terror to “Hey, there’s a cute little snake”
idiocy the instant the plot demands it. the
movie’s most horrifying/riveting scene, in
which a character performs emergency
self-surgery to remove a creature gestating
beneath her flesh, is followed by an unintentionally comic coda in which that
same character staggers through the ship,
bloodied and stomach-stapled, and nobody seems to care or even notice.
this is the kind of lazy writing that’s
forgivable in a low-budget slasher film,
but not in a movie with Prometheus’s
ambitions. But worse than the laziness
problem is the lindelof problem. Scott’s
movie shares a writer, damon lindelof,
with ABc’s famous plane-crash serial,
Lost, and this presumably explains why it
shares that show’s infuriating habit of featuring plot twists and plot devices that cry
out for an explanation, and then resolutely
refusing to explain them.
the overall design is somewhat clearer
in Prometheus than it ever was on Lost,
mercifully. But the narrative blueprint still
includes far too many blind alleys and
bridges to nowhere. From the meaning
of the pictograms that set the movie in
motion, to david the android’s various
maneuverings and double-crosses, to the
hinted-at connection between the film’s
finale and the plot of the original Alien, the
story presents tease after tease without
offering a payoff.
the final tease is the suggestion of a
sequel. the best material in Prometheus is
certainly powerful enough to justify one.
But the worst aspects of the movie suggest
that any follow-up will be just as flawed,
and just as ultimately frustrating.
J U LY 9 , 2 0 1 2
City Desk
To the
Scaffold!
RICHARD BROOKHISER
Y
ou hear it sometimes before
you see it—the pang pang
pang of rhythmic hammering,
the clang of dropped metal,
the smock of dropped wood. When you
turn the corner you see the familiar sight:
a crew of Central Americans or Africans
humping pipes, girders, planks, and plywood from a truck and throwing them up
into the air. Another scaffold is going up.
The technical name for these urban
portes cochères is sidewalk sheds, and the
city requires them whenever there is serious construction, demolition, or ordinary
repair. Any building, from 19th-century
brick or brownstone runts, to gargoyled
beaux-arts matrons, to the white-brick
slabs of Camelot, to the glass Rubik’s
cubes of postmodernism’s nightmares, is
liable to grow a ground-floor girdle. The
basic design is everywhere the same. The
verticals, or bridge legs, are thick metal
pipes. Slimmer pipes, with pinched ends,
are clamped alongside to form horizontal
braces, or X-shaped cross braces. The
business end—what prevents tools, workmen, or random cornices from toppling
onto your head—is the deck. Metal beams
clamped to the tops of the bridge legs run
across the sidewalk, metal runners are
laid at right angles over the beams, and
a ribbed metal sheet surmounted by
wooden planks is laid over the runners.
Plywood parapets offer extra insurance
against objects or people rolling into the
street. The prevailing color scheme of
plywood these days seems to be dark
blue, though I can remember parapets
of forest green.
The address of the construction compa-
ny is displayed; don’t worry about it, it’s
someplace in Brooklyn or the Bronx,
you’ve never been there. If demolition is
the game, there may also be a funnel to
direct detritus into a dumpster. Fancy
addresses seem to get fancier sidewalk
sheds—the elevation of the deck is higher, the look is airier. The parapets of the
sidewalk sheds in front of the WaldorfAstoria display pictures of a frieze. Why
didn’t Phidias think of that? Then when
Lord Elgin took the picture off the marbles, the Turks could have just put up
another.
Every sidewalk shed adds its bit to the
botheration of city life, by the din of its
going up and the constriction of foot traffic beneath it—New Yorkers move fast
except when they don’t, and one strolling
mama in a thicket of bridge legs can bring
a street to a halt—and when I first moved
here I looked to the day when all the sheds
would come down. But I soon realized
that they were never coming down; when
one is dismantled, another arises down
the street. In the country standard “Long
Black Veil,” the condemned man sings
The scaffold is high and eternity’s near.
