On Hiatus

I like the name of this space, but I'm not making any headway on the blogging side. Perhaps I will return in some time, when I have something more to say, but what I know is and always will be just a tiny, tiny dot on the big basketball of what there is to know.

Yours,

-William

The Birth of the Consumer Republic

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, sees the birth of the consumer-oriented political culture in the the writings of Walter Weyl and, more generally, in a strand of Progressivism that didn't quite match up with Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.

In the republican tradition of political economy that informed nineteenth-century American debate, producer identities mattered because the world of work was seen as the arena in which, for better or for worse, the character of citizens was formed. Consumptions, when it figured at all in republican political economy, was a thing to be moderated, disciplined, or restrained for the sake of higher ends. An excess of consumption, or luxury, was often seen as a form of corruption, a measure of the loss of civic virtue. From Jefferson's agrarian republicanism to Lincoln's celebration of free labor to Brandeis' call for industrial democracy, the emphasis on producer identities reflected the attempt to form in citizens the qualities of character necessary to self-government.

A politics based on consumer identities, by contrast, changes the question. Instead of asking how to elevate or improve or restrain people's preferences, it asks how best - most fully, fairly, or efficiently - to satisfy them. The shift to consumer-based reform in the twentieth century was thus a shift away from the formative ambition of the republican tradition, away from the political economy of citizenship. Although they did not view their movement in quite this way, the Progressives who urged Americans to identify with their roles as consumers rather than producers helped turn American politics toward a political economy of growth and distributive justice whose full expression lay decades in the future.

I don't really know what to say about this, which is, I suppose, a terrible fault for a blogger.

In this book, I am stumbling on to these old arguments, stacked up and dusty in cobwebbed corners, and the nostalgic impulse to try to bring them down, to make use of them, nearly overwhelms me at times. Some might truly be warped and broken from disuse, but it can be hard to distinguish that which was unjustly forgotten from that which was put away for good reason.

I'm still in this book's headspace; I'll try to sort out its arguments when I finally get through it.

Sophistry, just in case

Truth can be manipulated for personal gain.

(From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine, a wonderful little site.)

Done Packing

There is a 13-hour train ride tomorrow. I've got a stack of books in my rucksack. Might try to rip through Graham Greene's The Third Man, an "entertainment" that he wrote so that it could be made into a film. I haven't seen the film because I've wanted to find time for the book first. Then I've got the Barth and the Hart to work on.

It seems that with every page I turn these days, I find that I really don't know much of anything at all.

The Ocho Begins

Two nice starts which turned into two bad semesters, with a bad summer in between, and some terribly bright moments for contrast: that was my 2007. Good riddance.

At least I read some good books: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Witness to Hope by George Weigel, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, and Watership Down (for the first time!). I love my friends as much or more than ever. I suppose I now possess bits of self-knowledge that I was previously lacking. Yet the good things I can carry with me, the bad I can leave behind. And so, onwards.

On another note, this country needs to consider quite seriously the possibility of switching to a parliamentary government.

Time Magazine: 100 best Novels

TIME Magazine's 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

I've read 23 of them, and I'm glad that most of them made it, although I'm not quite sure about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I'm glad that William Faulkner and Graham Greene each got two novels on the list. And there's a few that I'd really like to read in the near future, among them: Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays and maybe something by Saul Bellow.

Also worth reading are the original reviews of many of these books. Some of them, such as Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, were at first reviled. Others were immediately recognized as masterworks. My favorite, however, is the 1966 review of The Lord of the Rings, which describes what was evidently a major Tolkien craze on college campuses:

The hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD. On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF—frequently written in Elvish script—are almost as common as football letters. Tolkien fans customarily greet each other with a hobbity kind of greeting ("May the hair on your toes grow ever longer"), toss fragments of hobbit language into their ordinary talk. One favorite word is mathom, meaning something one saves but doesn't need, as in "I've just got to get rid of all these mathoms." Permanently hooked Ringworms frequently memorize long passages from the trilogy and learn how to write Tengwar or Certar, two peculiar and ancient-looking scripts that Tolkien invented on behalf of his mythical creatures. The most ardent readers of all are likely to join the nation's fast-growing Tolkien Society of America, which publishes magazines containing learned disquisitions on the elaborate genealogies and intricate rules of grammar that the author attached as appendices to the trilogy.

