Off For Parris Island

Some of us, anyway. We might hit both ferries on the way down, at New London and Cape May. Posting will be light.

The Snapshot

It's a photo-op culture, because photos stick in the memory well. People believe that if you can make the snapshot happen, then everything is all right somehow. A friend tells me how much he wants a two-state solution for Palestine, but when you press him, he hasn't really thought it out what will happen after that snapshot moment. Everyone shakes hands and rejoices, journalists take pictures, people feel relieved. We have achieved Snapshot.

What happens next? Well, pretty much the same thing as now, except Israel's enemies have more leverage and legitimacy. One year later, things are no better, perhaps worse. But Americans and western Europeans have comfortably put it up on the shelf because of the snapshot achievement. See Oslo, for example.

It's not just a liberal thing, though they are more prone to it. Conservatives loved the purple finger snapshots in Iraq. Even though everyone kept saying "it's only a beginning," they were saying that because they knew many of their countrymen were thinking it was an accomplishment with some finality.

People who want universal health coverage want the snapshot: the moment when they can sigh with relief that if at this minute, a kid gets hurt in Yonkers, he is covered. What happens to research, access, wait-times, and cost after that simply "don't enter into it."

Heck, I understand it only too well. A life of successive comforting tableaux - who wouldn't want it?

Bailout, Stimulus, Budget

Here's the amount of money of AIG bonuses, that lefty groups are organising protests about and everyone is kicking capitalism and the unrestricted market about. It represents $165,000,000

$

Now, here's part of the bailout money alone. Remember that the full bailout, plus the stimulus, plus the new budget, is three thousand times as much - that is three thousand times as big as the following collection of $'s (each equaling $165,000,000). Point to a few at random and think "one hundred and sixty-five mil. Do this eight times a day for a year"

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What I Miss By Not Having TV

Via Wheat Among Tares

Road Rally Testing

The date is set for April 18, starting in Concord at 4pm (Exit 2 off 393, near East and West Sugar Ball).

Let me know what your teams of four are. My brother Jonathan and new son Kyle are both available as team members.

I have Concord area maps that include the proper locations in Concord and Bow. I recommend a good state map, a compass unless you can find south on your own, pencils and scrap paper, and whatever reference materials you want. Laptops are allowed.

Journolist

Mickey Kaus has leaked a journolist thread (that heretofore anonymous group of 300 liberal journalists which has excited so much comment in the last week). It includes comments from such liberal notables as Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias, Nation editor Chris Hayes, American Prospect's Matt Duss, Eric Alterman, Katha Pollit - an all-star progressive journalism team, thinking they were off-the-record. This is not a parody. It's from Slate, not The Onion.

Well, no wonder they believe that conservatives are seething masses of hate under the skin. It's projection.

This is their cream of the crop.

JorgXMcKie, commenting at Moe Lane's blog, wins the thread.

The whole thread reads like the HS chess club bitching about the jocks and attempting to re-assert their own values by staging a Star Wars trivia contest.

We have all run across such comments in online discussions, of course. The internet is full of them. You can find equally hateful and idiotic things written by conservatives in the threads at oh, Little Green Footballs or Daily Pundit. Here's the difference: they aren't the authors of the essays, and they aren't the drivers of the discussions. They are a sideshow.

Another View

My post a few weeks ago about the elderly psychiatrist who cannot seem to face the hard questions (The Truth is Veiled) elicited several responses. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that a coworker who I shared the essay with thinks that he is not evasive of the questions, but richly spiritual and questioning. I still disagree, but thought an alternative viewpoint should be noted.

Blog Neglect

I apologise to the folks whose sites I regularly comment on that I haven't been over. Integrating a fifth son into our schedule has been smoother than expected, but not without its inconveniences. Posting less is one thing, but I'm generally a better commenter than initiator, and reading without interacting at your sites is a move away from my strengths. I'm sure you'll all do fine without me, but I thought it polite to at least explain my absence. Next week will be worse, as I go down to Parris Island for Chris's graduation from boot camp.

