How Gov. Chris Christie is winning the battle of
Transcription
How Gov. Chris Christie is winning the battle of
2010_8_2 postal_cover61404-postal.qxd 7/27/2010 7:07 PM Page 1 August 16, 2010 49145 $3.95 Vincent J. Cannato on Norman Podhoretz Trenton Thunder How Gov. Chris Christie is winning the battle of New Jersey DANIEL FOSTER $3.95 0 74851 08155 33 6 www.nationalreview.com base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/27/2010 4:09 PM Page 1 toc_QXP-1127940144.qxp 7/28/2010 2:16 PM Page 1 Contents AUGUST 16, 2010 COVER STORY | VOLUME LXII, NO. 15 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m Page 28 The Scourge of Trenton A near-pristine version of Gov. Chris Christie’s fat-trimming budget passed at 1:13 A.M. on June 29, less than 24 hours before New Jersey’s constitutional deadline. It followed a long night of debate that was less the Democrats’ Waterloo than their Battle of New Orleans, coming long after the war had ended. Daniel Foster Jay Nordlinger on a Hot Race in Wisconsin . . . p. 32 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS 42 COVER: DARREN GYGI ARTICLES 16 SHERIFF M CAIN by Robert Costa 46 C To the chagrin of his primary opponent, the Arizona senator has dramatically recast himself. 18 BLACK BUDGET IN THE RED by Julian Sanchez 48 The American economy does not. THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY Andrew Stuttaford reviews William Golding, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies: A Life, by John Carey. by Robert P. George & Matthew J. Franck Congress should defend religious freedom on campus as it defended military recruiting. 24 DO PROGRESSIVES DREAM OF ELECTRIC CARS? THE DRIVE TO CREATE George Gilder reviews The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley. There is waste and fraud in national-security spending, too. 22 SOLOMONIC WISDOM THE PRIZE FIGHTER Vincent J. Cannato reviews Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, by Thomas L. Jeffers. by Henry Payne 50 FILM: . . . AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON Ross Douthat reviews Inception. FEATURES 28 THE SCOURGE OF TRENTON 51 by Daniel Foster New Jersey governor Chris Christie is winning a war for fiscal sanity. 32 A CLASH OF OPPOSITES John Derbyshire becomes a cyclist. by Jay Nordlinger Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, finds himself in a hot race with an Oshkosh businessman. 35 STATUS HIATUS by Michael Knox Beran Conservatism should recognize the value of a refuge from social hierarchy. 38 BAN THE BURQA THE STRAGGLER: ON THY SILVER WHEELS by Claire Berlinski To do so is an offense to liberty; not to do so is a greater one. SECTIONS 2 4 41 43 52 Letters to the Editor The Week The Long View . . . . . . . Rob Long Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Ruden Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks NATiONAl RevieW (iSSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATiONAl RevieW, inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © National Review, inc., 2010. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to editorial Dept., NATiONAl RevieW, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATiONAl RevieW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. eastern time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NATiONAl RevieW, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-6797330. POSTMASTeR: Send address changes to NATiONAl RevieW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATeS: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 2 Letters AUGUST 16 ISSUE; PRINTED JULY 29 EDITOR 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 National Correspondent John J. Miller Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson Associate Editors Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen Research Director Katherine Connell Research Manager Dorothy McCartney Executive Secretary Frances Bronson Contributing Editors Robert H. Bork / John Derbyshire Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum Roman Genn / 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. N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez Managing Editor Edward John Craig Deputy Managing Editor Duncan Currie Staff Reporter Stephen Spruiell News Editor Daniel Foster Web Developer Nathan Goulding Technical Services Russell Jenkins Acceptable Risk? In his article “Preferred Risk” (July 5), Iain Murray states that “the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which encourages building in high-risk areas, [exposes] taxpayers to huge liabilities.” I disagree. While it may seem that offering people flood insurance will encourage them to build in areas that are subject to flooding, just as having collision coverage encourages reckless driving, the NFIP is actually set up to discourage development in flood-prone areas. And while the NFIP ran into the red after Katrina, it is supposed to remain solvent. Whenever NFIP is solvent, people with flood insurance are paying the full cost of the risk they’re taking. Homeowners can purchase flood insurance only in communities that participate in the NFIP. In order to participate, a community must adopt base ordinances from FEMA that encourage sound development. Residents in communities without these ordinances may construct within flood-prone areas anyway, and in a manner less than sound: bridges that do not allow sufficient flow of water, acting as dams during floods; septic systems; propane tanks. The result is that when a flood does occur, other property owners face higher waters filled with hazardous materials. The only way to fully prevent development and construction in flood-prone areas would be to extinguish development rights on those properties. If a community does this without purchasing the properties (which few communities can afford to do), the property owners could sue. By implementing FEMA’s requirements for development within the floodplain, communities can ensure sound development. Justin Gindlesperger Boulder, Colo. E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan Contributors Hadley Arkes / Baloo / Tom Bethell James Bowman / Priscilla L. Buckley Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler James Jackson Kilpatrick / David Klinghoffer Anthony Lejeune / D. Keith Mano Michael Novak / Alan Reynolds William A. Rusher / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Taki Theodoracopulos Vin Weber Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Zofia Baraniak Treasurer Rose Flynn DeMaio Business Services Alex Batey / Amy Tyler Circulation Director Erik Zenhausern Circulation Manager Jason Ng WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett PUBLISHER Jack Fowler CHAIRMAN EMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes IAIN MuRRAy REPlIEs: The NFIP may appear to be designed to encourage “sound development,” but in practice it hasn’t worked that way. There are several studies on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s website that explain the problems with the NFIP in great detail. This quotation, from Eli lehrer’s July 2008 paper “Reforming the National Flood Insurance Program after 35 years of failure,” summarizes this particular issue: A study from the National Wildlife Federation describes the dimensions of this problem. Many properties, including some supposedly located in “safe” areas, have sustained loss after loss with almost no end in sight. David Conrad, the report’s author, put it well in a conversation with the author: “Even if it were enforced properly, the ‘100 year flood plain’ standard would mean that a home would have about a one-in-four chance of flooding in the course of a mortgage.” As for the funding, the program has cost taxpayers billions of dollars despite promises that it would sustain itself. The NFIP is broken and is in need of serious reform. Corrections Mario loyola’s “Beyond the spill” (August 2) stated that Richard Epstein is a university of Chicago law professor. Epstein is now employed at the New york university law school. Also, the Obama administration’s original offshoredrilling moratorium affected 33 drilling projects, not 100. FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr. Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected]. 2 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m AUGUST 16, 2010 Explore the Fall and Rise of China In the last century, China has undergone an astounding transformation. Currently, China is set to outpace the United States economically in the coming decades, making it the richest, most powerful nation on earth. How can we account for this momentous, unanticipated rise? What does it mean for us in the West? Speaking to these questions, The Fall and Rise of China brings to life the human struggles, political upheavals, and spectacular speed of China’s rebirth. In 48 intriguing lectures, China expert and Professor Richard Baum offers insights into one of the most astounding dramas in modern history. Grasp the core events in China’s recent past, including the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the republican era, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao economic “miracle.” Taking you to the heart of the story, Professor Baum leaves you with a clear view of the developments that created the China you see in today’s headlines. This course is one of The Great Courses , a noncredit recorded college lecture series from The Teaching Company. Awardwinning professors of a wide array of subjects in the sciences and the liberal arts have made more than 300 college-level courses that are available now on our website. ® ® Order Today! Offer Expires Friday, October 15, 2010 The Fall and Rise of China Course No. 8370 48 lectures (30 minutes/lecture) DVDs $519.95 NOW $129.95 + $20 Shipping, Processing, and Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee Audio CDs $359.95 NOW $89.95 + $15 Shipping, Processing, and Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee Priority Code: 39467 © Ian D. Walker/Shutterstock. base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:35 PM Page 1 The Fall and Rise of China Taught by Professor Richard Baum, University of California, Los Angeles Lecture Titles 1. The Splendor That Was China, 600–1700 2. Malthus and Manchu Hubris, 1730–1800 3. Barbarians at the Gate, 1800–1860 4. Rural Misery and Rebellion, 1842–1860 5. The Self-Strengthening Movement, 1860–1890 6. Hundred Days of Reform and the Boxer Uprising 7. The End of Empire, 1900–1911 8. The Failed Republic, 1912–1919 9. The Birth of Chinese Communism, 1917–1925 10. Chiang, Mao, and Civil War, 1926–1934 11. The Republican Experiment, 1927–1937 12. “Resist Japan!” 1937–1945 13. Chiang’s Last Stand, 1945–1949 14. “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” 15. Korea, Taiwan, and the Cold War, 1950–1954 16. Socialist Transformation, 1953–1957 17. Cracks in the Monolith, 1957–1958 18. The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 19. Demise of the Great Leap Forward, 1959–1962 20. “Never Forget Class Struggle!” 1962–1965 21. “Long Live Chairman Mao!” 1964–1965 22. Mao’s Last Revolution Begins, 1965–1966 23. The Children’s Crusade, 1966–1967 24. The Storm Subsides, 1968–1969 25. The Sino-Soviet War of Nerves, 1964–1969 26. Nixon, Kissinger, and China, 1969–1972 27. Mao’s Deterioration and Death, 1971–1976 28. The Legacy of Mao Zedong— An Appraisal 29. The Post-Mao Interregnum, 1976–1977 30. Hua Guofeng and the Four Modernizations 31. Deng Takes Command, 1978–1979 32. The Historic Third Plenum, 1978 33. The “Normalization” of U.S.China Relations 34. Deng Consolidates His Power, 1979–1980 35. Socialist Democracy and the Rule of Law 36. Burying Mao, 1981–1983 37. “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” 1982–1986 38. The Fault Lines of Reform, 1984–1987 39. The Road to Tiananmen, 1987–1989 40. The Empire Strikes Back, 1989 41. After the Deluge, 1989–1992 42. The “Roaring Nineties,” 1992–1999 43. The Rise of Chinese Nationalism, 1993–2001 44. China’s Lost Territories— Taiwan, Hong Kong 45. China in the New Millennium, 2000–2008 46. China’s Information Revolution 47. “One World, One Dream”— The 2008 Olympics 48. China’s Rise— The Sleeping Giant Stirs ACT N OW! 1-800-TEACH-12 www.TEACH12.com/5natr week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 4 The Week n Congress has an 11 percent job-approval rating. Who knew there were so many trial lawyers? See page 12. n Midterm elections are generally referenda on the party in power, and that is especially appropriate when the ruling party has as much power as the Democrats do and has deployed it with such sweeping unwisdom. Some Republicans believe that they therefore need no agenda of their own, which does not follow. An agenda, they fear, would give the Democrats an opening to attack them. Besides, they are not sure they can agree on a program. But a forceful critique of applied liberalism makes no sense without an alternative, and voters are bound to notice if Republicans all flounder about as pathetically as Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions, the heads of the Republican congressional campaign committees, did recently on the Sunday shows when asked to offer their ideas. Worse, Republicans will continue to flounder after the elections if they have not put forward any ideas. The country needs smarter and better policies: tax reform, spending cuts, a ban on federal funding of abortion . . . The list could go on, if Republicans remember that the point of politics is governance. ROMAN GENN n A few Democrats are breaking ranks on taxes: Some moderates, and a few liberals from wealthy districts, do not think that tax rates should be allowed to rise while the economy remains weak. The Obama administration’s view is that Bush’s tax cuts on the middle class should be extended but tax cuts on high incomes, capital gains, and dividends should lapse. Even if we needed to hike taxes on the rich to cut the deficit— and spending cuts would be far preferable—this would be just about the most economically destructive way to do it. Republicans should hold firm while the Democrats negotiate with one another. n Decades ago NR’s Joe Sobran called liberals “the hive.” They all swarmed at once, as if on cue. The JournoList scandal is an ethologist’s trove of bee behavior. Ezra Klein, Washington Post blogger, ran a listserv of several hundred journalists and academics, many of them overt lefties writing for The Nation or Mother Jones, but some—Jeffrey Toobin, Joe Klein—with mainstream-media outfits. The list was revealed, and shut down, weeks ago. But Tucker Carlson’s website, The Daily Caller, has been doling out threads from 2008, when the goal was to help Obama. What stands out? The unity of purpose, assumed, but also affirmed with ritual chest thumps. “We need to throw chairs now” (Michael Tomasky, Guardian). The witless wrath of online rhetoric. “Find a rightwinger’s [?] and smash it through a plate glass window” (Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent). The rare demurral. “I am really tired of defending the indefensible” (Katha Pollitt, The Nation). But quotation does not do JournoList justice. Read it all, and weep. Bees? No—flea circus. 4 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m n The outfit called WikiLeaks managed to tell us what we already knew about the Afghan War, while endangering our sources on the ground and revealing information about our tactics in the process. Access to the massive dump of classified documents was provided first to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel so they could run simultaneous “scoops.” The last two of these left-leaning papers adopted the storyline favored by the anti-war founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who claims the documents support war-crimes charges (apparently we hunt down and kill top-level members of the Taliban). The document’s tales of the frustrations of the war from 2001 to 2009 aren’t new and haven’t been denied by military or civilian officials. They are precisely why President Obama ordered this year’s surge to reverse the war’s trajectory. Needless to say, the war effort remains beset by serious problems, including the duplicity of the Pakistani secret service that is highlighted in the leaks, but there was no need to splay sensitive documents across the Internet to establish it. n Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) had a lot going for him: Forty years in the House; old-fashioned oily charm; and race, which guaranteed him a safe Harlem seat and protection from the shafts of unfriendly scrutiny. Two years ago, however, the magic lost its spell. Rangel had not paid taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic, nor declared hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets; he gave a tax break to an energy company whose CEO pledged a million bucks to a collegiate institute AUGUST 16, 2010 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 5 named for him; and he was found to be occupying four rentcontrolled apartments (ordinary New Yorkers get only one—if they’re lucky enough to find it). For months, House Democrats have been negotiating to let him off easy, in return for an apology. He admits to sloppy bookkeeping regarding his villa and his assets but won’t concede anything about the fundraising or the apartments. “I’m in the kitchen,” he said at a Harlem press conference, “and I’m not walking out.” If he doesn’t, Democrats can look forward to his September trial before a bipartisan House ethics subcommittee—a fine warm-up for November. n The special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) issued a tough rebuke of the Obama administration’s foreclosure-relief program, which has been funded using TARP money. The program is intended to help underwater homeowners stay in their homes by putting them in pilot programs to see if they can make lower payments, with the government subsidizing lenders for part of the loss. The problem is that lenders already have incentives to work out deals with borrowers who are good candidates for loan modifications. The administration’s program is helping the bad candidates stay for a few more months in homes they cannot afford while helping the lenders get a few extra payments they might not otherwise have gotten, but cannot prevent an inevitable correction in the housing market. The program “has not put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings,” the IG’s report stated, and the American people are “being asked to shoulder an addi- tional $50 billion in national debt without being told . . . how many people Treasury hopes to actually help.” Hmm . . . can we ask China for a loan modification? n The new health-care law establishes federally funded highrisk pools that cover people whose preexisting conditions make it hard for them to get private insurance. Officials in Pennsylvania and New Mexico suggested that the pools would cover abortions. After pro-lifers objected, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement saying that abortion would be covered only in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s life. Pro-abortion groups howled, pointing out that the text of the health-care law contains no such restriction. They are right about that; and until the law is modified or repealed, there is always a chance that the courts or the executive branch will fund abortions on a large scale in this or some other portion of Obamacare. The supposedly pro-life Democrats who voted for the law have chosen to spin it as a pro-life triumph rather than to try to fix it. They would rather keep the peace in their party than keep faith with their stated convictions. n Unable to find the votes in the Senate for strict caps on carbon emissions, Senate majority leader Harry Reid has decided to drop the restrictions in favor of an energy strategy that always finds plenty of ready “ayes”: a grab-bag of subsidies for wind, solar, and biofuels, plus maybe a few tax hikes on Big Oil. Don’t celebrate just yet: For one thing, the Democrats 5 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 6 THE WEEK could try again during a lame-duck session of Congress, even though it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the votes that weren’t there before November suddenly become available. For another, Obama’s EPA is moving ahead with unilateral restrictions on carbon emissions, a Supreme Court decision having cleared the way. We won’t be able to breathe free until a sufficiently empowered Congress can put an end to the EPA’s advances. n The report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force em paneled by Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) is a defense-policy document masquerading as a budget document. Charged with finding savings in our behemoth national-security budget, the committee instead has recommended sweeping changes in our military posture and repackaged them as penny-pinching measures. Among the report’s suggestions: $1 trillion in total military-spending cuts, $113.5 billion in savings from diminishing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, $147 billion in savings from reversing the growth in the Army and Marine Corps that accompanied the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, $126.6 billion in savings from reducing the size of the Navy’s fleet. Missile defense is in the crosshairs as well—a reliable sign of ideological bias (the economic value of removing the possibility of a missile strike on New York City, Washington, or Los Angeles considerably exceeds the cost of implementing appropriate defenses). It may be the case that the naval fleet should be The Deregulation That Wasn’t S we approach the election, one of the key Democratic talking points is the assertion that the economic mess we are still in was caused by unwise Republican deregulation. In the second presidential debate of 2008, Candidate Obama remarked, “[Regulation] is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked, and we need fundamental change.” Republicans, the story goes, are in bed with greedy capitalists and eager to pollute the earth, air, water, and financial markets if it helps their wealthy buddies turn a profit. To be sure, Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have often talked a good game when it comes to deregulation. But did they really deliver? It is difficult to know exactly how large the cost of regulation is for society, but one useful measure is simply the amount of government resources dedicated to supporting the regulatory structure. An invaluable recent report by Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren (published by George Washington University and Washington University) tracks recent trends in regulation. While the study considers many measures, the nearby chart focuses on one in particular, plotting the number of people employed by the main federal regulatory agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, Energy, Labor, Trans portation, Agriculture, and Commerce, as well as the Fed eral Reserve. Over the past half century, the number of government regulators has more than tripled, from approximately 40,000 in 1960 to 124,000 in 2009. It increased at a fairly steady rate except for two notable periods. The number declined under Ronald Reagan, from 111,000 in 1980 to a trough of 95,000 in 1984. George H. W. Bush reversed all of Reagan’s pro gress, but then, surprisingly, Bill Clinton’s attention to reducing the deficit took a toll on regulators as well. Under George W. Bush, the number of regulators increased from 115,000 to 119,000, hardly a Reaganesque A 6 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m outcome. If we include homeland-security personnel, the number of regulators increased under George W. Bush from 176,000 to 249,000. Economist George Stigler taught us that the problem with regulation is that regulators tend not to be successful, in part because they get captured by the firms they are supposed to be policing. An unsuccessful regulator can lead to a bigger crisis than might happen absent any regulation, because unwary private individuals are lulled into complacency. Given that Bush handed Obama a regulatory work force that was at least 3.3 percent larger than the one he inherited from President Clinton, there is very little evidence that Bush did much to reduce intrusive regulation during his term. And given the growth in regulation over the period leading up to the financial crisis, it is also difficult to support the view that deregulation had anything to do with it. The next time you hear someone blame deregulation, your answer should be: “What deregulation?” —KEVIN A. HASSETT Federal Government Regulators 140,000 120,000 100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 60 19 65 19 70 19 75 19 80 19 85 19 90 19 95 19 00 20 05 20 10 20 SOURCE: DUDLEY & WARREN, “A DECADE OF GROWTH IN THE REGULATORS' BUDGET: AN ANALYSIS OF THE U.S. BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEARS 2010 AND 2011.” NOTE: DOES NOT INCLUDE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY EMPLOYEES. AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:37 PM Page 1 It’s not the advice you’d expect. Learning a new language seems formidable, as we recall from years of combat with grammar and translations in school. Yet infants begin at birth. They communicate at eighteen months and speak the language fluently before they go to school. And they never battle translations or grammar explanations along the way. Born into a veritable language jamboree, children figure out language purely from the sounds, objects and interactions around them. 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It’s a smile of recognition, as though the brain suddenly recalls what it was like to learn language as a child, as though it realizes, “Aha! I’ve done this before.” Third, children learn through play, whether it’s the arm-waving balancing act that announces their first step or the spluttering preamble to their first words. All the conversational chatter skittering through young children’s play with parents and playmates—“…what’s this…” “…clap, clap your hands…” “…my ball…”—helps children develop language skills that connect them to the world. Adults possess this same powerful language-learning ability that orchestrated our language success as children. Sadly, our clashes with vocabulary drills and grammar explanations force us to conclude it’s hopeless. We simply don’t have “the language learning gene.” At Rosetta Stone,we know otherwise. You can recover your native language-learning ability as an adult by prompting your brain to learn language the way it’s wired to learn language: by complete Act like a baby? You bet. Visit our website and find out how you can reactivate your own innate, language-learning ability with Rosetta Stone. It’s the fastest way to learn a language. Guaranteed.® SAVE 10% TODAY WHEN YOU ORDER Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM products. Level 1 Reg. $229 $206 Level 1,2,&3 Reg. $539 $485 Level 1,2,3,4,&5 Reg. $699 $629 More than 30 languages available. WIN/MAC compatible. SIX-MONTH, NO-RISK, MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE.* PICK UP A NEW LANGUAGE TODAY! (866) 785-7012 RosettaStone.com/qds080 Use promo code qds080 when ordering. ©2010 Rosetta Stone Ltd. All rights reserved. Offer limited to Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM products purchased directly from Rosetta Stone, and cannot be combined with any other offer. Prices subject to change without notice. Offer expires November 30, 2010. *Six-Month, No-Risk, Money-Back Guarantee is limited to Version 3 CD-ROM product purchases made directly from Rosetta Stone and does not include return shipping. Guarantee does not apply to any online subscription, or to Audio Companion® CDs purchased separately from the CD-ROM product. All materials included with the product at time of purchase must be returned together and undamaged to be eligible for any exchange or refund. week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 8 THE WEEK reduced, or that we have too many Marines—but those are broad strategic questions that must be considered on their own merits, not sneaked in under the pretense of budget-balancing. n We didn’t have to wait long to see the first unintended consequence of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Democrats’ financialregulation overhaul. Due to a last-minute change in the laws governing legal liability for the ratings agencies, bond raters such as Moody’s and Fitch asked bond issuers not to use their ratings until they got a “better understanding” of their legal exposure. This shut down the bond markets until the SEC was forced to temporarily suspend requirements that all bond offerings come packaged with credit ratings. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works,” Sen. Chris Dodd famously said of the bill that bears his name. That is one thing he got right. SCOTT J. FERRELL/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY n The Justice Department quietly announced that there would be no prosecutions based on President Bush’s firing of eight district U.S. attorneys. This should be no surprise. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, who requires no cause to dismiss them. These firings, however, were relentlessly demagogued by Democrats and their media helpers, who conveniently forgot that, in one fell swoop, President Clinton had fired almost all sitting U.S. attorneys—an unabashed exercise in partisan patronage. The Bush Justice Department turned over thousands of documents to congressional investigators and made top officials available for interview and testimony. Yet there was no calming the ginned-up furor, which prompted multiple investigations, baseless allegations that Justice had been “politicized,” and the resignation of overmatched attorney general Alberto Gonzales, whose cluelessness made his mishandling of the controversy easy to portray as sinister. With Democrats now controlling the White House, the Justice Department has become better known for stonewalling on its actual politicizing of enforcement. Somehow, though, lawmakers have lost interest in their vaunted oversight function. Funny how that happens. n Vice President Biden says the problem with the stimulus is that it wasn’t big enough—and the Republicans are to blame. In support of this proposition, he cites “Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small.” We’re sure Nobel laureates Barack Obama, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and maybe even the Dalai Lama agree, and the evidence is certainly clear-cut: Amount of stimulus, $862 billion; result, nothing much; conclusion, stimulus too small. The beauty of this theory is that it works equally well with any number. That’s damn fine economics; but regarding who gets the blame for Congress’s stinginess, Biden explains that “in order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes.” It’s just like this administration to use the three Republican votes they did attract as evidence of “bipartisan support,” then turn around and blame them for everything that’s wrong with the economy. n One of Florida’s U.S. Senate seats is open, and real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene is running in the late-August Democratic primary. Recent news out of Belize may have cost him the green 8 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m vote. Belize has a fine, carefully conserved coral reef; Jeff Greene has a large luxury yacht. Five years ago the yacht— Greene not aboard—dropped anchor on the reef, causing much damage, then sailed away without making restitution. Belize claims $1.87 million in fines and damages. In other billionaireDemocrat-yacht news, John Kerry, senior senator from Massachusetts, has been docking his own $7 million luxury sloop in Rhode Island to avoid nearly half a million in Bay State taxes. That’s a pittance for this plutocrat, and Kerry eventually offered to pay it—after initial responses that were evasive and testy. Don’t they know who he is? n Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren is apparently a very good teacher. Last year, she won the law school’s teaching award for the second time in her career. Her scholarship on bankruptcy has won her acclaim among liberals and made her a favorite to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But her positions on consumer finance indicate that putting her in charge of this agency would be a dangerous thing to do. Warren holds the view that Americans need to be protected from themselves when it comes to borrowing money, and we have every reason to think she would move swiftly to curtail many forms of credit that are welfare-enhancing when used responsibly. In advocating the new agency, Warren famously compared certain kinds of variablerate loans to defective toasters, inviting the obvious reply that a defective toaster is always defective whereas a variable-rate loan blows up only if used to gamble on the housing market. Warren should stick to the classroom, where her misguided ideas can do less damage. n The “Cordoba Initiative” would erect a $100 million mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero, where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project’s face, says it’s about interfaith tolerance. Cordoba, though, was the caliphate that marked its 711 A.D. conquest of Spain by converting an ancient church into a huge mosque complex. Rauf, who urges America to become more shariacompliant, wrote a 2004 book called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America—except overseas, where it was provocatively titled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post9/11. Sometimes called “stealth jihad,” dawa is the aggressive promotion of Islam by which influential Islamists promise to “conquer America.” Rauf’s book was reissued by two American arms of the Muslim Brotherhood: the Islamic Society of North America and the International Institute of Islamic Thought. The Brotherhood was at the center of the government’s recent prosecution of a charitable front, the Holy Land Foundation, for sending millions of dollars to Hamas. It identified ISNA (which housed and directly funded Holy Land) and IIIT as participants in its “grand jihad” aimed at AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:39 PM Page 1 Direct from Locked Vaults to U.S. Citizens! 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AB-B89 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 10 THE WEEK “destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house.” The Ground Zero mosque is a very bad idea. n Lynne Stewart, the 69-year-old radical lawyer, was convicted in 2005 for material support to terrorism, specifically, for helping her former client, Omar Abdel Rahman (the notorious “blind sheikh” behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), pass directions to his Egyptian terrorist organization from jail. Though she was facing 30 years in prison, a sympathetic Manhattan federal judge absurdly sentenced her to less than 30 months, and added insult to injury by permitting her to remain free on bail for years while she appealed— even though, apart from the ludicrously light sentence, the case presented no serious issues. In 2009, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals finally ordered her to prison and, more important, ordered the trial judge to reconsider the sentence. He has now imposed a ten-year term. It is significantly less than what the government was seeking, but at least it approximates justice for her crimes. n Back in April, following an episode of South Park that depicted the prophet Mohammed in a bear costume, Virginia resident Zachary Adam Chesser suggested, on the website Revolution Muslim, that the cartoon series’s creators should throw out the Arizona law on grounds that it interferes with the executive branch’s ability to make foreign policy. This contention must rank high on the list of the perversities of the federal lawsuit against Arizona. If taken seriously, it would give foreign powers a veto over our immigration laws. For the original sinner here is not Arizona, but the United States Congress, which passed the laws in the first place that Arizona is only trying to help enforce (over the fierce resistance of the federal government, bizarrely enough). If the Obama administration is so fearful of offending Presidente Calderón, it can petition Congress to revise immigration law in a more liberal direction. In the meantime, Phoenix needn’t take dictation from Mexico City. n In the past several years, many immigration restrictionists have embraced the idea of “attrition through enforcement.” If we simply enforce our immigration laws, the logic goes, it will be hard for illegals to live a normal life here, and they’ll head back home, no “mass deportation” needed. Arizona’s new law—which allows police officers to demand immigration paperwork in the course of a lawful stop or arrest, and makes it illegal for day laborers to solicit work from roads and sidewalks if doing so slows down traffic—provides some evidence that this strategy could work: Even before the law went into effect, illegal immigrants began to leave the state. Of The arrest of Zachary Adam Chesser underscores the bravery of the South Park team in confronting Islamic radicalism. fear for their lives. Coming from Chesser, it turns out, this may have been no idle threat: On July 10, he was detained while trying to board a plane to Uganda and charged with providing material support to al-Shabaab, a terrorist group based in Somalia with ties to al-Qaeda. We of course hope that the federal government gets to the bottom of Chesser’s case, and that it tries, within the confines of the law, to press him for any important information he has. The arrest underscores the bravery of the South Park team in confronting Islamic radicalism—though we cannot say the same for the show’s cable network, Comedy Central, which censored a subsequent episode in the wake of the threat. n D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 241 teachers, 165 of them for being rated “ineffective” under DCPS’s brand-new teacher-evaluation system. For perspective: In 2006, the year before Rhee took over, the number of DCPS teachers fired for incompetence was zero. The Washington Teachers’ Union is suing, of course, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has condemned Rhee for “adhering to the destructive cycle of ‘fire, hire, repeat.’” Here’s hoping she does adhere to it, with emphasis on repeat. n Arizona passed a law telling police to check the identification of suspected illegal aliens. Mexico objected. The Obama administration thinks this should be enough for a judge to 10 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m course, many of those who left simply went to other states, and it might be harder to get them to leave the country entirely. But this does show that law enforcement affects behavior. We should try it on a nationwide scale. n The DREAM Act, reintroduced in Congress last year and currently languishing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, provides a path to amnesty for persons illegally resident in the U.S. who came here as minors, provided they have graduated from high school and are of good moral character. Trying to get some movement on the bill, several hundred activists showed up on Capitol Hill the other day. Two dozen of them squatted in the Hart Senate Office Building. Asked to move, they refused and were arrested. All were illegal immigrants, and proudly declared the fact in hopes of attracting the attentions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE of course did nothing. The squatters were given court-appearance dates, then released. Their spokesman told the press they were disappointed not to have been turned over to federal officials because it would have dramatized their actions. We share the disappointment, though for different reasons. n The Democrats are waging a scorched-earth campaign against jobs for teenagers. The effects of the 2007–09 increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 are being felt, and here’s the shocking new development in economics: Demand curves still slope downward. As the price of labor has gone up, AUGUST 16, 2010 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 11 employment has gone down among those most likely to earn the minimum wage: teenagers seeking part-time jobs. Youth unemployment, which had been going down for years, is up, to 25 percent. Researchers at the Employment Policies Institute calculate that the hike in the federal minimum wage has reduced teen employment by 6.9 percent in those states where the federal minimum exceeds the state minimum. Milton Friedman, who understood the effects of an artificial wage floor on marginal workers, called the minimum wage the “most anti-black law on the statute books”—a fact illustrated by the current unemployment rate for black youths: 45 percent. The real value of a first entry-level job isn’t the wages earned by flipping burgers for a summer, but the ex perience of being in the work force and developing needful skills. Which is to say, the real value of a first job is a second job. A higher minimum wage means that first summer job never happens for too many young Americans. n Sen. James Webb (D., Va.) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” that places him alongside the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a racial heretic in his party. “Present-day diversity programs,” Webb argues, have “expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.” Webb argues that the twin curses of slavery and Jim Crow still justify affirmative action for black Americans. But recent non-white immigrants get help they do not need. At the end of the last century, over 60 percent of young Chinese- and Indian-Americans had college degrees, as compared with less than 20 percent of white Baptists. “Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.” The clause before the comma will spare Webb a primary challenge in 2012. But the rest of the sentence still leaves him in Coventry. DOUGLAS C. PIZAC/AP n When the House Natural Resources Committee considered an amendment to end the Gulf drilling moratorium, 22 representatives voted in favor and 21 voted against. Yet the amendment failed—because five delegates, representing assorted U.S. territories, voted no. (Delegates can vote in committees but not on a bill’s final passage.) Of the five, one represents Puerto Rico, which, as a Caribbean island with 4 million people, perhaps deserves some voice in the matter. But the others were from Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a combined population short of 500,000. That’s considerably fewer than a congressional district—yet these four delegates cast deciding votes on a vital question of national policy. The practice of giving microterritories a voice in Congress is questionable in any case, since it is essentially representation without taxation; but having four members on one committee from flyspecks that amount to Democratic pocket boroughs, each with a full vote, makes a joke of the strict democracy that the House of Representatives is supposed to stand for. n The southern-California town of Bell has a median household income of $40,000, compared with a statewide figure of $61,000. There was therefore general astonishment when the Los Angeles Times revealed the annual salaries paid to municipal officials in Bell: $787,637 to the city manager, $376,288 to the assistant manager, $457,000 to the police chief. Most city-council members were paid $100,000 or more for their part-time positions. State attorney general Jerry Brown (who is running for governor) has launched a full investigation, with prosecutions threatened. The highest-paid officials have resigned. All well and good; but how long has this been going on without the citizens of Bell noticing? How could they not have noticed? n Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, is a cheeky freshman congressman. In January, during a Republican retreat in Baltimore, at which the president was the guest of honor, he confronted Obama for some broken promises: no lobbyists in senior administration jobs, for example. And he has now taken a stand against sports resolutions: resolutions honoring athletes and institutions for various achievements or milestones. Congress was honoring the Saratoga race course in New York at the start of its 142nd season. And Chaffetz said, in effect, Oh, come on. “It’s an absolute embarrassment,” he declared. What about the kids in the gallery? If they went back home and were asked whether Congress had debated war and peace, taxation and debt, they would have to reply, “Oh, no, they were honoring a race course.” Chaffetz does not like frivolous bills of any type. But he is taking a stand on sports resolutions because athletes already get “more than their fair share of accolades.” We would rather have Congress honor athletes and race courses than do many of the things they do. But we grin at the freshman’s cheek. n The chilly little welfare state to our north, Canada, is running relatively tiny deficits, having engaged only in relatively sober stimulus measures. To no one’s great surprise, Canada’s freedom from heavy government debt and its comparatively liberal economic environment (the Heritage Foundation now ranks its economy as more free than that of the United States) have enabled a much stronger recovery—to the extent that Canada, which has about one-tenth as many people as the United States, added 10,000 more jobs in June: 93,200 to our 83,000. Canada has recovered 97 percent of the jobs lost in the recent economic turmoil. Say what you like about aping the European welfare states, the Canadians do a better job of it than do Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. n The new Tory-LibDem government in Britain is getting written up as though it had disproven the conservative skeptics with its aggressive budget-cutting. Was it Prime Minister David Cameron or his Iron Chancellor George Osborne who said savagely that the cuts imposed by the Con-Lib coalition would be “deeper and tougher” even than those imposed by Margaret Thatcher? Actually it was neither; the words are those of Alistair Darling, the finance minister in the recent Labour government—about his own pre-election budget cuts 11 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 12 THE WEEK in March this year. The clean little truth that all parties would like to deny is that the most of the Cameron government cuts are inherited from its Labour predecessor. As Jeremy Warner pointed out in the Daily Telegraph: “Even the apparently shocking 25pc cut pencilled in for un-protected departmental spending is not quite as bad as it looks. . . . The cut implied by Alistair Darling’s last Budget was already 20pc. In the scale of things, an extra 5pc over five years is neither here nor there.” The explanation for this hidden all-party consensus is TINA. Or, as Lady Thatcher used to say: “There Is No Alternative.” Britain’s national debt stands currently at 62.2 percent of GDP and is predicted to rise above 70 percent by 2014–15. In other words the government is still overspending—it’s merely overspending less. The markets demand restraint. Yet the price for ameliorating a crisis caused entirely by such overspending is a package in which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, tax hikes provide 40 percent of the ready money. Unless, of course, the spending cuts don’t materialize—in which case tax hikes will contribute more. The tax hikes, incidentally, include a sharp rise in the capital-gains tax that will hit Britain’s already-reeling savers, small investors, and, er, Tory voters. Cameron justified this on the grounds that investing in second homes does not contribute much to the economy. Reports of Tory savagery are, alas, vastly exaggerated. n President Obama’s Chicago friend, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, has joined an array of leftists and Islamists in organizing another “peace flotilla” aimed at breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The beneficiary would be Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules the territory Israel ceded in 2005—assured that doing so would promote peace, though the cession has instead encouraged Hamas to continue its jihad. In late May, a similar flotilla was launched by a Turkey-based group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Several of its “peace activists,” armed for hand-to-hand combat, carried out a premeditated attack on the Israeli force that denied them passage, provoking a lethal response in which nine were killed. A voyage launched from the U.S., however, could violate several American laws, including those barring material support to terrorist organizations and the furnishing of a vessel to cruise against a country with which the U.S. is at peace. Khalidi & Co. appear confident that they are immune from enforcement actions by the Obama Justice Department: The ship for the planned fall voyage is to be named The Audacity of Hope. n Who’s that in black leather, with sunglasses and fingerless gloves, revving up at a rally on his Harley-Davidson trike and boasting about it? Why, it’s Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Russia, in the Ukrainian city of Sebastopol, where the Russian Black Sea fleet likes to anchor. In case anyone missed the point that you don’t mess with him and his gang, that same day he revealed that he had met the ten spies just expelled from the United States. Speaking as a former colonel in the KGB, he opined that they had had a tough life undercover, living in New York, learning perfect English, passing themselves off as realtors, and all for the motherland’s benefit. Someone had betrayed them, and traitors finish in a ditch: “The special services live under their own laws, and everyone knows what they are.” Home again, the spies were guaranteed bright and interesting lives. Everyone celebrated the occasion by singing 12 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m songs, including one dating from the 1960s, “What Motherland Begins With.” This is known as the unofficial anthem of Russian intelligence officers. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union in which he grew up is driving Putin to his version of the old Cult of Personality. n Hugo Chávez, strongman of Venezuela, has a thing for Simón Bolívar, Libertador of Latin America. He named his party the Bolivarian Movement. In power, he changed the name of Venezuela to include “Bolivarian Republic.” He has often left a chair empty at cabinet meetings, for Bolívar’s spirit. Etc. And now he has dug him up. Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York–based Human Rights Foundation and a descendant of Bolívar, explained all this in a piece for the Washington Post. “Shortly after midnight on July 16,” Chávez “presided at the exhumation of” Bolívar’s remains. Bits and pieces were removed for “testing.” Chávez implied to the nation that he and Bolívar were one: that he himself was the very reincarnation of Bolívar. Then the remains were reburied, in a new coffin with the Chávez government’s seal. As Halvorssen emphasized, Bolívar was an admirer of the American Founders and Adam Smith. We trust that the Libertador is rolling over in his (desecrated) grave. n Remember the pet rock? Well, meet the politically incorrect rock. That would be serpentine, a greenish magnesium silicate. Serpentine is abundant in California, so much so that in 1965 it was designated the State Rock. Now, alas, serpentine has fallen into disfavor. Some varieties contain traces of asbestos, whose microscopic fibers cause lethal lung diseases when in haled. Thus anyone suffering one of those diseases who might have had contact with serpentine—which is to say, well-nigh anyone in California—has a claim in law. Bank countertops, for example, are often made from polished serpentine, because its color resembles that of paper money. Which is exactly what trial lawyers want to get from the banks. With their backing, Democratic legislator Gloria Romero has a bill before the state senate to strip serpentine of its title. Geologists have rallied to serpentine’s defense. They don’t stand a chance. n Conrad Black, once a media lord with a string of great newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago SunTimes, is in the fight of his life, and he’s winning. Recent judgments in high courts mean that Black’s convictions for fraud have been set aside, and the lower court in Chicago responsible for his massive sentence of six and a half years must reconsider the case. In a Florida jail since March 2008, he’s out on a $2 million bail bond guaranteed by Roger Hertog, the New York financier and philanthropist. A smiling and selfconfident Black tells everyone within earshot that he’s been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Prosecutors and their allies in the media were out to cut him down because he was a flamboyant conservative and capitalist. (He still writes for NRO.) 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Gravitydefyer.com! week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:17 PM Page 14 THE WEEK confront overweening power that the state simply took for itself. It’s unlikely but conceivable that the lower court might uphold his conviction, so his troubles are not yet over. But some of those who delighted in his conviction are already offering nervous apologies. n Daniel Schorr was always celebrated as a “journalist’s journalist,” a fearless, principled man who never hesitated to “speak truth to power.” He often appeared more a left-wing partisan: an I. F. Stone in establishment posts. For 23 years, he worked at CBS News, starting out as one of “Murrow’s boys.” A key moment in his life occurred during the Nixon years, when he landed on that president’s “enemies list.” Speaking to an interviewer last year, he said that he considered his presence on that list a “greater tribute” than his three Emmy awards. In the last 25 years of his life, he was senior news analyst for National Public Radio, fitting in perfectly. Conservatives of a certain vintage may remember him for a very low blow. In 1964, while working for CBS, he filed a report associating Barry Goldwater, then running for president, with Nazi holdovers in Bavaria. The report was false from top to bottom. Goldwater, disgusted beyond belief, banned CBS reporters from his campaign. A journalist’s journalist indeed, Schorr has died at 93. R.I.P. POLITICS Racial Charade word. In this era of ubiquitous cellphones, not one video or audio recording of such an incident has surfaced. Breitbart has offered $100,000 for one; he is still waiting. Early in July the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City passed a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife resolution asking the tea party to “repudiate the racist element and activities” within it. Breitbart wanted to hoist the racist-baiters on their own petard. None of this justified airing the clipped clipping. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “It seems there is no God.” But he wrote a lot of other things that greatly qualified that statement. To quote it alone would be a distortion, even if the purpose were to show Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins applauding. Mark Williams, a tea-party activist, also wanted to strike back at the NAACP. He blogged a mock letter from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln, intending to satirize the politics of grievance and handouts. Instead, it exposed Williams’s tin ear and ham hands. “How will we coloreds ever get a widescreen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?” The tea party rightly bounced Williams from its ranks. The tea party’s critics are less, well, discriminating; Sherrod turned from victim to victimizer, accusing Breitbart of nostalgia for slavery. The administration’s apologists blamed Fox News for inspiring her dismissal, even though it hardly covered the story until after she had been fired. The truth is that Sherrod was thrown under the bus by Obama, joining the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s racist mentor, and Van Jones, the Communist 9/11 truther. Unlike them, she was innocent of the particular charge against her. Did the Obama administration skip to eject her because it knows it has a penumbra of extremists and crackpots, who trouble it only when they become inconveniently conspicuous? The post-racial presidency has been anything but. Obama’s race, always a central part of his appeal, bulks larger as his policies falter. It will be a long two and a half years. HIRLEy S HERROD ’ S more than 15 minutes of fame began when Andrew Breitbart’s website, Big Government, released a clip of her addressing an NAACP meeting. Sherrod worked for the Department of Agriculture; she was telling a story, from her pre-government career, about a white farmer in Georgia who came to her asking for help. Find a white lawyer, she thought. Members of her audience could be heard expressing approval. The blogs started buzzing, and the Ag Department asked her to resign. In the media flash flood that followed, everyone in political America (which is not quite America) knew what Shirley Sherrod had said. Except she had not said it. In her actual talk Sherrod went on to explain that poor farmers, white and black, need help against their rich oppressors. So she is a class warrior, but not a race warrior. Breitbart ran with the story out of a belief that liberals and leftists, including the NAACP, use charges of racism to stigmatize Barack Obama’s critics. Indeed they do. One of the tidbits of JournoList was an inflamed Spencer Ackerman, back in 2008, urging his colleagues to “take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists.” Black congressmen made the charge this spring against tea-party protesters on Capitol Hill who allegedly called them the N- SCHORR: MARK LENNIHAN/AP SHERROD: STEVE CANNON S 14 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:49 PM Page 1 Brazil Expedition Uncovers Thousands of Carats of Exquisite Natural Emeralds Special O ffer Receive a $100 Stauer Gift Co upon w ith the purcha se of th Yes, yo is necklace. u that rigread ht. 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Hayworth, a former congressman, in Arizona’s GOP Senate primary; Hayworth, a border hawk and talk-radio star, arrives defanged. After lurching hard, and awkwardly, to the right for months, McCain finds himself up by an average of 29 points in the polls, according to RealClearPolitics. McCain of course credits his probable survival to pluck. But luck, too, has played a part, as has his boatload of cash. Unlike many of his colleagues, who have faced political neophytes this season, McCain drew a foe with twelve years of experience in the House—a short stint compared with McCain’s nonstop congressional tenure since 1983, but more than enough of a record for opposition researchers to mine. McCain, with ease, punched early: Hayworth was a wellknown pork-barrel spender and an acquain tance of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist. Initially, “Hayworth tried to portray himself as an outsider, as some sort of fiscal conservative,” McCain tells me. “We knew that we had to define him—I freely admit that.” “We did not want to make the mistakes of Charlie Crist and Bob Bennett and become another statistic,” adds Brian Ro - A 16 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m gers, McCain’s communications director, referring to a pair of establishment candidates who found themselves in trouble. “Look at what happened to Crist,” he says. In Florida’s GOP Senate primary race, Governor Crist ignored Marco Rubio, his upstart opponent, “for months, enabling him to shape the narrative.” With Hayworth, “we simply could not let that happen. Bold colors were necessary.” But the senator’s own baggage weighed heavily on him. On immigration, McCain was understandably viewed with suspicion. Along with Ted Kennedy, he had cosponsored, in 2007, a “comprehensive reform” bill that many critics saw as a veiled move toward amnesty. Beyond that, there was a never-ending scroll of past dalliances with Democrats. So Hayworth, too, came armed. For the first few months of the campaign, he hammered McCain for his votes against the Bush tax cuts and for the bank bailout, to the delight of voters frustrated with Washington. As winter turned into spring, Hayworth’s poll numbers began to tick up, from 22 points down in Rasmussen’s January survey to just seven by mid-March. The former drivetime host on KFYI, charismatic and with a linebacker’s build, basked in the attention. He was going to be a giant-killer, the Great Right Hope. When I found Hayworth greeting his fans at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, the candidate was boastful. “John McCain is vulnerable on everything,” he said, beaming. “He should rename his bus the Double-Talk Express. His campaign of conservative conversion is just sad and predictable.” Yet all was not well in Hayworth land: A clip from his talk show in which he chatted about President Obama’s birth certificate surfaced, and McCain pounced. “Consumed by conspiracies!” screamed one spot. Instead of being able to highlight McCain’s policy shifts, Hayworth was boxed into a corner, forced to deny, over and over again, that he was a “birther.” Then, while at CPAC, he caught more flak, this time for sitting down for an interview with the John Birch Society. But Hayworth doggedly fought on, and swatted away the criticisms. Even after McCain vocally led the floor fight against Obamacare, Arizona Republicans remained skeptical of the senator’s jolt to the right. A late-March stump stop for McCain by Sarah Palin, his running mate in 2008, also did little to stir the base. By mid-April, Rasmussen put Hayworth within five points of McCain—but his springtime mo mentum was to be short-lived. Before the month ended, reacting to numerous reports of increased violence along the border, Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which requires immigrants to carry proof of legal status, and ignited a countrywide debate on immigration. With his key issue suddenly dominating state politics and national headlines, Hayworth looked to surge. McCain, however, elbowed Hayworth out of the spotlight by jumping into the fray as a self-proclaimed border sheriff—advocating an increased National Guard presence and billions for new security measures. “Complete the danged fence!” the senator growled in an ad, with his Navy cap on and a border guard alongside. McCain then proposed a tough ten-point plan on border security with Sen. Jon Kyl, his fellow Arizona Republican, and touted it on the cable networks and Sunday shows. As McCain drastically recast himself, Hayworth’s climb stalled out. Unlike many senior incumbents, “who make the mistake [of thinking] that people love them,” McCain “recognized that he had real problems,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “He was willing to turn 180 degrees on immigration and the maverick label.” McCain’s friends say the brazen reposiAUGUST 16, 2010 ROMAN GENN 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:58 PM Page 16 EW ice N Pr Finally, a cell phone that’s… a phone! w Lo Co N nt o ra ct base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:54 PM Page 1 “Well, I finally did it. I finally decided to enter the digital age and get a cell phone. My kids have been bugging me, my book group made fun of me, and the last straw was when my car broke down, and I was stuck by the highway for an hour before someone stopped to help. But when I went to the cell phone store, I almost changed my mind. The phones are so small I can’t see the numbers, much less push the right one. They all have cameras, computers and a “global-positioning” something or other that’s supposed to spot me from space. Goodness, all I want to do is to be able to talk to my grandkids! The people at the store weren’t much help. They couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want a phone the size of a postage stamp. And the rate plans! They were complicated, confusing, and expensive… and the contract lasted for two years! I’d almost given up when a friend told me about her new Jitterbug phone. Now, I have the convenience and safety of being able to stay in touch… with a phone I can actually use.” Questions about Jitterbug? Try our pre-recorded Toll-Free Hotline1-877-767-5671. The cell phone that’s right for me. Sometimes I think the people who designed this phone and the rate plans had me in mind. The phone fits easily in my pocket, but it flips open and reaches from my mouth to my ear. The display is large and backlit, so I can actually see who is calling. 