The Undemocratic High Church

I went to this morning's 9:00 service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. It was a step out of reality, into some other, older world. Perhaps it was a taste of what Tolkien's hobbits felt upon their arrival in Rivendell. The church itself is a beautiful Gothic building, dark and immediate when compared with the light, wide-open glory of St. Patrick's Cathedral, just a few blocks away. Upon entering St. Thomas, one sees at the far end of the sanctuary a solid wall of beautiful statuary: Christ Jesus surrounded by the saints.

The service used the old, beautiful language of pre-modern liturgy. There was a small choir, consisting of little kids with angelic voices. But the musicians were mostly hidden from view; organ music flew out and over from the chancel. An acolyte swung the incense at the offering: something I had heard about but never before seen. And taking the Eucharist there was unforgettable. As we processed up the aisles toward the alter, I felt ever smaller and ever more unworthy. Kneeling only feet from the back wall, I had to crane my neck to glimpse the statue of Jesus high over my head. I took the wafer and wine, prayed, and made my way back to my seat, blinking my eyes and holding my face in my hands.

In short, this was the opposite of all the seeker-sensitive services I have ever attended. The recent Willow Creek revelations - that market research and focus groups somehow failed to yield authentic discipleship - almost seem to belong to a different planet. Indeed, after the service, I found myself reluctant to walk back out to Fifth Avenue, which is again styling itself as Christmastown, USA. So-called contemporary services, on the other hand, always seem to be of one mind with consumerism.

But a high-church mentality is also somewhat opposed to the democratic spirit itself, or at least to its overly individualistic manifestations. At St. Thomas there are vestiges of the old aristocratic culture, not in the sense that anyone is excluded, but in the sense that there is an emphasis on order and beauty, and there is a King at the center of all things. It's an ancient conception of authority: power derived, not from the people, but from above.

I suppose there's not much of a political point to this, except to say that we in a democracy probably need a few undemocratic institutions to help us along. When we know something of the alternatives, we can better evaluate our own democracy. Modern democracy, as well as several Protestant denominations, are rooted in opposition to this sort of aristocratic spirit. I'm not qualified to remark on the theological implications of this opposition, but I will say that encountering the old world can be refreshing to the soul of the beleaguered and wandering democrat.

Listening Plans

I've been using Pandora and last.fm to find new music. So, for no particular reason, here is a short list of musicians whose albums I will buy as soon as I have a large amount of money and nothing else to spend it on, which is to say, several years from now. It's all the exact same kind of thing, I suppose.

-Bonnie "Prince" Billy
-Richard Buckner
-Smog
-Iron & Wine

This is how I turn into even more of a boring indie-folkster.

Mr. McCaughan Goes to Washington

Have you heard of Mac McCaughan? He's a hero.

Mr. McCaughan spent the 1990s as the frontman of Superchunk, a rock band from Chapel Hill. At the same time, he helped found and build Merge Records. Merge began by releasing albums by Superchunk and some friends of the band. Over the years, some of their bands got pretty famous: Merge handled big releases for Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, M Ward, and The Arcade Fire, among others.

Do you know these bands? Spoon and The Arcade Fire both had top-ten albums on the Billboard charts this year. But you probably didn't heard them on the radio; they don't get much play.

Anyway, the Senate Commerce Committee invited Mr. McCaughan to talk about non-commercial radio at a hearing on "The Future of Radio". And his argument made sense to me.

Low-power, college, NPR and other non-commercial broadcasting enterprises are extremely important today, especially as local information and entertainment options become scarcer. Commercial radio is about aggregating the largest possible number of listeners in a targeted demographic. Community-based radio is about serving its audiences. It has the unique power and the desire to be a conduit for news and culture, and is essential to the diversity that defines cultural life in this country.

Commercial radio is an entirely artificial market. The government takes a narrow slice of bandwidth and allows people apply for licenses to use it. "Deregulation" of the airwaves is not a free-market measure. The government can easily price small operations out of business. But this is emphatically not in the public interest. It's not just music that suffers when the large conglomerates take a larger market share. Local news, opinion, sports, and culture also suffer.

