This is Not My Hat recently won the prestigious Caldecott Award for Best Children's Book of 2012, but some people are not fans. Their criticism is evidence, as if any more were needed, that our kids have grown soft.
It's been a long time since I was ten, but a still remember a children's book back then that I was genuinely twisted and scary -- and not in the the slapstick Lemony Snicket way. It is called Herman's Hat. I don't mind children's books that aim to uplift outsiders and prevent bullying, whether it's The Paperboy (about a stutterer) or the current #1 bestseller Wonder (the protagonist suffers with a deformed face). But sometimes a kid needs to confront a book that suggest that he, himself, is messed up, not the rest of the world. Herman's Hat is such a book.
But before getting to that, it's interesting to see the main complaints about This is Not My Hat. From Amazon:
This sensitivity is quite different form the kids pop culture world that I grew up in in the 1970s. People don't remember, but in the 1960s and early 1970s America went through a period where children were depicted as monsters in the popular culture.
A Charlie Brown Christmas showed children as capable of religious and psychological insight as well as terrible cruelty. The Spider-Man cartoon of the era had the web-slinger going on a drug trip. Kids were literally demonic in 1970s films like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and It's Alive. And they were like small adults with complex psyches in books like Rumble Fish and Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. It was a much darker world than Diary of a Wimpy Kid and even Harry Potter.
It was this milieu that produced Herman's Hat. Written by George Mendoza and illustrated by Frank Bozzo Herman's Hat was published in 1969 and given to me sometime in the early 1970s, when I was about ten. I forget who gave it to me, but I do remember being seriously rattled by the book. It tells the story of a young boy name Herman who is given a large top hat by a circus clown who tells Herman to never take the hat off or else people will be able to see his thoughts.
If such a book were written today, the plot would be predictable. Herman's thoughts would include his dislike for a certain teacher, maybe his craving for pizza, his love for a girl -- or even more likely, for a boy. But Herman's Hat was published in the era of It's Alive, and the thoughts inside the hat are aggressive, bizarre, even oedipal. He is told by his father to take the hat off, but Herman just pulls it down tighter, imagining he is a king who can shame and humiliate his parents. During his bath Herman imagines himself in the crow's nest of a pirate ship, where he spots a strange starving being on a raft -- his emaciated father, who looks "wold-eyed and hungry and starved as a wolf."
Frank Bozzo's art is characteristic of the psychedelic style of the time -- think the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. The nightmare Herman has where he travels to the land of stumpy half-men with huge hats is still weird and disturbing. I had the book under a stack of clothes in my closet, where it remained for decades. As a kid I was afraid to even dig it up. I didn't like to be reminded that Herman was a tyrant, or see the horrible illustration of his father as a starving wolf.
Yet I never gave away Herman's Hat or threw it out -- something of a miracle considering my ADD personality. Why did I hold on to it for so long? Maybe I knew that while I was parts of the heroes of the other books I read -- Brooks Robinson, Frodo, President Kennedy -- in my subconscious I knew that I was also part Herman, with his tantrums, ego, and, ultimately, repentance. It's not a bad lesson for today's overly praised kids.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
The centerpiece of this book is the recent history of the Today Show, specifically its decline in popularity amidst a switch in one of its two anchors. Ann Curry, who had spent fifteen years as the news reader on the program before taking over next to Matt Lauer in 2011, was fired just a year into the lead role in a series of events known as "Operation Bambi" orchestrated by executive producer Jim Bell.
Curry, by most accounts in this book, was not up to the job. She was gaffe-prone and often awkward, unable to sell her co-star Lauer or allow him to sell her -- unable, in other words, to do her part in the married couple concept of co-hosting. But she was also a respected foreign journalist who had the point of view now espoused by Sheryl Sandburg in Lean In. "Considering that all my bosses -- all my bosses -- have been men, I have wondered what has happened to this hope for full equality in America," she told a women-in-media luncheon. That attitude is part of what motivated legions of Curry's (mostly female) fans to skewer NBC and Lauer on social media after she was dismissed.
Lauer, of course, wanted nowhere near this sideshow. A reserved personality, he was doing freelance and trimming trees when he was hired to host the New York market's lead-in to Today in the 1980s. Eventually he fulfilled his goal of taking over the headline show in 1997. Now in his broadcasting prime, Lauer's celebrity was called into question as the show's ratings bled and it was overtaken by rival Good Morning America. This book reminds us that there's much more to someone with a public persona than meets the eye. Just as Lauer could veer between high-brow and low-brow in the potpourri of morning news, he exuded discretion but also left some NBC executives convinced of rumors he had had extra-marital affairs. Perhaps his self-presentation finally wore thin.
In his uncovering of Operation Bambi and search for how much of a role Lauer played in Curry's ouster, Stelter discounts the fact that NBC had a ready replacement in Savannah Guthrie. With a striking look and quirky sense of humor that put her beyond "girl next door," Guthrie was in the right place at the right time. After covering the White House for a brief period, she had the gumption to ask out of that prestigious position -- "You can never feel that you know everything, that you've talked to everyone, that you have enough sources," she admits -- and was rewarded with the 9 o'clock hour of Today, prime position to be promoted to the main show.
Stelter gives vignettes of CBS's This Morning and MSNBC's Morning Joe, but most of the rest is devoted to Today's archenemy, Good Morning America. GMA finally snapped Today's 16-year weekly viewership streak in April 2012, a surreal accomplishment to those at ABC who had built up an inferiority complex. The saga of Robin Roberts, the GMA anchor who took a leave of absence to get a bone marrow transplant, buoyed her colleagues while at the same time making them wary of going too far in turning her health into a show theme. Perhaps the most unlikely star in the morning TV world is her co-anchor George Stephanopoulos, who after starting in Democratic presidential politics now found himself broadcasting shark attacks and missing persons stories. The absorption of hard news with salacious fodder is something that Today struggled with (fed by Lauer's disgust) while GMA happily obliged. In the end, that's probably why ABC finally pulled in more viewers.
Stelter is a deeply-sourced media reporter who founded a notable television news website as a teenager. He gives a behind-the-scenes narrative in the tradition of veteran Times TV writer Bill Carter, though mars it with blog-style colloquialisms. Top of the Morning is a page-turner because it captures the thrilling ride of a business that revolves around public grace and private anxiety. This duality (combined with chronic lack of sleep) threatens a meltdown around every corner. Just like anyone else in the morning, these people are never really themselves.
Rich Danker is economics director at American Principles Project, a Washington think tank.
]]>I would argue that the answer to both questions is yes. The Great Gatsby the film has already produced several think pieces about how Fitzgerald's gilded age mirrors our own (for my money the best was Nick Gillespie in Reason). But as interesting as the large socio-cultural questions is the role alcohol played for writers like Fitzgerald. Several years ago I came across a tightly argued book that examines the question: The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, by Tom Dardis.
The Thirsty Muse is fascinating because Dardis is both a wonderfully lucid stylist and a man with a nose for facts. This is the first sentence of the book: "Of the seven native-born Americans who were awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, five were alcoholic." The five were Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. Of course, as Dardis notes, the list of other alcoholic American writers who did not win the Nobel is long: John Cheever, Truman Capote, James Agee, Dashiell Hammett, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Hart Crane, and, of course, Fitzgerald.
In The Thirsty Muse, Dardis profiles four writers: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and O'Neill. His premise is that alcoholism caused a decline in the work of all of these artists except for O'Neil, who stopped drinking when he was 38. Dardis argues that Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner had all completed their best work by around the age of 40.
He is particularly brutal on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: "It is a self-conscious work brimming over with Christ and crucifixion symbols; it is fatally marred by its whimsical, folksy talk about the Indians of Cleveland and the great DiMaggio." O'Neil, on the other hand, produced The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night only after he had been sober for several years.
Alcoholism may also account for the main dramatic thrust of The Great Gatsby. In his landmark book Under the Influence, alcoholism expert James Milam argues that alcoholics often can't properly process grief and trauma, not because they are overly sentimental, but because their soggy brains prevent flushing bad memories. While it is certainly true that a bad experience, such as a broken heart, can be intense and make us do crazy things, for the alcoholic it's nearly impossible to recover.
Enter F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay Gatsby.
In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is obsessed with his love Daisy years after their love affair during the Great War. He dedicates himself to amassing a fortune and then builds a mansion near her and her husband, Tom Buchanan.
In modern novels, from The Corrections to The Interestings, characters have low self-esteem and suffer maladies like obsessive-compulsive disorder, free-floating anxiety and rage at their parents. They don't tend to pine over a lost love for years on end or have crack-ups.
As The Thirsty Muse reveals, Fitzgerald was always looking for "bluer skies somewhere." This is the voice of the whiny adolescent. If alcoholism makes it difficult to process difficult memories and experiences, it also arrests development.
With celebrity rehab, Dr. Phil, and New York banning Big Gulps, America has become far more sober than in Fitzgerald's time. These days our hot messes are celebrities, not writers. Our last genuine madman drunk was probably Hunter S. Thompson.
Thompson's career is additional proof of Dardis's thesis. Thompson started strong, ascended to brilliance, then became dull and repetitive, the soused uncle in the corner babbling about Nixon decades after the fact. For honest fans of his work, it became apparent in the 1980s that Thompson had flamed out.
But perhaps I'm being too hard -- on Thomson and the other dipsomaniacs. It's hard enough to write a novel, never mind a great or even immortal one. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will be read a hundred years from now and beyond.
Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, which to me still shimmers like gold. Faulkner had an incredible run -- as Dardis puts it, "Between 1928 and 1941he wrote ten novels that make him arguably the leading American novelist of this century, an amazing burst of creation that is unparalleled in American writing." And Fitzgerald, of course, gave us The Great Gatsby, which is still paying off.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
In the meantime, I keep getting distracted from The Woman Upstairs by Punk Rock Jesus. Punk Rock Jesus was a limited run comic book published by Vertigo that has now been issued as a stand-alone graphic novel. I understand that novelist like Claire Messud are gifted, and having a writer require a little patience on behalf of the reader is necessary for a rich payoff as the book develops. But the thing is, so far The Woman Upstairs is about a lonely and cranky narcissist who is angry at the world because it didn't make her famous. Compare that to Punk Rock Jesus, written and drawn by Sean Murphy, which is about -- well, that will take some explaining. But it's a lot more daring and interesting than Messud's work.
In fact, it's amazing that the film rights to Punk Rock Jesus haven't been sold. The story is a cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Kids Are Alright (that is, the rock and roll Who film, not the film about two lesbian mothers). It's the near future, and the corporation known as Ophis has cloned Jesus Christ. They did so by cloning some DNA off of the Shroud of Turin and using it to impregnate a teenager named Gwen.
Ophis and its "J2" project wants to bring up the new Jesus, named Chris, as something of an evangelical dope to appeal to born-again America, known as the New American Christians. There is a battle between Christians who believe Chris is the second coming and those who think that Ophis is trading in blasphemy.
Toss in a female Jewish doctor (yes, her religion matters in the story) who cooperates with the cloning to pay for her environmental zealotry, a former Irish terrorist hired to protect the new Lord, and punk rock, which Chris turns to to fight the power, and you've got something you'd think would be completely ridiculous. The thing is, it's hard to stop turning the pages to find out what happens next. Murphy manages to avoid camp through the use of the basics: smooth and believable plotting, good characters and a way with dialogue that bests many novelists.
He also has the virtue of being direct about politics, which is probably why he and other comic book writers are more popular than our literary novelists. With the exception of one character, I was enchanted by The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud's previous novel. But that one flawed character is part of a larger flaw with Messud and other modern novelists. A main character in the book is Murrray Thwaite, a liberal journalist who reminded me of Richard Cohen. Thwaite's children struggle to make it in post-September 11 New York, but Murrary's biggest challenge turns out to be his nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb. Bootie, a midwesterner unimpressed by Murray Thwaite's Manhattan elitism, almost upends his uncle's life.
The thing is, we never know why. I suspect it's because Messud didn't have the courage to make Bootie a conservative, even though that would have made him a perfect foil for Thwaite. Because to do so would have meant creating a conservative character who was human and could outsmart someone on the left. In a similar fashion, The Woman Upstairs has a character who who is violent and dysfunctional because he supported the Iraq War. To liberal novelists, conservative characters are either not used when doing so would make them look good, or else treated as caricatures.
In Punk Rock Jesus, the anti-corporate, anti-religious worldview is obvious, yet liberals often don't come off much better than the conservatives. The themes and the scenes are big and weird enough for a 1970s Charlton Heston sci-fi flick. It is this bigness, this daring to create a fiction that comments in a bold way on the world, that makes Punk Rock Jesus the more interesting read. I can't wait to see the movie.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Antle has a good background to write this book. He is a reporter working the DC beat whose writing appears in the American Spectator, the American Conservative, and the Daily Caller. Given his background, the book delivers what you would expect: a detailed account of the political struggles that built Big Government line by budgetary line. I appreciated these parts of the book: I had forgotten or never known aspects of these fights.
Antle provides more than just the details. He struggles to understand the big picture of politics while looking at a few brushstrokes in one corner of a painting. His history of the expansion of the American state after the New Deal serves the reader well. Antle also has something new for those familiar with the era. His praise of the "Do Nothing Congress" of 1948-1949 is apt; I wish I had recognized its significance in my own writings.
Reviewers are often unfair. They wish the author had written the book they wanted to read and not the one he actually wrote. Judged by his own intentions, Antle has done a fine job. If I mention a couple themes that might have been included in this work, I hope I am not being unfair.
Big Government is more than taxing and spending, as important as those are. To his credit, Antle criticizes aspects of the surveillance state and defense spending, apt themes but perhaps not the normal fare for many of his readers. I would like to have seen more on how the feds try to manage the economy through tax preferences, loan guarantees, and a multitude of other obscure interventions. These interventions complicate the political task of controlling Big Government. Tax reform, for example, benefits the well-to-do voter who might be limited government's best hope at the ballot box. But these policies are part of the problem, in part because they do not seem to be part of Big Government.
The friends of limited government tend to blame politicians and the media for its popularity. They are imposing, as it were, a false consciousness on "the people." Tim Groseclose has shown that media bias does move public opinion to the left. However, as Antle notes, the most expensive welfare programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- have attracted strong support. Conservatives often complain about Medicare Part D, but over 80 percent of the public supported a prescription drug benefit in 1994, the year of the supposed revolution in favor of limited government. Given such support, it is surprising that another ten years would pass before a drug benefit became law.
I wish Antle had taken a closer look at Medicare Part D. Some experts say its reliance on market mechanisms have fostered lower costs and high client satisfaction. Is that true? Might policies like Medicare Part D be the "best we can do" given what voters overwhelmingly want?
Yet the popularity of these programs invites skepticism. Like Medicare and Social Security, the prescription drug law did not impose costs equal to its benefits. These programs are thus popular: they have delivered and promise to deliver trillions of dollars of benefits in excess of their costs. The government will not make good on those promises. When costs are greater than benefits for individual taxpayers, will the entitlement programs remain popular? Past polls do not matter. What citizens will think in the future does. At the same time, this illusion of a free lunch suggests "serving the check" for the meal will cut short the welfare state banquet. Perhaps. But it is far from certain that any politician will serve the check to 97 percent of the electorate.
Can Big Government be reined in or even ended? Antle is realistic, perhaps because he is a student of history. But history may suggest that the political regime founded by Franklin Roosevelt will end with a bang similar to the Great Depression or the Civil War. Few argue in favor of a catastrophe, but most voters both want spending and do not want higher taxes. Most creditors assume this electoral circle will be squared well before a crisis. But that confidence may be misplaced, and if so, what should proponents of limited government do in a crisis? Will they cast about for a few years as FDR did in the 1930s?
A Republican victory in 2016, even if that Republican is Rand Paul, will not fix our mess. Antle knows the difficulty of winning the war over the size and scope of government, but he offers some reasons for a measured optimism. Opponents of Big Government are better organized and more willing to fight Republican congressional leaders than in the past. The coming failure of the entitlement state may foster enough disappointment to call the welfare state into question. The Republican party itself should change and become a true party of limited government. In the end, Antle suggests, nothing can replace continuing political engagement.
Those who know James Antle's journalism will not be surprised by the quality of this book. He engages the reader with a fluid style and broad knowledge. He does not duck the hard questions. As result, his book provokes more thought than anger, a selling point for the serious reader. Pushing back against a world of sound bites and silliness, Antle has made a strong case for a politically-informed libertarian conservatism.
I can only hope Ellison gets better. He is one of the last remaining male novelists with a rampaging ego, pugnacious attitude and inflated sense of self-worth. (He is indeed a great writer, and the fact that his self-assessment isn't far off the mark makes it doubly annoying.) After the deaths of Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, Ellison is one of the few authentic madmen still standing. Here is a man who got fired on his first day working for Disney for joking about making a porno film with Disney characters.
Ellison, like Mailer and the other tough guys, is a member of a generation of male writers who mined tough experience for their art. Born in 1934, Ellison was raised in Ohio and moved to New York in 1955. He wanted to write about street gangs, and joined one in Brooklyn under a fake name (echos here of Thompson joining the Hells Angels).
His experience became the novel Web of the City. It tells the story of Rusty Santoro, a member of the gang the Cougars. Santoro wants out. The story has girls, violence, near-misses and, even the author admits in the intro, some purple prose. Still, even in his early twenties Ellison was showing signs of real talent. If Web of the City is not a great book it is certainly not a bad one either. It never flags and is a terrific edition to the beach bag for reading this summer.
Ellison would, of course, go on to true greatness. Shatterday, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, A Boy and His Dog, the great Star Trek script City on the Edge of Forever -- the list is long and, indeed, awesome. Science fiction and fantasy, the genres Ellison chooses to work in, may reveal what separates him from the Mailers and the Roths, as well as why his work may even last longer.
In 1997 David Foster Wallace wrote a scathing essay about John Updike and the other male writers that Wallace referred to as the postwar Great Male Narcissists (GMN). The essay was a review of Toward the End of Time, a dystopian science fiction novel by John Updike. The book, according to Wallace, is an absolute disaster; even in a work set in the year 2020, Updike could not stop talking about sex, women, neurosis, sex, himself, his penis, sex, and sex. Wallace actually broke down the page count of how often what subjects appear where. The final tally: Toward the End of Time contained about three percent science fiction. The rest was Great Male Narcissist anguish.
Ellison would never make that mistake because he is not a narcissist but an egomaniac. The narcissist is someone looking to fill his hollow self because he has such a fragile psyche. The egomaniac is the opposite. Whereas the GMN like Mailer and Updike and Roth were too weak and damaged to stop talking about themselves for too long, Ellison is almost psychotically cocksure. They wrote about alcohol, suburban malaise, prostitutes and shimmering mortality. Ellison set out for the stars.
And in the end this may make his work more immortal than theirs. In a recent blog post the science fiction writer John C. Wright explored how science fiction and fantasy moved into mainstream popularity as literature began to withdraw from monsters (Grendel), adventure (The Iliad), and the nature of evil (The Divine Comedy). People by nature like stories about about these things, because they take us outside of ourselves even while allowing us to reflect on love, death, fate and good vs. evil.
Ellison is a blowhard. He's full of himself. Web of the City is no masterpiece. But I daresay the man who wrote the screenplay for what would eventually become the movie The Terminator and dozens of other amazing stories will be read after Philip Roth is forgotten. That is not necessarily a bad thing for literature.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Since Pope Francis was elected March 13, there has been a breathless scramble by publishers to get anything by or about the pontiff into stores and onto Kindles. The first one out is Andrea Tornielli's Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Francis: Pope of a New World. It's published by Ignatius Press, the popular Catholic house that published most of the books by Pope Benedict XVI.
Francis: Pope of a New World is exactly what you would expect of a book published by a respected house in two weeks: a serviceable primer that uses lengthy quotes from other sources. Still, Tornielli, a writer for the Vatican Insider website, is a good storyteller, and his insane deadline may have contributed to the lucidity of his prose. He's like a hard crime writer who had to chop anything superfluous in the rush to pub date.
Thus, we get a general sketch of Jorge Bergoglio, the man who would become pope. His parents were Italian immigrants to Argentina. They were devout Catholics, and during a confession when he was a young man Jorge felt the call to the priesthood. He joined the Jesuits because he liked the tough language of the order that called itself "the pope's Marines" (of course, today they're more like Obama's army).
He felt a particular compassion for the poor, and insisted on living simply even as moved up the ranks. He cooked for fellow priests and rode the subway to work. He moved up to Archbishop of Buenos Ares, and then was appointed a cardinal by John Paul II.
Tornielli relies on a lot of long block quotes, but his choices are always interesting. Very soon a picture emerges, and it is one that reveals just what a tonic, in fact how revolutionary, Francis may turn out to be.
The Catholic Church, my church, has become out of touch with the people, and I mean that in a very literally way. Growing up in the Catholic schools and community of Washington, D.C., I was surrounded by priests who were both powerful men and very involved in the minutiae of your life. In the first week of my freshman year at Georgetown Prep, the headmaster traveled to the house of every new student to meet with the parents. "We have them for eight hours and you have them for eight hours," Fr. Sauter told my parents.
You were taught by priests, played basketball with them, and the school chapel was open 24/7. You'd see them when you went out socially. One of my most indelible memories was going to see the King Arthur saga Excalibur when I was sixteen and, just as the lights went down, noticing two priests from Prep sitting directly behind me and my friends. The movie's sex scene seemed to go on for days.
Once I graduated, all that ended. Priests were more remote, even unseen, and churches were often closed when mass wasn't going on.
This last point is a real beef of mine. It's dispiriting to be a Catholic walking through the city, especially at night -- the time when the soul is more prone to sex, sin, and mysticism -- and to feel the desire to pray or even just sit in a church, only to find that the place is locked.
This has happened to me at Trinity, the Jesuit run church in Georgetown (it literally is never open other than for mass), St. Matthews Cathedral downtown, and my favorite church in Washington, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. In fact, the going assumption when walking past a Catholic church is that it will be locked. One wonders how many conversions would have been lost -- from Thomas Merton to jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams -- if this had been the policy fifty years ago.
It seems that Pope Francis aims to change this. In Pope Francis he tells priests to "keep the church open." He talks of the "600 meter radius" of the church, and encourages priests to plug the spaces between parishes with lay catechists. When someone says that adding preachers makes no sense when people are not coming to mass anyway, Fr. Bergoglio argues that keeping the doors open and adding people in the in between places will actually have the opposite effect.
He was once late for a train when a drug addict who may have been mentally ill approached him for a confession. The future pope told him he was late and that another priest was going to be along soon. He took a few steps, but then turned around and offered to hear the man's confession. Ashamed, Bergoglio then went to confession about what he had almost done.
It turned out that the event Fr. Bergoglio thought he would be late for was itself delayed, so he was on time. He took this as a sign from the Blessed Mother: a priest had to be with the people. He had to be one of them. Like the pope's fellow Jesuits at Georgetown Prep, he has to keep not only the doors, but himself, open.
Such a Christian attitude has already had a huge effect on the church, and people's perception of her. Francis: Pope of a New World is a breezy but very worthwhile read.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Those words were once said to me at a party by a literate and book loving friend of mine, and they carried the force of genuine revelation. After years of required reading in school and you-have-to-read-this recommendations that fizzled, he had reached his limit. If a book didn't garb him pretty early, he was out. And it wasn't his fault.
I'd like to apply this Simon Cowell strategy to some new spring books coming out. I recently received "Buzz Books 2013," a download from various publishers that includes excerpts from "some of the spring/summer season's hottest books." There are twenty-eight total. I decided to pick ten titles at random and see which ones could hold my interest long enough that I would want to buy the full version when it's released. Here's how I voted: a book either gets the designation Beach Bag, meaning it was good enough out of the gate that I will buy the full version and read it this summer, or it's stamped Remaindered, meaning it will be available for the bargain price of $2.99 at Amazon in six months.
A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. Beach Bag. This novel tells the story of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Nao. Nao is bullied in school and suicidal, but before talking her life she want to tell the story of her great grandmother, who was a Zen Buddhist nun. The excerpt had me hooked from the start. Ozeki make's Nao's voice believable, and I was interested in learning the history of the grandmother.