I have also been frustrated enough by the truly amazing list of Obama problems to return to some deeper, more timeless reading in order to get perspective. I should do more of that anyway, rather than merely reacting to the events of the day, but I have more incentive now. We may be at a precipice, and sudden, instinctive moves on our part might be dangerous. Pick up your Bible, your Plato, your Marcus Aurelius, your Chesterton or Chanson.

Book Destruction & Chronocentrism

It's easy to put a paranoid spin on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 - especially as the first year of prohibited children's books is 1984. In an attempt to protect children from dangerous inks with lead in them before 1985, books older than that can no longer be distributed to those under 12. Used children's clothing is also prohibited, and thrift shops around here have had to throw out enormous quantities of what any of us would say are "perfectly good" clothes. Consignment shops are sending items back to their original owners. The net effect on the clothing is that there is less of the discount stuff for parents to purchase for their children, which will raise the price. It is a shameful unintended consequence of the legislation, hitting poor parents proportionally much harder.

The loss of the books is more subtle. The American Library Association warned Congress of the possible ridiculous consequences of CPSIA, and they are just ticked enough to take the view that this legislation doesn't apply to them until they are told otherwise. Good on them, then, as it's easy to see how public library collections could be devastated by this. Schools less so, but the effect would still be there. Used booksellers will have to get out of the children's market altogether, which strikes me as another blow to poorer families. But no one is sure whether CPSIA enforcement will include libraries or not at this point. The law clearly says "distributing," not "selling." At a minimum, an opening has been created for a person to officially demand a book's removal on lead-based ground even if the motivation is transparently about content.

No one intended this. It's not some liberal plot to eventually control all our children's reading. If that were the case, they would have found a way to make 1960 the cut-off date. But such loopholes can and have been used by the unscrupulous.

Yet even without the paranoid possibilities there are reasons for concern. The act disproportionately affects out-of-print titles. This is the last you will see of my Aunt Jennie's books (as pictured) except within the family. (And are we technically in violation of the law if we let Emily read our copy before she's 12?)

The net effect is to take more old books out of circulation. This will scarcely be noticeable at first. Many old favorites come out in new editions, and the titles with serious demand will remain available. Not many children read old books these days. This was always true, but will become more pronounced. Two generations ago, children read older books because there weren't that many titles available. You took what you could get. Some of us were certainly charmed by stories out of a previous era, but I can't say with assurance we would have read them if other things had been available. I was much more likely to read classics than other children, but I read the Alcott books because I ran out of other things to read at my grandmother's. Similar circumstances at summer camps brought me to the Frank Merriwell and Leatherstocking books. I had to read something.

The internet has made many older works more easily available, and in that flood we don't notice the larger flood of the internet as the Encyclopedia of Now. I rejoice that I can find old things, and they will be available on Kindle for my grandchildren - more available than they were to me. But they will be in competition with ten times as many new things, many quite worthy. Over many months, the minds of our young will be less shaped by immersion in cultures that have come before.

There is a peculiar power to the education of entering of another culture. In our multi-culti world, it is the older cultures that are fading like old photographs. CS Lewis describes the necessity in his introduction to Athanasius: "On The Reading Of Old Books." It is not long, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. Other eras are not without their biases and blind spots, but they are different blind spots than we find in our own era. Even in children's literature - perhaps especially in children's literature - the reader encounters people who see things in quite different ways. These are not so far apart from our own lives as to be not understandable, but they see things differently. Divorce is rare, but widowhood is common. Poverty is just one of the many possible difficulties of life. Small luxuries, such as a ribbon for a pretty girl's hair, can send people into raptures. Whole books are written with no mention of romance or underwear. Christians of other eras take mere church attendance as a possible spiritual danger, and regard angry words as a serious disruption to family harmony. They might be quite foolish in all this, but the point is that they see things differently. We enter their world and see how moral questions might be the same and yet different.