Sidewalk sheds are near you wherever
walk sheds replaced the Bowery flophouse. Their interiors filled up with
pushcarts, cardboard mattresses, blankets,
bodies. A blind man would know he was
under a sidewalk shed by the tang of
urine. Then came Giuliani and the problem miraculously (as far as the great
and the good were concerned) vanished.
The occupy movement brought a brief
and lesser return of the bumoisie, but they
too have moved on. The sheds remain,
however, for the next social crisis (the
double dip? an obama loss?).
Sidewalk sheds are weapons in the war
of landlords and commercial tenants. A
shed either hides signage or obscures it in
gloom. When building and renter are on
good terms, the parapets display temporary signs telling the world (or at least the
world across the street) what businesses
are imprisoned below. When owner and
renter go to war, up goes a shed, and enjoy your new location in Howe Caverns,
baby. one of my favorite restaurants had
folding glass doors and, in good weather,
sidewalk tables on a block so charming it
might have been in Italy, except there
were children and people paid their taxes.
Then there was blood; a sidewalk shed
Every sidewalk shed adds its bit to the
botheration of city life.
you are, and they stay up for eternity. But
I have learned to love them. They are a
sign of life, creative destruction made visible, like cutting hair or clipping toenails.
Detroit has no sidewalk sheds, only coyotes.
Sidewalk sheds serve multiple purposes, from the harmless and useful to the
unseemly and dishonorable. The horizontal braces are a forum for masculine display. The black kids who knocked off a
few quick chin-ups at the end of the last
century have sons chinning themselves
now. When it rains, the sidewalk shed
doubles as the forgetful man’s umbrella.
Everyone carries a mental map of the
sheds along his daily commute which,
with the help of awnings, doorways, trees,
and loading docks, can be a point-to-point
route to the Number 6 train and dryness.
The traveler’s aid can equally become
the caravanserai of the homeless. In the
Seventies and Eighties, when the only
response to people living on the street was
to insist that they were poor, not mad, and
wring hands in a kabuki of crisis, side-
appeared, brooding over the new San
Gimignano like Mothra. This went on for
at least a year, until the restaurant owner
took his staff and his tiramisu to a new
location down the street.
Mayor Bloomberg, whose attention
nothing escapes, has decided to reform
the sidewalk shed. An international design competition was announced in 2009
and the winner was a 28-year-old architecture student at the university of
Pennsylvania, who came up with a design
he called urban umbrellas. The supports
look a little bit like old Paris metro entrances or fan vaulting for unbelievers.
Since ribbed metal and blue plywood
would spoil the effect, the decks and the
parapets will be made of some sort of
clear plastic. Any smoke from forbidden
cigarettes will waft away between the
arms of the umbrellas. This being New
York, the first prototype was not unveiled
until last December. When a new shed
went up this month, down the street from
my front door, all I heard was pang pang
pang and clang and smock.
47
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Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Mr. Powell and His Peers
LL political lives,” said the British politician
Enoch Powell many years ago, “unless they
are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture,
end in failure, because that is the nature of
politics and of human affairs.” It’s certainly the nature of politics in the Westminster system. Consider the dazzling Tony
Blair of 1997, and the universally reviled “Bliar” of a decade
later, skulking into premature retirement against his will
and cursed as a warmongering Bush stooge who’d sold his
soul and gotten nothing in return.
Powell himself spent the final third of his life as his own dictum’s ultimate cautionary tale. Asked in his twilight how he
would wish to be remembered, he replied, “I should like to have
been killed in the war,” which seems a tad gloomy even for him.
Yet, upon his centenary this month, I found myself struck not for
the first time by his relevance. Not because he got everything
right, but because he got enough right of the things that almost
everybody else got totally wrong and that haunt us still. Powell
is little known in America, and his antipathy to the United
States dated back at least as far as the 1943 Churchill-Roosevelt
Casablanca summit, which he attended as a staff officer.
Thereafter, he was never well disposed toward Uncle Sam,
which avuncular epithet almost certainly never passed his oddly
sculpted and forbidding lips: As he once conceded, he was
“allergic” to “the things that are typically American.” This “allergy” was about all he had in common with his bête noire, the
faux-Tory technocrat Euro-fetishist Edward Heath. On almost
every other matter, Heath was wrong, and Powell was right.