Shakespeare Saved My Life, by Dr. Laura Bates. Beach Bag. Bates goes into prisons to teach inmates the Bard. This memoir starts mid-action and I was eager to read more.
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton Discalfani. Beach Bag. Simple, elegant sentences gently drew me into this excerpt. The novel, set during the Great Depression, is about a fifteen-year-old girl, Thea Atwell, who is exiled from her home and sent to a Southern boarding school for debutantes.
How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, by Wendy Moore. Remaindered. "Spring sunshine warmed the ancient brick walls of the courtyards and chambers in London's legal quarter. The jet of water that leapt up thirty feet from the fountain in Fountain Court sparkled in the light before splashing nosily into its basin." The first paragraph is clumsily written and does not inspire confidence. These are the first two sentences. The second one is where the author lost me. Does a jet of water really leap? Does fountain water splash nosily into its basin, or is it more even, gentle sound?
The Astronaut Wives Club, by Lily Koppel. Remaindered. Koppel doesn't seem to have the insight to find out anything interesting about her subject -- either that or her subject just isn't that interesting. And it has nothing to do with sex. Who wants to read a book about the husband of Margaret Thatcher?
The Testing, by Joelle Charbonneau. Remaindered. A Hunger Games knock off.
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip and Dan Heath. Beach Bag. Much more than a Dr. Phil platitude-fest, the authors -- at least in the excerpt -- write with clarify and intelligence, and use examples at self-improvement that actually make sense.
Beg: A Radical New Way of Regarding Animals, by Rory Freedman. Remaindered -- or better yet, pulped. This one seemed to go on forever right from the introduction. Rory Freedman, the author of the Skinny Bitch series, has a voice like an annoying sixteen-year-old girl (she's actually an annoying thirty-something woman). Beg is about how much Freedman loves dogs, how much her love made her a better person, and how, like, it's really awesome how animals can make us, like, really awesome, too. If I was stuck on a cross country drive with Freedman, I'd pull a Romney and get on the roof.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon, by Antony Marra. Beach Bag -- but just barely. "Stegner Fellow, Iowa MFA, and winner of The Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, Anthony Marra has written a brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences." Whenever I see so many writerly credentials lined up, I back away. The writing is usually just too precious, too revised-by-committee, too mannered, too Iowa Writers Workshop. Like the first sentence of A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon: "On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones." Sure, someone would have dreams, or even sleep, after a night like that. It reminds me of Pete Townshend's comment when asked about modern pop music, with its computerized perfection: "That's not really my thing. With The Who you could feel the blood coursing through the veins." Still, Marra spent a lot of money on tuition. I'll give it a shot.
The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer. Beach Bag. "On a warm night in early July, the Interestings gathered for the very first time. They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. Julie Jacobson, an outsider and possibly even a freak, had been invited in for obscure reasons, and now she sat in a corner on the unswept floor and attempted to position herself so she would appear unobtrusive yet not pathetic, which was a difficult balance." Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I care about these girls, I care about and empathize with Julie Jacobson, right from the opening paragraph. I want to know who the Interestings are, why they are gathered, and what will happen to them.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
This became clear when I was reading Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations, a William F. Buckley omnibus that collects some of the late conservative icon's best writing. Reconnecting with Buckley's wonderful prose revealed something quite clearly: conservative journalism has plenty of pit bulls, but it lacks show dogs. It needs some graceful writers.
Conservative journalists at places like Breitbart, the Weekly Standard and National Review -- the magazine Buckley founded -- are skilled at lawyerly argument, at performing surgery on the bias of the mainstream media. But they haven't developed their muscles for artistic long form journalism. S.E. Cupp is not Joan Didion, and Rich Lowry is not Tom Wolfe. Since the deaths of William F. Buckley, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard John Neuhaus, the conservative media is in desperate need of a journalistic poet -- an experienced Jonathan Franzen or a young Christopher Hitchens. Or another Whittaker Chambers, whose journalism ranks with some of the best of the 20th century.
The lack of good literary conservative journalism is a product of the success the right has had in creating its own media over the last ten years. Because liberals controlled the media for so many decades, the digital revolution was an intoxicating rush for many on the right. All of a sudden, if a liberal journalist told a lie, it could be instantly rebutted on the web. Suddenly, we could interview our own heroes, and write our own stories.
Yet because there was more money and hits to be had in boxing with the left rather than producing artful long form journalism, we had a glut of right-wing books and media attacking the left. Stars were made out of young right-wingers because of their success in humiliating the left, not necessarily for their writing skill.
Liberals are for higher taxes, identity politics, abortion, gun control, and sexual decadence. These are things that should be opposed, but at some point the conservative media is going to have to offer more. We're going to have to celebrate what we are for, and produce some memorable long form journalism. And I'm sorry, but Andrew Ferguson going on for 5,000 words in the Weekly Standard trying to decide whether he loves or hates George Harrison doesn't cut it. Who would you rather read -- John Podhoretz or James Wolcott?
In Athwart History, Buckley writes about politics, of course. But he also writes about sailing, Beethoven, "what to do about sloppy dress," the role of beauty in politics, skiing, rock and roll, and Catholicism. He did profiles of Malcolm Muggeridge, David Niven, John Dos Passos, Evelyn Waugh, Churchill, and Princess Grace, among others. Buckley could also push back agains his own side, as when he criticizes Ann Coulter for what he saw as her excessive defense of Joseph McCarthy.
Let me give a specific example of the price I think the right pays for not fostering talent that can produce honest and poetic long form journalism of the type that Buckley practiced. This summer is World Youth Day, the semi-annual gathering of hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth from around the world. With a new pope and the Church at a particularly interesting point in its history, it is an event that cries out for a competent, literate and soulful journalist to tell the story. The event takes place this year in Rio, a dynamic city that lends itself well to journalism.
But for the Weekly Standard or Breitbart to send such a journalist would mean an investment in the future, like a record company executive putting resources into a talented but not famous band. And the conservative media has no interest in such an investment when Ben Shapiro kneecapping Piers Morgan is where the action is. Who wants the next Hunter S. Thompson when Hannity's ratings are so good?
So here is what will happen with World Youth Day. Major media like the Washington Post and New York Times will cover the event, but the reporters doing the coverage will view the event through the prism of liberal orthodoxy. Conservatives will then react to the liberal coverage, and complain about there not being enough conservatives in the media. They will then find the next Michelle Malkin, and promptly make her a star on Fox.
For a fraction of the price of creating a new conservative star, you could send an actual writer to Rio to do the story that the New Yorker will not. But then, for many conservatives it's more fun, not to mention lucrative, to throw tantrums.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Reading David Freddoso's new book, Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Elect Barack Obama, it's possible, indeed likely, to feel that the symmetry of where the media is exactly 40 years after Watergate is just too perfect. Certainly when people and institutions grow older they sometimes have to be somewhat hypocritical -- the former pot smoker who's now a dad and tells his kids to "just say no"; the born again evangelical who begins to second guess whether everyone else in every other faith is going to hell. But the way that the American media has, during the presidency of Barack Obama, warped into exactly and precisely the very thing it once considered the epitome of shame and evil is genuinely staggering.
Spin Masters is thoroughly researched and damning in its detail, but the strength of its case reminded me of something Christopher Lasch once observed about the no-nukes movement: the extent that it convinces is also the extent to which it paralyzes. That is to say, when peace activists convince you that there are millions and millions of nuclear weapons, it's easy to give up. I mean, what is one person, or even thousands of people, against all that?
This is the place where criticisms of the Obama worshipping media have come to. The problem is undeniable and epidemic, and therefore difficult to fight or control. Freddoso effortlessly reels off topic after topic that should have been covered and example after example of the media ignoring or downplaying stories because of who the president is. A quick five that come early in Spin Masters: drone strikes, the poor economy, undeclared war in Libya, unconstitutional recess appointments, and the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
The worst of these has been Benghazi, where four Americans were murdered at the hands of terrorists and then the administration lied about it to win an election. Fredosso is a fan of Bernard Goldberg and mentions Goldberg's astute criticism of liberal bias. Recently on Bill O'Reilly's show, Goldberg claimed that the press's love of President Obama is unprecedented in American journalism. (I would add that anyone who thinks that the fourth estate gave FDR a free ride need only read H.L. Mencken's popular columns from that time.) Goldberg is absolutely right. We are in uncharted territory here for the American media, something more akin to a dictatorship or third world country.
Forty years ago, indeed right around this time of year in 1973, the American populace eventually cottoned on to the Watergate scandal. As Woodward and Bernstein uncovered more and more, the public began to turn against Nixon. But it was a more literate and engaged population back then. These days, people seem to have lost the basic ability to reason, or be outraged.
And it is in dealing with the fact that nobody cares that David Freddoso makes a big mistake. "I don't have a fix for liberal media bias," he writes near the end of Spin Masters. "But even if it can't be fixed -- so what? No amount of slanted coverage -- whether it comes in the form of subtle bias or the overt propaganda from 2012 that was designed to drive fear and resentment -- can forever overcome the soundness of a truly good idea."
I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Propaganda, lies, slander, and derision of an opponent can indeed overcome the soundness of a good idea, and if not forever, than at least long enough to see the long, slow deterioration of a country and a culture.
Recently Senator John McCain was on Meet the Press talking about his fight to discover the facts about Benghazi. In what was one of the most bizarre examples of role-reversal I've ever seen, McCain fired off several unanswered questions about the massacre to the Meet the Press moderator, award-winning and establishment journalist David Gregory.
Forty years after the fact, we had a complete mirror image of the Watergate hearings. In 2013, it was a U.S. government official who was hunting for facts, and a reporter who was trying to hide them. "Do you care, David?" Senator McCain plaintively asked. "Do you care?" Gregory, like Nixon before him, had no answer.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
This pope has left a record of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words and it is astounding how many liberal Catholics have read none of them. For a so-called Catholic pundit to talk about the pope and his place in history without having read a single word of the more than 50 books the Holy Father has written is like someone covering the Washington Nationals and not knowing Bryce Harper's stats.
This is why, for the next few weeks of media attention on Rome, the progressive, leaning forward Catholic left will offer the most juvenile and reactionary coverage. There are basically three requirements to writing liberals columns and books about the Catholic Church:
1) Don't know your subject. It is especially important that liberal Catholic intellectuals not read any of Pope Benedict's writings. His books, particularly the popular Jesus of Nazareth series, are much more accessible than the works of John Paul II, which could get bogged down in academic jargon. He has also written tens of volumes about the liturgy, theology, Church history, and his own life. And in the unfortunate event that you do read some of his work, make sure you misquote it or use deceptive ellipses -- see Wills, Gary.
2) Bring the snark. "The pope, following Sarah Palin's lead, resigns." So tweeted Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post shortly after the news broke of Pope Benedict's abdication. I call this the Ana Marie Coxing of journalism. In order to debase the pope, it's necessary to drag him into your pop culture frame of reference -- even if doing so results in a joke that is neither insightful nor funny. The low end of this is, of course, Andrew Sullivan, who jokes about the pope wearing a "dress" and nice shoes.
3) Bring straw men. Lots of them. Throw a party. The pope hates women and gays. He's turned his back on the Second Vatican Council. He doesn't understand the modern world. Crucial to this step is a firm grounding in step #1.
Equally important is the iron insistence that the western world has not moved to the left in the last 50 years. To ignore the liberal shift means that one can simply say that gay marriage, the welfare state, and sexual "freedom" are simple facts of life, and that to be against them is like standing against the tides.
Thus liberal Michael Tomasky: "How long is the Church going to resist the flow of history and keep choosing conservatives or reactionaries? This is a chance for the Church to join the modern world as it did in the early 1960s under John XXIII. But I would imagine it's an opportunity the Church won't take."
Tomasky then informs us that he's not Catholic. Tomasky is instead an atheist, which makes him a drunk and a child molester. From what I understand of atheism. (See what I did there?)
The great irony in all this is that as a prose stylist, Pope Benedict is superior to Tomasky and most journalists working today. His encyclicals, particularly God is Love, are models of sharp style and poetic rhythm.
Here is the opening of Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth: "The Book of Deuteronomy contains a promise that is completely different from the messianic hope expressed in other books of the Old testament, yet it is of decisive importance in understanding the figure of Jesus. The object of this promise is not a King of Israel or a king of the world - a new David, in other words -- but a new Moses."
Here you have drama with understatement, command of language and facts, and a powerful foreshadowing of the events to come.
Don't expect the same from the professionals covering the retirement of Benedict, or the transition to the next pope.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
The entertainment media is in dire need of a new version of Punk magazine. Punk was an underground magazine that ran for 16 issues in the mid 1970s. It was created by cartoonist John Holmstrom, writer "Legs" McNeil, and publisher Ged Dunn. It Books, a division of HarperCollins, recently published a big and beautiful retrospective, Punk: The Best of Punk Magazine. Immersing yourself in the street art, slapstick comics, and sheer sense of fun of the reproduced back issues, you become increasingly sickened by the over-the-top deification of hype cyclones like Beyonce.
Granted, it's not really Beyonce's fault that after her soulless and overblown Superbowl performance people actually tweeted that she was so magnificent that she may not even be human. Furthermore, I'm no fan of some of what punk brought into popular culture -- namely, a blanket of irony and sarcasm so thick that it became suspect to lose yourself in the simple joy of a simple pop song. (Johnny Rotten was interviewed in Punk, and could not name a single thing he liked.)
Nevertheless, what Punk the magazine, and punk the movement, taught rock and roll fans is something crucial: the stars aren't gods. While total abandonment to musical transcendence is natural and beautiful, punk said: don't be afraid to take them down a notch, even if you're a fan. The first issue of Punk came out in January 1976, and featured a Lou Reed cover story. Towards the end of the interview this exchange takes place:
Punk: Why don't you just give up on "Lou Reed" and do something.
Reed: There wasn't anything else to do. I don't give up. I don't give up on things. It's just that, you know, it wasn't very interesting anymore.
Punk: Are you bored now? Or are you excited by the new album?
Reed: It's all over. I'm already bored with it. I mean I've already forgotten it, I'm interested in the one after it.
Punk: Were you ever not bored?
Reed: Um...no.
Now just sit back for a moment and consider the fallout if one of today's "reporters" showed that kind of insolence to Beyonce, or her husband Jay-Z, or Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake. The interview would be ended abruptly and the celebrity ushered out the door as Twitter exploded over the "controversial" confrontation.
I'm not talking about hating a celebrity, which you can find any day in the comments section of any number of internet pages. I'm talking about a gutsy face-to-face jab, not an anonymous cold cock from the safety of cyberspace.
The interviews that Punk conducted with the Ramones, Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols show obvious appreciation of the artists, but there is an ennobling tone of equality, of the writers and readers of Punk being peers and equals to the subjects. Punk was exactly what co-founder John Holmstrom said he wanted the magazine to be: a mix of Rolling Stone and Mad magazines, with a dash of National Lampoon tossed in.
A final word should be said about the stellar job It Books has done with this compilation. Punk was published in the 1970s, obviously before the digital revolution. Interview were transcribed by hand, photo collages were cut and paste, and the art was big and colorful. Punk: The Best of Punk Magazine is a heavy book printed on heavy stock, which is perhaps ironic considering the ethos that guided the original magazine.
Yet compared to the coo-cooing and ass-kissing of celebrities by today's media, not to mention the passive populace -- Beyonce is the Queen of the Universe! -- Punk seems more critical than ever.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Comic fanboys will point out the differences between manga and American comic art. In manga, the eyes are bigger and the action sequences more angular and kinetic. (And purist manga reads not from left to right, but right to left.) Yet what struck me about Doman's book on the pope was how much like an American comic it is. Specifically, the kind of comic produced by Marvel comics.
In the 1960s, Marvel revolutionized comic books by creating superheroes such as Spider-Man and the X-Men who, despite their great power, wrestled with doubt and personal problems. The reason Habemus Papam! works so well is that it presents not only Pope Benedict XVI, but Joseph Ratzinger, a young, handsome seminarian in Bavaria who struggles with doubt and obstacles both literal and figurative.
Catholicism is an intellectual religion but it is also a dynamic and passionate one. Unfortunately, in recent decades the Church has fallen behind in using the right genres of the popular culture, specifically films and graphic novels, to show this.
With the arrival of Habemus Papam! and, more specifically, its publisher Manga Hero, that may be starting to change. Manga Hero was started a few years ago by Jonathan Lin, a 37 year-old real estate broker from San Rafael, California.
Lin's father asked him, "Why isn't there any Biblical manga?" Good question. Lin produced 300,000 copies of a 32-page comic about Pope Benedict to distribute at the 2011 World Youth Day. It was a hit, and was then expanded into Habemus Papam!
As author Regina Doman explained to me in an interview, Lin is a businessman, and he wanted his series of graphic novels to be strong enough artistically that they could appeal to elitist comic fanboys. He brought in Sean Lam, an accomplished manga artist, and writers like Doman, who had experience writing a series of novels aimed at Catholic youth.
The result is a comic that could compete with today's super heroes. In fact, Habemus Papam! has a lot of the elements that make Marvel's heroes so compelling. There is the all-too-human main character who suspects that he may have a supernatural destiny but has to struggle with poverty (Peter Parker), prejudice (the X-Men), and enemies bent on global domination (Galactus in the Marvel universe; Nazis, modern nihilists, and the devil himself in Ratzinger's). There is a period of trial and doubt, followed by the metamorphosis into the hero, and the acceptance of the burdens of the calling.
I found myself totally absorbed in the story as a reader, not as a Catholic. Unlike with a lot of theology books, I couldn't stop turning the pages. It's exciting to imagine what Manga Hero could do with Teresa of Avila, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Edith Stein or John Paul II, who was a real life action hero.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Or as James Wolcott once put it: "Avoid preamble -- flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it's only a five-hundred word slot: no matter how short the piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in."
To young writers who want to master this skill, I always say: avoid creative writing programs and read the hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. The popular online travel site acts like the best kind of unforgiving writing coach. You've done something you like and that is interesting, namely taken a trip and stayed in a hotel, so the content is fresh. And you only have a very limited amount of space to describe the experience. You can't waste too many lines, and you get extra points for being clever and engaging.
There are no preambles in TripAdvisor reviews -- or rather, if there are, they are the kind of foreshadowings that belong in the best pulp fiction: "OK, OK, I shouldn't have stayed here after reading the reviews. But it was late, I was tired, and I needed a place to stay." (This can't end well.)
That kind of forced brevity makes a writer's voice come out quickly, and some of the efforts on TripAdvisor are better than bestselling novels. There are basically three literary forms in the TripAdvisor review: Austenite, Salingerian, and Joycean.
The Austenite reviews are like Jane Austen's novels: straightforward, pleasant, polite, and a little dry. An example is this one, of the Hotel Drisco in San Francisco: "We recently discovered a wonderful boutique in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco that met our needs in every way. The Hotel Drisco has the ambiance of a private home and there is a cozy sitting room for catching up on the world news while sipping or tea and perhaps chatting with another hotel guest. Meanwhile our room was spacious and well appointed with pillow choices, comfy robes and all those amenities one cherishes after a long flight."
Perfectly nice piece. Directness, evocative phrasing, good detail.
The second TripAdvisor genre is Salingerian, after J.D. Salinger -- particularly his novel The Catcher in the Rye. Travel mishaps and unpleasant surprises at a hotel just lend themselves to sarcasm and fear; recall Holden Caulfield's ugly evening with a hooker in a New York hotel.
TripAdvisor's scribes excel at this genre. Take Austin R's review of New York's Dream Downtown: "If you like sleeping surrounded by the color of metal, then this is your place. This place is like a porn set in space or a gay brothel in a Woody Allen movie. Some idiot also got cute with the light switches which are impossible to figure out. Stay away unless you are 25 and work in the fashion industry."
Or this miniature pulp masterpiece by Eric T, who stayed in the A1 Inn Kansas City: "The room had a heavy stench of cigarettes, but that didn't bother me as much. Upon checking out the bed in search of an outlet, we found one. The EXPOSED outlet behind the bed literally bursted and shocked one of us. It could have easily been the start of a fire. We spoke with the manager and asked to switch rooms and explained what had happened. He began to get extremely agitated (and let me state that my friend remained quite calm throughout the situation) and started yelling at us....During the night, we also had run ins with some prostitutes and someone tried to buy my friend, which was weird. All in all, worst place I've ever experienced."
Finally, there is the Joycean TripAdvisor review: a piece that breaks new literary ground with stream of consciousness or flat-out strangeness. These are hard to find because most writers aren't those kind of risk takers. But Joycean TripAdvisor entrees can offer a kind of exhilaration that comes with crashing through literary guardrails.
The best of these I've seen is this review of the Alamo Motel in Ocean City, Maryland. I've kept the exact punctuation of the original; one doesn't alter Finnegan's Wake: "some creepy one armed guy rides around in a golf cart all day ,i guess too keep an eye on all the shady people who are staying there . the rooms are horrible an the water seems too have an iron problem an we had ants in our room the one armed guy seem to get angry when i asked for another room wich was worst then the first room an this dump was 165 a night ,i stayed one night left first thing in the morning what a dump"
Ah, how late it was, how late. And he got right to the point.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
"See, here's how it works," he said, drawing a graph. "With a dog, you put in a medium amount of work, and you get a medium amount of reward. If you were to, say, purchase a lion, you'd put in a lot of work, but you'd get pretty much no reward - and you might even get eaten. Horrible deal." He paused, drawing a straight line that hit each point directly between the axes. "See? With a kid, you put in a ton of work, but you also get a huge reward for years to come. It's a great deal!"
That was three kids ago, and I can assure you that the "ton of work" part is true. The "huge reward," happily, is also true. Children are a source of great joy, and, as a bonus, often hilarious. This is especially useful to remember when the preschooler gives you pinkeye, the toddler flushes your contact lenses down the toilet, and the baby cooks up a habit of happily, inexplicably, all-out yodeling at 4:30 each morning.
What's strange about our dining room child-planning summit, from a historical perspective, is that we considered it at all. "A few generations ago, people weren't stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy," wrote Jennifer Senior in her much-discussed parenting treatise, "All Joy and No Fun," which ran in New York magazine in 2010. "Having children was simply what you did."
But not, apparently, anymore. Around the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. Countries like Japan and Russia teeter on self-imposed fertility cliffs, facing dramatic population shrinkage and the potential collapse of their welfare states. Europe, with stagnant birth rates, isn't far behind -- and, contrary to popular opinion, neither is America, according to Weekly Standard writer Jonathan V. Last. His new book, What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster, documents a remarkable demographic shift: the global baby un-boom.
Last has good timing. A new Pew report shows the traditionally robust American birthrate falling to record lows. Recent data from the Census Bureau and other studies suggest that the world's population, once a source of widespread hand-wringing, could stop growing within our lifetimes. Meanwhile, in its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood cited a record number of abortions: 333,964 in 2011 alone.
The magic fertility number, if you want the population to remain stable, is 2.1 children per woman. Today, the U.S. fertility rate perches at 2.01. Compared to countries like Poland (1.32), Germany (1.36), and Singapore (1.11), that might seem impressive. But as Last points out in What to Expect, America's buoyant fertility may be a statistical mirage.
Break the numbers down demographically, and the trends seem less promising. For college-educated women, for instance, the fertility rate is roughly 1.6. As education goes up, fertility shrinks. Hispanic women, meanwhile, pull far more than their own weight, with an average rate of 2.73. The problem? Their fertility numbers are falling fast as well, and continue to plummet as immigrant women assimilate into the larger U.S. culture.
For certain environmentalists, misanthropes, and frustrated motorists in Los Angeles, less people on the planet might sound appealing. But as Last argues, "Very Bad Things" have historically accompanied depopulation, including disease, war, and economic disaster. In the case of the United States and Western Europe, the latter seems to be the most pressing. In the case of our other global neighbors (China, Iran, or Russia, for instance), the second-to-last may loom equally large.
When people, particularly males, start talking about how other people should have more babies, certain ladies start freaking out. In December, when Ross Douthat published a New York Times column titled "More Babies, Please," shrieking erupted in various corners of the Internet. "Douthat," wrote one outraged Slate.com commentator, "is clearly irritated at his countrymen and especially his countrywomen for their persnickety desire to enjoy life rather than see it as a dutiful trudge to the grave."
