Welcome back. For once there's more digging out to do in blogs than emails. Yes, that's a good thing. It's been a busy fortnight. I've seen a newborn sheep, for instance, and just at ten to seven this morning spun out 20 feet into the grass median between the 66 and the Dulles airport road. But yr. hmbl. crsspdt. is back in action. Forthwith, a sprint through what seems worth catching up on...
1. Read (carefully) my Scene colleague Alan Jacobs' ruminations on the internet and bad reading. He's right that our democratic desire for the Top Ten List version of events and opinions drives us to skim ever-larger amounts of Web 2.0 information in an effort to get the gist fast and hurry on to the fun part, i.e. bloviating and diva-ing and expounding and IMHOing. Rather than refuting a person's particular argument, what gains currency are refutations of a sense of a person's argument. Or even just snark attacks of a sense of a person's argument. This is larger than the internet, though, which only seems to be enabling a much deeper and broader cultural move. Pete Powers comments incisively:
We really have entered a period where pretty much everyone is
interested in writing, but no one really cares very much to read, or at
least not to read anything for a purpose other than the opportunity to
write.
2. There is nothing wrong with beards. Necessarily. Pull out your civil war history books for a refresher on what works. And consult this photo of Robert Plant, who has been quite wrongly rewarded for his chinbristles, for a grim reminder of what doesn't. Beard of the year? Try Hagar at Guantanamo.
3. I usually dig Peggy Noonan's porchfront oracularism, but her pensees on The Candidates seem, as Daniel has dutifully pointed out, incoherent. The line about Rudy is particularly troublesome. But I want to point especially to this:
For Mr. Obama: a lot of America will be looking at him for the first time, and under the most favorable circumstances: as the winner of something. This is an opportunity to assert freshly what his victory means, and will mean, for America. This is a break with the past, a break with the tired old argument, a break with the idea of dynasty, the idea of the machine, the idea that there are forces in motion that cannot be resisted ... But what is it besides a break from? What is it a step toward, an embrace of?
Must there be an answer? I mean, Obama has to have 'answers' to the extent of coherent policies, yes. (More on this later, in Huckland). But in broader fashion, why must we always step toward something? Why must we always embrace something? Why must Obama be a positive prophet? An affirmative actor? Why is is insufficient for us to decide that the dynastic machine should be stopped first and then, while we have a moment to regain our bearings, the questions can begin to flow? These are meta-issues that go beyond any basic support or opposition for Obama's policies. They ought to be particularly acute for Republicans, too, who have the much more profound reckoning awaiting them, but in the longing to recover a rallying figurehead, the logic of unbroken dynastism whips the horses madly on. Bottom line: I wouldn't oppose Obama because of what he wouldn't do, but because of what he would.
4. Typifying Mitt Romney's problems, while the Weekly Standard calls his foreign policy bona fides into question by mocking his suggestion that Iraq isn't the "sole front in the War on Terror," Andrew declares him "the continuation of theocratic politics and an unchecked executive. He is Christianism's avatar." What Mitt unquestionably now is is the only Republican candidate who has a political future to look forward to even if he loses in the general election. Much more to say here but I'll leave that claim hanging for now.
5. Does Peter Lawler have the final word on Mike Huckabee?
I very much prefer concerns
about his foreign-policy judgment and his narcissistic paternalism,
which may well reflect apolitical weaknesses in the "evangelical
worldview."
Or maybe Yglesias?
via Ambinder, the governor explains
that he doesn't need policy proposals to be a worthwhile presidential
candidate: "I can hire people, once I raise the money, who can come up
with all kinds of proposals. That's fine. That's good. But the real
question is: Am I going to be able to be a leader? You know there is a
difference between a leader and a manager." But no. Leadership is, yes,
an important part of the job of being president. But there's no such
thing as generic "leadership" people need to know what sort of thing you want to do.
That doesn't mean detailed legislative language on every aspect of your
agenda, but you need to say something about what your top priorities
are and what general direction you want to move in.
But yes, Matt, there is generic leadership, whether you or I like it or not, and Obama and Huckabee have it in spades, whether you or I etc. etc. So Yglesias and Noonan seem to be in agreement. What troubles me most is the already well-developed change in our division of labor between leadership and management. Delegation is a good thing insofar as it decentralizes power. Dividing leadership and management can work to the good that way. But the way we like to do it now involves keeping leadership and management centralized, but unplugging each from the other. So Bush could lead 'the country' without ever really leading his own administration or federal bureaucracy. And people like this. "Leave the details to the hired geeks," they say, "and leave the decisions to the Decider." Only problem here is that the only people doing details are minions, and the only people doing decisions are in one room. This is inimical to political liberty and federalism alike, and, incidentally, creates a new wrinkle on Weber's World, in which, worse come to worse, scientists pretend the facts they supply powermongers exonerate them from responsibility for the ends to which they're put because they've been arrived at through proper neutral detachment. So you get in Washington that class of irresponsible wonkoids, the minion class of irresponsible underqualified DOJ spoils hires (e.g.), and on top of it all the shrinking class of responsible civil servants who are realizing their once-regnant function in the sleepy Washington of yore is being written out of the DC logic game. And you get people running for President -- and people voting for President -- based on the notion that raw Weberian charisma is our best criterion for election. A 'sense of inspiration'. Time to kick out the emergency door.
