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April 22, 2013 $4.99 SteynMark on Zombies MARRIAGE AND THE COURT: Ponnuru w The Editors

WoWonderlandnderland

CHARLES C. W. COOKE ON the miracle of Canada’s tar sands

$4.99 16

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APRIL 22, 2013 | VOLUME LXV, NO. 7 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 32 The Quiet Reihan Salam on the modern family Gold Rush p. 20 In our search for energy supplies, there is of course a BOOKS, ARTS need for some self- awareness. But there is no & MANNERS need what soever for the 41 THE GREAT ABYSS Michael F. Bishop reviews companies that make our July 1914: Countdown to War, lifestyles possible to prostrate by Sean McMeekin.

themselves in front of us 42 WHERE SHE’S COMING FROM Florence King reviews apologetically. Charles C. W. Cooke My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor.

COVER: AP PHOTO/JEFF MCINTOSH 44 LANDSCAPE AFTER Andrew Stuttaford reviews ARTICLES The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in THE PORTMAN POSITION by Ramesh Ponnuru 16 Eastern Europe, by Marci Shore. Why do so few share the senator’s views on marriage? EVELYN WAUGH, CATHOLIC MODERN FAMILY 47 20 by Reihan Salam OPTIMIST Developed societies still need kinship groups. Micah Mattix reviews 22 HIGHER EDUCATION REVALUED by Thomas K. Lindsay Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family, by Michael G. Brennan. Texas considers a proposal to reverse grade inflation. 50 FILM: ON THE BRINK 24 QUAKERS AND BOOTLEGGERS by Kevin D. Williamson They’re putting a cork in Pennsylvania liquor-law reform. Ross Douthat reviews Ginger and Rosa. 28 A COURT IN CAMBODIA by Jay Nordlinger The struggle for justice in the wake of the Khmer Rouge. 51 COUNTRY LIFE: ROOTS QUEST Richard Brookhiser discusses this past 30 PASSION’S FETTERS by Theodore Dalrymple winter’s horseradish harvest. How Chris Huhne doomed himself.

SECTIONS FEATURES 2 Letters to the Editor 32 THE QUIET GOLD RUSH by Charles C. W. Cooke 4 The Week On the many splendors of Canada’s tar sands. 39 Athwart ...... James Lileks 40 The Long View ...... Rob Long 36 CYPRUS SINKING by Andrew Stuttaford 46 Poetry ...... Sally Cook The euro zone signals that bank deposits are not safe. 52 Happy Warrior ...... Mark Steyn

NaTiONal RevieW (iSSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NaTiONal RevieW, inc., at 215 lexington avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © National Review, inc., 2013. address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to editorial Dept., NaTiONal RevieW, 215 lexington avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NaTiONal RevieW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 a.M. to 10:30 P.M. eastern time. adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NaTiONal RevieW, 215 lexington avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-679- 7330. POSTMaSTeR: Send address changes to NaTiONal RevieW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.a. RaTeS: $59.00 a year (24 issues). add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (all payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters--ready:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/2/2013 10:24 PM Page 2 Letters

APRIL 22 ISSUE; PRINTED APRIL 4

EDITOR Richard Lowry Have Some Compassion Senior Editors I write to express my disappointment at yet another paragraph in The Week Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones devoted to transsexuals (March 25). If I recall correctly, this is the third such Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts news bulletin that NaTIoNal RevIeW has printed in recent months, and each time Literary Editor Michael Potemra Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy the editors have offered an arguably snide and certainly unsympathetic com- Washington Editor Robert Costa ment on some unfortunate person—or child, in this instance. Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson National Correspondent John J. Miller I usually enjoy NaTIoNal RevIeW’s sense of humor, and I don’t dispute the Art Director Luba Kolomytseva editors’ right to reflect however they wish on whatever subject they choose, but Deputy Managing Editors Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz I do find it puzzling that the choice is so frequently the transgendered and that Robert VerBruggen these reflections are unfailingly dismissive and unkind. This is beneath a publi- Production Editor Katie Hosmer Editorial Associate Katherine Connell cation with strong Catholic roots and a deserved reputation for incisive and edu- Research Associate Scott Reitmeier cated analysis. Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace Those who struggle with perhaps the most fundamental identity of all, that of Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat gender, should receive our deep sympathy and efforts at understanding. Can we Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty imagine that anyone would consider such an extreme remedy as a sex change Jonah Goldberg / Florence King Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin unless he or she were experiencing deep pain and a conflict between mind and Yuval Levin / Rob Long body that the rest of us cannot even comprehend? We should think seriously and Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy Kate O’Beirne / Reihan Salam compassionately about a six-year-old such as

NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Coy who is grappling with such a profound Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez problem at such a young age, and Coy’s Managing Editor Edward John Craig National Affairs Columnist John Fund parents, who are themselves deserving of News Editor Daniel Foster Media Editor Eliana Johnson commendation for appreciating their child’s Political Reporter Andrew Stiles dilemma, even if they are wrong in not appre- Reporter Katrina Trinko Editorial Associates ciating that of the school. Nathaniel Botwinick / Charles C. W. Cooke Jesus cautioned us not to judge others, but Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Developer Wendy Weihs rather to do unto them as we would wish done

EDITORS- AT- LARGE unto us. Most assuredly, I would not wish to Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan receive the cavalier treatment that NaTIoNal Contributors RevIeW has offered Coy and Coy’s family. Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier Would the editors wish their own personal Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans struggles to be publicly visited with such scorn? as a wise pastor once said, Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter “Too often Christians nail others to the cross, rather than going to the cross for George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart them.” That is a thought worth remembering before further comment is made on Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune those we disagree with or do not understand. D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber Karen Amrhein Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Baltimore, Md. Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Zofia Baraniak Business Services Alex Batey / Alan Chiu Lucy Zepeda Solving the Everyday Problem Circulation Manager Jason Ng Assistant to the•Publisher Kate Murdock WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com Kevin D. Williamson, in his article “The everyday Problem” (March 25), com- MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 pletely ignores a major contributor to traffic congestion: one person per car. SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 Yes, there are commuter lanes on some roads, but they are lightly used. There ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 is no real incentive for people to group together. The only possible solution is to Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Advertising Director Jim Fowler charge cars with only one occupant a toll (additional for toll roads) at entries to Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet major roads. Associate Publisher Paul Olivett Vice President, Communications Amy K. Mitchell Henry Mulkiewicz PUBLISHER Jack Fowler Monmouth Junction, N.J.

CHAIRMANEMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes

FOUNDER Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected]. William F. Buckley Jr.

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n On the basketball court over Easter, Obama shot 2 for 22. Must be the sequester.

n While a few state governments enacted new gun-control measures in the wake of the Newtown tragedy—not all of which will survive the courts—federal legislators have not even come close to drafting a bill that could pass both houses of Congress. An assault-weapons ban seems to be off the table entirely, as it reportedly has fewer than 40 votes in the Senate. And background-check legislation is “going nowhere,” in the words of Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.): Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on even the most basic provi- sions, such as whether and how records are to be kept. Con - nec ti cut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, when pressed by CNN’s Candy Crowley, could not say that any- thing in the Senate’s gun-control bill would have prevented the Newtown massacre. Nor would it be likely to have an ef - fect on crime generally. Banning some rifles cannot reduce gun crime, seeing as very few crimes are committed with rifles of any kind, and a background-check system is almost guaranteed to be unworkable on a practical level. But then practical steps to improve public safety have never been the point of this exercise.

n When Charles Francis Adams and his son Henry visited Zachary Taylor at the White House, they found the presi- dent’s horse, Old Whitey, in a paddock out front, while inside the president “was receiving callers as simply as if he were in the paddock too.” No president will ever live that way n Dr. Ben Carson, pediatric neurosurgeon and recently a conser- again—D. or R., limousine liberal or Tea Party. But accord- vative celebrity, was invited to speak at the commencement of the ing to President Obama, this is a time of government au steri ty, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But when he told Fox News brought on by sequestration, so severe that he was obliged to that “no group—be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they peo- cancel tours of the White House. And yet his daughters spent ple who believe in bestiality . . . get to change the definition” of their spring break in Paradise Island, the Ba ha mas, and in marriage, a student petition was launched to disinvite him. Sun Valley, Idaho. Presidents and their families need relax- Carson subsequently backed off his comparisons, but insisted ation, and the families, especially the children, deserve pri va cy. that marriage remain a commitment between a man and a But if government services that benefit ordinary citizens woman. So far the School of Medicine stands by its invitation, must be cut, could the Obama girls be restricted to one coun- citing Carson’s “extraordinary accomplishments” and describing try per vacay? his “personal views” as “just that, his own.” The man is entitled to his own opinion, for now. n On March 18, seven Marines were killed and eight injured by the explosion of a mortar round during a live-fire training exer- n The New York Times gave the front of its Sunday opinion sec- cise in Nevada. The next day, Senate majority leader Harry Reid tion to David Stockman, President Reagan’s first budget direc- took to the floor of the Senate and exploited their deaths in a de - tor, to attack Reagan’s tax cuts, federal debt, Paul Ryan’s cuts in nun ci a tion of sequestration. He mourned their loss, and then said, anti-poverty spending, loose money, Milton Friedman, the “One of the things in sequester is we cut back in training and Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporate bailouts, maintenance. That’s the way sequester was written. . . . Our Ma - and the last eight decades’ worth of attempts to smooth out the rines were training there in Hawthorne. And with this sequester, business cycle. Stockman neither focuses his critique nor sup- it’s going to cut back.” Of course, the military’s sequestration ports his assertions, but he does tell an easily grasped story of cuts have barely begun to be implemented, and there was abso - elite malfeasance leading to near-certain doom. His closing lute ly no evidence that leaner budgets had anything to do with the advice is to “get out of the markets and hide out in cash.”

ROMAN GENN accident; Reid insisted on juxtaposing them anyway. Semper lie. Conservatives must sift what is true and useful from Stockman’s

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THE WEEK screed, which does not include his implicit counsel to retreat n The Society of Actuaries released a study finding that Oba ma - from public life while the country burns. care would cause insurers to pay out 32 percent more in claims for individual health policies—which means much higher premi- n For reasons we cannot comprehend, the Washington Post saw ums for a lot of people. Not to worry, says Health and Human fit to publish an op-ed arguing that white men as a demographic Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, because the higher premi- should have to answer for the problem of mass shootings. ums will come with a lot more benefits. Policies won’t just be Though the authors claim that we would react this way to any “skimpy” catastrophic coverage. This defense might also be other crime trend that correlated with race, the evidence for this available if the government were to prohibit all meat inferior to is scant: For instance, black men are overrepresented among filet mignon. Yet Obamacare is actually worse than that, since murderers in general, but anyone claiming that black men in comprehensive coverage is not clearly better than catastrophic general should be held accountable for this would (rightly) be coverage. If various counterproductive government policies were denounced as a racist. Further, the whiteness of mass shooters scrapped, most people would probably prefer catastrophic cover- isn’t particularly striking: Liberal journalist David Sirota notes age because buying it and paying out of pocket for routine ex - The Society of Actuaries released a study finding that Obamacare would cause insurers to pay out 32 percent more in claims for individual health policies.

that, over the last several decades, 70 percent of mass shooters penses would be cheaper. Perhaps Sebelius is working on a new have been white men—but about the same fraction of Ameri - regulatory edict from the department: You’ll pay more, and by cans are white today, and more were white in years past. The God you’ll like it. demographics of mass shooters should not be off limits as a topic of debate, but the Post’s op-ed neither gets the facts right n Senators Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) and Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) nor draws reasonable conclusions from them. propose to empower states and localities to impose sales taxes on retailers over whom they have no legal jurisdiction—aban- n In November 2009, Major Nidal Hasan, one of our home- doning, in the process, the principle of no taxation without rep- grown jihadists, shot up people at Fort Hood. He murdered 13 resentation—with the grievously misnamed Marketplace or 14: It depends on whether you count an unborn child (we do). Fairness Act of 2013, better known as the Internet sales tax. At (As Private Francheska Velez died, she said, “My baby, my present, sales taxes are collected by retailers at the point of sale baby.”) Thirty-two people were wounded. There has been a and remitted to the local authorities, the key variable being the push to get the killed and wounded Purple Hearts: They were seller’s location rather than the buyer’s location. The Enzi- soldiers who were hit in circumstances of war. The Pentagon Durbin bill would turn that on its head, requiring online retail- has said no. Our government treats the Fort Hood massacre as ers to ascertain the location of each of their customers, calculate an instance of workplace violence, not war, or combat, or ter- the appropriate sales-tax rate (there are thousands and thou- rorism—which strikes us as a pretty bad case of not knowing sands of separate state and local taxing jurisdictions), and remit the battlefield. the money to the proper authorities from sea to shining sea. The movers behind this bill are tax-hungry state and local authori- n A report from the Brookings Institution finds that only 14 of ties, who covet the ability to lay taxes on people who cannot the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas have more people vote against them, and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, employed today than they had in January 2008—and six of the who resent the fact that people who buy from online retailers 14 are in Texas: Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, McAllen, Dallas, can often escape sales taxes. The proposal is foolish, and Sen a - and Houston. Texans preened at the news, but their critics tor Enzi should know better. If local authorities want to collect protested: It’s just an oil boom, and the rest of the country taxes on online retailers, they are free to do so—provided those doesn’t have all that oil and gas. That line of criticism is wrong retailers are located within their jurisdictions. on both counts: According to the Texas Workforce Com mis - sion, the state’s jobs numbers, while certainly benefiting from n That the planet has stopped warming over the past two dec - the energy industry, are the product of a much more diverse ades has gone from persistent observational anomaly to estab- economy than is generally appreciated, from Austin’s high-tech lished scientific fact. This most inconvenient of truths has sector to Houston’s manufacturing, while better banking prac- thrown off the catastrophist models, troubled the purported tices partly protected the state from the real-estate bubble. And climate-change “consensus,” and given warming alarmists Texas is not the only state that could enjoy an energy renais- cause for alarm. But it has not as yet goaded the U.N.’s In ter - sance: California and New York, for example, have oil and gov ern men tal Panel on Climate Change into modesty. Instead, abundant natural gas; what they do not have is thriving oil-and- the IPCC is expected to double down on the doom in its gas industries, which is entirely the result of politics. New York upcoming report, raising the upper bound of its estimate of State sits atop the same shale formation as Pennsylvania, but warming over the next century, because why not? IPCC chair- state authorities will not allow it to be developed. Politicians man Rajendra Pachauri has made a positively Gory living as a may not be able to pull jobs out of a magic hat, but they can do global-warming “consultant” to governments and corpora- a great deal to discourage them with bad policy. tions. And while even he has been forced to concede the brute