We are slowly cutting ourselves off from earlier selves. No one is doing this to us, we actively choose the shiny, shiny. Even those of us who have a deep fondness for older things don't seek out other old things. We are comfortable with the familiar old things we have. If we pick up something different, it is far more likely to be something new. The improvements in visual technology we unconsciously ascribe to our being more real than they were. Video games and movies had fewer effects (and besides, those people had incredibly stupid hair) - our brains automatically tell us the folks living then had a similar clunkiness about them. We do this even if we were those people and lived then.

Emerging Technology

For those of you who like to see science fiction as it approaches, The Next Big Future has a roundup of tech stuff that is moving beyond the talked-about stage to the startup stage. Remember that if even a third of these pan out, it's a whole new world. The fusion and the quantum computers really caught my eye.

Instapundit, as usual for these things.

Kingston Trio

I was tempted to put up MTA, but I always liked this one. This looks like a guest appearance on a TV show, where the trio is loosely part of the plot somehow. Love the harmony. Maybe the woman in the back is a music teacher.

Post 1800 - The Answer Is Seven

When Ben was on math team as a sophomore, his team decided that when you had to take a guess, the answer was 7. It was right more often than you'd think, and they even considered shirts emblazoned with it.

That "7" would occur with extra frequency was not a surprise to me once I considered the matter. I suggested that -1 would also be common, and at upper levels, 2pi revolutions would show up more often than you'd expect. Seven is just beyond the level where you might get lucky and notice a relationship. If you saw a 216 in a long numerator and a 108 in the denominator, a clever person might pick up the connection and save computational steps. Anything ending in 5 or 0 is going to have obvious factoring. But seven, no one is going to see into a seven - relationship by luck.

These math test makers are essentially evangelists. They want you to see the elegant beauty of how complicated, messy conglomerations resolve to something simple. 29 is also beyond intuitive math, as is 9.7, but those aren't so much fun. You have to think like these math teachers - they think it is just very cool when numbers operate cleanly like that. But they don't want to make it too easy. Thus, the use of the answer -1, instead of just 1, which would of course be the ultimate in cool resolutions. With -1 you have to keep track of the signs. Heheheh, a lot of them won't be careful at this point and they'll forget to switch the sign. Won't they feel silly, then?

The SAT and other standardised test people don't design things this way. They might want to, but they have to make you grind out the answers, so that 13.2 is a real possibility. They're just trying to test you accurately, not convince you of math's elegance.

You have to think like the people making the test. As the remarkable book Up Your SAT (the precursor to Up Your Score) puts it, the paragraph in the comprehension section is not going to say that Beethoven sucks. That will never be one of the main ideas you're supposed to carry down to the multiple-choice questions below. Being able to think like a test-maker is worth an unfair number of points. Of course, one could argue that figuring out how a test-maker thinks is itself a measure of intelligence.

Math team, when in doubt, guess 7, or -1 if they're playing with the signs. There might be some bias toward those answers on the SAT, but nowhere near as strong.

Solzhenitsyn, The Americans, And The French

I had known that Solzhenitsyn has gradually become anathema to the left. He is regarded as a crank by many in the American academy, and the erosion of his reputation here is a fascinating story. I had not known that he remains popular in France, and is regarded seriously even by those who disagree with him. Bernard Henri-Levy and Raymond Aron were powerful figures in a strain of French intellectualism that is first of all anti-totalitarian, and thus deeply suspicious of all marxist strategies, though neither were in any sense right-wing. American leftists pay lip service to this anti-totalitarianism, but tacitly side with any number of dictators and despots, so long as they stick a finger in the eye of conservatives. In France this is less true. If their marxists are more thoroughgoing than ours, there is at least a clear division with anti-marxists who subscribe to classical liberalism. Everyone on the left seems infected with some marxism here, ranging from a whiff to a deluge. Good on the French, then. (Side note: I regard Henri-Levy as lazy and sloppy intellectually, but highly perceptive)

It’s nice to read something to approve of about French intellectuals for a change, isn’t it?

