WordPlay - Language, Culture, Media, and Meaning

Why the United States (and the West) Has Won the Iraqi War

Because a day like today (June 30th, 2009) has dawned in Bagdhad.

I am fully aware in writing this that there are formidable issues of ethnic and religious rivalry that still threaten the new nation, and will persist into the indefinite future. But are these any different than the ones that beset this nation not so long ago? Or any other nation?  There are two schools of thought in English political philosophy, one descending from Hobbes, that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and humankind the prisoners of its appetites, the other from Locke and Hutcheson, that human beings are fully capable of self-governance and freeing themselves from the historical nightmares of tyranny and theocracy. The second theme is, of course, fully embodied and articulated in the Declaration of Independence, in which Jefferson actually semi-plagiarized a great deal of Locke.

You either believe this stuff or you don't. I do. A lot of the editors who are going to be publishing copies of the Declaration and Gettysburg Address this next Saturday (July 4th) give that legacy only lip service. What has been enormously disheartening to me in the last six years is to see the Deranged Opposition turn its back on the most basic ideas that the United States offered to the world, embracing fascism and racism - anything to justify its loathing of George Bush.

I actually opposed the war in 2003, worried that the human cost would outweigh the benefit. But I never descended into the moral fury that seemed to engulf the opposition. That a positive outcome might be possible, that the United States even in its worst days was grimly and clumsily going about the business of nation (not empire) building - that seemed to me apparent. It was a basic truth that the anti-Administration faction went to almost any lengths to deny.

To say that a government based on the free consent of the governed is possible doesn't mean that it is going to come to pass. Our own nation was not able to bridge a colossal cultural gulf, and the related issue of slavery, without a monstrous civil war. (A Hobbesian writing in 1789 who could envision the later war would have smugly cited that catastrophe as proof that the new democratic nation was a failure.) The United States was also almost miraculously blessed with the right kind of heroic personalities at the right time, both on the macro scale(Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt) and micro (that a man of the stature of Joshua Chamberlain happened to command the volunteer Maine regiment stationed on the extreme left flank of the Union forces on the second day of Gettysburg.)

But the plain fact is that victory in a conflict of this sort cannot consist of more than the providing to a free people the opportunity to escape the dead hand of history that has held them in its grasp, to establish in concrete reality that government based on the consent of the government - and that is where we are today. There is still a long way to go? The stability created in the last few years is fragile and may fall apart? Absolutely true - but also true of every nation on the face of the earth, including this one. I am simply not going to accept the notion that any people are condemned to despotism and/or the rule of priests forever and ever. 

So congratulations to all those who labored and sacrificed to achieve such a day. God speed to the Iraqi people, and their nation, may God smile upon them as He (She, It, or They) did upon this fractured land once upon a time.

The Tolerance of He-Who-Knows-Best

I am actually a fan of the New Yorker columnist Adam Gopni, who writes entertainingly about a number of difficult topics. But I can hardly let this pass, from his appreciation last fall of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. The sentences quoted below are taken verbatim from the second paragraph of the article, the emphasis added by yours truly.

"[John Stuart Mill] was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.)"

Someone might inform Mr. Gopnik that the tolerance that means something extends to the subtext as well. It's just barely possible that the rights and/or wrongs of Coleridge's conservative thought and Carlyle's reactionary politics might be too complex to be dismissed airily in an adjective.

Harry Potter and the Green-Eyed Critic

    A couple of days ago I ran across an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'Sex and the Single Wizard', a genuine exercise in superciliousness, conducted by someone named James Parker, who gives off all the vibrations of a committed twit. The article was of the 'bait and switch' type, in that it purported to be a discussion of the difficulty of transforming the Harry Potter novels into quality screenplays. However, the pudding proved in the tasting to be a snide attack on the books themselves. A little warning to Parker and others of his ilk – if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, snide is the most easily recognizable variety of envy.  Sorry, Parker, but your secret is not safe with me.

    J.K. Rowling hardly needs defense at this point in her career from a minor league blogger like yours truly. But I have long wanted to write a grace note on the Harry Potter novels, an exercise in uninhibited fandom, and  this seems to be the right occasion. Rowling did not succeed on the scale she did because of luck or good connections. She succeeded because she is a narrative genius.  I have to confess a failing here that in any case will shortly become obvious. I am a story addict, a quintessential 'tell-me-what-happened-next' reader. I often finish books and movies that are plainly terrible, just to find out how the story turns out. So with that sordid confession behind, let's proceed.
Leaving the question of literary value aside for a moment, and considering the Potter novels simply as storyteller's art, the series is one of the great achievements in Western literature. Using prose of elegant simplicity, Rowling succeeded in weaving a dazzling number of threads - plots, subplots, sub-sub-plots, extended themes, characterizations, nuances, thrones, principalities, etc. - into a seamless narrative by which the plot arc is (seemingly) effortlessly advanced – the art that conceals art, the finest kind. A loose comparison can be made to a passacaglia, a form of musical composition in which the progression of the piece occurs in the base line, while various melodies play in the upper register.  In the same way, the  plot arc (Harry vs. Voldemort) moves relentlessly through a series of harmonic progressions towards an inevitable resolution, while the minor plots play out in the upper staves.

    A few devices – the most obvious example being the enigma of Snape's loyalty and motivation – are almost as large and extended as the plot arch itself. Others, such as the extended account of the Weasley family's confrontation with their obnoxiously ambitious son Percy, have a multi-volume scope. Smaller riddles – Dumbledore's puzzling tolerance for the charlatan Madame Trelawney – are of lesser scope, but also run through more than one novel. Then there are the volume stories themselves – the first five books stand alone nicely. The smaller narrative mechanisms are too numerous to recite. All of them are integrated gracefully and naturally into the flow of story and  characterization.

