This Was The Year We Missed

As we ring out '08, a lot of important stuff happened and we didn't pay any attention. What will we fail to learn in '09? If this is a (fair & balanced) cliché, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
What We Missed: This Year's 10 Most Overlooked Stories
By Kurt Soller

What a year of huge stories: the Dow descended, Obama ascended and the world had the pleasure of getting to know a family of Palins, a country called Georgia, a pregnant man (remember that?) and the opportunity to say buh-bye to scores of commercial banks. But amid all the economic crises and political campaigns, much was happening beyond the front pages of America's newspapers: attacks in Africa and Afghanistan, important health legislation, even a few Pentagon snafus that largely escaped the public's attention. What follows is Newsweek's list of 10 stories that deserved more ink and airtime in 2008. And tell us which events and people you think were undercovered during the year, in our comments section below. The best responses will be featured on Readback, our feedback blog. In the meantime, our picks:

1. Already at War in Afghanistan
Throughout the campaign and Barack Obama's subsequent preparations to take office, the president-elect has mentioned that he would look into a surge in Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban. Maybe that's too late, considering the current administration spent 2008 increasing the amount of troops deployed there by more than 85 percent. The Defense Department reported during the year that troop levels have reached their highest levels in Afghanistan since 2001, with roughly 40,000 American soldiers fighting. Though troops in Iraq were once triple that number, the lack of coverage (and antiwar protests) surrounding Afghanistan could lead to a longer war and continued deployment.

2. Chaos in Congo
In October, the United Nations sponsored a partial ceasefire between the Congolese government and rebel leaders of the African nation, which has been in demographic and political disrepair for more than a decade. A mere week later the ceasefire fell apart, paving the way for continued devastation in a violent country where an estimated 5 million people have already been killed. As militia groups—even entire countries—have joined the fighting, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quickly becoming Africa's worst war zone.

3. U.S. Nuclear Fuses Arrive in Taiwan
Oops! In March, it was announced that the Pentagon had accidentally shipped nuclear fuses in place of spare helicopter batteries that the Taiwanese government had ordered in 2006. The larger problem here? It highlights a string of incidents in which the Pentagon has mishandled nuclear equipment. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were disappointed; Washington quickly sent a nervous missive insisting that America stands by its policy not to arm Taiwan.

4. Insurance Coverage for Mental Health
Nearly everyone bemoaned the "sweeteners" that were part of the $700 billion financial bailout passed by Congress in October. But one unexpected—and undercovered—surprise was that the plan included the passing of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008. Under this bill, employers who provide insurance coverage for the treatment of physical illnesses must now do so on an equal basis for mental-health coverage, beginning when plans renew after October 2009. Sweet, indeed.

5. Iraq Goes Ignored
Though studies vary, 2008 was likely the year when casualties hit the 1 million mark in Iraq. So why are news outlets pulling their correspondents from Baghdad bureaus, and where did all those Iraq headlines go? Ironic, considering that Obama was elected partly on a get-out-of-Iraq platform.

6. Solar Energy? Not So Hot.
As solar panels have become a common solution for providing clean energy, it was revealed in the fall that a compound involved in their production may be the farthest thing from green: nitrogen trifluoride is used to treat titanium solar panels, and reports show that the gas may be 20,000 times worse than carbon dioxide at contributing to global warming. Worse yet, the Kyoto Protocol—which provides regulations for greenhouse gases—still says nil about protecting the environment from this gas.

7. Our New Missile-Defense Program ...in India
After meetings in New Delhi, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates quietly announced in February that the United States may develop a missile-defense shield on Indian soil. The program is admittedly in very early stages, but as countries around Asia ascend to economic power, meddling with a missile shield on the Subcontinent could have detrimental effects for stability between the United States and China, and tilt the power balance throughout the region.

8. A Kick in the Knee to Venezuelan Relations
In September, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela decided to expel the American ambassador from his country after saying he had learned of an American plot to stage a coup against him. This was the low point in a year of deteriorating relations between the United States and the oil-rich South American nation.

9. Fairly Fighting AIDS ... Finally
As President Bush's approval ratings hovered at historical lows, one unsung success was his role in contributing billions to the fight against AIDS, mostly through funding programs in Africa. In 2008 he also signed a renewed and expanded President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which, among other things, paved the way for reversing a longstanding regulation that prevents those with HIV from visiting or immigrating to the United States. The Department of Health and Human Services still has to approve this change, so the fight isn't over—but Bush won this round.

10. Church Refuses Protection From Pedophiles
When delegates from the Southern Baptist Convention met in June, they went on record to admit that sex abuse is reprehensible, sinful—and happening. That said, they refused pressure to create a database that would screen church workers and, presumably, prevent pedophiles from re-employment. It's a blow to many congregations around the country, as local churches are forced to rely on mere instinct (or God's will?) in the hiring and screening of their staffs.

[Kurt Soller is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; he is one of the newest staffers at Newsweek.]

Copyright © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

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Strike Three, Dubster! You're Outa There!

In his film, "W," Oliver Stone found baseball to be a touchstone for W's life. Poppy (Bush 41) had been a star baseball player at Yale while The Dubster was the family ne'er-do-well until he landed in the owner's box with the Texas Rangers. The Dubster couldn't play, but he could wear a team jacket and hang out with players and other owners. Today, The Dubster takes a called third strike in this blog. "Get out of here, ya bum!" If this is (fair & balanced) baseball jeering, so be it.

[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]
The Dubster's "Legacy"
By John Sherffius

Click on the fine print to enlarge.

[John Sherffius began drawing editorial cartoons for the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. After two years of working as a freelance artist, after graduation, he was hired by the Ventura County Star in Southern California as a graphic artist and gradually worked his way into editorial cartooning for the paper. In 1998, he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as the newspaper's editorial cartoonist, a job he held until 2003 when he quit the paper over editorial differences. Sherffius bridled at editorial insistence that he tone down cartoons attacking Republicans. Sherffius then went to work for the Boulder Daily Camera where his cartoons appear regularly and are syndicated nationally by the Copley News Service. Sherffius won the 2008 Herblock Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius/Boulder Daily Camera

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Angry Bob Has An Idea Whose Time Has Come: No Free Pass For The Dubster!

Angry Bob wants The Dubster to pay for the damages he has inflicted upon the Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave. The first step would be a law to rescind The Dubster's post-presidential pension and perks. A second step would be a national tour for The Dubster: a flatbed trailer hauled to each of the 50 states with The Dubster chained to a pole in the trailerbed. The rig would be parked in the center of each town through which it passed. Citizens would be welcomed to bring shoes and fling them at The Dubster. After the tour was completed, then — and only then — would The Dubster be allowed to skulk into his reitrement home in North Dallas. With no Secret Service agents present, any passerby would be allowed to hurl shoes at the front door of the residence. The Dubster might become a shoe target busker as a way to earn a retirement income. The Dubster would stand in the front yard and allow someone to fling a shoe at him after the thrower put a buck in the cigar box. If this is a (fair & balanced) fantasy of retribution, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Add Up the Damage
By Bob Herbert

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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What A Day! Hurry, January 20, 2009!

To makes sense of today's "This Modern World," The Dubster (aka the Alfred E. Newman clone) needs no explanation. However, Sparky and Blinky do merit comic strip hermeneutics. To that end, this blogger turned to the source of all knowledge:

[x Wikipedia]
Sparky the Wonder Penguin
Sparky can actually talk. Spark's first words in the strip are "George [H. W.] Bush is a wanker". A strong liberal advocate, he briefly became a Republican after being hit on the head with a random falling toilet.