This may be a moot point, as broadband wireless may soon enable people to listen to internet stations. But as long as the government has control of the available bandwidth, it needs to make room for the little guy.

The Rambler

I needed a break, so I stopped by the magazine store on 35th Street. I suppose my idea was to look for something with a CD in it, so I could find some new music (I've become hermetic in my tastes). Nothing looked interesting; everything was glossy and popular. You can't sell a magazine about unpopular bands, but that's what I wanted.

So I went back to the magazines about writing. And I saw the Rambler.

Last year, it caught my eye because it featured an article by a professor I knew in Chapel Hill. Sure enough, it's published in my favorite University town.

The November/December issue's cover shows a woman with an upside-down umbrella leaking rain on her. And the magazine isn't about much more than that. It's got articles about small things: old stories, food, fatigue, airplanes. No commentary on current events, no policy articles, no strategic national institutions. There are some very pretty photographs. It's evocative of real life, which is what we have left after our ambitions are spent, on the other side of dreams, when we can see the work of our hands and tell others how it came to be.

You strive, strive, strive, and need a break. Here is a place for small stories, inconsequential to big missions, but absolutely necessary to the good life.

Global Warming as a Noble Lie

In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues that the citizens of his city-in-speech will never accept the class system that they need unless they are made to believe a myth about its origins. The founders of the city know that the story is false as can be, but they can’t allow the citizens to question the established order. In other words, sometimes you need a whopper of lie to get things done.

Could global warming be such a lie? It depends on what one means by “global warming.” If you say that human activity has changed the composition of the earth’s environment, and that this could potentially have unforeseen consequences, then there’s no argument. But if you say you know exactly what those consequences will be, then we have a problem.

As far as I can tell, the scientists know exactly what is going on. They know that very few systems are more complex or unpredictable than the weather, and they have done an excellent job showing that the earth’s atmosphere has indeed changed over time, going through both long and short cycles of heat and cold. A good scientist knows that mathematical models are approximations, often useful, but certainly prone to error.

These models are the source of all predictions of increasing global temperature, changing weather patters, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and, finally, the submerging of Manhattan. All of these models must account for a staggering array of variables; they must balance effects that may work against each other – for example, the warming of the air and the melting of the ice caps both would simultaneously heat and cool the ocean. That’s a simplified example, but it illustrates the difficulty in any kind of prediction. And we don’t even know what would be happening to the environment even if humans never existed.

So all our predictions are in some way contingent. If one model proves to be accurate over time, then perhaps we could really start to trust it. For now, though, we should all be aware that something gets completely lost between the scientific papers and the headlines.

Why, then, are there so few vocal dissenters in the science community? Why don’t more scientists speak out against the blatant misinterpretation of their work?

Because the poisoning of our atmosphere is a real problem, but nobody will care unless there’s a catastrophic consequence around the corner. The real case – that we are making radical changes to our environment which may or may not be irreparable – would never be listened to by a population that is just fine with a national debt up in the trillions and a creakingly damaged social security system. Who cares if it might go wrong? No, to get anything done, you have to be able to show that there’s an impending crisis: in other words, people will die unless we do something.

So maybe global warming is a noble lie. We let the media trumpet its disaster-movie version of the truth, hoping that it will spur some kind of change.

But for those of us who aren’t comfortable with lies, no matter how noble their purpose, there is no other course besides a deep reexamination of our culture’s consumption mentality. And that, my friends, is a topic for another time.

Karzai asks US to Stop the Planes

I'm watching 60 Minutes right now. It's a segment on bombings in Afghanistan: specifically, a bombing that killed nine civilians in a small village. Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, asks the United States to roll back its bombings. He believes that the bombings hurt more than they help.

The resurgence of Taliban forces in Afghanistan is usually overshadowed by the bigger problems in Iraq. But it should be troubling to us nonetheless. According to a Wall Street Journal article from October 14th, Tangling with the Taliban, there are still over 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, with many of them working to stop Taliban forces which number between five and twenty thousand - it's hard to tell.
NATO forces have to pick up a lot of slack when the Afghan government can't provide basics, often taking up police duties in troubled areas.