    The 19th Century Viennese music critic Edward Hanslick despised Wagner's operas (and paid a price in consequence). But he was honest enough to note his admiration for the 'bee like industry' that informed every bar of Gotterdammerung. A nice phrase, 'bee-like industry', and one that applies equally to Rowling's attention to detail in Harry Potter. I do believe it's a quality that can be found in almost all successful  'large' works of art.  

    It won't do, of course, to bestow all this raving praise on the Potter books and stick to high concept. I do believe a trip to the nitty-gritty is required, a hard look at the worker bee in action.  By way of example. I'd like to take a hard look at  an episode at the end of the fourth book, the Goblet of Fire. I choose this particular scene because the nadir, the truly wretched bottom of Parker's supercility, is reached when he compares Tolkien's Sauron favorably to Voldemort. That's absolute nonsense, for reasons I'll address in a moment. But for now, to the nitty-gritty. A caution; there are Spoilers here. But I am making the natural assumption that any reader who is interested in these thoughts is already thoroughly familiar with the Potter novels.

    Near the end of Goblet of Fire, Harry wins a wizarding contest. But when he lays hands on the prize, it proves to be a trap, a magical device that transports Harry to a place where Voldemort lies in wait with his most faithful servant. As the action goes forward, Voldemort is restored to his full power, his acolytes arrive, Harry escapes miraculously, and returns to Hogwarts to give an unverifiable account of what happened. Doubts about Harry's veracity spring up like weeds, and the consequent cloud over him in the bureaucracy and elsewhere becomes a central theme in the books that follow

    Now, all this would work naturally and plausibly even if Harry alone fell into the trap. But that is not the way Rowling chose to tell the tale. Harry is accompanied by Cedric Diggery, a minor figure that Rowling has taken great pains to characterize and to include in final journey. Diggery is a sort of Hogwarts' Frank Merriwell, a boy popular with everyone and a heartthrob with the girls. His presence at the scene of Harry's confrontation with Voldemort adds nothing to the action, for he is murdered instantaneously with his arrival. 'Kill the spare', Voldemort directs, and so it happens. So why all this effort to inform the reader of Diggery's sweetness and popularity? And to see to it that he is present when Harry first confronts Voldemort?

    My own intuitive explanation?  Rowling has organized the story in the way she did precisely so she can introduce Voldemort with the line  - 'kill the spare'. In its ruthlessness, its murderous malice, and its complete indifference to the human qualities of Cedric Diggery, it demonstrates immediately all the evil with which Voldemort has been described by others. To Voldemort, to whom only his own needs matter, Diggery is the 'spare' – not even inquiry about his name or why he happens to be there - murdered for no other reason than he is redundant. From the involved preparation for this scene, it is apparent it was no 11th hour inspiration. Rowling had had this masterstroke in mind at least from the outset of the fourth novel (when Harry encounters Cedric and his father before the World Quidditch Match, at which time the boy's charm and effect on the schoolgirls is apparent ). In its directness, its efficiency and its effect, it is that – a masterstroke.

    Rowling goes on to present Voldemort in a tremendous series of scenes and encounters – the one that registers most vividly with me is a dinner during which a helpless captive twists upside down from the ceiling while the other 'guests' each wish they were anywhere else.  His influence becomes more and more a reality in the lives of the principals. In the last volume, the lights are going quietly out all over the magic kingdom. Harry and his allies are reduced to living in a mobile tent, as their friends are overwhelmed, one after another. Off hand, I can't think of another hero reduced to such desperation before the tide turns. Voldemort's evil has moved from the realm of the possible to a complete, devastating reality.

    The cliché that a monster or villain is always reduced in stature by the reveal has become a cliché because it is so very, very  true. Very few reveals succeed. But the reveal of Voldemort, conveyed in these ice cold scenes, are a brilliant success, and another triumphant example of the narrative skill the authoress demonstrates at so many other points.. (The only other one I can think of that is similarly accomplished is the 'reveal' of Norman Bates' mother at the end of Hitchock's movie Psycho.)

    And what of Sauron, whose brooding evil Parker contrasts favorably with Voldemort? In this respect, the Lord of the Rings is a version of the Emperor's New Clothes. Tolkien informs his readers endlessly (and didactically) that Sauron is Evil, that a Shadow is spreading over the Middle World, etc., etc., - but yet Sauron never wins a round. Not even one blessed inning.  Not even one light left jab. He does no significant damage to anyone. It's like watching a tennis match  (mixing the sports metaphors) in which the commentators keep touting one player who never hits a winner. Frodo goes through the entire narrative unscathed. He doesn't lose any friends. He doesn't lose any blood. He doesn't even miss any meals. Hell, he doesn't even miss the mustard for his ham sandwich.

    I remember being first bothered, then really annoyed with this when I first read the books, at approximately age 20.  EYou can't endlessly reiterate the fearsomeness of the villain/monster, and then set up a story in which he is unable to alter even one minor event.  My recollection is that Tolkien was aware of this, but fatuously believed that the basic narrative demand was satisfied by repeated 'cliffhanger' episodes (“And they were about to carry the day, and would have carried the day if not for . . . “). He could not have been more wrong, Sooner or later, no matter how great the risk, you have to deliver the goods, let Voldemort appear, show Norman's mother, let Dracula come out of hiding. Even mediocre storytellers know that. It is a shame that one of Tolkien's Inkling friends, say. C.S; Lewis in a mood of Screwtape realism, didn't sit the lad down and give him the bad news. JR, old chap, this is not working.