Blinky the Dog
A small dog (Boston Terrier) who shares some of Sparky's political sympathies. Normally very mellow, he briefly became a radical when steroids were put into his food when he was intended to replace the then-Republican Sparky.

It will be a Happy New Year, beginning January 20, 2009. Praise the Lord (of your choice)! The Dubster will be gone and this blogger will be rotten glad of it. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x Salon]
"Don't Let The Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out!"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge.

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Guess What? (He's Back For 2009!)

William Safire is back with his prognostication quiz for 2009; use this link to review his 2008 quiz. As this blogger wrote within the 2008 quiz post at the end of 2007: "Pop quizzes, hated by students and loved by teachers (The power-trip was intoxicating amid a chorus of groans.), can appear anywhere. This blog is no sanctuary. If this is a (fair & balanced) current events search and destroy mission, so be it." Actually, if this is a (fair & balanced) future events search-and-destroy mission, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Office Pool, 2009
By William Safire

When Dolph Camilli, Brooklyn Dodger star slugger of the 1940s, stepped up to the plate after whiffing ignominiously in his two previous times at bat, we fans in the Ebbets Field bleachers would nod sagely and murmur, “He’s due.”

Last year, in the 34th annual Office Pool in this space, I predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average would break 15,000 in 2008. (Readers whose pick was “recession has brokers selling apples for five euros on Wall Street” won that round.) But this year — I’m due. For each item, choose one, all or none. Only those daring to play now can claim hooting rights later.

1. In Demo-dominated D.C., post-postpartisan tension will pit:
(a) lame-duck Fed chairman Ben Bernanke against Fed chairman-in-waiting Larry Summers and Fed chairman-of-Christmas-past Paul Volcker (a k a “The G.D.P. Deflator”) over an “imperial Fed”
(b) Hillary Clinton at State and trade rep Ron Kirk against Labor’s Hilda Solis over protectionism
(c) Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel against United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, a Zbigniew Brzezinski acolyte, over Mideast policy

2. Springtime for G.M. will lead to:
(a) a slippery-slope series of industrial bailouts exceeding $100 billion
(b) a “pre-pack bankruptcy” auto rescue sweetened by federal pension protection and guarantee of new-car warranties
(c) a multinational merger with troubled Toyota

3. Toughest foreign affairs challenge will come if:
(a) Afghanistan becomes “Obama’s War” or “Obama’s Retreat”
(b) Iraq backslides into chaos after too-early U.S. withdrawal
(c) Depressed Russia moves on Ukraine
(d) India-Pakistan fighting breaks out

4. Oil selling below $50 a barrel will:
(a) threaten President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s June election in Iran
(b) reduce Arab support of Hamas and, in Israel’s February election, help Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party reach the Tzipping point
(c) be the equivalent of a huge U.S. tax-cut stimulus

5. Best-picture Oscar goes to:
(a) “Doubt”
(b) “Slumdog Millionaire”
(c) “Revolutionary Road”
(d) “Gran Torino”
(e) “Frost/Nixon”

6. The non-fiction sleeper will be:
(a) Power Rules, a Machiavellian view of foreign policy by former diplomat and Times editor Les Gelb
(b)Deep Brain Stimulation, by neuroscience writer Jamie Talan
(c) Bold Endeavors, by financier and infrastructuralist Felix Rohatyn
(d) Losing the News, by Alex Jones
(e) Ponzi Shmonzi: The Bernie Madoff Story, crash-published by a dozen houses
(f) Fiction: Shadow and Light, in 1920s Berlin, by Jonathan Rabb

7. The don’t-ask deficit at year’s end will be:
(a) under $1 trillion, thanks to the new administration’s cutting of waste, fraud and abuse, as well as tax-soaking of the remaining rich
(b) $2 trillion, adding to the inherited Bush bailouts a raising-Keynes handout to shovel-ready contractors
(c) $1,393,665,042,198 and no cents. (Why so specific? A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion. That’s 10 to the 12th power, or 1 followed by 12 zeroes)

8. In Congress:
(a) House Republicans Eric Cantor and Mike Pence will energize the G.O.P.
(b) Senate Republicans Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander will be the fulcrum of a bipartisan “Gang of 20”
(c) among Senate Democrats, Judiciary chairman Pat Leahy’s influence will rise because Supreme Court nominations will take center stage, while Harry Reid’s clout dissipates because of home-state weakness

9. Post-honeymoon journalists and bloody-minded bloggers will dig into:
(a) the jailhouse singing by Chicago’s felonious fixer, Tony (“Who You Callin’ ‘Boneheaded’?”) Rezko, to Dewey-eyed prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to reduce his six-year sentence
(b) suspicion by conspiracy theorists about the unremarked lobbying that led to the expensive renaming, after 72 years, of the Triborough Bridge to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge just in time for Caroline Kennedy’s campaign for anointment to an open Senate seat
(c) the retaliatory scheme to rename the Brooklyn Bridge the Clintons Bridge

10. The Supreme Court will decide:
(a) in nipple exposure or “fleeting expletives” on live TV, that the F.C.C. exceeded its authority in fining Fox for indecency
(b) that the Federal Election Commission was wrong to censure a moviemaker whose “biopic” was hostile to Hillary Clinton during her campaign
(c) that the appearance of impropriety in financial dealings of a West Virginia judge disqualified him from sitting in a coal-company dispute
(d) that Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. director Robert Mueller had a “qualified immunity” from being sued for racial profiling in imprisoning suspected terrorists
(e) that in al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, a legal U.S. resident cannot be held indefinitely at Guantánamo

11. Obama philosophy will be regarded as:
(a) proudly liberal on environment and regulation
(b) determinedly centrist on health care, immigration and protectionism
(c) unexpectedly right of center on national security
(d) all over the lot

12. Year-end presidential approval rating will be:
(a) eroding as recovery stalls
(b) soaring after economic turnaround propels Dow above 12,000
(c) sinking but 30 points higher than that of Congress and the news media

My picks: 1 (all); 2 (b); 3 (a); 4 (all); 5 (b) (an uplifting film has an edge in hard times); 6 (d); 7 (b); 8 (c); 9 (b) (diehards will still say, “Take the Triborough to Idlewild”); 10 (all) (I aced the Supremes’ decisions in last year’s pool); 11 (d) 12 (b).

[William Safire, a former Times Op-Ed columnist (1973-2005), is the chairman of the Dana Foundation.

The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropy with principal interests in brain science, immunology, and arts education. Charles A. Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist and philanthropist, was president of the Dana Foundation from 1950 to 1966 and actively shaped its programs and principles until his death in 1975.

Safire left public relations to join Richard Nixon's campaign in the 1960 White House race, and rejoined Nixon's staff in the 1968 campaign. After Nixon's 1968 victory Safire served as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew; he is well known for having created Agnew's famous term, "nattering nabobs of negativism."

Safire joined the New York Times as a political columnist in 1973. In 1978, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary on Bert Lance's alleged budgetary irregularities. However, subsequent investigations by Congress could find no wrongdoing.

Since 1995 Safire has served as a member of the Pulitzer Board. After ending his op-ed column in 2005, Safire became the full-time chief executive of the Dana Foundation where he has been chairman since 2000.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Multiple Guess: Is This Blog (A) Tradition-Directed (B) Inner-Directed (C) Other-Directed?