In Britain’s Daily Mail, his biographer Simon Heffer reminded readers of a few of them. In 1957 (pre–Milton Friedman), he insisted that public debt would lead to economic
decline, and that government should denationalize the public
sector and use the proceeds for tax cuts. The European Union?
Incompatible with self-government. The euro? It would lead,
inevitably, to the loss of economic sovereignty. You might
argue that all the above is entirely obvious—except that, to
varying degrees, Messrs. Obama and Hollande, Frau Merkel,
the Spanish government, and the Greek electorate are busy
trying to disprove the obvious 15 years after Powell’s death.
He was a diligent attender of the Conservative Philosophy
Group. On one occasion, just before the Argentines invaded
the Falklands, Mrs. Thatcher spoke about the Christian concept of the just war and Western values. “We do not fight for
values,” said Powell. “I would fight for this country even if it
had a Communist government.” “Nonsense, Enoch,” snapped
Maggie. “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend
our values.” Powell stuck to his guns. “No, Prime Minister,
values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time.
They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.” John Casey,
co-founder of the group, asserted that Mrs. Thatcher had just
been confronted with the difference between British Toryism
and American Republicanism. Be that as it may, it also applied
‘A
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).
48
|
to differences closer to home: In Iraq, the aforementioned
Mr. Blair thought he was fighting a war for his party’s famous
“values” only to find that his party and its voters thought he
was fighting a war for another country’s interests.
Powell was famous and notorious, loved and hated, for a
single political intervention, the so-called Rivers of Blood
speech on immigration, the one that ended his career. However, his personal favorite among his many speeches was the
one on what NR readers may find his rather arcane objection
to the 1953 Royal Titles Bill, addressing modifications to
the Queen’s style in her various realms. He denounced the
changes as “a sham . . . something which we have invented to
blind ourselves to the reality.” I would hazard that was also his
objection to “values”—that too often they’re something we
invent to blind ourselves to reality. Likewise “Europe” as a
political construct, and “multiculturalism” as a civilizational
virtue. To oppose them is to embrace nationalism, or nativism,
or racism, or something else polite society disdains to put in its
portfolio of “values.” Powell thought it impossible to “foresee
how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change.”
That’s to say, rapid one-way biculturalism is inherently transformative. That would seem to be stating the obvious, but stating the obvious became more difficult in an age of “values,”
and arguing against values and virtue and moral preening
was tougher than arguing against monetary policy.
He had been a professor of Greek at 25, the youngest
brigadier in the British army, a reforming health minister, and
then he gave one speech and it was all over. The British state
is fulsome with its baubles: Harold Macmillan, the prime
minister who put Powell in the cabinet, was garlanded with an
earldom; Edward Heath, the Tory leader who fired him, was
made a Knight of the Garter; even the mediocrity who preceded him as health minister got a baronetcy and a peerage.
But almost alone among his generation of cabinet ministers,
Enoch died as plain old Mr. Powell.
Which, in its way, was fitting. Out on the streets, he was, like
Madonna or Bono, one of those rare uninominal celebrities: To
the despair of captive leftie passengers, cabbies the length and
breadth of the realm enthused about “Enoch.” A decade after
his death and in a jurisdiction for which he had little use, John
O’Sullivan and I took a taxi ride in Dublin in which our driver
ended his disquisition on immigration with the words, “Enoch
got it right.” I once wrote a piece on the increasingly crusty and
reactionary Aussie feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Fe male Eunuch, which a waggish editor headlined “The Female
Enoch,” confident that every reader would get the joke.
Most of today’s political class will end their lives as failures, too, and without even the consolations of contrarianism.
But, on statism, Europe, multiculturalism, and much else,
Powell taught a very basic lesson—that any sane person
should be instinctively skeptical when all the smart people
agree. The “unforeseen consequences” are usually out there
on the not-so-far horizon looming large in plain sight.
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The Imperial President . . . . . . and His Discontents

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