    Both Rowling and Tolkien use similar imagery – shadows spreading over the landscape, the silent growing power of the evil force – but where as Rowling gives the readers incidents, murders repulsive in their coldness, personalties changed, apparatchiks running wild (the scene of Umbridge interrogating a half-blood magician is infuriating to read) – Tolkien simply endlessly uses the background imagery, while giving nothing in the foreground. His story becomes frustrating, and then unintentionally comic. It is my own cynical thought that, had Tolkien not been a tweedy Oxford Don surrounded by famous friends, but an ordinary amateur scribbler, that his epic might not have seen the light of day. Even what is good and inventive in it owes a big debt to Wagner.

    Had Tolkien been entrusted with the Harry Potter/Voldemort scene in which Cecil Diggery meets his end, Harry and Diggery would have been menaced . . .  threatened from all sides . . .  come close to death . . .  BUT, at the last second, Dumbledore would arrive, having found the port key, or Cecil would discover a charm on the premises, or Voldemort's wand would break, or something. And Voldemort and his cohorts would slink away, muttering threats, having accomplished nothing. But he'll be back, boy . . . . he's REALLY mean, just wait and see . .  . . I'm tellin' you, that Sauron – er, Voldemort is EVIL . . . you'd better believe it. (Tolky, baby, it ain't happenin'.)

    The plain, ugly, unvarnished  truth is that, if Tolkien had been responsible for that scene, Cecil Diggery would be alive today!!!! But, scandal aside, and unluckily for him, the writer who did have the conn was far more gifted writer made of far sterner stuff. 

    I don't mean to imply that the Potter novels are a perfect, finished work of literature. There is no such thing. There are dozens of minor plot holes, and one major one. But what is good about the books is so very, very good. When considering the value of a work of art that, with no greater means than words on a printed page, managed to capture the attention of the world in a post literate age, it might be a good idea to focus on how the trick was done, not its supposed flaws. Too late for Parker, but good advice for other twit critics. 

    For what it's worth, even Parker's sniggling comments about the sex life (or lack thereof) of Harry Potter are beside the point.  The base storyline concerns Harry's maturation, magnificently told, from complete confusion about who he is, to a recognition of his own identity. Erotic subthemes don't fit well in that context. Besides, there is in the subtext some sly innuendo that one of Harry's principal antagonists, more glibly sophisticated in every way than the chronically confused Harry, may be doing quite well in that way. You would never write 'Harry Potter and the Harems of Hogwarts'. But you might try 'Draco Malfoi and the Sluts of Slytherin'. My sense is that Rowling does not particularly care for this fraternity boy style of loose womanizing. She has a lot of company.

    That's about it. My apologies to Parker, whose rather silly essay in truth was no more than a prompt for an appreciation I have meant to write for some time.  I have to beg the question I raised above, about the literary merit of these books. The question of whether the skill and care that has been lavished on what is ultimately a story of children's fantasy seems a real one to me. Although the entertainment value may be justification enough, the issue is still interesting. I think there is something there a bit more significant than entertainment. I'll take that up on another day, if anyone is interested.

    But this essay is long enough as it is. Thanks for the attention paid.

Groucho Olberman

The Big Store (1941) is not vintage Marx Brothers stuff. By that time, the lads had been in the MGM stable for six years. The once zany nihilists had become old routiniers. Nevertheless, it contains one classic verbal gag that I have had cause to quote again and again over the years.

Grouch is applying (never mind why) for the position of floorwalker at the Big Store – a sort of Macy's/Gimbels place – to the manager, the perpetually exasperated Douglas Dumbrille. The room is crowded with onlookers. The manager puts a test question to Groucho:

*

Manager: A woman has fainted on the fourth floor. What do you do?

Groucho (after brief pause): What color is. her hair?

Manager (in amazement): What color is her hair? What difference does that make?

Groucho (turning to the onlookers): There you go. A woman has fainted on the fourth floor, and he says [weary sigh] 'what difference does that make?'

*

You wouldn't think a rhetorical trick this transparent would work on any audience. You'd be wrong. It is worked constantly, on audiences of all types, in a variety of forms. The latest and greatest practitioner of this verbal sleight of hand is Keith Olberman of MSNBC. Last fall, Sarah Palin in the midst of her campaign, poked fun at the wastefulness of doing fruit fly research in Paris. France, that could presumably be done just as easily in the United States. The project had been noted as classic pork barrel stuff by a number of tax payer organizations. But that evening, there was Olberman, in his most pontitifical voice and face, so pontifical that it is almost meta-papal, backgrounded by a display of notable projects involving fruit flies, denouncing Palin as an anti-science Luddite. Even though there was no face to face encounter between Grou -er, Olberman – and Sarah Palin, I'll translate it into Marxese.

*

Olberman: So identify some of these pork-barrel boondoggles you're against.

Palin: Well, going to Paris to do ordinary research for one.

Olberman: Name the research.

Palin (amazed): Experimentation with fruit flies, I believe.

Olberman (turning to the MSNBC audience): There you go. I ask her to name wasteful projects and she says [weary sigh] 'experimentation with fruit flies'.

*

It's the same device as Groucho's, but not nearly as funny. Maybe that's because Groucho's is a joke, and Olberman's is a con.

If this was merely a sidenote to the recently concluded campaign, it could be relegated to history with no further ado. But Olberman is still very much with us, and now beating the drums nightly about the treatment of detainees back in 2002-2003. I don't watch these shows, any of them, of any political stripe. The spectacle of the preacher preaching to the converted doesn't do much for me, no matter who the preacher, who the congregation, or what the scripture. But my friends who do watch Olberman are having a tough time extracting hard facts from the discussion. The rather limited CIA interrogations seem to be associated with the much larger number of field interrogations done in Iraq and Afghanistan which is in turn conflated with the prisoner abuse in Abu Gharib, which weren't interrogations at all. The more you watch Olberman, the less you understand and the more indignant you become, which I suspect is not a coincidence.