6. At Jewcy, Daniel Koffler has what seems to be the consensus attitude about Bhutto:
Say what you will about Benazir Bhutto
--- she was personally corrupt, autocratic by disposition, she
cynically empowered pro-Taliban forces to gain a strategic advantage
against India --- she was by a vast margin the best hope for democracy
in Pakistan. [...]
All of which is to say that Bhutto's murder is likely only the curtain-opener to a period of bloodletting. [...] A desire that Pakistan not descend into civil war is admirable, but it's not a plan,
and a reflexively hawkish disposition doesn't imply any sort of wisdom
in dealing with an extraordinarily complex and fractious polity whose
factions violently repudiate any easy correlation between their
interests and American interests.
But do we really think that a Peaceful Transition to Democracy in Pakistan was far more likely with Bhutto alive than assassinated? I'm not sure. Nor am I sure that Pakistan is headed for a Violent Transition to Revolution, either. If this was going to happen, methinks it would've happened within 48 hours of Bhutto's murder. But it didn't. And it won't. Maybe an indirect cause will suddenly fan these few embers of unrest, but not Bhutto, whose son, for the ten seconds I saw him on the teev, was definitely not doing what Fox News said he was doing, namely advocating REVENGE. "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge," is what the guy said. This sentence seems to imply everything I have just said about the future of Pakistan, while also suggesting that Bhutto was not nearly as central and decisive a figure as she appeared before her death.
7. The gush over this movie Juno seems endless, beyond my poor power to add or detract. What bothers me much more than the movie itself, which, out of a comprehensive indifference to it, I will never see, is the person of its creator, who seems like an avatar of a different sort, a working blueprint for a new kind of American who will have to decide some time soon whether they have any interest in doing the work necessary to prevent the rise of a Pink Police State in which they will be rich, famous, admired, and so very self-actualized.
8. I missed a long meme on gay marriage. You can chase it down with Reihan, I think, but all I can do now is draw attention to Andrew's statement this morning:
This is Huckabee's "truth". It's what Christians once said of Jews. It
is the antithesis of the Gospels, where Jesus clearly and unequivocally
preached solidarity with every human being and championed and embraced
the socially marginalized as the inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.
By further marginalizing gay people, by writing us out of any equal
moral existence as sexual and emotional beings, Huckabee is actually
attacking the message of Jesus, not affirming it.
I think states are quite free to develop robust civil-union regimes, that they will, and that most of them will find this to be a handy measure with several important public benefits and a level of enlightenment about the sort of goods that federalized political liberty can provide. But I can't imagine what that process has to do with arguing publicly over whether gay sex is or isn't morally admirable. Because, at least in these United States, that conversation seems inextricable, as Andrew himself shows, from a more profound and labyrinthine conversation about whether -- let's not beat around bushes -- any kind of sex among lovers is consecrated by God. Yes, the issue here is whether love is God, or our best and irrefutable proof of God, with the premise that love today has been revealed as inconceivable, incomplete, and false if not inclusive of its full carnality. That seems to me to be exactly the kind of question least appropriate for political debate -- not because it's 'about religion' or might serve, as Rorty suggested, thereby as a 'conversation stopper', but because political actors must contort themselves and their political tools in order to address such questions; political 'solutions' to such questions do not solve them. The last place we need to be taken over by our obsessions over acting out sexual desires is politics. So why can't we just turn the civil unions question over to the states and the other question over to the churches? Because somehow this seems to be inadequate to everyone. We want one answer. And, by my lights, we won't get it without despotic force, one way or the other. This is a bad thing. The yearning for equal moral existence for every unique individual is a deeply democratic mythos that goes way beyond mere homosexuality. Its motto is Eros Lo Volt. God is too partial. Reihan points to the Lavendar Diamond's manifesto, ELV to the core: Love is everything, God is everything only insofar as God is love, with Love the divine ceases to be God. This sort of yearning will continue to mess up and divide us and make life weirder and less dignified until we get a grip on how to detach politics from such unitary obsessions and decentralize it to serve the interests of self-selecting state and local populations -- all without fracturing the USA into tiny Tocquevillian cliques and castes.
9. Dan Drezner raises awareness about the limits of raising awareness. We're very actively learning how to agree on the facts, agree on the judgment, and not face inevitable action. Why try to cure our unsolvable problems when we can instead focus our energies on ameliorating their pain in our lives? And one of the better tools in the kit is sending rich good-looking people around the world to do our caring for us.
10. Bloomberg won't run if Romney does. Whoops, that's a prediction.
And that's this holiday season in blogs.
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