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Created together with worldwide leader Samsung. Copyright © 2010 by firstSTREET for Boomers and Beyond, Inc. All rights reserved. 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:58 PM Page 18 tioning—or the “adjustment,” depending on whom you ask—was instinctual as much as it was political. “He sensed early that this could become serious, that this was an awful year,” says Mark Salter, his longtime speechwriter. The primary, Salter says, has been viewed within McCain’s inner circle much like the senator’s 1992 reelection bid, “which came so quickly after Keating,” an influence-peddling scandal in which McCain had become entangled. “Everyone agreed that this is a year where you had to make an effort.” McCain’s border maneuvers led to gains in the polls: By late May, he was up by double digits. He was also blanketing the airwaves, outspending Hayworth ten to one. Then, in June, as Brian Rogers puts it, political “gold” fell into the campaign’s lap—something much more damaging to Hayworth than his talk about Obama’s birth certificate: A YouTube video surfaced showing him, while out of office, hawking “free money” from the federal government. The ad was made soon after Hayworth lost his House seat in 2006, and introduces him as a former member of the Ways and Means Committee who will help viewers obtain a government grant. “It’s something you should take advantage of,” he explains. Needless to say, this was a message the tea partiers loathed. McCain began to tag Hayworth as a “huckster” whenever he could, and by early July he had a 23-point lead in one poll and a 45point lead in another. While Hayworth floundered, McCain demonstrated his stature on military matters. As the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, the senator was a stalwart voice in favor of the Afghan War during the turmoil surrounding Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s radioactive comments to Rolling Stone magazine. When I met with McCain in early July, all he wanted to talk about was the war. A few days later, McCain led a group of senators on a surprise Fourth of July trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. On television, in Arizona as elsewhere, it was McCain the senior statesman. Hayworth could do little to compete with McCain’s furrowed-brow leadership on national security. By now, McCain’s path to victory was clear. Two July debates were left—Hay worth’s best chances to change the dynamic of the race. “I knew that I had to do well in the debates,” McCain says. “I could not let him bother me with his shtick.” McCain decided to focus on policy. “We could con18 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m vince people not to like Coke, sure,” he says. “But I had to give them a reason to like Pepsi.” On July 16, the gloves came off in Phoenix, where McCain met Hayworth and Jim Deakin, a little-known tea-party activist, for the first televised debate. Hayworth was never able to draw blood. Both McCain and Hayworth appeared relaxed and prepared. “I have never seen such smiley candidates in my life,” Larry Sabato says. McCain called himself a “proud Ronald Reagan conservative” and stole a line from the Gipper, too, saying often about Hayworth: “There he goes again.” Hayworth, for his part, did his best to call out McCain’s “political shape-shifting” without getting nasty. “I’m the consistent conservative,” he said, and McCain is the “convenient” one. He took time to apologize for his grab-your-handout infomercial, in order to free himself up to go on offense. “I’m willing to admit my mistakes,” he said; “they were more personal in nature. The unfortunate thing, John, is that you’ve made mistakes that have hurt America.” He also chided McCain for running harder against him than he had against Barack Obama. “Shame on you,” Hayworth said, wagging his finger. It was not enough. Hayworth got in some entertaining oneliners and quips, but failed to deliver the knockout he needed. McCain seemed every bit the happy warrior. “McCain is a pugilist,” says Rick Davis, McCain’s longtime senior adviser. “He does not take it personally, in the sense that he does not hate Hayworth or have some kind of personal vendetta against him. Being in the ring so long, he has become realistic about these kinds of things, and approaches them in an almost clinical fashion.” McCain adds that he was itching for a brawl, even after two bruising presidential campaigns. “I was never like, ‘Oh, God, not this again,’” he laughs. “I like this stuff.” Barring a dramatic and unexpected turnabout, this long, strange primary looks to be another “he survived” moment for John McCain, thanks to his strategic opportunism and tactical aggressiveness. “John McCain has nine lives,” says Mark McKinnon, a former senior McCain adviser unaffiliated with the campaign. “Clearly, he’s got a few left. The primary challenge just proves that the old soldier still has a lot of fight left in him.” At least enough, apparently, to get past a flawed challenger like J. D. Hayworth. Black Budget In the Red There is waste and fraud in national-security spending, too BY JULIAN SANCHEZ like a recipe for a conservative crusade: a sector of the government that’s seen 150 percent growth in less than a decade yet is “so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine”; one where projects run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, where audits and required reporting frequently are neglected, and where officials at the highest levels admit they can’t keep track of what their agencies are doing, or even how many contractors they’ve got on the public payroll. This tale of government bloat was unspooled in a lengthy Washington Post series, which described a federal leviathan “so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” And yet conservatives, especially in the years since the 9/11 attacks, have been reluctant to apply their own insights to the subject of the Post’s exposé: the American Intelligence Community (IC). If the Post can discover that government is wasteful, can conservatives begin to think of the IC as one more bundle of government programs, with all the faults to which that breed is prone? There are, of course, obvious differences between the IC and other agencies: Nobody doubts that the FBI and the NSA serve vital functions. And if $75 billion per year is the price of detecting and preventing plots to murder Americans by the thousands, it would be hard to call it money wasted. Yet the most compelling conservative arguments for skepticism about runaway government growth have never depended on the worthiness of the goals at which government aims. Rather, conservatives have drawn on the insights of public- I T sounds Mr. Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 3:59 PM Page 1 Get y Get your our ccopy opy today! today! S Sixth ixth eedition dition n now ow a available vailable through through A Amazon.com mazon.com or or b by y calling calling 800-USA-1776 800-USA-1776 Natiional Headquarters, National Headquarters, F F.M. .M. K Kirby irbyy F Freedom reedom C Center, enter, 1110 10 E Elden lden Street, Street, Herndon, Herndon, Virginia Virginia 20170, 20170, 800-USA-1776 800-USA-1776 Reagan R eagan Ranch Ranch Center, Center, 217 217 State State Street, Street, Santa Santa Barbara, Barbara, California California 93101, 93101, 888-USA-1776 888-USA-1776 © CCopyright opyrightt 2010 2010 Young Younngg America’s America’s Foundation Founndaation www.yaf.org w ww..yyaf.org 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:58 PM Page 20 choice economics, which predicts that rational bureaucratic actors—often in collusion with profit-seeking firms—will more reliably act to maximize their own power and budgets than seek the general welfare. They have borrowed the insight of Friedrich Hayek—back on the bestseller lists after six decades, thanks to the tireless promotion of Glenn Beck—that there are limits to the volume of dispersed information any centralized authority can effectively manage. Yet conservative jeremiads against federal pork seldom focus on examples like—to pick one boondoggle that became public—the NSA’s Trailblazer. The Science Applications International Corporation, one of the 800-pound gorillas of intelligence contracting, signed a $280 million contract to set up this classified data-mining system in 2002, as reporter Tim Shorrock recounts in his 2008 book, Spies for Hire. NSA veteran William Black, who’d been hired on as a vice president at SAIC “for the sole purpose of soliciting NSA business,” returned to his old agency to run the project. More than three years later, having run up a tab of at least $1.2 billion, the system was scrapped. The contract to build the successor system went, of course, to SAIC. Or consider the controversial program of warrantless wiretapping authorized by Pres. George W. Bush. The political debate over that program—later revealed also to encompass large-scale data mining, perhaps of the sort Trailblazer had been meant for—centered above all on weighty legal questions about the balance between privacy and security interests and the legitimate scope of executive power in wartime. Yet surely the more obvious question was: Does it work? The only assurance we had that it did came from the very officials tasked with running it—the kind of testimony conservatives rightly greet with an arched eyebrow when it comes from an EPA administrator or a jobs czar. When the inspectors general for the IC finally produced an unclassified report on the “President’s Surveillance Program” in 2009, they concluded that the large majority of the leads generated by the program had no connection to terrorism—corroborating early press reports in which FBI officials complained of being sent on wild-goose chases. “Most IC officials interviewed” by the inspectors 20 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m general, the report concluded, “had difficulty citing specific instances where PSP reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes.” The classified version of the report cites instances in which the program “may have contributed” to an intelligence success. It’s hard to be reassured that this legally controversial program was the best use of the available resources—especially if it was generating so many false hits. Intelligence agencies may be discovering the “fatal conceit” that Hayek ascribed to advocates of economic planning: the belief that sufficiently brilliant experts can effectively aggregate and understand the information flowing through a modern economy. Our hightech spies now aspire not simply keep tabs on specific suspected terrorists but to harness blazingly fast computers to automatically detect their traces in the bitstream of 21st-century financial and communications networks. The result is a community choking on information it cannot process. Every day, according to the Post’s report, NSA’s collection systems “intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications,” a tiny fraction of which are processed and stored in some 70 databases. A 2005 inspector general’s report found that the FBI had collected, just in the previous year, a backlog of untranslated intelligence intercepts amounting to 87 years’ worth of audio. The information problem faced by analysts repeats itself at the management level. One of the handful of “Super Users” interviewed by the Post, an intelligence official meant to have full access to the Defense Department’s classified intelligence activities, conceded, “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.” A similarly resigned take was offered by Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, Lt. Gen. James Clapper: “There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all [Special Access Programs]—that’s God.” The problem is then compounded by the intersection of perverse political incentives with the compartmentalization, the complexity, and, above all, the secrecy in which intelligence work is shrouded. While the House and Senate intelligence committees have primary jurisdiction in principle, their authority overlaps with that of the judiciary and appropriations committees—with the latter often having more practical say over intelligence expenditures, despite a paucity of the cleared staff that would be necessary to do serious scrutiny of the classified intelligence budget. And the rewards are slim for members of Congress wondering whether to invest precious time and political capital in trying to guarantee the efficiency of vital intelligence programs. Legislators seeking to face down entrenched bureaucracies—and corporate behemoths eager to protect their $50 billion share of a $75 billion intelligence budget—can’t easily go on cable news to rally the public against ineffective or wasteful programs, or to trumpet their achievements after the fact if they succeed. Instead, oversight tends to follow what intelligence scholars have dubbed a “fire alarm” model: periods of intense scrutiny in the wake of a prominent scandal or failure, followed by long stretches of apathy. Even if our burgeoning surveillance state posed no long-term structural threat to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, it would be mysterious that many conservatives are reluctant to apply to the intelligence community the same standards and the same skepticism with which they greet any other wellintentioned government program. Why should we believe that throwing more money at a problem through government will produce better results when subject to less outside scrutiny? One possibility is that conservative principles have, in the intelligence arena, become a casualty of the culture wars. During the debates over the warrantlesswiretap program, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) bristled that concerns about abuse of this broad new spying authority constituted a “slap in the face to the people who protect our nation.” It was a familiar motif in a broader narrative often deployed by conservatives: Leftists attack our troops and intelligence officials, while conservatives support them. But patriotism is no vaccine against the pathologies of bloated government—nor should it be a soporific to conservatives who, in any other sector, would be wary of a bureaucrat with an ambitious plan and a request for a blank check. AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 4:05 PM Page 1 Pioneering audiologist invents “reading glasses” for your ears. Neutronic Ear is the easy, virtually invisible and affordable way to turn up the sound on the world around you. You don’t have to pay through the nose to get Personal Sound Amplification Technology. It’s amazing how technology has changed the way we live. 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As it happens, several years ago Kagan led a failed effort to marginalize the American military on the campus of Harvard Law School. The fact that Harvard failed where Hastings succeeded may point the way toward a rectification of the wrong that was committed in the Martinez case. In the early 2000s, several elite law schools—including Harvard—denied the U.S. military permission to recruit on their campuses, in protest of the congressional prohibition on military service by open homosexuals. Congress responded by strengthening and clarifying the Solomon Amendment, which since 1996 had required access to campus for military recruiters as a condition of the receipt of federal funds. Some of the affected law schools sued the federal government, claiming that the Solomon Amendment infringed their rights of “expressive association,” and lost 8–0 in Rumsfeld v. Forum forAcademic and Institutional Rights (2006). The Supreme Court held that there had been no imposition of an “unconstitu tional condition” on the grant of federal ZUMA/NEWSCOM O Mr. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Mr. Franck is director of the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton. 22 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m funds. The Solomon Amendment worked indirectly, with the “carrot” of federal funding, but the Court noted that Congress could even use the “stick” of directly requiring institutions, public or private, to be open to military recruiting, under its Article I power to raise and support military forces. Yet this June, the UC–Hastings College of the Law was permitted to deny the campus’s Christian Legal Society (CLS) recognition as a registered student organization, which would have afforded it access to facilities and other resources. The group’s offense? Requiring members and officers to sign a “statement of faith” and abide by traditional Christian morality, which permits sexual relations only between husband and wife. In explaining their refusal to recognize CLS, the only group ever denied such recognition, Hastings administrators at first claimed they were following university policies that prohibit discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation. But other student groups were permitted to base membership on shared ideas, and under existing precedents, CLS’s right to associate freely was likely to outweigh the school’s nondiscrimination policy. In short, the school was vulnerable to a charge that it was discriminating on “viewpoint” grounds—denying free-association rights only to these Christian students—so the administration scrambled to redefine its policy and its argument. The school then claimed that it had an “accept all comers” policy (of which no one had previously heard), which allowed no student group to forbid membership to anyone. On this absurd basis—which would force a group of student Republicans to admit Democrats, or allow the Christian group known as “Jews for Jesus” to take over the campus Jewish group—the Supreme Court sanctioned the law school’s “diversity”-friendly hostility to the Christian Legal Society. Justice Samuel Alito, in a powerful dissent, noted that the law school’s true policy was “accept-some-comers,” for registered groups were allowed to employ “conduct requirements” rather than “belief” to police their membership. The school had shed no light on what conduct standards could be used—although given its transparent effort to freeze out CLS, Alito said, “presumably requirements regarding sexual conduct” would be forbidden. Yet the real calamity of the Martinez ruling, as Alito also noted, is not the prospect of hostile takeovers of small and politically incorrect groups. It is that students who are serious about their faith will, forthesakeoftheirownintegrity, simply not attempt to organize as a recognized group: “There are religious groups that cannot in good conscience agree in their bylaws that they will admit persons who do not share their faith, and for these groups, the consequence of an accept-allcomers policy is marginalization.” The Supreme Court’s decision did not settle the matter completely: The Christian Legal Society may still prevail at Hastings Elena Kagan, while dean of Harvard Law School AUGUST 16, 2010 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 4:15 PM Page 1 “This is a stunning ring... I just love your jewelry. Everything you do, you do with such class... thanks again.” — J. H. from Central Ohio The Fifth C? Cut, Color, Carat, Clarity... 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But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion for the majority in Martinez shows the way for institutions of higher education to squeeze conservative religious student groups until they either drop their organizational efforts or dilute their devotion to the tenets of their faith. Colleges and universities need only declare a free-for-all in the world of student organizations, allowing any student to join and participate in any group, and count on the most fashionable views—or the emptiest and most in nocuous ones—to prevail. not just Christian groups, but Jewish, Muslim, and other religious student groups are put at risk by the Martinez ruling. now look at Elena Kagan and Rumsfeld v. FAIR. Dean Kagan and her allies lost, where Hastings won, because a statute specifically required them to give access to military recruiters or lose funding. A similar approach could effectively right the wrong of Martinez: Republicans and Democrats who respect religious freedom could pass a law that denies federal funding to universities that require student religious groups to compromise their commitment to their faith for the sake of official recognition. Certainly in the case of public universities, this indirect policy would impose no “unconstitutional condition,” since Congress may even act directly to protect religious freedom against infringement by public-sector institutions. And a good case could be made for applying a similar policy to nonsectarian private-sector institutions, which enjoy nonprofit status under federal law and ample largesse from the federal treasury. Justice Alito called Martinez “a serious setback for freedom of expression.” He might have said more pointedly that freedom of religious expression and association, a subject of special solicitude in the Constitution, was dealt a savage blow. But the rights the Court refused to protect—to organize based on faith and morals and to inhabit the public square alongside other groups in fidelity to one’s beliefs—can and should be protected by Congress. Will congressional leaders—and the White House—deny such protection to believers and cling to a “diversity” agenda that is increasingly being exposed as the imposition of ideological uniformity? Let’s find out. 24 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m Do Progressives Dream of Electric Cars? The American economy does not B Y H E N RY PAY N E n July 15, Barack Obama came to Holland, Mich., and wrote another chapter in his administration’s Chicagostyle, take-no-prisoners political manual. At a groundbreaking ceremony for an auto-components factory, the president called the district’s Republican congressman, Pete Hoekstra, a hypocrite for attending the event after voting against the stimulus funds that had financed the factory. Obama’s cheap shot, delivered while Hoekstra sat a few feet away, drew criticism because such events are usually considered friendly; Hoekstra’s appearance was standard protocol for a congressman showing respect for the presidency. Largely forgotten in the political scuffle was the company that had received the $150 million gift from the taxpayers: LG Chem, a Korean multinational that makes batteries for electric vehicles (EVs). If the Hoekstra insult represented Obama’s penchant for hyper-partisan politics, the LG Chem giveaway symbolized this president’s appetite for grandiose big-government schemes to remake entire industries. In the case of autos, Obama has long held a messianic belief that EVs are the future. It is part of his transformational vision that Americans should be greener, more urban, and more like Asians and Europeans in their lifestyle choices, in order to be moral citizens of the planet. The president is an admirer of South Korea’s “Green new Deal,” a massive, government-funded effort to transform the smokestack-heavy Asian nation into a green economy. Like our Western Euro pean allies, South Korea’s government has pledged large sums—2 percent of O Mr. Payne is the editor of The Michigan View.com and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News. He can be reached at [email protected]. GDP—to transform the country’s energy sector with investments in wind, solar, and battery technologies. LG Chem, Korea’s largest chemical firm, has been a direct beneficiary of this government largesse, becoming one of the world’s leading producers of lithium-ion batteries for cars. Still, creating a Korean market for EVs will likely require even more government intervention—and that’s in a nation where most car buyers live in a cramped urban environment (1,260 people per square mile), which makes frequent recharging convenient, while shouldering $6-a-gallon gas prices. The United States, by contrast, is a sprawling, suburban country, with 94 people per square mile in the lower 48 states—and gas prices half those in South Korea. LG Chem knows there is no U.S. market for EVs—which is why an $11 billion foreign firm had to be lured with $150 million in welfare from the U.S. government. If there were a future for EVs here, LG Chem would be investing its own money. Even sales of hybrid-electric vehicles, which can run on gasoline or battery power, are falling after more than a decade in the American market. This year hybrid sales have dropped to below 2 percent of the market, from a high of 3 percent when gas prices hit $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008. In Korea, hybrids have failed to garner more than 0.5 percent of the market. For all the White House hype, battery power is the technology of the past. Writes Tad Friend in The New Yorker: At the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles outsold all other types of cars. “Electric road wagons” and “Electrobats” were popular with women, because, unlike gas-powered vehicles, they required no strenuous cranking to start. (The Columbus Buggy Company proclaimed, “A delicate woman can practically live in her car yet never tire.”) Cars with internal-combustion engines gradually took over, because they were easier to refuel and they cost less, as Henry Ford’s assembly line breakthroughs made his cars cheap enough for nearly everyone. Over the last century, entrepreneurs tried sporadically to revive the EV market, but they were always tripped up by the vehicles’ Achilles’ heel: A limited range, typically less than 100 miles between rechargings. 