(I should say something about the substantive issue before ending this. Back in 2001-2003, I was more than a little scandalized by the open discussion and public acceptance of harsh interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists. I was particularly infuriated by Alan Dershowitz's suggestion of a torture warrant, which was appalling. There is no question that we as a society have got to decide how to deal with these issues in future. The shock of 9/11 sent us reeling into areas in which we would rather not be. John McCain's opinion on the subject seems to me the correct one, and decisive.

However, there is also no question in my mind that these practices were fully aired, subject to much public discussion, disclosed to Congress, etc. It is rather despicable hypocrisy in my view to hide under your desk for six years, tacitly endorse the tactics of the day, then emerge with your finger pointed when you feel safe. If Olberman can produce any statement in condemnation or denunciation of the CIA in the 2002-4 time frame, I stand corrected. But as I recall he was making funny noises on Fox Sports Cat the time.)

So there you have the exposure of the Groucho-tactics used rather openly by Keith Olberman. The difference is that Groucho Marx made himself a legend playing comic and inartful con men. Olberman is the real thing, and quite artful. Groucho's act was very funny. Olberman's isn't funny at all.

An Anecdote About the Death Penalty

A few days ago, a discussion about the death penalty broke out in the small, civil forum where I usually hang out. The argument quickly devolved into a debate about the validity of the conventional abstractions. Does the death penalty deter or not? How can the State justify taking a life as punishment for taking a life? A few of the anti's brought up the Illinois experience, both the blanket clemency granted by outgoing Governor Homer Ryan in 2003 and the 'exonerations' claimed by the Northwestern project. (The word 'exonerations' is in quotes because there is much to wonder about in those claims. But that's a subject for another day.)

To me, this approach to the subject is suspect in its entirety. There is no one, universal rule that applies to the death penalty. Each case is unique, absolutely idiosyncratic, a law unto itself. I can only explain myself anecdotally.

Back in 1999, I attended a brush-up seminar in evidentiary law. One of the presenters was a prosecutor working out of the District Attorney's Office in Alameda County. She was a blonde, suburban 'soccer-mom' type, working in inner Oakland. Despite the obvious demographic disadvantages (risking a little political incorrectness here), she presented her cases simply and directly and got excellent results.

Her topic was the use of thematic and demonstrative evidence. It was a first-class presentation, but the substance of one of her cases interested me more than the nominal subject. It concerned a capital case she had recently conducted successfully in Oakland. I was particularly struck by the conduct of the jury.

The facts were stark. The victim was a four-year-old child. The defendant had become involved with her mother, and they had had some sort of falling out. In some shortsighted move made either for revenge or to set accounts straight, the defendant had kidnapped the little girl and held her at gun point. The police were called, there was evidently, a short car chase, and then a hostage stand off. The car was surrounded. It became apparent that the defendant's plan had failed completely. As the police called for him to give up, evidently feeling he had to prove he was not a braggart given to empty threats, he blew the girl's brains out in the front seat of the car. It was an absolutely pointless thing to do, a pure, vicious act of malice. There is worse. The girl was not only an only child, but also an only grandchild. The hopes of two generations vanished with her. The grief of the family was beyond telling

There was obviously no question of guilt in this case. Also, there was no racial issue. Everyone who mattered -- defendant, victim, the majority of the jury, and above all, the jury foreperson -- was African-American. (Of course the prosecutor was white, and I don't know about the judge and defense counsel, but these don't matter.) The only issue was the penalty.

The prosecutor was well trained philosophically. She themed the case around a maxim of Kant's (as I recall, the primary slide actually attributed it to him) -- that there are some crimes that are such an affront to humanity, such a horrific assault on human values, that not to respond to them with the ultimate penalty, is to disregard and insult the victim's humanity. I am writing this from memory -- the actual formulation used at trial was much pithier and more direct.

This theme resonated with the jury. (If it is not obvious already, this woman was a superb trial attorney.) I don't think the reason was the attribution. I have had some fun lately discussing expressions of apparent wisdom uttered by great men that are actually the reverse. But Kant's insight to my mind is the reverse. It resonates because it accurately describes the moral process involved in these cases at the level of jury decision. The primary criterion in resolving these situations is the moral quality of the act (although, to be sure, since that moral quality encompasses motive and purpose, the defendant's background and character are included implicitly). Though not always expressed explicitly, this is the guiding principle of most jury deliberations. It becomes lost completely in the appellate process.

The foreperson was a competent, extremely well organized young African-American woman, a young professional or junior executive. From the start of deliberations, she kept the jury focused on the primary issue -- was the nature of the defendant's act such that imposition of anything else but the death penalty was an affront to the small child humanity? That was the question the jury felt it had to answer.

Over nearly seven (!) days, the jury discussed every aspect of the crime in exhaustive detail. The deliberations began with two-thirds of the jury members believing that death was the appropriate verdict. The others had reservations. The arguments were quiet and thoughtful, disagreements put respectfully. As the days passed, one after another, the jurors in the minority came around to the notion that death was the only possible result. Finally, unanimity was reached.

That, however, did not end the deliberations. The forewoman directed the jurors to separate for an hour, reflect on themselves, their lives, and beliefs, and return. If after that interval any one of them doubted the moral correctness of the result, they would report themselves as divided -- for they had reached the end. When they regathered, the verdict was still unanimous. The jurors then held hands for a moment of silent prayer. Then they delivered their verdict to the court.

You may not agree with the outcome. That's not my point. What I want to emphasize is the real human content that occurred in this actual trial and how different in kind that it is from discussions of the subject in the abstract. If you had approached this jury panel and either extolled or berated them because their decision might (or might not) deter some hypothetical child killer who doesn't even exist in reality, I think they'd look at you as if you had two heads. How on earth does that matter? And if you suggested that their agonizingly considered judgment should be vacated because of police misconduct in a different case in a different city, I believe they'd be rightfully furious. What the devil, they would say, has that got to do with this? This trial was about that child and the man who killed her -- and if a different case has to be reversed, by all means reverse it. But what has the one case to do with another?

