Postmodern Conservative.

Mr. Reactionary

HST RIP:

From 1968 to 1972, Hunter Thompson was the central witch-doctor in a scene that linked Gary Hart to Warren Beatty and Sandy Berger to Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone. In the hands of Wenner, and the generation of flunkies which have taken control of the popular press and are his heirs, the Duke of Gonzo will stay memorialized in caricature as a radical, wrought-iron Leftist. The Jann Wenner version of history, bogus here as everywhere else, threatens to become so ubiquitous as to take on the sentimental aura of received truth.

In Thompson's hands, by contrast, the truth was bent but not broken. When Hunter lapsed into double vision, it was more like Doc Holliday's than Foreigner's: he had two guns -- one for each of you. But the kooky left that looks back upon their lion does so with lyin' eyes. In favor of stroking the man so hard that perhaps some of his truth would come off, the dandies and dilettantes and BS artists that outlived Thompson also outlived his vision.

The liberal cultural establishment of modern television, film, and music does not belong to Thompson, nor does he belong to it. Within his best pages, Thompson indicted the very sort of people who would grow up to eat coke, swap wives, and spoil their bastard children. And he denigrated the Democratic old guard that they replaced.

Full eulogy at The Spectator.

Update: "Hunter Thompson's Reactionary Heart" picked up by The Washington Times.

Ratzi not a Nazi

The Papacy returns to Italy. No fashionable ideas this season from the Conclave; the rift between traditionalist and progressive Catholics will only deepen, opening the possibility that political parties geared toward traditional and progressive morality will each lay claim to religiosity in order to broaden or strengthen their current positions. This point and others, at length and in their entirety, I make at Bayou Buzz.

To the East, no Garden of Eden

Whither the Pacific Rim? There are no current solutions on the table for any of the latent or blatant crises facing East Asia and all its implicated countries. The central source of instability is China, but Japan's debut at the Security Council and the implosion of North Korea will grab headlines, while Taiwan simmers and Russia and Australia fade beside the vital center they bookend. The attention of private citizens and policymakers -- with all justification -- is trained on the Middle Eastern arc of instability and its largely Muslim population. But billions to the east (many also Muslim) harbor powerful desires in significant nations where unfinished business is on the agenda. It will not be tabled. There is no pause button. The future in Asia will be here before we know it, and maybe it already is.

Read the full article at The American Spectator, here.

Rome Not Built In a Minute, Man

I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America. I'm for enforcing the law in a rational way.
—George W. Bush

Power is raunchy when the cops are watching.
—Beck

Robert C. Bonner, border czar, believes this year’s increase of 210 Border Patrol agents is a fine substitute for the 2,000 demanded by Congress (Jerry Seper, “Border Patrol Hiring Ripped,” The Washington Times, March 3, 2005).

“Yes,” he enthused. “Given the right combination of agents and technology, if we work smarter and do a better job." The key to the Bush administration’s fight against illegal immigration is, indeed, electronic surveillance. Why ought Bonner risk the thirst and boredom of agents in the field when an IT closet will do?

The administration’s comprehensive plan, saving us thousands in Border Patrol salaries, is the $84 million America's Shield Initiative (ASI), featuring monitors, sensors, and synergistic technologies. Commissioner Bonner assures us it is, indeed, “state-of-the-art.”

ASI may be “state-of-the-art,” but that is where the hyphenate buzzwords end. A catchphrase like “of-the-moment,” for example, belongs to that other border control initiative—the Minuteman project.

This is not the occasion to anthologize the mountain of media coverage that rivals the death of the Pope as spring’s most covered event. We know the sexy headline—Bush Defies Own Seething Rednecks. Hill Democrats and “even some Republicans” have taken the President to task for scrimping on reinforcements, and no one seems excited about investing millions on what sound like third-rate robots to deter and deport the millions of people that the government of Mexico is investing in us.

Strange news, indeed, with military e-reconnaissance such a smashing success.