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THE WEEK fact of the temperature plateau, he told an Australian news - dued media coverage. “A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday paper that the leveling would have to continue “at least” that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unortho- another two decades to counter the larger warming trend. dox abortions at a Philadelphia clinic,” the Associated Press Perhaps that’s when his pension kicks in. reported. These abortions, including one in which Gosnell’s employee plunged scissors into the neck of a newborn delivered n The trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Pennsylvania abortionist in a toilet, were outside the ordinary, explained the AP, because charged with the murder of one woman and seven infants who “abortions are typically performed in utero.” A New York Times had been born alive in his clinic, commenced in March to sub- report on page A17 carefully identified Gosnell’s victims as Boys Left Behind

HE Democratic National Convention last September and Milligan examined other activities that are not repre- was unreserved in its insistence that discrimination sented in the chart, such as reading stories to children, T against women is a large and troubling problem in the telling stories to them, and singing songs with them. At U.S. to day, with speaker after speaker noting that, in the both ages, parents spent more days per week on average words of Nancy Pelosi, “women still make just 77 cents for doing these activities with girls than with boys. every dollar men earn.” Multiple scholars, however, have Baker and Milligan studied whether these differences dem on strat ed that pay differences can be explained by fac- influence academic performance and found evidence that tors other than discrimination. strongly suggested a link. The gap between girls’ and boys’ Still, there is a large and troubling gender gap in America. home activities corresponded with significant gaps in their As liberals fret over aggregate pay differences, a gulf has performance on cognitive tests at ages four to five, with emerged over the past two decades between the aca - girls outperforming boys in both reading and math. Boys, demic performance of girls and that of boys. Girls outscore then, are now starting school with a significant handicap, boys in most measures of scholastic aptitude, and this out- one that may lead to persistent differences. performance is reshaping the academic landscape. Since The academic performance of boys has dropped signifi- 1982, women have earned more bachelor’s degrees than cantly over the past two decades, and this may be in part men; they earned 56.9 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the result of increased female labor-force participation. 2012, along with 59.6 percent of master’s degrees and 52.1 Parenting time has become scarcer. The authors found little percent of doctorates. And it’s not just in college and grad- evidence of overall bias—parents spent about the same uate school that girls are beating boys: Female students amount of time with boys as with girls—but they favor took 56 percent of all Advanced Placement tests in high different activities with different sexes, and cognitive- schools in 2011. development time with boys has suffered. If my own par- While is it easy to see the gains that women have made enting experience is any guide, perhaps this is because it’s over men in education over the past few decades, it is harder to get boys to stop wiggling, a gender difference that harder to pinpoint a definite cause. Different theories have is too politically incorrect ever to be the topic of a been offered, ranging from the hypothesis that organized Democratic-convention speech. classrooms are better suited for the learning of girls to bias on the part of parents and teachers against young boys. A —KEVIN A. HASSETT fascinating new paper by Michael Baker and Kevin Milligan for the National Bureau of Economic Research provides new clues about the root of achievement differences Factors in Child between boys and girls. Their evidence suggests that par- ents spend a bit more time engaging in activities that pro- Cognitive Development mote cognition with young girls. Two-year-old boys Two-year-old girls The nearby chart illustrates their key findings. Baker and Four-year-old boys Four-year-old girls Milligan analyzed data about the Early Childhood Long i tud - in al Survey–Birth Cohort, who were born in 2001 in the U.S. 70.2 65.9 40.5% The chart compares boys with girls according to the num- 36.5% 33.1% ber of books that parents reported the children as having, 29.8% 29.5% 44.5 and also according to the percentage of parents who 39.9 23.4% accompanied their child to the library or to a story hour

within the past month. Comparisons are shown for both for 11.5% 12.6% two-year-olds and four-year-olds. For both ages and all of the criteria, girls were better off than boys. For example, while 29.5 percent of two-year-old girls had visited a library Number of Books Attended a Visited Child Owns Story Hour the Library in the past month, only 23.4 percent of two-year-old boys

had done so. Two-year-old boys owned an average of 39.9 SOURCE: MICHAEL BAKER AND KEVIN MILLIGAN, “BOY-GIRL books, compared with 44.5 for two-year-old girls. Baker DIFFERENCES IN PARENTAL TIME INVESTMENTS,” NBER

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“Brothers and sisters, before the bishop blesses the people, I ask you to pray to God that he will bless your bishop.” — Pope Francis

FRANCIS Pope of a New World LçÑ
›`Åi>Ñ/ ś‹i’’‹ÑUÑ Åiå Å`ÑLçÑÅµÑ ‹ÓVˆÑ*>Vå>]Ñ-µµ ho is Pope Francis, elected in one of the shortest conclaves in Whistory? Who is the man chosen to be the fi rst pope from the Americas and the fi rst Jesuit pope? How does he see the world and his ministry? How does he un- derstand his call to serve Christ, his Church, and the world? In short, what is the mind and heart of this new pope of a new world—of the Americas and the rest of the world of the 21st Century? This complete biography offers the keys to understanding the man who was a surprise choice, even a kind of revolutionary choice, for pope. It is the story of the humble pastor of one of the world’s largest arch- dioceses; a cardinal who takes the bus, talks with common folk, and lives simply. It is the story of why the cardinal electors of the Catholic Church set aside political and diplomatic calculations to elect a pope to lead the renewal and purifi cation of the worldwide Church of our time. FPNW-H µÑµÑµÑ-iå›Ñ>Å`V äiÅ]ѧœÛÑ°°µ]Ñf§œµœy FPNW-E µÑµÑµÑ Š ‘Ѳ>ä>‹’>L’iÑ>ÓÑwww.ignatius.com³]Ñf§œµœy E-BOOK AVAILABLE AT WWW.IGNATIUS.COM Praise for “Andrea Tornielli is one of the best, FRANCIS Pope of a New World “As I moved through this biography, if not the best, Vatican reporter out I began to appreciate the depth and there. Period. He is the best-sourced, “May this knowledge of Pope Francis’ complexity of Pope Francis—a soul most accurate and one of the most past and background enlighten every imbued with learning, compassion, knowledgeable reporters among the reader ... [and] provide a context for intelligence, and wisdom, originating out unique band of ‘Vaticanisti’ who travel the new surprises he seems capable of a profound love for Christ and a desire with the pope, digest theological of offering to the Church and to the to serve him in every way possible.” treatises as bedtime reading and count modern world as a whole.” — Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., author, cardinals and monsignors as friends.” — Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., Ten Universal Principles: A Brief — Nicole Winfi eld, Associated Press from the Foreword Philosophy of the Life Issues

Happy Are You Poor The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom LIVE THE MESSAGE OF POPE FRANCIS! Fr. Thomas Dubay BOOKS ON LIVING CATHOLIC CHARITY The concept of poverty is often confused with destitution. A love- filled sharing frugality is the message. Dubay presents the richness of the Gospel message and he explains how Gospel frugality is lived in each state of life. HAYP-P . . . 180 pages, Sewn Softcover, $14.95 Charity in Truth Caritas in Veritate A deluxe edition of the Pope’s third Encyclical, which explains the Catholic approach to the economy. LIT-H . . . Sewn Hardcover, 150 pages, $14.95 H LIT:A-D . . . Read by Kevin O’Brien, 3 CDs, $19.95 What to Do When Jesus Is Hungry A Practical Guide to the Works of Mercy Fr. Andrew Apostoli, C.F.R. Fr. Apostoli explains the Corporal Works of Mercy and illustrates multiple ways we can do them in our modern everyday life, and also outlines the lesser-known but equally important Spiritual Works of Mercy. A great wealth of spiritual and practical wisdom. WDJ-P . . . Sewn Softcover, 188 pp, $14.95

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THE WEEK “seven viable fetuses.” When a prosecutor asked the medical would feel second-guessed, and would retreat to the natural iner- assistant, who has pled guilty to third-degree murder, whether she tia of minimal work and minimal crime-fighting. “We cannot knew that what she was doing was wrong, she replied, “At first I afford to play election-year politics with the safety of our city.” didn’t.” Perhaps she thought she was merely performing an un - True—yet New York is doing just that (Quinn has vowed to pass or thodox procedure on a viable fetus. an inspector-general bill over Bloomberg’s veto). We can’t stand him while he is here, but how we will miss him when he is gone. n After rushing to passage a highly restrictive new gun law in closed-door negotiations following the Sandy Hook massacre, n Speaking of whom: Bloomberg spends most weekends in New York governor Andrew Cuomo now protests that the obvi- Bermuda, where he owns a $10 million waterfront estate (he’s ous flaws in the bill are the result of the fact that “it was rushed known not to schedule events in New York after 10 A.M. on Fri - to a vote in the legislature after closed-door negotiations.” Going days). One assumes he’s going for the golf and the sunshine, but off half-cocked, in other words. The main immediate problem is there’s another thing he probably likes about Bermuda: The is - the law’s ban on magazines holding more than seven rounds: land has extremely strict gun-control laws, to the point where Nobody thought to tell the geniuses in Albany that practically most of the police on the island are not armed. But in just anoth- nobody makes magazines that hold seven rounds or fewer, mean- er example of protection for me but not for thee, the New York ing that the law amounts to a ban on all firearms with detachable Times reports that Bloomberg obtained a special indult for his magazines, or about 90 percent of handguns and rifles, and there- New York Police Department detail to carry weapons in Ber mu - fore is probably unconstitutional. Governor Cuomo’s response da. If only the mayor were willing to allow ordinary citizens to was the sort of thing satirists spend a lifetime trying to dream up: protect themselves in his city the same way he is protected on the Ten-round magazines will now be acceptable, he proclaims, but beach. residents will be required to keep no more than seven bullets in them. We like to imagine a Bronx gangster preparing for a n Even as fewer Americans are engaged in manual labor and Saturday night, carefully thumbing 9mm rounds into his Glock medical treatment has improved, disability claims have sky- and conscientiously stopping at number seven in deference to rocketed. While numerous analysts have noted this trend in Governor Cuomo and his delicate sensibilities. recent years, it was an NPR story that finally brought it to pub- lic attention and put a human face on it. In six months of travels n New Jersey father Shawn Moore throughout the country, reporter Chana Joffe-Walt discovered received a surprise visit in March that government disability claims are often accepted or declined from four police officers in SWAT based on judgment calls—some people with back pain or high gear and two representatives of the blood pressure qualify, while others do not, and overall the stan- state’s child-welfare agency. The dards have been loosening. Very little effort is made to keep raiding party demanded Moore pre - people off disability who do not belong there, and as a result dis- sent any weapons in the house, cit- ability has “become a de facto welfare program for people with- ing po ten tial child endangerment. out a lot of education or job skills.” As far as solutions go, The source of their worry? A Face - tightening standards is an obvious one, and we might also listen book photo of Moore’s eleven-year- to scholars Richard V. Burkhauser and Mary C. Daly, who argue old son holding a .22-caliber rifle that we should structure disability programs so that they encour- made to look like an “assault wea - age people to work, rather than cutting off benefits abruptly pon.” Never mind that Moore is a once people start making their own money. People respond certified firearms and hunting in - to incentives, and the incentives created by federal disabili- structor, or that the boy had passed a hunter-safety test and ty programs are counterproductive. frequently accompanied his father on deer trails, or that the rifle—a birthday present—is quite literally small-bore, widely n Saint Joseph Abbey in Covington, La., recently won its case available, and common for youths and beginners, or that the boy before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has is smiling from ear to ear in the photo in question. Moore by all ruled that the Benedictine monastery may continue to sell the accounts handled himself ad mirably in dealing with the police. simple wooden caskets that the monks there make to help sup- Remind us again who the “gun nuts” are? port themselves. In 2007, the state board of embalmers and fu - ner al directors ordered the monastery to stop, citing state n Michael Bloomberg has been, in many ways, a problematic regulations, which were written by the board. Nine of its ten mayor of New York, bullying, nattering, invested in crackpot or members are funeral directors. The monastery was told it need- feel-good causes (bike lanes, gun bans). The one thing he has ed a license whose heavy requirements made sense only if it done right has been the most important thing: He has kept crime meant to set up shop as a funeral home. With help from the In - down. This has saved thousands of lives, made New York livable, sti tute for Justice, the monks filed a lawsuit in 2010. Judge Stan - and boosted the economy in a dozen ways. This fall he will be suc- wood R. Duval Jr. has ruled against the economic protection of ceeded by the reign of the tiny hacks—New York City Democrats, “the rule makers’ pockets,” vindicating the economic freedom of which is to say union shills, race hustlers, and professional gays. the monks and their clients, for whom it’s not just about price City Council president Christine Quinn, the largest of the dwarfs, points. “Every couple of weeks or so,” Abbot Justin Brown ex - backs a bill to place an inspector general alongside the police plained, he hears from someone expressing gratitude for their department, and Bloomberg rightly blasts it. “[We do not] need work. “It made them feel so good that they knew these caskets two competing police commissioners.” Cops down the line were made with love and prayer.”