It has also been gratifying to learn that Solzhenitsyn retains some important defenders among the intelligentsia here. In the first years of his exile, it slowly dawned on the American left that Aleksandr was rejecting not only Stalinist and Soviet excess, but marxism itself (Quelle horreur, eh?). His depiction of Russian elites in August 1914 revealed that he thought them dangerously wrong, and a primary cause of the 1917 revolution. Worse, Solzhenitsyn was traditionally religious in outlook. Much of later criticism had these key failings at its foundation, though this was seldom conscious or acknowledged. The revelatory comments are fairly obvious to those alert for them, however.

He believed the West should oppose the Soviet Union rather than engage it, and embrace its own religious heritage rather than reject it. He believed the West had lost its courage and moorings. He saw the origin of political problems in moral decisions.

Shortly after Solzhenitsyn's watershed Harvard commencement address, Mike Barnicle stated that S "couldn't write his way out of a paper bag." I imagine that must be because the Russian's One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago are the only serious competition to Barnicle's commentary on Boston Globe Cartoons for "Most Significant Book Of The Twentieth Century."

There remain aspects of S that deserve criticism. His insistence that the Russians were the primary victims of marxism allowed him to diminish the role that the Russian people played in imposing this horror on other countries. He refused to see the Holodomor, for example, as anything but an excess of what was happening everywhere, including Russia. But he remains the indispensable writer of the 20th C.

Judd Gregg

Judd Gregg is retiring from the Senate in 2010.

So, Judd Gregg for President, 2012.

Today on CNN "State of the Union" Gregg said the massive budget will bankrupt the economy. By nominating him to Commerce, Obama has already implicitly stated that a lot of Democrats don't think Gregg is an uncooperative crazy Republican that no one can work with. The far left went nuts over the nomination, saying that Gregg is an extremist conservative, but those are good enemies to have. Judd has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of about 80, a bit low by national Republican standards, but high for the Northeast. Way higher than Specter, Snow, and Collins. Most of his lost points are on environmental issues.

I'm looking for 60% of the vote next time, not 50.3%

Some Needs Aren't All That Special, I Guess

Frequent commenter Retriever has weighed in on the President's Special Olympics gaffe. The frontline report, of her own son's defense of his classmates, and the turmoil at the therapeutic school as all the Obama-supporting staff reassured their students that they really are valuable, despite the president's implication otherwise, is worth reading.

I was thinking that a man who cannot speak coherently or appropriately without a teleprompter has very little business snarking at people with disabilities.

Obama's mistake is in one way not serious, yet in another, very serious indeed. People misspeak. In searching for negative comparisons, we necessarily have to imply something lacking about someone else. Trying to describe something negative about AIG executives, Obama compared them to suicide bombers. We object to that for the opposite reason, because suicide bombers are generally agreed to have some important part of their humanity lacking, and the comparison with business executives who may or may not be responsible for a company's failure seems a bit much. Al Gore referred to the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, and at a different time, the double-chromosome portion of his opposition.* When you make a comparison for dramatic effect, you are likely to offend on one side of the equation. People make such incautious statements all the time, because they don't have a finely-distinctive repertoire of negatives to draw from. Which is a good thing.

Once you are aware of an issue, however, you become protective of the feelings of that group, especially if it touches you in some way. We cannot all be always aware of every possible offense, but we try to decently avoid offense. As so many people have been protective on Obama's behalf along racial lines this past year, to the point of ludicrous overinterpretation of nonracial comments, he might set himself the task of being especially careful about giving offense. But no, that is beyond him, I believe. He is very quick to insult whole categories of others. It is revealing that this protectiveness, required of leaders of nations rather than interest groups, does not occur to him. He doesn't dislike kids at Special Olympics - when he thinks of them, I'm sure he wishes them well and hopes they succeed.

But he doesn't think of them. They aren't a star group of victims, because you can't blame their problems on his political opponents. They aren't on his radar. They don't matter. (They matter now, of course. Look for some high-profile event where he says something nice and gives them money. Government money, of course, not his.) It's just a group of people he thinks should be given money and then go away.

*Tangentially, I think Gore was not reaching for a Down's Syndrome reference there, but to Klinefelder Syndrome, which was once thought to be implicated in hypermasculine, violent, learning-impaired behavior. Which wouldn't have been any better, but would have offended fewer people.