The skies over Iraq are clogged with drones. 750-800 unmanned aircraft patrol Iraq’s airspace at altitudes ranging from 300 to 60,000 feet. There are so many, they sometimes run into each other. Predators fitted with Hellfire missiles hit Al-Qaeda in Yemen and blasted scores of targets, or other objects, during the Battle of Falluja. They are relatively cheap. They are hardworking, and do not require pilots on speed to keep them aloft. They do not disappoint. And, like them or not as zero-risk weapons, the use of armed drones is not the issue in border security. Right now, on a daily basis, Predators costing $5 million a pop are beaming “24-hour-a-day,” “seven-day-a-week” reconnaissance reports back to a rotating crew of air-conditioned servicemen able to control their flying familiars from a compound in—Las Vegas.

That is correct. While the United States operates, from a stone’s throw from the Strip, an airborne flotilla of unmanned surveillance craft halfway around the world, America’s southern border waits in arid frustration for a half-planned and unbuilt contraption of webcams and infrared beams priced roughly at the same level as seventeen Predator drones. These drones can be fielded immediately. They will not get sand stuck in their gears at 20,000 feet (where there is no sand); like obedient dogs, they will come home to their own maintenance crews. They will not fall prey to coyotes.

Why has President Bush not ordered the deployment of even one unmanned aircraft over the Mexican border? Why has he not established stripped-down command centers in Barstow, Nogales, and Galveston, and wired them to the same eternal eyes in the sky that are good enough for the Vegas Air Force?

Because Bush likes illegals. He now believes two things, both the product of a certain roving and ubiquitous government creature of a very different kind: first, pro-immigrant Latinos need to go Republican to keep the GOP on top in American politics; second, the tide of illegals is an unstoppable force, more a function of Hegelian world economics than domestic law or policy.

Both postulates are as posh as they are preposterous. Latino America does not default, morally or practically, toward support for illegal immigration. Those with legal jobs threatened by an influx of cheaper labor do not support the status quo. Moreover, despite sub-hype turnout, the Minutemen held a full-press court. The media has made their existence known—and not just on this side of the border. They brush off the idea that Mexican cop/army patrols are the real deterrent. Their nervous detractors cling to it. In fact, Mexico is responding to what’s happening in America. The initiative can be re-seized from a Mexican government whose feigned powerlessness in preventing the mass exodus of its own people amounts to criminal negligence. The more Mexico does to stop illegal immigration before it starts, the more wind is sucked from the sails of the Minutemen and their supporters.

Vicente Fox does not, however, want to be the one to suck wind. He wants to print pamphlets that save the lives of those who he couldn’t help at home. For the Mexican government—or so it seems—the desperation of the average illegal does not exist until he touches American soil.

This crisis took years to create and it will take years, not a minute, to undo. Bush still has time, before the under-40 set takes over Minuteman, to get his house in order. But his cheapskate collusion with globalization’s pimps, with the Border Patrol made to watch, is in the interim the raunchiest sort of disgrace.

The Death of the 20th Century

Contrary to the modern sense of humor the ends of people's lives are not marked by the births of their children. Like you and I, ages are marked by their deaths, not by the beginnings of the eras that follow them: the airplane and the automobile may have ushered in modern times, but it was the First World War that killed off the 19th century. The internet, and even 9/11, are not endpoints, but starting places, whereas the fall of Communism was the end of most of the 20th century, but not all of it.

We've still got the capitalist half of the 20th century loitering around the present. But it's dying, too. Its members are leaving we the public behind. Veterans of World War Two were the first to depart in large numbers. Now 20th-century celebrities are following suit. The Pope joins Johnnie Cochran and Johnnie Carson and Ronald Reagan in death; the career death of Michael Jackson and every major network anchor of the 20th century--with Peter Jennings, to be morbid, the sad final casualty--signals the beginning of the end of the 20th century in popular life. The generational switchover is in full swing. Yesterday's elder statesmen are today's geriatrics. Who expects that time will swing so quickly on its hinge?