Recent mention of Robert A. Nisbet and The Quest For Community in this blog triggered memories of David Riesman (with Harvard colleagues Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) and The Lonely Crowd. A recent polemic from across The Pond illustrates the vitality of The Lonely Crowd nearly sixty years after the book first appeared. Any reader who correctly answers the query posed in the title of this post will receive a great prize. If this is (fair & balanced) hucksterism, so be it.

[Note: This blogger wrote on Tuesday, November 15, 2005
What Book Set YOUR Brain On Fire?

For me it was two books in the same college course ("Individualism in America"): Robert A. Nisbet's The Quest For Community and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. I was reawakened to take ideas seriously. The first time I took an idea seriously came during my senior year in high school(?) when I read Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Donald Ramstetter at North High School and Professors Michael McGiffert (History) and Robert Richards (English) at the University of Denver.]

[x The Meritocracy Party]
The Lonely Crowd: The Multicultural Fallacy

David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) was one of the most influential books of the last century. You rarely hear of it nowadays but perhaps its time has come again since it provides an invaluable tool for understanding modern social issues. It predicts that multiculturalism will fail in the UK, and it reveals that there is in fact no clash of civilisation between the democratic West and the Islamic East. The true clash is between incompatible sociological systems.

Riesman scrutinised the ways in which people formed their core values and attitudes and identified three distinct types of person and corresponding social systems, labelling them as "tradition-directed," "inner-directed," and "other-directed."

In a tradition-directed society, inherited conventions and belief systems are of paramount importance. Everything is inflexibly handed down from generation to generation, and there are severe penalties for anyone who attempts to break free. Shame and honour feature prominently in the thinking of such societies. As a result, behaviour changes little over many centuries.

The archetypal tradition-based model in the present day is the Islamic world. Many Muslims today probably behave quite similarly to the original Muslims of 1400 hundred years ago. This is not a rapidly-evolving, dynamic social model. It’s fearful and suspicious of change, and likely to lash out against it. Change can represent only one thing — a threat — to tradition-directed communities. If the Koran has already provided all truths relevant to the human condition, what point is there in debating issues, seeking innovative discoveries, exploring new things?

Islam provides the most prominent tradition-directed societies (culminating in the Taliban who are intent on returning Afghanistan to its primitive condition when it first converted to Islam many centuries ago), but most religious believers who cite a holy book that claims to reveal absolute, eternal truths and who express a wish to follow these revelations dogmatically, fall into the same category. Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians are obvious examples.

In the West, the vast majority of people are other directed, meaning that they look to what others around them are doing and try their best to fit in with the prevailing fashions. This is an outlook that allows for rapid change. Something that was "in" yesterday can be "out" today. These other-directed people make the ideal subjects for consumer capitalism. They are easily influenced, highly susceptible to advertising and crave being in vogue. They are terrified of being "abnormal" and shunned by their peer group.

Other-directed people tend to be flexible and happy to accommodate others. Modern companies favour this type of personality, and it has become the overwhelming norm in the workplace. Riesman says, "The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed." Such people seek to be emotionally in tune with others, and they dislike conflict. They are essential for the smooth operation of modern companies, but they aren’t independently minded and have little initiative. Their obsession with others gives them a "keeping up with the Jones’s’ mentality." A society dominated by other-directed individuals lacks credible leadership, is not concerned with self-knowledge, and arguably trivialises human potential. Today, the triumph of the other-directed is almost complete. Companies are full of emotionally well-adjusted incompetents. They control virtually all aspects of society. However, as Riesman points out, the costs of this dominance may be high. When conformity has been placed above individuality, society loses its ability to think clearly. Isn’t that the most characteristic aspect of modern Britain — its hostility to serious ideas?

Riesman says that other-directed individuals have an internal "radar" for sensing and responding to their peers, making them "capable of a rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and response to everyone." They are "at home everywhere and nowhere." This is both their triumph and their tragedy. Ultimately, they are reflections of all the people they meet rather than real people in themselves.

Because they aren’t grounded in any deep values, do not have an inner moral compass, and are being buffeted by the pressures of the contemporary world all the time, the other-directed have no identity other than that conferred on them by their peer group and current trends. All of their relationships are potentially transient because they themselves could go out of fashion amongst their peers and be cut adrift. For this reason, they are fearful and insecure. Although they are obsessed with relationships, they are unlikely to form any with deep roots. Therefore, in a profound sense, they are both alone and lonely even in a huge crowd, hence the title of Riesman’s book.

One might say that they are hardly people at all but merely units of consumption that fuel the economy. In Marxist terms they are alienated from their labour and from themselves. In existentialist terms, they are living in bad faith because they do not take responsibility for their lives and choices and simply drift along in others’ wakes.

The final of Riesman’s categories, and by far the rarest, is that of the inner-directed. These are individuals who evolve their own values, based on their personal experiences and understanding. Often, their parents are freethinkers who have created the environment that allows them to develop in this way.

According to Riesman, the Europeans who first settled in America were tradition-directed, most having fled religious persecution in their homelands. The American War of Independence brought inner-directed individuals to the forefront, and many of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, were of this ilk. By the twentieth century, mass industrialisation had appeared, accompanied by huge, complex cities bustling with millions of people from many different cultures. Within this hotchpotch, none of the old tradition-directed cultures could hope to prevail. There were too few inner-directed individuals to guide society, so the other-directed filled the vacuum, and that’s what we’re saddled with today: a shallow, ephemeral, consumerist society lacking any coherent values.

The movie "Pleasantville" in which a couple of modern teenagers find themselves trapped inside a black and white 1950s TV show provides a fabulous illustration of what happens when other-directedness collides with a tradition-directed society. By the end of the movie, the black and white show has been transformed into full colour and the cast of characters seem much freer than before, yet there’s a powerful sense that innocence and stability have been lost, and that the new freedom of the characters will quickly degenerate into mindless hedonism.

Tradition-directed individuals cite prophets as their main inspiration while other-directed types are heavily influenced by the lyrics of their favourite pop stars, the witterings of their favourite celebrities, catchy lines of dialogue from their favourite movies, and catch-phrases from their favourite comedy shows. Inner-directed people will cite philosophers such as Nietzsche, Camus and Baudrillard, and will take a keen interest in existentialism and postmodernism.

Tradition-directed individuals think of the "truth" as absolute and eternal, other-directed individuals will follow whatever the current fashionable truths are, while inner-directed people will debate whether "truth" exists at all or is simply a humanly constructed perspective. Tradition-directed societies are masculine, aggressive, patriarchal and hierarchical and place high value on obedience, loyalty and duty. Other-directed societies are usually feminine, consensual, cooperative, empathic, egalitarian and place high value on emotional intelligence. Inner-directed societies can be quite confrontational and inflexible because the people in these societies are not looking to others for approval, and are quite certain that they are right. They place high value on IQ and rational debate. They tend to be contemptuous of both tradition-directed and other-directed individuals.

Riesman’s scheme allows us make sense of a host of difficult problems. Multiculturalism, the belief that significantly different cultures can live in harmony, learn and benefit from each other and create a diverse, energetic, more prosperous society, is seen to be hopelessly misguided since it completely ignores the incompatibilities of the different cultures. Tradition-directed communities are simply incapable of any kind of healthy mixing with either inner-directed or other-directed communities. They will inevitably become ghettoised and fearful, and from their ranks fanatics will appear who will wish to attack the surrounding society, which they will perceive as decadent and threatening. Multicultural Britain has become a collection of mutually suspicious ghetto communities that can never work constructively together. Why maintain the pretence any longer?

As for the "clash of civilisations," it can now be viewed as simply a tradition-directed culture (Islam) standing in opposition to an other-directed culture (the democratic West). Such cultures have nothing in common and there’s no possibility of a meeting of minds. The best policy is for such opposed societies to stay well clear of each other, with the possible exceptions of trade and tourism.