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they see a crime, particularly a violent one, in progress. The intent n Florida Atlantic University has placed instructor is laudable; as any servicewoman will tell you, sexual harassment De andre Poole on leave for telling his class to write the and assault are serious problems in today’s military. But the tac- name “Jesus” on pieces of paper and step on them. Poole tics the video suggests can be bizarre: “Name or Acknowledge said that a student who refused to comply threatened to hit the Offense; Identify the Obvious; Interrupt Behavior; Publicly him. The student denied it, after facing disciplinary action Support Aggrieved Person; Use Body Language; Carefully Use from the administration, and insisted he was being pun- Humor; Encourage Dialogue; Ease Strong Feelings; Call for ished for ob ject ing to the instruction that he commit what Help.” Most of these make good advice for writing editorial com- most Chris tians would consider blasphemy. Poole de - ments, but as crime-fighting measures, they seem much less scribes himself as a Christian, even effectual. We expect our military, of all institutions, to understand “very religious.” He bor rowed the that talking things over is not the best solution to every problem. exercise from the in struc tor’s guide to a textbook whose author, James n There may be no European people in the sense of a common Neuliep, explains that it’s “sensi- citizenry, but there is certainly a European elite capable of tive” business but that “most” generating a consensus strong enough to withstand any facts. students will hesitate to fol low How else to explain that even the political leadership of through, thereby demonstrating the Cyprus, with much to gain and little to lose by ditching the power of symbols. So everyone euro, is nevertheless sticking with it, as other EU governments just got the wrong idea of want? Monetary policy in the euro zone has been set for the what he was trying to con- convenience of Germany from the beginning, with results that vey. Natu rally he is a pro- were first too loose for peripheral countries and are now much fessor of communication. too tight. With banks in Cyprus already closed, there is no risk of capital flight if the country leaves the euro for its own cur- rency. The alternative is to keep the euro and hope that a severe n Monsanto, a major producer of the genetically modified and prolonged depression eventually leads euro-denominated (GMO) crop seeds that have revolutionized agriculture in the prices and wages to fall enough to make the country competi- United States in the last 30 years, is the perfect target for a certain tive. Yet that is what Cypriots have been signed up for. And kind of liberal, setting off both his hatred for large corporations Po land, which has been spared the worst of the European cri- and his (certified organic) food elitism. So it was only natural that sis, like every country on the continent outside the euro, now liberals would cry foul over a rider they derisively call “the Mon - has a government that wants in. The dream of European unity san to Protection Act” buried (by Democrats) in the last continu- will never die, no matter how many victims it claims. ing resolution. The fevered and conspiracy-tinged coverage would have us believe that the provision effectively immunizes n On the last day of President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, Monsanto and other biotech firms from legal liability should their he brought off a diplomatic coup: Prime Minister Benjamin products prove harmful (they have yet to). But in fact the rider Net an ya hu phoned Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip does no such thing. It instead protects farmers who purchase Erdogan and apologized for “operational errors” in the 2010 raid Monsanto products in good faith from being ordered to rip their on a Turkish ship running Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The two crops from the ground (as sugar-beet farmers recently were) countries, once friends, driven apart by Erdogan’s Islamism, face when the odd judge rules in favor of the “grassroots” food groups a common problem in Syria’s chaos; Obama, the pal of each, that routinely pelt GMO producers with lawsuits. This is a salu- brought them together. Then, four days later, it was all off: tary if quite minor bit of deregulation that has been genetically Erdogan announced there would be no rapprochement until modified, as it were, into a corporatist conspiracy. Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza. Erdogan, having played Obama and Netanyahu for suckers, was back to his neo-Ottoman n The Internal Revenue Service has admitted filming a pair of preening, with an Israeli apology to display as trophy. In the scale staff-made videos that parody 1960s television shows. In its of Islamist rulers, Erdogan is better than Hamas (since he is not defense, the agency says the video based on Gilligan’s Island is murderous) but possibly more dangerous than Morsi (since used to train managers (somehow that doesn’t sound as reassur- Turkey can absorb a lot more ruination than Egypt before the ing as it should), but admits that its decision to make a Star Trek rascals must be thrown out). Not an ally for Obama to build on. parody, which was shown for entertainment at a 2010 confer- ence, was as ill-advised as a taxpayer who calls the IRS help line. n Michael Gove, the British education secretary, wants young The six-minute epic, with a budget of around $40,000, has im - people to know how to add and subtract, to know some of the press ively realistic sets and costumes but is marred by acting that kings and queens of their country, and to know how to write a sen- makes William Shatner look Oscar-worthy. In a just world, the tence. A teachers’ union, the ATL, condemned him in fierce terms. IRS would face stiff fines and a possible jail sentence for the dis- Its acting deputy general secretary said, “For the state to suggest allowed business expense, but instead it will probably receive its that some knowledge should be privileged over other knowledge regular yearly budget increase. is a bit totalitarian in a 21st-century environment.” If Britons sur- vive their education establishment, they are a great people indeed. n A video from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute—a government agency devoted to human-relations n The Shroud of Turin—believed by many Christians, including training for the military—encourages its viewers to intervene if (eloquently) NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart, to be the burial shroud

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THE WEEK of Jesus—is in the news, as the subject of a televised ostentation, in early February. And while we do feel lawmakers should do the or public display (with a video message by Pope Francis), as well job they’re hired for, his absence at least leaves Alabamans’ guns as an app, Shroud 2.0. Giulio Fanti, a professor at the Univer- and the South’s reputation for oratorical excellence a little more sity of Padua, has also concluded, after 15 years of research on secure. selected linen fibers, that the cloth is 2,000 years old, give or take a few centuries. A carbon-dating test in 1988 dated the Shroud to n The Windham, N.H., school board has banned dodgeball (and the 13th or 14th century, but Fanti says that test may have been other, unspecified “human target” games) from gym classes, call- contaminated with fibers from a medieval patch. The Catholic ing it an incitement to bullying. Such anti-dodgeball sentiment is Church has never officially declared the Shroud to be genuine, not new; in 2006 the National Association for Sport and Physical and a definitive date consistent with Christ’s life would not settle Education opposed the game on the grounds that it is dangerous the question of His nature (“Faith alone justifies us,” as another and leaves students inactive for long stretches. Windham’s Christian remarked). But science, which excavates lost cities and schools had addressed the first objection by using a Nerf ball, probes the stars, rightly studies a possible relic of Jesus. which doesn’t sting and is difficult to throw hard; it also dives and hops unpredictably in mid-air, which is why professionals—yes, n Comedian Jim Carrey made an asinine and unfunny anti-gun there are professional dodgeball players, though it isn’t exactly a propaganda video in the form of an ersatz Hee Haw episode—no lucrative line of work—prefer the old-fashioned rubber ball. As points for timeliness—in which he suggested that former NRA for the charge that dodgeball involves too much sitting and stand- president Charlton Heston’s immortal soul was damned be - ing around, the critics should check out softball. Nonetheless, cause he insisted on using firearms as penis substitutes. (This Windham’s school board, ever alive to the peril of Nerf persecu- apparently is what now passes for humor in Carrey’s circles.) The tion, chose to ban it. What’s next? Will they abandon four cen- world responded mostly with its usual weary shrug, though turies of New Hampshire tradition and ban snowball fights too? Carrey was criticized on Fox News while several gun enthusiasts gleefully began auctioning autographed photos of him on n Anthony Lewis was a man eBay, promising to use the proceeds to buy guns. Needless to say, for a moment—the era of Carrey, who has made a great deal of money waving guns around crusading liberalism, led by in the movies, is, like most celebrity gun-grabbers, protected by a freewheeling Supreme armed men during his public appearances. What strikes us is this: Court. He covered the courts Years after his death and long after the zenith of his celebrity, for the New York Times from Charlton Heston remains a large enough cultural presence that 1955 to 1964—roughly, Earl there apparently is some gain in mocking him. Thirty years from Warren’s tenure—then wrote now, who will bother to parody the star of Mr. Popper’s a column, often about judi- Penguins? cial matters, from 1969 to 2001. Lewis praised Warren n Google will often celebrate a day by altering its logo. For for using “his power in be - example, if you used the search engine on St. Patrick’s Day, you half of life’s outcasts—the saw some adorable kids dancing a jig. On Easter Sunday, you saw Communist, the suspected criminal, the Negro.” It is the proper a worshipful, glowing portrait of Cesar Chavez, the labor leader, role of a chief justice to say what the law is, on behalf of the whose 86th birthday it was, or would have been (Chavez died in Constitution, but that would not have served Lewis’s agenda. 1993). Jesus and the Resurrection do not need the publicity. But Philosophically he claimed to be a skeptic, but politics always Cesar Chavez on Easter, really? Couldn’t they have thrown in a tipped his hand: In a farewell interview in 2001, he warned bunny or something, or made a couple of colored eggs out of against “people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin those “O”s in “Google”? One is grateful that Che Guevara Laden and John Ashcroft.” We see a difference, thanks. Dead on wasn’t born on December 25. the eve of his 86th birthday. R.I.P.

n Eddie Maxwell, a retired coal miner in Alabama, sent an e-mail n Yvonne Brill was born in 1924 to Flemish immigrants in a to every member of the state legislature, expressing his opposi- town near Winnipeg, Manitoba. The daughter of a carpenter, she tion to any new gun-control measures. Most ignored the message became a rocket scientist in the United States, inventing a pro - or gave form responses, but Representative Joseph Mitchell, a pulsion system to help keep satellites in orbit, an achievement for black member from Mobile, cared enough to craft a personal which she received the National Medal of Technology and reply: “Your folk never used all this sheit to protect my folk from Innovation in 2011. Before mentioning these achievements, the your slave-holding, murdering, adulterous, baby-raping, inces- New York Times began its obituary by noting that she “made a tuous, snaggle-toothed, backward-a**ed, inbreed, imported mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and criminal-minded kin folk.” Now, Alabamans are a famously took eight years off from work to raise three children.” This set courtly bunch; one normally hears language like that only when off a storm of accusations that the paper’s obituary was sexist. the Crimson Tide plays Auburn. So it might be worth learning The Times’ public editor agreed, and the lead was rewritten, with more from Mitchell about what has him so worked up. the culinary commentary excised. Mrs. Brill (she preferred to Unfortunately, after responding to Maxwell’s next e-mail with a go by “Mrs.”) summed up her own priorities in an explanation

FILE longer and more coherent but scarcely less inflammatory rant, the of why she was happy to move to wherever her husband’s job / Democrat abandoned the discussion. Meanwhile, he has been took the family: “Good husbands are harder to find than good

AP PHOTO absent without expla nation from the legislature since it convened jobs.” Dead at 88. R.I.P.

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THE WEEK the votes of citizens and legislators. THE LAW The other case before the Court is a challenge to the provi- Marital Discord at the Court sion of the Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage, for purposes of federal law, as the union of a man and a woman. he Supreme Court has been considering whether to here the challengers make an argument beyond their equal- overturn two duly enacted pieces of legislation—the protection claim. The federal government is supposedly in - T federal Defense of Marriage Act and a California con- fringing on the states’ power to set marriage laws by insisting stitutional amendment—on the basis of novel theories about on its own definition in its own laws. the Constitution that had occurred to almost nobody until quite One would think that to state that claim is to refute it, but recently. It should let the laws stand. Justice Kennedy showed signs of crediting it. The act leaves In the California case, a popular referendum ratifying the states free to adopt any marriage law they want. The Con sti - definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is tution does not compel the federal government to use the said to violate the Constitution’s guarantee that states will states’ definitions in its own laws, although it may decide to do extend the “equal protection of the laws” to all persons, includ- that as a matter of administrative convenience. If the federal ing those persons in same-sex couples who wish to have the government has the power to designate some households in tax state government declare their relationships to be marriages. laws as joint filers—which no one contests—then it has the equality means that like cases should be treated alike. power to say which households, and so long as its classifica- Whether California’s definition of marriage meets that stan- tions are compatible with the Constitution it cannot matter dard depends on whether there is some difference between whether they track state law. Federalism does not, in other opposite-sex and same-sex couples that justifies recognizing words, mean that state governments have the right to force some of the former and none of the latter as marriages in the federal law to change to their liking. Chief Justice Roberts eyes of the law. The answer to that question in turn depends on exposed the emptiness of this “federalism” argument when he what we understand marriage to be. asked whether the federal government would invade the It turns, that is, on whether marriage should be understood to province of the states by extending marriage-related federal have an ineradicable connection to procreation or be under- benefits to all cohabiting same-sex couples in all states, even stood exclusively in romantic terms. We believe that the basic those that recognize no such couples as married or even in a purpose of marriage as a pre-political institution and a public civil union. The opponents of DOMA were appropriately flum- policy is to channel heterosexual behavior into the social forms moxed by the question. most likely to lead to stable child-rearing. If this is true, then it In both cases, the Court should leave lawmaking authorities makes sense, and entails no invidious discrimination, that its to do their will. We oppose same-sex marriage, but in the ab- definition includes sexual complementarity. Many people do sence of a constitutional amendment enshrining our view it not, of course, accept our premise, and they have advanced would be wrong for the Supreme Court to block it—and no body various arguments against it. has ever argued otherwise. Proponents of same-sex marriage The Constitution is silent—obviously silent—about which feel no such inhibitions. The Supreme Court should be more side is correct, and that is reason enough for the Court to allow dispassionate. California to decide the matter as it wishes, which of course means to allow it to change its mind. The Court should forth- rightly declare that the Constitution gives it no authority to choose one side or the other. It should reject calls for it to “punt” by rul- ing that defenders of the law have no stand- ing to plead their case, which would have the effect of allowing lower-court judges to write same-sex marriage into the Consti - tution for their jurisdictions. Justice Scalia neatly exposed the weak spot of the argument that the Constitution requires same-sex marriage when he asked Ted Olson, a lawyer making that argument, when that requirement came about. Olson declined to make the ludicrous contention that the adoption of the Fourteenth Amend - ment in 1868 was the public’s way of advancing same-sex marriage. That left him arguing that the evolution of the cul - ture had changed the meaning of the amend - ment. Public views on homosexuality and marriage certainly have changed: But that DANA VERKOUTEREN /