A New York Times article from August 12, How a 'Good War' In Afghanistan Went Bad, quoted a high-level American commander in Afghanistan who argued that the US has failed to provide the proper sorts of experts to help build the Afghani infrastructure. For example, the official says that there are only a handful of American agriculture experts helping in agriculture, which is 80% of the Afghan economy.

A former CIA official, Robert Grenier, contended that the CIA shifted its best counterterrorism agents to Iraq. It's hard to question the article's logic: if not for the war in Iraq, our most qualified people would all be in Afghanistan. But things looked pretty good in spring of 2005.

Except for one thing: the Taliban forces weren't defeated; they were in Pakistan. And they came back in spring of 2006.

It's not as bad as it could be; it's not as bad as Iraq. Still, just looking through the news reports, it's not hard to see that, if not for the war in Iraq, things could be much, much better. There were a few of us, at the time, who said that the United States should make sure it takes care of the one country it took over before it tries to take over another.

It's far too late for that now. As long as we're tied down in Iraq, we will have to rely on blunt measures like air strikes is because our troops and special forces are in Iraq. So here's another reason to create Kurdistan* and balance our forces. We still owe a lot to the people of Afghanistan.

*I know this isn't realistic at the moment.

Good Sentences from Esolen and Spengler

Wandering about on the Internet, I found some good sentences, both a bit polemical, enjoyable nonetheless.

The first is from Anthony Esolen on the Mere Comments blog over at Touchstone Magazine. Perhaps it's been said before, but it's probably worth saying again. He's talking about California's gender-identity-neutral textbook legislation (on which I will decline to comment):

But school administrators know best, yes they do. Why, they've taken a three-hour seminar on sex, and some of them, it is said, have actually engaged in the activity. They can't be counted on to perform the modest but necessary tasks for which they have been hired. Our graduates can't tell us anything about Alexander Hamilton, or read The Federalist, or understand what simultaneous linear equations are all about, or identify the passive voice. If condoms were commas, we'd be in big trouble, because I never meet a college freshman who knows where to put one.

Next, we have Spengler commenting on Turkey and the Armenian genocide (the article itself is well worth your time, although I have my reasons for disagreeing with its final analysis), employing what writers often refer to as "vivid imagery":

America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning. But America’s obsession with the surgical implant of democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with a welter of armed ethnicities.

Wish I could have found something on the other side of the aisle from Esolen for this post, but nothing jumped out at me. (Spengler, interesting as he may be, isn't on one side of the aisle as much as he's in the viewing gallery, or perhaps in another room altogether...)

Primaries: An American Comedy

The New York Times has a Candidate Appearance Guide that by itself shows the problem with primaries. I shudder to about think what the Founders would say if they could see how this. With all due respect to Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, which are probably wonderful states full of kind and gentle people, this part of the election cycle is rotten.

I wonder what it would be like to experience an election cycle as an Iowan. In North Carolina, we hardly ever had candidates eating in local diners or speaking at town-hall meetings. But I suppose I'm lucky; the attention lavished on South Carolina probably helps the candidates hear about at least some of our regional concerns. If I had grown up anywhere between Wisconsin and Washington State, I probably wouldn't have even had that luxury, as that geographical stretch appears to be a wasteland as far as primary campaigning is concerned.

Could we come up with something more rational? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could come up with some sort of rotation system? Every four years, a different group of states could get some time in the spotlight. That would better represent the spirit of our republic over time.

Unfortunately, that's not a workable solution. As Americans, it seems like we prefer an irrational grassroots system to a bureaucratically designed solution. After all, who could possibly come up with an impartial selection? New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina may be an arbitrary handful of states, but they assumed their importance by jostling ahead of the other states. Now that other states are pushing their primaries further forward, it's starting to get ridiculous, but at least it's a uniquely federal form of silliness which gives the states some individual importance.

It's a weird system, and I can't say that I like it, but I'll go with it for now.