Why did the Coalition fail so dismally in Iraq? The answer is obvious. Coming from an other-directed perspective, the Coalition thought that all it had to do was get rid of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people would transform themselves into lovers of western-style capitalist democracy. In fact, their plans were doomed to fail from the start because they were confronting a tradition-directed society resistant to the blandishments of Western consumerism.

Why are kids glued to the Internet now? The Internet provides the ultimate other-directed platform. Kids revel in keeping in touch with their peers from all over the world. MySpace and FaceBook are the essence of the other-directed mindset. Actual physical contact is much less important than feeling yourself part of some comforting global community of like minds. Yet these relationships are essentially illusory.

Why are celebrities practically worshipped these days? Other-directed people are obsessed with fashion, and celebrities are those who dictate the latest fashions. Celebrities enjoy the glamorous lifestyle that the other-directed crave. They form the über peer group to which all peer-obsessed individuals wish to belong. They are zeitgeist figures, embodiments of the tastes of the age. Tradition-directed societies are largely immune to them, as are inner-directed individuals. The cult of the celebrity can truly exist and flourish only in other-directed societies. In fact, you only need to look at the endless shelves of women’s magazines proclaiming the latest celebrity tittle-tattle to see that this cult is essentially a female phenomenon.

Why are black boys running amok in some inner city areas? These kids, lacking any parental control and largely excluded from the education system, have become extreme examples of a highly masculine form of other-directedness. Their peer group — their gang — sets all of their values for them. Anti-authoritarian rap songs and violent movies like Scarface (showing the irresistible rise of a non-educated, ruthless thug) are where they derive their dog-eat-dog inspiration. They have no respect at all for any tradition-directed influences, and there are no inner-directed individuals amongst their ranks. They are a terrifying example of what happens when tradition-directedness and inner-directedness break down entirely. Whereas feminine other-directedness emphasises harmony, masculine other-directedness revolves around respect based on brute force. It’s little more than the law of the jungle.

Solzhenitsyn characterised America as a society of spoiled children, sunk in mindless egotism. We could easily say the same of the contemporary UK. This is largely what other-directedness achieves. As for tradition-directed societies, they are backward and hostile to change. Only a society governed by the inner-directed could ever be admirable, but the likelihood of inner-directed individuals succeeding in an other-directed society is close to zero. They are outsiders, voices like Nietzsche’s crying in the wilderness. What would you rather read — Baudrillard’s speculations on hyperreality or the latest installment in the life of Jade Goody? For other-directed people there’s no contest. Who cares about thinking when there’s good celebrity gossip to read?

[Contact the Meritocracy Party via this link. Anyone who is sympathetic to the aims of the Meritocracy Party — and that means that you object to all those who use nepotism and cronyism to rig the system in their favour — is free to promote the Meritocracy Party in whatever way they see fit. You do not need to seek any permission. The Meritocracy Party objects in particular to the the "Superclass" of 6,000 individuals, many of them billionaires, who run the world as their personal fiefdom (see Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf). These individuals use nothing but cronyism and nepotism to advance their goals. They have no interest in you, no interest in justice, and the last thing they would ever advocate is meritocracy because that is the one political principle that would destroy their insidious cartels.

Copyright © 2007 The Meritocracy Party

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BoBo Boy Wants Community And So Does This Blogger (Although, Maybe Not With... Him)

A recent post about Noam Chomsky brought an old classmate out of the woodwork. So, if ol' Noam exercised someone to send an e-mail rejoinder, perhaps Robert A. Nisbet will work similar mojo in this blog. As this blogger's favorite philosopher, Joaquin Andujar, was wont to say: "Youneverknow." If this is (fair & balanced) community-seeking, so be it.

[x American Enterprise Institute — AEI]
Robert Nisbet's Quest (This essay appeared in the 09/30/96, issue of the Weekly Standard.)
By David Brooks

Robert A. Nisbet, one of America's most eminent and influential sociologists, and for many years a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, died September 9, 1996, at the age of eighty-two. From his earliest work in the 1950s, Mr. Nisbet emphasized the nature of community and the relation of voluntary associations to the growth of centralized state power; on these and many other subjects, his writings anticipated current political debates and examined them with unequaled depth and originality. A bibliography of Mr. Nisbet's most important books follows this tribute.

Robert Nisbet was ailing when Hillary Clinton uttered the most remarkable line of the presidential campaign—"it takes a president" to raise a child. Nisbet died on September 9 of prostate cancer at the age of eighty-two, ending a distinguished career as a sociologist and public intellectual. But his life's work is a refutation of Mrs. Clinton's declaration. Nisbet was a devastating critic of the politicization of everyday life, of the way family, friendship, and community have been suborned by the state. He anticipated, by nearly half a century, much of the current talk about family, neighborhood bonds, and reducing the size of government. And many of the answers he gave, starting with his 1953 book The Quest for Community, are more sophisticated and certainly more culturally learned than the ones we're stumbling upon today.

Nisbet was impossible to classify—an anti-individualist libertarian may be the closest label--and to read him is to expect the unexpected. For starters, the historical epochs normally taught as high points, like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, were for him low points. And vice versa. He began his historical reflections at the Middle Ages, when, as he quotes Jacob Burckhardt, "Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation--only through some general category." Nisbet emphasized the complex array of intermediate organizations—family, guild, church—that intertwined to create a web of authority in which medieval people could lead their lives. Local attachments were strong, relations to central government weak. And that diffusion of authority allowed merchants to go through Europe without worrying about passports and permitted the creation of leagues of cities, such as the Hanseatic, Rhenish, and others.

It was in the Renaissance that the political and military began to take over and crush earlier, more local community structures, Nisbet argued. Philosophers forgot the distinction between state and society. Nisbet didn't pine for a return to the Middle Ages; he scorned nostalgia all his life. But a central problem with state power, he believed, was that it choked off new forms of community that would have allowed people to cope more comfortably with changes in technology, work, and ways of living. "The real demon of the modern mind," Nisbet wrote in a 1953 letter to Russell Kirk, is Rousseau. It was Rousseau who regarded the community bonds Nisbet cherished as nothing more than chains shackling naturally virtuous man. Rousseau introduced a civil religion that swept away custom and mediating institutions, and had individuals making a direct contract with the state. A strong government would actually increase personal liberty, Rousseau believed, because it would sweep away reactionary religious and civil bonds. Nisbet quoted Rousseau: "Each citizen would then be completely independent of his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state . . . for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured." In his 1988 book The Present Age, Nisbet summed up Rousseau by saying that he transferred prestige and trust from the body of the church and the community to the body of the state.

Over the subsequent centuries, the state got stronger and stronger, local authorities more and more powerless. People began to look to the state to realize their personal aspirations (Communists most notably), and they increasingly felt that to be modern meant to sweep away custom and strive toward efficiency and centralization.

Quantum increases in state power, Nisbet emphasized later in his life, come during wartime: "Military, or at least war-born, relationships among individuals tend to supersede relationships of family, parish and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastity, modesty, decorum, respectability change during wartime." And war gives government a pretext to dominate national life. For America, he came to believe, the crucial consolidation of central state power came around World War I. Woodrow Wilson tried to use government to construct a national community and to turn foreign policy into a moral crusade. Progressives like Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey argued for a stronger state apparatus, guided by politicized experts, so that government would embody, in Croly's words, a "national idea," bound together by a "religion of human brotherhood."