Upon reading this, I must admit, I laughed out loud. Perhaps it was because, just moments before, my toddler had taken a giant mouthful of applesauce, coyly turned my way, and sneezed. But perhaps it was also because, in its own way, laced between the paragraphs of hysteria (Overpopulation! Climate change! Women chained barefoot in the kitchen!), this snippet of Internet hyperbole really said it all. What does it mean to "enjoy life"? What is our purpose? Why do we have kids, anyway?
Not so long ago, people had children for simple economic and religious reasons. Some people had children just because everyone else was doing it, or, most obviously, because they lacked reliable birth control. Today, "a thousand evolutions in modern life" -- Last cites education, delayed marriage, the Pill, urbanization, abortion, modern capitalism, insane parenting costs, secularization, and even car seat laws -- have shifted our view of children. For some, Last notes, having children is almost an "act of consumption." For others, it's an "act of self-actualization." For many, it's simply a lifestyle choice. The individual, in short, reigns.
But as we've seen, those reasons aren't enough to inspire multiple babies, probably because having kids isn't exactly a trip to the Four Seasons Bora Bora. It's not even a trip to the grungy Super 8 off the local highway -- there, at least, you can sleep in. To have kids primarily as a "lifestyle choice," in fact, would border on insane, considering it's a lifestyle largely devoid of "me time," leisurely breakfasts, spur-of-the-moment plans that don't involve going to Target, and, as my dad liked to hopelessly request when I was a kid, "peace and quiet."
The best arguments for having children, unfortunately, run opposed to modern, secular American culture. Good reasons to have kids tend to be about delayed gratification, prioritizing family, putting others first, transmitting serious values and beliefs, focusing on something larger than yourself, and understanding the difference between joy and fun. Perhaps this is why, as Last notes, "American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one." It's also why, if American fertility continues to slide -- and, as the author notes, that's still an "if" at this point -- there's little the government can do.
What to Expect When No One's Expecting discusses potential policy solutions to the global fertility drought. Many are vague, and few are convincing. When it comes to pro-natalist government policy, welfare-state support for parents seems to work a bit; outright bribery, as recently attempted in Singapore, does not. But the main driver of faltering global fertility -- and the reason Last's book is so interesting -- is based on culture, not policy.
The good news is that culture can be engaged and changed. The bad news is that change can be plodding. America still has time to adjust its priorities in terms of marriage, community, and family. Other countries, having already jumped off the fertility cliff, may not have that luxury.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/
I was an English major in college, and I remember spending several days in a seminar pondering how, with Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain had written three-fourths of a masterpiece, and one-fourth meandering mess. It isn't simply that the book drops off in quality; the end of Huckleberry Finn actually reads like a different novel than the preceding two hundred pages. Tom Sawyer and other new characters show up. Pointless adventures take place. A happy ending is tacked on.
It's amazing how similar this is to Django Unchained. In Tarantino's film, it's antebellum America and two morally superior men, one black, one white, travel through the wilderness -- a metaphor for freedom -- and deal with the evil of racism. In Mark Twain there are Huck and Slave Jim, in Tarantino Doctor Schultz, a white dentist and bounty hunter, and Django, a slave he sets free. Both Jim and Django want to be reunited with their wives, and will go through hell to do it. Southern whites are depicted as nefarious, barbaric and stupid.
In both cases the renderings of the natural world, and the world of slavery, are mesmerizing. It's been years since I read Huckleberry Finn, but I still remember the magical scenes with Huck and Jim on the raft, especially the ones at night. Tarantino's shots of the mountains of the American West are equally gorgeous. And both Twain and Tarantino reveal the micro evil of slavery, the quotidian offenses to human dignity and small details of life in a chattel system.
In fact, it is here that Tarantino is downright brilliant. There are whippings, beatings, near castrations and gallons of blood in Django Unchained, but what struck me were the small touches that revealed the ridiculousness and stupidity of slavery. The dinner scene at the plantation house of Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is devastating in its details, from a simple shot of a row of slaves serving dinner while standing in front of the lush red wallpaper to the amazing performance by Samuel L. Jackson as a house slave Stephen. As in the early pages of Huckleberry Finn, the pacing is perfect, the tone flawless, and the plot enrapturing.
And then, it all goes bad. Very bad. Somebody needs to quietly take Quentin Tarantino into a room and explain to him that he actually has negative charisma -- that when he appears on screen in one of his own movies, the film doesn't just stop cold, it immediately sinks into a negative zone (he also needs to push himself back from the craft services table). In Pulp Fiction, it was Tarantino's cameo as a drug dealer who stood there and said the n-word for two minutes. In Django Unchained, he appears as the same character, only in a different setting, this time as an Australian slave trader. It's exactly like the late appearance of Tom Sawyer in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- an unwanted character from a previous work by the creator that almost ruins, or perhaps does ruin, a masterpiece.
When the film kept going after what should have been the natural climax of Django Unchained, I actually found myself doing what I consider a criminal offense -- I began talking in a movie theater. Not obnoxiously, and very much sotto voce, but I began to argue with Tarantino the way I used to argue with Mark Twain at the point when The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins to fall apart. "No, no, no," I said. "You have a near-masterpiece on your hands. Stop. Please. Roll credits. Stop."
But of course, it's Tarantino, so there has to be a bloodbath, and climax stacked upon climax stacked upon climax. It was like watching someone create a magnificent banquet and then stand on the table and piss on it. Mark Twain, of course, wrote many great short stories. Tarantino's next film should be 45 minutes long, and with no blood. Just to see if he can do it.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
It turned out that it wasn't the New Yorker's time. Tina Brown left in 1998 and was replaced by David Remnick, who had brought the magazine back by going back to the standards that once made it great: long, well reported stories on interesting subjects and salient criticism of the current arts scene.
Newspapers also have life cycles. And maybe it's time for the Washington Post to die.
The Post recently fired its editor, Marcus Brauchli, apparently because he didn't get along with Post publisher Katherine Weymouth. But all the inside baseball about the Brauchli ignores the big picture.
The typical accusation about the Post and its decline over the last several years is that the paper is too liberal. The problem is even more fundamental than that. The Post's writers and editors no longer have any idea what makes an interesting story. It's as if a hospital hired doctors who did not know the human body. I genuinely think the problem is that simple, and that profound.
For instance, I have in front of me a copy of the Post from Sunday, December 2, 2012. Here are some of the stories and editorials that are in the paper:
Here are some of the book reviews in the Book World section:
The problem isn't liberal bias. The problem is that the writers and editors of the Washington Post are just stone cold boring. Honestly, reread some of those story selections. Holograms. Cheers for gay marriage. Dull book reviews of boring books that cover topics that have been covered for decades. (And seriously, a book about the Dallas Cowboys? In the Washington Post?)
The one that truly baffles me is the Arts section spread about the Kennedy Center honorees. When I saw it I literally tried to imagine a reader in Washington -- or anywhere else -- actually seeing those profiles and being excited to read them. Is there anyone who doesn't already know a lot about David Letterman and Led Zeppelin?
Again, this isn't about bias. It's about terrible story selection. The Post hires people who just aren't very interesting, to write on topics that have been covered to death for years.
In the last couple decades the Post has made the same mistake the New Yorker made when it hired Tina Brown in 1992. Instead of sticking with its strength, well-reported stories and incisive cultural criticism, the New Yorker dumbed things down. The stories became shorter and fluffier, and they tried stunts like bringing in guest editors -- the low point being the issue edited by Roseanne Barr.
In the digital age, this is the worst thing you could do. As the web was exploding with information and convenience, the Post decided to cut back coverage.
Last week here are some of the things that I enjoyed:
Now remind me again, why should I subscribe to the Post?
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
This is the theme of Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing, a wise, beautiful, and perhaps revolutionary book by Christopher West. West is an expert in the Theology of the Body, the remarkable series of lectures about human sexuality given in1985 by Pope John Paul II about human sexuality.
West starts with an obvious but important observation: human beings are creatures of desire. We are filled with passion and longing. This is how God made us. We ache for something. It's why we love rock and roll and sex and art. West writes gracefully and with a vast knowledge of popular culture, and he convincingly makes the case -- which, it should be said, others have also made -- that a lot of our popular culture is a healthy expression of this desire. U2's lead singer Bono called the band's song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" "a gospel song for a restless spirit."
According to West, Christianity should celebrate our passions, and our sexual longings, provided that we truly understand what they are, how to respond to them, and ultimately what they point to.
God wants us to take pleasure in drinking, laughing, music, making love and eating good food, provided that we understand that these things are not God in themselves -- that they are finite things that point to the infinite, to the heavenly celebration to come. We can enjoy them if we do not make idols out of them.
West argues that we have three ways to deal with our longing: as a stoic, as an addict, or as a mystic.
The stoic "tries to avoid the pain of desiring more than this life has to offer by choosing not to want too much, by shutting desire down." This, of course, was preached by many in the Catholic Church for years. This wasn't totally wrong. Particularly in a decadent culture, It's important to live a countercultural life of self-denial. Yet Jesus came as a bridegroom, after all. He came with a heart burning with passion.
After the stoic, the second way of dealing with our longing is as an addict. As West puts it, "the addict tries to avoid the pain of wanting more than this life has to offer by gorging on the things this life does have to offer, trying to suck infinity out of finite things."
But finite things can never satisfy our desire for the infinite. West compares this lifestyle to fast food -- something we consume impulsively, and that does not truly feed us.
The right way to order our desire, says West, is the third way: the way of the mystic. The mystic is the one who "allows himself to feel the deepest depths of human desire and chooses to ‘stay in the pain' of wanting more than this life has to offer." Having gone through many purifying trials (or "dark nights of the soul"), the mystic "is able to do without the many pleasures of this world, and at the same time rejoice in all the true pleasures of this world without idolizing them."
West poetically elaborates: "For the mystic, the true pleasures of this world are a welcome but only dim foreshadowing of the ecstasy that awaits him in the life to come. He can live within the ache, or wound of love, because of his living hope that his soul shall be satisfied with a banquet, a banquet that lasts forever and truly fulfills all his desires. A mystic is someone who has been captivated by the fragrance and beauty of divine love, and nothing can thwart his or her desire for ever deeper intimacy with the Divine Lover. God calls us all to this intimate union with him."
Fill These Hearts is an important, passionate, and grace-filled book. It should be required reading for every teenage, and their parents.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
The most famous of the characters is Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter who covered up mass starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In The Party Line, Duranty is not painted in broad strokes, but, like the other characters, in crayon. Konstantin Oumansky, the director of the Soviet Press Office, is right out of a 1960s James Bond movie, except with less dimension. Pim Fortuyn, a Dutch politician, is based on a real person, but it's hard to believe that the real Fortuyn, a gay man, was so incapable of having a single conversation without hitting on the person he was talking to. Katya, Duranty's Russian wife, doesn't say much. Which may be a good thing, because the dialogue in The Party Line falls flat on every page.
The play is in two acts and 17 scenes. In each brief scene, the lights come up, the characters all act in ways that are supposed to reveal their character, then the lights go down. Duranty is a boozer and a womanizer. The Russians are either starving peasants or bureaucrats. The women are barely there. I'm not a liberal and am well aware of the American left's appalling sympathies for communism (my documentary project proves this), but The Party Line never answers a crucial question: Why did these people become communists?
Playwrights Longin and Simon simply have them talking about the worker's state and the new paradise, but there is never any exposition on how they came to believe in the Soviet system. Letting even one of the characters explain their faith in communism would make their subsequent disillusionment or downfall that much more poignant.
The great espionage novelist Charles McCarry once read an unpublished novella I had written in college. He said he liked it, but that "you hate your antagonist too much." It's a bad idea to make the bad guy all bad, he said. Without any humanizing trait, the villain just becomes cardboard; even Heath Ledger's Joker had moments of humor and pathos. The Party Line cries out for a speech, and maybe more than one, about why Duranty became a communist. He suffered during the Great Depression. He had a loss in life that he never got over. Something.
This leads to what is perhaps The Party Line's greatest flaw: the misuse, or rather the lack of use, of Aleister Crowley. Crowley was an occultist, bisexual and heroin addict. When he was young, Duranty befriended Crowley and became a devotee. Crowley appears exactly twice in The Party Line, at the beginning and the end. His role is not even clear -- he just kind of appears, does some magic tricks, then forces Duranty to drink a potion made out of the organs of Duranty's late first wife. Yet Duranty is sarcastically dismissive of Crowley, which further defuses any potential power that Crowley's character may have had.
It's a failure that indicates that the playwrights did not think through what they were doing. Because there is a clear connection between the political depersonalization of communism and the sexual dehumanization of Crowley and his modern day descendants. Both treat people as if they are spare parts to be used, or pulverized if they resist. The Party Line does nothing to draw this out. In fact it completely ignores it.
One is left wondering why Crowley is even in the play at all. Or even why the play was written.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Nieli explains it well: "According to the personalistic philosophy human beings are each individually centers of Meaning and Mystery. They are not Hegelian moments in a collective group history, nor are they faceless, depersonalized abstractions upon which to project one's stereotyped image of a group."
He notes this does not mean that human beings to not organize themselves in groups and societies and governments -- he calls them "collective and communal activities" -- just that there is a deeply spiritual uniqueness, mystery and metaphysical meaning to each human person: "Human persons according to the personalistic philosophy have an indissolvable unity to their being, to their life and thoughts, their actions and feelings, which groups of human beings simply do not have, even the most intimate group of the family."
When I read this, I could easily bring it down to my own experience. I run a summer journalism program for high school students at Georgetown University and substitute teach during the year, and my work as a photographer and journalist constantly brings me into contact with different people. And at the risk of sounding corny I can say with absolute certainty that no two are alike.
That sounds like Hallmark sentiment, but when you experience it everyday, it takes on profound mystical meaning. Here's an Asian kid who loves football and won't wear sneakers and has a scar on his shoulder where he fell off his bike. Or one of my Irish Catholic buddies from high school who was a football star but cries at movies and once passed out from laughing too hard. Or a model I just photographed who loves John Cheever's stories. Or the left-wing Occupy member who has beautiful eyes and is too gentle to hurt anything. The Republican with allergies and who moves punk.
They all have different stories, they all come from unique strange and wonderful families, they all have unexpected quirks. They are all individuals. No two alike.
It's not possible to overestimate what will be lost if America loses this concept -- that is, not just the concept that we are all individuals, but that there is a religious mystery at the heart of our individual uniqueness, and that if the state begins to obliterate that we are in dire trouble. The white postwar American conformity of the mid 20th century is being replaced by a multicultural conformity that is possibly more oppressive. Liberals have effectively turned their own acolytes into single-thinking, Borg-like groups.
Obama's campaign played on this, appealing to women, who they believed only think about birth control; and Latinos, who they thought only think about immigration, and blacks; who they thought only think about race. Sadly, many members of these groups have indeed fallen into the trap of groupthink. Equally disturbing is how dismissive the new Obama majority and the media have been in trashing "old white men."
Which brings us to Soledad O'Brien. I now know what makes me so sad about the CNN anchor. I have followed O'Brien since her start on the "Today" show in the early 1990s. O'Brien is the daughter of an Australian father and an Afro-Cuban mother. At first she seemed like a extremely bright young reporter and producer who had savvy and enough intellect to follow some important and interesting projects. Like everyone else in America, she had the possibility of being an individual.
Yet I have watched how O'Brien, a Harvard graduate, has repressed any hint of mystery or surprise in favor of the cold, obsequious pandering of the politically correct cog. Her endless Black/Asian/Latina/Left-Handed/Pink-Eyed in America series is a walled-off cul-de-sac. Her new, more shrill interview tactics against conservatives who appear on her show is phony and laughable.
In essence, whatever odd and wonderful path O'Brien's life and mind were going to take her on was plowed over by the dictatorship of Race Awareness that overwhelmed her at Harvard (she had planned on being a doctor). O'Brien has claimed that her job is "to give voice to the voiceless." What a narrow and clenched way to live. O'Brien has walled herself off from reporting on so many things: a bizarre cult movie she may love; the state of modern Irish poetry; the exact day in the 1990s when David Letterman stopped being funny.
What is ultimately so tragic about the loss of personalism is that when the state declares that each person is not a unique and special creation by God it can start separating people unto groups. Those groups usually get labeled those worthy of respect, and even of life itself, and those not worthy. The torrent of tweeted death threats against Mitt Romney before the election do not augur well for the future.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
That's what I kept wondering as I plodded through My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir by Colleen Carroll Campbell. Campbell is a Catholic journalist and television host. She has written a very boring memoir.
Reading it, I kept thinking of something I heard a rock and roll musician say in a club once. Two male members of his band, the singer and the drummer, had fallen in love and were in the bathroom having a quarrel. The musician ruefully shook his head. "This isn't why I joined a band," he said. "Where are the girls? Where are the drugs?"
Indeed. The main problem with My Sisters the Saints is a serious case of First World Problems. First World Problems is a term for problems western people have, like the failure of cell phone service, that don't really register with people in the rest of the world -- or even with most people in the United States.
Here are the basics: Colleen Carol Campbell was born and raised in the St Louis area, the daughter of devout Catholics who worked for the Church. From the beginning she was a popular and good looking girl. She wrote her first resume in sixth grade. She got a scholarship to Marquette university, married a doctor (while on a $50,000 fellowship for a conservative organization), and went to work as a speechwriter for the George W. Bush administration. She has her own television show and has won many awards for her journalism.
In short: Tommy Lee this ain't. If anything, Campbell is Tracy Flick, the iron willed social climber and politician in the film Election. Spiritual memoirs are supposed to be journeys from darkness to light, but the lack of depravity in My Sisters the Saints is boring.
In the first chapter, "Party Girl," Campbell describes a post-party scene in her college dorm. She and her roommates are hungover. Still, there is a beacon in the darkness: "I was a scholarship student carrying a near-perfect GPA, on track to land a prestigious summer internship in Washington, D.C., and serving as editor-in-chief of the campus magazine. I had a resume packed with honor society memberships....I attended Mass every Sunday. When it came to sex, I abided by the letter of the law I had been taught in my Catholic home -- no sex outside marriage -- thought not its spirit."
After college, Campbell goes from success to success. She gets a newspaper job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where at 24 she became the youngest ever member of the paper's editorial board. Then comes the Phillips Journalism Fellowship, $50,000 to write about "the new faithful," young people who are embracing religious orthodoxy. In the course of her research, she meets her doctor husband John.
Campbell writes as if all of this just kind of happens, and expresses surprise at her success, but her type is well known. She's the ruthless overachiever (she dispatches her first college boyfriend with Terminator-like efficiency). The sections of My Sisters the Saints where Campbell complains about how understanding her husband is, and how stressful are the rigors of life at the top of Washington food chain, are particularly galling.
Of course, there was never any chance of failure, any more than there was a chance that Tracy Flick would lose the election. After the White House Campbell is picked up by a conservative think tank in D.C. Like all too many in Washington, she'll probably be coasting there for many decades.
Of course, Campbell has problems. There always are in life. Campbell feels unfulfilled by college party life. She admits to suffering from some vanity. Her father suffers from Alzheimer's, and she and her husband get the terrible news that she may be infertile. Dealing with the more serious of her trials constitute the best and most powerful parts of the My Sisters the Saints. To cope, Campbell turns to female saints -- St. Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Edith Stein, Sister Faustina of Poland, Mother Teresa, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Their wisdom and writings provide peace.
Sadly, Campbell seems to not have picked up any writing tips from Teresa of Avila, who is my favorite saint. It was dispiriting to see how many journalism awards Campbell has won. Her prose is lifeless and full of cliches. Her writing sometimes reads like a police report, and doesn't show any skill building suspense, even when she does eventually have children (of course she would have them -- failure is not an option!). It's not surprising that Campbell wrote for a president. They all are cliche geysers, and George W. Bush was no exception.
Catholics, of which I am one, tend to give people like Campbell a pass. After all, Campbell is spreading the faith. She's an attractive spokesperson. But for years I've watched the Catholic Church -- not to mention the conservative conservative movement, which supports Campbell -- promote a lot of mediocre teachers, artists and writers, and at the expense of people will real talent and vision.
We are the church that produced Augustine, Dietrich von Hildebrand and, yes, the female powerhouses who are the subjects of Campbell's memoir. If we want more of them, we need to demand a little less perfection.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Alvare is a brilliant woman and a writer of graceful precision, and the book is worth its price for her essay "Fear of Children." It always amazes me that detractors profile Catholics as people living stunted lives in some kind of fantasyland, when it is thinkers such as Alvare who repeatedly show the courage to strike at the heart of questions about human existence. But then, those same detractors don't read books by Alvare or any other Catholic thinkers.
In the introduction to Breaking Through, Alvare, a well-know public intellectual and law professor, recounts being approached in a hair salon by someone who sighed that Pope Benedict "is terrible on the woman thing." Alvare replied that she was amazed -- she didn't know three people who had actually read what the pope has said about women, and here was one right in front of her. Of course, the person had never read a word Benedict has ever written.
In her contribution, Alvare writes what many people think but are afraid to talk about -- human beings have not only a biological but a psychological and spiritual need to empty themselves in love for another person, and that other person is usually a child. Alvare advocates not just love, but "loving in truth" -- the way to find yourself is to make a gift of yourself.
This is why women, Alvare included, begin to feel anxious at the sound of their biological clock. It's just the way God made us. Alvare finally put aside her fear and had children, and it opened her up to genuine self-giving love.
Of course, people who do not have children can also experience "spiritual maternity." That phrase is from the essay "Finding Joy: The Mystery of Religious Life" by Sister Mary Gabriel of the Sisters of Life. Sister Gabriel is, like Alvare, a wonderful essayist -- intelligent yet understated. She explores how her "spiritual maternity" affects her every time she goes out into the world: "it doesn't matter whether it's the daily Massgoing grandmother who slips me a paper with the names of her grandchildren; the non-Catholic young woman filling her gas next to me who,without hesitation, asks me about her friend who just died on cancer; or the heavy-metal band member on a plane who introduces himself to me....I'm theirs. I'm theirs because I'm God's."
Sister Gabriel explores the history of Catholic women running schools, hospitals, and even parishes. To anyone, like me, who grew up in a Catholic house, it always seems odd when liberal talk about how the Church represses women, when I grew up with Catholic women who were doctors, who ran the school, who both coached and played sports, and on more than one occasion could drink us under the table.
One such strong woman is Dr. Marie Anderson, M.D. Anderson's contribution to Breaking Through is "Contraception: Wrestling with Reality." Anderson is an ob-gyn who had completely rejected the Catholicism of her youth, only to find herself troubled by the the callousness towards life expressed by many of her colleagues, as well as the depression and post-traumatic stress suffered by many women who have abortions.
Like the other contributors, Anderson did not have a spiritual transformation because of some irrational urge to flee from reality, but because she got tired of denying that the reality that she saw in front of her face was showing her evil. She changed because the science and the facts pointed her in that direction. Of course, grace was also involved. But faith and reason worked together. Secular society seems to have lost both.
Most of the other essayists in Breaking Through are as strong as Alvare -- Elise Italiano on Catholic dating (Italiano a first-rate high school teacher whose students rave about her), Rebecca Vitz Cherico on the sex abuse scandal, and Michelle Cretella on same-sex attraction.
I wish I could say that it was some kind of revelation that orthodox Catholic women are sharp reasoners and elegant and perceptive writers. But to anyone familiar with names like Teresa of Avila, Peggy Noonan or Flannery O'Connor, it's just not news. And at its best, Breaking Through belongs in their company.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Mind you, they agree with the arguments. They just don't need to hear them yet again. The problems with liberalism have become so obvious, and indeed so immediately dangerous, that people don't need more angry dissertations. A $16 trillion debt and a government violating the First Amendment safeguard of religious liberty is enough to convince most rational people that the time for talk is over. They don't really need a lot more convincing.
This is a good thing, because it means that conservatives can move into areas aside from non-fiction political tomes, which have traditionally been their strength. Conservatives can now move into writing fiction, making documentaries, maybe even try and get into television. A new website named Liberty Island has just launched with the intent to have more conservatives engage with fiction. Founded by longtime conservative editor Adam Bellow, it will publish conservative fiction, seeing an opening in the liberal publishing world of New York.