change can be and has been expressed in AP

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leaves that impression. If that is right, though, it makes a hash of his simultane- ous claim to have been unaware that denying marriage to same-sex couples is discriminatory. Clinton, at least, came out for same- sex marriage a few years before urging the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. Jon Hunts - man, the former governor of Utah and candidate for the Republican presiden- tial nomination, declared that he no longer opposes same-sex marriage the same month he urged the Court to de- clare same-sex marriage a constitutional right. He wanted the Court, in other words, to strike down as unconstitution- al the position he had taken until a few minutes earlier (and helped pass into law in Utah). President Obama, in his shifting posi- tions on marriage, has out-Clintoned Clinton. He supported same-sex mar- riage in a candidate questionnaire in 1996. Then he said he opposed it for reli- gious reasons but supported civil unions and wanted to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. He continued to say he opposed it while also, in 2008, opposing The Portman Position the California ballot initiative to put the traditional definition of marriage, which Why do so few share the senator’s views on marriage? he claimed to support, into the state con- stitution. (He said it would be discrimina- BY RAMESH PONNURU tory to do that.) Then his administration decided that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional while Obama still Hen Senator Rob Portman In an op-ed attempting to justify his opposed same-sex marriage. Then his of Ohio endorsed same-sex change of position, Clinton noted that spokesman said that his position was still marriage, he joined a very when he signed the law he had urged that “evolving.” W small club—or, actually, it not be used as an “excuse for dis- With great fanfare, Obama announced two of them. He is the first Republican crimination” against same-sex couples. in May 2012 that he had finished evolv- senator to have taken this position. He is “I know now,” he added, that “the law is ing and now favored same-sex mar- also one of a small number of people who itself discriminatory.” He also borrowed riage—but that, like Portman today, he support same-sex marriage as a public a claim from a group of former senators believed the policy should be set state policy but do not want the Supreme Court who voted for the act but this year sub- by state. At the end of February, the to require all states to adopt that policy. mitted a brief to the Court urging its nul- administration said that it would urge More typically, politicians who have lification. They said that many supporters the Supreme Court to strike down the had a change of heart on marriage, or at of the bill had favored it only to head off traditional-marriage law California vot- least changed their public positions on calls for a constitutional amendment cod- ers put into their state constitution in it, have leaped, sometimes in one bound, ifying the definition of marriage as the 2008. Its current position is that because to the conclusion that the policy they union of a man and a woman, “which Cali fornia recognized civil unions it has used to support was not only mistaken would have ended the debate for a gener- no constitutionally permissible rationale but unconstitutional. President Clinton ation or more.” for refusing to recognize same-sex mar- signed the Defense of Marriage Act in As many gay-rights activists who riages. States that offered no official 1996 and ran radio ads touting the fact in fought the law’s passage at the time have recognition at all to same-sex relation- his reelection campaign. now he says noted, nobody was talking about a consti- ships are in the clear, according to the the Supreme Court should strike down tutional amendment back then. Clinton is Obama administration. an important portion of the law. (Maybe being characteristically shifty. He doesn’t Well, in the clear for now. At the next year he’ll call for the Court to get quite say that he himself favored the law moment, the administration is arguing PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS /

rid of the rest of it.) because he feared an amendment. He just that its position until May 2012—civil AP

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unions yes, same-sex marriage no— pertinent example, to their race. That’s almost identical to the policy case for was unconstitutional. The next step in certainly a plausible interpretation of the their acting on that freedom. its evolution will be to explain that no words. (I will discard as implausible a I say “almost” because it is possible to state may refuse to recognize same-sex suggestion some conservatives have reject the traditional definition without marriages and that its position since made, that the amendment bars only thinking it grossly unjust. The gathering May 2012 has also been unconstitu- racial discrimination because its ratifiers political and cultural force behind same- tional. had only that type of discrimination in sex marriage has, however, been directed The acrobatics by Clinton and Obama mind, even though the text they ratified as much against the view that traditional can be explained by political oppor- made no such qualification. On that the- marriage is reasonable as against the tunism: There is no reason to think any ory a state could decide to exclude gays, view that it is right. Proponents of same- of their positions has been sincere (ex - or women, or redheads from police pro- sex marriage generally say that the oppo- cept, perhaps, for Obama’s first one). tection without running afoul of the 14th sition is bigoted, not just mistaken. The What about the Huntsmans of the world, Amendment.) argument against constitutionalizing though? Or to put it another way, why The second counterargument would same-sex marriage that is actually being are there so few Portmans, who support refer to the closing section of the amend- made in front of the Court occupies a same-sex marriage without believing ment, which grants Congress the power shrinking cultural space. that every state must be compelled to to enforce the preceding parts. It would Politicians who believe, or at least agree? then, perhaps, note that at the time of say, that marriage is the union of a man The Court has for decades assumed that it is in the business of deciding what forms of unequal treatment by governments are justifiable.

Perhaps some of it reflects the zeal of ratification there was no expectation and a woman have generally not offered converts. One side effect of the venera- that judicial review would play anything any reasons for their position, instead tion of the Constitution in our political like as large a role in our political life resting their case on tradition, religion, culture is that it makes people think that as it does now, and that it is unlikely that or majority opinion. Once majority opin- policies they consider unjust must be the ratifiers would have greeted the end ion turned, these politicians were free to incompatible with it. Rights cannot be of a civil war caused in no small part by switch positions without ever having to put up for a vote, as people often say judicial overreaching by giving the Su - abandon any of their arguments, since when they are putting them up to a vote preme Court vastly greater power. It they had not made any. Traditions change, of nine justices. There may, however, be would conclude that it is largely up to after all. The reticence of the politicians a deeper reason that the debate over Congress, not the Court, to decide what has encouraged the belief that the old same-sex marriage has taken the form it equal protection means in practice. view of marriage had no rational basis, has, a reason having to do with modern Either of these arguments would limit and thus made it more vulnerable to constitutional jurisprudence. the Court’s discretion significantly—but modern equal-protection jurisprudence. The case that governments at all levels the adoption of either would also mark a (When the justices heard the same-sex- must recognize same-sex marriage under radical break with its jurisprudence. The marriage cases, liberal commentators the Constitution is a pretty simple one Court has for decades assumed that it is pronounced it “strange” that conserva- even if it did not occur to almost anyone in the business of deciding what forms tives were just now arguing that marriage before the past 15 years or so: The 14th of unequal treatment by governments had something to do with procreative Amendment requires all states to extend are justifiable. sex—as though this were a view that they the equal protection of the laws to all That leaves only one counterargu- had devised for the occasion.) persons, and that means that couples ment available: that the definition of Hence Senator Portman stands almost wishing to get married must be treated marriage as the union of a man and a entirely alone. And his own position without regard to their sexual composi- woman is not unjust discrimination may not be stable. He does not say in his tion. against anyone. To make that argument op-ed that the Constitution, read cor- There are three possible counterargu- requires explaining what traditionalists rectly, allows states to decide whether or ments, none of them incompatible with think marriage is and why same-sex not to recognize same-sex marriage. the others. The first is that the amend- couples, along with those in many other “An expansive court ruling would run ment’s equal-protection language does possible relationships, cannot be mar- the risk of deepening divisions rather not mean—that is, was not intended by ried—if not to persuade the justices that than resolving them” is all he says. He the states that ratified it to mean—equi- those views are right, at least to make could at any point sincerely change that table treatment. It means, instead, that them consider those views reasonable. contingent judgment without altering state governments must protect citizens The constitutional argument for allow- any view of constitutional principle. At from theft, murder, rape, and other ing states to keep the traditional defi - that time, the club would shrink to crimes without regard, for historically nition of marriage, in other words, is almost zero.

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either could not or would not take on the family disruption. For example, the num- responsibility of providing care. Medi - ber of single-parent households increased Modern caid aimed to provide medical care to from 390,000 in 1995 to over 1 million in the poor, a responsibility that had tradi- 2010, a time during which the total popu- Family tionally been met by a patchwork of lation hardly changed. And as extended local charities and governments. kinship networks continue to break down, Yet even as poor families have seen homelessness has increased by 17.5 per- Developed societies some of their burdens eased, many still cent over the last two years. still need kinship groups lack the ability to meet other responsi- Family breakdown is not as far along bilities, such as instilling discipline and in South Korea as it is in the United BY REIHAN SALAM a willingness to defer gratification in States, where the out-of-wedlock birth - children. The idea behind universal rate now stands at 41 percent and, accord- ver the coming decade, the early education, after all, is that many ing to the socially conservative Family debate over the size and shape poor children are raised in chaotic envi- research Council, only 45 percent of of government is likely to ronments and thus lack skills that are teenagers are raised in intact biological O grow more intense. In the necessary to persevere through high families. But it is noteworthy that, despite wake of the Affordable Care Act, the pro- school and meet professional obliga- the vast differences between these two ject of welfare-state expansion is moving tions. The hope is that immersing poor societies—America being one of the to new frontiers, such as paid parental children in a structured learning envi- world’s most diverse market democracies leave, universal early education, wage ronment will insulate them from the and South Korea being one of the least— insurance, more generous welfare pro- chaos of their home lives and help them there are similar social dynamics at work. grams, and eased eligibility requirements acquire these skills. And the idea behind A rash of suicides by older Koreans re - for unemployment benefits. paid parental leave, wage insurance, cently prompted Andrew Sullivan to Given our present fiscal straits, such and other cash transfers de signed to get argue that “capitalism destroys the very proposals seem unrealistic. Assuming families through crises is that families structure of the societies it enriches.” economic growth returns, however, the often don’t have networks of relatives Sullivan drew on the celebrated “cul- desire for welfare-state expansion along and friends they can rely on to keep tural contradictions of capitalism” thesis such lines will eventually grow stronger, them out of such turmoil in the first that sociologist Daniel Bell in tro duced for a simple reason: Families are falling place. Much as many households now in The Public Interest in 1970. Bell apart, and government will continue to be outsource work that they once would observed that while an emphasis on self- called upon to pick up the slack. have done themselves—by, e.g., eating discipline, delayed gratification, and re - Not all families are falling apart. out and hiring house-cleaning ser- straint remained essential to success in a College-educated adults continue to vices—the expansion of the welfare market economy, individuals in market- marry at high rates. Many families con- state is about outsourcing the responsi- driven cultures had come to reject such tinue to cultivate a sense of motivation bility to plan ahead; to form strong, last- bourgeois values. The same business and self-control in their children, to accu- ing relationships; and, increasingly, to enter prises that demand hard work and mulate savings, and to maintain strong raise children who become self-reliant, sobriety from their employees stimulate networks of friends and extended-family capable adults. demand for pleasure and play in adver- members. But others do not—and as Many conservatives believe that these tising their goods and services. And the skills, resources, and networks are passed phenomena are related—that as govern- abundance fostered by market-driven on from one generation to the next, the ment takes on responsibilities that were economic growth lends itself, in Bell’s damage accumulates, and the gap be- once borne by families and communities, words, to “prodigality rather than pru- tween adults who come from a history of families and communities grow com- dence.” But given that these cultural fac- stable families and those who come from mensurately weaker, an argument that was tors influence all individuals in modern, a history of unstable ones grows. viewed made most powerfully by the conservative or rather postmodern, societies, why through this lens, the fact that the chil- sociologist robert Nisbet in his 1953 book have the cultural contradictions of capi- dren of affluent families are far more The Quest for Community. Whatever the talism been so much more damaging to likely to be affluent than the children of cause, it is undeniable that American fam- the poor than to the rich? poor families, a relationship that Scott ilies and communities have become weak, In “Why Do People Become Modern? Winship has discussed in these pages, is particularly among the poor. A Darwinian explanation,” an essay hardly surprising. This change is not limited to the United published in 2009, the biologists Lesley Welfare-state expansions have always States. During a recent visit to South Newson and Peter richerson offer a use- involved giving the government re - Korea, I was struck by the extent and the ful framework. In premodern societies, sponsibilities that were once within the speed of its social transformation. South virtually all social networks are kin- purview of families and communities. Korea is universally recognized as a great based. Individuals have an interest in Social Security, for example, was de - economic success story, having vaulted encouraging close relatives to reproduce, signed to address poverty among the from being one of the world’s poorest, as relatives share some portion of their aged as a growing number of older Amer - most violence-scarred societies to being genetic inheritance, and so norms and icans outlived their meager savings and one of its most prosperous and educated. values geared toward producing off- a growing number of adult children Yet it has also experienced a surge in spring early and often dominate those

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that promote the pursuit of other life that while some people are relatively disruption. To be as productive as we goals. But as individuals transition from good at adapting to new environments can be, we have to uproot ourselves. But kin-based social networks to non-kin- and forming new attachments, others in doing so, we reduce the number of based social networks in which most of need stability and durable rela tionships. people we can rely on in a time of crisis. the people who shape and influence their A knowledge-intensive economy that And this ongoing erosion of stable, lives don’t necessarily have an interest privileges the most footloose, rootless solid attachments may well contribute to in their reproductive success, different individuals will necessarily be challeng- mental illness, substance abuse, and other norms and values come to the fore. ing for those who aren’t suited to a life of maladies that can drag down middle- If Newson and Richerson are right, we constant change. Indeed, this difference income families or keep low-income should expect that individuals in societies in proclivities can occur within families, families from ever achieving some mod- experiencing rapid economic growth and creating additional strains. icum of economic self-reliance. Efforts to urbanization will shift from wanting Historically, extended kinship groups expand the welfare state are designed to large families and taking their obligations managed internal tensions out of neces- mitigate some of the damage that flows to extended family members very seri- sity, as family members had no choice from these phenomena. It is not clear, ously to prioritizing self-improvement but to rely on one another. Today, family however, that they can address the root and wanting much smaller families. The members increasingly have the option to cause. advent of reliable birth control, the fact go their separate ways, culturally and One view, common among social sci- that adults are less likely to depend on geographically. Yet the household for- entists who study the evolution of family children as a source of income and old- mations that result—the small families, life, is that we should want all Ameri - age support, and the fact that we have the single adults living alone—are far cans to live like the college- educated more time and resources to pursue self- more vulnerable to economic and social minority, who appear to have recon- improvement have all contributed to this ciled the de mands of mobility and adapt- shift. ability in a knowledge-intensive economy And this is roughly what has been with the need for strong attachments. happening around the world, from This is one of the impli cit motivations the U.S. to South Korea to behind ex panding access to higher the emerging societies of Latin education, a pro ject that in re - America, Africa, and Asia. cent years has yielded massive Yet the weakening of kin- increases in student-loan debt based social networks will un - but only modest increases in fold differently in different college-completion rates. social classes. Berkeley econo- Another answer is that we mist Enrico Moretti has urged ought to find ways to foster a policymakers to focus on what more rooted and stable soci- he calls “mo bility inequality,” ety, one in which extended kin - i.e., the fact that more-skilled ship groups can flourish. This workers are far likelier to be won’t be easy, and it can’t be geographically mobile than accomplished solely via the less-skilled workers. Moretti instruments of law or policy. argues that if less-skilled work- It will also require a renewed ers were more able or more focus on the moral founda- willing to move, income dif- tions of our economy. While ferences might shrink as the left -liberals champion mea- less-skilled settled in higher- sures such as increased social productivity regions where transfers and greater public- firms pay higher wages. To this education spending, con serva - end, he calls for reforming un - tives might champion measures employment insurance and such as an in crease in the child pursuing other measures to tax credit and more investment facilitate geographic mobility. in programs de signed to encour- One could say that Moretti age work and, if necessary, en - wants less-skilled workers to force work re quire ments. The become as “modern” as skilled virtue of the latter approach is workers, who are more likely not that it is cheaper, because to choose their home on the the truth is that it might be very basis of economic opportunity expensive. Rather, it is that the and high-quality amenities latter approach has the potential than from a sense of inherited to help all Americans take re - obligation. sponsibility for their own lives