Triune Intuition

Alexander Schmemann, writing years ago in the New York Times Magazine, brought forth a concept that resonated deeply within me:

When I speak of a "Christian writer" and of Solzhenitsyn in particular, I have in mind a deep and all-embracing, although possibly unconscious, perception of the world, man, and life, which, historically, was born and grew from Biblical and Christian revelation, and only from it. Human culture as a whole may have had other sources, but only Christianity, only the revelation of the Old and New Testaments contain that perception of the world which, incorporated into human culture, revealed in it the potential, and indeed the reality, of a Christian culture. I shall call this perception the triune intuition of creation, fall, and redemption. I am convinced that it is precisely this intuition that lies at the bottom of Solzhenitsyn's art, and that renders his art Christian. "Reviving Myths of Holy Russia," 1979

Solzhenitsyn noted that Schmemann described something of his faith as revealed in his writing that he had not fully recognised himself, but entirely agreed with.

It is this intuition, always present, which caused me to regard my Christian conversion as a homecoming, rather than any new insight. A good Creation, spoiled by man's action, redeemed by the continuing act of God - I knew this to be true of the world, the culture around me, my friends and family, and especially myself. It is precisely what I recognised as deeply Christian in Tolkien, though neither Christ nor Church are mentioned. Lewis writes of this perception as well, seeing in this triune intuition the nature of reality, which he reluctantly concluded was present in Christianity's explanation and no other.

It is certainly not the only possible Christian intuition of the world. I know believers who have regarded my discursions on such topics with puzzlement. But this intuition I knew to be true, and was my lighthouse.

Too Much Power

"The rich have too much power," someone said yesterday. It is a commonly-held sentiment, but I wonder what it means? I don't know who the richest people in my town or my state are, but I doubt that they have much power over me. Town and state officials, not all elected, have much more power over me. They in turn do not necessarily have that much power to do what they want. Their power is derivative, a community consensus of what we all should be able to do and not do to each other. In that realm, the rich do have more power to do what they want to.

Yet even that is hardly unlimited, and there are ways that one can do that without having a lot of money. The power to be left alone, particularly beloved of libertarians, is sometimes accomplished in the opposite way. People limit their wealth to get off the grid, not be connected to the government or standard economy, or otherwise extricate themselves from others having power over them.

Taxation is a limitation on the power of everyone. The more your money goes into gas taxes or property taxes, the less power you have to do what you want. Further, how officials use that money to structure the society around you also has its effect. Moving to another location is an enormous power, allowing one to get away from difficult people, dangerous neighborhoods, and declining economies. Still, one has to live somewhere, and that somewhere will have its own rules and structure. Eastern Europeans move to the west. Western Europeans move to Canada, New Zealand, and the US.

Ernest Copley Vs. Solzhenitsyn

From the title, you'd think old Ern was going to take it on the chin here. Who can stand in philosophical depth against the Lion of Russia? AVI, I never heard of this Copley guy. But Ernie's going to score points. Whether you end up siding with Aleksandr or Ernie is going to be up to you, but Copley will hold his own.

I am reading The Soul and Barbed Wire, an overview of Solzhenitsyn's works. It is reminding me of some approaches and understandings I held long ago, which deserve reconsideration.

By the early 80's, I had moved from the politics of redistribution to a mild Christianised socialism. If everyone would just be maximally generous, I thought, we wouldn't need to be discussing the politics of this at all. But, as people aren't maximally generous, and tend to turn away from seeing need, I reasoned, we are stuck with a rather onerous, inefficient, corrupt method of caring for the poor via government. Yeah, Jesus didn't say that, exactly, but He does want us to care for the poor, and this is the only choice on the menu to get there.