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To charge an EV within the five minutes that Americans are used to spending at the gas pump would require an 840-kilowatt connection, which would drain as much power from the grid as a 100-unit apartment building. Naturally, Obama’s green allies have an answer for this: government billions to develop urban recharging stations, so that EV owners can charge their cars in parking garages during an eight-hour workday. Paris and Tel Aviv are early test beds for this technology, with the French and Israeli governments partnering with a private firm called Better Place. Senate Democrats just picked $5 billion from the Washington money tree to subsidize similar projects in the U.S. Proponents of such projects say it’s a chicken-egg situation: Drivers won’t buy EVs until the infrastructure is in place, but no one will build the infrastructure until there are more EVs. Hence the case for government subsidies to jump-start the process. Yet given EVs’ limited range and long charging times, and America’s vast sprawl and enthusiastic drivers (about 50 percent more miles driven per capita annually than in Europe), the subsidies required would be monumental. In addition, what supposedly makes EVs green is that they can use electricity produced from wind or solar power. Yet the most common and cheapest fuel for electrical generation is coal, and charging an EV with electricity from a coal plant merely shifts emissions from one place to another. Running cars on wind or solar power would be much more expensive The Chevy Volt 26 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m than using fossil fuels, and thus would require—you guessed it—more subsidies. Given their inherent fueling and cost disadvantages (an EV power train costs five times as much as one on a conventional gasoline vehicle), electric cars have largely remained toys for the rich. The only fully electric passenger vehicle on the road today is a $110,000 sports car manufactured by Tesla Motors (founded by PayPal multimillionaire Elon Musk). The two-seater, quick and silent, has become a status symbol among California’s wealthy; owners are said to include George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But the company has never made a dime. So, naturally, Obama’s Energy Department invested $465 million this year to help build Tesla’s next big thing—the $57,500 Model S electric luxury sedan. Congress will subsidize the Model S’s wealthy buyers with another $7,500 in taxpayer funds for each purchase. Musk isn’t the only California millionaire cashing in on Obama’s vision. Former Aston Martin and BMW designer Henrik Fisker also hopes to make luxury vehicles for America’s gentry, so the administration has lined his pockets with $529 million in low-interest loans to make the $88,000 plug-in hybrid Fisker Karma and the $45,000 electric Fisker Nina sedan. Large automakers scoff that these boutique firms will never be able to build EVs for the masses—which is why Big Auto is getting EV subsidies of its own. It is also getting regulatory help: In an effort to force the production of battery-powered vehicles, Obama has mandated a 35.5 mpg fleet-average fuel-economy standard by 2015. The goal is absurd (the current average for new vehicles is around 25 mpg), and the law is riddled with loopholes—including credits for automakers making EVs. In this unholy alliance of Big Government and Big Auto, the carmakers exacted their price—more taxpayer billions to underwrite their research, in addition to the same $7,500-per-vehicle tax credit that buyers get for purchasing a Tesla. And since plug-in hybrids like GM’s Chevy Volt cost $40,000—or about the price of an entry-level BMW—the program amounts to yet another set of subsidies for buyers with six-figure incomes. In an early sign of his in-your-face political approach, Obama made a campaign stop in Detroit in May of 2007 to confront the Big Three and demand “the transformation of the cars we drive.” He told a roomful of auto executives that they were making the wrong vehicles at a time when their “competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology.” He said they had “continued to reward failure with lucrative bonuses for CEOs.” He said the carmakers “refuse to make the transition to fuel-efficient production because they say it’s too expensive.” Obama compared global warming to the Nazi threat in the 1930s, saying it was “jeopardizing our planet” and risked “setting off a chain of dangerous weather patterns that could condemn future generations to global catastrophe” with “record drought, famine, and forest fires.” He warned of a threat so imminent that it “will require a historic effort on the scale of what we saw in those factories during World War II. . . . It starts with our cars—because if we truly hope to end the tyranny of oil, the nation must once again turn to Detroit for another great transformation.” Obama promised generous tax incentives and a national overhaul of the healthcare system so that automakers could “invest the savings right back into the production of more fuel-efficient cars and trucks.” America may not have been listening to this radical campaign rhetoric, but Obama has kept his promise to the car executives. When the president makes his planned visit to Detroit on July 30, his first since that 2007 campaign stop, he will extol the success of his government/industry alliance in fighting the climate war. He will visit GM’s Hamtramck plant, where the plug-in Chevy Volt will be assembled with LG Chem’s lithium-ion batteries. But he will also visit Chrysler’s Jefferson North assembly plant. That sprawling facility makes Chrysler’s most profitable vehicle. It is a product whose resurgent demand has created 1,100 UAW jobs this year alone. It is a plant that needs no taxpayer subsidies, no loans, no handouts. That’s because the Jefferson North plant makes the gas-guzzling Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV—a car Americans actually want to buy. AUGUST 16, 2010 CHEVROLET 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:59 PM Page 26 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 7/23/2010 4:16 PM Page 1 S A ! 29 W LO $ Help him celebrate his 420th birthday (in dog years) Kick up your heels for 60 years of Snoopy and Peanuts! Get this 2010 Snoopy Dollar, minted in Brilliant Uncirculated condition and expertly colorized. Featuring Snoopy and Woodstock and a cuddly Snoopy stuffed toy in a decorative box. Everyone’s eyes will open wide when they pop the lid. Get several—birthdays, holidays and other special occasions are always around the corner. You’ll be a hero for bringing Snoopy along. Comes with a 30-day unconditional return privilege. 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Facts and figures were deemed accurate as of June 2010. ©GovMint.com, 2010 PEANUTS © United Feature Syndicate, Inc. 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 28 The Scourge of Trenton New Jersey governor Chris Christie is winning a war for fiscal sanity BY DANIEL FOSTER I 28 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m “We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being dispatched with the dead letter. “All right, we’ll see,” came the reply. And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone. “We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat. “I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.” C hrIStopher JAmeS ChrIStIe is fond of saying that he’s been underestimated his whole professional life. the Newark-born son of an Irish father and a Sicilian mother, Christie is the product of respectable but middling schools—the University of Delaware and Seton hall Law—and enjoyed a successful, if not spectacular, career as a partner in a small New Jersey firm. he served a single term as a morris County freeholder, but was primaried, and soundly defeated, in his bid for reelection. When, despite a lack of criminal prosecutorial experience, he was appointed U.S. attorney in 2002, some detractors thought it a bit of cronyism—the Bush administration rewarding Christie for the fundraising work he’d done during the 2000 election. they were wrong. By the time Christie left the job six years AUGUST 16, 2010 HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AP was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris Christie’s young administration: a may showdown over what Democrats in trenton were calling the “millionaires’ tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession. the Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto pen. Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even ad monished, in a turn of phrase eminently trentonian in its sheer backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during this crisis is just wrong.” he promised that the millionaires’ tax was where the Democrats would “make our stand.” the tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate on may 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor—who had vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises—vetoed it. the whole thing took about two minutes. t 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 29 later, he had put over a hundred crooked pols—“from the school board to the state house and of both political parties”—behind bars, without losing a single case. And he had tried and convicted terrorists, Mafiosi, and child pornographers; arms dealers, gang members, and corporate hacks. So when he announced for governor in 2009—as a low-tax, small-government alternative to Democrat Jon Corzine, who had the misfortune of being both an incumbent and a former CEO of Goldman Sachs—he did so with a brand name. Yet the initial response from the right was skeptical. New Jersey had become deeply blue over the past 40 years, and its Republican executives tended to be milquetoast centrists. Even as Christie beat conservative favorite Steve Lonegan in the primary and surged past Corzine on a wave of anti-incumbent fervor, the state’s small conservative establishment feared they were in for more of the same. Those fears seemed justified, since Christie, despite employing the proper rhetoric about Trenton’s unsustainable “addiction to spending,” was frustratingly vague about his plans to fix the state’s finances, more or less claiming that he had to see for himself how bad the situation was before he’d know what needed to be done. To many, this was the tack of a governor who intended to go along to get along, and who’d be swallowed whole by the Democratic Trenton machine. About this, too, Christie’s critics were wrong. “I think Democrats in the legislature, and Democrats in the counties, had become accustomed to rolling governors,” says Jay Webber, a state assemblyman and Christie’s pick to chair the New Jersey Republican State Committee. “They rolled Jon Corzine all the time—they didn’t respect him. I think they rolled [former Democratic governor] Jim McGreevey, and they rolled [former Republican governor Christine Todd] Whitman in her last term, which wasn’t as strong as her first term. I think Trenton had lost sight of what that office can do, and Chris Christie stepped in there and showed them, very quickly.” It started in December of 2009. Governor-elect Christie was in the middle of a transition meeting with senior staff when he was presented with a startling document. It was a chart, prepared by independent Wall Street analysts, showing the state’s cash balances over the previous four years and forecasting future balances. It wasn’t good. “It was like a picture of a failing company,” says Richard Bagger, Christie’s chief of staff and a veteran of Trenton politics. “It just went down and down. In December it touched zero. Then in March 2010, it plunged into the red.” That didn’t match the picture painted by the political appointees in the outgoing Corzine administration, who were telling Chris tie’s transition staff that the state’s operating budget would get it through the rest of the fiscal year. In fact, the state was down to only a few days of cash on hand, and was meeting payroll with expensive short-term borrowing. But if Christie’s transition team had any doubts about which analysis was closer to the mark, within two hours of the governor’s being sworn in on January 19 career treasury staffers had confirmed the worst: The state was going to default on its obligations the first week of March. The only way out, Christie was told, was more short-term borrowing. How did New Jersey, once an economic powerhouse, get so low? It starts, but by no means ends, with the recession. New Jersey’s economy is intimately bound with, and its narrow tax base heavily reliant on, the financial sector. In the wake of the banking collapse, the state suffered a worse unemployment spike than even New York, precipitating what the state treasurer called a “historic revenue collapse.” This meant that in his last budget, for fiscal year 2010, the outgoing Corzine saw a $7 billion shortfall appear as if from thin air. To meet it he cobbled together federal bailout bucks, tax hikes, worker furloughs, and deferred pension payments—but he didn’t take so much as an Allen wrench to the budget’s structural imbalances, namely, public spending that had doubled as a percentage of GDP over four decades to finance an increasingly Byzantine patchwork of regional “authorities” and “commissions” that crosscut existing state, county, and municipal governance; a morbidly obese pension system underfunded by at least $46 billion; and $52 billion in total outstanding debt—more than $5,000 per resident—backed by everything from cigarette-tax revenue to traffic tickets. The New Jersey that Chris Christie inherited was one that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University had ranked 46th in the Union on its economic-freedom index, and one whose business-tax climate the Tax Foundation had called the worst in the nation. Its narrow tax base had been in a death spiral for years: High-tech, high-paying jobs were fleeing—one Boston College study estimated $70 billion in wealth had left between 2004 and 2008 alone—and being replaced by low-wage, low-tech ones. For decades Trenton had jacked up taxes on the wealth that remained—inspiring new rounds of capital flight—and relied on weak budgetary rules and accounting tricks to kick growing shortfalls down the road. As a July 2009 study by Mercatus’s Eileen Norcross and Frederic Sautet concluded, the government of New Jersey has resorted to fiscal evasion— avoiding the rules meant to constrain spending—and has sustained spending growth through fiscal illusion, obscuring the full costs of policies by relying on intergovernmental aid and debt to achieve the current level of spending. The state has long emphasized current spending at the expense of higher taxes for future taxpayers. The costs of this approach are now coming due. Come due they had for Christie, who after less than a day on the job was being advised to borrow his way out of crisis. What he did instead set the tone for everything that followed. F IvE weeks later, on February 11, Christie addressed a spe- cial joint session of the state legislature, replacing the vague promises of the campaign trail with first principles, and elaborating the constraints under which he was determined to govern: Our constitution requires a balanced budget. Our commitment requires us to begin the next fiscal year with a prudent opening balance. Our conscience and common sense require us to fix the problem in a way that does not raise taxes on the most overtaxed citizens in America. Our love for our children requires that we do not shove today’s problems under the rug only to be discovered again tomorrow. Our sense of decency must require that we stop using tricks that will make next year’s budget problem even worse. And in an extraordinary move, he then declared a fiscal state of emergency, announcing that by executive order he would impound $2.2 billion in appropriations from a fiscal year that was already seven months gone. That figure represented virtually every dollar the state was not legally obligated to pay out for the 29 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 30 remainder of the year. In Bagger’s words, it was “everything that wasn’t nailed down.” “By doing that so quickly and so dramatically, and by executive action, it really set the stage,” Bagger says. “It was just a very clear declaration that there’s a new reality.” There was much wailing and teeth-gnashing about the cuts among Democrats. Sweeney accused Christie of “pick[ing] someone else’s pocket,” and senate majority leader Barbara Buono went so far as to say the executive order had “declare[d] martial law” in New Jersey. This raised the stakes significantly for the FY 2011 budget battle, which was then only beginning. In the year to come, the state would face an $11 billion deficit that made the previous shortfall look like a gratuity. It was a big hole, and Christie needed Democratic votes to close it. But he had no intention of mollycoddling the other side. On March 16, the governor went back before a joint session of the legislature and introduced a $29.3 billion budget that doubled down on his most controversial measures, trimming fat—and muscle, and sinew—from virtually every department and every entitlement in the state. The budget did small things, like reducing overtime hours, shrinking the state’s fleet of official vehicles, replacing paper with digital filing, and consolidating government office space. It cut the pay and pension eligibility for members of a number of state boards and commissions, many of whose duties required them to do little more than attend once-monthly meetings. It saved $216 million by eliminating a number of wasteful programs, and another $50 million by privatizing others. But the budget did big things as well. It shrank the state’s major spending programs—including many that were, the governor admitted, not without merit—by reducing base appropriations and either scaling back or eliminating scheduled funding increases. It converted the state’s property-tax rebate system—long funded by borrowing, at interest, to cut checks to homeowners—with tax credits. It cut $466 million in local aid, against Trenton’s trend of corralling more and more municipal tax dollars for the purposes of redistribution, while pushing a constitutional amendment that would limit towns’ ability to raise property taxes in the future. And like Corzine before him, Christie deferred payments to the state’s pension program to secure $3.1 billion in savings, under the justification that it was imprudent to sink more money into a failing system. But unlike Corzine, Christie pushed through tough pension reforms that rolled back overgenerous payment increases, limited payouts for unused sick leave, and enrolled new workers into 401(k)s. he’d also signed a law requiring public employees to pay at least 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their health benefits, which would save the state and local governments hundreds of millions each year. B uT what caused the first and most strident wave of opposition to Christie’s agenda was his decision to slash funding for public education, by some $820 million. That scary number obscured the fact that, when one subtracted the federal-stimulus goodie bag that Corzine had used to plug the leaky dam of the state’s school-funding formula the previous year, Christie’s budget was actually increasing aid to schools. And it obscured the fact that the cuts topped out at 5 percent per district, and that Christie had offered to restore them in districts where 30 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m teachers accepted a one-year pay freeze and agreed to increase their contributions to their benefits packages from zero—zero— to 1.5 percent of their salaries. Of the 591 school districts in the state, fewer than three dozen agreed to these conditions. Instead, the teachers’ unions, led by the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), invested nearly $6 million to lobby against the budget, running radio and television ads accusing the governor of failing to “protect the quality of our schools” and, gob-smackingly, of going back to “the old Trenton ways of doing business.” The campaign reached its peak, and its nadir, on May 22, at a march on Trenton organized by public-sector unions. There, NJEA president Barbara Keshishian led as many as 35,000 labor activists—a mere 7 percent of the 460,000 names on the books of the state’s pension system—in shouting down the governor and warning Democrats not to become his “accomplices.” When a reporter asked Christie what he thought of the protest, he literally shrugged, saying that it had had “absolutely no effect” on him. “[I hope they] had a good time,” Christie said. “And I hope that it helped spur Trenton’s economy.” The governor had grown increasingly hostile toward the NJEA in the months since he’d introduced his budget, and had essentially stopped taking their phone calls in April, after the union had failed to discipline a functionary for circulating an e-mail praying for his death. Thereafter, he went from not pulling punches to putting his full weight behind them. When a teacher at a town hall in the borough of Rutherford complained to Christie that his budget would leave her inadequately compensated relative to her education and experience, he told her to find another job, and reminded her that the cuts wouldn’t be necessary if teachers made the most modest concessions. “Your union said that is the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state,” he told the teacher. And then, to applause: “That’s why the union has no credibility—stupid statements like that.” Indeed, the war of credibility between the unions and the governor had been settled weeks before, when New Jersey’s school districts put their annual budgets—many of which sought to hike taxes to erase Christie’s cuts—to a taxpayer vote. Nearly three in five failed, a greater number than in any year since 1976. M EANWhIlE, what was supposed to be an epic battle with the Democrats largely failed to materialize. Sweeney and Co. had made their stand on the millionaires’ tax, which amounted to little more than a demonstration at Christie’s flanks, and then had more or less quit the field. Elected Democrats were conspicuously scarce at the May 23 Trenton rally, and in reaction to the NJEA president’s warning against the majority’s becoming “accomplices” to the Christie budget, senate president Sweeney could only shake his head. “Instead of showing the public that we’re in it together, they’re showing them that they still don’t get it,” he had said of the rally participants. “We’re not accomplices. If anything, we’re trying to fix the state with him.” And it was true so far as it went. Sweeney had shown leadership on pensions, working with the governor to assure broad Democratic support for reform. This struck some in the state’s labor movement as a special kind of betrayal, since Sweeney was AUGUST 16, 2010 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 31 himself head of an ironworkers’ union. But it made sense. Privatesector unions like Sweeney’s depended on economic activity for work, and his members were suffering mightily through the recession, even as public-sector labor was shielded from the worst of it. Thus did Christie split the Democrats in the state legislature from their traditional labor base, exploiting fissures both between public- and private-sector unions and between the teachers’ unions and the taxpaying public. Having taken their best shot at Chris Christie, the opposition now found themselves chastened, confused, and cannibalized. The rout was not unnoticed by one anonymous member of the Democratic leadership, who told a reporter from the Newark Star Ledger that “we’re getting murdered. We’re losing the public debate and we know that. He’s beating us and dividing us. He won’t forever. But he sure is now.” Nor could the Democrats, having lost the public-opinion battle, count on stopping Christie’s budget in the house: New Jersey’s constitution gives an oppositional majority little in the way of procedural tools to block a determined governor’s path. As the only at-large elected official in the state, the governor not only commands the bully pulpit but appoints all the key executives—from attorney general to education commissioner—who might stand in his way. moreover, his line-item budget veto is both powerful and precise, giving him the ability to strike whole clauses or decrease individual appropriations to the cent. The only thing the governor can’t do is raise spending. Budget talks between the governor’s office and members of both parties hummed along through the late spring, but they were now on Chris Christie’s terms, and there was no longer any doubt that he would get 99.9 percent of what he wanted. The Democrats, for their part, found themselves with nothing to do but stall. They’d arranged a series of thematically disjointed budget hearings in which a number of sympathetic interest groups were trotted before committees to recount tales of woe about how the budget would hurt them. But as may gave way to June and the deadline to pass a budget neared, they had yet to offer a real alternative. “There were divisions everywhere,” says Assemblyman Webber. “Democrats were divided between the senate and the assembly, divisions within the senate and the assembly—some geographic, some having to do with their core constituencies. They couldn’t agree on a message. At the end of the day the only thing they could come to some agreement on is ‘Let’s raise taxes and spend more money.’And then they fought over who should be the beneficiary of our newfound largesse.” So long did the Democrats delay that, with barely a week until the vote, senate minority leader Thomas Kean Jr. had to direct the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services to prepare the Christie budget under Republican sponsorship. In an unprecedented move, the Democrats let it happen. “I don’t see how that can be interpreted as anything but simply handing away control of the most important bill this legislature passes on annual basis,” Kean says. “I’ve never known it to happen in the history of New Jersey—where the minority party has carried the ball on the budget.” The majority had agreed to supply the bare minimum votes required to assure passage of the budget, but they were content to let Christie and the Republicans do the heavy lifting. “De facto, they had abdicated their leadership to the gover nor in march, when the governor introduced his budget,” says Webber. “But de jure, they abdicated their leadership in June, by letting us go and pass it.” A political cartoon published by the Star Ledger’s Drew Sheneman on June 8 captured the mood in Trenton at the time. It showed Christie and a generic Democratic leader in opposite corners of a boxing ring, a white towel arcing through the air between them. The caption read: “It’s customary to wait for the fight to begin before you throw in the towel.” A near-pristine version of Christie’s budget passed at 1:13 A.m. on June 29, less than 24 hours before the constitutional deadline. It followed a long night of debate that was less the Democrats’ Waterloo than their Battle of New Orleans, coming long after the war had ended. Christie signed it twelve hours later in a firehouse in South River, a Central Jersey suburb in heavily Democratic middlesex County, before a small crowd of boosters. Outside, a scant contingent of protesters waved signs. B as significant as his early victories have been, Christie must now turn to pushing the structural reforms that will institutionalize his vision of leaner, meaner state government. He knows this second act will be much harder to pull off than his first. Even as he was fighting the budget battle, the governor was barnstorming the state to talk up perhaps the most significant of these reforms: his “Cap 2.5” initiative, which would constitutionally limit the ability of municipalities to raise property taxes. The cap is popular among residents, most of whom pay the preponderance of their non-federal tax liability in property taxes. And it has received steadily increasing support from the state’s mayors and other municipal leaders, who rely almost exclusively on property-tax revenue to run their towns. Even Cory Booker—the decidedly liberal, if heterodox, Democratic mayor of Newark, and perhaps the only elected official in the state whose political star burns as bright as Christie’s—has signed on. But Christie’s amendment is at the mercy of the Democratic legislature, whose assent is required for a popular referendum on it. The deadline for giving it this year has come and gone, forcing Christie to negotiate on the terms of the Democrats’ proposed alternative: a higher, 2.9 percent cap run through like Swiss cheese with exclusions and opt-outs that would render it all but meaningless. Christie was able to whittle down the exceptions to four and reduce the cap to 2.0 percent—lower even than his proposed 2.5. But it is statutory, not constitutional, and therefore subject to the caprice of Trenton. Christie has vowed not to give up the fight. Other battles loom wherein the governor’s chances for success are highly uncertain. He has promised yet more pension and compensation reforms, moves that could break his tenuous alliance with the reformist elements in the Democratic party and push his openly hostile relationship with labor beyond Thunderdome. Then there is Christie’s plan to fundamentally reshape the state’s massive gambling and entertainment interests, effectively ending the increasingly unprofitable horse racing in the meadowlands, and wresting control of Atlantic City casinos from an overburdened and underequipped municipal government. That move is sure to draw the attention—and the ire—of some of the state’s most, shall we say, persuasive constituencies. But by far the biggest test of the success of this year’s budget battle will be—next year’s budget battle. The fact is that no uT 31 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 32 matter what happens between now and June of 2011, there will be a tremendous temptation to revert to the status quo ante: Either the state’s economy lingers in the doldrums and Democrats claim redemption for their long-failing policies, or Christie’s program helps spur a recovery for New Jersey taxpayers and Democrats come to voters with the message that fiscal crisis has been averted and New Jersey can get back in the business of big government. But Christie insiders are convinced that the bar has been reset, and that they can fight next year’s budget wars on their terms. “they say there is another $10 billion gap for next year,” says one top Christie insider of the 2012 budget. that’s based on the assumption that you take your hands off the wheel, and you go back. You don’t do any reforms, and you therefore put back all of the money that was pulled this year. No. the whole point of resetting the base is that as the economy starts to recover and we start to see some growth, then there is not an automatic conclusion that this program that was cut becomes restored. then it becomes a serious discussion about what priorities of the state, what taxes should be cut. t HE administration is confident they have the best man to shape that discussion, and the ubiquity in the right-ofcenter blogosphere of Youtube videos showing Christie speaking eloquently, and extemporaneously, about his vision suggests they have it right. “I don’t think you can underestimate the political capital the governor has accumulated in his first six months in office,” says Webber. “the first six months were crucial for him to establish himself as somebody who’s willing to use the veto pen, someone who has a unified party behind him, someone who can rally the public to his point of view. And he’s shown all that. Now when the big fights come, he starts from a stronger position than he started from in February or March.” Not even those closest to Christie know whether he plans to run for a second term, but one of his great strengths is that he governs as if he won’t. He has claimed, with the ring of truth, that he pays no attention to his roller-coaster public approval ratings—that to him, the only poll that mattered was the one that installed him as Jon Corzine’s successor in November of 2009. this philosophy is not Republican, but republican: He sees himself as a representative of the people who nevertheless refuses to pander to them, to recalibrate his stances at their every perturbation. Senator Kean, who hopes to move from minority to majority leader in the senate, has confidence that Christie will continue to stick to his guns. “the governor has an internally strong constitution—that’s who Chris is—and he has an externally strong constitution in the constitution of the State of New Jersey,” Kean says. “I think he is absolutely the genuine article. that’s why we won’t ever go back to the status quo, at least not under Chris Christie’s governorship.” It is said that on a long enough timeline the impossible becomes the inevitable. After decades of unchecked bloat in trenton, a drastic scaling back of the excesses—and the ambitions—of big government seems, each day, less an impossibility and more an inevitability. Chris Christie has made it so. 32 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m A Clash of OPPOSITES Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, finds himself in a hot race with an Oshkosh businessman BY JAY NORDLINGER ot long ago, two friends were talking about the current election season. Both of them are conservative, but one especially dislikes the McCain-Feingold law (which restricted campaign finance and political speech). She said, “Both of them are up for reelection this year— McCain and Feingold. Wouldn’t it be great if they lost? oh, it would be Christmas morning!” that Christmas is not likely to come for her. Sen. John McCain, in Arizona, will probably win his Republican primary on August 24—and, of course, go on to beat the Democrat in the general. But Sen. Russ Feingold, the longtime Democrat in Wisconsin? He may actually lose to the Republican nominee. And that is an astonishing development, in an astonishing political year. Feingold’s all-but-certain opponent will be Ron Johnson, a businessman from oshkosh (b’gosh). Johnson has to win a Republican primary on September 14, but everyone expects him to do that. And the race between him and Feingold is essentially tied—this despite the fact that Johnson has been in politics only a few months. He announced in May. In mid-July, Rasmussen came out with a stunning poll that showed Johnson ahead of Feingold by a point: 47 percent to 46 percent. Democrats cried, “Republican poll!” okay. But a couple of weeks earlier, a Democratic firm, Public Policy Polling, had Feingold ahead by only two points: 45 to 43. By all appearances, the race is a dead heat. And that can’t be good news for the longtime incumbent. Wisconsin swings a little, but it has been pretty much a Democratic state for a while, certainly at the presidential level. the last time the state went for a Republican, it was for Ronald Reagan in 1984 (and that’s when every state went for Reagan, except for Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home turf—and even that was a close call). But Wisconsin, like the rest of the nation, is restless and quirky this year. Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, surveyed the landscape and decided not to run for reelection. the Republican will probably win that race. And something jolting happened in the U.S. House. David obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who took office way back in 1969, decided not to run again. He is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and a very big deal. But he was facing a tough, interesting Republican challenger, Sean Duffy, and he was also facing that strange, new mood. It seemed like a good time to retire. As Bob Kasten, the Republican ex-senator from Wisconsin, says, obey’s retirement was “a huge kick in the gut for the Democrats in Wisconsin”—and, in a way, for Democrats nationally. But obey was not without a lovely parting gift: N AUGUST 16, 2010 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 33 national health care, a.k.a. Obamacare. The veteran lefty said, “I have been waiting for that moment for 41 years, and its arrival— finally—made all the frustrations of public life worth it.” Russ Feingold was elected to the Senate in 1992, when he beat Kasten (who had been elected in the big Reagan and Republican year of 1980). Until May, he had no Republican challenger to give him too much worry. Former governor Tommy Thompson—who ran briefly for president in 2008—considered a run for the Senate, but demurred. Then came this upstart, Johnson. He had never given any thought to running for political office. But in October, he attended a “tea party” in Oshkosh, giving a speech. Mainly, he defended the “producers of America,” as he says. And he made a particular defense of doctors, who he thought had been demonized in the health-care debate. Johnson has very strong feelings about American medicine: “My first child was born with a serious heart defect, and I know from personal experience how wonderful our health-care system is. I also know how important it is that we have the ability to seek out the best medical treatments.” Johnson believes that Obamacare will destroy innovation and opportunity in this field. After the tea-party speech, strangers approached Johnson to say, “Why doesn’t someone like you run?” Johnson thought that was a crazy idea—until Obamacare was passed and signed. That was in March. And it was “the final straw,” he says, the event that tipped him into running. He figured, “Maybe there comes a time when a guy like me ought to run.” You can’t always sit around waiting for someone else. And he is worried about far more than Obamacare, emblematic as this new system is. “I spent 31 years building a business, and now we see politicians spending without constraint, really pushing the United States of America to the brink of bankruptcy. We in the private sector, with some business experience, have a responsibility to step up to the plate and offer some alternatives.” R USS FeINGOLD is a classic “progressive.” He idolized Bobby Kennedy, and, like RFK, sees government as the engine of great moral and social good. He has been in politics virtually his entire adult life—since shortly after he graduated from law school. In common with McCain, he does not lack for self-esteem: He believes in his value to the Senate and to the country. He has always styled himself a “maverick,” and he has some votes to prove it: For instance, he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act; and he voted against TARP, the bailout legislation. But he has been a proud supporter of the basic Obama agenda: voting for the “stimulus” package and, of course, for national health care. He recently aired an ad entitled “Penny Pincher.” He said, “In Wisconsin, we don’t spend money we don’t have—we pinch our pennies. That’s how we do things here. And Washington needs to learn that lesson.” The Johnson people retorted that politicians who support the stimulus and Obamacare forfeit their right to call themselves penny pinchers. A Green Bay talk-show host, Jerry Bader, quipped, “‘Russ Feingold the Penny Pincher’ is like ‘Britney Spears the Nun.’” Johnson was born in 1955 (two years after Feingold). He grew up in Minnesota, where his dad was treasurer of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. Both of the candidate’s parents had grown up on farms. Young Ron did some farm work himself. He says he has always been a hard worker, and believes in that ethic. Here is a snippet from his campaign bio: “At the age of 15, Ron started paying taxes when he began working at Walgreen’s Grill. He only started as a dishwasher, but he quickly rose through the ranks to become a night manager before reaching the age of 16.” He worked his way through college—all that American Dream stuff. In 1979, he moved to Oshkosh, and built up a company called Pacur. It is a plastics manufacturer. You will recall the most famous piece of advice in movie history: “Plastics,” says the family friend to the young man in The Graduate. “There’s a great future in plastics.” Johnson remarks, “It has worked for me.” Pacur now has more than 100 employees and robust profits. Naturally, Feingold lays a charge against Johnson: Richie Rich! He has accused Johnson of having an “elitist vision of reality.” Johnson, says Feingold, is “not operating in the real world. He’s operating in the world of a very wealthy individual and his company.” This disgusts Johnson, who replies that he knows far more about how an economy works, and how to create jobs, than this creature of Democratic politics. Moreover, says Johnson, it’s about time somebody served in the Senate who knows what it’s like to live under the government’s policies and strictures. Feingold has another charge: Extremist! Outside the mainstream! Extremist, extremist! What he means is, Johnson is a conservative Republican. He is unapologetically for the free market. He is skeptical of the U.N. and of the global-warming crusade. He is pro-life and anti-gay-marriage. Where immigration is concerned, he is opposed to “blanket amnesty.” And so on. Feingold has issued a warning about Johnson: “He hasn’t even said he supports the Civil Rights Act”! He hasn’t said he supports Mother’s Day, either. For the record, Johnson indeed supports the Civil Rights Act (I asked). (Not sure about Mother’s Day.) Johnson is somewhat amazed at the Democrats’ efforts to brand him a kook: “I come from a place called Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I played recleague basketball and softball until the age of 44. I’m one of the normal folks, honestly. My standard work uniform was blue jeans and a collared shirt.” Johnson is something of a fusion candidate in that he has much of the “tea party” behind him and the “establishment,” too: He has been endorsed by the Wisconsin Republican party; and the national Republican party is behind him as well. So, for good measure, is the Club for Growth. Johnson takes umbrage at the way the Democrats, in and out of the media, portray the tea partiers: as a bunch of racists and boobs. The reason he can’t accept this portrayal is that he has actually been to their events and knows them. “The people I see are just decent, hard-working, patriotic, tax-paying Americans who are as concerned about the direction of this country as I am. They’re just good solid Amer icans, and they don’t deserve to be denigrated.” Here is another Feingold charge—a triple one: Oil lover! Oil driller! Oil investor! Interviewed in early June, Johnson said the following about ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: “ANWR may be environmentally sensitive, but it may be easier to drill up there and with less environmental impact than trying to drill in very deep water. You know, these oil rigs are being forced so far offshore. By doing that we’re just increasing the risks.” In a later interview, he was asked, “Do you want to open up more of the United States—the continental United States—to drilling? I mean, would you support drilling like in the Great Lakes for example, if there was oil found there, or using more exploration in Alaska, in ANWR, those kinds of things?” Johnson answered, “Yeah, you know, the bottom line is, we are an oilbased economy, and there’s nothing we’re going to do to get off 33 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 34 Russ Feingold Ron Johnson of that for many, many years. So we have to be realistic and recognize that fact. We have to get the oil where it is, but we need to do it responsibly. We need to utilize American ingenuity and American technology to make sure we do it environmentally sensitively and safely.” Some hell broke loose. The environmentalist gods had been offended. Johnson’s campaign pleaded that he had been talking about ANWR, not the Great Lakes—where drilling is illegal. But Feingold fired up an ad in which he said of Johnson, “He’s willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies.” Johnson fired up a counter-ad saying, No way. He accused Feingold of “mud-slinging” and of failing to protect the Great Lakes himself. (This latter charge was tendentious.) As for investments, Johnson’s portfolio includes some shares in oil companies—even in the dastardly BP. The Democrats have made as much hay as possible out of this. (By the way, one of Johnson’s early jobs was baling hay.) Johnson says, “I don’t feel guilty” about the oil investments, even the one in BP. What he feels is poorer. “I wish I didn’t own” the BP stock, he says, “because it hasn’t been a very good investment over the past three months. But that’s the way capitalism works. If a company does something bad, it suffers, and so do the shareholders. There should be consequences to things.” Free to Choose (the Friedmans), The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), and The Law (Bastiat). He sees Atlas Shrugged being played out today, particularly in Massachusetts, with its health-care system, a state precursor to Obamacare: The insurance companies are being manipulated and battered. Johnson is a rookie candidate, and he will likely make some errors along the way. Feingold is a tough, savvy, smart cookie. He will likely make few errors, unforced. But the public is in an anti-incumbent—specifically, an anti-Democratic—mood. Wisconsin political pros say they have seldom seen such an atmosphere. Johnson is the “change candidate,” and Feingold, who has so cherished his “maverick” image—partly justified— is looking awfully status quo. What everyone says is that Feingold and Johnson are opposites—Feingold says it, Johnson says it, their supporters say it. Feingold is a left-wing political lifer (he and his supporters would not put it quite that way); Johnson is a Rand-fired businessman. Feingold thinks that national health care is a blessing, long overdue; Johnson has entered politics for its very repeal. As Obey is going home, Johnson wants to go to Washington to undo Obey’s work. Brian Schimming, a Republican politico in Wisconsin who has worked with hundreds of candidates, says he finds Johnson completely refreshing. “Ron is not inherently political. And he believes everything he says.” Schimming gives the impression that this sincerity is almost freakish in politics. Johnson is campaigning energetically, running what he calls a “dash”—he started only in May, remember. “We need to get this done,” he says. “Our country is in peril. That’s the bottom line. This is not my life’s ambition, by any means”—to run for office, to serve in the Senate. “This is just a concerned American who’s stepping up to the plate. I would hope that more people like me do this.” Russ Feingold once said something endearing—at least endearing to some of us. Talking to The Progressive, he said, “I love to golf. I hate to admit that in The Progressive magazine, but I’m a bit obsessed with golf. It’s really pretty bad. I’ve been seen all over town golfing, so I can’t hide it very well.” The interviewer asked, “Do you see a life after politics?” Feingold said yes. For one thing, there are “so many golf courses to play.” Republicans are hoping he’ll have all the time in the world for this activity. He could even join President Obama on the course. They could rejoice together over national health care, and plot to fight off its repeal. FEINGOLD: MANDEL NGAN/AFP J OHNSON will be selling off a number of his stocks to finance his campaign. One of his gifts to the Republican party is that he is a self-financer. But he is also doing what he can to raise money from others, who are, in fact, responding. Fein gold should have plenty of cash on hand. But, as Bob Kasten points out, he may feel a bit of a squeeze, because “the national liberal money is diluted.” Liberals are having to defend their seats all over the place, including expensive California, where Sen. Barbara Boxer is in a fight. That could leave less for Feingold in Wisconsin. He is facing a mightily unusual politician in Johnson—actually, a non-politician, even an anti-politician. I ask Johnson about writers, statesmen, or others who may have inspired him. He reels off a string of books. “Well,” he begins, “the foundation book would be the Bible. Right after that, Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand. (It would be enjoyable to hear Rand’s response! On being introduced to Bill Buckley, she said, “Young man, you are much too intelligent to believe in God.”) Johnson then names 34 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m AUGUST 16, 2010 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 35 STATUS HIATUS Conservatism should recognize the value of a refuge from social hierarchy BY MICHAEL KNOX BERAN wonder the Curzons (George Nathaniel, KG, First Marquess Curzon of Kedleston and Viceroy of India, was one of them) placed Thalia, the muse of comedy, on the parapet of Kedleston Hall, their seat in Derbyshire. She bears witness to a truth that has long bedeviled philanthropists, reformers, and the tender-minded in general: Aristocracy always has the last laugh. A curious fate has decreed that, as society grows ever more democratic, large numbers of people should become ever more aristocratic, in inward fantasy if not (to judge from contemporary manners) in external fact. Proust, we now know, was right when he predicted that society would “become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.” Under our meritocratic stars, an exalted status is no longer the exclusive property of a sharply demarcated class; power and riches are open to all. This is the miracle of democratic civilization, and the foundation of its ideal of self-made success. But it can also, though more subtly, be a burden. No sooner did it become theoretically possible for any man to obtain a higher status for himself than it became practically necessary for every man to try to do so. (If only to preserve his selfrespect.) This has proved a blessing and a curse; we pay for our freedom to rise—and to fall—in the anxiousness we feel when we contemplate our place in the pecking order. So reflexive has this anxiousness become that we are often unaware that we are pronouncing, in some unacknowledged tribunal of our consciousness, a judgment on our own status or that of others. Calvin Trillin, observing the exegetical finesse people bring to bear on the marriage pages of the Sunday newspaper, concluded that it amounted to a kind of “Sunday morning scholarship.” “I happened to glance at the wedding announcements one Sunday,” he wrote in his 1999 book Family Man, N o and realized that I could tell which one of the newly engaged young women whose pictures were shown had come out at a debutante cotillion that could be bought and which at a cotillion that was authentically snotty. The rest of the information needed for making distinctions between the backgrounds of the bride and groom was more or less at hand already—knowledge about the academic standards of various colleges and the animosity between various ethnic groups and the standing of various law firms and investment banks. Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made. I discovered that I could interpret wedding announcements in the way literary critics can deconstruct a passage of poetry or that Kremlinologists in the Cold War era could extract some meaning out of who was standing where on the Kremlin’s reviewing stand at the May Day Parade. So dispassionately does Trillin analyze the status anxieties he describes that you might think him exempt from them, as indifferent to the comparatively trivial vanities he dissects as the antiquarian who studies with philosophical detachment the finer shades of difference between the rival fanaticisms of the Blues and the Greens in the hippodrome of Constantinople. “I happened to glance at the wedding announcements . . .” ordinarily (we must infer), Trillin would not stoop to so frivolous a recreation, yet by a curious chance he possesses precisely the knowledge necessary to render the frivolous pages intelligible—he is deeply schooled in “the academic standards of various colleges and the animosity between various ethnic groups and the standing of various law firms and investment banks.” Come off it, man—confess yourself as passionately interested in status as (with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of saints and the more respectable crowned heads) the rest of us are. Proust was probably right when he said that those who most ostentatiously represent themselves as being above the rites and rituals of hierarchy—who affect to be as indifferent to them as to the order of precedence in an ant colony or a beehive—are typically those who are, in fact, most worm-eaten with status anxiety. M. Legrandin, the character in À la recherche du temps perdu who pretends to despise “snobbishness” and the “fashionable life,” is seen scraping acquaintance with the nobilities of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. “Thank you so very much for letting me come and see you,” Legrandin says after he has practically forced himself into the salon of the high-born Mme. de Villeparisis. “It is a pleasure of a quality altogether rare and subtle that you confer on an old solitary . . .” In the same way Trillin, who affects to analyze the status anxieties of the Sunday wedding pages with the cool disinterestedness of a zoologist, waxes warm when his own status is at issue. He arranged his 1993 book Remembering Denny contrapuntally around the contrast between Denny’s descent into failure and his own rise to success; the story of the one man’s capitulation is punctuated by little communiqués from the camp of the other man’s victories. “I was going back to do my first article for The New Yorker,” Trillin writes in the interstices of his narrative of Denny’s decline. “I had spent a year in the South as a reporter for Time. . . . I had published the University of Georgia piece as a three-part series in The New Yorker and as a book.” T delight Trillin takes in his status as three-part-series man is surely justified, for the pleasure of making it is one of the great happinesses that life, which has so many sorrows and disappointments, can show. The difficulty is that every tremor of satisfaction we feel when we look down (upon those who are lower than we are in a particular hierarchy) is counterbalanced by the pain we feel when we look up (to those who are higher). The farther one climbs, the more vexing the problem becomes. The naïf who is ignorant of the esoteric distinctions Trillin described cannot be hurt by his inability to penetrate into realms of which he is oblivious. But so sensitive is the initiate to He 35 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:36 PM Page 36 the subtlest gradations in the scale that his ineligibility for membership in a particular club—even his failure to be invited to a particular party—will figure to him as a catastrophe, as it did in the case of the fashionable woman who, having not received an invitation to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, threatened suicide. The same anxiety explains why those who enjoy what is supposed to be an enviable status go to such lengths to preserve their preeminence by keeping down those who might otherwise rise above them. Nowhere are the hierarchies more jealously guarded than in democracies (or in societies that are becoming democratic), precisely because the degrees of rank there do not find as strong a sanction in law and principle as they do in rigidly oligarchic societies. George Santayana, who passed his early years in quasi-feudal Spain, found it “at first very strange” that Americans should have been more attached to hierarchy than Spaniards, and he was startled to find that the background of his highly cultivated Harvard friend Charles Loeser “cut him off, in democratic America, from the ruling society.” (Loeser’s father “kept a ‘dry-goods store.’”) Unable to rely on the state to enforce their hierarchies, those who have caste advantage in free societies (or societies that are becoming free) must constantly change the social locks in order to make it more difficult for those who lack caste to fashion a satisfactory key. Perhaps the most ingenious of the devices the status “haves” have devised to demoralize the status “have nots” is status inversion. When a weapon in the social arsenal of status fails to hold the line, the elite will not merely discard it, they will ironically invert the old status hierarchy and disdain the thing that was once coveted, thereby disconcerting the aspirants who took so many pains to master it. No sooner did the well-to-do bourgeoisie in England, at the beginning of the Industrial revolution, find that it could compete with the old territorial aristocracy in matters of dress than the gentlefolk began to discard the powdered wigs and silk stockings that had formerly been comme il faut in the drawing rooms of London and Paris—yet they continued to dress their domestic servants in that style. What had been a badge of grandeur became a mark of lowliness. In the 20th century, the upper classes gradually abandoned morning clothes, but until quite recently kept their valets and butlers in them. “ready-made clothes,” George orwell wrote in 1944, now follow the fashions closely, they are made in many different fittings to suit every kind of figure, and even when they are of very cheap cloth they are superficially not very different from expensive clothes. The result is that it grows harder every year, especially in the case of women, to determine social status at a glance. The more chic the personage today, the more proletarian his style of casual dress as a rule will be: thus the haute-grunge style of TriBeCa and SoHo, and the Parisian haute-couture that obli ges runway models to dress like tramps. The hedge-fund magnate comes coatless to the cocktail party; the blue-collar worker shows up, a little awkwardly, in a necktie. Food used similarly to be a symbol of status: The paunches of Edward VII and William Howard Taft reveal the comfortable embonpoint of the prosperous gentleman. But foodstuffs have be come ever easier to procure, and today it is the multi-millionaire who pays his chef to starve him, while the lower orders are routinely gluttonous. The same process can be observed in the 36 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m devolution of refinement of language, perhaps the last redoubt of old-fashioned aristocracy. When Nancy Mitford composed Noblesse Oblige in the 1950s, it was possible to distinguish the cultivated habits of speech which separated “U” from “Non-U.” But even as she wrote, the masses were beginning to go to college, and just about anyone could learn to speak the King’s English. As a result, upper-class diction gradually ceased to be a mark of status, and today well-bred Englishmen often affect a pseudo-lower-class dialect known as “Mockney,” much as Ivy League students in America use the word “like” as a discoursive particle, in the way speakers of demotic dialects like California or Valley Girl English do. F all the anxiousness of their position, the great ones of the earth will probably always have the last laugh. They have staying power. It is true that, unlike Lord Melbourne, who had a soft spot for the order of the Garter “because there is no damned merit in it,” we in America prefer that our optimates earn their places through the sweat of their brows. But only the most naïve among us suppose it desirable to dismantle the hierarchies altogether and to open up, in the name of equality and brotherhood, the exclusivities they perpetuate. The status ladder is too essential to the continuance of the civilization. Adam Smith believed that man’s faith in the “pleasures of wealth and greatness” is largely a delusion. The attainment of status is not “worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.” on the contrary, Smith argued, the grandeurs we covet are mostly empty, and produce nothing more than “a few trifling conveniencies to the body.” Yet the very stupidity of our status inclinations, Smith said, is productive of a nearly boundless good: or It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life. The evil to be feared, then, is not status anxiety itself, which is indirectly the cause of many blessings, but the disappearance of resources that—before the advent of democracy and universal freedom—offered a respite from the pressures of status competition. The status uneasiness of men in the Middle Ages was different from our own: If we are made anxious by our freedom to rise (and our freedom to fail), they were made uneasy by the hopelessness of their prospects in a world where social divisions were largely unbreachable. “When Adam delved and Eve span,” John Ball asked at the time of the Peasants’ revolt of 1381, “who was then the gentleman?” This was the uneasiness of those who had every day to contemplate the pride and arrogance of their liege lords. Nevertheless, the medieval man was soothed by something we have lost, cultural havens in which status had little place. The status-free zones of the Middle Ages flourished in the shadow of a church that preached the existence of a God who was “no respecter of persons” and who was indifferent to the worldly status of individuals. These zones offered something more than homilies on humility; under their auspices, a culture grew up quite different from that of the aristocracy. If the château proclaimed the high status of its master, the civic forums that grew AUGUST 16, 2010 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 37 up in the towns and villages were conceived in opposition to feudal hierarchy. French towns “rose against the feudal establishment,” Walter Pater wrote in his essay “Notre-Dame d’Amiens,” “and developed severally the local and municipal life of the commune.” The people of Amiens were typical; they invested their civic pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new, revolutionary, Gothic manner. . . . Nay, those grand and beautiful people’s churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of “our Lady,” concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what is reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary. No sooner did feudalism disintegrate, however, than the civic culture that grew up in opposition to it began to decay. When it became possible for everyone to compete for higher status, no one remained to perpetuate a culture that was too painfully associated with the lower status all were now free to escape. It is even now remarkable, in countries that have never known a feudal tradition, how little civic culture is to be found in them. The relics of civic artistry that give the humblest villages in France or Italy a high degree of charm find no counterpart in even the most prosperous towns of the United States. T hE civic culture that was a by-product of the reaction against aristocratic hierarchy was highly artistic, but in contrast to the feudal arts, which exalted status, the civic arts soothed those who lacked it. Artistic motifs that depicted (in Pater’s words) a “tender and accessible” compassion inspired conduct concerned less with distinguishing “who’s in” from “who’s out” than with nourishing the affections and awakening the sympathetic virtues. A culture that is driven principally by concern for status is unlikely ever to develop a really satisfactory discipline of pastoral care. Status-driven culture may be, indeed often is, generous in its charity; but the largesse always reinforces the status of the donor, and the cultural artifacts of status-driven culture, being stained by pride, tend subtly to betray the motive in which they were begot. Philanthropists today pour millions of dollars into the various civic projects that bear their names, but the power to create a civic culture like that which was fashioned in the shadow of Chartres and the Parthenon—built for the most part by unknown hands in the name of a glory greater than themselves—is beyond us. Nor can status-driven culture bring people together in the way the older civic culture could: Its deepest raison d’être is to keep them apart. Ever since the days of Voltaire and d’Alembert, it has been the fashion to disparage a culture that had its origins in the benighted times, in the Dark and Middle Ages. Yet the institutions that were created then effected a revolution in the care of those whose status was low and whose anxiety was great. The delicate union of art and myth, philosophy and faith, enabled communities to suppress, if only spasmodically, the restless quest for status, and persuaded them to devote a portion of their cultural energy to the elaboration of an ideal of care almost maternal in its tenderness. Such voluntary associations as the confraternity and the sodality, the guild and the charité, were hospitable in the widest sense. In old French towns the hôtels-dieu—“hostels of God”—offered refuge to the weak and the sick, and to those who were “cast down amidst the sorrows and difficulties of the world.” In Venice, the Scuole Grandi—the “Great Schools”—admitted everyone but noblemen: Not only did they brighten the city’s piazzas by sponsoring civic festivals and processions, they distributed alms, succored paupers, and administered hospitals. The Low Countries had their frater-houses, the English shires their almonries and chantries. The same soothing, status-free ideal inspired the mendicant orders whose adepts devoted themselves to the service of the community, the various friars (Black, White, Grey, Brown, Austin, Capuchin) who went forth into the marketplace to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick. Supported by local communities, the friars, Dom David Knowles has written, “for at least two centuries surpassed all other members of the clergy in spiritual energy, doctrinal knowledge, and pastoral ability.” Even in the smoky depths of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, in the coal-hell of the English Midlands, the civic-pastoral system, though it was by then on its deathbed, still functioned. When Morel is too sick to work, the money nevertheless comes in. The family had seventeen shillings a week from clubs, and every Friday Barker and the other butty put by a portion of the stall’s profits for Morel’s wife. And the neighbors made broths, and gave eggs, and such invalids’ trifles. If they had not helped her so generously in those times, Mrs. Morel would never have pulled through, without incurring debts that would have dragged her down. M reformers whose thought has been molded by the French philosophes have sought to replace what survived of the old civic-pastoral culture with a more rational system of charitable care administered by experts in the service of the state. But the state has proved an unskillful shepherd, and the social-welfare agencies it has established have failed to fill the void that opened up with the disappearance of status-free zones of civic artistry. Nor, in a secular age like our own, can churches be expected to be the principal directors of a broad civic and charitable culture that overlooks worldly prestige. Yet before we shrug our shoulders and confess the impossibility of recreating, under modern conditions, a tradition that was long vital to the health and moral balance of civilization, we would do well to consider the consequences such a confession of impotence obliges us to accept. Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw this difficulty; he wondered whether the modern democratic man, knowing only the narrow culture of status competition, would not find himself, at last, shut up “in the solitude of his own heart.” The novelists of the 19th century were no less conscious of the costs of egoistic fragmentation in a status-driven world. Where the civicpastoral safety nets that are a by-product of status-free culture have failed, society, the novelists showed, is continuously exposed to new forms of soul-sickness and unsoothed anxiety. “Do you understand, sir,” Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov asks raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, “do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?” The tragic characters of 19th-century fiction—Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov and his Snegiryov; the harried fathers in Dickens—have nowhere to turn. oDErN 37 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 38 Other writers traced a relation between the decline of civicpastoral culture and the rise of novel forms of psychopathology. Robert Louis Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, two years before the Whitechapel Murders; Arthur Conan Doyle brought out the first of his Sherlock Holmes mysteries in 1887. In many of the Holmes stories as well as in Stevenson’s novella, London itself emerges as the sociopath’s accomplice: The dark metropolis, with its anonymous crowds, its grisly ghettos, its swirling fogs made lurid by gaslight, becomes a metaphor for the civic estrangement, the failure of pastoral care, that have helped to make the evildoer’s career possible. Stevenson’s antihero, who commits murder and other acts of “cruelty, at once so callous and violent,” is the epitome of a type of “vile life” and character that seems scarcely to have existed two or three centuries ago, when the pastoral folds and fences were (to a greater degree than today) in place. There have been murderers throughout history, but the phenomenon of the lone psychopath intent on cruelty as well as bloodshed seems not to have been remarked until the 1860s, with the murders committed by Dumollard in Montluel and Lyons, by Joseph Phillippe in Paris, by Frederick Baker in England, and by Gruyo in Spain. These were followed by the crimes of Vincenzo Verzeni in the Bergamasco region of Lombardy in the 1870s, the Austin Axe Murders in Texas in 1884 and 1885, the Whitechapel Murders attributed to Jack the Ripper in 1888, and the Vacher Murders in France, which began in 1894. The problem of the sociopath fascinates us because it seems to us the symptom of a larger problem, the most lurid manifestation of a more extensive breakdown. Only on such a supposition can we explain the bizarre and otherwise unaccountable overrepresentation of serial-killer dramas and murder shows on television and in popular culture generally. The shows are, after all, treatments of an exceptionally rare phenomenon, the small number of sick souls who in their estrangement from the community actually become murderous. But they exploit a more profound fear: Constantly interrupted by commercials hawking pharmaceutical remedies for such garden-variety decrepitudes as depression and insomnia, they finger the deeper apprehension that these run-ofthe-mill morbidities may degenerate into pathological ones— that under the pressure of modern life the apparently innocuous neighbor or colleague or spouse will snap. Such, at any rate, is the storyline commonly retailed when yet another mass killing takes place. It may be that we dwell on the psychopath because we know, in some catacomb of the heart, that a civilization that is too exclusively concerned with the competition for status cannot provide that tenderness in culture which, if it cannot heal every sick soul, can at least help communities identify the sheep that are likely to stray. The partisans of the Left seek to mitigate status anxiety by taxing the competition for status and, in effect, punishing success. Insofar as they succeed, they deprive society of the good that status competition produces. The prudent conservative, by contrast, recognizes the value of status-driven culture, and wishes to see it left largely untouched by the state. But he will nevertheless ask himself whether there might be a way, under modern conditions, to revive, at the local level, those zones of status-free culture which were one of the most beautiful features of the civilization of the past. The great ones of the earth will probably always have the last laugh; but there is no reason why, in the meantime, the rest of us may not be merry too. 38 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m Ban the Burqa To do so is an offense to liberty; not to do so is a greater one BY CLAIRE BERLINSKI Istanbul here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her: “If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real. Why had she decided to cover herself? I asked. As a teenager, she told me, she had experienced a religious revelation. She described this in terms anyone familiar with William James would recognize. She began veiling to affirm her connection with the Ineffable. “Every time I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see a religious woman looking back. It reminds me that I’ve chosen to have a particular kind of relationship with God.” Seen thus, the covering of the head is no more radical than many other religious rituals that demand symbolic acts of renunciation or daily inconvenience. I have heard Jews describe the spiritual rewards of following the laws of kashrut in much the same way. It is inconvenient, they say, and seemingly arbitrary; it demands daily sacrifice. But a Jew who keeps kosher cannot eat a meal without being reminded that he is a Jew, and thus the simple act of eating is elevated to a religious rite. One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women. But that was when I could still visit the neighborhood of Balat without being called a whore. I MOVED T HE French National Assembly’s recent vote to ban facecovering veils including the burqa—which conceals even the eyes—is the latest such measure taken by governments across Europe. In April, the Belgian parliament became the first to ban the burqa; shortly afterward, police in northern Italy Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too, and There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. AUGUST 16, 2010 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 39 fined a woman for wearing a niqab, which covers the entire face save for the eyes, appealing to a 1975 law prohibiting the covering of the face in public. Conservative backbencher Philip hollobone has called for a burqa ban in Britain. Last week in Spain, a measure to ban the burqa was narrowly defeated. The broad term for veiling, curtaining, or covering is hijab, and all forms of it, even those exposing the face, have been banned in French public schools since 2004. Let’s be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against religious freedom and freedom of expression. They stigmatize Muslims. No modern state should be in the business of dictating what women should wear. The security arguments are spurious; there are a million ways to hide a bomb, and one hardly need wear a burqa to do so. It is not necessarily the case that the burqa is imposed upon women against their will; when it is the case, there are already laws on the books against physical coercion. The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts. All true. And yet the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized. The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand up now against veiling—and the conception of women and their place in society that it represents—within a generation there will be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk comfortably or safely. Recently, on a New York Times blog, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum not only argued against the ban, but proposed that those who wear the burqa be protected from “subtle forms of discrimination.” It was a perfect example of a philosopher at the peak of her powers operating in a cultural and historical vacuum. “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum writes, was that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest—derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing. Nussbaum is absolutely wrong. There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe. In the benighted Islamic suburbs of Paris, as Samira Bellil writes in her autobiography Dans l’enfer des tournantes (“In GangRape hell”), there are only two kinds of girls. Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school. . . . Those who . . . dare to wear make-up, to go out, to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as “easy” or as “little whores.” Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran. The association of Islam and crime against women is seen throughout Europe: “The police in the Norwegian capital Oslo revealed that 2009 set yet another record: compared to 2008, there were twice as many cases of assault rapes,” the conservative Brussels Journal noted earlier this year. “In each and every case, not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant.” These statistics are rarely discussed; they are too evocative of ancient racist tropes for anyone’s comfort. But they are facts. T hE debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved. The cancerous spread of veiling has been seen throughout the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. I have watched it in Turkey. Through migration and demographic shift, neighborhoods that once were mixed have become predominantly veiled. The government has sought to lift prohibitions on the wearing of headscarves, legitimizing and emboldening advocates of the practice. Five years ago, the historically Jewish and Greek neighborhood of Balat, on the Golden horn, was one in which many unveiled women could be seen. It is not anymore. Recently I visited a friend there who reluctantly suggested that I dress more modestly—while in his apartment. his windows faced the street. he was concerned that his neighbors would call the police and report a prostitute in their midst. Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus—an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think. At its core, the veil is the expression of the belief that female sexuality is so destructive a force that men must at all costs be protected from it; the natural correlate of this belief is that men 39 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 7/27/2010 10:11 PM Page 40 cannot be held responsible for the desires prompted in them by an unveiled woman, including the impulse to rape her. In 2006, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric, delivered a sermon referring to a recent rape victim thus: If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside . . . without cover, and the cats come to eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred. His remarks caused a firestorm of denunciation and the usual insistence that this sentiment did not represent the true nature of Islam. But the only unusual thing about his comments was that they were made in public. If you believe these views are atypical of the Muslim community, spend five minutes in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. No need to cherry-pick; just Google “hijab” and look at the first results that come up. A typical entry: What kind of dignity a non-believer has by the way; they conduct their life and expose themselves. They have removed the shield of protection, that modesty of Hijab and left themselves unprotected and that is the cause for the assault, which takes place once every ten seconds in rape and murder around the world. But those true Muslims who observe proper Hijab are protected from such assaults and not one [case of] this type is ever heard of. A faraway, fire-eyed Saudi cleric? No. This site is hosted in Norway. The site’s moderator is one Espen Egil Hansen, and the managing director is someone by the name of Jo Christian Oterhals. Some other comments: Any woman who perfumes herself and passes by some people that they smell her scent, then she is a Zaniyah [adulteress]. . . . Examining the various conditions about the hijab one can clearly recognise that many of the young Muslim women are not fulfilling these conditions. Many just take “half-way” measures, which not only mocks the community in which she lives, but also mocks the commands of Allah. . . . The hijab fits the natural feeling of Gheerah, which is intrinsic in the straight man who does not like people to look at his wife or daughters. Gheerah is a driving emotion that drives the straight man to safeguard women who are related to him from strangers. The straight MUSLIM man has Gheerah for ALL MUSLIM women. In response to lust and desire, men look (with desire) at other women while they do not mind that other men do the same to their wives or daughters. The mixing of sexes and absence of hijab destroys the Gheera in men. These insights were posted on the official website of the Islamic Society of the University of Essex. As they suggest, the veil is a legitimization of murderous jealousy. It sanctions the impulse of primitive men to possess the very sight of their women entirely to themselves. There is no nation on the planet where the veil is the cultural norm and where women enjoy equal rights. Not one. Nor is there such a thing as a neighborhood where the veil is the cultural norm and yet no judgment is passed upon women who do not wear it. L all freedoms, religious freedom is not absolute. It is said in the United States that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and this principle is applicable to any open society. It is one thing to say I should be perfectly free to 40 IKE | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m worship Baal, another to say I must be free to sacrifice children to him. Donning a burqa is not an outrage on the order of killing a child, but it is surely an outrage on just that order to permit a culture that views women as slaves to displace one that does not. We are all by now familiar with the demographic predictions: Europe’s Muslim population is growing; many cities will soon have Muslim majorities. If the conception of Islam that the veil represents is allowed to prevail in Europe, these cities will no longer be free. It is difficult to form a position on this issue that reconciles all of the West’s legal precedents and moral intuitions. It is probably best that the burqa be banned immediately on “security” grounds, even if we all know deep down that the case is spurious; for such a ban to make perfect sense, it would have to extend to all loose clothing, suitcases, capacious handbags, beer bellies, and shoes. Yet in some cases, hypocrisy is the least awful of options; bans thus justified may be the best way of expressing a society’s entirely legitimate revulsion without setting a dangerous precedent of legislating against a targeted religious group. Headscarves cannot at this point be banned. It is politically impossible, and it is also too late: The practice is too widespread. But the decision to wear them should be viewed much as the decision to wear Klan robes or Nazi regalia would be in the United States. Yes, you are free to do so, but no, you cannot wear that and expect to be hired by the government to teach schoolchildren, and no, we are not going to pretend collectively that this choice is devoid of a deeply sinister political and cultural meaning. Such a stance would serve the cause of liberty more than it would harm it: While it is true that some women adopt the veil voluntarily, it is also true that most veiling is forced. It is nearly impossible for the state to ascertain who is veiled by choice and who has been coerced. A woman who has been forced to veil is hardly likely to volunteer this information to authorities. Our responsibility to protect these women from coercion is greater than our responsibility to protect the freedom of those who choose to veil. Why? Because this is our culture, and in our culture, we do not veil. We do not veil because we do not believe that God demands this of women or even desires it; nor do we believe that unveiled women are whores, nor do we believe they deserve social censure, harassment, or rape. Our culture’s position on these questions is morally superior. We have every right, indeed an obligation, to ensure that our more enlightened conception of women and their proper role in society prevails in any cultural conflict, particularly one on Western soil. When government ministers such as the British environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, legitimize the veil by babbling about the freedom and empowerment the garment affords, they reveal a colossally dangerous collapse in Europe’s cultural confidence. Instead, campaigns designed to discourage veiling should be launched. If the state is entitled to warn, say, of the unhealthful effects of cigarette smoking, it is surely also entitled to make the case against the conception of women that veiling represents. Banning the burqa is without doubt a terrible assault on the ideal of religious liberty. It is the sign of a desperate society. No one wishes for things to have come so far that it is necessary. But they have, and it is. AUGUST 16, 2010 longview_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 10:10 PM Page 41 The Long View Therapist’s Notes Media-ordered therapy, result of Shirley Sherrod video Patient: Andrew Breitbart First Session: Therapist greets patient, who arrives with three BlackBerrys. Patient is pleasant and good-humored, seems aware of his surroundings, is able to carry on simple transactional conversations. Patient, to therapist’s surprise, is not tortured by hate. He seems to understand why he’s here, which is important in the work that we do. He understands that the Media have the power to compel treatment, and he understands that our work here is part of a general process to make his work more palatable and mainstream. Patient smiles affably during this conversation and seems to genuinely want to be rehabilitated in the eyes of what he calls the Mainstream Media. He understands that as a result of the Shirley Sherrod–video contretemps, this therapy is necessary. Patient does, however, have irritating habit of “posting” during our sessions. Patient in fact “posts” several videos of Democratic congressmen (many of whom were in the adjacent treatment room, in the “Learning to Like the Little People” group session) calling him a racist on MSNBC. Session ends when patient begins tweeting therapist’s notes. Second Session: Patient arrives with a small video crew. When asked to stop videotap ing the session, patient replies goodnaturedly that as far as he’s concerned, transparency is crucial. He makes disparaging comparison to the recently shut down JournoList—some members of which are patients of the therapist, in the “Diversity of Thought Is Okay” group sessions. Patient doesn’t seem to understand that the Media-ordered therapy must be conducted in private. He seems un willing to accept that his past actions— including, but not limited to, the Sherry Sherrod video posting—have made him a dangerous and hated figure among the more mainstream and ap propriate Media outlets. He seems un willing, despite his affable demeanor, to do what it takes to “fit in” with others in the Media. Therapist explains all of this to patient, and explains that as long as he insists on disturbing the peace and disrupting established, venerable institutions like ACORN and the NAACP and the Department of Agriculture, he’ll always be considered a racist outcast. Session ends early, when therapist’s BlackBerry begins buzzing ceaselessly. Patient has apparently already posted video of the beginnings of the session on Drudge. Third Session: The third session takes place entirely on Fox News’s Red Eye program, with patient and therapist trying to work out their issues during a particularly intrusive cross-conversation between patient and Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld, who insults therapist many times, making fun of his sweater-vests and his close-cropped beard and his soft, modulated voice until therapist is near tears. Session ends when Red Eye takes a commercial break and therapist is escorted out and presented with a Red Eye coffee mug, which therapist forgets about and uses absentmindedly the next day during patient Pelosi’s multiple-personality-disorder therapy, awakening patient Pelosi’s paranoid personality, “Iris,” who snatches it away from therapist and tosses it against the wall, shattering it and staining the New Yorker “View of the World” poster with hazelnut coffee. Therapist plans to bill patient Breitbart for poster. Fourth Session: The fourth session takes place entirely on Twitter. Patient continues to use BY ROB LONG “@” replies to therapist’s questions. An example: @therapist: @andrewbreitbart, why do you insist on maintaining an adversarial tone to the MSM? @andrewbreitbart: @therapist, because they’ve controlled the conversation. They smear anyone who disagrees w/them. The left-wing MSM hates real dissent. #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod @therapist: @andrewbreitbart, why do you insist on sharing all of this information with everyone? @andrewbreitbart: RT @therapist: @andrewbreitbart, why do you insist on sharing all of this information with everyone? #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod @andrewbreitbart: RT @ericboehlert: Breitbart is tweeting his therapy sessions! He’s clearly insane! #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod @andrewbreitbart: @therapist, the MSM always tries to suppress information it doesn’t like. I’m trying to get information out. Big, big diff. #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod @ericboehlert: RT @andrewbreitbart: @therapist, the MSM always tries to suppress information it doesn’t like. I’m trying to get information out. Big, big diff. // Breitbart needs to be stopped. @therapist: @andrewbreitbart, I can’t really have an effective therapy session if you keep tweeting everything. @andrewbreitbart: @therapist, I can’t help it. It’s what I do. #tcot #mediamatters #sherrysherrod @therapist: But @andrewbreitbart, you’re right in front of me, in my office. We cd do this in person. @ericboehlert: RT@therapist: But @andrewbreitbart, you’re right in front of me, in my office. We cd do this in person. // Breitbart isn’t taking his therapy srsly! RT! RT! Fifth Session: Doesn’t take place. Therapist’s contract with the mental-health clinic is terminated after patient posts all videos, tweets, and therapist’s notes on his new blog, Big Therapy. 41 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 42 Books, Arts & Manners The Prize Fighter V I N C E N T J . C A N N AT O Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, by Thomas L. Jeffers (Cambridge, 393 pp., $35) ‘I t’s important to have enemies, because everything depends on the kind of enemies you have,” Norman Podhoretz once told Cynthia Ozick. It is the kind of quote you would expect from a politician, not a magazine editor with a literary bent. Yet this influential and contentious intellectual has certainly made his share of enemies over the years, and they largely have been the right kind of enemies. Along with William F. Buckley Jr. and Irving Kristol, Podhoretz stands as one of the most important architects of conservatism in the late 20th century. With Kristol, Podhoretz is a founding father of that much-maligned group, the “neoconservatives.” His 35-year editorship of Commentary spanned a time of great political and social change in America and his personal political odyssey was deeply shaped by those changes. Now comes the first full-scale biography of Podhoretz, written by thomas L. Jeffers, a professor of literature at Marquette University. At first glance, an English professor might seem like an odd choice for the job. today, most people Mr. Cannato is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author most recently of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins). 