The problem, however, is and their own families. ROMAN GENN

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been demonstrated repeatedly by nation- ceive that the average grade in a class al studies. Today, an A is the most com- will be an A, they do not try to excel. It Higher mon grade given in college—43 is likely that the decline in student study percent of all grades, as opposed to 15 hours, student engagement, and literacy Education percent in the 1960s, according to Stu- are partly the result of diminished acad- art Rojstaczer, formerly of Duke, and emic expectations.” Christopher Healy, of Furman, who This, then, is the academic reality Revalued conducted a 50-year survey of grading. whose veil the bill would lift: Too many Texas considers a Arthur Levine, president of the Wood- students are learning too little, yet their row Wilson National Fellowship Foun - grades have never been so high. proposal to reverse grade inflation da tion, has also studied the trajectory Will Texas universities oppose tran- of college grades. He finds that in 1969, script transparency? It’s hard to imag- BY THOMAS K. LINDSAY 7 percent of two- and four-year college ine a principled basis for resistance, students said their GPA was an A- since universities are defined by the RADE inflation is real, ram- minus or higher; by 2009, 41 percent of pursuit of knowledge and its dissemi- pant, and ravaging a univer- students did. Having been either a col- nation to students and the larger soci- sity near you. It would be a lege student, a professor, or an admin- ety. Nevertheless, one university has G scandal if more people knew istrator for nearly 30 years, I am not complained to Representative Turner about it. A bill filed in March in the Texas legislature looks to ensure that more Too many students are learning too do. Called “Honest Transcript,” it is a little, yet their grades have model of brevity, at only a little more than 300 words. Yet its sponsors expect never been so high. it to shake up higher education in the state and beyond. They believe that surprised by such findings. Nor, I sus- that the bill would create “processing when the public gets wind of higher pect, is anyone else in the academy. difficulties in the Registrar’s office.” education’s widespread grade-inflating And neither are employers. People who This objection comes too late, for practices, it will put a stop to them. make hiring decisions here in Texas such “processing” is now the norm. Others, less hopeful, think that public complain to me that grade inflation Recently, through services such as transparency will merely reveal public makes it virtually impossible to rank MyEdu.com and internal school web- indifference. job applicants accurately, because nearly sites, students have been able to sift The bill would require all public all have A or B averages. through the grading histories of profes- colleges and universities to include on It gets worse. A 2011 national study sors. MyEdu proclaims that it “works student transcripts, alongside the indi- published as the book Academically directly with universities to post their vidual student’s grade, the average grade Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa official grade records, including aver- for the entire class. This would help Roksa, found that our puffed-up prodi- age GPA and drop rates. Yes, real - potential employers determine whether gies are learning much too little. Thirty- ly—these are the official grade records a high grade-point average signified six percent of the students it surveyed straight from your university.” It boasts talent and achievement or merely re- show little or no increase in their ability a membership of over 800 schools and vealed that the student had taken easy for critical thinking, complex reasoning, more than 5 million students. Its reach courses. and clear writing after four years of col- in Texas extends to nearly every public The Honest Transcript bill was intro- lege. Small wonder that employers are college and university. duced in the Texas house by Re pub li can frustrated, with the annual parade of One major concern for almost every- Scott Turner, a freshman repre sentative impressive transcripts hiding empty one involved with higher education is and former NFL cornerback (Redskins, heads. low graduation rates. Nationally, about Chargers, Broncos), and in the state sen- Employer concerns notwithstanding, half of entering students do not com- ate by veteran Republican Dan Patrick. universities have a higher calling than plete college; most of those who do fin- Supporters argue that its modest trans- simply preparing future workers. Al - ish take longer than four years, which parency requirement would show how most all of them proclaim in their hikes the cost of their degrees. Those grade inflation has se vere ly degraded mission statements that they seek to who fail to graduate do not fail to the significance of college degrees. enhance their students’ capacity for acquire student-loan debt, which, lack- A half-century of grade inflation has independent thought. In undermining ing a degree, they often find hard to this, their noblest calling (which har kens repay. Na tion al student-loan debt is Mr. Lindsay is the director of the Center for Higher back to Socrates’ declaration that “the approaching $1 trillion and now exceeds Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and unexamined life is not worth living”), total credit-card debt for the first time. a former deputy chairman of the National grade inflation is especially harmful: It Six teen states have adopted or are con- Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author, eats away at the essence and morale of sidering “outcomes-based funding,” with Gary Glenn, of the recently published book an academic institution. For Rojstaczer through which a portion of state higher- Investigating American Democracy. and Healy, “when college students per- education appropriations are awarded to

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schools based on certain metrics, includ- as gambling and drinking has long since ing improved graduation, retention, and disappeared from Pennsylvania politics. completion rates. Quakers and (It has mostly disappeared from the MyEdu has many tools that can help Quaker ethic, too, and america’s most students graduate, but some argue that Bootleggers famous pacifists are of late much more it also contributes to a grade-shopping interested in sponsoring hamas muni- ethos. the Austin American-Statesman They’re putting a cork in tions flotillas than temperance pledges.) notes critics who slam the site “for pan- Pennsylvania liquor-law reform the government of Pennsylvania is up to dering to students interested primarily its ears in various sindustries: When in using it to identify faculty members Pennsylvania’s government-cartel casi- who reliably give high grades. a Ut- BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON nos stock their bars, they go to the state’s austin student survey conducted last government-monopoly alcohol whole- year confirmed most students used the hat are these Republicans salers, which also supply the state’s site to check professors’ grade distribu- drinking? In 2011, Gover - government-monopoly spirits retailers tions.” nor Bob McDonnell of and its government-monopoly wine re - Linking grade inflation to such sites W Virginia tried to privatize tailers. and that means there’s a powerful ignores the fact that grading standards his state’s Soviet-style liquor stores and nexus of economic and political interests have been progressively watered down was handed a stinging legislative defeat. at work in the Keystone State: crony cap- since the early ’60s, while MyEdu is In 2013, another Republican governor, italists and public-sector unions. Divorc - relatively new to the scene. Lax univer- tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, persuaded ing the two is no small task. Governor sity standards and old-fashioned word- the Pennsylvania house of representatives Corbett, like Governor McDonnell, has a of-mouth had already proven quite to pass a liquor-privatization bill, which Republican majority in the state house to effective at inflating grades. Blaming remains stalled in the senate. the efforts rely upon, and, unlike the Virginian, he transparency for grade inflation is like of those GOP governors have been has a Republican majority in the senate, blaming a blemish on your mirror. If stymied in part by Democrats unwilling to too. But liquor reform is far from a done critics are correct that grading-history give up state-run enterprises and the deal. sites facilitate grade-shopping, however, money that the union-dominated work Pennsylvania is kind of goofy when it the honest transcript bill could bal- forces associated with them shunt into comes to booze, with the most restrictive ance the access already available to stu- their campaign coffers. But those free- laws outside of Utah. a bar can sell you a dents with equal access to parents and market Republicans face another obstacle: six-pack of beer to go, but no more. a employers. the result, they hope, will anti-free-market Republicans. state-licensed beer distributor can sell be the unmasking of higher education’s In 1983, economist Bruce Yandle pub- you a case of beer, but no less. Grocery pretensions. lished his famous “Bootleggers and stores are forbidden to sell beer unless honest transcript’s sponsors also Baptists” essay, in which he argued that they have restaurant licenses, seating for hope that transparency will encourage parties with opposite interests often find at least 30 people, and a separate cash prospective students and parents who themselves supporting identical regula- register for ringing up the booze. Spirits truly care about education to avoid the tions. In the case of alcohol prohibition, and wine are sold only in the state-run majors with the easiest grading. But teetotaling Baptists supported the law monopoly stores, where clerks with that’s not likely, say arum and Roksa because they hoped that fewer people decidedly Stalinist demeanors will grum- in Academically Adrift. Criteria other would raise their spirits by downing spir- ble while collecting in excess of $40,000 than academic standards, such as “stu- its, while bootleggers supported the law a year for scanning whichever bottle you dent residential and social life,” likely because they wanted to drive drinkers choose out of the scant selection on hand. drive students’ decisions, as does “the into the black market, which outlaws those clerks are represented by hall-of- ability with relatively modest invest- would by definition monopolize. Without fame working-class hero Wendell W. ments of effort to earn a credential” for in tending to, the Baptists and bootleggers Young IV, who inherited the presidency a job. Why make things harder with a formed a unified political coalition. Some - of the United Food and Commercial GPa-reducing return to former stan- times, such competing interests are mem- Workers Local 1776—and the 260 grand dards? bers of the same organization, as with the a year that goes with it—from his father, Such doubts transcend the current case of the taliban, which is a narcotics Wendell W. Young III. debate. Discussing property, aristotle syndicate that crusades against drug use, You can see how the math works: cautions that “the nature of desire is or the U.S. government, which both Wendell W. Young IV makes about ten without limit, and it is with a view to penalizes and subsidizes the consumption times what the average member of his satisfying this that the many live.” of tobacco. Likewise, the Commonwealth union is paid, and if those members had to Easy grades in vapid courses are a of Pennsylvania is both the regulator of compete in a real labor market rather than result of the effort to satisfy that desire. alcoholic beverages and the sole retailer in a state-run monopoly, their compensa- the proponents of honest transcript of wine and spirits. Call it “Bootleggers tion probably would go down, and his aim, in a small way, to turn the many and Quakers.” paycheck and political influence would toward something nobler, and their Except Pennsylvania is not really the be more difficult to support. the unions effort may have implications well Quaker State any more. the Quakers’ spread money around to both parties, lav- beyond texas. social conservatism regarding issues such ishing special attention on key leaders and

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and though he says he supports “smart privatization,” his most recent legislative action on the subject was a bill that would have preserved the state-monopoly struc- ture with a few modifications, such as keeping stores open on Sundays—not privatization at all. Conservative activist Rob Ciervo has threatened to stage a pri- mary campaign against McIlhinney over the issue, and reformers have been with- ering in their criticism. “McIlhinney introduced legislation to ‘modernize’ but not privatize the sys- tem,” says Leo Knepper of the conserva- committee chairmen. The 150 or so gro- the kiosks went to a major financial tive reform group Citizens Alliance of cery stores that have restaurant licenses supporter of Democrat Ed Rendell’s Pennsylvania. “His plan keeps liquor do not want to compete with the thou- gubernatorial campaign—to his finance stores under state control, while the state sands of grocery stores that don’t. And chairman, in fact—but the machines also wholesales all of the liquor in Penn - most of all, those government-protected themselves were the real treat. They were sylvania. Him saying that he’s in favor of beer distributors do not want new com- essentially giant soda machines with a ‘smart privatization’ sounds opportunis- petitors in the marketplace and will fight direct link to agents at the state’s Liquor tic. If his version of ‘smart privatization’ like rabid wolverines to maintain their Control Board. Would-be buyers would is anything like his ‘modernization,’ it political privileges. Some of them are bet- walk up to the kiosks, swipe their drivers’ will be privatization in name only.” ter prepared for battle than others: Pat licenses to prove their age, submit to an McIlhinney points to imperfections in Deon Beverages in suburban Bucks examination by LCB officials operating the house bill, such as the fact that it County is owned by Republican bigwig remote cameras, submit to a breathalyzer maintains the silly separate-counters rule Pasquale Deon, who is a member of the exam, and then—if the chemistry and the for grocery stores, and wants to hold board of both the turnpike commission bureaucracy were all satisfied—choose extensive hearings on the subject. “After and SEPTA, the Philadelphia area’s mass- from a selection of wines about the size waiting since 1930 for privatization, a transit authority—high places in the and quality of that offered in business little more time to ‘get it right’ for every patronage-driven ecosystem of Pennsyl- class on a domestic airline. Strangely, Pennsylvanian seems fair to me,” he vania politics. this did not catch on. Governor Rendell’s wrote in an op-ed (flashing B.S.-alert Privatization proponents have offered buddy’s firm threw in the towel, and the quotes around “get it right” in original). some serious sweeteners for the distribu- state managed to lose a million dollars or His critics suspect that he is simply try- tors, such as a year-long period during so on the deal. “You can buy the machines ing to delay the bill to death. Knepper which they would have exclusive access on eBay,” Brouillette observes drily. points out that the separate-counters rule to new liquor licenses at a deep discount, “Pennsylvania operates like an arsonist was included as a sop to the beer distrib- but it is not clear that they will be that is preaching fire prevention. On one utors, who are opposed to liberalization enough. Republicans may have a nomi- hand, the state is trying to sell more liquor, in toto. “He’s criticizing something that nal majority in the state legislature, but on the other they’re supposed to be regu- was put in there at the request of the con- conservatives complain that the func- lating consumption. Privatization gets rid stituency he’s trying to please,” Knepper tioning majority belongs to the “union of that conflict of interest.” says. “If he really wants a broader range party,” the bipartisan collection of legis- It is illegal for Pennsylvania residents of free-market solutions without these lators beholden to the state’s public- to drive over the state line into Delaware kinds of restrictions, we’d be thrilled to sector labor syndicates. The failure of or New Jersey and bring back a bottle of support that.” earlier piecemeal reform efforts nonethe- Bordeaux, but the Liquor Control Board So it’s the union party duking it out less has reformers betting big on true full concedes that the bootlegging law is with the cocktail party. The liquor-reform privatization. “It’s the Soviet Union try- widely ignored, and sales lost to other bill is expected to remain in limbo until ing to move to a market economy,” says states cost Pennsylvania some $180 mil- the early summer, at which point it proba- Matthew Brouillette of the Common - lion a year. “People cross the border to bly will become a bargaining chip in wealth Foundation, a free-market think get wine and spirits, either because you broader budget negotiations. The under- tank dedicated to Pennsylvania issues. can’t get them here, because of the limit- lying issues—crony capitalism, the bale- “The transition costs are high. But we’ve ed selection, or because of lower prices,” ful influence of public-sector unions on tried perestroika strategies, and they’ve says Brouillette, a self-confessed boot- both parties at the state and local levels, given us boondoggle after boondoggle.” legger. the fact that Republicans will on occasion The booniest of those boondoggles One key opponent of privatization is auction their free-market principles to the were the wine kiosks experimentally state senator Chuck McIlhinney, whose highest bidder—will be occupying con- CHRIS MELLOR / installed in a number of Pennsylvania law-and-justice committee has jurisdic- servatives long after Pennsylvania has grocery stores. This being Pennsylvania, tion over the issue. He has already said he figured out how to let Trader Joe’s sell a

GETTY IMAGES it goes without saying that the contract for would have voted against the house bill, bottle of wine.