Solzhenitsyn believed that the goal of a people is to maximise the spiritual health and wealth of all, and this is true prosperity. However difficult that may be to measure, it's hard to argue with that goal. I acceded to that thought in large measure. For the American people to learn to be good and generous and unmaterialistic seemed an excellent place to put my energy. If the Christians could learn that, more people would want to be Christians, or at least dimly perceive a need to aspire to that society. The giving would be Enough, I felt, to create a sort of voluntary socialism. If people had basic needs met, however unevenly, then all this politics stuff would be unimportant. Opposed to this was the highly fundamentalist belief that this world was always going to be crap and unjust, and making heaven on earth was dangerous. I reconciled this with the running idea that I, at least, should do my bit to grow toward spiritual gianthood. The world might go wherever it would, and there would always be evil and injustice, but we Christians had a responsibility to develop ourselves for the next world and be an example in this one.

Enter Ernie Copley. The exact phrasing has long escaped me, but it was something along the lines of "If I were a starving person, instead of a system that makes you more generous, I'd be interested in a system that gave me more food." I squirmed against that at the time, but it stuck with me. Wherever else we go in the discussion from here on in, that is one large rock in the stream. The method that feeds, houses, and clothes more people has an enormous moral head start against all the theories and theologies that try to compete with it.

I didn't like the Life Competition idea that said we lab rats would get more food if you shocked us into jumping into a job and having to sweat it out for our daily pellet. It seemed cruel. Why should we work to build a society like that, anxiety-ridden, competitive, and harsh, when for just a little bit more effort, we could have a society where we lab rats were fed graciously and calmly? It would leave us time to pursue the arts, or nuzzling our young, or - did you hear this Jesus? - in prayer. If a few people have to go just a little bit hungrier in order to get there, that's too bad, but the best we can hope for in a fallen world. Right? Right? And if some rich people, insulated from the storms of life, have to confront the realities that others face, why, that might even be a good thing, mightn't it?

Except. Except it's not just a little bit more effort to get a lot more comfort-for-all. In practice, even a whole lot more of generosity via government doesn't seem to improve the general standard of living. In the long run, it looks suspiciously as if the cruel method feeds more people. That slow 2% GDP improvement year after year since the free market became the norm 200 years ago adds up over the 1/2% year over year improvement that preceded it for six centuries; which in turn was better than the 0% improvement for a few thousand years before that. A collapse caused by the free market looks like a catastrophe, because we can imagine how it could have been avoided if we'd all just suddenly gone big government six months before.

Except. Except we would just be trading off for some other catastrophe, brought about by that system.

Let's hold off right there for the moment. There's plenty to think about. But of course, I'm going to switch directions a bit and examine what we lose by that method. Reading Solzhenitsyn will do that to you.

School Conference

Today I went to teacher conferences for the eighth child (includes three foster children, one of which, admittedly, was doing fine late in highschool and we just wanted to check in). Thirteen schools, starting with Miss Jacques in Manchester in 1977 and including two in Romania in 2001. Spanning thirty-two years and including over seventy teachers - I didn’t count St. Andrew’s Musical Kindergarten, as I don’t think we actually conferred with anyone there – we just sent the kid and showed up for closing exercises in June. I’m glad we weren’t the sort of parents who intervened on our children’s behalf while they were in college, or it would be more.

And you know what? It's easier now. I can download the information to cause teachers to see my child the way I want in just a few minutes now. I can spot-translate their comments without having to review it after with my wife.

They like Kyle. He's polite, he's witty, he doesn't look for trouble. For a kid who has missed 23 days and been tardy 28 this year, he's doing fine.

The secret to being a great parent is having nice kids who make you look good.

The Roots of Liberal Condescension

William Voegeli's essay from a few weeks ago has been linked at three separate sites I frequent, suggesting that it strikes a chord. It certainly fits with my Cultural Tribes theme.

Later in the essay, "The Aimlessness of American Education," Buckley elaborated on the "common premise" the university rejected: "The Ten Commandments do not sit about shaking, awaiting their inevitable deposition by some swashbuckling professor of ethics. Certain great truths have been apprehended. In the field of morality, all the basic truths have been apprehended."

Buckley's position, then, is not really populist. The –ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God's laws and tradition's wisdom, Buckley's argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.

What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the "democracy of the dead," incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.

The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their "intellectual arrogance" is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an –ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality.

Longish, but as one section is repeated at the link, it's not so bad as you'd think.