In most of these arguments, it's usually the anti's clinging to the abstract, searching for some rule that would ban the death penalty in all places and under all circumstances. To them, the actual human and moral content of the particular case is inconvenient and irritating, often infuriating. But the reality is that each case is unique. There is no universal. Demonstrate an actual miscarriage of justice and of course it should be reversed, and the victim (defendant) compensated. But why should a defendant whose guilt is buttressed and reconfirmed by DNA analysis get the benefit of the test that exonerates someone else? Why does Ted Bundy walk because of second thoughts about someone else?

The one and only thing that matters is the moral quality of the particular act at issue. The rest is noise.

[In the meantime, if I were an anti, I wouldn't be too much worked up about the fate of the child killer I described in the first paragraphs. I heard this story at a seminar in 1999. The trial likely occurred in 1997-9. It is improbable that the judgment is even final in the California Supreme Court. It'll be another decade, at least, before the Federal habeas corpus has run its course -- say, 2020. By that time, the lost little girl, the center of the story, will have long since turned to dust. The moral journey that the magnificent jury undertook will be as completely gone and forgotten as she is.

Unless you and I remember it.]

(This piece originally appeared in a slightly edited form on the American Thinker on April 12.)

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest) - 2

    Our first foray into the realm of pseudo-wisdom has to be rated an unqualified success. I received more than 100 comments on the American Thinker website (click here) and another thirty or so e-mails directly. Most of these were entries into the Contest-Without-A-Prize, and most quite good.  (There were a few who damned me as some sort of moral relativist and anti-intellectual – quite a come-uppins for a strict Kantian and committed theist – but if the shoe fits, wear it, I say. Even if it pinches about the toes.) But I am not quite ready to close the books just yet – I think one more go-around is justified, before age withers and custom stales the extremely finite variety of this formula.

    For those taking this thing as a contest seriously, I will tell you that the current front runner is Charles Cammock, and his suggestion of a well-known phrase of Nietzsche's (here, in the version I prefer), 'That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.' This one was also very high on my list, since this utter nonsense has become a staple of American conventional wisdom, particularly with athletic coaches. However, the contest remains open, and someone may yet trump Mr. Cammock's ace.

    With that, once more unto the breach. The quotation of George Santayana I used in the first essay was actually not even in the my top five. I picked it because it was easy to write about. Since there is only so much of this the traffic will bear, today I will go to my all time number one, a bit off the beaten path, but quoted often enough to make the cut. It is not only fatally flawed, but subtly and frighteningly pernicious. It is this beauty from Jame Joyce (in Ulysses).

    A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals to discovery.   
-James Joyce

    We owe Joyce the benefit of context here, since this is a dramatic utterance, made by a character in a work of fiction, and not a stand-alone quote. For that minuscule fraction of my readers not intimately acquainted with Joyce's masterpiece, this pronouncement is made by Stephen Daedalus, in the course of a discussion about Shakespeare that takes place in the Dublin Public Library. (Daedalus is one of the great insufferable prigs in all literature, made tolerable only by the fact that he is a merciless self-caricature of Joyce himself.) The 'man of genius' referenced is thus William Shakespeare. But it requires no great intuitive leap to infer that Daedalus considers himself included in the ambit of genius, and also inevitably Joyce the author.

    What can be overlooked in the glow of admiration for the conciseness and precision of Joyce's marvelously elegant diction is that this gem misstates almost everything that it is possible to misstate about talent, achievement, and human nature itself. Throw in a bow towards the excessive categorization that mars so much of Scholastic philosophy, and you have the ranking inanity (in my humble opinion) ever uttered or authored by an otherwise renowned man.

    Where do we begin? The first is that there is some clear, absolute, distinction between 'mere' talent and genius. See how the fates their gifts allot. A, the dear lad, is talented, but only so much – while B, lucky fellow, is a genius. A is in one pigeon hole, B in another one. Consign A to the plebes and think no more of him – while B is mounts to Olympus. Please.  Leaving aside the mundane fact that the experience of art is maddeningly relative, that something that I think is profound might leave you yawning and bored, the crushing burden of self-consciousness that this view of art and achievement generates is one of the great deadeners for any one striving to do anything.

    I wonder how many good writers are frozen into impotence by the need to meet the overpraise of critics for earlier work, how many painters can't face their palette, and so on. Joyce himself fell victim to his own misconception – he rendered himself speechless with self consciousness. (You are all welcome to Finnegans Wake. I'll meet you at the bar when you're done, laddie, and stand drinks for the house.) Charlie Chaplin came to world fame making slight comedies with terrific gags and a central character at once quirky, indomitable, endearing, and trivial. From the 1920's, when he was discovered by the intelligentsia, to the 1950's, his movies became steadily more self-conscious and morally sentimental – finally so far from the roots of his comedy that they became a type of self-parody. Buster Keaton, who never gave a damn about anything but the next gag, is more the people's choice these days. Something of the same can be said about Woody Allen, or Alfred Hitchcock after the book by Francois Truffaut. There are innumerable other examples.

    The actor Andy Garcia tells a story on himself about an incident that occurred during the filming of the movie 'The Untouchables'. He was having trouble with some scene, which he could not do to his satisfaction. Sean Connery, also in the case, finally move over and whispered to him, 'Just say the line, kid. It's not fucking Hamlet'.