The result, Nisbet claimed, was instead the form of democratic absolutism that Tocqueville had predicted, in which government power is "absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild." Whereas once government had stopped at the church, school, fraternal organization, and club, now it felt itself justified in being everywhere, except perhaps in foreign embassies. Local institutions like mutual-aid societies were robbed of their natural function, and so withered. Even the authority of parents was weakened, as government served in loco parentis.

Nisbet could tease fascinating observations from this central pattern. For example, in his 1975 book Twilight of Authority, he noticed the emergence of "Democratic Royalism." Presidents, especially since JFK, have turned the White House into a palace (nowadays we think of the way highways are shut down when the presidential motorcade goes by). The presidential image is as closely tended as in the days of Alexander the Great and Louis XIV. Executive-branch power accrues not to cabinet colleagues but to intimates who directly serve the presidential person. For Nisbet, this inflation prevails in all societies in which the intermediate authorities have been swept away and the individual citizen relates directly to the one central figure, president or king. In richer communities, authority is dispersed and the president leads a more austere life as first among a group of diverse leaders.

In a state-dominated nation, everything becomes politicized or it withers. Nisbet wrote key sociology textbooks, but looking at the welter of policy proposals from colleagues, he acknowledged, "the social sciences [should] be termed for what they so largely are: the political sciences." He thought religious leaders, especially on the religious right, had dangerously politicized religion. And he thought that conservatism had been corrupted by politics and had become bogged down with pro-defense-spending militarism, conservative social-policy meddling, and economic fiddling. Looking back on the Reagan years, he wrote, "In large measure conservatism has become, within a decade or two, an ideology seeking to capture democratic absolutism rather than secure from it social and moral authority distinct from political power."

Nisbet was also out of step with contemporary conservatism because he had no taste for its celebration of the individual. He criticized the "spell of romantic individualism" that propagated the illusion of purely individual achievement. Nisbet invented the term "the Loose Individual" to describe the dominant type in a politics-dominated world: mobile, loosely connected to neighborhood, church, and spouse, driven mostly by his hunger for economic opportunity. Most of his relations revolve around his career and the cash nexus. He is even loosely tied to property, as his own wealth comes more and more in the form of mutual-fund shares, stocks, and options, rather than, say, a local factory. Without a settled place, he becomes more obsessed with status, so that, Nisbet observes, people in our egalitarian age are more covetous of a Harvard degree than they were in FDR's more class-ridden day.

The odd thing is, Nisbet's writing is not particularly gloomy in tone (especially for someone who at some points in his career thought America was on the verge of military dictatorship). He was a successful and much recognized academic, at Berkeley, Columbia, and then as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and colleagues say he enjoyed his work immensely. He was also remarkably handsome, which must make life a little sweeter even as you contemplate the decline of civilization.

And he must have drawn pleasure from the nonpolitical aspects of life he celebrated. He lovingly quoted Burke on how we should structure our affections: "We begin our public affections in families. No cold relation is the zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighborhoods and our provincial connections. These are our inns and resting places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit and not by a sudden jerk of authority are so many little images of the great country in which the heart has found something it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality."

Probably Nisbet laid it on a little too thick about the decline of American culture, but his emphasis on the subpolitical and the local was prescient and has had obvious influence on the communitarian and civil-society debates of our own day. And there's something else that must be celebrated in his writing: Nisbet could scarcely go a page without bringing in some example, from Greece or Florence or India; from the third century, the fifteenth century, or the nineteenth century. Either you have a taste for this kind of ambitious field of reference or you don't, and certainly more people in the 1950s and 1960s had a taste for it than now. But if you don't press the historical comparisons too hard, it makes for unexpected and thrilling reading.

Selected Works by Robert A. Nisbet

The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. New York: Harper Row, 1989.

The Making of Modern Society. New York: New York University Press, 1987.

Conservatism: Dream and Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

The Social Bond. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Twilight of Authority. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

The Social Impact of the Revolution. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974.

Degradation of the Academic Dogma. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Tradition and Revolt. New York: Random House, 1968.

The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1967.

Community and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

[David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times and has become a prominent voice of politics in the United States. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. He served as a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Brooks has written a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. He has been largely responsible for coining the terms "bobo," "red state," and "blue state." His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.]

Copyright © 2005 American Enterprise Institute

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Yes, Virginia, There Is Help On The Internet

In the spirit of holiday giving, this blog supplies some tips for gaining help when technology goes bad. Click on the underscored links (not these, though) and thank St. Vannevar Bush. If this is (fair & balanced) tech support, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
There’s Lots Of Tech Help, Yes, On The Internet
By Azadeh Ensha

Illustration by Christophe Vorlet

This week, I bought a shiny new BlackBerry. This made me very happy. Then I went home and found that my new BlackBerry was inundating my in-box with copies of my sent e-mail messages. This made me very frustrated.

I headed back to the store, where a well-intentioned “specialist” took my phone, tweaked a few settings and said that my e-mail messages would be duplicate-free. They weren’t.

If you’re like me, odds are that you’ve also found yourself with a tech problem that was made worse by the lack of ready, available — and perhaps most important — useful help. But with the Internet, there’s no need to have to wait on hold.

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of other users out there, sharing their experience and wisdom, often free. So instead of getting on the phone, get online and start crowdsourcing your tech support needs.

Here’s how.

General Tips

First, a few general rules. Many of the below sites require you to register a user name and password before you can post a question. Also, it’s a good idea to check how active a site is. Answerbag.com, for example, has more than 750,000 members. The bigger the site, the more likely you are to get an answer.

Sites with moderators are a plus because they will help weed out irrelevant or duplicate answers and keep the discussion on topic. There are also good fee-based sites like Experts Exchange, but I’ve limited the below list to free help.

PCs

One of my favorite tech support sites is FixYa.com. It has a clean design, which makes searching easy. When posing a question, use keywords, hit the search button, and a list of solutions will pop up.

FixYa lets its users rate one another so you can see who has a good solution rating and who doesn’t.

Users can choose among the “post a new problem,” “I can solve this!” and “I have the same problem” tabs. The site also has an alphabetical list of brands so you can search by name.

TechIMO.com is also a good bet, judging by sheer volume of active users.

The site’s PC hardware and tech general discussion board had nearly 240,000 posts when I checked it. Fair warning: the site is geared more toward the tech-savvy than the tech-phobic.

Tech publications PC World and CNet also have good discussion forums.

Macs

Pretty as they may be, Macs have their own special brand of problems. Apple’s own site has effective forums, but sometimes they can turn into complaint centers where everybody acknowledges having the problem, but no one seems to have a solution.

CNet’s MacFixIt.com gets around this by taking select Apple.com forum questions and answering them on its site. In one post, a Mac user wrote on Apple.com’s forums that he was experiencing problems with Time Machine backups. Most of the thread’s other users chimed in only to say that they had the same problem. MacFixIt then stepped in and offered its solution.

In addition to an active forum, MacFixIt also offers useful tutorials with digestible instructions, and explanations, on everything from sleep problems to reinstalling your system.

Of course, it’s better to find advice for your exact Mac. Everymac.com’s Q.& A. section is broken down by model, so if you’re dealing with MacBook Pro problems, you can go to that section.

Smartphones

I solved my BlackBerry problem on Crackberry.com’s forums. Not only does the site break down problems by model, including Apple’s iPhone 3G, but it also has a section for older BlackBerrys, which is helpful because not everyone has the money or desire to switch models every year. You can also search by carrier.