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A Court in Cambodia The struggle for justice in the wake of the Khmer Rouge

BY JAY NORDLINGER

HE court in Cambodia an - nounced the death of Ieng Sary “with regret.” Those words T were puzzling: Did the court regret the passing of a human being, who may have meant a lot to his family? Or did the court regret that it had not yet work. Not until 2009 did trials com- dent in Paris—majoring in Shakespeare at completed its trial of him? mence. What took so long, seeing as the the Sorbonne. She was excused from the Ieng Sary was a Khmer Rouge leader, Khmer Rouge fell in 1979? In brief, trial last September on grounds of de - Brother Number 3, to be specific. Bro- Cambodia was enmeshed in civil war, to mentia. This happened at Nuremberg too. ther Number 1 was Pol Pot, who was one degree or another. And then there Gustav Krupp was excused, and he died at Ieng Sary’s brother-in-law. Ieng Sary were protracted negotiations between the his castle in Blühnbach, Austria. As it was typical of the Khmer Rouge: a stu- Cambodian government and the U.N.: happens, I had lunch there last summer. dent in Paris; a member of the French What would the court look like? What The current proprietor is an American and Communist party; a professor of history would its powers be? In the government an improvement, to say the very least. back home; a forger of the new Red are plenty of former Khmer Rouge. This Before Case 002 came Case 001— world that would smash inequality. makes prosecution tricky. which had one defendant, Kaing Guek The Khmer Rouge took power on April The court is supposed to accomplish a Eav. He is known as Duch, or Comrade 17, 1975. This was the launch of “Year number of things for Cambodia. It is sup- Duch (pronounced “Doik”). What he Zero,” as they had it. They ruled for three posed to expose the truth. It is supposed did was preside over a prison called years, eight months, and 20 days—till to enhance the rule of law. It is supposed Tuol Sleng, also referred to as S-21. The January 7, 1979. Their rule was one of the to give survivors of the genocide a voice. prison was really a torture center: Some most savage episodes in human history. (Survivors may participate in the trials 16,000 people were tortured to death They killed around 2 million people, either as complainants or as civil parties.) there. Seven people are known to have which is to say, between a fifth and a quar- The court is supposed to punish the survived the place. ter of the population. They had many apol- guilty, of course. And it is supposed to Duch gave the Nuremberg defense: ogists in the West, among intellectuals. occasion some kind of catharsis. In a He was merely following orders. He Ieng Sary was indicted for war crimes in word, the court, like other courts, is sup- was convicted, and sentenced to 35 the aforementioned court a long time after: posed to achieve justice, however rough. years in prison, reduced to 19. This sen- on September 15, 2010. When he died last This has proven elusive. tence was appealed to a higher chamber month, at the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Ieng Sary was a defendant in the sec- within the ECCC: and that higher Hospital in Phnom Penh, he was 87. ond and current trial of the ECCC—Case chamber upped the sentence to life. The court is known as the ECCC, which 002. He was one of four defendants. Now You never saw a sweeter-looking man stands for Extraordinary Chambers in the there are two: Nuon Chea and Khieu than Duch. And, by the way, there is no Courts of Cambodia. To speak very for- Samphan, i.e., Brother Number 2 and death penalty in Cambodia. There isn’t mally, it is the Extraordinary Chambers Brother Number 4. They are 86 and 81 any in Israel either—but they made an in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prose- years old. They are frail men who have exception for Eichmann. cution of Crimes Committed during the suffered strokes. Brother Number 1, Pol So far, Duch is the only person to have Period of Democratic Kampuchea. That’s Pot, died in 1998 at 72. been tried, in full, for Khmer Rouge what the Year Zero people called Cam - The Nazis were much younger during crimes. Like Brother Number 3, Brothers bodia: “Democratic Kampuchea.” the Nuremberg trials—in their forties and 2 and 4 may not live until the end of their It is a hybrid court, the ECCC: part fifties. Hitler himself had just turned 56 trial. They are in and out of the hospital, Cambodian, part international, or U.N. when he avoided capture and trial, shoot- and are receiving the best of care. Think But it is mainly Cambodian: A majority ing himself. of what their victims, those millions, of the personnel are Cambodian. The Ieng Sary’s wife, Ieng Thirith, was a received. court uses a mixture of Cambodian and defendant in Case 002. When the Khmer The ECCC is a vast operation, with a international law. Rouge ruled, she was social-affairs minis- cast of hundreds. These hundreds come MARK PETERS /

AP Not until 2006 did the court begin its ter. Like her husband, she had been a stu- from all over the world. They are judges,

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lawyers, administrators, staffers, and on gravy trains. They can start to exist “Why bother?” I thought of an exclama- and on. Ieng Sary had an international mainly for the benefit of those who work tion that rang through American politics team of five lawyers. One of them was a for them. The ECCC may well limp on, earlier this year: “What difference, at this pretty young woman from Indiana. As of doling out its salaries and per diems, point, does it make?” now, the ECCC has spent $209 million. A until the last Khmer Rouge croaks. Ever since 1945, people have debated lot of fuss has been made over a few old It may have been better to have a truth whether Nuremberg was worth it. The tri- men, and one senile woman. commission: no prosecution, just lots of als were tainted by the presence of the You can see pictures of them, all over testimony, and amnesty for all. John Soviets, of course, as judges and prosecu- the ECCC website. They are the stars of Bolton, the American diplomat and tors. The Soviets were the Nazis’ original the show. You see them smiling, sitting lawyer, is of this view, and so are many partners in crime. Yet, as the historian serenely, exchanging confidences with Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge defen- David Pryce-Jones says, Nuremberg did their lawyers. You can almost forget they dants, far from confessing and apologiz- this: It established a record. It taught us are genocidal monsters. ing, are proclaiming their innocence. things about the Nazis and their conduct. The trials have been marred by a num- They have no incentive to sing. You have Have the ECCC’s trials—its trial and a ber of things—prominent among them, the spectacle of one of Brother Number half—served a similar purpose? the interference or lack of cooperation by 2’s lawyers, a Dutchman, demanding We have heard some interesting testi- the government. It seems clear that the that Henry Kissinger appear in the dock. mony, true. Some of it came from Vann government has pressured the court not It was the United States that made possi- Nath, one of that handful of survivors of to indict certain persons. And when the ble the rise of the Khmer Rouge, you see. the Tuol Sleng prison. He was so hungry, court has summoned government offi- “Without Kissinger, we would not be he almost ate into the corpses around cials, merely to give testimony, those here today,” said the lawyer. him. He was spared execution because officials have felt free to ignore the The Khmer Rouge trials can seem a he was an artist who could paint portraits summonses. Then there is good old- farce, and a cruel one at that. “Justice of Pol Pot. Chum Mey, another survivor, fashioned financial corruption. delayed is justice denied” is an expres- also gave testimony. Though almost tor- Claudia Rosett, the American journal- sion often heard from the court’s critics. tured to death, he was spared when his ist, who is an authority on the U.N., If you look into the crimes of the Khmer jailers discovered that he could repair makes a point about international bodies Rouge, and then look into the seven-year cars, typewriters, and other machines. such as the ECCC: They can become history of the ECCC, you might ask, (His wife and baby were killed.)

2 9 3col:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/2/2013 10:23 PM Page 30

In court, Chum Mey was able to ask humiliated Pryce to seek revenge on her Duch why they insisted he say that he husband at any cost was the fact that he worked for the CIA. Duch gave a matter- Passion’s took his new lover rather than her to a of-fact answer: “The real CIA is different state banquet at Windsor Castle. In days from people accused by the regime of Fetters gone by, of course, this would not have being CIA. You were identified as some- been allowed: The hypocritical appear- one who opposed the regime. That’s why How Chris Huhne ances would have been preserved. A man we called you CIA.” doomed himself could keep a veritable harem, but still he That is interesting. But in the past 35 had to appear in public with his wife. Alas years, we have learned a lot about the for Pryce, for whom an invitation to a Khmer Rouge and its crimes, without BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE state banquet was what one might call the benefit of the ECCC. For example, Vann Apotheosis of Arrival, we now live in lib- Nath published a memoir in 1998. It Oh! what a tangled web we weave eral times when a man can take whom - must be said, though, that he greatly When first we practice to deceive! ever he chooses to meet the Queen, and looked forward to the trials. “I could not —Sir Walter Scott, Marmion so the Apotheosis was not to occur, not sleep last night,” he said as the first trial for Pryce at any rate. began. “I was waiting for the sunrise so F proof were needed that high intel- However, she had what she thought that I could see Duch in the dock.” (Vann ligence is no certain protection was the perfect instrument of vengeance Nath died in 2011.) against self-destructive foolishness, to hand, one that she thought would infal- According to Sophal Ear, survivors of I the case of Chris Huhne and Vicky libly destroy his career. (Personally, I sus- the genocide are split on the question of Pryce would supply it. pect that he is indestructible, and will whether the court is worthwhile. He is a Huhne had a brilliant academic, jour- come out of prison with a new career. Cambodian-American political scientist nalistic, business, and political career, That is what happens to such types these in California, the author of a new book be coming a minister in the British cabi- days.) on foreign aid to Cambodia (harmful, he net. Vicky Pryce, his wife of 26 years In 2003, when Huhne was trying for argues). Ear is a survivor himself; his and mother of his three children, was a the first time to enter Parliament, he was father and brother were not. He says that prominent economist, the author of a caught speeding by radar, not for the the ECCC has almost no credibility now. recently published book, Greekonomics. first time. In fact, if convicted he would Personally, he is not quite ready to give Of Greek origin, she learned English as a have lost his license, which, for what- up on the court—but he is far from en - fourth language; but she nevertheless ever reason, he supposed would have couraged. He wonders whether the $209 became chief economist to British banks damaged his political chances severely; million could have been spent in better and then a very high-ranking civil ser- and so he persuaded his wife, Pryce, ways in Cambodia. vant. Few couples are more successful, illegally to take the rap for him. (In the So does Thida Mam, another survivor. at least in the eyes of the world; but both event, this was quite pointless: He was (Her father, no.) She is a software engi- Huhne and Pryce have just been sent to disqualified from driving a few weeks neer in Silicon Valley. At first, she had prison. later in any case, when caught using his high hopes for the court. They have been It will surprise no one to learn that pas- hand-held phone while driving. And dashed. She speaks of the ECCC with sion was at the root of this wealthy and this, no doubt, gives us some insight into pain, frustration, and anger. She is dis- accomplished couple’s downfall, though an aspect of his character.) mayed at the corruption, the slow pace, the precise nature of the passion involved If Pryce could let it be publicly known, the arrogance of the defendants, their is not absolutely clear. The trouble began when he was a cabinet minister and after proclamations of innocence, their self- when Huhne abruptly announced that he he had deserted her, that he had avoided justifications, the excusal of Ieng Thirith, was leaving his wife for his press adviser. his penalty by illegally allowing someone the fact that Ieng Sary was given a grand Pryce had long known that they spent else to take the blame, without also letting and glorious funeral—the Ieng family is much time together, but because the press it be known that the someone else was extremely rich, as leading Communists adviser had entered a civil union with she, her revenge would be perfect. Pryce tend to be. She understands that the court another woman she assumed that her hus- therefore went to a newspaper, alleging must be civilized and humane, unlike the band was safe from her wiles. (Here I that Huhne had shifted the blame to a people it is trying. But must the defen- must just interpose a statement of patriot- political assistant in his parliamentary dants be so pampered? She finds she can- ic pride: British scandals are still better constituency. The newspaper discovered, not follow the news from the ECCC any and more titillating than the rest of the however, that the political assistant whom longer. Instead of helping her, it is tor- world’s put together.) she named did not have a driver’s license, menting her. “There’s no justice. I was What by all accounts caused the deeply and the newspaper, concluding that Pryce hoping for some justice, but forget it.” was unreliable, dropped the matter. Sophal Ear points out that millions of Mr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Pryce, however, did not drop the Buddhists hold to the idea of karmic jus- Journal and the author, most recently, of The matter. It is possible that she was now tice. His late mother trusted that, if there Pleasure of Thinking. He directs interested being advised by her friend and next- were no justice in this life, there would readers to his blog at The Salisbury Review door neighbour Constance Briscoe, a be in the next: The Khmer Rouge would (www.salisburyreview.com) for a further reflection prominent lawyer and one of Britain’s come back as cockroaches. on the case of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce. first black recorders, or part-time judges.