    Which is my humble, bottom-line advice to one and all - the talented, the untalented, the geniuses, the wannabe's. Don't worry too much about it. There is no Joycean distinction between genius and talent – only a universe of triers and achievements in large and small part, some great, some not so great, all with flaws of one kind or another. So don't worry about whether it's Great or American or even a Novel. Just write the paragraph, daub the paint, focus the lens, kid. It's not fucking Hamlet.

    So. Joyce's thought is pretty demoralizing for all those young men portraying themselves as artists.  But it is in the larger arena of politics that the pernicious implications come into play. The  notion that genius is immune from genuine error, that even apparent error leads to the 'portals of discovery', contains within it the implication that genius is beyond good and evil, that the moral universe has no claim on it. Conventional wrongdoing is, after all, only a species of error.  Joyce's elegant assertion of the attributes of genius is actually elegant formulation of the rights of the the superman, the ubermensch – that much-misunderstood concept of the even more misunderstood Nietzsche.

    No mistakes? Volitional error? The Fuhrer beckons from just down the corridor, as do the leaders of the proletarian vanguard, as do all the others who claim to possess a wisdom – genius, in a word - far above and beyond that vouchsafed us ordinary members of the common herd. Claims of this type, and seizure of power on that basis, are the blight of human history.

    The subject of the claims of political 'genius', alas, has become topical again. Not a little of the hysterical adulation of the recently elected President is tinged with these hues. I'll come clean here, in an article published on the American Thinker. I'm not nearly as down on Barack Obama as most of my readers. I like the guy. From the start, I've sensed a big streak of pragmatic politician in him that negates much of the concern about his ideology. Also, it's terrific to have a US President who's universally popular – the first since Kennedy. Popularity is an extremely useful tool. If Obama was working with a Republican majority to keep him in check, I think the country would be in fine shape politically. (Its financial shape is a different story.)

    It's Obama's followers who scare me a little. Over the last two years, I've witnessed a number of persons whose thoughtfulness I respected, morph into True Believers. There is a core of Obama's constituency that would be quick to grant him the status of Joyce's genius, making only volitional errors, which errors themselves lead to 'portals of discovery' of the greater good. I will not be surprised if a grass roots movement begins to repeal the Twenty-Third Amendment – and before his first term is half up. When a country is blessed with a genius like Obama, why look for anyone else? The fact that much of this constituency is elitist and anti-democratic in the first place is not helpful in this context.

    Not good. There is no 'genius' of the type Joyce described, not in the form of an artist, definitely not in the form of a statesman. We will not be saved by a hero-leader, no matter how gifted. Whatever he may achieve, Barack Obama will also make his share (and maybe then some) of colossal mistakes – and they will be just that – mistakes. Our only hope lies, as it always has, with ourselves. The Great Blind Beast, as I call the amazing American public, possessed of zero intelligence and infinite wisdom, can give anyone fits with its inconsistencies, its meanderings, its bouts of indifference and impatience – but the only genuine power, the only true moral authority, lies with it and in it.

    And thus endeth the sermon.

    As noted, the contest remains open. If you have a candidate saying, please remember (a) it has to appear at first reading to be fairly sensible – obviously inane sayings don't get to the starter's line;  and (b) it has to be attributed – common sayings and folk wisdom are also disqualified. Mr. Commack's contribution meets both tests. The polls remain open. All contributions are welcome. Submit them here as comments, or to me directly at fdber@yahoo.com.

[This article originally appeared on the American Thinker site in a slightly altered form.]

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest)

    A long time ambition of mine, which is being fulfilled in this writing, has been to conduct a competition to identify sayings, aphorisms if you will, that are often quoted, APPARENTLY expressions of great wisdom, that - when they are in depth and critically, reveal themselves to be utter nonsense or worse. The object is to take a hard look at REAL conventional wisdom - principles that most of us actually believe reflect wisdom, as opposed to attitudes and expressions to which we give lip service for the sake of getting along.

    Some tough rules apply here - because this is not an exercise in ridicule. The point is to identify the sayings at which we all nod sagely that don't hold up on second thought. So the rules have to be hard.

    1. No quotes from identified idiots or villains, e.g., bring your tired old game from Adolph Hitler or Mikail Bakunin into the key, and it'll be slapped back in your face. Rejection city, baby. Quotes from respected sources only - the more respectable, the better.

    2. No predictions. For one thing, predictions that have been proven disastrously wrong have no value as hard intellectual currency these days. We all know ther's no such thing as an unsinkable ship. For another, even the best and brightest go wrong in fortune telling. It's too easy.

    3. No obviously stupid sayings Hiqh quality counterfeit wisdom is the name of the game, stuff that can pass as coin of the realm unless it is bitten really, REALLY, hard.

    The contest is open to anyone with a candidate. (Sorry, there are no prizes.) But obviously I have some candidates of my own. I'll lead off with one of them to get the ball rolling in the right (I hope) direction. My first choice -

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana

    Something of a surprise? I'd be surprised if it were not. This aphorism (or innumerable variants thereof) of Santayana's is endlessly re-quoted, always with approval. It seems to state a principle of elemental, axiomatic wisdom. But in my (actually rather humble, in this instance) opinion there is some really dubious stuff here, relative to the notion of history as science and history itself.

    As to the first, the premise that history repeats itself in any meaningful sense is extremely suspect. The more I learn about some historical event, the more I am struck by the accidental aspects of it, particularly the importance of personality. Discuss the macro-economic factors behind the American Revolution till the cows come home - the importance of the personalities of the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington, are critical to the shape of the contours of the event. As time moves on, the contours become everything.

    How can the larger signficance of the Civil War be separated from the personalities of Lincoln, Grant, and Robert E. Lee? What happens if a man wi the courage and wisdom of Joshua Chamberlain is not at the end of the line at Liltle Round Top at Gettysburg? In the same way, the Russian Revolution cannot possibly take the form it does absent the personality of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin?