Users of the iPhone can turn to the iPhone Blog, which is helpful because it uses screen images and other visual aids instead of dizzying amounts of text. Even better are video tutorials. Instead of wasting time trying to locate your SIM card tray, just mimic the video’s step-by step instructions and pause and replay as needed.

If you’re short on patience, CNet’s video tutorials are better organized and are presented by the site’s editors who, generally speaking, should be qualified to solve your problems. The site’s Quick Tips section is good to browse if you’re looking to better navigate your gadget. In one video, CNet’s editor at large, Brian Cooley, gives some BlackBerry navigation tips, which is infinitely more colorful than reading your phone’s instruction manual.

And if you still insist on speaking to a human being, go to gethuman.com first — it will tell you the fastest, most direct number to use to reach a living, breathing technician on the line.

See, even when you don’t want its help, the Internet is there for you.

[Azadeh Ensha was Associate Editor at CondéNet/Conde Nast Publications; she joined The New York Times as a Technology writer in 2007. Ensha is fluent in Persian and French. She is a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA and received a Master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Happy Belated Birthday, Noam! Happy Birthday To You!

Noam Chomsky (b. 12/07/28) is an Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 53 years. Chomsky moved beyond transformational grammar and linguistic theory when he became a leading spokesman in the opposition to the War in Vietnam in 1967. Since then, Chomsky has been an unrelenting critic of U.S. foreign policy. He is a prophet without honor in his own land. If this is (fair & balanced) truth to power, so be it.

[x Standpoint]
Noam Chomsky
By Oliver Kamm

Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic, turned 80 in December. Few who read him are indifferent to his message. A biographer, Robert Barsky, even declares: "Chomsky is one of this [past] century's most important figures, and has been described as one who will be for future generations what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Mozart or Picasso have been for ours."

Leave aside the hyperbole and consider the improbability of its recipient. Chomsky has been the most influential figure in theoretical linguistics since the 1960s. His idea that human languages are the realisation of an innate language faculty is part of our intellectual culture. But this is a specialised discipline, in which Chomsky's ideas are far from universally held. Scholars once close to him, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, have diverged from important elements of his ideas.

Chomsky's popularity derives primarily from his political output: a stream of books, essays and interviews condemning America's role in the international order and its supposed marginalising of dissent at home. Chomsky sees the US as "a leading terrorist state", insisting he derives this from consistent application of a universal standard.

This is the background to two persistent myths about Chomsky. The first is that his political views are distinct from, and even aberrant compared with, his seminal work in linguistics. An example of this position is Richard Posner, who in his book Public Intellectuals notes that Chomsky's political writing "has taken a great deal of time away from his immensely distinguished academic career, and yet has received little public attention, much of it derisory".

The second is that, while Chomsky's political vision may be flawed in its absolutism, it nonetheless possesses an appealing moral consistency. In the New York Times, Obama adviser Samantha Power urged: "It is essential to demand, as Chomsky does, that a country with the might of the United States stop being so selective in applying its principles."

Chomsky's political output is consistent with the rest of his oeuvre in one important respect: the method of argumentation. Across disciplines, he has long employed a variety of unscholarly techniques to insulate his conclusions from criticism. The linguist George Lakoff once identified Chomsky's tendency to "fight dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book." In the current issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence, Margaret Boden, Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University, notes that a review of her book by Chomsky is "a sadly unscholarly piece, guaranteed to mislead its readers about both the tone and the content of the book. It is also defamatory." In politics, Chomsky's preferred technique is vituperative abuse of his opponents. Take a few examples. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". In disputing Chomsky's analogy between 9/11 and President Clinton's attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, Christopher Hitchens "must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt". The French nation collectively has a "highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture".

The irony of Chomskyan invective in the political sphere is that it is highly selective. Chomsky has never regretted his intervention in the 1980s on behalf of a Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Chomsky has no sympathy with Holocaust denial, and if he had stuck to defending Faurisson's right to free expression he would have been right and principled. Instead, he wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." The point here is not the perversity of the judgement. It is the way in which Chomsky espouses supposedly universal principles while extravagantly failing to apply them. Liberals and left-wingers who see value in US interventionism are racists, frauds, apologists for state terror and so on. Yet a man like Faurisson who exemplifies all of these qualities is regarded differently.

Consider, too, Chomsky's writings on Indochina, the issue on which he became famous as a political controversialist. He did not only excoriate an unjust and brutal US war. He derided refugee accounts of horrors after the fall of Cambodia, pointedly referring to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and disputing a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. In an interview last year, Chomsky characteristically congratulated himself on the astuteness of this analysis, declaring: "If we were to rewrite it now, we'd do it exactly the same way."

Chomsky's output is vast, and not always wrong. He was early and right in condemning Western acquiescence in Indonesia's subjugation of East Timor (though typically he cannot now acknowledge that the reversal of that policy has provided a casus belli for Islamist terrorism). But he cannot be accused of disinterested opposition to oppression. His political writings will last, if at all, only as a monument to Xenophon's definition of the sophist as one who sells wisdom to pupils for pay.

[Oliver Kamm is an author, columnist and banker. His writings have appeared in The (London) Times, The Guardian, Prospect, The New Republic, and The Jewish Chronicle. Kamm is an advisory editor of the online journal Democratiya. His book, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy was published in 2005. Kamm was educated at New College, Oxford and Birkbeck College, London University. He went on to a career in the Bank of England and the securities industry.]

Copyright © 2008 Social Affairs Unit Magazines Limited

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Forget Red Ryder! Donald Fagen Might Put Your Eye Out!

"A Christmas Story" is in on its way to film immortality alongside "It's A Wonderful Life." Before you get out the tissue box, consider a less-than-rosy appreciation of Jean Shepherd, the creator of "A Christmas Story." If this is (fair & balanced) holiday debunking, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Man Who Told "A Christmas Story": What I Learned From Jean Shepherd
By Donald Fagen

If you know Jean Shepherd's name, it's probably in connection with the now-classic film "A Christmas Story," which is based on a couple of stories in his book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He also does the compelling voice-over narration. On Christmas, TBS will continue its tradition of presenting a 24-hour "Christmas Story" marathon. There are annual fan conventions devoted to the film—released 25 years ago this Thanksgiving—and the original location in Cleveland has been turned into a museum. But long before A Christmas Story was made, Shepherd did a nightly radio broadcast on WOR out of Manhattan that enthralled a generation of alienated young people within range of the station's powerful transmitter. Including me: I was a spy for Jean Shepherd.

In the late '50s, while Lenny Bruce was beginning his climb to holy infamy in jazz clubs on the West Coast, Shepherd's all-night monologues on WOR had already gained him an intensely loyal cult of listeners. Unlike Bruce's provocative nightclub act, which had its origins in the schpritz of the Catskills comics, Shepherd's improvised routines were more in the tradition of Midwestern storytellers like Mark Twain, but with a contemporary urban twist: say, Mark Twain after he'd been dating Elaine May for a year and a half. Where Bruce's antics made headlines, Shepherd, with his warm, charismatic voice and folksy style, could perform his most subversive routines with the bosses in the WOR front office and the FCC being none the wiser. At least most of the time.

I was introduced to Shep, as his fans called him, by my weird uncle Dave. Dave, who was a bit of a hipster, used to crash on our sofa when he was between jobs. Being a bookish and somewhat imperious 12-year-old, already desperately weary of life in suburban New Jersey and appalled by Hoss and Little Joe and Mitch Miller and the heinous "Bachelor Father," I figured Dave was my man. One night, after ruthlessly beating me at rummy, he put down the cards and said, "Now we're gonna listen to Shepherd—this guy's great." The Zenith table model in the kitchen came to life midway through Shepherd's theme music, a kitschy, galloping Eduard Strauss piece called the "Bahn Frei" polka. And then there was that voice, cozy, yet abounding with jest.