It's about time. When I heard about Liberty Island I was working on an article about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the film The Exorcist. The film began as a 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. If Blatty were a young orthodox Catholic today, instead of The Exorcist he may have written a nonfiction book defending the Catholic Church. It would have been easier to write, and would have been published by a conservative or small Catholic publisher -- and would never have had the cultural and artistic impact of the novel.
The promise of Liberty Island is that it will make righties stretch their legs a little bit. It will challenge them to create art, which is much more difficult than a political jeremiad. This may, ironically, argue the conservative case better than nonfiction. More people read The Hobbit, a thrilling adventure about courage and evil, than read National Review.
Still, if the fever for nonfiction right-wing books is passing, it has just offered up a wonderful coda: Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval, a just-published collection of essays by leading conservative authors. The essays were first published in the New Criterion, which is probably the best journal in America. Future Tense contributors include Michael Lewis on 9/11, James Panero on defining what a museum is, Andrew McCarthy on "totalitarian democracy," and David Bentley Hart on the end of religion in the West.
The essays are all uniformly well-written, and make familiar arguments. The overarching theme is that America could very well be in her last days, done in by nihilism, intellectuals, debt, softness in the face of radical Islam and just general spinelessness. The best of the lot is by theologian Hart, who in one paragraph distills exactly what will happen to the United States if the secular left takes over. Talking about cathedrals, Hart make the following observation:
Such places....are only the most concentrated crystallizations of a culture's highest vision of the good, true and beautiful; they are not isolated retreats, set apart from the society around them, but are rather the most intense expressions of that society's rational and poetic capacities. It is under the shelter of the heavens made visible in such places that all of a people's laws and institutions, admirable and defective, take shape, as well as all its arts, civic or private, sacred or profane, festal or ordinary. This is a claim not about private beliefs, or about the particular motives that may have led to any particular law or work of art, but about the conceptual and aesthetic resources that any culture can posses or impart, and those are determined by religious traditions -- by shared pictures of eternity, shared stories of the absolute. This is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless.
Sounds like a great idea for a novel.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Though the President of the Chicago Teachers Union was never mentioned by name, Lewis's interests commanded Barack Obama's attention throughout the night.
Obama opened his plea for another term with a promise to "invest in education and training" by hiring "another 100,000 new math and science teachers." While there was much ado about taxes, President Obama suggested that with the revenue from higher rates on the wealthy, "we're also able to make the investments that are necessary in education or in energy."
By the time moderator Jim Lehrer said "good night" the President had mentioned "teachers" and "education" 14 times. Even though Obama declined to take any public position on last month's strike in Chicago, he made his loyalties known in Denver.
Now that members of the Chicago Teachers Union have ratified a contract, it is clear Obama stands with those who belligerently refuse to pay their fair share. Chicago Public School teachers, who were already the highest paid in the Nation at $76,000 on average, will now enjoy a 17.6 percent pay raise over four years. All the while, teachers will continue to contribute nothing to their health care coverage.
And so, it's no surprise President Obama repeatedly accused Governor Romney of proposing "drastic cuts" to education "by up to 20 percent." It's a charge Romney rejected outright: "I don't want to cut our commitment to education. I wanted to make it more effective and efficient."
Rather than standing with Karen Lewis and the unions, as Obama does, Romney threw his weight behind the taxpayer. Central to Romney's responses on education was choice: "I want the kids that are getting federal dollars...to be able to go to the school of their choice.
"So all federal funds, instead of going to state or to the school district, I'd have go, if you will, follow the child and let the parent and the child decide where to send their student."
The President would have none of that. "Budgets reflect choices," he quipped. But if the President's choice is to hire new teachers at Chicago-level pay or more, there won't be much left for the children.
Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor for RealClearReligion.
That's the only rational reaction to the news that Penguin publishers was paying Ana Marie Cox $81,250 for a book on "a humorous examination of the next generation of political activists." Actually, Penguin's final price for the book was $325,000. The $81,250 was the advance, paid up front to encourage Cox to finish the book.
It's been a few years and Cox has not finished the book, and now Penguin is suing to get their advance back, plus $50,000 in interest.
But honestly, what the hell was Penguin thinking? Cox became a political analyst because she scandalized squares in Washington by making dick jokes as the editor of Wonkette. That's it. Her first book, the 2006 novel Dog Days, didn't come close to earning back its $275,000 price tag. If Penguin can't do research and basic math, they deserve to lose their shirts.
I was once told by none other than Anne Rice that if I ever had to opportunity for a big advance on a book, I should turn it down and ask for a smaller one. The thinking is obvious and sound: with a smaller advance, particularly in the age of e publishing and diminishing expectations among publishers, there's not nearly as much pressure to deliver a blockbuster.
That way, you can write the book you want. If the book doesn't do well, the publisher hasn't lost a huge pile of money. If it does great, everybody wins.
In either case, it helps if the author goes in with a good idea. It's astounding to me that Cox actually sold the idea of a book about "the next generation of political activists." Was there an outline? A sample chapter? I've turned her concept over in my mind and no matter how I approach it I simply cannot make the idea interesting.
It's not an idea that has absolutely no potential whatsoever. I can see reading it as an article in, say, Politico. But a 300 page book?
What was Penguin thinking? I can only guess that because Cox has a massive twitter following, the editors at Penguin thought it would translate into book sales. This is like giving a band a lucrative record contract without knowing if the members know how to play. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
If you're going to pay that much money for a one-sentence idea, best to make sure that the idea is a strong one. For the past year I've been working on a novel about a guy who is cheesed off at the media decides to kill journalists if they make more than three mistakes. He monitors their articles and broadcasts and on the third mistake, he hunts them down and kills them
You could sell the idea to Hollywood in about five minutes. You can instantly visualize the story, the suspense of the journalists who become more and more obsessive about fact-checking their copy and their live broadcast. Of course, the deeper point would be about the evil and stupidity of killing, how what seems to a troubled mind like the solution to a problem can usually end badly. I don't claim that Dead Line is high art, but I do think it could earn back a reasonable advance and go on to be a successful film. Right now I'm negotiating to have it serialized on Liberty Island, unless a publisher shows interest before then.
I also know that I could finish the thing for a fraction of what Cox has gotten -- hell, for the interest on what she has gotten. But then, I didn't go on Rachel Maddow and make double-entendre "tea bagging" jokes for five minutes. I didn't create a juvenile, Kardashianesque frisson that was cute for about three days ten years ago and has proven to be much more Katie Perry than Gore Vidal. Like, OMG.
I also haven't had a lot of editors like the ones at Penguin, who are idiots.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
I should have seen it coming. I should have been smarter. But I was a sucker. A sucker for a pretty face and the promise of hope and change.
I was working in a bar when I met her. I had just gotten back from the war. The therapy and the medicine were helping me cope.
Then I met... her. I was bartending in Washington, D.C., where I had settled after I got back from Afghanistan. Things were going good. I was making some good tips, and was freelancing for the book section of the Washington Examiner. My speciality was crime. Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, George Pelecanos, Raymond Chandler, Donald Westlake -- the great ones.
They created worlds of sex, violence, and despair. And my favorite publisher was Hard Case. They publish pulp the way God intended -- classic covers featuring hot babes, action from the first page, and a world where people have been pushed to the limit, either by their past or circumstances beyond their control.
The publish both classic works that have been neglected, and newer writers like Stephen King. They just published The Cocktail Waitress, the last book written by James M. Cain. It's a good one, and takes place right here in D.C.
I read my Hard Case books when things were slow at the Billy Bar, where I was working when I met her. It's a nondescript place on Georgia Avenue. The crowd is a mix of old-timers who grew up in the neighborhood and the new young hipsters who are gentrifying.
The owner, Billy, is a fat middle-ages Irishman who came to America in 1950. He's not a bad guy to work for -- even if he's "borrowed" a couple of my Hard Case books and not returned them. He loves the covers -- and who wouldn't? Great saturated color and terrific babes rendered by masters like Terry Beatty and Richard Farrell.
It was September of 2008 when she walked into the Billy Bar. I was reading House Dick by E. Howard Hunt, who had been a pretty good novelist before he went away for Watergate.
I looked up right as she was walking in. The first thing I noticed were her legs. They were long and strong -- you could tell she was a runner. Probably spent a lot of time on the canal. She had long red hair and skin the color of coffee. She was a mix of Irish and Mexican -- a toxic mix, as it turned out.
She ordered a martini and glanced at my book. "Oh, House Dick," she said. "A good story, but not one of Hunt's best. I prefer American Spy."
She stayed until closing -- and after. Her name was Maritza Connelly. Her mother was Mexican, her father Irish. She was an editor at the Washington Post. The Post is the big boy on the block in D.C., even in the days of newspaper fire sales. We talked about books, about politics, about D.C. And over the course of that night, which we spent together, and the next four years, she was my world.
She read books by Jonathan Franzen and A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie. Slowly, she convinced me that there was no need to read Hard Case books anymore. The night Obama was elected, we made love in her U Street condo to the sounds of a city celebrating on the street below.
"It's a new era," she whispered in the dark. "It's a time for hope and change. You don't need those dark macho books anymore. The world is a place of light now."
Before the election she had talked about moving to Mexico. Now she was staying in America.
Slowly, over the course of time, I stopped reading Hard Case. I found myself reading Maritza's copies of Anne Tyler and Nora Ephron, and watching Oprah's Book Club. I left my job at the Billy Bar and joined Maritza's book club that met at Politics and Prose book store. I thought about going to law school.
I read The Piano.
Then, in 2011, I got the news. Hard Case was closing down.
Then, as soon as it had started, it was over. I woke up one morning and she was gone. She had run up my credit cards and taken her books. When I checked with the Post, they said Maritza had moved to Mexico. I was left with a huge bill from Politics and Prose.
I was a sucker. It turned out that nothing had changed -- in fact, things were probably worse than ever.
But Hard Case didn't close down. Their fans and even Stephen King insisted they stay in business. Now I'm back to bartending at the Billy Bar.
Some nights I wonder what the hell I'm going to do to get out of this hole that was dug by hope and change. And the city seems a very dark place.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
I was not prepared for how completely I would by absorbed by My Friend Dahmer, which recounts author Backderf's high school friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer, who would become one of America's most nightmarish serial killers. This is a haunting book. Backderf -- henceforth referred to at Derf, because that's what everyone calls him and he calls himself -- is well known among readers of alternative weeklies, fifty of which publish his weekly strip "The City."
I have been reading "The City" for more than a decade, but "the City" did not prepare me for My Friend Dahmer. Derf first met Jeffrey Dahmer in seventh grade in Ohio, where both men grew up. Dahmer was "the loneliest kid I ever met," according to Derf. One of Derf and Dahmer's former classmates praised My Friend Dahmer for showing "the teenage years of an American monster."
But what truly terrified me down to my soul after finishing My Friend Dahmer is how Derf so convincingly portrays Dahmer as a deeply sick man who was all but screaming for help (actually, there were times when he seemed to be literally screaming for help). This is not to excuse what he did, or to lapse into psychobabble and victimology. But what Derf explores with such pathos is that Dahmer was desperate for help and couldn't get it.
From an early age Dahmer had a fascination with dissection and the insides of animals. The son of a chemist, he would find roadkill and dissolve the skin in acid. In high school he threw fake epileptic fits and for laughs imitated the gestures and speech of someone with cerebral palsy.
He also began drinking to control the compulsions he felt. Dahmer was homosexual, and had fantasies involving sex with men and murder. The alcohol numbed those -- for a while.
Derf was a witness to Dahmer's self-medicating, and one of the most chilling scenes in My Friend Dahmer occurs when Derf is driving Dahmer and two other guys to the local mall. They've paid Dahmer to pitch fake fits in public and generally cause trouble. In the 10-minute drive to the mall, Dahmer sat in the back seat and polished off an entire six-pack of beer.
It was at this point that Derf knew that something was wrong with Dahmer, even if the teachers and administrators at Revere High did not. Looking back from our era of zero tolerance in schools, it amazing to realize just how slack things were in America's public schools in the 1970s.
While Dahmer's parents were bickering at home, on their way to a divorce, Dahmer would stay at school long after hours, getting drunk outside the building. The teachers didn't notice -- in fact, one of them once bragged in class about his skill in rolling a joint. "Where were the adults?" Derf asks. Indeed.
When his cries for help didn't get noticed and his parents divorced, Dahmer spun out of control. He moved to Milwaukee, and eventually would murder 17 people. He would dismember his victims, have sex with them after they were dead, and put their body parts in acid.
Derf, who ends his story after Dahmer's first murder, tells the story with more subtlety than a novelist and certainly Hollywood would. My Friend Dahmer, like most of Derf's work, is black and white, and it masterfully uses shadow to convey the darkness that was slowly swallowing its lead character. I left the Small Press Expo with a stack of books and comics, but it was the one that I could not put down.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Wolcott's extended essay is about Gore Vidal, the great American writer who recently passed away at 86. Wolcott argues that with the passing of Vidal, American literature and journalism has been left in the the unoriginal hands of bloggers and wordy, writing-workshop soundalikes. Wolcott lists the major writers who passed away this year: Nora Ephron, Andrew Sarris, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Helen Gurley Brown.
Who today can replace them? Ana Marie Cox? David Weigel? Toure?
I remember when I was in college and came across Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night. The book is a self-proclaimed attempt at "history as novel, the novel as history." It is Mailer's 300-page account of a 1968 anti-war march at the Pentagon. The book is grandiose, eloquent, bug angry, funny and often sloppy and self-indulgent. But it is bold. It has blood in its veins.
It's not the kind of thing that Ezra Klein, or any of the other overly cautious young punditry, would even attempt. Gore Vidal wrote essays, (large) novels, plays, speeches, and even appeared in a few movies. His face-offs on television with Mailer and William F. Buckley still make for amazing television (on YouTube).
How did the revolution of freedom that was provided by the digital revolution result in more cowed and cautious writers? To be sure, the Coulters and Krugmans are willing to say more outrageous things, and the political name calling can get nasty. But there's no real stretching, no Big, Important books or novels being published by these people.
The Internet seems to both foster freedom yet stifle growth and ambition. One of my favorite bloggers goes by the name Allahpundit. He writes for the popular conservative site Hot Air. Allahpundit often offers deeply penetrating political analysis, and his posts ring with wit. Fifty years ago he would not be anonymous. He also would be expected to eventually up his game, produce a book or even a novel, do attempt something grand. Yet in 20 years his posts may not look that different than they do now.
With the passing of Vidal, argues Wolcott, a particular creativity and set of skills has vanished:
Anti-intellectualism has become the pride and prejudice of some of our slickest Ivy League graduates, who have consecrated their brilliance into slumming upward in the entertainment industry (ensuring that those groin jokes in sitcoms really zing), and Slate/Salon wunderkinds who shy away from difficult art as if afraid their dicks might fall off....The bulging brains that segment producers prefer to book today are pop sociologists and techno-babblers who can hold TED audiences and corporate retreats spellbound, pundits who can condense the latest findings in political science or social research into Flintstone vitamins -- popularizers whose worldliness doesn't extend beyond the Amtrak corridor and whose sense of history began the day their were hatched.
I've been reading a couple new novels, Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. They are both good novels by accomplished young writers. But they lack the largeness and creativity of the novels of Vidal and his peers. Forty years ago you knew when you were reading a book by Gore Vidal, or Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion or Philip Roth. They had flaws that were particular to the human beings who wrote them, but that made them human.
Reading Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, I was dazzled by the linguistic virtuosity, but it seemed like it could have been written by any star pupil from America's better writing workshops. It was a brilliant juggling act that is missing a heart. Here is Esquire on Telegraph Avenue: "Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women."
I'm sorry, but I don't read novels to see circus acts. I'll take the over-the-top but crazy-inventive fiction of Tom Wolfe, whose new novel Back to Blood is being released in October.
It's not surprising that Wolfe, who at 81 is still a more compelling writer than people half his age, is a contemporary of Gore Vidal. Both men came from a time, postwar America, when the single sine qua non for a man of letters was individuality and creativity. These writers wrote huge novels, big books of essays, plays, poems, political speeches.
Call James Wolcott a grump, but who around today is Vidal's equal? Jonathan Franzen? Maureen Dowd?
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
We are, of course, far past the idea that comics are for kids. This is not only due to people like Robert Downey, Jr., and Christopher Nolan, but even more sophisticated artists like Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. I have watched as these artists went from the fringes of the comic book world to the pages of the New Yorker. The New Yorker will be represented at the Small Press Expo (SPE) by Francoise Mouly, the editor of the magazine's annual cartoon issue.
I will be reporting from the expo, but going in I definitely do have a favorite publisher who will be there: Seattle's Fantagraphics Books. I can get into more of their titles when I see what they bring to the Bethesda Marriott, the site of the con, next week.
For now I'll just review a fascinating and wonderful upcoming release from Fantagraphics: The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, a book written and drawn by Noah Van Sciver. It's a book about the depression, or "hypo," that Lincoln suffered from, particularly the period around 1837 when the future president was a debt-ridden 28 year-old.
Van Sciver's black-and-white art is a bit raw and primitive, but it is a style that perfectly fits the story being told. We follow Lincoln as he goes to his law practice, then meets and courts Mary Todd. Van Scriver is smart enough to know the power of the story he is telling, and he lets it unfold with understatement.
There are no superhero flourishes at all -- in fact, The Hypo is at times more harrowing realistic than many novels about Lincoln. This is especially the case when depicting the suffering Lincoln endured while doctors tried to cure his anxiety and depression with hot and cold baths and bloodletting.
Again, there may still be some holdouts who think this is strong stuff for a comic book -- this even after Batman's darkness and Iron Man's alcoholism. Yet the smaller independent comic book presses have always been places where the most awkward experiences in life are rendered.
Daniel Clowes, who started at Fantagraphics and has seen two of his books, Ghost World and Art School Confidential, become films, focused many of his early strips on the awkwardness and embarrassment of adolescence. Ditto Peter Bagge, whose comic Hate! satirized hipsters in Seattle.
These books and the medium they are delivered in have only grown more beautiful and relevant in the age of the Kindle. Most books I want to read these days I download. But you can't download Maus. You can't download Art School Confidential.
And this is a good thing, because there is no tactile pleasure like sitting on your sofa holding a good book that is taking you on a journey -- a book like Noah Van Sciver's The Hypo.
I'm not giving away any spoilers when I say that ultimately Lincoln and Mary Todd get married. Through the entire story, Todd was a lodestar to which Lincoln kept returning. Van Sciver's portrayal of her is both accurate and subtle.
He doesn't overemphasize Todd's intellect and independence to score a postmodern and anachronistic point about feminism, but simply reveals her to be a bright person with a tremendous enthusiasm for politics. Her meeting Lincoln and their courtship makes their respect for each other clear.
It's an engaging read from a wonderful American publisher. We'll see how the rest of the competition stacks up on the weekend of September 15.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Rachel Maddow, a hectoring ideologue, goes on David Letterman and is called "the smartest person in the world." Maureen Dowd pens some imbecilic singsongy column, and Howard Kurtz expressed disappointment that someone of her "intelligence" would do such a thing. To Chris Matthews, anyone who diagnoses the craziness of the conservatives is "just a brilliant, brilliant person." At this rate Ed Shultz will win the Nobel Prize for literature next year.
One of my prized possession is the Library of America's two-volume collection of H.L. Mencken's Prejudices. Prejudices were a series of essay collections that Mencken, one of the greatest journalists of the 20th century, published between 1919 and 1927. Here are some of the topics Mencken covered: The American Magazine; The Genealogy of Etiquette; Art and Sex; Edgar Allen Poe; FDR; Broadway; Opera; the Nature of Love; Marx; The Life of Man; Education; The Nature of Liberty. And that's just the first volume. I cannot name one journalist or pundit today who could hold forth on all of those topics with any kind of perspicacity.
One of the best essays in the Mencken collection is "Journalism in America." In 1924, as Mencken notes, journalism was becoming more and more popular and more and more professional. It wasn't considered a hobby for the aimless and artistic, and advertisers, cowed by growing circulations, were increasingly reluctant to try and dictate coverage. It was a fat time for newspapers. Thus, the journalist began to think of himself not as an artist or intellectual (i.e., Mark Twain) but as a professional man.
Mencken sums up the transition and the journalist's new view of himself: "Once [the journalist] thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as what Beethoven called a free artist - a gay adventurer careening down charming highways of the world, the gutter ahead of him but ecstasy in his heart. Now he thinks of himself as a fellow of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn to the service of the born and the unborn, heavy with duties to the Republic and his profession."
This was before the age of blogging, which has made the problem worse. We now have journalists who are not artists and know very little, yet who pass themselves off as intellectuals. Tom Brokaw has achieved an elder statesman status, yet he is not wise, and his books are not very literate. Dan Rather can barely write. Most conservative bloggers can write about nothing but politics, and many do that badly. This has to do both with illiteracy and ageism; many right-wing sites hire pretty blonde girls who are 20 years old and and have no idea what Watergate was, much less who Mencken was.
Mencken, born in 1880, was in his forties when he started writing Prejudices. His work influenced an entire generation of artists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said "Mencken has done more for the national letters than any man alive." (These days it's the young who are dictating news and opinion to the old.)
When I was growing up in Washington I had the great fortune to have met, on several occasions, a man named Luis Marden. At this point I'm supposed to explain who Luis Marden was and what he did, but that is not easy. Marden was an explorer, pioneer photographer, writer, navigator, artist, explorer and intellectual. He worked at National Geographic for most of his life, which spanned most of the 20th century.
Marden was friends with my father, who was an editor at the magazine. On the occasions when Marden was at our house, we thought of him not as a scientist or explorer or writer or photographer, but as a man with whom we could speak with about any topic, from baseball to dolphins to revolutions. Can you say the same thing about Ana Marie Cox?
Of course not. And yet, Cox still appears on television regularly, honored as an expert of some kind about something when all she is is a childish ideologue and a hack.
So let's just put an end to it. Call them analysts. Call them pundits. But to coo over people like Frank Rich and Monica Crowley as brilliant intellectuals is to denude the term of meaning.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
There are a few people out there who think there may be some spiritual lessons to be gained living in recessionary, "new normal" Obama America. But it may be too little, too late.
Christianity has failed in America. It becomes obvious when you step back an observe the big picture. And The Selfless Way of Christ, which is less a book than an essay with reproduced art by Vincent van Gogh, provides the big picture.
The President of the United States is a man who did not want to permit babies who had survived abortion to be given medical care. Not nearly so bad, but of genuine concern, is the philosophy among conservatives that we can simply create a utopia of an ever-expanding economy until everyone is well fed and happy.
Caught between the two poles of an evil, death-dealing regime that supports infanticide, and a consumer economy that eventually attempts to commodify all things, Americans have said, "yes!"
Yes to the false uplift of Barack Obama, which is really about the audience wanting to feel virtuous than about any concrete policy. Yes to the McMansions and Joel Osteen, with his snake oil and glimmering smile. Yes to abortion. Yes to three cars. Yes to Jersey Shore.
Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest. He died in 1996, but his works continue to be published posthumously. This isn't detritus cranked out to make a buck, but wisdom that is ever ancient, ever new.
"Regardless of the particular shape we give to our lives," he writes, "Jesus' call to discipleship is primal, all-encompassing, all-inclusive, demanding a total commitment. One cannot be a little bit for Christ, give him some attention, or make him one of many concerns."
And Jesus is the ultimate example of a downwardly-mobile life. Born into poverty, anonymous for 30 years, then beaten and tortured to death while naked on a cross. As Nouwen notes, it is cause for serious and genuine reflection to ponder exactly what is meant by Jesus wanting us to live like him.
If taken literally, it means radical self-abandonment. Even if not taken as seriously, it still means that we should shun not only the culture of death but the culture of greed. We must resist the temptations not only of to be "relevant," "spectacular," and "powerful." We must embrace downward-mobility: "Our vocation as Christians is to follow Jesus on his downward path and to become witnesses to God's compassion in the concrete situation of our time and place."
I have long believed that there is no hope for a country that would kill its own babies. But a real tipping point came when Obama was elected. The night of the 2008 election parts of my liberal hometown of Washington, D.C. exploded with joy. There were spontaneous parades in the street, strangers hugging strangers, and chanting.