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Pryce might have pondered the choice of sive language, formed part of the evi- of people not born in England; whether her adviser, for Briscoe had achieved the dence in the trial. Huhne, to his credit, did the dominant and malicious framer of the unusual feat of being sued by her own not reply in kind, to either son or mother. questions was trying to make a point mother for libel as a result of a memoir Pryce, who sought only to destroy her about immigrants, or whether he or she she had published claiming that her husband (now ex-husband), had to face was politically motivated by some other mother had abused her severely as a child. two trials because the first trial collapsed cause, will never be known. Briscoe won the suit although her siblings when the jury could not reach a verdict. In The second jury convicted Pryce, and testified against her; but Briscoe, aged 55, calling for a retrial, the judge said that the now the search is on for the moral of the is clearly unusual, for when her 76-year- jury was the worst he had ever encoun- story, if there is one. It is probable, in fact, old consort, a very prominent criminal tered in 30 years; it had failed completely that an entire textbook of moral philoso- attorney, suddenly left her for a 25-year- to understand its role and duty. He said phy could be written on the case. At the old aspiring barrister, she seemed to this because the jury had sent him ten very least we see that Walter Scott’s lines maxi mize the publicity surrounding his written questions that, he said, showed became a cliché precisely because they departure. Now she has herself been ar - startling incomprehension. are so very true. We see that intelligence rested and faces trial for having lied to the It was worse than that: They showed and accomplishment are not at all the police about Pryce’s case; and the libel that at least one member of the jury, prob- same thing as wisdom. We see that hubris case may be reexamined. In her desperate search for vengeance, Pryce went to another newspaper and spilled the beans about Huhne, this time admitting that it was she who had taken the rap. She was apparently under the im pression that only Huhne would be subsequently prosecuted for perverting the course of justice, not she; or that if she were charged, she would be able to mount the defense of marital coercion. Huhne was arrested, but so was she. Huhne at first denied everything with such determination and so convincingly that his subsequent admission that it was true all along would make any sensible person mistrust whatever he said for the rest of his life. In the event Pryce did mount the defense of marital coercion, claiming among other things that her hus- band had “forced” her to have an abor- ably dominant by virtue of his or her edu- is followed by nemesis. We see how diffi- tion, and that he had wanted her to abort cation, was determined to subvert the cult it is to disentangle human motives, their youngest son, Peter. whole trial process. Here are two of the which are not only often mixed but This latter claim, that he had wanted questions they asked the judge, who had changeable. We see that the law is a very her to abort Peter, undermined her case given the clearest of instructions regard- dangerous instrument of vengeance to rather badly; for the fact is that Peter was ing the law: those who use it as such. not aborted, which suggests an ability on Above all, we see the dangers of pas- her part to resist her husband’s “coer- Can a juror come to a verdict based on a sion, whether it be that of disappointed reason that was not presented in court cion.” In fact, the defense produced gen- love, thwarted worldly ambition, or lust and has no facts or evidence to support it, erally unfavorable comment and even either from the prosecution or defence? for revenge. It has become fashionable some hilarity: Her appearance and man- in neurobiological circles to claim that ner were certainly not that of a woman Would religious conviction be a good emotion and cognition cannot be distin- easily cowed, and her career suggested enough reason for a wife feeling that she guished for, as Hume said on purely philo- otherwise too. had no choice ie she promised to obey sophical grounds, reason is the slave of Peter, of course, was left in an emo- her husband in her wedding vows and he the passions. But even if there are no had ordered her to do something and she tional bind of almost Antigonean propor- ends that can be desired or chosen solely felt she had to obey? tions. If his mother was to be believed, by means of reason, there are reasonable his father had wanted him never to exist; These questions are at once so stupid means of reaching desired or chosen if his mother was not telling the truth, she and so well phrased that they cannot be ends. And no one supposes that Huhne was using him merely as an instrument explained by a lack either of education or and Pryce desired or chose prison as their in her struggle to wreak vengeance on of understanding. They are therefore (in end. As Edmund Burke would have put his father. In the event, he believed his my hypothesis) malicious, designed for it, people of intemperate minds (such as mother, and the distressing text messages whatever reason to undermine the entire theirs) could not be free. Their passion STEVE PARSONS /

AP that he sent his father, in the vilest of abu- process. The jury was composed mainly forged their fetters.

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The Quiet Gold Rush On the many splendors of Canada’s tar sands

BY CHARLES C. W. COOKE

Alberta, Canada hile we are sitting on the tarmac waiting inter- window and look out into the snow. Regimentally, the men minably for Newark’s permission to take off, the troop off. They have been here before. man in the seat to my right turns and asks me if The tar sands are a hot political issue in the U.S., the ulti- W i call Calgary “home.” i explain mildly apolo- mate target of opposition to the completion of the Keystone getically that i don’t, that this will in fact be my first trip Xl pipeline. When environmentalists speak of “Keystone,” across the 49th parallel, and that—alas—i am stopping there they are really speaking of Canadian tar-sands oil, for it is this only in order to connect with another flight. From the city’s that the pipeline would carry from the mines in Alberta down sprawling international airport i will continue on up to Fort to the refineries along America’s Gulf Coast. The State McMurray, the boomtown gateway to Canada’s tar sands. Department’s repeated findings that the pipeline would have “Ah,” he says, his interest piqued. “Actually, i’m in the oil “limited adverse environmental impacts” have fallen on deaf business myself. i’ve been in New York for meetings.” Then ears. environmental groups remain implacably opposed, he leans in. “Fort McMurray, eh? That’s a real gold-rush sort claiming that the process by which tar-sands oil is extracted of place.” leads to unacceptable greenhouse-gas emissions and the irrev- My second flight of the day, this time on a noisy little turbo- ocable destruction of the local environment and wildlife. prop puddle-jumper that sounds like a bomber from a World The usual suspects have come out in force. NASA scientist War ii movie, gives me no reason to doubt his description. James hansen was arrested in February after he chained him- Unlike the large jet that took me from Newark, this aircraft is self to a gate in front of the White house in protest of the packed full of sturdy men wearing jeans, baseball caps, and pipeline. hansen has warned against America’s feeding the steel-toed boots. There are no women—not a single pair of X “tar-sands monster,” describing Keystone as the “fuse to the chromosomes on board—and nobody speaks a word; they biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” it would be “game over,” because they are discernibly weary of the journey, i because i hansen believes, if the United States elected to borrow “the am stunned into silence by what i can see outside. The 400 dirtiest needle from a fellow addict.” President Obama’s base miles of Alberta we cross are just spectacular: endless white is sufficiently riled up about the issue that he feels secure in fields sweep up toward the horizon for miles until they are delaying the project despite the wishes of the public (about 65 broken by a line of snow-capped mountains. The sky is a daz- percent are in favor of it), the Democratic-controlled Senate zlingly clear blue, and the moon is visible. After 90 minutes or (62–37 in favor), the house of Representatives (237–187 in LARRY MACDOUGAL /

so of this, we land at a tiny airport and i drag my eyes from the favor), and a majority of the states. As Canada’s Globe and AP

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Mail newspaper noted in February, “for environmentalists other unflattering names. Large surface mines such as especially, Keystone has become a symbol; it’s not just another Syncrude’s are indisputably the most physically intrusive in ‘old’ energy project, it’s a test of the President’s promises to the region. But, contrary to popular claims, they have left no take serious steps on climate change.” hellscape in their wakes. What the oil sands’ antagonists rou- tinely fail to mention is that the region’s surface mines are temporary, and that they are not so much growing as they are n the evening, I meet with Travis Davies in the bar at my moving. An area of roughly fixed size is slowly crossing the hotel. Davies works in the media department at the landscape. Yes, Syncrude’s mine turns an area of beauty into I Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, an organi- an ugly open wound, but it is an extraordinarily small part of zation whose primary role is to push back against the idea that that area—and then they turn it back. there is something wrong with a technology that can turn dirty “We are reclaiming as we go,” Robb tells me. “And this is sand into cheap, plentiful oil. Davies is slightly nervous. An the largest reclamation project in the world.” The company nBC crew will be accompanying us, filming the area as part has planted more than 7 million trees, all native species that of a feature on oil-sands exploration. People in the news media, are painstakingly replaced in accordance with notes taken he gripes over chicken wings and beers, have a tendency to prior to the start of production. At an overlook point a mile or focus disproportionately on the grotesque “holes in the ground” so from the main production facility, a photograph of scarred or on the smokestacks. mining lands is displayed on a bluff. “This is how it was,” What the oil sands’ antagonists routinely fail to mention is that the region’s surface mines are temporary, and that they are not so much growing as they are moving.

The next morning we all get up before it is light and make Robb says, pointing to the display. Then she waves at the land our way out into the cold. It is minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, in front of us. “And now . . .” and the air is so cold that it hurts the back of my throat when It is astonishing. The land is flat and pristine. Bison graze in I breathe. On the way to our first stop of the day we see end- the distance. “It took 20 years to mine out,” Robb smiles, “and less buses running to and from Fort McMurray—40, 50, 60, then almost twelve to fill back in.” now, it is a flawless, snow- 100 of them pass us in the first few minutes, ferrying workers covered field, and the only sign of disturbance in the area is to and from sites around the area. (The oil companies provided the pop-pop of propane cannons, triggered by radar to keep my transportation to and from their facilities.) The buses are the birds away until the reclamation work is finished and the filthy. During the long winter, vehicles become caked with the engineers are ready to welcome them back. ugly combination of melted snow and dirty sand within min- Our attention is drawn behind us, to “Gateway Hill,” a for- utes of hitting the roads and there is no point in washing them mer mine that was reclaimed in 1983. The Province of Alberta until the summer comes. Summer, however, is a long way off, has monitored the land for over 25 years, as part of a $50 mil- and the water in the Athabasca River is frozen solid—four or lion scheme that is paid for by the industry and administered five feet deep—providing a sheet of ice so thick that cars can by the government, and it has certified the land as “sustain- safely drive on it. Around us, always, are trees; miles and miles able.” I ask what that means. “The ecosystem is now on a strong and miles of trees. enough footing,” Robb informs us, that “it can regenerate itself After half an hour’s drive, the incessant stretch of virgin if there is a forest fire.” land comes to an end and, over the shallow hills, we see white In the afternoon, we head to Royal Dutch Shell’s Albian smoke billowing into the sky. A few more miles and an indus- Sands facility, another surface mine, where we put on hard trial plant comes into view. Against the green-and-white land- hats, gloves, sturdy boots, ear protectors, and safety glasses, scape, it is a shock. I recognize it immediately as belonging to and then head into the noise of a mechanics’ shop, which is, in heavy-oil giant Syncrude, and as the favorite subject of the truth, less a shop than a hangar. Towering over us is a gargan- myriad anti-oil-sands photographs that are currently circulat- tuan Caterpillar 797 dump truck—a beast at four stories high, ing around the Web. It is without doubt an ugly thing to see 3,440 horsepower, and possessed of a container that can hold amid so much beauty, and the Tolkienesque distaste for the 400 tons of bitumen, which will turn into around 200 barrels of “scouring” of the countryside that informs the “green” zeit- oil once it is processed. Each vehicle costs around $5 million geist is born of a noble instinct. Yet not all is what it seems. To to buy, which is good news for the American economy as the a layman, the seven sets of white clouds look baleful, but, I engines are built in Indiana, the cab in Illinois, the frame in learn, six of these chimneys are emitting just harmless steam. Louisiana, and the tires in South Carolina. Just one wheel will Our host, Cheryl Robb, jokes that she prefers conducting sum- set you back $65,000. mer tours because then “the steam is invisible.” She gives us A few of the mechanics physically recoil when told that the details of an ongoing $1.6 billion project that will reduce their visitors are journalists from new York City. One audibly the emissions from the one offending chimney by 60 percent. mutters to another that their activities are “never well covered What about the land? “We can almost restore the area to by those guys.” Consequently, they slightly oversell the safety how it was when we found it,” she tells us. Environmentalists concerns that are a genuine part of their day, and at times dur- grimly call the development the “scar sands” and a score of ing our presentation they descend into security theater, mak-