What's Up With Ayn Rand

I found Ayn Rand disturbing from the moment I first read one of her novels. A post on the First Things blog does a pretty good job of explaining the feeling:

Rand’s Ideal Man could never be a schoolteacher, say, or a physical therapist, or a claims clerk in the Social Security Administration. He must not be short-winded or fat. He must be perfection in action—gifted and brave, uniquely talented, and utterly free of irrationality and fear. He must, like Roark, defend the premise that no man should ever compromise his individual will or submit to pathetic notions of “sacrifice”; he must recognize that men of genius like himself will forever fight the lazy, inferior parasites who seek to take what superior minds have made. He must, in short, look like Gary Cooper and think exactly like Ayn Rand.

. . .

What made Rand’s works controversial, then and now, was their unashamed elitism and atheism—their contept for the values and attitudes held by most human beings who must make their way through the real world with the usual sets of weaknesses and strengths.

Rand hated religion as much as she hated communism; for her Christianity was, of course, the religion of fools and slaves. Rand’s “marginalia,” culled from the books in her library and published in 1998, are particularly revealing: . . . [C.S.] Lewis, Rand averred, was a “driveling non-entity,” a “mediocrity,” and “scum.”. . .

The book’s big event—a national strike involving disgruntled industrialists and tycoons—might have made a good Preston Sturges comedy. But Rand turns it into an earnest melodrama touched up with nobody-can-stop-me arias, paperback sex scenes, and attacks on jack-booted Washington bureaucrats: It’s Tony Robbins meets Harold Robbins meets the Cato Institute.

Dr. Dobson's Threat

It's old news by now, but forgive me for playing catch-up. I've been busy.

On September 30th, the New York Times reported on a secret meeting of Christian conservatives that produced a resolution to support a third-party candidate if Rudy Giuliani gains the Republican presidential nomination. The group included Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, whose opinions are perhaps the most influential in conservative Christian circles. Dr. Dobson published some comments on the resolution in a New York Times op-ed on October 4th.

Dr. Dobson's threat is a big one. As we learned in 1992 and 2000, neither of the major parties can afford to have a large segment of its core voters defect to a third party. The mostly anonymous religious conservatives are serious here. Dobson argues that there are certain things on which Christians just can't compromise:

I firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

Social conservative disappointment with the GOP has been brewing for some time now. The pro-life movement expected some real action under the Bush administration. I remember the sense of excitement during the end of the Clinton administration: they really believed that the Republican Party would respond to their concerns. Socially conservative Christians responded to Karl Rove's famous (or perhaps infamous) mobilization strategy, but they wanted something in return.

They haven't gotten it. President Bush spent all his political capital on the war effort, leaving him no room to enact any pro-life policies on the level that social conservatives desired. Yes, he got the votes he needed, but he had to make promises he couldn't keep. Of course, there are always excuses, and I suppose that the voters who would be most likely to be upset about a lack of pro-life progress will also be the ones who will be most forgiving of what I will generously call slow progress in Iraq.

But even if they are letting Bush off the hook, they still expect the GOP to follow through on its pro-life commitments, and they know Giuliani is not the man to fix the problem.

As for the Christian Right, now would be a good time to do some soul-searching. The GOP has gotten the votes and support it needed and generally gone about its business. What has the Christian right gotten in return? Money, power, scandal. . .

Dobson's move makes a great deal of sense from the social conservative perspective. If the GOP is not willing to recommit to the promises its made, the social conservatives will be right to bolt.

Avery Cardinal Dulles on Evolution

Avery Cardinal Dulles's article in First Things, called "God and Evolution," provides a thoughtful overview of an important contemporary debate. He takes Pope John Paul II's position as a starting point:

He [John Paul II] recommended a program of dialogue and interaction, in which science and religion would seek neither to supplant each other nor to ignore each other. . . . Science can purify religion from error and superstition, while religion purifies science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each discipline should therefore retain its integrity and yet be open to the insights and discoveries of the other.

Cardinal Dulles moves on to discuss the three common Catholic positions on evolution.

1.) Theistic evolution: "God initiates the process by producing from the first instant of creation (the Big Bang) the matter and energies that will gradually develop into vegetable, animal, and eventually human life on this earth and perhaps elsewhere." Francis Collins is perhaps the most notable proponent of this view.

2.) Intelligent design (ID): "[T]he development does not occur without divine intervention at certain stages, producing irreducibly complex organs."