A lot of it was appropriate for the election of our first black president, but there was also a cultish fanaticism to the festivities. These were people who had been promised heaven, and they thought they were about to collect.
And now that the dream has been dashed after four long years, have we learned any lessons? Have we returned to contemplation, and to not only accepting limits but celebrating them, as they are an imitation of Christ?
The state of the political parties does not give one a lot of hope. One side is absolutely freaked out at the prospect that someone may get elected who will let people keep their own money and might hint that we should stop killing babies, and the other side wants to restore the economy to where it was -- that is, people buying a lot of crap they don't need so that can try and feel the void where God once was.
The line for the iPhone 5 is going to be stretch from sea to sea.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Today, The End of Men reports, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees, hold more than half of all managerial and professional jobs, and are soaring in the ranks of medical, law, and business schools.
Forty years ago, American women brought in 2 to 6 percent of their family's income; now the average is 42 percent. One out of two girls now participates in sports, compared to one in 27 in 1971 -- and in survey after survey, today's not-so-delicate young ladies easily match the "assertiveness" scores of their testosterone-laden peers.
Even in the brave new world of designer babies, women rule: 75 percent of requests for a new method of sperm selection, Microsort, are for girls.
"Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of 'em graduate from college," biologist Ronald Ericsson, who first isolated male and female-producing sperm in the 1970's, tells Rosin. "They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way -- these females are going to leave us males in the dust."
That proverbial dust, untidied by female hands, often grows into unsightly, unmanageable piles -- a symbol of the entropy plaguing an increasing number of modern men. Once the key to conquering the world, testosterone may now be a liability, Rosin argues, particularly for the lower and middle classes.
Of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the "Great Recession," she notes, three-quarters of the pink slips went to men. The value of brawn has withered in today's "new feminized economy," and women, Rosin writes, are far more flexible in adjusting to the new rules than men. "In 1950, roughly one in twenty men of prime working age was not working," she notes. Today, that number is "about one in five, the highest ever recorded."
With an increasing share of men out of work, underemployed, or frequently found smoking, drinking, napping, or randomly gutting a carp on the newly polished kitchen table at two in the afternoon, many breadwinning women are throwing up their hands -- and asking themselves, as Coming Apart author Charles Murray recently told a gathering in Chicago, "Why should I marry that bozo?" Marriage rates have plummeted, particularly for those without a high school diploma.
Meanwhile, in the middle class, high-achieving women face a dearth of equally qualified men, leading them to go it alone rather than "marry down." MIT economist David Autor puts it this way: "When men start to flame out, women by necessity have to become self-sufficient...They don't marry the men, who are just another mouth to feed."
But here's where things get weird. These supposedly unmarriageable, childlike men-the men who are couch-surfing in dirty t-shirts, wasting their days on the Internet, or maybe just not pulling in enough cold, hard cash to impress the upwardly mobile ladies in their midst -- are still apparently good enough to date.
They're also still good enough to live with, and, crazier yet, good enough to father a child or two (although "father," perhaps, is accurate only in the biological sense of the word). "A child born to an unmarried mother, once a stigma, is now 'the new normal,' The New York Times reported in a 2012 front page story," Rosin notes, "as more than half of births to American women under thirty occurred outside marriage."
This new breed of woman, profiled repeatedly in The End of Men, is exhausted, overtaxed, and barely keeping it together -- and yet, in Rosin's book and elsewhere, they're repeatedly presented as somewhat empowered. "Many of these single mothers," Rosin writes, "are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college," but they're still, at least, "in charge."
"I think something feminists have missed," sociologist Kathryn Edin tells Rosin, "is how much power women have" when they're not tied up by marriage. "The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids," adds sociologist Brad Wilcox, who recently conducted a study on marriage's widespread disappearing act, "but it's not clear they are bad for women."
Not to pick on sociology, or its occasional tendency to echo Advanced Studies in Missing the Obvious, but come on, people! Taking on increasing levels of paid work, housework, and childcare simultaneously -- as studies demonstrate many women are doing -- is far from empowering.
Surveys show that even busy career women have increased, not decreased, their child care time, and despite their supposed liberation, today's women rate their happiness as no higher than their supposedly oppressed 1970s counterparts. Even in today's higher-income, double-earner "seesaw marriages," which Rosin heralds as a more flexible roadmap to gender equity, women often run themselves ragged. Marriages where a successful female can quit her job and stay home, meanwhile, are labeled a "tragedy" for female advancement.
This is not, in other words, Joan of Arc triumphantly leading armies across Europe. It's not even Billie Jean King whipping blustery Bobby Riggs in tennis. This new dynamic is more like the famous "accidental waterskiing" scene in the 1980s comedy The Great Outdoors, when a fully-clothed John Candy is dragged behind a suped-up, warp-speed powerboat, getting cattails shoved up his nose, dock splinters in his arms, ducks up his pants, and fierce water burns, all because he forgets to let go of the rope.
The End of Men offers a wealth of research, reporting, and insight into society's shifting gender dynamics. It also, when read between the lines, offers a fascinating look at how women often cling to that metaphorical rope, sabotaging themselves along the way.
Often, the culprit is as simple as buying into mainstream feminist tropes: embracing casual sex (which, as Rosin admits, ultimately devalues both sex and marriage), celebrating single motherhood, viewing highly qualified, nonworking women as a "tragedy", refusing to judge bad life decisions -- and, ultimately, expecting absolutely nothing from men, which turns into the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.
Certain women may be going places, and certain men may be falling behind, but it's a bit silly to view these new gender roles -- the hyper-achieving, hyper-stressed female workhorse, the hapless or indifferent man-child -- as an empowering "rise of women." It seems more accurate to argue that women have, in a certain sense, been taken for a ride.
The good news is that no one, including men, appears to be winning in this equation. The bad news is that it may take a few more cattails up the nose for women to figure that out.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/
The New Criterion is the highbrow conservative monthly edited by Roger Kimball. It has a graceful modernist design with no pictures, and covers politics, museums, books, music, poetry, media and art. Typical sentence: "The law; the economy; the political prospects; changes in our intellectual habits wrought by changes in out technology; the destiny that is demography: America, the West, indeed the entire world in the early years of the twenty-first century, seems curiously unsettled."
Maximum Rocknroll is known as "the Bible of Punk." Like The New Criterion, its design has not changed in three decades. It's as if the digital revolution never happened. There are the same cheap photographs of lean and sweaty punk bands in basements around the world. There's still the amateur collage and cut-and-paste art and long interviews and articles. Sample sentence: "Something is happening in this city, and I don't mean the fucking Olympics."
Both TNC and MRR have a central point in common: that life is about more than making money and being led around by the nose to consume more and more thing you don't need. Now, to readers of The New Criterion -- not to mention editor Roger Kimball -- this will seem arrant nonsense. There is no more fulsome booster of capitalism and the free market than The New Criterion, and no bigger enemy of political correctness.
Yet the very existence of The New Criterion implies that human flourishing requires contemplation, particularly contemplation of art and beauty. It is an art magazine, after all. It's hard to imagine Mitt Romney reading TNC -- harder than it is to imagine it being read by the members of Neon Piss, a punk band championed in Maximum Rocknroll who have a song called "Look Homeward Angel."
Of the two magazine, Maximum Rocknroll is the more ideologically rigid. This is a shame, because in my heyday, the mid-1980s, punk bands were allowed some diversity. San Francisco group The Dead Kennedys and their hyper literate singer Jello Biafra spend almost as much time satirizing the insularity, hypocrisy, and intolerance of the left as mocking Ronald Reagan. I still remember their song "Do the Slag" from their album Bedtime for Democracy:
We'll slag everyone each and every night
So we can pretend that we're all right
Make those pricks feel just so small
We'll show the world that we're three feet tall
Slander their integrity
Doubt their humanity
Talk about their haircuts
Are their politics correct?
Do the slag!
Great lyrics, even if not on the level of The New Criterion's monthly verse, which is consistently some of the best in any of the small magazines that still publish poetry.
There's no doubt that younger people, particularly those in punk bands, are drawn towards more left-wing politics, but in reading the recent issues of Maximum Rocknroll, I was disappointed that there was nothing critical of Obama and modern liberalism.
And it was just pathetic that at least one band is still trading on dumb collages mocking Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In the thirty years since MRR was first published, America has indeed turned to the left, but there has also been a rise on pro-life punk rockers -- and no less a punk godfather as Johnny Ramone has been revealed to have been as right-wing as Sean Hannity.
I have long argued that rock and roll is the last vibrant form of modernism. As explained by Hilton Kramer, the great editor of The New Criterion who passed away this year, modernism was a form of 20th century art that was once shocking but then was assimilated by the middle-class, soon to became regarded by the people as simply non-controversial art. Picasso came into living rooms. The same thing happened in rock and roll, as punk-inspired bands like U2, Talking Heads and Radiohead went on to create genuine art that has been loved by the masses.
It is vibrant living art that continues to dazzle, even as novelists and painters raised on modernism attempt with difficulty to discover something new. While most art bores or flails in an attempt to shock the public, rock and roll still delivers masterpieces that both surprise and are grounded in older forms. As art, it should be covered by magazines like National Review -- and of course The New Criterion.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
And yet The Summer of 43: R.A. Dickey's Knuckleball and the Redemption of America's Game, the new bestselling Kindle Single by Joseph Bottum, is too short.
But before getting into the details, a couple disclaimers: I'm an acquaintance of Joseph Bottum's. I'm also mentioned in the book. Bottum takes issue with something I wrote about Bryce Harper, rookie phenom for the Washington Nationals.
Bottum is a great writer, and it has been rewarding watching him go from relative obscurity to bestselling author, first with Dakota Christmas, his first Kindle Single (which is going to be a proper book this fall) to The Summer of 43. Bottum, a former editor at First Things and the Weekly Standard, is the kind of writer that you'll read no matter what the subject is. He knows how to use strong metaphors, and he's always passionate yet level-headed about his topic. He's also a devout Christian, which means that, unlike secular journalists, he can see an obvious spiritual component where others might not.
All of these strengths come together in The Summer of 43, which tells the story of the redemption of R.A. Dickey, a 37-year-old knuckleball pitcher for the New York Mets. Dickey was a mediocre major-league pitcher who had played for several different teams and been demoted to the minors when he altered his game to become a knuckleballer. He was soon pitching one-hit games and watching his ERA drop.
According to Bottum, the ascent of Dickey has been the key event in the recovery of baseball from the steroid scandals of the 1990s. Yet Bottum never really proves why this is so. Had Dickey discovered his knuckleball in 1990 instead of 2005, would he have done as well? Does steroid use make it easier or harder to hit a ball that travels like a drunk sparrow?
Bottum nicely describes the physics of a knuckleball, and recounts Dickey's rebirth after a near-drowning with the right religious insight. Yet one is left wondering just how crucial to the recovery of baseball Dickey has been -- especially after he got rocked by the Washington Nationals recently.
This is the problem with The Summer of 43. Bottum wants to argue that 2012 is a great year for baseball and signals a return to the game after the steroid era, yet the focus is all on Dickey, and book ends at the All Star break. It would have been wiser to wait until the season is over and double the length of the book.
Bottum also mentions me and my grandfather Joe Judge, who was a star player for the Washington Nationals from 1915 to 1932. But it's only in passing, and this constitutes a missed opportunity. Because one of the best ways that baseball can gain respect after the steroid era is by finally and at long last letting Joe Judge into the Hall of Fame. Had Bottum delved into this, he would have made a much stronger case.
Joe Judge played first base for the Washington Senators from 1915 to 1932. While his stats justify a place in the Hall -- in his 18 years in major league baseball he had a .298 batting average, 2352 hits, 433 doubles, 1037 RBI, 1500 double plays, and was an American League fielding leader five times -- he should be honored not only for that but for what he was.
Judge was not the kind of player, or the kind of man, who drew a lot of attention to himself. Family, friends, sportswriters all describe my grandfather the same way: polite, taciturn, unassuming, humble. A 1925 article in Baseball magazine described him as "the sheet anchor of the Washington infield."
Off the field, Judge was the most sober and even-tempered man in any room. Relatives, players he coached, journalists and everyone he came in contact with or who has read about him all describe him the same way: as a gentleman. It's the kind of behavior that keeps you off the front page and out of the Hall of Fame.
My grandfather's career was between 1915 and 1934, which means it partly took place in the "dead ball era" before the 1920s. He learned to play a game that was about singles, bunts, fielding and defense, not the loud, vulgar, pyrotechnic power spectacle that baseball became in the 1920s, with the arrival of Babe Ruth -- to say nothing of the steroid era.
Unlike Ruth, Joe Judge has never made the Hall of Fame. This might have something to do with something my grandfather published in 1959. It's long been an open secret in the family that the article was actually written by my father, who at the time was a writer for Life magazine. Called "Verdict Against the Hall of Fame," it was published in the June 6, 1959 issue of Sports Illustrated. It argued strenuously that the Hall of Fame was letting in players who didn't deserve to be there.
"The Hall has lost some of its meaning and much of its glory in recent years," it read. My father, writing as my grandfather, named players who were in the Hall for inappropriate reasons.
Players Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance, were in simply because of the ring of their double-play combination, Tinker to Evers to Chance. Tinker's lifetime average is .264, Evers' .270. The article pointed to catcher Ray Schacht, lifetime average .253, and shortstop Rabbit Maranville, who never hit over .300.
The essay then blasted the growing tendency to favor players with more personality than talent: "To be a credit to the game of baseball, a man need not have got off a record number of wise cracks or assembled a record number of feature-stories. There are a lot of colorful palookas."
He went on:
In my day, by the time the infield was finished spitting tobacco juice and licorice and rubbing the ball down with mud, especially on a dark afternoon, the ball would come at you looking like a clump of coal. A great hitter would lay the wood on it regardless of the side it was thrown from or the stuff on it. That same man could steal the base that made the difference. He was fast enough so that the hit-and-run and bunt-and-run were always possible. And when he got back to his position he would come up with a great catch, the great save, the great throw that meant winning instead of losing.
Today many so-called sluggers couldn't steal a base if they were alone in the park. They are not expected to throw too well or run too fast as long as they can belt the ball out of the park when their one moment of usefulness arrives. The idea of being a team member sometimes is lost completely, and what we have is an association of specialist businessmen investing their specific talents and carefully watching their own special interests, upon which they hope to declare a dividend the following year.
Had Bottum cited this article, a kind of pre-emptive strike against the steroid era decades before the fact, The Summer of 43 would have been a stronger argument.
My grandfather would be dead within four years of the SI article. He died after suffering a heart attack while shoveling snow on March 11, 1963. The papers reported the news, calling him "The greatest of all the Senators' first basemen." Columnist George Clifford of the Washington Daily News summed him up this way: "Joe Judge was not a character in the clownish, bittersweet fashion of sports. The stories about him become legends simply because of his ability."
Perhaps the best line to summarize my grandfather came from Sam Rice, the great Senators outfielder. When Rice learned of Joe Judge's death, Rice said, "There was no play he couldn't make."
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
In Forrest Gump, the novel by Winston Groom that was made into a movie, the lead character is someone who simply receives his worldview early in life and never changes his mind about anything. He's is a geyser of learned cliches. In Lucky Bastard, John Fitzgerald Adams, the president (and illegitimate son of JFK), is recruited by Marxists and is an actual communist. Obama is a kind of Forrest Gump Marxist.
Early on in Lucky Bastard, author McCarry comes up with a crucial distinction: John Adams and those who recruit him are a very particular kind of communist. As McCarry writes of one of them, "he was not, however, a Marxist-Leninist. Peter did not believe that the revolution had happened yet. Or, to put it another way, he thought that it had happened in the wrong country at the wrong time."
These are people who believe, as many on the left still do, that "genuine communism has never been tried." And that the time and place that it will succeed is modern America.
Has anyone asked Obama directly if he thinks communism was a failure? The answer would be interesting from the man who is creating the Leviathan State to replace Christianity.
But Obama is erecting this new world in such a hackneyed and campus socialist- boilerplate way. What is ironic about Obama is that his revolutionary ideas and actions come from never challenging the assumptions of the people who raised him. Unlike every other teenager in America, Obama never rebelled.
Perhaps President Obama's autobiography, Dreams of My Father, offers some serious moments of crisis. I could be wrong. But the one thing I have been struck by is the absolute lack of conflict in Obama's life. To be sure, his father had personal problems. But aside from that, the president has lead a life in which he never seriously questioned his own beliefs.
He is raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, then goes to the mainland where he lands at Columbia and Harvard. There doesn't seem to have been any moment when he stumbled over his conviction in the goodness and rightness of liberalism. Like Forest Gump, he just kind of wandered through life unchanged. There's not moment of existential crisis like Whittaker Chambers in Witness, no inner turmoil like Saint Teresa of Avila, no intellectual self-examination like Ronald Reagan.
There is an episode when he is in grade school in Hawaii and some big dumb kid makes a crack about his skin being dark. The offender is quickly reprimanded by the rest of the class. But did this even happen, or was it manufactured, like so much else of Obama's biography?
Here is a telling passages from The Bridge, the Obama biography written by David Remnick: "Obama received a liberal education in the most rounded sense of the term. He was too young for the sixties; rather, his teachers were products of the period and brought new values and historical narratives to the classroom and lecture hall: the antiwar movement, civil rights, gay and women's liberation, ethnic diversity. These were not the struggles of Obama's youth; they were the givens, the environment."
Remnick can't see the humor in this. The future 44th president in fact has had the opposite of a well-rounded liberal education. A classical liberal education in the traditional sense strives to teach students to master the basics of rhetoric, Latin, science, classical literature and speech. It attempts to make students have a confrontation with something they haven't experienced before, all while aiding in the discovery of the eternal truth of things.
Barack Obama was forged in the new liberal curriculum: environmentalism, feminism, socialism and political correctness. He goes from the liberal teachers in Hawaii to the liberal professors at Columbia to the liberal professors at Harvard to liberal Chicago and then to Jeremiah Wright.
Like John "Jack" Adams in Lucky Bastard, he is at the right place at the right time and gains a position in which he can begin to affect the revolution. And like Gump, he's not about to have a moment of doubt. It's revolutionary idiocy.
In The Bridge, Remnick tries to portray Obama's biracial identity as something that caused agony, but the impression one gets is that while it caused slight discomfort, the main affect it had was a doorway to the left-wing activist groups in Chicago. Indeed, had Obama been half white and half Asian the path would probably have been much more difficult.
If The Bridge is an indication, Barack Obama's life has been nothing like a box of chocolates. You know exactly what you're going to get: one lucky bastard.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
I won't print exactly what he said, but it was a pretty creative string of expletives. Here's the gist: It was not fair that my family and I were on a boat in the Chicago River, cruising out to see some fireworks, while he and his friends were stuck schlepping above us on the Michigan Avenue bridge.
We were, according to his shouted analysis, "rich you-know-what-holes." We had "our you-know-whats stuck up our you-know-whats." We could also proceed, he screeched in a grand, man-of-the-people finale, to "you-know-what" ourselves.
The boat had been rented that night for a family reunion, but he didn't know that. I guess we're lucky he didn't spit on us, or, worse. (Chicago's Michigan Avenue Bridge, it should be noted, has holes in it. A few years back, the Dave Matthews Band's bus driver dumped some raw sewage through similar holes in a nearby bridge, sliming some unlucky sailors below.)
So it could have been worse -- and when it comes to Chicago, it can get much worse. This year's horrific gang violence has left a body count of 275 already, earning comparisons to Afghanistan and Iraq. Homicides are up 35 percent. Most of the carnage is contained in chaotic corners of the city's South and West sides, where it's not unusual to see young kids shot capriciously in front of their homes.
Occasionally, the violence spills over into Rich People Country. The area around Michigan Avenue, where tourists and wealthy residents fill the streets, has seen several random mob attacks this year-and that's when it really makes headlines. That's when Chicago's two worlds, in a rare instance, collide. And that's when the elites, or the "rich you-know-what-holes," as some might call them, finally start to think, at least for a few minutes, that something has to change.
This all seemed particularly timely as I paged through Christopher Hayes's new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After the Meritocracy, while lounging on my yacht in St. Tropez. (Kidding, kidding, kidding!)
Hayes, an MSNBC host and editor-at-large for The Nation, has had it with "the elites" of America-and these days, who hasn't? Whether it's the Occupy Wall Street crowd (or, I suppose, what remains of them), fired-up Tea Party members, or crazy guys shouting from random Chicago bridges, everyone seems to hate America's "elites," those out-of-touch one percenters who pull society's strings, stealthily crafting our nation's disasters.
Hayes argues that America's meritocracy is broken, lorded over by entrenched, corrupt power brokers hell-bent on rigging the game. His book has gained a fair amount of buzz, and over the course of 240 pages, Hayes touches on some fascinating ideas, wading into some interesting critiques of the American meritocracy.
But then, like a rubber band of liberalism that has simply been stretched too far, he snaps back, reminding us that what we really need to worry about is a) taxing rich people and b) the catastrophic arrival of climate change that is entirely man's fault and has nothing to do with the natural climactic cycles exhibited on Planet Earth for millions of years.
And no, given the subject matter of the book, I don't know where that second item came from either. Let's assume it has something to do with taxing the rich.
What's most interesting about Twilight of the Elites -- and about much of the media's current agonizing about "elites" and failing meritocracies -- is its blissful, irony-free residence deep in Rich People Country. In a way, Hayes admits this, calling for "a newly radicalized" upper-middle class.
"The most militant and effective political mobilizations of our last decade, " he writes, "were, for the most part, upper-middle class uprisings." The professional classes, he argues, "are now the class that feels most keenly the sense of betrayal, injustice, and dissolution that the Crisis of Authority has ushered in."
Really? How about the family of 7-year-old Heaven Sutton, who was just gunned down at her mother's candy stand in Chicago?
It's certainly easy to blame a flawed top 1 percent and a failed meritocracy for society's ills. Addressing the cancer of growing government dependency, our nation's general culture of entitlement, or the social, cultural, and economic problems that plague the bottom 1 percent (and, more broadly, the bottom economic quintile, which, unlike most of America, actually does have a crisis of mobility) is apparently too awkward and scary.
So what should this newly enraged, horribly oppressed upper-middle class rally for? Twilight of the Elites suggests higher taxes, income redistribution, and, if I may be so bold as to read between the lines, the replacement of one government behemoth with a bigger, "better" one.
After writing a book dedicated to rampant institutional failures stewarded by out-of-touch power brokers, one would think Hayes would rethink the whole "more control from the top" theme. He doesn't, and he's not alone.
If you've ever had young kids, you know that distraction ("Hey, is that Buzz Lightyear driving that mail truck?" "Here, son! Want to play with this broken stick?") is a great tool. The political version ("Aren't these rich people terrible? Look, there's Mitt Romney on a jet ski!") can be even more ingenious and dazzling.
So, people of America, gird your loins. We're in for a few long months.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/
Anne Rice has returned to the porn business. The erstwhile Catholic and author of the first second-wave vampire novels in the 1970s and 1980s, Rice has republished the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, three books full of repetitive sex, spanking, and S & M. They are based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. It's pure crap, a quickie cash-in based on the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon, and Rice ought to be ashamed of herself.
The three books, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release, first came out in the 1980s, under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure. Take any one of the books and open it to a random page, and you'll find something like this: "Again she arched her back. Her breasts were suffused with red. As he drove his organ into her, he felt her shudder violently with unwilling pleasure."
Add spanking to the scene, repeat 847 times, and you have the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. You don't know repetitive until you've read this books. It's as if Larry Flynt were twelve years old and had ADHD and Tourette's.
In a new preface, Rice tries to justify republishing these books. It's the same-old porn-as-liberation boilerplate. "The books aren't about literal cruelty," she explains. "They're about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex."
Think about that sentence for a few seconds. Ah yes, the fun of being raped. Of course, the victim of this, the character Beauty, is set free: "Beauty's slavery is delicious sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating." Right.
There's nothing wrong with a well-crafted sex scene, but the best ones have some subtlety and humor. The great model Lauren Hutton once revealed in an interview that she enjoys sex more in her 60s than in her 20s. "You learn how to steer the bus better," she quipped.