    If events of this magnitude devolve endlessly into details, and ever more profound detail, in what meaningful sense can patterns be deduced from them? I know that the thought causes Hegelian and Marxist scholars to weep buckets, but I don't believe there is any pattern at all to historical movements. The study of history is of supreme value, but as the best and most useful study of human nature, nothing more.

    Which leads to the second point. Even if the past did have lessons for the present, how could they possibly be applied? Let me wax lyrical and borrow a metaphor from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine - the characters in their Pulitzer Prize winning show 'Sundays in the Park with George'. I do believe that our perception of contemporary events can be deemed 'pointillist'. We are ourselves figures on the canvas, both participating in and observing the events of our time. We perceive huge arrays of data points, but too sprawling and unwieldy to be interpreted with any precision (unless we want to bring in our value judgments and decide that some are more important than others.) No one can distinguish for certain between a fad, a trend, or an irrelevant incident. It is a certain distance develops between the canvas and the observer, that these points form themselves into shapes, patterns, colors - and even then, undercut by the effect of random detail, as noted above.

    So even if solid lessons could be developed from history, deciding how and to what they apply is impossible - a matter of sheer hit and miss intuition. So what wisdom is there, really, in Santayana's aphorism? Not much.

    So this famous quote turns out to be a non-starter. As far as the science of history, there is no area of human study in which God - and the Devil - dwell more completely in the details - so completely that it makes any pretense of 'science' an illusion. (I'd apologize to all those Marxists and Hegelians, but they deserve all the misery they get.)

    In the sense in which Santayana uses the term 'history'. not only does history not repeat itself. It doesn't even happen the first time.

[This post first appeared on The American Thinker, in slightly different form, on February 28th.]

Good Movies, Bad Influences

    Some films are things of beauty in their own right, but possessed with rotten DNA. I am referring to movies that are masterpieces in their own right, but horrible influences on the future. It's easy enough to compile a long list, but I am going to start with just two. Both are in black and white, they were released within three years of each other, they are both superb pictures, and they are both grandfather and godfather to a whole slew of ghastly spawn.

    The first is Hitchcock's picture 'Psycho', which debuted in 1960. 'Psycho' is an undoubted masterpiece, an enthralling movie. The shock scenes, in the shower and on the staircase, as well as the revelation at the end, are so famous (aka notorious) that it is easy to forget that the picture is basically 'plotty'. The screen violence has the impact it does because the story starts life as an energetically told tale of a frustrated woman attempting to burst the confines of her life by an impulsive act of embezzlement. Her sudden death, totally unrelated to the major plot line, comes straight out of nowhere. The audience walks into the twist like a prizefighter leaning into a right hook. It is impossible to recapture that now, when the outlines of the plot are so well known, but the surprise was the reason it scared the initial audiences out of their wits in way back when. Add to that a career making (and ending) performance by Anthony Perkins, strong support from Martin Balsam and Janet Leigh (nominated for an Academy Award as a supporting actress), and you have quite a movie.

    Which unfortunately became the inspiration for the 'slasher' movie, a million and two of which have been cluttering up theaters ever since. Hitchcock may have made 'Psycho' with a lot of art and droll wit. But the moral a ton of second raters drew is that quite an effect can be obtained simply with a little shrill music and someone jumping out of nowhere holding a big knife - never mind the intricacies of plot. I am not a film historian, just a random observer, so perhaps in error, and correct me if if so. But I don't believe the 'slasher' genre existed before the success of 'Psycho'. As good as that movie is, its prestige came at a considerable price. Too great a price? That's a question beyond the scope of this essay.

    Three years later, in 1963, Frederico Fellini presented '8-1/2' to the world. It too is a masterpiece. The movie is as plotless as 'Psycho' is plotty, a discursive series of events and recollections of a film director trying to create an authentic picture. It was almost impossible to make coherent sense out of it from the subtitled dialog when it first came out (almost the only movie I know where viewing a dubbed version works better than the original). But I don't know anyone that wasn't completely dazzled by the picture. A superb performance by Mastroianni, a wonderful ensemble cast, a magnificent score by Nino Rota - but above all, the collage of events and recollections worked at some subliminal level.  Energized by Fellini's autobiographical intensity, the mishmash of imagery somehow coalesced into a satisfying, coherent whole.

    Which success establishes Fellini as a close-to-unique talent if not a genius (a word I like to avoid.) Unfortunately, it was also an open invitation to a lot of not-so-uniqe talents and anything-but-geniuses over the next two decades to put out all sorts of similar collages of arresting imagery that were internally vague and incoherent. The totally erroneous moral these auteurs drew from '8 1/2' was that consistency and clarity were dispensable qualities if the photography was arresting (and mystifying) enough. The result was a series of thoroughly wretched Fellini-esque imitations over the next two decades. The technique worked for Fellini (sometimes). But you have to possess a talent of Fellini's magnitude - which very few do - to make it work.

    Both 'Psycho' and '8 1/2' are masterpieces. They are both very good movies. They were both very bad influences.

Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!!

    In the midst of the four day celebration now in progress of Obama's inauguration, one foreign commentator (here, reprinted from the Australian) takes the time to assess the Bush Administration a bit more soberly. Three points of note:

    1. It's already apparent that Obama is going to continue the major Bush foreign policies. With all the pronouncements about willingness to talk to anyone, Hilary Clinton in her confirmation hearing, articulated pretty much the same preconditions that Bush had announced. Query - faced with at least the notional possibility that the last five years were not as demoniacally evil as the Demented Left has been proclaiming, how will it react? By (a) branding Obama as a sellout, (b) re-evaluating the hysterical opposition and sheepishly conceding that some of it was a bit overblown, or (c) ignoring the apparent contradiction? My vote is on (c), with the pendant that every problem that Obama cannot surmount will be blamed on his predecessor, every triumph credited to him. (a) is possible, but very unlikely. (b) is out of the question. The Demented Left has been living on myth for forty years. Myth is not susceptible to revision.