3.) Teleological critique: "Becaues of the ontological gap that separates the living from the nonliving, the emergence of life cannot be accounted for on the basis of purely mechanical principles." Furthermore, "the forward thrust of evolution and its breakthroughs into higher grades of being depend upon the dynamic presence of God to his creation."

All three positions are "sustainable in a Christian philosophy of nature," yet the first two have significant weaknesses. Theistic evolution is often dangerously close to Deism, and Intelligent Design runs the risk of using as evidence things for which science may soon find an explanation. As Dulles wisely remarks, "[h]istory teaches us that the 'God of the gaps' often proves to be an illusion."

Notably, strict creationism hardly merits a mention.

I suppose that I should have guessed a Thomist/Aristotelian teleological position would appear in the article, but it actually took me by surprise. In Protestant circles, we seem to still be talking about creationism vs. ID vs. Theistic Evolution, a debate which goes in circles due to the aforementioned weaknesses. In public debates, Design too often comes off as a soft version of creationism, a sort of back door through which fundamentalists can get their world view back into textbooks. And, conversely, I suppose that opponents of Theistic Evolution see that as a back door through which Darwinists can get their world view into the church.

As usual, it's the Thomistic point of view that really illuminates what happens in our culture. It's philosophically sophisticated, and it certainly can't be labeled as soft modernism. Indeed, it takes us back to medieval thinkers. Yes, this looks to be the way forward.

Finally, Cardinal Dulles quotes Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and I can't resist putting it here:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. . . . If card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins [were asked] to pass judgment on the geopolitics of South Africa, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.

American Heroes: "The Wire"

I've never watched "The Wire." But as I read Salon's Sopranos vs. The Wire point/counterpoint, I realized that at some point I may try it out, and all because of critic Laura Miller's cultural insight.

Death, loss, enslavement, the ruination of all their hopes and dreams, and yet in the midst of the world's stony realities, as inevitable as the wine darkness of the sea and the rosy fingers of dawn, there can be heroism, courage, honor. Just don't expect things to change; all of this is part of the game, and in "The Iliad" the game is war.

The characters in "The Wire" inhabit such a world. The gods may have different names; instead of Apollo and Juno pulling the strings, it's the bureaucracy, party politics, the free market: all equally capricious and implacable. Anyone who tries to alter the system -- be it Stringer Bell aiming to turn legit businessman, Bunny Colvin experimenting with decriminalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam" or Frank Sobotka struggling to save his beloved stevedores union from its inevitable demise -- will be crushed. The best they can hope for is to clean up one little corner of their world; Bunny may not be able to save the neighborhood, but at the end of Season 4, he managed to save one kid. To thrive, you have to learn to fly low and kiss up, and if you're unfortunate enough to be afflicted with a sense of vocation, you play it like that smooth operator, Bunk Moreland, not like that perennial troublemaker, Jimmy McNulty.

In a way, it doesn't make sense to talk of "The Wire" as the best American television show because it's not very American. The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it's not exhorting you to "follow your dream" it's reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don't do doom. "The Wire" is not Romantic but classical; what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity.

I can't argue that the classical view is superior to the Romantic one; to even introduce the idea that art is meant to nudge us toward moral improvement and social awareness is to concede to Romantic hope. But for some people, in some places, the classical view is more true, and in such cases, the artist's duty is to show us that these lives are no smaller for that.

A Point on Iraq

Beneath the rhetoric and (perhaps) hyperbole in this Salon.com article by Gary Kamiya is a completely valid point. I'm not endorsing the rest of the article, but the statement here is not very far off the mark.Of course, it's far too late to say these things now: the war is already in progress. Decisions like that can't just be undone. But let's still remember this for next time.

The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won't stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush's die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.

What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we're prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East -- and that they're Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.

Hauerwas on MacIntyre in First Things (!)

You have to be a subscriber to read it online, but it's almost worth the subscription price. First Things has an article by Stanley Hauerwas on Alasdair MacIntyre's career. It's almost too much. I printed it out and devoured it quickly. Fortunately, essays are better than sandwiches in the sense that once you've devoured an essay, you can go back and read it slowly and carefully.

In fact, it was First Things that first introduced me to the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre in an essay by Edward Oakes.

I wish I could write more, but it's been a busy week.