Then there's this great moment from Savage Night, one of the best works by crime master Jim Thompson and one of the first sex scene I even read. In the book one of the characters meets a women who has a deformed hand and bad foot that requires a crutch: "All that work and deep breathing had put breasts on her like daddy-come-to-church. And swinging around on that crutch hadn't done her rear any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony. But I don't mean it was big. It was the way it was put on her: the way it hinged into the flat stomach and the narrow waist. It was as though she'd ben given a break there for all the places she'd been shortchanged." There is more humor and even grace in that paragraph than in Rice's entire trilogy.
After her hefty vampire books, Rice adopted a style that is much more minimalistic, and it is interesting that this tone works very well in her religious books but not her erotica. Rice had a few years where she reverted to Catholicism, and during that time she wrote a couple novels about Jesus. Compared with the stuffy language of the King James Bible, the thin and light sentences of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt took on a cool and effective velocity, like Haruki Murakami but with less skill.
It also had a plot that kept you reading; you knew that Christ's life was going to be eventful, whereas in the Beauty trilogy it's just a matter of who's on deck for the next spanking.
But then, I sense myself getting repetitive even in trying to describe Rice's repetitiveness. It's all so tame and cliched and done-before and pseudo-radical. Any idiot can spank someone. It takes a real soul, and a real writer, to open themselves up to making love.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearBooks and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Cronkite, who left the anchor chair in 1981 and died in 2009, hadn't been the subject of a full-scale biography until Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley began working on one several years ago.
It was worth the wait. Brinkley's Cronkite is a thorough examination of its subject's life and times. It is a respectful, though not fawning, work that will be of great interest to scholarly and general readers who want to learn more about a seminal period of political and media history.
Brinkley (who is not related to Cronkite rival and former ABC and NBC anchor David Brinkley) sees his subject as a "defiant monument of what happened when a great news broadcaster had the sound, centrist judgment of the nation at heart. Cronkite wasn't like ordinary TV narcissists and braggarts. He didn't broadcast what the folks wanted. Cronkite instead wanted what the people wanted to be considered serious news."
Cronkite began his career as a newspaper and wire reporter. However, as the public relied more on broadcast news, he shifted to radio and eventually television. Though originally eclipsed by others, including CBS legend Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite prevailed because his calm persona resonated with the public. In addition, he came across as a persistent, though not obnoxious, interviewer. That style made him especially effective during moments of tragedy and triumph, such as the JFK assassination and the various space launches.
Some of the best parts of Cronkite are descriptions of the behind-the-scenes in-fighting at CBS. Cronkite's battles royale with Murrow and Dan Rather were legendary within the industry, and while Brinkley tells the stories from Cronkite's perspective, it's not all one-sided. And although there are plenty of quotes from Murrow and Rather and their allies, the reader comes away thinking that both of them (especially Rather) were petty and insecure.
Brinkley is more critical of Cronkite on an issue that fixates modern press criticism: the politics and detectable biases of the man. Uncle Walter usually played it down the middle, but he let his opinions come through on some subjects, such as the space program and civil rights, both of which he supported, and he displayed little, if any skepticism, about the Vietnam War until 1968. All three of these stances put him squarely on the side of the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
"Although Cronkite later cringed at the allegation, he was in fact behaving in 1964 like a rubber-stamp sycophant for LBJ -- and it should be added, as a reliable spokesman for NASA, with top-secret clearance credentials, and as an ardent foe of the Soviet Union since being based in Moscow under Stalin for the United Press, with a myopic cold war worldview," Brinkley writes.
After he left the anchor position (he was largely put out to pasture by CBS), Cronkite became more outspoken. He opined often in support of liberal causes, including the decriminalization of marijuana and opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Some of his utterances tarnished his image as a reliable centrist, but because of the reservoir of goodwill he had developed and his advancing age, Cronkite was given a great deal of leeway.
Brinkley, whose previous books have dealt with subjects ranging from civil rights icon Rosa Parks to President Theodore Roosevelt's environmental policies, has seemingly read everything written by and about Cronkite. In addition, he conducted extensive interviews with many of his subject's friends and foes.
The result is that readers have to sift through a vast array of information. While much of the book is fascinating and engaging, Brinkley occasionally gets too bogged down in minutiae and some of the stories are a bit repetitive. On balance, however, in Brinkley, Cronkite has a biographer worthy of his stature.
One unforeseen hazard of this book is that while readers are immersed in it, many will be frustrated by the excessive verbal food fights that are the hallmarks of contemporary broadcast journalism. They may find themselves longing for a return to the calming civility of Uncle Walter's era.
Claude R. Marx, an award-winning journalist, regularly reviews books for publications such as the Boston Globe and the Weekly Standard.
]]>The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, which covers Johnson's life from 1958 to mid-1964, depicts him as a powerful Senate majority leader transformed into a powerless vice president who was transformed into a powerful president. The overriding theme of Caro's books (including an earlier one on New York's master builder Robert Moses) is how people accumulate and use power. Caro has read everything ever written about his subject and talked to many of Johnson's friends and foes.
Those efforts, which started with the launch of this project in 1976, have helped Caro masterfully distill the essence of LBJ's ability to get his way. Many of the events have been written about extensively, but Caro looks at them with a fresh set of eyes and sometimes seems to have the literary equivalent of X-ray vision.
As majority leader, Johnson reinvigorated the Senate and made that chamber once again relevant to the governing process. By engineering the passage of civil rights legislation and other key measures, while running things with an iron fist, Johnson was in his element.
Caro writes that the role was one "he was born to play. As he stood at the Leader's commanding front-row center desk in the Senate Chamber directing the Senate's actions with the surest of hands, as he strode the aisles of the Chamber and Capitol with colleagues addressing him by title . . . he was completely in charge, a man at home in his job."
Though Caro admires Johnson's skills, he doesn't neglect the bullying, meanness and arrogance that came along with them. One comes away with the impression that Caro respects, but doesn't really like, his subject.
If Caro were just writing about Johnson, he could have covered the subject in far fewer words. However, he greatly enriches the narrative with his verbal portraits of key players with whom Johnson interacted. These profiles sometimes drag on a bit and the editing could have been tighter. While Caro clearly doesn't believe that less is more, political junkies will feel that they are truly getting their fix.
In this volume, much of that ink is devoted to John and Robert Kennedy. Johnson and JFK tolerated each other, though there was considerable mistrust. The relationship between LBJ and Robert is best described in a book titled Mutual Contempt.
Among the most riveting parts of Caro's latest is when he takes us behind the scenes of JFK's selection of LBJ as his running mate in 1960. Jack Kennedy saw the political benefits of such a matchup, while Robert and others went apoplectic. Caro doesn't buy the argument made by some at the time that JFK's offer was pro forma and one that he expected LBJ to reject.
Caro contends it is quite possible that Kennedy had for years planned to persuade LBJ to join his ticket because it would help him win the election. Caro writes that this suggests "cold calculation'' and that there was a "deep reservoir of calculation and reserve beneath Jack Kennedy's easy charm.''
Given JFK's single-minded focus on becoming president -- and his ideological flexibility -- that is, at least to this writer, the most plausible reason he picked LBJ.
Once LBJ became vice president, he was marginalized. Administration officials made little use of his political skills in general and knowledge of the Senate in particular.
Caro notes that LBJ's frustration was apparent in his physical demeanor. The author observes that when walking, "the old, long imperious Texas lope was gone; he walked more deliberately with shorter steps."
On Nov. 22, 1963, everything changed.
After Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson picked up the mantle of power quickly and made the presidency his own. He pushed several measures through Congress (including bills that expanded civil rights laws and cut taxes) that his predecessor hadn't been able to. Though he achieved his lifelong goal through awful circumstances, LBJ rose to the occasion. He calmed a saddened nation and showed his true political acumen.
Caro argues that Johnson's actions from that day in Dallas through the middle of 1964 (when he showed more self discipline and diplomacy than usual) were the high point of his tenure in the Oval Office. He contends that by "overcoming forces within him that were difficult to overcome, he not only held the country steady during a difficult time but had set it on a new course, a new course toward social justice."
When you combine a larger-than-life figure with a seminal period in American history and have the story told by a masterful writer, the result is a literary treat. That's an apt description of The Passage of Power.
Claude R. Marx, an award-winning journalist, regularly reviews books for publications such as the Boston Globe and the Weekly Standard.
This only partly due to liberal bias, the smothering conventional wisdom that sees no practical difference between restoring the Constitution and returning the powdered wig to its proper place in American fashion. Gold standard? Letters of marque and reprisal? Mainstream media eyes glaze over.
Political journalists also have something of a Great White problem with Paul: once bitten, twice shy. Whenever they begin to take the 12-term libertarian-leaning Texas congressman's presidential ambitions seriously -- such as when he won the fourth quarter money primary in late 2007 or was leading in the polls in Iowa exactly four years later -- he ultimately falls short of expectations. Sometimes just short, like when Michele Bachmann barely edged him out at the Ames straw poll or when he finished a very strong third in the Iowa caucuses. Sometimes quite a bit short, as when his top-tier 2008 fundraising didn't come close to translating into a top-tier candidacy.
But the biggest problem is that there is no easy media narrative for what Paul is doing. The success or failure of most presidential campaigns is determined by two simple metrics: winning the nomination and winning the White House. Whatever his principled disagreements with Mitt Romney, when Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, that was all she wrote. There is no generation of Rick Santorum Republicans ready to run in his place. When John Kerry came up short in Ohio against George W. Bush in 2004, he became yesterday's news. (His running mate, John Edwards, has not been so fortunate.)
As is obvious to everyone but most of his 1.3 million voters so far (of which this reviewer is one), Ron Paul isn't going to be the Republican presidential nominee. He has won the popular vote in just one contest, a razor-thin, almost universally ignored victory in the Virgin Islands' GOP caucuses. He has lost every bona fide state. Although most running tallies grossly understate Paul's delegate haul, his numbers are far behind Romney's. It is even less likely that Dr. Paul will become president.
But Paul is also more than your typical also-ran. He is still attracting crowds that number in the thousands on the stump. His online money bombs raise millions of dollars even as this late stage of the campaign. Most importantly, his supporters are crowding Republican state conventions and district meetings. The result is that Paul is accumulating a surprising number of delegates at the very moment Romney is on the verge of capturing the nomination.
Doherty is a rare political journalist who understands that something special is going on here. As someone with an affinity for the ideas that animate Paul's campaign -- Doherty is a senior editor for Reason magazine and wrote an exhaustive history of the libertarian movement entitled Radicals for Capitalism -- his new book Ron Paul's REVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired brilliantly captures the ideas, personalities, and politics of this unique politician.
Before Paul ran for president he cobbled together an interesting career winning election to Congress -- three times as a nonincumbent -- in traditionally Republican districts running as Dr. No. Paul's congressional staff was helpful and adept at constituent services. But while they hunted down your government check that had gone missing, Paul was busy voting against funding it.
"To ensure a staff that understood where he was coming from," Dohery writes, "Paul relied on people with some history with the original libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), including John Robbins, Bruce Bartlett, and the controversial Gary North." (North was controversial because of his affinity for Christian reconstructionism, which Doherty describes as "a mix of economic hyperlibertarianism and social intolerance so severe that the death penalty was prescribed for homosexuality and adultery.")
Bartlett, now best known as an apostate conservative columnist, told Doherty that Paul was "never happier than when the vote was 434 to 1. It was his way of making a point." Paul was a successful congressman who eschewed the normal rules of Capitol Hill. His congressional office was as much a libertarian educational initiative as a political enterprise. That would prove true of his first two presidential campaigns -- one as a Libertarian and his first as a Republican -- as well.
Paul spent thirty years talking to a relatively small like-minded audience of libertarians gold bugs. He didn't seem to have much influence in Congress. Most of his bills were spurned by statists on both sides of the aisle. Paul was one of just seven Republicans -- and one of only three conservatives -- to vote against the war in Iraq. He barely beat Russell Means for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in 1988, a dismaying experience that has almost as much to do with why he won't go third party in November as his son Rand's political career.
So it shouldn't have been surprising that Paul's first presidential campaign started as an educational mission too: Get into the presidential debates, stand on the stage alongside John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani, and rail against immoral wars, expensive government programs, and a reckless monetary policy. His exchange with Giuliani over the 9/11 terrorist attacks and blowback from American foreign policy would have ended most careers.
Instead something completely different happened. Paul became a cult hero. He raised millions of dollars (as mentioned earlier, he outraised all the other GOP candidates in the last few months of 2007). The monetary issues that made Paul seem a crank to most Republicans and the antiwar views that had him branded as a heretic were what drove his most passionate young supporters.
But the money came in too late to significantly upgrade the campaign organization. Doherty discusses Paul's amateurish New Hampshire ads ("He's catchin' on, I'm tellin' ya!) and the conflicts between Paulite true believers and campaign staffers who wanted to appeal to mainstream Republican voters. And then there was the Ron Paul blimp:
When I was doing a dual interview in 2011 with deputy campaign manager Dimitri Kesari and Trygve Olson, a Republican operative who jumped on the campaign in 2011, Kesair ecumenically said a blimp doesn't hurt, but, well, that was six hundred thousand dollars that the campaign didn't have available to spend on things more useful in winning vote. Olson seems to quietly concur for a moment, but couldn't resist interjecting: "But... he had a blimp!"
Doherty does an excellent job tracing Paul's history from congressional backbencher to Republican elder statesman and pop culture icon. He untangles the complex ideological web Paul occupies, understanding Paul's libertarian roots and his place in traditional, Old Right conservatism. He explains the friends who helped form Paul's movement and who helped imperil it with divisive rhetoric ranging from racially tinged newsletters to intralibertarian quarrels (Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell loom large). He is a rare writer who captures both Paul's irritation with some of his allies and his reluctance to cast them overboard even when there is an obvious political advantage (see again the newsletters controversy).
In researching Ron Paul's REVOLution, Doherty draws on the well of knowledge accumulated in writing Radicals for Capitalism. He also interviews most of the major players, while highlighting lesser known figures like former online campaign staffer Justine Lam and soldier-turned-libertarian provocateur Adam Kokesh. Doherty depicts Paul as principled, decent, and almost as surprised by his sudden popularity as anyone else.
The Paul campaign learned from its 2008 mistakes, with a top-tier performance in Iowa and a second-place finish in New Hampshire to show for it. A second foreign policy exchange in South Carolina -- Paul's adamant opposition to a possible U.S. military attack against Iran and his uncharacteristic waffling about whether he would have ordered the raid killing Osama bin Laden -- stunted his momentum. (It is a delicious irony that Barack Obama is now making hay of 2007 remarks in which Romney similarly quibbled with the idea of an unauthorized Pakistani incursion to get bin Laden.)
Paul still did much better than in 2008. An analysis by New York Times elections blogger Micah Cohen shows that in the states that voted before Super Tuesday, Paul improved his share of the total vote by six percentage points. In caucus states, that number rises to eight points. He received nearly as many votes in the peak of the campaign as he did throughout the entire primary process last time around, when he needed to run in the electoral equivalent of garbage time to boost his popular vote number above 1 million.
The Ron Paul forces are still giving the Republican establishment fits months after their campaign was presumed dead. They took 16 out of 19 delegates allocated by congressional district caucuses in Romney's home state of Massachusetts. Paulites even denied a delegate slot to Romney's former lieutenant governor. Delegate-wise, Paul may turn out to be the winner in Iowa after all. The state GOP will be chaired by Paul supporters in both Iowa and Alaska.
Paul's legacy includes dozens of Ron Paul Republicans, the most successful being his son Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, and the up-and-coming young Michigan Congressman Justin Amash. This is what makes Paul so hard for the media to cover: he is clearly having a bigger long-term impact than the 1972 John Ashbrook presidential campaign, but movement-building doesn't fit neatly into the horserace mentality of most political journalism.
Doherty ends his book with an exchange between Paul and an ABC News reporter. What would Paul do to improve his poll numbers? "I don't change my message," Paul replied. He then followed up with what Doherty describes as "that slightly hesitant Ron Paul thoughtfulness": "I change minds."
Ron Paul is changing the Republican Party right before our very eyes.
W. James Antle III is associate editor of the American Spectator.
It was a long and productive life Benny Spock enjoyed, and despite what his critics claimed, it was a life that benefited millions of families around the world. The original title of his book, first published in 1946, was The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and it really was full of common sense.
In later years, as he demonstrated against the Vietnam War and for a variety of left-leaning causes, Spock’s detractors declared that he was marching with a generation of insistent children he had helped spoil. But these skeptics were confusing the man’s politics with his work, which is easy to do -- especially in our time of voluble celebrities.
Benjamin Spock was Ozzie Guillen before Ozzie Guillen was born. The oldest of six children in a New England family of Dutch descent, he was a big man, 6-foot-4, with broad shoulders, who’d rowed crew on Yale’s 1924 Olympic gold medal-winning team. Spock was, literally, a gentle giant and he possessed an easy confidence around children, a soothing bedside manner as a pediatrician, and the heretical thought that parental instincts are often right.
Before he came along, textbooks were actually published with advice such as the following: “Never, never kiss your child. Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.”
Dr. Spock, by contrast, wrote this: “Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled -- gently and lovingly. You may hear people say that you have to get your baby strictly regulated in his feeding, sleeping … and other habits -- but don’t believe this. He doesn't have to be sternly trained. . . . Be natural and comfortable and enjoy your baby.”
He began each edition of his famous book with the same gentle admonition: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
Norman Vincent Peale, among others, thought the good baby doctor from New Haven knew less than he thought he did. He summarized Spock’s view as: “'Feed ’em whenever they want, never let them cry, satisfy their every desire.”
This was a selective reading of “the baby book,” as it was simply known, but by the 1960s, the doctor’s political activity was coloring how many viewed his work. He protested against nuclear weapons, marched against the war in Vietnam, burned draft cards (for which he was arrested and convicted in a famous free speech trial), became a socialist, and ran for national office as a fringe candidate.
But his 1972 presidential platform, considered radical at the time, foreshadowed themes embraced by modern candidates ranging from Barack Obama to Ron Paul. Spock espoused free medical care, including legalized abortion (this was pre-Roe v. Wade). He supported decriminalizing marijuana and a guaranteed minimum income for American families, and called for bringing home all U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam and elsewhere. (He almost certainly would have disapproved of the war in Afghanistan.)
Vice President Spiro Agnew, noting Spock’s work in counseling young people how to avoid the draft, accused him of corrupting America’s youth. The Rev. Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, added from his pulpit, “And now Spock is out in the mobs, leading the permissive babies raised on his undisciplined teaching.”
By way of rejoinder, Spock quipped, "Well, nobody could accuse me of having brought up Spiro Agnew.”
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics.
In a recent article, Mooney summarizes his case. "[I]t often seems there are so many factually wrong claims on the political right that those who make them live in a different reality." He continues, "So here's an idea: Maybe they actually do. And maybe we can look to science itself...to help understand why it is that they view the world so differently."
Translation: Republicans are stupid and there has to be a biological explanation for it.
If Mooney's argument sounds familiar to you, it should. It's called "eugenics," and it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior. Taken to an extreme, it encouraged people to selectively breed in order to improve the gene pool and eliminate those who the elites determined were unfit. It was rightfully dismissed decades ago, but this does not stop a modern-day science writer from resuscitating it and applying it to political adversaries.
He isn't the first to invoke dubious scientific reasoning to support a pet political belief. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa got there first when he tried to make the case that liberals are more intelligent. Progressives applauded him for his keen scientific insight until he also tried to claim humans evolved to find African-American men attractive but African-American women ugly.
Thus, while it can produce useful insights, evolutionary psychology at times is highly suspect because it can also be easily influenced by researcher bias. Mooney's book is largely built upon data that is vulnerable to manipulation.
For instance, the field of neuroscience is in its infancy and is just now beginning to be understood. That doesn't prevent Mooney from using it to confidently paint a dubious narrative about "neuropolitics." Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne dismantled Mooney's claims, asserting that he has drawn "unwarranted conclusions" based upon flawed logic and an incomplete understanding of evolution.
Also, take a look again at the book's title (The Republican Brain) and pause to consider our cultural double standard that allows a book with that title to be published. How would people respond if the word "Republican" was replaced with "African-American"? Or if the book tried to explain why women denied reality? There would be outrage and accusations of racism or sexism. Yet, it is socially acceptable to make similar denigrating remarks about Republicans.
None of this is to say that there isn't a grain of truth to what Mooney asserts. Because our genes influence everything -- from brain size to gender differences -- it is probable that genetics plays some role in our thought processes and therefore political beliefs. But, the environment plays just as big, if not a bigger role.
Mooney doesn't frame it that way. The introduction to his book details how misguided he believes Republicans are and then offers "science" as an explanation. Sorry, Republicans. You believe dumb things because biology made you that way.
As climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. wryly commented, perhaps science will find a cure for this disease soon-to-be-named "Republicanism."
Mooney is not a scientist, and hence, he can conduct scientific malpractice with impunity. As a journalist who has mastered the dark art of framing, he distorts science in order to fit a preconceived narrative that he wants to tell.
You can do it too, sort of like a home science framing experiment. Here's how: Because liberals might have a larger anterior cingulate cortex -- a brain region linked to "uncertainty" -- perhaps this explains why Democrats historically run discombobulated campaigns.
Is that an absurd argument? Sure. But Mooney advances those kinds of arguments about Republicans because he's a loyal combatant for Team Blue. This is not science. This is what happens when partisans hijack science.
Mooney has become something of a national spokesperson for American scientists. The National Science Foundation, a recipient of your tax dollars, even had him teach a seminar to academics about how to communicate science to the public. Given his long record of political partisanship, one wonders if part of the lesson plan involved how to insult Republicans.
Is a person who engages in this sort of "outreach" a good spokesperson for all scientists? Mooney claims to be a public defender of science. In reality, science may need defending from people like him.
Dr. Alex B. Berezow is the editor of RealClearScience and holds a Ph.D. in microbiology. Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book Science Left Behind.
That is a good question. And as Norquist and Lott point out, this surge in spending comes at precisely the wrong time, as greedy hordes of Baby Boomers are getting ready to retire and raid the federal treasury. In Debacle, the authors offer a solid chronicle of the government's recent fiscal follies -- from the stimulus to green jobs and from housing to bailouts -- with a focus on the Obama administration.
On the question of whether President Obama has delivered the results he promised, the facts speak for themselves. In Debacle we find the handy graph created in early 2009 by two Obama administration economists to illustrate the expected effects of the first major stimulus. Without the stimulus, the unemployment rate would climb to 9 percent in 2010 and stay above 6 percent through most of 2012; with the stimulus, unemployment would never reach 8 percent, and would fall below 6 percent in April of 2012.
In fact, the stimulus passed, and the economy did worse than it was supposed to do without the stimulus. Here in April of 2012, the unemployment rate is still above 8 percent. And as Norquist and Lott show, the climb out of the Great Recession has been quite slow in comparison with previous American recoveries. Without time travel there's no way to prove a different president would have done better, but President Obama has not succeeded.
Norquist and Lott don't stop at demonstrating the administration's ineffectiveness, however -- they also argue that progressive policies have made things worse. These arguments are a good deal more speculative, and how convincing they are will depend in large part on the reader's preexisting biases. But they are nonetheless a clear explanation of conservative and libertarian economic thought.
If you've wondered how "injecting money into the economy" could do more harm than good, or why so many conservatives blame the "affordable housing" movement for the real-estate crash, Debacle will furnish the answers you seek -- with generous helpings of numbers, and footnotes as a source of further reading.
The final chapter in Debacle, a plan for reform directed at GOP voters and legislators, is less helpful. Much of it is unremarkable: Enact the Paul Ryan plan for entitlement reform, simplify the tax code, etc., etc. But then there's Step One.
The No. 1 priority outlined in Debacle won't be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Grover Norquist: Don't vote for tax increases under any circumstances. A world without tax increases is perfectly acceptable as a libertarian dream; the Ryan plan proves that it's possible to balance the budget (eventually) without raising revenue. But anti-tax absolutism has been a disaster in the realm of practical politics.