    2. The author notes one interesting fact that does occasionally sound above the cacophony, that Bush is by miles the most Afro-centric President in US history - three times the aid to the sub-Saharan region as Clinton. I hope Obama continues with this.

    3. The author also notes (correctly, in my opinion) the reason for the difficulty in appraising the successes and failures of the Bush Administration - the virulent attitude of too many elements of the US media, particularly the New York Times. Its editors and columnists have needed rabies tests for nearly four years now. (The notorious editorial it ran in August 2007, demanding instant withdrawal from Iraq and blandly accepting the inevitability of carnage as a result, was one of the most shameful in its history. Although events have proven the editorial dead wrong, to the best of my knowledge, it has never retreated or retracted a word of it.)

    I don't know what history will say about the Bush Administration. But since there aren't all that many demons in actual history, I suspect it will draw a sort of balance. At least some Iraqi journalists see some positives.

Nassim Taleb, Barney Frank, and George W. Bush

   One last time on one of my favorite themes, before the sun sets forever in the West. That is the absurdity attempting to evaluate all the events of the last eight years without consideration of the alternative histories that might have come to pass.

    A Lebanese currency trader named Nassim Taleb established his reputation in the last four years with two books about decision making and markets, entitled 'The Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness'. Although the second one, 'The Black Swan', is the more colorful and widely noted, the first, 'Fooled by Randomness', is actually the more systematic and accessible. Both books are attacks on over-quantified thinking, emphasizing the significance of unpredictable events and the tendency to confuse random success with scientific skill.

    In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb illustrates his central point with a brutally effective hypothetical. He considers the case of a young man invited to play a game of Russian roulette for stakes of $10,000,00 a round. He notes the absurdity of judging the wisdom of taking this bet by the outcome. Five-sixths of the time, his biographers applaud his cold blooded willingness to risk his life for a grubstake. The sixth?

    Accepting the bet is obviously an appallingly foolish thing to do. Taleb's point is that it is only when the 'unknown histories', the outcomes that by the roll of the dice never came to be, that the actual soundness (or not) of the decision can be determined. He goes on to note that the easily calculable risk of Russian roulette is child's play, compared to the subtle, infinitely varied, and infinitely changeable risk-reward aspects of real life. But the principle is the same - it is not the outcome, but the method of decision generation that determines the wisdom of a decision.

    What occurs to me, taking this process one ply deeper, is that the player in real life who avoids the loaded chambers of the decisional revolver, is doomed to be the most despised of all the prophets without honor. Compare, for example, the situation of Barney Frank and George W. Bush. Franks is certainly not the only member of Congress who failed to respond to the looming danger of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mismanagement, but he's visible enough to serve as an example for our purposes.

    Supposing Franks had had the wisdom to recognize the threat, AND the political guts and will to insist on reform. What happens?

    Franks puts himself in the position of recognizing the loaded chamber in the revolver before it discharges. He demands, and gets, timely reform. This, of course, brings the manic mortgage lending of Fannie Mae to a halt, and with it (a man can wish) the whole insane house of leveraged derivative cards built upon its sandy foundation. What is Frank's reward for this prescience? To be roundly damned by everyone who stood to profit from the frenzied market, which is quite a number, and to receive no support whatsoever from those saved from loss, since they don't even know they were ever endangered, let alone who they are. The market was in good shape. These derivatives weren't that dangerous. We knew what we were doing. What needed reform? Why did you do this?

 

    Only a precious few would honor Frank for reacting to the unknown histories - the loaded chamber(s) - as well as the one that came to be. They are so few and so precious, in fact, that Nassim Taleb has just made a career out of pointing out the necessity of thinking in such a manner. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king; he's in big trouble. (Another aphorism shot out of the saddle.)

 

    George W. Bush is on the other extreme. In all of the eternal rounds of damnation that have been hurled at his administration in the last few years, I have read few if any who consider that a comparison of unknown histories is necessary to assess his actions, that the question is not the evils of the present course per se, but whether they are lesser or greater than the evils that might have been. My own thinking on this point was permanently influenced by the chance acquisition of a book, The New Yorker Book of War Pieces [ISBN 00805209018], a collection of articles that appeared in the New Yorker between 1939 and 1945. Over and over, particularly in the first pieces, the writers agonize - literally - over why the West let it come to war, let Hitler and Germany develop the momentum he did. These are anguished reports. The writers were frightened men and women.

 

    But of course if the West had reacted to Hitler in timely fashion, the world would never have known the wisdom of that course of action. As with Frank, the actual history becomes one of the unknown ones. It is entirely possible that the very same journalists who agonized in the world that came to be in 1940, would have condemned the reaction as an overreaction in the world that never arose. Hitler wasn't so bad. He made they trains run on time. Things were better under Saddam.

    If we were living in a world in which a psychopathic Saddam Hussein, bloated with oil money and emboldened by Western passivity, was racing with Iran to stockpile nuclear weapons, we'd know. Worse - if we were digging out of the radioactive ruins of Manhattan, we might be sharing the agonies of that 1940 world. No one can say for certain (obviously) - the calculation can only be intuitive. But the fact that such a judgment must be made is reason enough to restrain the demonization.

 

    What it comes down to is that Taleb insists that the unknown histories be considered, as well as the one that came to be, in evaluating the soundness of a decision. Otherwise, the winners of Russian roulette games are celebrated for wisdom rather than the simple luck of the survivor. George W. Bush may have saved the world, as horrible as that sentiment sounds to the Demented Left. Barney Frank for sure did not. That for sure does not end the thinking about momentous issues, but it is where it should begin.