He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my 12-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with 25 more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down, and loosened his tie. I was hooked. From then on, like legions of other sorry-ass misfits throughout the Northeast, I tuned in every weeknight at 11:15 and let Shep put me under his spell. Afterward, I'd switch to an all-night jazz station and dig the sounds until I conked out. Eventually, this practice started to affect my grades and I almost didn't graduate from high school.

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; "slobism"; "creeping meatballism"; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in "trivia," bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone.

Shepherd's talk usually fell into one of four categories. Fans of "A Christmas Story" will be familiar with the basic comic tone of his Depression-era tales, elaborations on his experience growing up in Hammond, Ind., a Chicago suburb in the shadow of the U.S. Steel Works on Lake Michigan. These stories featured his manic father ("the old man"); his mother (always standing over the sink in "a yellow rump-sprung chenille bathrobe with bits of dried egg on the lapel"); his kid brother, Randy, and assorted pals, bullies, beauties, and other neighborhood types. While the film preserves much of the flavor of Shep's humor, not much remains of the acid edge that characterized his on-air performances. In the film, the general effect is one of bittersweet nostalgia; on the radio, the true horror of helpless childhood came through.

Then there were the stories culled from his three years in the stateside Army during World War II (a juvenile ham radio and electronics freak, he was assigned to the Signal Corps). The third hunk of material was informed by his adventures in postwar radio and TV. He seems to have done every possible job, from engineer to sportscaster to hosting live cowboy music broadcasts. Finally, there was the contemporary stuff, comments on the passing scene.

In between, he'd sing along to noisy old records, play the kazoo and the nose flute, brutally sabotage the commercials, and get his listeners—the "night people," the "gang"—to help him pull goofy public pranks on the unwitting squares that populated most of Manhattan. In one famous experiment in the power of hype, Shepherd asked his listeners to go to bookstores and make requests for I, Libertine, a nonexistent novel by a nonexistent author, Frederick R. Ewing. The hoax quickly snowballed and several weeks later I, Libertine was on best-seller lists. (Shep and sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon eventually codged together an actual novel for Ballantine Books. I owned a copy.)

Hilarious as Shep's tales could be, one sensed a tough realism about life that ran counter to the agitprop for the Leisure Revolution that the media were serving up in those years. With the Soviets flexing their muscles and the constant specter of global nuclear war, the government was going to fantastic lengths to convince everyone that things were just peachy. From Bert the Turtle's exhortations to "duck and cover" in the face of an atomic blast to the endless parade of new products hawked on the tube by Madison Avenue, Americans were feeding themselves a line of hooey that was no less absurd than the most hard-core Maoist brainwash. "Relax, life is good," we were told. "Your government and Walt Disney have got the future well in hand." To skeptical Mad magazine-reading little stinkers like myself, it was this mendacity on the part of adults that was the most sinister enemy of all.

Because Shep made it clear he was just as dazed, enraged, and amused as you were, that he noticed what you noticed, he established himself as one of a handful of adults you could trust. (Others were Mailer, Ginsberg, Vonnegut, and Realist publisher Paul Krassner.) Night after night, Shepherd forged the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a whole generation of fans into an axiom that went something like: "The language of our culture no longer describes real life and, pretty soon, something's gonna blow."

Toward the beginning of the show, Shepherd frequently read news clippings that listeners, his "spies," had sent in. These were mostly odd little fillers he called "straws in the wind," indicators of the prevailing mood. Once I mailed Shep an article from our local Central Jersey paper about a guy who, after being fired for some petty infraction, got loaded and tossed a Coke bottle through every store window in the local shopping mall. A couple of nights later, I'm listening to the show and Shep does his usual bit: "So, this kid sent me a piece ..." and ACTUALLY READ MY CLIP ON THE AIR! Wham: I had connected. My life as an independent consciousness had begun. I remember scurrying down to the "TV room" and announcing this amazing event to my parents. Having always considered both Shepherd and my uncle Dave to be half-cracked, they were greatly underwhelmed.

As grateful as I am that Shep was there for me during those crucial years, my idealization of Shepherd the Man was not to survive much longer. In December of 1965, I came home from my first year of college for Christmas break and noticed that Shepherd was going to be appearing at nearby Rutgers University. On a frosty night, I drove my used Ford Galaxy to New Brunswick, where I sat on the floor with a congregation of Rutgers students and watched Shep walk into the spotlight to enthusiastic applause. He had neat but stylishly long hair and was wearing a green corduroy sports coat with the collar up over a black turtleneck T.

Onstage for almost two hours, he had the young audience in his pocket from the downbeat. But, for me, something wasn't right. On the radio, speaking close to the mic, he was able to use vocal nuances and changes in intensity to communicate the most intimate shadings of thought and feeling, not unlike what Miles Davis could achieve in a recording studio. Live onstage, he spoke as though he'd never seen a microphone in his life, trying to project to the back of the room. Moreover, he blared and blustered like a carnival barker, as if he had the scent of failure in his nostrils and was ready to do anything to get the crowd on his side. It was obvious that the guy I thought was so cool had a desperate need to impress all these people, whom I assumed to be casual listeners at best.

In truth, even at home, listening on the radio, I'd noticed a strain of grandiosity creeping into Shepherd's routines. Apparently, he'd originally come to New York with the idea of being a stage actor or making it big on network TV. But it's easy to imagine mainstream producers and network execs being put off by Shepherd's contrariness and intrinsic marginality. Supposedly, when Steve Allen retired as host of The Tonight Show, he'd suggested Shepherd as a replacement. NBC ended up giving the job to the eccentric but more cuddly Jack Paar. In any case, as the years rolled by, Shepherd rankled at being confined to the ghetto of radio and must have come to see his crown as King of the Hipsters as a crown of thorns.

What I saw that night at Rutgers wasn't pretty. In the studio, his occasional abuse of the lone engineer on the other side of the glass could be seen as the petulance of an artist trying to make things work on the fly. But, incandescent under the gaze of all those kids, his self-indulgences looked more like straight-up narcissism and his "hipness" was revealed as something closer to contempt. By the end of the show, he'd crossed the line between artist and showman and then some. No longer wanting to meet the great man, I left before the reception, scraped the ice off my windshield, and drove home. Anyway, the cool early '60s were over and the boiling, psychedelic late '60s had begun. Shepherd was no longer part of my world.

Not long ago, in the absence of any books, films, music, et cetera, that seemed to give off any light, I started looking back at some of the things that used to inspire me as a kid, including some of Shep's old shows, now available on the Internet. Hearing them almost a half-century down the line has been a trip. Despite the tendencies I've already mentioned (plus the gaffes one might expect from a wild man like Shep ad-libbing before the age of political correctness), much of the stuff is simply amazing: The guy is a dynamo, brimming with curiosity and ideas and fun. Working from a few written notes at most, Shepherd is intense, manic, alive, the first and only true practitioner of spontaneous word jazz.

I've done a little catch-up research: Shepherd stayed on at WOR until 1977, when the station did a makeover. His books, collections of stories based on the same material he used on the air, sold well. He had a successful career on public television and continued to do his bit on stage into the '90s. And, of course, there was the collaboration with director Bob Clark on "A Christmas Story." But I'm sorry to report that the narcissism thing kept getting worse as he got older.