The reason we're in the situation we're in is that conservatives and liberals have both gotten the economic policies they want the most. Conservatives have gotten lower tax rates, and liberals have gotten spending increases. In the 1980s, some conservatives believed that by holding the line on taxes, they could deprive the government of revenue, forcing it to cut spending.
The theory was called "starve the beast," but the beast didn't starve, it borrowed. Reading Debacle -- in which it is claimed that "we never get to step two [lower spending] if we fail to stop tax increases dead in their tracks" -- one wonders exactly how high our deficit must go before it becomes clear that tax revenue has no influence whatsoever on legislators' desire and ability to spend.
Of course, this isn't just the ramblings of some dreamer; one of the authors possesses immense political power. The vast majority of congressional Republicans have signed Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," vowing not to raise taxes, but not vowing to support spending reductions or reject spending increases. (That's Step Two, you see.) It's only today's taxpayers who are "protected": The young, and the as-yet-unborn, get stuck with the tab for this cowardice.
The absurd ideology behind the Pledge crops up elsewhere in Debacle's reform plan. One recommendation is that in their rhetoric, advocates of limited government should focus on spending, not the deficit. Norquist and Lott seem afraid of the fact that spending is merely a political issue: It's possible to run a sustainable government at a wide range of spending levels. The deficit, meanwhile, is a mathematical issue: If you let your deficit (and thus debt) get out of control, credit dries up eventually, and you're Greece.
We as a nation need to get the deficit under control; we on the right merely want a government small enough that we could drown it in the bathtub. But if we talk about the deficit, someone might notice that higher taxes could be one part of a solution, and we can't have that.
Norquist and Lott also encourage Republicans to reject any "grand bargain" that trades higher taxes for spending cuts. Again, in theory, this could work -- all that needs to happen is for the Democrats to get behind a budget that's at least as austere as the Ryan plan. But that's not going to happen, so both sides will need to give a little.
Norquist and Lott correctly note that grand bargains have gone poorly in the past, with the tax increases going into effect and the spending cuts magically disappearing. But that's a reason to structure future agreements more carefully, not to ignore political reality as the nation careens toward bankruptcy.
All this is infuriating, especially for a reader who's decades away from Social Security eligibility. Still, Grover Norquist will be Grover Norquist. Policy recommendations aside, Debacle is an intelligent criticism of big-government economics gone wild.
Robert VerBruggen is an associate editor at National Review. Twitter: @RAVerBruggen.
An opening chapter offers an intriguing mini-biography of Alfred Nobel and explains how he came to create the prizes named after him. Nordlinger demolishes various myths associated with creation of the Peace Prize, notably that Nobel was atoning for inventing dynamite. (Nobel did not feel any necessity of apologizing for this useful invention.) Nordlinger uses Nobel's intentions as a measuring rod for examining the worth of various laureates. He shows how the standards of the Nobel selection committees have changed over the years and how they have been influenced by politics and Norwegian culture. Into this story Nordlinger weaves a history of the early peace movement, largely demolished by the horrors of what we now call World War I.
Who are the genuine peacemakers? That is the question that the Nobel committees have wrestled with and that Nordlinger wrestles with as well, sometimes with surprising results. Yasser Arafat is a case in point. Nordlinger concludes that there was a strong case to be made for Arafat, who shared the 1994 peace prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, despite Arafat's past and subsequent record of terrorism.
Nordlinger does not go overboard; he writes that he would not himself have voted to give Arafat the peace prize. Nor does Nordlinger give other bloodstained laureates a pass. He unblinkingly exposes the phony alternative "peace prizes" such as the Stalin (later Lenin) prize. It's more than a bit depressing to learn how many laureates see moral equivalency between flawed democratic societies (mostly the United States) and communist, fascist and other monster states that routinely engage in mass murder. Interesting, the tolerance of many of these laureates toward totalitarian societies does not extend to Israel. Several of them have used their Nobel acceptance speeches and other forums for hymns of hate against the Jewish state. Nordlinger fairly describes this phenomenon; I wish he'd also analyzed the reasons for this enmity toward Israel.
One of the many strengths of this book is its excellent profiles of the laureates, including famous people such as George Marshall and Elie Wiesel and people of whom I knew next to nothing, such as Shirin Ebadi and Wangari Maathai. Nordlinger makes a persuasive case that the Nobel committee often does its best work when it gives the prize to the obscure (who soon become non-obscure by virtue of the award) rather than the well known and celebrated. He reproduces paragraphs from acceptance speeches that are alternatively inspiring (Theodore Roosevelt, Marshall, Martti Ahtisaari), poignant (the Italian pacifist Ernesto Moneta, Fridtjof Nansen, Kim Dae-jung) and annoying (Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Mohammed ElBaradei). I liked the comment of Al Gore, who said he wrote his own Nobel speech "with the help of Mr. Google." It turns out, according to Nordlinger, to have been a pretty good speech.
Nordlinger is particularly thoughtful about the more controversial Nobel awards. He is understanding of Theodore Roosevelt, mildly skeptical of Jimmy Carter, more gracious than I would have been to Henry Kissinger, and properly generous to Barack Obama, who didn't need anyone to tell him that he hadn't done anything to warrant the prize. But the Nobel Committee was, as gamblers would say, "betting on the come," and the award to Obama may look better down the historical road than it did at the time.
On the other hand, in a nitpick that may reflect my own prejudices, I wish Nordlinger had displayed empathy for Sean MacBride, a leader of the Irish Republican Army when the IRA was not a gang of thugs but the legitimate representative of the aspirations of Irish Catholics. (MacBride's father participated in the Easter 1916 rising and was executed by the British when his son was 12.) True, MacBride embarrassed himself and the Nobel committee by accepting the Lenin Prize in 1977, but to judge from the evidence of this book, he had plenty of company among Nobel laureates in parroting Soviet propaganda.
Nordlinger acknowledges that every reader will have favorites among the Nobel laureates and will be inclined to judge the merit of particular awards based on his opinion of the recipient. Nevertheless, in admirable defiance of his own biases, Nordlinger does his best to apply objective standards -- Nobel's standards, when possible -- in deciding whether a particular recipient is deserving. He is convincing more often than not. By their nature all Peace Prize awards are to some degree controversial; the Nobel landscape is vast and many find discomfort navigating in its outer reaches.
Some have also been discomforted by the failure of the Nobel committee to award the Peace Prize to persons who deserved it, especially Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader and premier apostle of non-violence. As Nordlinger explains it, Gandhi was a victim of politics and timing. His best chance to win was probably 1948 when Gandhi did his best to calm murderous violence between Hindus and Muslims that had been ignited by the partition of India, but he was assassinated that year and the Nobel committee did not then give posthumous awards. It has departed from this policy only once, to award the prize to United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold after he was killed in a plane crash in 1961.
This is a delightful book with something of value on every page. It at once entertained me and enriched my knowledge. How many books do that? If you pick it up, I defy you to put it down until you've finished it.
Lou Cannon is an editorial advisor and columnist for the State Net Capitol Journal.
The folks at Mattel gave Barbie a full name (Barbie Millicent Roberts), a fictional hometown (Willows, Wisconsin) and a boyfriend (Ken, who first appeared in 1961), but it was always Barbie herself -- along with those endless outfits -- that held American girls in such thrall.
Five decades later, some 800 million Barbies have been sold here and around the world. Anyone that popular is going to invite controversy, and Barbie has seen her share. But at a time when Rush Limbaugh and the "Uterus Wars" are roiling our election-year politics, Barbie and her friends can teach us a thing or two.
The marketeers at Mattel have understood this demographic dynamic for a good long while. A Latina version of Barbie first appeared more than 30 years ago, and Barbie spoke Spanish as early as 1968, the year after her African-American friend, Francie, hit the toy shelves.
Barbie's WASP-ish ethnicity was never really the primary concern. The source of consternation among adults of a certain political persuasion centered on others facets of the doll, mainly her provocative little body and the rampant materialism implied by all those outfits and dream houses.
One didn't have to be a "bra-burning feminist," in the parlance of the day, to worry that Barbie's dimensions (it was estimated that, if she were life-sized, her measurements would be 36-18-38) might give young girls unrealistic expectations about how their bodies should look as they got older. Also, what was with all the designer clothes -- who could afford those?
There were effective rebuttals to both critiques, and they relate directly to American politics in 2012.
For starters, the idea for Barbie came to Ruth Handler, a co-founder of Mattel Inc. with her husband Elliot, by watching their daughter Barbara play with dolls. The girl and her friends gravitated toward adult paper dolls -- not baby dolls -- and Ruth theorized that little girls wanted to play with dolls that depicted kids older than themselves, not younger.
On a trip to Europe in the mid-1950s, Ruth saw just such a doll and bought three of them -- one for Barbara and two for her toy designers at Mattel.
Although Ruth didn't know it, this doll was named Bild-Lilly, and she originated from a racy cartoon character in the German newspaper Die Bild-Zeitung. Lilly was a saucy, post-war secretary who didn't mind using her feminine wiles -- and her figure -- to get what she wanted in strapped post-war Germany. And what she wanted, mostly, was a good time, and good clothes. Various feminist writers have called Lilly "slutty," a term I would not use -- and I'll bet Rush Limbaugh wouldn't either. But you could say that Lilly was the original Material Girl.
A German toy company licensed a Lilly doll, which was originally sold as kind of a gag gift in tobacco shops for German men. But German husbands had German little girls at home, and it soon became apparent -- as Ruth Handler had noticed in Southern California -- that girls preferred this kind of doll. And so the Handlers and their engineers, along with a tall and attractive fashion designer named Charlotte Johnson, schlepped to Japan to see about getting their vision of the doll mass produced.
The Japanese manufacturers must have been taken with the statuesque American woman in their midst because the finished product looked more like Charlotte Johnson than Bild-Lilly. In any event the rest is toy-making -- and advertising -- history.
The answer to angst about Barbie's killer body was in the marketing: Mattel sponsored a new TV show, "The Mickey Mouse Club." What could be more wholesome -- and less like Bild-Lilly -- than Disney? Besides, kids loved the doll, clamored for the doll, and as American parents were learning in post-war America, child consumers were becoming as relentless as Patton's Third Army.
As for the materialistic aspect of Barbie, here the critics were also outflanked. Yes, she started as a teenage fashion model in a bathing suit and was once programmed to say, "Math class is tough." And yes she was marketed in any manner of settings, from stewardess to nurse, that required new clothes and new dolls.
But among those models was a Miss Astronaut Barbie (in 1965, when Sally Ride was 14 years old), Barbie the Olympic Athlete (1975, before Title IX regulations were adopted by the federal government), Barbie, Ambassador for Peace (1986, exactly 10 years before Madeleine Albright became the first female secretary of state), Marine Corp Officer Barbie (in 1991, a year before Gunnery Sergeant Melody Naatz became the first female to don the flat brimmed "Smokey Bear" as a Marine drill instructor), and a Barbie for President (in 1992 when Hillary Clinton was seeking the position as first lady).
In other words, Barbie was never a baby, but she's come a long way -- and so have the kids who grew up with her.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics.
One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its "Living Room Scale," which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader's Digest, framed diplomas, or "any work of art depicting cowboys" (sorry, pardners) is not.
Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn't shy away from awkward subjects -- he's best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet's nest in the mid-1990s -- and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, "is coming apart at the seams -- not ethnic seams, but the seams of class." Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.
Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.
America's working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty -- and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.
Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven't. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. "This growing isolation" of the elites, he writes, "has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power."
While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: "How Thick Is Your Bubble?" It's rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America's raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we're also done.)
And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious "nonjudgmentalism." Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama's infamous "clinging to guns and religion" comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about "low-sloping foreheads" in "the middle places" of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.
"Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture," Murray writes. "If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret." Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter -- and to understand why they do.
Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we're here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.
"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It's a cost that many in the new upper class don't experience or understand.
Unfortunately, in today's political landscape, the idea that government "help" can sap human virtue is a radical concept. "Those in the new upper class who don't care about politics don't mind the drift toward the European model," Murray points out, "because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience -- much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens."
Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn't worried about the very poor, because, well, "we have a very ample safety net." Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything's fine!
Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that "the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated." A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues -- for everyone, not just the new upper class -- and a restoration of the American experiment.
I hope he's right, but I'm a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he's a racist). But certain facts -- say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children -- tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.
In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that "I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties."
Some of this stems from good intentions: People don't want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.
"Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary," Murray writes. "The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem." That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/
But that was all before the rise of Caitlin Flanagan: mother, Atlantic contributor, and established expert in making certain women's heads explode. Flanagan's secret is simple: She says old-fashioned things. Her first book, 2006's To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, infuriated various feminists by suggesting that housewifery and stay-at-home mothering might be an okay idea. With the release of Girl Land, her newest book, Flanagan, no slouch in the controversy department, has already been labeled an "anti-feminist provocateur" (Cha-ching! Thank you, Christian Science Monitor), a "professional pearl-clutcher" (Gawker.com) and a writer who has been "enraging liberal-thinking women since 2001" (New York magazine).
In Girl Land, Flanagan ruminates on the lurid world of today's adolescent girls, which, she argues, is often nasty, brutish and strewn with land mines. "In the space of a few short decades," she writes, "the entire landscape of what is possible for a girl has changed dramatically. But on the other hand, at the exact same moment, we have seen the birth of a common culture that is openly contemptuous of girls and young women." Girls are trained to see themselves as sexual objects, she argues, learn to please men above all else, and are deprived of many of the basic ingredients of a healthy female adolescence -- privacy, daydreams, introspection, visions of romance.
And proms. Along with dating, and, oddly, diaries (more on that later), Flanagan devotes a whole chapter to proms, citing them as an essential ingredient in today's girl-to-woman journey. At first, I found this hilarious. My own prom ended in a bit of a melee, thanks to some earnest, junior-class party planner who decided it would be cute to have goldfish bowls on each table -- prom theme: "Under the Sea!" -- and forgot that said tables would be populated with high-school boys. The more fortunate fish ended up wiggling down girls' dresses, or perhaps soaring above the dance floor to their doom, a sorrowful, bug-eyed flight, their last living moments choreographed to "Lady in Red." The less fortunate met a more grisly end, dangled above an oh-so-romantic "Under the Sea!"-themed prom candle.
But proms of 2012, apparently, are a different ball of melted-goldfish wax. Today, "Girl Land" reports, proms are made up of two parts: a formal, adult-monitored dance; then an unsupervised, liquor-soaked after-party that would make Ozzy Osbourne, bat-biter extraordinaire, shamble over to a corner and shrink into a fetal position. "The bacchanalian after-parties that have become as important as the proms themselves," Flanagan writes, "are ones in which the manufactured romance of the school-sponsored event is replaced by a frenzied attempt to embrace the most coarse and vulgar aspect of the common culture, in which girls change from prom wear into sleazy clothes and drink to the point of passing out, both of which seem to be inclinations supported wholeheartedly by the boys."
Well, goody. Assuming one finds this alarming (and apparently that's a big assumption among some high school parents today) what's a parent to do? Flanagan makes some modest suggestions: Parents should be more protective of their daughters. Fathers should make sure they meet -- and through their presence, covertly telegraph their superior ability to maim and kill -- their daughters' dates. (I'm paraphrasing here, but it's pretty much in the book). Parents, Flanagan also suggests, should cut off unsupervised Internet access in their daughters' rooms.
None of this seems too crazy to me. Regardless, Flanagan's approach and advice, along with her admittedly dated cultural examples and tendency to generalize, have drummed up howls of derision from the usual suspects -- self-labeled feminists leery of a paternalistic power structure squelching the "independence" and "sexual equality" of young girls. It's an equality that is entirely fictional, thanks to biology, but hey, why get hung up on the details?
"As a parent," Flanagan writes, "I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households -- individual mothers and fathers -- are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment." This sentiment, of course, sells a lot of things short: church communities, extended families, trusted friends. It also highlights one of the main flaws of Flanagan's book: her willingness to paint with an overly broad, and overly dark, brush.
In nearly every corner of Girl Land -- looped through discussions of Judy Blume, Patty Hearst, or tragic drug-soaked runaway girls -- there lurks a strange ambiguity towards men. On one hand, Flanagan seems to buy into the "all men are predators" narrative, speaking of the pervy uncle and the drunk father hitting on the babysitter as if they are prototypes, not anomalies. Perhaps this stems from an assault Flanagan endured when she was younger, which she details in the book. But it's an odd quirk, particularly in a girl culture better represented by the aggressive, love-struck babysitter in "Crazy, Stupid, Love" (in the movie, she harasses her charge's clueless father, leading to mortifying results) than anything else.
But then, on the other hand, Girl Land exhibits a strange sense of "boys will be boys" that excuses even the crassest behavior. "If I were to learn that my children had engaged in oral sex -- outside a romantic relationship, and as young adolescents -- I would be sad," Flanagan writes. "But I wouldn't think that they had been damaged by the experience; I wouldn't think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or that they would need therapy. Because I don't have daughters, I have sons."
Forgive me if I'm not inspired. Like Flanagan, I am the mother of two boys, but unlike Flanagan, I plan to hold them to the same moral standards as I would a girl. Also, I can pretty much guarantee that one of those standards will be no "big pimpin'" in the middle school parking lot.
Again and again, Girl Land reminds us that boys and girls are different, and they certainly are. There's no denying that today's girls face a toxic culture. They definitely have more to lose when it comes to sex. But "because I said so," the reasoning that seems to float behind much of the cautions of Girl Land, is not a lasting moral framework. Neither are the oft-repeated platitudes about "feelings" and "respect."
It's a funny thing these days; you say old-fashioned things, you get called a provocateur. Girl Land hands out old-fashioned material in spades, but it falls short when it comes to the big question that all kids ask: "Why?" Why practice self-control in life? Why does how we behave matter? Why should anyone care? The only way both boys and girls will make the right decisions in life, and make them independently, is through a big picture perspective. It's a framework that provides an understanding of the human spirit and a worldview that goes beyond the material here and now.
Oh, and on the whole diary thing -- don't let any girl bamboozle you into thinking that they're some essential part of growing up. Diaries are fine, but they're mostly one more excuse for preteens to gossip about their friends. I know. I, too, have been a resident of Girl Land. And I survived.
Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Chicago. http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/
Rarely has it felt so awkward, so nostalgic, or so generally beside the point to speak of such a thing as the American literary scene, let alone to render some fixed assessment of its "state." In our post-meltdown new millennium, literary expression seems to have embraced a self-conscious role as lifestyle ornament, offering imaginary retreats from the historical present in lieu of any sustained reckoning with the way we live now.
In his widely hailed love-triangle novel, The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides recreates the more innocent (if theory-besotted) academic world of his 1980s alma mater, Brown University. In 1Q84 Japan's master postmodernist writer Haruki Murakami went Eugenides one better, setting a noirish tale of political intrigue in the Tokyo of his 1980s young adulthood -- but then proceeds to recast the decade as an underground alternate reality. And Chad Harbach's bestselling novel The Art of Fielding perhaps unfairly one-ups all the nostalgic competition by gracing readers with a coming-of-age tale set at a small liberal arts college (though apparently not during the 1980s) that doubles as a fable about the timeless charms of baseball. Forrest Gump -- who just narrowly missed being an '80s icon in his own right -- would seem to be the de facto literary muse of 2011: After an unsettling tour through campus life and a fraught 1960s political scene, he, too, discovered the tonic, restorative virtues of athletic prowess.
Meanwhile, in apparent recognition of their own correspondingly diminished role, culture critics settled into a nostalgic mood of their own. Freshly reissued collections of harsh twentieth-century taste arbiters such as Dwight MacDonald and Pauline Kael came in for long appraisals in outlets like the New Yorker -- the august weekly where both Kael and MacDonald had previously published, but which now has to make do with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik as public intellectuals.
David Brooks, the New York Times theologian of Beltway consensus who has often professed his own nostalgia for the midcentury cultural and ideological pyrotechnics of The Partisan Review, produced what was easily the year's worst book: The Social Animal, a didactic portrait of the family life of a pair of fictionalized ideal-types intended to embody the hallowed pundit principles of meritocratic worth and social capital. In fairness, though, the sex scenes in The Social Animal have to rank as the year's greatest (if also its most inadvertent) moments of literary farce.
Brooks, as it happened, had also been on the vanguard of one of the most striking literary trends of late 2010 -- which, given the general paucity of more timely material of interest, we may as well count as part of our year-end review: the jihad declared on the one recent novel that has tangled with the degraded American social world, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.
In a column betraying almost no actual familiarity with the book's contents, Brooks derided Franzen's novel as a classic specimen of the "Quiet Desperation Dogma" that is catnip to an "American literary culture" hellbent on deriding "small-town and suburban" existence in these United States. While Franzen is an undeniably talented writer, Brooks conceded, his unforgiving vision of the bourgeois American scene is confined within an "intellectual cul de sac": "There's almost no religion. There's very little about the world of work and enterprise. There's an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling."
In an expert dissection of the literary right's multifront assault on Franzen's novel, Maureen Tkacik noted that there are no less than seven fundamental misrepresentations of Freedom's plot and characters in those three sentences alone. To take just the most obvious among them, the bit about the absent world of work, which had Brooks mistakenly claiming that just one major character in Freedom was holding down a real job: "Franzen's characters main and minor are universally not only gainfully employed, but unusually industrious and devoted to their jobs." It was, Tkacik marveled in the Washington City Paper, very much as though Brooks had reported that the novels of Candace Bushnell, while "important," were dismayingly short on "references to female friendship, casual sex, meals consumed in trendy restaurants, ludicrously expensive anti-aging ointments and/or cosmetic surgery procedures, homosexuals, frivolity in general." To take another howling Brooks misreading of the most basic features of Freedom: None of the action in Franzen's novel occurs in or around suburbia or small-town America, save for a very brief epilogue near the end.
Still, as Tkacik also noted, Brooks was far from the worst offender. That laurel went to B.R. Myers, who composed a feature-length essay in The Atlantic grousing mainly about Franzen's use of profane and slang-ridden dialogue, which somehow culminated in the arch, dogmatic dismissal of Franzen's book as "a 576-page monument to insignificance." Next to such outbursts, Adam Kirsch's charge, in The New Republic, that Freedom was somehow anti-Semitic for featuring a neoconservative plotline seems downright restrained.
This shrill and rigid public denunciation of a novel about America's social mores and ideological folk wisdom spoke volumes, of course, about the actual subject of Franzen's novel: the way the pliant and worthy American ideal of freedom gets bent out of all recognizable shape in the service of brute personal, ideological, and commercial ambitions. Even at the height of the 1950s Red Scare, when conservative demagogues professed to find anti-American conspiracies and ideological formations in anodyne school textbooks and public-health initiatives, most cultural commentators were content to let American novelists ply themes of social criticism on a fairly wide scale.
Sure, the "conformity novel" of the '50s produced some thuddingly earnest exercises in pasteboard storytelling such as Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, but in hands of far more assured writers such as Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov and Richard Yates, the distempers of the suburban soul were not fodder for Maoist preachments on the spiritual snares of consumer capitalism -- and no one mistook them as such. Even the most heavy-breathing Red baiters of the age would have regarded such critiques as lunatic ideological readings of works of art. In the new millennial ambit of postideological American literary consensus, very much by contrast, a novel about family life and relationships that veers pointedly at times into the world of political ideas is treated as a 600-page thoughtcrime.
Indeed, the intense convictions of the 2010 Blame Freedom First crowd supplies a striking parallel with the 2011 boom market in tidy backward-glancing lifestyle parables. When a social novel of comparatively modest reach comes in for such a sustained beatdown from our most prestigious opinion-making outlets, where's the percentage for writers publishing anything other than sepia-toned works of campus reminiscence, or meditations on the metaphysics of defensive baseball?
What's more, it's no great stretch to suggest that the heyday of critics such as Kael and MacDonald helped to stoke stronger demand for cultural works that more directly and honestly engaged their own historical moment. To take just one illustrative instance, when Saul Bellow had achieved early success as a midcentury literary enfant terrible, he promptly sought to leverage it into a career as the editor and publisher of a quite good small literary journal, The Noble Savage. In that long-ago literary age, the works of critics of artists were understood as being very much of a piece -- which is also why Bellow would later fictionalize the plight of intellectuals losing touch with the American bourgeois culture in powerful works such as Herzog and Humboldt's Gift.