42 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m know Podhoretz for his writings on politics and foreign policy. But Jeffers’s book reminds us that Podhoretz came to politics through literature; his early works dealt almost exclusively with it. He was a star pupil of Lionel trilling at Columbia and could have had a prominent academic career had he not been drawn—willingly and gratefully—into the world of the New York intellectuals of the 1950s. Podhoretz was born in 1930 and raised in the lower-middle-class ethnic and racial stew that was Brownsville, Brooklyn. A grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Podhoretz showed early both academic promise and a wealth of self-confidence. A strict but caring teacher guided his studies, trying to transform this “slum child” into a gentleman of letters. A full scholarship to Columbia was followed by graduate studies at Cambridge University. One of his earliest major publications was a review of saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March; Bellow was angered by the review, and there’s some evidence he held it against Podhoretz for years. Podhoretz’s ascent was interrupted by a short stint in the Army, after which he joined the staff of Commentary (where a young Al Pacino worked briefly as an office boy/mail clerk). Podhoretz began writing reviews and essays for The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Leader, and The New Republic. He had left Brooklyn for Manhattan forever. Contrary to the stereotype of an era of conformity and cultural stagnation, the 1950s was a high time for intellectuals in the U.s. More students going to college meant more academic jobs for intellectuals. A growing middle class meant more of an audience for literary/intellectual magazines that would employ writers like Podhoretz (at rates that would make today’s freelancers envious). It was also the high point of liberal anti-Communism. Liberals, bolstered by former Marxists and trotskyites, were not shy about condemning the sins of Communists and their fellow-travelers. this was the milieu in which Podhoretz began his career. In 1960, at the age of 30, he was named editor of Commentary. He was at that time a fairly standard anti- Communist left-liberal. (In 1964, he called Goldwater supporters “really vicious.”) In the early 1960s, Podhoretz rode the increasingly liberal cultural wave. Norman Mailer was a close friend; another was Jason Epstein, who would found The New York Review of Books and invite Podhoretz to be its editor (Podhoretz declined). During this period, Commentary published excerpts from Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, an influential precursor of the coming counterculture, as well as Norman O. Brown and James Baldwin. It would be a mistake to call the Podhoretz of this period a radical. A few years earlier, he had written an essay titled “Know-Nothing Bohemians,” attacking Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac for being “hostile to civilization.” Forget about the lunches with Jackie Kennedy and the drinking with Mailer; at heart Podhoretz had always been a member of the middle-class bourgeoisie and his gradual shift to the right would further intensify his identification with those values. His time in Europe had left him with a distaste for cheap anti-Americanism. From his days with trilling at Columbia, Podhoretz would always retain a strong streak of cultural conservatism, a kind of elitism that wanted to defend the best of literature and Western civilization. Years later, Podhoretz would write: “My line from now on must be elitist in culture, anti-elitist in politics.” A shift in Podhoretz’s politics began with his 1967 memoir Making It. the critical reaction was negative, often harshly so. Many of his friends resented their portrayal in the book. some reviewers thought the author’s effort selfserving and self-aggrandizing. In many ways the book was jarring. Published at the height of great social and cultural change in America, it celebrated an older notion of American success, a modern intellectual’s rags-to-semi-riches tale. Podhoretz’s main sin was honesty. Writers and intellectuals weren’t supposed to care about success, but here was one of their own proclaiming, even celebrating, such worldly goals, even as other liberals AUGUST 16, 2010 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 43 became increasingly focused on the ills of America, from racism to the war in Vietnam. Intellectuals were supposed to be alienated from the larger society, and here was one of their own proudly claiming a stake in it. The book, as Podhoretz later said, was “a kind of blasphemy.” It argued that “it is possible to live a reasonably decent life and maintain one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual integrity without becoming a revolutionary.” If Norman Podhoretz was becoming alienated from anything, it was from the leftward drift of American liberalism. In 1970, while walking alone on a winter’s road in upstate New York, Podhoretz had a mid-life crisis/spiritual awakening. Jeffers is not entirely clear as to what happened, but it seems to have been a result of the combination of turning 40, the depression that had set in as a reaction to the criticism of Making It, and the dislocations in American society during the late 1960s. All had taken their toll on Podhoretz; the resulting epiphany made him take his Judaism more seriously and quit drinking. It also opened a new chapter in which Podhoretz and Commentary would more forcefully criticize the New Left, black radicals, the politicized university, and the counterculture. Podhoretz still considered himself a “left-liberal,” but was increasingly torn. He was generally against the Vietnam War, but sometimes felt “inclined to support” it “simply out of the huge well of contempt I feel for most of the people who oppose it.” On race, Podhoretz criticized the militancy of black radicals, worried about black anti-Semitism, and opposed affirmative action and racial quotas. Again, this is not a complete reversal of opinion. In 1963, Podhoretz had written an essay titled “My Negro Prob lem—And Ours.” It was a brutally honest and awkwardly personal account of race relations in which Podhoretz condemned as simplistic the idea of universal white guilt and universal black innocence, all while arguing that the way out of America’s race dilemma was through miscegenation. The essay was a sign, even in the Golden Age of civil rights, that Podhoretz’s views on race had always been somewhat less than ro mantic. If there was one area where Podhoretz made the biggest impact, it was foreign policy. He spent much of the 1970s as part of a small but influential band of Democrats (many soon-to-be-former Democrats) who tried to stop the drift of the Democratic party toward McGovernite isolationism. Their goal was even more fundamental: to arrest the lack of faith in American power and institutions in the post–Vietnam War era. Groups like the Committee on the Present Danger sought to keep alive anti-Communism, warn Americans of the continuing threat from the Soviet Union, and remind everyone that America still had a role to play in defending liberal-democratic values across the globe. Podhoretz befriended former Johnson and Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan and published his article “The United States in Opposition,” which argued for a full-throated defense of liberaldemocratic principles in the face of opposition from the Soviet Union and its Third World allies. The article led directly to Moynihan’s appointment as U.N. ambassador. Podhoretz would become a close Moynihan confidant and adviser. He later grew disillusioned with Moynihan—who soon after became a U.S. senator—owing to the dissonance between Moynihan’s ADVERTISEMENT FOR “LET’S PRAY” Choreographed by Thandumzi Moyakhe, performed by Nqaba Mafilika and Bathembu Myira, Johannesburg, South Africa They dance there with outrageous zest, Kneeling and swaying without rest, White crosses painted on their chests. Hour after hour I see them falling, Rolling and riotously crawling, Uproariously reaching, sprawling. They fill their mouths with stolen light. See how their closed eyes gorge on sight So vast, yet in the world so slight; How they are crucified who pray, And how they dance, tomorrow and today, In Africa, which is so far away. —SARAH RUDEN private, hawkish views and his public opinions too often tailored for Democratic audiences. There was another difference between the two men: Moynihan had never given up on the New Deal idea of an activist government, while Podhoretz was slowly shedding that faith as he drifted rightward. Podhoretz would launch yet another Commentary contributor into the United Nations. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then an obscure professor at Georgetown and member of the Committee on the Present Danger, wrote “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which sought to differentiate authoritarian regimes supported by the U.S. from totalitarian regimes supported by the Soviet Union. Reagan would choose this self-described “AFLCIO Democrat” as his first U.N. ambassador. In 1980, Midge Decter, Norman’s wife and compatriot, formed the Committee for the Free World, to carry the antiCommunist banner. In that same year, Podhoretz published his small book The Present Danger, which reaffirmed the need for America to contain Communism and support democracy. The book’s subtitle said it all: “Do we have the will to reverse the decline of American power?” That same year, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan provided an emphatic answer to Podhoretz’s question. Podhoretz also devoted more attention to the plight of Israel. His 1982 essay “J’Accuse,” written at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is as relevant and potent today as it was back then. What makes the piece so effective is that Podhoretz calls American criticism of Israel “a cover for a loss of American nerve” in the post-Vietnam years—“a cover for acquiescence in terrorism [and] for the appeasement of totalitarianism.” As “J’Accuse” demonstrates, Podhoretz’s great skill, besides editing, is as a writer of polemics, in the sense of wellargued political combat. Podhoretz is not just a very good prose craftsman; he also brings a style of tightly contained verbal ferocity to his essays. The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz once said that Podhoretz taught her that good writing must show “no yielding. No ‘on the other hand’s’ to concede a point.” That is Norman Podhoretz’s style: to the point, unyielding, relentless, always seeking to score debate points against opponents. 43 carribian 5 cabins_no appl_carribian 2p+application.qxd 7/28/2010 2:10 PM Page 2 NATIONAL REVIEW’S 2010 Sailin g No ve mber 14 –2 1 o n Post-Election Cruise Join KARL ROVE, BERNARD LEWIS, VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, ANDREW BREITBART, PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, TONY BLANKLEY, SCOTT RASMUSSEN, GREG GUTFELD, CAL THOMAS, BERNIE GOLDBERG, JONAH GOLDBERG, ANDREW McCARTHY, ALAN REYNOLDS, JIM GERAGHTY, RICH LOWRY, DANIEL HANNAN, KATHRYN LOPEZ, ROGER KIMBALL, VIN WEBER, JAY NORDLINGER, ROB LONG, KATE O’BEIRNE, RAMESH PONNURU, JOHN O’SULLIVAN, ROMAN GENN, MICHAEL NOVAK, JOHN DERBYSHIRE, EDWARD WHELAN, KEVIN WILLIAMSON, ROBERT COSTA, and PETER SCHRAMM as we visit the beautiful ports of Grand Turk, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Half Moon Cay, and Ft. Lauderdale T his is your special opportunity to participate in one of the most exciting seafaring adventures you will ever experience: the National Review 2010 “Post-Election” Caribbean Cruise. Featuring a cast of all-star conservative speakers (that will expand in coming weeks), this affordable trip— prices start at only $1,899 a person!—will take place November 14–21, 2010, aboard Holland America Line’s MS Nieuw Amsterdam, the beautiful new ship of one of the world’s most highly regarded cruise lines. Fast forward to November 3—the morning after the elections. Whether you find yourself bemoaning another two years of Democrat control of Capitol Hill, or whether you’re flabbergasted by massive GOP legislature pick-ups, or whether the results are as mixed as a tossed salad, make sure you’re packing your luggage and preparing for the Nieuw Amsterdam, your floating luxury getaway for scintillating discussion of the elections and their consequences—and on all other major current events and trends. You could spend the week of November 14 raking leaves. Instead, opt for seven sunny days and cool nights sailing the balmy tropics, mixing and mingling with the exemplary speakers we’ve assembled to make sense of electoral matters and the day’s top issues. Confirmed speakers for NR ’s “Post-Election” Cruise include former top Bush-43 White House aide Karl Rove, historian Victor Davis Hanson, Islam scholar Bernard Lewis, conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, conservative web guru Andrew Breitbart, liberalmedia critic Bernie Goldberg, leading columnists Tony Blankley and Cal Thomas, Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld, terrorism expert Andrew McCarthy, GOP strategist Vin Weber, scholar Michael Novak, conservative economist Alan Reynolds, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, acclaimed pollster Scott Rasmussen, European Parliament Tory star Daniel Hannan, Ethics and Public Policy Center president Ed Whelan, conservative scholar Peter Schramm; and from NR: editor Rich Lowry, Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg, “The Long View” columnist Rob Long, NRO editor-atlarge Kathryn Lopez, NR Institute president Kate O’Beirne, senior editors Jay Nordlinger and Ramesh Ponnuru, Campaign Spot blogger Jim Geraghty, former editor John O’Sullivan, “The Straggler” columnist John Derbyshire, NR reporter Bob Costa, deputy managing editor Kevin Williamson, and acclaimed artist Roman Genn. NR trips are marked by riveting political shoptalk, wonderful socializing, intimate dining with our editors and speakers, making new friends, rekindling old friendships, and, of course, grand cruising. That’s what’s in store for you on our 2010 sojourn. There are countless reasons to come, but none are better than the luminaries who will be aboard this luxury trip. This truly extraordinary gathering is one of the best ensembles we’ve ever had on an NR cruise, which guarantees that our seminar sessions (featuring ample audience “Q & A”) will be fascinating. aWatch Karl Rove, ex-congressman Vin Weber, ace columnist Tony Blankley, and pollster Scott Rasmussen provide expert analyses of the elections and their consequences. aSome of our primo past cruise experiences have been the interchanges between Bernard Lewis and Victor Davis Hanson on the struggle between Islam and the West. These academic giants, and terrorism expert Andy McCarthy, will provide their razorJOIN US FOR SEVEN BA LMY DAY S AND COOL CONSERVATIVE NIGHTS sharp insights on America’s dealD AY / D AT E PORT ARRIVE D E PA R T SPECIAL EVENT ings in the Middle East and the SUN/Nov. 14 Ft. Lauderdale, FL 5:00PM evening cocktail reception Muslim world. aCan you find more insightful MON/Nov. 15 Half Moon Cay 8:00AM 4:00PM afternoon seminar “Night Owl” session social commentary than from the likes of Phyllis Schlafly, New TUE/Nov. 16 Grand Turk 12:00PM 6:00PM morning seminar late-night smoker Criterion editor Roger Kimball, Cal Thomas, scholars columnist WED/Nov. 17 AT SEA morning/afternoon seminars Michael Novak and Peter Schramm, evening cocktail reception (or from esteemed artist Roman THU/Nov. 18 Grand Cayman 8:00AM 4:00PM afternoon seminar Genn)? A more perceptive dissecFRI/Nov. 19 Cozumel 10:00AM 11:00PM afternoon seminar tion of the liberal media than from “Night Owl” session Bernie Goldberg, Greg Gutfeld, Rob SAT/Nov. 20 AT SEA morning/afternoon seminars Long, and Andrew Breitbart, or a evening cocktail reception clearer take on the national economy than from Alan Reynolds? Or on SUN/Nov. 21 Ft. Lauderdale, FL 7:00AM our courts from Ed Whelan? Picture H carribian 5 cabins_no appl_carribian 2p+application.qxd 7/28/2010 2:11 PM Page 3 n Ho llan d A meric a’s MS Nie u w A ms te rda m OVER 340 CABINS BOOKED! PRICES START AT JUST $1,899! Superior service, gourmet cuisine, elegant accommodations, and great entertainment await you on the beautiful new mS Nieuw Amsterdam. Prices are per-person, based on double occupancy, and include port fees, taxes, gratuities, transfers (for those booking airfare through Holland America), all meals, entertainment, and admittance to and participation in all NR functions. Per-person rates for third/fourth person in cabin: Ages 6 months to 2: $482 Ages 18 and over: $1,139 Ages 2 to 17: $582 DELUXE SUITE Magnificent luxury quarters (528 sq. ft.) feature use of exclusive Neptune Lounge and personal concierge, as well as compliT mentary laundry, pressing,Land I Sdry-cleaning A I Tverandah, king-size service. Large Wprivate bed (convertible to 2 twins), whirlpool bath/shower, dressing room, large sitting area, DVD, mini-bar, and refrigerator. Category SA DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 4,499 P/P $ 6,999 SUPERIOR SUITE Grand stateroom (392 sq. ft.) features private verandah, queen-size bed ST Iwhirlpool (convertible to 2 twin beds), IT L A sitting bath/shower,W large area, DVD, minibar, refrigerator, floor-to-ceiling windows, and much more. Category SS DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 3,499 P/P $ 5,799 DELUXE OUTSIDE Spacious cabin (241 sq. ft.) features private verandah, queen-size bed (convertible to 2 twin beds), bath with shower, sitting area, mini-bar, tv, refrigerator, and floor-to-ceiling windows. Categories VA / VB / VC DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 2,899 P/P $ 4,399 LARGE OCEAN VIEW Comfortable quarters (190 sq. ft.) feature queen-size bed (convertible to 2 twin beds), bathtub with shower, sitting area, tv, large ocean-view windows. FT Category D FEW LE DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 2,399 P/P $ 2,999 LARGE INSIDE Cozy but ample cabin quarters (185 sq. ft.) feature queen-size bed (convertible to 2 twin beds), bathtub with shower, sitting area, tv. Category K FEW LEFT DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 1,899 P/P $ 2,499 NEW SPEAKERS! NR Editor RICH LOWRY and NRO’s JOHN DERBYSHIRE sign on!! Daniel Hannan and John O’Sullivan discussing the fate of EuroAmerican relations. aAnd they’ll be joined in all the elucidating and election-analyzing by NR’s editorial heavyweights, including Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Jim Geraghty, Bob Costa, Kevin Williamson, and Kate O’Beirne. Then there’s the ship: The just-launched Nieuw Amsterdam offers spacious staterooms, countless amenities, and affordable rate—prices start as low as $1,899 a person. No matter what cabin meets your tastes and circumstances, you can be assured that the Nieuw Amsterdam and its stellar staff will offer you unsurpassed service, sumptuous cuisine, roomy accommodations, and luxury. And don’t forget the fantastic itinerary: Grand Cayman, Grand Turk, Cozumel, and Holland America’s private island, Half Moon Cay (with a must-see-it-to-believe-it blue lagoon!). The National Review 2010 “Post-Election” Caribbean Cruise will be remarkable—but then every NR sojourn is. Our winning program of seminars (we’ll have eight), cocktail parties (three are scheduled—they’re great opportunities to chat and have photos taken with your favorite conservatives), a late-night poolside smoker (featuring world-class H. Upmann cigars and cognac), and dining with our editors and speakers (on two nights)—it’s all something you really must experience. Sign up now: visit www.nrcruise.com to reserve your stateroom (securely!), or call the travel experts at The Cruise Authorithy at 1-800-707-1634 (weekdays from 9AM to 5PM, Eastern time). Take the trip of a lifetime with some of America’s preeminent intellectuals, policy analysts, and political experts—Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, Victor Davis Hanson, Bernard Lewis, Phyllis Schlafly, Andrew Breitbart, Scott Rasmussen, Andrew McCarthy, Bernie Goldberg, Greg Gutfeld, Daniel Hannan, Cal Thomas, Tony Blankley, Vin Weber, Alan Reynolds, Roger Kimball, Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Lopez, Jim Geraghty, Kate O’Beirne, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, John O’Sullivan, Michael Novak, Ed Whelan, Rob Long, Kevin Williamson, Robert Costa, Roman Genn, John Derbyshire, and Peter Schramm— on the National Review 2010 “Post-Election” Caribbean Cruise. REGISTER NOW AT WWW.NRCRUISE.COM. OR WWW.POSTELECTIONCRUISE.COM. CALL 800-707-1634 FOR MORE INFORMATION. NEED A CABIN ‘SHARE’? WE’LL FIND YOU ONE! books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 46 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS As the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said: “Norman gives new meaning to the word ‘intense.’ There’s nothing that doesn’t matter.” If the motto of the countercultural Left was “the personal is political,” Podhoretz’s motto could have been “the political is personal.” It is hard to see him skiing in Switzerland with John Kenneth Galbraith, as Buckley often did. It was that intensity that helped clarify the issues of the Cold War in its last two decades, but it also exacerbated the growing polarization of contemporary politics. Podhoretz and other neoconservatives provided intellectual backbone to the conservative movement, but sometimes blurred the lines between backbone and rigidity. It is not enough to say, as Jeffers implies, that Podhoretz did not leave the Democratic party, but that the party left him. Yes, liberalism has evolved, but so did Podhoretz. Not all neocons made the entire trip rightward, but Podhoretz appears to have done so. Just this past March, Podhoretz wrote a defense of Sarah Palin in which he declared that he “would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party.” That certainly is a long way from private meetings with LBJ at the White House in the 1960s. Writing a book about the life of a writer and editor, especially one as anticountercultural and bourgeois as Podhoretz, can be a challenge. Jeffers neatly lays out Podhoretz’s career in a workmanlike fashion in what is basically a semi-authorized bio. Jeffers clearly admires his subject, but too often the biographer and the subject merge, their views nearly indistinguishable from each other. One wishes that Jeffers had stepped back just a bit and provided more analysis of Podhoretz’s career and ideas. Overall, though, Jeffers serves up a rich intellectual history of postwar America. Podhoretz outlasted many of his enemies and ex-friends, saw the end of the Cold War, and watched his son John ably take the reins at Commentary while watching his son-in-law Elliot Abrams serve under two U.S. presidents. From the streets of Brownsville in the 1930s to the Presi dential Medal of Freedom in 2004, Norman Podhoretz’s life has been an idiosyncratic intellectual and political odyssey: an idiosyncratic, yet wholly American life. 46 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m The Drive To Create GEORGE GILDER The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley (Harper, 448 pp., $26.99) I a castle in Newcastle, complete with reflecting pool, dappled woods nooked with marble sculptures, and pastures lowing with cattle, Matt Ridley, dean of British science writers and author of four erudite, Darwinian bestsellers, might seem an intellectual grandee ready for an honorable, bland retirement in a North Country Eden, perhaps readying himself for the House of Lords. But at the end of his lawn, invisible throughout a leisurely walk down its length, is a vast and amazing surprise that offers a vivid portent of this new Ridley book: a tome as unexpected and as ambitious and as contrarian as a massive coal mine under an environ mentalist’s lawn. Far below, a visitor can descry the tractors and extractors crawling around in the dirt like yellow-jacketed ants. And like the Ridley mine, this book, The Rational Optimist, is a trove of readily combustible fuel. In this volume, Ridley announces a shift: “In the last two decades I have written four books about how similar human beings are to other animals. This book is about how different they are.” What he discovers roundly refutes the prevailing gloom about the human future epitomized by John Kenneth Galbraith’s view that the rational response N Mr. Gilder is a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, and the author most recently of The Israel Test. to the predicament of the poor is to accommodate their poverty, with the only remedy being government planning and stimulus. Ridley devastates not only the case for expanded government, but also the worldview of environ mentalism as a vessel for rational pessimism. Cogently showing that the environment faces no threat so dire as environmentalism itself, he spurns the “precautionary principle—better safe than sorry” as self-refuting: “In a sorry world there is no safety in standing still.” In a typical aperçu dramatizing the benefits of economic advance, he comments, “Today a car running at full speed emits less pollution than a parked car of 1970 [did] from leaks.” Combining Adam Smith’s division of labor with Charles Darwin’s natural selection, he frames a far-reaching synthesis of economics and ecology, a triumphant new démarche in the understanding of wealth and poverty. He begins with a fruitful comparison between two similarly shaped artifacts on his desk: a cordless computer mouse and a million-year-old Acheulean hand axe. “Both are designed to fit the human hand—to obey the constraints of being used by human beings. But . . . one is a complex confection of many substances reflecting multiple strands of knowledge. The other is a single substance reflecting the skill of a single individual.” The difference between humans and other animals, he writes, “cannot just be that I have a bigger brain. . . . After all, late Neanderthals had on average bigger brains than I do.” The stone axe “was invented in the Paleolithic period, spread widely, yet never improved significantly over the subsequent million years while the hominid brain enlarged by one third.” Over eons of hominid history, biological evolution was many times faster than technological evolution. He continues: “No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative [through interdependent trade and exchange] in a way that happened to no other animal.” Conversely, economic AUGUST 16, 2010 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 47 independence produces decline: “Selfsufficiency is poverty.” With exchange, consumption could diversify while production specialized. But protectionism or parochialism reverses the process. The Dark Ages, Ridley writes, were “a massive experiment in the back-to-theland hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund).” He quotes the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand: “Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.” Because Ridley flaunts his ownership of coal mines, his elegant, learned, and cogent defense of fossil fuels will incur the usual critique of self-interest that self-indulgent academics wield against their entrepreneurial benefactors. Coal is the environmentalist’s ultimate evil: a black distillation of carbon, pouring out pollution, stripping vast acreage of forest and topsoil, chopping off mountaintops, loading the lungs of miners, darken ing the skies of cities. Ridley boldly demonstrates that these evils are merely diminutive echoes of the evils produced by so-called clean power. The industrial revolution, he writes, shifted the world from recent solar power (burning trees, catching wind, feeding grain) to tap “solar capital laid down some 300 million years before.” Ending all previous economic booms were busts that occurred when “renewable sources of energy ran out: timber, cropland, pasture, labor, water, peat.” All were self-replenishing, like wind and biofuels today, but “were easily exhausted by a swelling populace. Coal not only did not run out . . . it actually became cheaper and more abundant as time went by. . . . Economic growth only became sustainable when it began to rely on non-renewable, non-green, nonclean power.” Far from relying on technologies that squander farmland and wilderness to avoid emissions of life-enhancing carbon dioxide, “a sustainable future for nine billion people on one planet is going to come from using as little land as possible for each of the people’s needs.” Nuclear, oil, gas, and coal rep resent “an almost laughably small footprint—even taking into account the land despoiled by strip mines.” In Ap palachia, “roughly 7 percent of 12 million acres were affected [by strip mines] over 20 years,” an area somewhat bigger than Rhode Island. But to serve “the 300 million occupants of the U.S. with their current power demand . . . would require: solar panels the size of Spain; or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan [the ninth-largest country in the world]; or woodland the size of India and Pakistan; or hayfields . . . the size of Russia and Canada combined [first- and secondlargest]; or hydro dams with catchments one-third larger than all the continents put together.” To Ridley, the ultimate scandal is biofuels, which require that Americans “in effect” be “taxed thrice over”—to subsidize corn growing, support the production of ethanol, and then face increased food prices. But in a globalized economy, such blunders may be absorbed: “The price of wheat roughly trebled in 2006–8, just as it did in Europe in 1315–18. . . . Yet in 2008, nobody ate a baby or pulled a corpse from a gibbet for food. . . . Interdependence spreads risk.” Echoing Peter Huber’s pioneering Hard Green (1999), Ridley observes that to support the current U.S. standard of living without fossil fuels would either strip most of the world of its trees—including all the rain forests—or require non existent trillions of slaves. So Ridley adopts a materialist model of advance and hurls it in the face of the materialist doomsayers. He sees a hedonic mode of human incentives demolishing the claims of leisured stagnation. Wealth grows through “what Hayek called ‘the catallaxy’: the everexpanding possibility generated by a growing division of labor,” while the socialist alternative offers only a Moloch to which to sacrifice human lives in an ever-growing state. To the great consternation of movement “scientists,” Ridley masterfully refutes every pretense of the climate-change pretenders, from ocean acidification and disappearing coral reefs to Al Gore’s hockey-stick graph eclipsing the medieval warm period. The hideous horsemen of the apocalypse—disease, resource exhaustion, infrastructure decay, tribal war—cannot permanently strangle progress, even in long-afflicted Africa. He offers a definitive answer to Galbraith’s idea of rational resignation to an “equilibrium of poverty.” Reason, to Ridley’s mind, impels us relentlessly forward and upward. Reli - gion, on the other hand, he sees as a reactionary obstacle to growth, pro gress, and even morality. He cites, for example, the indignation of Israel’s prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, along with Homer, against the pride of the Phoe nician traders as typical rants of reactionary traditionalists against the creators of wealth. Instead—echoing his previous books on the evolution of virtue and the superiority of sexual reproduction to reduplicative cloning—Ridley maintains that moral codes naturally evolve from the rise of catallaxy. Cultures that reach out to immigrants and new ideas gain cultural and genetic innovation. As wealth grows, population growth relents; women instead release their energies into the marketplace. This inspiring Ridley vision is full of fascinating insights. But by exaggerating the sufficiency of unaided reason, Ridley fails to confront the current predicament of remorselessly secular Eu rope—where women are bearing children at a rate that ensures ever fewer workers to support the throngs of retirees, remittees, and welfare parasites. (For details, consult Mark Steyn’s America Alone or Melanie Phillips’s World Turned Upside Down.) The collapse of Judeo-Christian religion enables the ascendancy not of rational enterprise and feminist productivity but—as minarets sprout in European cities—of a patriarchal and often barbarous Islam that prevails through raw fertility, masculine ferocity, and lethal anti-Semitism. Secular culture seems to harbor an inexorable bias toward sexual suicide and socialist stagnation. (The U.S. and Israel currently resist the dem ographic sink chiefly through the fertility of their religious minorities.) That a secular-feminist society, feeding on hedonic incentives, can ultimately sustain a functional national defense capable of standing up to the Vandals and Goths of the 21st century is yet to be proven, but the portents are unpromising. Europe is dismantling its military, while the U.S. increasingly regards its own chiefly as an arena for sex-role gaming. Religion projects a society into the future and provides a foundation for a durable optimism. Ridley’s blindness to religion stems from reliance on Darwinian materialism and Smithian 47 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 48 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS catallaxy as sufficient sources for wealth and morality. He insists that economic growth is driven by consumption and governed by the emergence of “spontaneous order.” Thus he shares Hayek’s confusion between order, on one hand, and information and creativity, on the other. Order is what is not spontaneous; it is the opposite of information and creativity. Order is an effect of institutions, legal protections, stable currencies, and social regularities such as family and tradition. It is not bottom-up but largely top-down. In terms of information theory, order is low in information (it is low in “entropy,” and in surprises) but indispensable for creativity. It takes a low-entropy carrier (one in which there are no surprises from intrusive gov ernments) to bear the high-entropy, information-rich inventions that drive economic growth. Citing the reductionist schemes of Paul Romer, who considers invention essentially a process of recombining chemical elements or generating new combinations of atoms, Ridley even sees entrepreneurial creations as “mistakes,” like mutations, selected naturally by the “market.” Entrepreneurs are seen as responding to external stimuli in a bottom-up scheme resembling Darwinian natural selection or Skinnerian stimulus and response. As supply-siders know, however, the invention comes first, not the market. A typical invention does not break down the manufacture of, say, carriages, vacuum tubes, or typewriters into fine-tuned components that respond to demands of existing consumers. Rather, the inventor surprises customers with a new system. The car (or transistor or computer) subsumes any existing components into a higher-level machine. The chief discovery of 20th-century mathematics was the incompleteness of all logical systems; as Kurt Gödel showed, all logical schemes depend on outside axioms that they cannot prove. The entrepreneurial inventions stem from this strict limitation on the determinist rationality of socialism and the emancipation of creativity, which always comes as a surprise. The root of invention is within imagination and aspiration, faith and freedom—the kind of values that elude the larger philosophies of the author but are manifest in this superb book. 48 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m Through A Glass, Darkly A N D R E W S T U T TA F O R D William Golding, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies: A Life, by John Carey (Free Press, 592 pp., $32.50) W E’ll never know for sure what the English writer William Golding (1911–93), a publicly private man, would have thought about the publication of this book. Thanks partly to Golding’s failure to cooperate, no biographies of him were published during his lifetime, but the assumption that follows from that would probably be wrong. Feast has followed famine: To help him in his work on this book, the Golding family granted John Carey, a prominent Oxford academic, distinguished literary critic, and acquaintance of Golding, access to the author’s previously closed archive. It was a hoard too extensive not to have been designed as an invitation, one day, to biographers, and this appears to have been exactly what Golding intended. He just had to die first. Safe in his grave, Golding couldn’t be pestered; but he could be remembered. The Golding papers contain (amongst much else) early drafts of what was published, and copies of what was not—in cluding novels or their fragments, two autobiographical works, and a 5,000-page warts-and-all journal maintained more or less daily for 22 years. As a resource for Carey, this trove was essential—and it was not wasted. This book must be one of the most closely observed portraits Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. of an author ever written. If you are looking for a perceptive, marvelously written close-up of a body of work being shaped and reshaped, this is the book for you. And if you want to know when Golding upgraded chess computers— and to what model—this is also the book for you. As a picture of both the man and his oeuvre, this makes for an engrossing (if sometimes overly pointillist) read, but I finished it unconvinced that Golding was worth all the effort. As Carey’s title reminds us, his subject’s reputation has dwindled. Golding no longer needs no further introduction, and so he has been given that implicitly condescending identifier, “The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.” Carey explains that this was meant both ironically and as bait to lure new readers in, but I doubt that Golding himself would have been greatly amused. The book may have made his fortune (since its publication in 1954 Lord of the Flies has sold 20 million copies in the U.K. alone) and his reputation (there would have been no Nobel Prize without it), but Golding himself later described it as “boring and crude.” False modesty? In part, but as with so much else about Golding, the truth was more complex than the performance. The disdain Golding came to feel for his first published novel was genuine, and very revealing. And it’s no less revealing that Carey, a biographer convinced of his subject’s genius, makes so little of it. Could the reason for this be that Golding’s most brilliant book was, in some crucial ways, among his least representative? To be sure, its big theme—man’s fallen nature—became the leitmotif of much of Golding’s writing, and, yes, like so many of his novels, Lord of the Flies is characterized by passages of astounding power and almost hallucinatory beauty. Nevertheless, by Golding’s standards it is a remarkably spare and uncluttered work. Its message may be profound, but its language and its storyline are stark, straightforward, and unburdened by the rococo rambling that bedevils so much of his later writing. Much of this was thanks to the efforts of Faber and Faber’s Charles Monteith, the novice editor who was the first to see what Golding’s much-rejected typescript could become. The fruitful relationship between the clever, long-suffering, and benignly AUGUST 16, 2010 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:36 PM Page 49 manipulative Monteith and his histrionic, pathologically self-absorbed discovery is wonderfully described by Carey—and is essential for a proper understanding of Golding’s career. The two men were to work together for four decades, but it is reasonable to assume that Monteith’s creative influence was at its peak right at the beginning of their relationship. Golding wanted to be published, and Monteith appeared to be the only person who could make it happen. So Lord of the Flies was slimmed down, losing both backstory and, more significantly, a messiah. Golding had originally envisaged the character Simon as a Jesus figure. His death was to have been an act of selfsacrifice: noble, mystical. After Mon teith’s intervention, it is reduced to a cruel accident, the result of hysterical misunderstanding. The only god on this island was the devil that the children had dreamt up for themselves. They are—we are—alone. Monteith was right. Horror is amplified by hopelessness. But the change, I suspect, may have left Golding thinking that the book that made his name was not quite his. He was deeply (if unconventionally) religious. He had, he disclosed, seen spirits and apparitions. Psychiatrists can make of that what they will (while Carey generally has plenty to say about what made Golding Golding, he shies away from medical commentary, which is a mistake), but to Golding such fancies were fact. Taking the Jesus out of Simon must have seemed to him an unnatural and arbitrary act. Years after Lord of the Flies was published, he was, as Carey notes, still talking up the sanctity of Simon—and still failing to reverse the effects of Monteith’s shrewd editorial pen, a failure he finally tried to remedy with Matty, the enigmatic central character in the largely incoherent Dark ness Visible (1979), a figure who may be an angel, a holy fool, or both, but either way remains overshadowed, like all Gold ing’s later characters, by a handful of feral schoolboys. Golding found himself on firmer ground when he returned in book after book to the wickedness of you and me. “Man produces evil,” he wrote, “as a bee produces honey”: a typically melodramatic overstatement redeemed by the subtler suggestion that we have no real choice in the matter, it’s just who we are. When the last dumb but decent Neanderthals of The Inheritors (1955), the novel with which Golding followed Lord of the Flies, are wiped out by the New People (your ancestors and mine), their annihilation is merely the inevitable consequence of the arrival of smarter, more assertive Homo sapiens. It’s just what we do. The sources of Golding’s misanthropy were complex and (I’ll take psychological speculation a little further than Carey is prepared to go) rooted in a disordered, depressive psyche, lunatic spirituality, and the need for an alibi to assuage the overwhelming sense of guilt that descended upon him during his (distinguished) service in Britain’s wartime navy and never went away. The war, explained Golding, generated “a sort of religious convulsion” within him, giving him for the first time “a kind of framework of principles.” Once they were in place, however, he realized that he had not lived up to them. “I have,” he claimed, “always understood the Nazis because I am that sort by nature”—a characteristically absurd, characteristically self-important exaggeration. The similarities that Golding saw between himself and the Hitler crowd lay in what he now—eyes freshly opened—believed to have been the “viciousness” and “cruelty” of his younger self. To be sure, there was that clumsily attempted (and mercifully unsuccessful) date rape, and the smashed heart and mind of an abandoned fiancée (her traces can be detected in 1959’s Free Fall), as well as some more persistent suggestions of sadism, but, for all that, he was a long, long way from the Third Reich. This overwrought sense of his sin would only have been exacerbated by— he was a child of his era—a mix of curiosity and unease about his obvious homosexual leanings. But after fantasies of sodomy and hints of the lash came the reality of rum. As Carey records in sometimes spectacular detail, Golding was for decades a guzzle-yourself-prone drinker, and obnoxious with it: not an unknown phenomenon in literary circles, but in his case it could come with a distinctive twist. We may laugh (well, I did) at the tale of a drunken Golding attacking another author’s Bob Dylan puppet, but that’s before discovering that Golding had mistaken the marionette-troubadour for Satan. That sense of his sin may have helped drive Golding to drink, but it also followed him there. How much better if Golding could soothe himself with the idea that he was not really as bad as he thought. In the absence of a sense of proportion, the next best thing would be the conviction that everyone else was just as bad. It’s not a case that Carey makes, but some of Golding’s onslaught on the Old Adam must have been an attempt to conscript his fellow man into sharing the burden of the wickedness that he could not bear to shoulder alone. But perhaps he drank to deal with something else too. Lord of the Flies is an extraordinary creation, a ghastly glimpse of a very dark place, but much of the rest of Golding’s work (with the exception of 1956’s remarkable Pincher Martin) is dreary, pretentious, and sometimes just nuts. Carey would certainly not agree, but for all his canny, well-crafted explanations of some of Golding’s more puzzling writing, and despite his deployment of a series of enthusiastic mid-century critics to hosanna his hero, the suspicion must remain that Golding’s talents were more second-division than first-. After Lord of the Flies, Golding had shot his bolt and, I reckon, he knew it. He was, after all, smart enough and insecure enough to be his own fiercest critic. If that obsessive guilt of his was not already reason to turn to the bottle, the growing realization that he would never repeat the success of his debut would surely have done the trick, particularly if, like so many high achievers, he already felt like a fraud. And he often did. All this may also help explain Golding’s prickliness, rumored plagiarism (a topic too quickly passed over by Carey), money worries that lingered even as his bank balance fattened, and—he was British after all—undignified scramble for a knighthood and, presumably, the validation that some might believe a “K” could bring. But, still: One masterpiece ought to be enough for a reputation. The island transformed by this bleakest of Prosperos into mirror and hell will endure long after the booze and the bluster have passed into trivia: Toward the end of the afternoon, the mirages were settling a little. They found the end of the island, quite distinct, and not magicked out of shape or sense. There was a jumble of the usual squareness, with one great block sitting out in the lagoon. Sea birds were nesting there. “Like icing,” said Ralph, “on a pink cake.” What could go wrong? 49 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:37 PM Page 50 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Film . . . As Dreams Are Made On R O S S D O U T H AT LEGENDARY/WARNER BROS. C hristopher NolaN is ill-served by his admirers. in an age starved for movies that straddle the line between middlebrow and highbrow, pop art and the real thing, he’s been hailed as a kind of last best hope for mass-market filmmaking: the artist who knows how to make a blockbuster, the crowd-pleaser who’s also an auteur. The Dark Knight (2008) was lauded as the superhero movie that shakespeare would have made, had somebody graced him with an ample budget for special effects and the chance to cast heath ledger as the Joker. this summer’s follow-up, the highconcept blockbuster Inception, was inspiring similar hosannas before it even reached the multiplex. if you believed the online chatter, audiences could look forward to a James Bond film written by Carl Jung and directed by David lynch—or maybe to The Matrix as reimagined by a tag team of alfred hitchcock, David lean, and stanley Kubrick. Nolan’s movies, alas, don’t support these panegyrics. the result has been backlash: From the blogs to the glossy magazines, critics have lined up to declare the new movie overrated, and Nolan a grim gamesman who lacks the human touch. the new consensus was summed up pretty well by Salon’s andrew o’hehir, who dismissed Inception as “a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth.” this assessment is basically correct. But in a summer populated by superhero se quels and 1980s retreads (The A-Team and a Predator reboot, hollywood?), let me say a word for handsome, clever, selfserious boy-movies. if you don’t expect them to outdo Kubrick or hitchcock or The Godfather, they can be a pretty good time. so it is with Inception. at its best, this is a heist movie in the spirit of Ocean’s Eleven, with less wit but a bigger “wow” 50 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m factor. instead of George Clooney or Brad pitt, Nolan has leonardo DiCaprio, playing Cobb, a professional thief who specializes in relieving corporate bigwigs of their intellectual property. his goals are oldfashioned, but his methods are novel: instead of invading his marks’ homes or offices, Cobb invades their dreams, swiping the crucial ideas from the recesses of their subconscious and leaving them none the wiser that anything’s been taken. or at least mostly none the wiser, since the movie opens with the exception to that rule: an “extraction” gone wrong, in which the target—a Japanese tycoon named saito (Ken Watanabe)—figures out that his dreamworld is a dream. But the botched operation is still impressive enough to convince saito to make Cobb an offer of his own. he wants the near-impossible: not extraction but “inception,” in which an idea is planted rather than lifted, and the Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception dreamer awakes and follows through on whatever premise the invaders have dropped into the basement of his consciousness. Cobb wants to turn the job down, but saito dangles a carrot he can’t refuse—the chance to be reunited with his children in america, which he fled years ago under suspicion of murdering his wife. (that spouse, Marion Cotillard’s ravishing Mal, now haunts Cobb’s own nightmares, and sometimes shows up unbidden when he’s on the job, through subconscious mechanisms too mysterious to quite explain.) so he reluctantly signs up to “incept” robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir of a vast energy empire that saito wants the younger Fischer to impulsively decide to break apart. For this he needs a team. (saito actually says “assemble your team!”—an early clue that this is going to be more of a boymovie than a masterpiece.) this means an architect (ellen page), who weaves the dreamscapes where the inception takes place; a chemist (Dileep rao), who de signs the sedatives that drop the mark and the thieves alike ever deeper into sleep; a forger (tom hardy), who can play different parts within the dream; and an aide-de-camp (Joseph Gordon-levitt), who keeps the whole operation running smoothly. together, they enter a series of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, following an intensely complicated set of rules that you’ll probably still be puzzling over hours after the film has run its course. (the biggie is this: time moves more slowly in dreams than in reality, and more slowly still in dreams-within-dreams, so that every time the dreamers drop deeper into the subconscious they gain hours more to work with.) here Nolan the visual magician goes to work, staging set-piece after set-piece—cities that fold up on themselves, M. C. escher–style; weightless fights on the walls and ceilings of a spinning hotel corridor; and a finale in the acres of empty skyscrapers that Cobb and his late wife built for themselves in limbo, the bottom level of everyone’s unconscious and the place where all the ladders start. the key is to relax and enjoy the ride, instead of hoping for something deeper than a heist movie. Nolan’s dreams are gorgeous but simplistic, more like video-game levels than the irrational, unstable tableaus one enters in real sleep. his allusions to mythology and theory are thudding and painfully on-the-nose. (page’s character, the dream architect, is named ariadne; Cobb literally rides an elevator into the darker regions of his subconscious, etc.) and the story’s human drama, Cobb’s wrestling match with the specter that is Mal (another on-the-nose name), plays like a rehash of DiCaprio’s similar dance with dead-wife guilt in last winter’s Shutter Island. But go in with the right attitude, and none of this will matter. You’ll be wowed by Nolan’s technical proficiency, and come out arguing about the rules of inception, the various plot twists, and the hints that what seems like the film’s “reality” might be an illusion as well. and the characters and themes, such as they are, will fade like an unmemorable dream. AUGUST 16, 2010 books8-16_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/27/2010 6:37 PM Page 51 The Straggler On Thy Silver Wheels JOHN DERBYSHIRE T he recent political ructions over the extension of unemployment benefits brought Norman Tebbit to my mind. Tebbit was Margaret Thatcher’s secretary of state for employment in the early 1980s. There was some urban rioting, and it was suggested to Tebbit that these disturbances were a natural response to the indignity of unemployment. Tebbit, whose origins were humble, replied briskly: “I grew up in the Thirties with an unemployed father. he didn’t riot. he got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.” This was a key moment in Tebbit’s career, a sort of political aristeia. he was known forever afterwards as the chap who’d told the unemployed to get on their bikes—loathed by the Left for his supposed heartlessness, loved by the Right for his appeal to lawful, selfsufficient striving. Apt as it was, Tebbit’s remark came to my mind for another rather particular reason: I have become a cyclist. This I owe to a next-door neighbor who sold up and moved to Georgia. Cleaning out his garage prior to the move, he unearthed two bicycles he and his wife had bought with some idea of taking exercise together. The bikes were grimy and a tad rusty, but he offered them to the Stragglers and we, in thrall to the same joint-exercise fantasy, took them. The bikes then rested undisturbed in our garage for five years. Those two bikes might have gone on being passed from one self-deluding suburban couple to another for decades had not my daughter learned to drive. I now share a car with a busy 17-year-old. Since I work from home it’s no great hardship, but now and then I need to go somewhere beyond walking range. A bike would be just the thing! And I’d get some exercise! I extracted the bikes, wiped off five years’ worth of back-of-garage Spanish moss, and took them to a local bike store. They replaced the tires, which had perished, tuned up the cables, and sold me a bike rack to fit my car. The Stragglers are now a biking family. well, in part. I am making the modest excursions I planned to make, but Mrs. Straggler has yet to set foot to pedal. her bike has been taken over by Miss Straggler, who has scrambled the entire logic of the enterprise by daily biking the two miles to and from the railroad station whence she embarks for her summer internship in the city. That leaves me with the car as a daily temptation not to bike. on the other hand I find satisfaction in seeing my daughter enter into the spirit of Norman Tebbit’s injunction, albeit in reverse: She has found work, she has got on her bike. Biking, I have learned, is not what it was. As a child I inherited my father’s bike, an all-steel Raleigh “Sports” with a three-speed hub gear. I can dimly recall dad actually riding it to work Tebbitstyle, 60-something years before his granddaughter followed suit. once dad got a car, though, the bike went into the family shed. It came out when I was big enough to ride it. I cleaned it up and it became a source of much pleasure to me. My friends and I must have ridden hundreds of miles through the countryside of the english east Midlands in the late 1950s, through drowsy villages with names in domesday Book, sometimes on roads first laid out by the Romans. Though I loved that bike, I didn’t get far as a mechanic. The pons asinorum here was the gear assembly, packed away in the rear-wheel hub. If you tried to dismantle it, which of course I did, at a certain point a sort of jack-in-the-box mechanism kicked in. The mechanism emitted a loud PING! and fired 20 or so little greased ball bearings, rockers, and screws all over your back yard. I could fix a puncture, though. In those innocent times your bike came with a hand pump attached to the frame, and a repair kit that lived under the saddle. Fixing your own punctures nowadays would be as eccentric as churning your own butter, and your pump and repair kit would swiftly vanish in our casually criminal society. In respect of which, I have purchased a security chain—a thing unknown in my childhood, when citizens were much poorer, and bikes relatively much more expensive, than today. I’ve also become attentive to bike news, of course. here’s an item from the London newspapers: CoupLe wARNed oveR ALLowING ChILdReN To CyCLe To SChooL ALoNe. oliver and Gillian Schonrock let their daughter, eight, and son, five, cycle a mile unsupervised from their home in dulwich, south London, to Alleyn’s junior school. They believe cycling to school is good for their children’s independence and self-confidence. But other parents and the headmaster have said it is irresponsible. . . . Mr. Schonrock, who walked alone to school as a boy in Germany, and cycled to swimming club from the age of six, said: “we wanted to recreate the simple freedom of our childhood. . . . These days children live such regimented lives.” A later report on the situation tells us that the headmaster threatened to report them to London’s Social Services. By the time you read this the Schonrocks are probably in jail. “The simple freedom of our childhood,” indeed! If there are freedoms to be had, you will be notified by the proper authorities, and sent a form to fill out. oh, you want bike humor? I got bike humor. Through the middle decades of the 20th century bikes were the vehicles of choice for undergraduates and staff at england’s grand old universities. Thus two Cambridge students are walking to class when they spot the professor of Greek verse kneeling down beside his bike, which is propped against an ivycovered wall. Approaching, they see that he has a flat tire, and is vigorously working his bike pump. however, he is pumping away at the wrong tire, the one that is not flat. when they point this out to professor Murgatroyd he stops pumping, stands up, scratches his head, and looks at the bike in bewilderment. “wrong tire? Then do they not . . . communicate?” 51 backpage_QXP-1127940387.qxp 7/28/2010 2:18 PM Page 52 Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Captain Post-America Ou can imagine the fist-pumping and broad grins that went around Hollywood when it was announced they were making a movie about Captain America—and the subsequent dismay when they learned it was not about Peter Fonda’s character in Easy Rider. Seriously, Captain America . . . as in, Captain America? The pitch must have been a hard sell, and perhaps an investor offered script advice: How about he’s a robot in the future who finds a comic book in the ruins of New York, which was nuked by white supremacists, and he becomes an unthinking patriot until a hip, streetwise hacker reprograms him to organize communities? No, the producers must have said, actual Captain America. But don’t worry. It’s a dark, gritty reimagining. Sighs of relief. Okay, then. Is he a Gitmo guard who’s exposed to radiation and takes on the government on behalf of the people? Sorry, sorry, it’s your baby. Run with it. Here’s $200 million—you did say dark? Okay, here’s the money. Pure fantasy, of course, but ask yourself: Would it have been possible to greenlight a Captain America movie in the Bush years and make him a patriot? The very word is a dog whistle for freaky Bible-thumping Birther-Birchers! You want to apply it to someone, use the guy who founded WikiLeaks! But even if you don’t care much about the politics of Hollywood, you’ve seen enough superhero movies to know that the top military guy (William Hurt) will be icy, cruel, and obsessed with using Cap to destroy democracy in order to save the country. Also, he will be a smoker. Then you hear the movie is set during World War II, and you relax. That was the Good War, after all. It has the Tom Hanks seal of approval (the European part, anyway). Sure, Eva Braun will probably look like Sarah Palin, and Hitler will probably tell the rest of Europe they are either with him or with the Bolsheviks, but it’ll be okay. We have permission to be patriotic about World War II. Sorry. “We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers,” said Joe Johnston, whose past directing credits include Jurassic Park III and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. “He’s a guy that wants to serve his country but he’s not a flag-waver. We’re re-interpretating, sort of, what the comicbook version of Steve Rogers was.” Johnston further explained: “He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver.” What a relief! They waved flags at the Nuremberg rallies, you know. The fact that he mentions the absence of waving flags twice suggests he’s nervous about the project’s inherent problem for Hollywood: How do you make a movie about Captain-frackin’-America without affecting international box-office? The Forties had lots of characters like Cap: big guys with Y Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. 52 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m Ipana-toothpaste smiles punching horrible racial caricatures or oh-so-haughty Nazis. Here’s another helping of a knuckle sandwich, Fritzie old boy! Yank special! Want some more? They were aimed at ten-year-olds reading the comics, metabolizing the news of the day through the exploits of nationalistic archetypes. Most faded away, but Cap came back. Marvel revived him and brought back his arch-foe, the Red Skull, as a Commie. (He was a Nazi in his previous incarnation.) But there are alternative versions. Here’s one, as summarized on Wikipedia: Red Skull is the illegitimate son of Captain America and his girlfriend Gail Richards, conceived before the Captain’s presumed death during WWII. . . . As a final symbol of his rebellion against the system that created him, he assassinates President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It is satisfying to some to believe that JFK was whacked by Captain America’s son, certainly more so than believing a Castro-symp Communist did it. (But the former is true on a metaphysical level, no?) The Red Skull is in the new movie, and he’s a Nazi. Everyone hates Nazis. (Especially Illinois Nazis.) This will help the world bond with Cap and forget his regrettably American origins. In 2007, the producers were asked about “anti-American sentiment” hurting the box office, and one of them answered: Captain America stands for freedom for all democracies, for hope all around the world. He was created to stop tyranny and the idea of stopping tyranny is important today as it was then and unfortunately it’s not going to change because that’s how the world works. So I think that we will have some interesting challenges but at the end of the day if the movie is terrific and the movie talks to the world, it’s not about one place, it’s about the world. By “stopping tyranny” we can assume Cap was going to the League of Nations to make an impassioned speech about letting sanctions work against Hitler. No unilateralism here. But then a wonderful thing happened: Obama! After his election, another producer commented, “The idea of change and hope has permeated the country, regardless of politics, and that includes Hollywood. Discussions in all our development meetings include the zeitgeist and how it’s changed in the last two weeks. Things are being adjusted.” This is how you know the movie will be a mess: They adjusted the story of a World War II hero to reflect the imminent shift in the international zeitgeist. And for all that, he’s still not waving a flag. If they can’t wave a flag in the Age of Hope and Change, they never will. But that’s no surprise. A few years ago, the prudes began airbrushing out Churchill’s cigars and FDR’s cigarettes; you wouldn’t be surprised if they removed the flag from the photos of Iwo Jima. Flags are scary. An empty pole stands for everyone. Doesn’t it? 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