Like a lot of fine-tuned performing artists, Shepherd increasingly exhibited the whole range of symptoms common to the aging diva. He became paranoid and resentful of imagined rivals, whether they were old ones like Mort Sahl or upstarts like Garrison Keillor. At the same time, he disavowed all his radio work, claiming that it was just a temporary gig on his way to some fanciful glory on the stage and screen. He even seemed to want to kill off his childhood, insisting that all those stories and characters were pulled clean out of his imagination. Old fans, for whom he had been almost like a surrogate father or big brother, were often met with derision when they approached him.

He didn't drink himself to death like his pal Jack Kerouac or OD like Lenny Bruce but gradually succumbed to that very real disease of self-loathing and its accompanying defenses. Disappointed in the way the world had treated him, he retired to Florida's west coast and died in 1999.

Although Shepherd almost never divulged details about his private life, he wasn't shy about giving us a bit of unflattering self-analysis, as this fragment of a show from 1957 attests:

Protective coloration is extremely important in our lives. ...[W]e are in the weeds all the time because we find it better down here in the weeds....

Look at me. ...I am not at all what I appear to be. ...[T]his is merely a mask ...that more or less covers up the real me that's underneath. The real me is a saber-toothed tiger. I couldn't dare go down the street the way I really am. I'd get shot in five minutes. They'd have me in a wagon with a bunch of Doberman pinschers.

To an adolescent back then, long before a therapeutic vernacular had entered the language, this was reassuring news. It's possible that Shep's greatest lesson to the gang wasn't just "things are not what they seem" but rather "things are not what they seem—including me."

[Donald Fagen is a New York City musician. Fagen met his long-time musical partner, the other half of Steely Dan, Walter Becker, while attending Bard College in New York. Fagen and Becker, along with now famous actor/comedian Chevy Chase, formed a college band called The Leather Canary. At the time, Chase called the group "a bad jazz band." Fagen and Becker's youthful career also included a stint with Jay and the Americans under pseudonyms, and in the early 1970s, as pop songwriters, prior to forming Steely Dan. In 1984, Fagen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree by his alma mater, Bard College. In 2001, both Fagen and Becker received Honorary Doctor of Music degrees from Boston's Berklee College of Music.]

Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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A Double Dose Of Tom Tomorrow At Year's End

As we bid a fond goodbye to 2008, the year is reviewed by Tom Tomorrow in two installments of "This Modern World." If 2008 wasn't so great, will we be fine in 2009? If this is a (fair & balanced) farewell to the year that was, so be it.

[x Salon]
This Modern World — "2008 In Review: Parts I (Goodbye To All That) & II (The End Of An Error)"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Part I
Click on image to enlarge.
Part II
Click on image to enlarge.

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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If The First Words At The Inauguration Are "Love Is The Morning And The Evening Star," Run!

According to Wikipedia, Richard D. (Rick) Warren earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from California Baptist University in Riverside, his Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX, and his Doctor of Ministry degree from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. According to Warren, his call to full-time ministry came as a 19-year-old student at California Baptist when, in November 1973, Warren and a friend skipped out on classes and drove 350 miles to hear W(ally).A(mos). Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel, in San Francisco. Rick Warren stood in line to shake hands with Criswell (pastor of First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas, TX) afterward.

“When my turn finally arrived, something unexpected happened. Criswell looked at me with kind, loving eyes and said, quite emphatically, “Young man, I feel led to lay hands on you and pray for you!” He placed his hands on my head and prayed: “Father, I ask that you give this young preacher a double portion of your Spirit. May the church he pastors grow to twice the size of the Dallas church. Bless him greatly, O Lord.”

Verily, Warren's (nondenominational) Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA (the most densely populated city in Orange County) is a megachurch with 22,000 worshipers at its Sunday services. In 2007, First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX was nowhere to be found (Saddleback Church was 4th.) in the 100 Largest U.S. Churches (Outreach Magazine, 2007). Ol' Criswell was passing the torch of evangelism and didn't even know it at the time. Or, if one accepts Warren's porpoise-driven account, the old fella with white hair and his standard white suit was divinely inspired. If the Saddlebags preacher shows up at the inauguration in a white suit channeling Elmer Gantry about love bein' a mornin' and an evenin' star, verily run — don't walk — for the nearest exit. If this is (fair & balanced) impiety, so be it.

[x Huffington Post]
"We Call on You Lord": Leaked Rick Warren Invocation
By Linda Hirschman

(NOTE: Copies of what seemed to be a draft of an inaugural invocation by Pastor Rick Warren arrived in the fax machines of several prominent journalists this morning. This site does not vouch for the authenticity of the draft, although each of the statements does conform to material in Pastor Warren's speeches, interviews, or on his websites.)

O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate a president and vice president. We pray, O Lord, for President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, to whom You have entrusted leadership of this nation at this moment in history.

We pray for their advisors and supporters, particularly their Jewish advisors and supporters, who will surely roast in hell if they do not abandon their refusal to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior. Pray for the conversion of Obama chief advisor David Axelrod and his economic wise man Larry Summers, his early supporters Lester Crown and his campaign finance chair Penny Pritzker, for, as the Bible says, there will be a day when there will be a great revival of faith in God through Jesus among the Jewish people. (Romans 11). Obviously, this is a day that we, as believers in Christ, want to pray for! Let the light of Christian salvation come to the Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and his family, some of whom survived the German effort to bring them to Christian truth in the last generation.

May all efforts to stop homosexuals from violating the ancient humanitarian institution of marriage succeed as did your will in California in the last election. Attend particularly, O lord, to President Obama's environmental chief Nancy Sutley, and to the man who has worked essentially without sleep for three months to save the American economy from total collapse, Representative Barney Frank. Use the government to bring an end to acts as bad as incest, pedophilia and polygamy, by stamping out homosexuality among the homosexuals, a people evolutionarily unfit, that we may truly become one nation before God. May the First Amendment to the Constitution protect all who want to compare homosexual sex to incest, pedophilia and polygamy from the arrows of hate speech accusations shot by the politically correct.

Change the hearts of the new administration's pro-choice advisors and supporters, including the Justices of the Supreme Court who stand here today with us: Holocaust denier Anthony Kennedy, holocaust denier Ruth Bader Ginzburg, holocaust denier David Souter, holocaust denier Stephen Breyer, and holocaust denier John Paul Stevens, who is about to swear in the Vice-President, in that abortion is a holocaust and the eighteen million or so women who have committed abortion in the thirty-five years since 1973 are thus no better than Nazis.

Bless the women, who have chosen to follow their ambitions into public life, but change the hearts, Lord, of Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis from independent lives of their own to submission to their husbands, if any, for I love the King James Version's rendition of Ephesians 5:22 "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands" and of course "Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ if God." 1 Corinthians 11:3. These women have chosen to participate in the public life of the community. Enlighten them as to the requirement that women not speak in church, saving any questions they have about their common life to ask their husbands as they return home.

Now, O Lord, despite the plain language of the Constitution that created this great nation, we dedicate this presidential inaugural ceremony to You. May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before You and acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[After college (Cornell University, B.A. with honors) and law school (University of Chicago, J.D.), Linda Hirschman practiced labor law for fifteen years. By 1988, Hirschman decided to move on to teaching and went back to get a PhD in philosophy, while she taught. After receiving a Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Chicago) in 1994, she accepted appointment to the Allen/Berenson Chair in Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. In 2002, Hirschman "took a vow of poverty" and became a freelance writer. Hirschman has written two books: Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex with legal historian Jane Larson (1998) and A Woman’s Guide to Law School (1999), as well as many articles, scholarly and popular.]

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

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