In our new century, Bellow's best-known legatee in American letters -- his son, Adam -- has published his own impassioned vindication of his chosen career path, In Praise of Nepotism, and is now best known as the publisher of Sarah Palin. It's a rich saga of intrafamilial ambition, intellectual orthodoxies, and free-ranging anxieties of influence -- all great material for a social novel of its own, if we had any writers left with the nerve to try one.
Chris Lehmann is an editor for BookForum.
It's not this way just in college. When male students graduate -- if they do -- uncertainty is often what they tenaciously hold to. Glancing off jobs and relationships, they remain undecided about what to do and whom to love for the better part of a decade. This is the thesis Kay Hymowitz explores in her new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women is Turning Men into Boys. Well, not boys exactly, but rather "preadults," a term Hymowitz coins and uses frequently. Either way, the implication is an unflattering metamorphosis.
Preadulthood -- most common among men in their twenties, though it can easily extend to one's thirties and beyond -- is a consequence of two related economic trends that are reshaping the coming-of-age experience for young Americans, both men and women. The first trend is the extended period of training -- college and beyond -- deemed necessary to succeed in the modern economy. The second trend is women's participation and flourishing in the new economy. Breaking news? Not exactly. But developments that are here to stay make Hymowitz's book all the more timely.
Hymowitz rejects the popular idea that preadulthood is a limbo state, an extended frat party for dudes unwilling to grow up. Preadult males may play video games (the average gamer is 35) and "ride their bikes in traffic," but preadulthood is "not even remotely a college after-party." Its roots, Hymowitz says, are a "predictable, perhaps even necessary, response to massive changes in the way Americans earn a living."
Economic changes drive cultural ones. This underlies Hymowitz's narrative, and it represents a noteworthy change in the author's outlook. In her previous book, Marriage and Caste in America (2006), Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, argued that the erosion of their "life script" -- school, career, marriage and family -- accounted for the floundering lives of young men in their twenties. Young men sank into joblessness and poverty, crime and addiction when marriage and fatherhood broke down or were not contemplated. "There is no way to attack these worrisome economic trends without tackling culture," Hymowitz wrote. What results is a "destructive pattern of drift, of a tendency for men to stumble through life rather than try to tame it."
The thrust of Manning Up is different. In her new book, Hymowitz puts economic conditions first -- along with the increasing professional accomplishments of women. Preadulthood, she says, is "an adjustment to huge shifts in the economy, one that makes a college education essential to achieving or maintaining a middle-class life." Hymowitz points to the lifetime earnings gap separating college graduates from those who have only a high school diploma. But as a changing economy becomes more friendly to the educated, it also becomes "very, very female friendly," offering women more career choices. Last year, women became a majority of the workforce: "At the heart of preadulthood is women's determination to achieve financial independence before marriage."
Indeed, the "second sex" so dominates higher education from attendance data to graduation statistics that the College of William and Mary has a compensatory male-friendly admissions policy. As one administrator explained to writer Andrew Ferguson, "We are the College of William and Mary, not Mary and Mary." After graduation, young single women out-earn men in nearly every U.S. city, and they are more than twice as likely to own real estate. More education typically means delaying marriage. The average college-educated woman now waits until she is 28 to tie the knot. And what goes for the goose goes for the gander. Forty years ago, 80 percent of men aged 25-29 were married. Today it's 40 percent.
If women have adapted well to the new economy, the same cannot be said for many men. Why not? It easy to paint the rise of working women as the reason why working men are losing ground, but that's an oversimplification. In Boys Adrift (2007), psychologist Leonard Sax argues that men aren't getting the training they need and blames the education system. The school curriculum is all wrong for boys. They're taught reading and writing at too young an age. Competitive activities and hands-on learning are discouraged. Boys are reprimanded when they show an interest in war and violence. Taken together, these changes lead to the "widespread belief among the children themselves that school isn't welcoming to real boys." Restless and bored, boys are diagnosed as ADHD and medicated accordingly. If Tom Sawyer were a boy today, says Sax, he would be on Adderall.
Sax makes his case well, but I don't believe the challenges facing men can be pinned solely on a female-centric education. Schools by themselves can't affect a child's life trajectory as much as we sometimes imagine. Overlapping political, economic and cultural factors are far more significant.
Government social programs are the culprit for the libertarian scholar Charles Murray. In a 2010 address to the American Enterprise Institute Murray relates the story of the janitor:
When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent (through a range of government social programs like welfare, healthcare and daycare), it doesn't affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't.
Murray's poignant description of the impact of welfare state programs is on the mark; it has been played out to devastating effect in many inner-city communities. However, the moral hazard created by government overreach is overstated for those men in working class and middle income communities whose lives have been dislocated by the recession and long-term economic changes.
Journalist Hanna Rosin describes a group of men in Kansas City who could be Murray's janitors. In her essay "The End of Men" (Atlantic, June 2010) she calls them "casualties of the end of the manufacturing era."
The 30 men sitting in the classroom aren't there by choice: Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. Like them, he [the social worker running the class] explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical "white picket fence" -- one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. "Well, that check bounced a long time ago," he says..."All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain't even that...What is our role? Everyone's telling us we're supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It's toxic, and poisonous, and it's setting us up for failure." He writes on the board: $85,000. "This is her salary." Then: $12,000. "This is your salary. Who's the damn man? Who's the man now?" A murmur rises. "That's right. She's the man."
The recession has been a defining event in the working lives of many men my father's age. When the housing market tanked, taking the construction industry with it, my former boss watched as a year's worth of anticipated work evaporated almost overnight. He laid off his five-man crew, myself included, who counted on siding to houses and remodeling kitchens. Twenty-six years old and single, I lost a job. My coworkers, in their forties with mortgages and families and working at the only jobs they knew, lost far more.
Rosin's arresting line -- She's the man. What does it mean to be a man?
In his 2006 book Manliness, Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield combs through events in history and works of literature to offer an answer. To become a man is to develop a sense of duty, he writes, which means responding productively to life's challenges. An ad for the U.S. Navy shows men jumping from helicopters into the ocean on a rescue mission. The subliminal message: "Answer the call."
Mansfield notes that most expressions of manliness are hidden beneath the clutter of everyday life. Only emergencies bring it to the surface, as when a family man jerry-rigs a pull cord to fire up the generator and restore power to his house after a winter ice storm. Ah! Where would his home and family be without heat, without him. This is manliness employed.
Today, however, men are unemployed, and the cause, Mansfield believes, is modernity, which relies on technology more than duty to satisfy our needs and protect us from trouble. The economy's productivity and the government's programs provide the baseline level of safety and security. Security, says Mansfield, is the "very antithesis of manliness." There's the rub. Today's rescue mission is not men jumping from helicopters. It's the Allstate man, or woman, handling your insurance claim. "The entire enterprise of modernity could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed."
Mansfield, like Murray and Rosin, locates men at the intersection of work and family. All three suggest that growing numbers of men are unemployed, not only in the job market but within the family. It's small wonder, then, that a rising generation of young guys is unsure why, or how, to enter manhood. "My mother says to get a job, But she don't like the one she's got," sings the rock band Green Day in "Longview," an anthem to the squandered potential and ennui of young American men who are Hymowitz's preadults. "In a house with unlocked doors, And I'm fucking lazy."
Hymowitz argues that economic trends are making the transition to manhood more complicated. Can men figure out a way to beat the trends?
Conventional wisdom suggests that if men want better jobs, they should seek more schooling to overcome the widening earnings gap between those with a college education and those without. The "knowledge economy," as it's called, shouts, "You earn what you learn." But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Peter Theil, the billionaire founder of PayPal, is skeptical about the benefits of college: "Parents see kids moving back home after college and they're thinking, 'Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.'"
What's happening is that two constraints are weakening the conventional wisdom.
One reason why the "knowledge economy" is misfiring is that many jobs in the modern economy require no advanced training. Writer Matthew Crawford contends that a modern economy is cognitively stratified. Truly intellectual and creative tasks fall to a shrinking pool of elites, who codify their work into efficient and uniform systems of rules and processes that govern what most other people do for a living. In the introduction to his recent translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Professor Mansfield underscores what that French visitor noted more than a century and a half ago:
The most efficient production of consumer goods requires both concentration of capital -- large corporations -- and specialization of labor -- small, repetitive tasks. This kind of production gives rise to inequalities not just in the incomes but eventually in the very abilities of workers and managers. Repetition of small tasks narrows one's mental faculties, whereas the challenge of managing a large corporation may enhance them. Tocqueville forsees the possibility of an industrial aristocracy based almost exclusively on intellectual ability, the new sort of aristocracy we now call meritocracy... Democracies will either have to swallow the new kind of inequality for the sake of maximizing material prosperity, or else accept diminished economic productivity for the sake of equality.
If Mansfield is right, then we can better understand the findings of a report that Thiel commissioned in 2009. It argued that the increasing earnings gap was caused not by a rise in wages for the college educated, but by the falling wages of those with only high school diplomas. According to government data, the median annual earning for a man aged 25-34 with a high school diploma fell dramatically from $44,200 in 1980 to $32,000 in 2008 (in constant 2008 dollars). Median annual earnings for men with a bachelor's degree crept up only slightly $52,300 to $55,000. The earnings of women without a college degree fell just a bit to $25,000, while women with a college degree experienced an earnings jump from $38,800 to $45,000. "Relative to the past," the report states, "students who go to college do better than their peers who do not, but this is simply a mathematical result of their peers doing worse than in the 1970s." That's particularly the case for men.
The second constraint on the conventional wisdom that "you earn what you learn" is that what you earn increasingly depends on what others learn. College becomes a zero sum game to the extent that employers use the acquisition of a college degree as a device to screen out prospective employees. Any benefit depends on someone else not going to college. A corollary is that as more workers complete college, the wage premium for a degree shrinks. British economist Fred Hirsch predicted this in his 1977 book Social Limits to Growth: "More education for all leaves everyone in the same place...it is a case of everyone in the crowd standing on tiptoe and no one getting a better view."
Many students attend college primarily to pass the employers' initial screening. Consider the subjects they choose as majors. By far the single largest field of study is business, which accounts for more than one in five undergraduate degrees. I was a business economics major, and I think my fellow students and I thought our degrees sent a signal that we could think. They were not markers for what we had learned.
Most Americans agree. According to a recent Pew Poll, 57 percent say higher education fails to provide good value for money. However, they recognize that there is no other option: nearly every parent surveyed (94%) expects their child to attend college. Young people are forced to take on potentially crippling debt in order to earn a credential whose value diminishes with each additional new college graduate. The alternative is to opt out of the college pool, be overlooked by employers and thrust into intense competition for low-wage employment. My cousin's ten-year-old son recently told me his solution: "I'm going to college. Then I will work construction with my dad."
Hymowitz's book does an excellent job chronicling the rise of preadults, and her case that economic changes are driving cultural ones is compelling. As another writer, Jonathan Rauch, agrees, shifting economic norms are reshaping the American family. Rauch says the new model is delayed marriage and delayed family formation, as men and women pursue their education. This ushers in new gender roles. Fatherhood is redefined to include providing for children's emotional well-being. Motherhood is redefined to include bringing home a paycheck.
The new model is effective for some, but Rauch warns that, "for many Americans, the new rules are not a perfect or complete or sometimes even adequate substitute for the old." Most Americans don't delay family formation into their thirties because they're finishing up their MBAs, and for them the path to successful adulthood is increasingly hard to locate. Helen Fisher, one of the brains behind Match.com, the world's largest dating website, told a writer for the New Yorker: "Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand...and we don't know what to do."
Next year Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart will provide the data to back up Fisher's point. Murray notes that American behavior in the core areas of marriage and family is dividing along class lines to an unprecedented extent. For the educated upper middle class, the new rules work fine. But in the working class, intact families are an endangered species.
Murray compares the extent of marriage in the upper-middle class relative to the working class for those in the prime of life (ages 30-49). In the 1960s, 88 percent of those considered upper-middle class and 83 percent of those considered working class were married. In 2010, the figures were 83 percent and 48 percent. That 35 percent gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes in this country...Marriage has collapsed in the working class." And the rate of out-of-wedlock births has skyrocketed. In 1960 only six percent of children of working class parents were born out-of-wedlock. Today the number is nearly 50 percent. (Murray looks only at data for white Americans to underscore his argument that class, not race, is the issue that divides us.)
Hymowitz's book doesn't address this issue, and it's an important shortcoming. Instead she focuses on college-educated guys like me who are successfully drifting, not fighting to survive. My name is Philip, and I am a preadult. That sounds right.
Hymowitz's advice to preadults is to "man up." I respond: We want to, and we will, we are just figuring out how.
Philip Brand is the author of The Neighbor's Kid: A Cross Country Journey in Search of What Education Means to Americans (Capital Research Center, 2010). He lives and works in New Hampshire.
King's words in front of the Alabama State Capitol building have been evoked anew, in recent months and weeks, after Alabama's legislature signed the nation's strictest anti-illegal immigrant bill into law. The law, known formally as the "Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act," or HB 56, is one of dozens mirroring Arizona's SB 1070, and has been referred to by many as "SB 1070 on steroids" for its enhanced and menacing effort to create a segregated underclass of undocumented immigrants in Alabama.
Amongst other provisions, the original bill (which, like Arizona's SB 1070, is being challenged in the federal court system, for its potential civil rights breaches and its violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution) instructs local law enforcement officials to stop anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, makes it a crime for citizens to knowingly transport an undocumented person -- to church or a hospital or anywhere else --, prohibits "an alien unlawfully present in the United States from receiving any state or local public benefits, prohibits a person not lawfully present from being eligible on the basis of residence for education benefits..."
The list of things undocumented immigrants would be prohibited from doing, as well as the list of ways U.S. citizens would be prohibited from interacting with undocumented immigrants, goes on for quite awhile. It's worth reading for yourself, at least the first few pages of the bill, to understand the length and depths to which Alabamian legislators tried, as the New York Times asserted, to turn the state "into the most hostile territory for illegal immigrants."
In particular, HB 56 has drawn vehement criticism for the provision requiring public schools to check students' birth certificates and immigration status before allowing students to enroll in public school. Such provisions are causing many to make comparisons between Jim Crow laws and anti-illegal immigrant measures like HB 56, referring to the latter as Juan Crow laws.
If we turn to a simple definition of the word segregation, such as that provided by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary -- "the separation or isolation of a race, class or ethnic group by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or other discriminatory means" -- it is difficult not to see how HB 56 is segregationist. As the New York Times said, the law is perpetuating a permanent underclass, making undocumented immigrants even more "isolated, unemployable, poor, defenseless and uneducated."
There is, of course, a justification for the bill. In the legislators' own words, "The State of Alabama finds that illegal immigration is causing economic hardship and lawlessness in this state and that illegal immigration is encouraged when public agencies within this state provide public benefits without verifying immigration status."
There is a perception among those who support such laws that illegal immigrants are draining tax-payer funded institutions at the expense of U.S. citizens. The argument goes: illegal immigrants are making classrooms overcrowded, putting a strain on already over-burdened public clinics and hospitals, and, as Steven Camarota, of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, has argued, a fiscal net loss to the U.S. government, the largest costs incurred from Medicaid, treatment for the uninsured, food assistance programs, and prison, court and school systems. The Alabama bill, like all SB 1070 copycat laws, is rooted in this sort of logic. Supporters of such laws argue that they are not segregationist. They are fair and protective.
To fully understand the genesis of Alabama's HB 56, it is worth briefly tracing its origins back to the "The Mother Law" of anti-illegal immigrant bills, Arizona's SB 1070. Signed into law by Arizona's governor, Jan Brewer, on April 23, 2010, Arizona's SB 1070 was, at the time, the nation's strictest immigration law. In a strategy of "attrition by enforcement," the most controversial measures of SB 1070 granted local police officers the right to stop anyone they suspected of being in Arizona illegally, and made it a crime for citizens to knowingly transport or shelter undocumented immigrants in any capacity.
The passing of SB 1070 immediately grabbed national attention. Overnight, people across the country, on all sides of the debate, were stirred up and weighing in, arguing over the new law. Detractors called the law racist and a serious violation of basic civil rights, while those in favor, like Kris Kobach, former Attorney General Ashcroft's chief advisor and secretary of state of Kansas, said the law was "a measured, reasonable step" in the effort to secure the border, "giving Arizona police officers another tool when [coming] into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement
duties."
Upon signing the bill into law, Governor Jan Brewer voiced her support of the measure. "I believe Arizona, like America, is governed by laws. Good laws... well-intentioned laws... laws that confer respect and that demand respect in return," she said.
Meanwhile, critics of SB 1070 said the law would enable rampant racial profiling and ultimately violated the equal protections clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Many such critics, like Cardinal Roger Mahoney, made comparisons to Jim Crow, and to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques "whereby people were required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation." A large group of faith leaders, across theological and denominational lines, came together to condemn SB 1070 and to appeal for humane and comprehensive immigration reform instead of racist and ill-conceived laws.
Jim Wallis, one of the most strident evangelical voices in favor of immigration reform, called the new law "a social and racial sin." Not only was it "mean-spirited" and "crossed many moral and legal laws," Wallis wrote in his God's Politics blog, but furthermore, it went against his and others' "Christian conscience."
The law, Wallis wrote, "should be denounced as [a sin] by people of faith and conscience across the nation. This is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It's time to stand up to this new strategy of 'deportation by attrition.' It is a policy of deliberate political cruelty." Wallis stressed how SB 1070 made it "illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona. . . . Jesus . . . instructed his disciples to 'welcome the stranger,' and said that whatever we do to 'the least of these, who are members of my family' we do to him. I think that means that to obey Jesus and his gospel will mean to disobey SB 1070."
Ultimately, the federal government filed a lawsuit against Arizona, claiming SB 1070 violated the "preeminent authority" concerning matters of immigration. As Joyce Vance, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama would later say, explaining the federal government's right to control all matters of immigration, "To put it in terms we relate to... you can only have one quarterback in a football game. In immigration, the federal government is the quarterback."
As a result of the lawsuit against Arizona, many of the most controversial provisions of SB 1070 were blocked by federal judge Susan Bolton. Bolton did not cite racism per se. Nor did she cite the equal protections clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Rather, in her ruling she stated, "the mandatory requirement that Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies check the immigration status of any person arrested," would both "burden legally-present aliens" as well as "divert federal resources from the federal government's other responsibilities and priorities," and unfairly target lawfully present immigrants with "the possibility of intrusive police practices that might affect international relations and generate disloyalty."
But still, even with the key provisions blocked, in no way did Arizona's SB 1070 go gently into the night, not only because Bolton's ruling is being appealed, but more importantly because SB 1070 served as the spark that ignited a bonfire, so to speak, of Arizona copycat bills. Within a year, in more than a dozen states, bills mimicking SB 1070 were introduced, and many such bills added even more draconian measures, banning sanctuary city-policies outright, barring undocumented students from in-state tuition at state colleges, allowing local law enforcement officials to confiscate the property of undocumented immigrants, forcing parents to show proof of legal residence to register their children in schools. And so forth.
Before such copycat bills, the state of Arizona was singled out as America's racist backwater. As the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said when SB 1070 was signed into law, "Today, Arizona stands as the state with the most xenophobic and nativist laws in the country."
However, the difference between Arizona and most of the other states that have been proposing similar and more severe legislation is that, unlike Alabama, Arizona has been deeply affected by the chaos of the U.S.-Mexican border. Hundreds of migrants die in the harsh Arizona desert trying to enter the country illegally. Ranchers' land is damaged by rampant illegal activity, both human and drug smuggling operations. Arizona hospitals, drained of funds, due to caring for so many sick migrants rescued in the desert, are threatening to close their doors. Citizens must endure the constant presence of Border Patrol operations (walls, highway checkpoints, Blackhawks, etc.).
If any state had an excuse for such anti-illegal immigration legislation, one might argue, it would be Arizona. As the Arizona Republic opined, SB 1070 was "ugly and indefensible," but "unlike other states, Arizona has an illegal-immigration superhighway running north from the border into our biggest metropolitan areas... Feeling cornered and anxious, Arizona lashed out with a nasty immigration bill. . . . But those in other states who defame Arizona need to look in the mirror. This is your problem, too. This is America's problem. ... It is a fantasy to believe that Arizona is an island, a racist backwater isolated from the other 49. We are you. We are what happens when the brunt of a national problem is [borne] by one state. Rather than make Arizona the scapegoat, we can all make it the catalyst to finally fix our national immigration system."
Many opponents of measures like SB 1070 or HB 56 would say just that: there is a lot of scapegoating going on, and the real problem lies with the U.S.'s shamefully outmoded immigration system. During the height of the SB 1070 controversy, President Obama delivered a speech at American University's School of International Service calling for bipartisan cooperation in the effort to overhaul what he called America's "fundamentally broken" immigration system, admitting that the current system reflects "years of patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions," which have led to paralyzing "backlogs and bureaucracy."
Obama blamed the "creakiness" of the system on a combination of nasty political posturing, intransigent partisanship, and a certain moral laziness of everyone: on the part of government, on the part of businesses, and on the part of individuals. Immigration reform, he said, was "not only a political issue, not just an economic issue, but a moral imperative as well."
Unfortunately, with current economic stagnation and high unemployment, immigration reform has not been a priority. Many say fixing the economy must come first. But, when looked at holistically, the issue of immigration is about the economy. The economic upheaval in the United States points to certain core systemic flaws in the ways we (as a nation and a global community) have chosen to conduct trade, seek out labor, cut costs, build businesses, outsource jobs, and rely on cheap products manufactured in ethically dubious assembly plants.
Many of these practices have influenced migration patterns, creating "push" and "pull" forces that span international boundaries, contributing to "shadow populations," such as illegal immigrant communities throughout the U.S. This is why immigration reform must also be a priority, because it is deeply connected to the work of trying to imagine a healthier global economy and a more harmonious and just human community.
In the same speech in Montgomery, King called Jim Crow "the psychological bird" of the "poor white man." Segregation, he said, was a strategy used by the Southern aristocracy to keep the southern masses divided and impoverished. "When the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society of justice," he said that Jim Crow was engineered to keep the rich and powerful at the top of the pecking order by imparting a sense of false superiority to the poor white man.
King said, "The southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man. And he ate Jim Crow."
In the wake of laws like Alabama's HB 56, many have been drawing parallels between Jim Crow laws and what they call "Juan Crow" laws. The two -- Jim Crow and Juan Crow -- may not be exactly the same thing. They have very different histories, different contexts. But many are saying that the spate of anti-illegal immigrant bills over the past eighteen months is part of a similar strategy of division and impoverishment, a way of keeping people disunified and complacent, and of pointing the blame for current social ills at the wrong groups (illegal immigrants).
This impoverishment is not only limited to those immigrants targeted by such laws. The impoverishment extends to society as a whole. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, pointing to the way in which such laws morally impoverish everyone involved, the oppressed and the oppressors.
For this reason, many religious and interfaith groups across the country have been protesting these "Juan Crow" measures, citing the many commands in the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures to love those who are most vulnerable, such as widows, orphans, and aliens. Groups like Vamos Together, a Montgomery based civil rights and social justice organization rooted in the teachings of King, believe HB 56, like SB 1070, goes against the Christian injunction "to love neighbor as self."
On its website Vamos Together lists "101 reasons to repeal HB 56," amongst those reasons: "Modern day Good Samaritans will be outlawed; the law violates the Bible: Exodus 22:21, 'You shall not oppress a foreigner'; it reeks of nativism and such is not a Christian option; and the law contradicts the essential tenets of the Christian faith." This imperative to act with loving kindness toward the most vulnerable is also prominent in Muslim scriptures and commentary, in Buddhist texts, in much humanist philosophy, and in the majority of many of the world's other prominent religious traditions.
"Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality," King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, begging the questions: Are laws like SB 1070 and HB 56 distorting the soul of America? Are they psychological birds, distracting us from the real problems at hand?
Ananda Rose holds a doctorate in Religion and Society from Harvard University. Her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is Showdown in the Sonoran Desert: Religion, Law and the Immigration Controversy.