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ing a song and dance of having special work orders signed so pumped down through the upper well, creating a “steam that the truck can reverse in our presence. chamber.” As more steam is pumped in and the chamber At Albian Sands, oil is being dug out of the ground at a grows, the heat reduces the viscosity of the bitumen—which record pace. The crew works around the clock every day of starts at a molasses-like texture—causing it to flow down into the year and production never stops—not even for Christmas. the lower well for collection. Any water that condenses is also It is quite the sight to behold. We stand 150 feet down, at the collected and then recycled—“with 95 percent efficiency,” I bottom of the mine, and watch as the razor-sharp blade on the am proudly told. I remark that the process is more like manu- end of a seven-story-tall electric power-shovel effortlessly facturing than like oil drilling. “That’s exactly how we see scrapes a bucketload of sand from the quarry’s wall and drops ourselves,” says Travis Davies. Effectively, we have “big it into a waiting truck. This is repeated until the shovel’s oper- water plants that happen to produce oil.” ator is satisfied that no more sand can be safely loaded, at which The question of the environmental impact comes up. “We will point he honks a horn and the truck leaves—with profits have an impact,” Reg Curren of Cenovus’s media-relations dependent upon the efficiency of the process, the trucks travel office tells us. “But not a big one. The great thing about SAGD at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. is that its footprint is tiny. Imagine a postage stamp on an enve- Sometimes, multiple trucks await payloads on either side of lope. That’s what we’re looking at here.” I note that, flying into the shovel, so, to avoid traffic jams—or worse, for there are the area earlier, I was hard pressed to see what all the fuss was 13,000-volt power cables lying nearby—the trucks’ paths are about. “I just saw endless wilderness with very occasional planned in real time by a centralized computer system that our patches of activity,” I offer. Reg agrees: “Compare and contrast. hosts described as being “like air-traffic control.” Calgary is 730 square kilometers. Cenovus’s entire facility is On the other side of the mine, the trucks deposit their loads six square kilometers.” This includes “everything”: the land for into an open pipe 35 feet wide—this looks like a water slide at the plant site, the wells, the roads, the pipelines, the camps. an amusement park—which in turn leads into a group of Reg’s colleague Rhona DelFrari adds that “the wells them- swirling steel teeth that crush the larger pieces into smaller, selves are a small portion of that disturbance. If we talk only more manageable ones before dropping them onto the world’s about the land disturbance of the well pads, each one is about largest conveyor belt. This belt shuffles the bitumen out of the 0.06 square kilometers. But the wells under that pad access mine, spilling it into a storage silo. On the other side of the about 75 hectares of oil resource. So the pad is about 8 percent facility, warm water is added to the bitumen. Next, an array of versus the amount of resource accessed.” Those six hectares at chemical treatments detach the bitumen from other solids. Christina Lake are extraordinarily efficient. Cenovus is produc- After the bitumen has been separated out, a solvent is added ing 98,000 barrels of oil per day; when the current expansion is to it. This ensures that the bitumen remains in liquid form for finished, in 2020, the company will have brought this up to its southward journey down the 300-mile pipe to the refinery 300,000. To put that number in perspective, the entire oil-sands at Scotford, near Edmonton, where it is upgraded into petro- region currently pumps out 1.3 million barrels per day. leum and sent out for sale to consumers. This is not your father’s oil field. The control room at Albian has its own airport, which can “handle planes all the Christina Lake makes a Space Shuttle cockpit look old-hat. It way up to big Airbus jets.” Boeing 737s, we’re told, “are the collects 17,000 pieces of data every second, from all around norm.” From Monday to Thursday each and every week, Shell the site, and sends them for instant analysis to a server farm. flies in contractors from Calgary and beyond. Albian Village, Nothing is left unmonitored. Back in the van, we talk about the where the workers sleep, has 2,700 rooms, a 1,000-person threat to local animals. The area in which Cenovus operates is cafeteria, a running track, and an auditorium. Rudimentary full of moose, bears, lynx, coyotes, wolves, waterfowl, cranes, “man camps” these are not. Such investment is easy to justify. caribou, cougars, deer, and other species, Reg tells me, and The area’s proven reserves are vast, and the returns are they are kept out of the facility by a network of border fences already impressive: In 2007, Shell reported profits of $21.75 and radar-controlled propane cannons. Simultaneously, a per barrel from the oil sands. Its average worldwide profit video-monitoring system allows workers in the facility to from crude-oil production was $12.41 per barrel. watch animals along its perimeter and to share the findings Because they are so visually impressive, surface mines with regulators. receive the most attention. But this process has a limited future. Accounting for 50 percent of current output and 80 per- cent of all potential production, a newer technique known as N a sketch by the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, “in situ” is where the growth is. The most common in situ tech- a man walks in amazement around a farm. Speaking as if nique is a deep-extraction process known as “steam-assisted I he were letting the viewer in on a well-kept secret, he gravity drainage,” or “SAGD” (“Sag-Dee” to the experts). whispers that all a farmer needs to do to in order to make At Cenovus’s Christina Lake SAGD facility, most of the money is to pull things out of the ground. “You know sheep?” action is underground. We watch from a small pad as workers he asks. “They’re woolly! It’s wool! Pull it off, sell it—it on a 15-story rig bolt a series of pipes together. Very slowly, the f***ing grows back again!” He points to a chicken: “See that? piping is bent at three joints on each piece and pushed into the It’s made of chicken. It’s actually made of chicken.” Food? ground until a huge underground arc has been formed. The end “Comes out of the f***ing ground! Couldn’t believe it.” He of the pipe will eventually be 650 feet down and a half a mile pauses and touches the side of his nose. “You cannot lose!” away. This procedure is performed twice, with the parallel One could be forgiven for taking the same attitude here. “We wells being kept 16 feet apart by a magnetic-ranging system. have the energy!” proclaim the signs at Fort McMurray’s city When the piping has arrived at its destination, steam is limits. And how. Canada’s total proven oil reserves are vast,

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second only to Saudi Arabia’s. Of its 1.7 trillion barrels of the increased demand has pushed Fort McMurray to build a bitumen, only 10 percent is currently accessible, but history much-needed new airport, which will allow direct flights to shows that science has a tendency to overcome such limita- Denver when it opens in 2014. In support of this development, tions. Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper, arrives on the tar- And there is plenty of money to be made. You can earn mac one day as we get out of our plane and makes a short $150,000 to $200,000 per year here as a rig operator. One speech in favor of Keystone. His words are drowned out by interviewee tells the television crew that an opportunity like traffic, by the constant noise from big and little commercial this would never have come to him otherwise. Now, he can planes, from helicopters, and from private jets. In the distance, save for his kids’ education. traffic jams are forming miles outside of the city center. They There is nothing slick about the people here in northern last for three hours in the afternoon. It is a good problem to Canada—no Gordon Gekko edge to speak of. Many had other have. careers and wanted a change—in Alberta’s expanding energy In the hotel’s bar on my final evening, I meet two environ- sector, they saw an opportunity and they took it. One man I mentalist girls who are having dinner with the NBC TV crew. speak to was a journalist for 26 years; another was formerly in We strike up a conversation. Their lexicon is replete with IT; a third has been a lawyer. I meet a young woman who rec- insistent and earnest calls for “renewable energy” and for ognizes my accent and introduces herself as a fellow Brit. I doing “something different.” We must have a “conversa- inquire as to when her family moved to Canada and she tion,” they say. The “public must get involved!” One of them laughs: “They didn’t. Just me!” I ask why. She tells me that she repeatedly insists that there needs to be a “compromise.” I trained as a speech therapist and moved out here for a job. The suggest that this “compromise” is precisely what has hap- Canadian embassy in London was so surprised that a young pened here: The Province of Alberta allows private compa- woman wanted to come here on her own, she says, that they nies to operate within very strict guidelines and, if they break interviewed her parents before accepting her residency appli- the rules, they lose their license to manufacture. She doesn’t cation. They’d be more surprised now: Soon after moving, she push back against this directly, but she is “worried” that oil decided to pack up speech therapy and work for an oil company. production still has its “drawbacks.” I agree in principle. She “love[s] it.” After all, what doesn’t? But I’m struck by the thought that Golda Meir once joked that the only thing she had “against she’s striving for an impossible perfection and has chosen the Moses” was that “he took us 40 years through the desert in wrong target. order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no Americans, representatives from Alberta’s government tell oil.” Perhaps Moses should have gone to Canada. The scale of us in a tedious panel session at a local hotel, are always

   


            

  
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“amazed” by how heavily regulated Canadian oil-and-gas production is. these soft-spoken, almost dull overseers of the development confirm my suspicion that if this is a “gold Cyprus rush,” it’s a quiet one. “the government doesn’t produce oil, but it does own the lease and licenses,” Christopher J. Holly of Alberta’s department of energy explains to us. “Our approach is to monitor, regulate, and enforce.” A few PowerPoint slides later and the message is clear: this is no capitalist dystopia in Sinking which money-hungry cowboys can dig up the land with impunity. It takes an average of five years just to get a permit. The euro zone signals that Moreover, Holly explains, there is an inherent win-win with this sort of production: “If producers can reduce greenhouse bank deposits are not safe gases by using less steam at their plants—and steam is expen- sive to generate, remember—then they will increase their BY ANDREW STUTTAFORD profits.” the government employees have an unfortunate tendency t says something about the lunatic calculus of Europe’s mon- to couch their discussions of the oil sands in politically correct etary union that the Republic of Cyprus, a slice of a Medi - nonsense jargon. the oil companies are somewhat guilty of terranean rock known mainly, if not always fairly, for this too, being especially prone to smug talk of “giving back I sunshine, no-questions-asked banking for murky Russian to the community.” I loathe this conceit. Companies that fol- money, and a history of ethnic conflict, has shared a currency with low the rules and sell great products that people want to buy Germany for the past five years. And it says perhaps even more should not have to promise to “give back” to society as if they that in 2010 and mid-2011 its two largest banks passed EU-wide were convicted criminals who had done something wrong and “stress tests” that, revealingly and not so revealingly, hugely must atone for their crimes. downplayed the risks that banks were running with their holdings Fossil fuels are the foundation of the modern economy. they of government bonds. And, yes, those two Cypriot banks had a give us heat, light, food, technology, and transportation. they lot of government bonds—Greek-government bonds—and a make possible travel, education, and medicine, among an end- great deal of other business in the hard-pressed Hellenic Republic less parade of things that even their discontents cannot live besides. Wait, there’s more: together those two banks in 2011 without. As George Orwell noted of coal in 1937, carbon is had assets equivalent to over four times Cyprus’s GDP. Over - inextricably linked with our prosperity—the “caryatid upon all the country’s banking sector had assets that amounted to more whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is support- than eight times GDP. What cannot go on, won’t. By the second ed.” In our search for supplies, there is of course a need for half of 2011, Cyprus was in the grip of a growing financial crunch. some regulation and for self-awareness. But there is no need After securing an emergency loan of €2.5 billion from Russia, whatsoever for the companies that make our lifestyles possible Cyprus’s former AKEL government (“Communists,” but not to prostrate themselves in front of us apologetically. really) turned belatedly, in June 2012, for help to the bailout- the people I meet in northern Canada are selling what the hardened troika of the European Commission, European Central world wants. Ultimately, that is what their opponents hate. A Bank, and IMF. Negotiations dragged. It took the election of the common complaint of the anti-Keystone brigade is that oil- new center-right president, Nicos Anastasiades, in February sands petroleum requires between 5 and 15 percent more carbon finally to break the logjam. Anastasiades had a clear mandate to emissions to generate than the average crude-oil equivalent. agree to structural and budgetary reforms of the type that the (this number obsesses the television crew that is following us troika was looking for, but he balked at demands that depositors around.) Royal Dutch Shell questions those numbers, and points with Cyprus’s banks share in the pain. the longer-term conse- out that, besides, it has a plan to reduce emissions by 1 million quences for Cyprus’s banking sector, a mainstay of his nation’s tons per year, “equivalent to taking 175,000 cars off the road.” economy, would, he knew, be disastrous. this is a “very real project,” say the government regulators in that was not something that worried Angela Merkel. She was our meeting. “An impressive project.” said to have said that Cyprus “must realize its current business the project is well and good—and, within reason, it is to be model is dead.” Helping out the banks in an offshore tax haven applauded. But whom do these marginal improvements con- was never a proposition likely to appeal greatly either to the chan- vince? People who hate oil hate oil. they don’t want more oil cellor herself—no friend of international finance at the best of in the world; instead, they desire to replace oil with the myth- times—or to German voters. they are due to go to the polls in ical energy sources of their choice or, if that is not possible, September. After years of bailouts that they never liked and that they want to lower total global energy consumption—the poor were designed to rescue a currency that they never wanted, there be damned. Could things be better? Yes. Are there costs to was an obvious danger that coming too generously to the aid of maintaining civilization? Yes. But we could also stop buying an oligarchs’ playground would be a handout too far. And so oil from sadistic medieval regimes run by family crime syndi- Germany played a major role in insisting that any bailout be cates. I’d take a 15 percent increase in carbon emissions in accompanied by a “bail-in” that would shift a good part of the exchange for North American energy independence. So would cost of a rescue onto depositors with Cyprus’s banks. the Canadians I meet in the wilds. So, the polls show, would the Cypriots caved. the euro-zone nations and the IMF would most Americans. One day soon, I hope, so will the person sit- ting in the White House. Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE.

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together provide €10 billion in new loans, but depositors in Cyprus’s banks would have to chip in too, a grim first in the grim history of the euro-zone bailouts. Deposits of over €100,000 would be subject to a one-off tax of 9.9 percent. Then CATHO LICISM came an additional, dangerous twist. Depositors with less than €100,000 would also be taxed—in their case, at 6.75 percent, a levy that made nonsense of the under- standing that, within the EU, such smaller deposits are meant to be insured. That breach of faith could easily be seen as an unsettling precedent, especially elsewhere in the euro zone’s troubled periphery. The Cypriot leadership probably chose to penalize the smaller fry in this manner because they worried that taking too much from the high rollers risked damaging

what was left of Cyprus’s offshore-banking business, but it created such an uproar— AND on the island and beyond—that its overwhelming rejection by the Cypriot parlia- THETHE AMERICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE ment a few days later came as a surprise to no one. 2012 YEAR OF FAITH 2013

T was back to the drawing board. What emerged on the second go-round a few June 7- 9, 2013 days later was structured somewhat more sensibly. Bank deposits of less than at Portsmouth Abbey School I 100,000 are protected, but Cyprus’s second-biggest bank, Laiki, will be € Portsmouth, RI restructured out of existence, quite possibly wiping out all uninsured deposits on the way. Its larger rival, the Bank of Cyprus, has been rescued, but this will come as cold Speakers include: comfort to its major depositors, who are likely to end up taking a shellacking so bru- George Weigel, Keynote Address: tal that there will be little to choose between their fate and that of their counterparts at Laiki. “Catholics in an Unfamiliar America” The good news was that this kept the troika committed to the €10 billion loan. His Excellency, The Most Reverend That would, said Anastasiades, be enough to stave off bankruptcy. More modest Thomas J. Tobin, Bishop of than most euro-zone politicians, he did not claim that his particular chapter of the Providence: “Evangelization in a currency union’s interminable crisis was over, merely that it had been “contained,” Secular Age” an idea echoed by the fact that draconian “temporary” controls on the movement of money out of the country have been put in place. Even so, the president was being Peter Steinfels: “Catholic Identity too optimistic. The banking sector is shrinking rapidly. Many other businesses have vs. Catholic Leadership in a Secular been badly damaged by the calamities of recent weeks and are now facing the America” prospect of operating in a near-siege economy—conditions that are, in addition, unlikely to attract the foreign investment that Cyprus will now desperately need. Roger Kimball: “Is There Such a Making matters worse still, money will leak out, despite the controls. GDP will con- Thing as Catholic Art?” tract sharply, perhaps by as much as 20 percent over the next couple of years. Unemployment will soar. Casey Carter: “The Faith in the Future With the economy in free fall and government debt-to-GDP set to rise to some Foundation: A New Paradigm in Ameri- 140 percent after the bailout, it will take a miracle for Cyprus to avoid a return to the can Catholic Education” begging bowl—a miracle so far-fetched that even Cyprus’s most senior cleric, Alex Mikulich: “Witnessing to Charity Archbishop Chrysostomos II, cannot believe in it. The influential archbishop, in Truth: Pope Benedict’s Call to Prac- admittedly long a strong nationalist, is urging abandonment of the euro, which tice Integral Human Development” would trigger the nation’s outright default. That won’t happen for now. Anastasiades has pledged to stick with the single currency. A majority of his fellow citizens are ... and more to come. probably behind him in that, at least for the moment, for reasons that are easy to guess. A reversion to the Cypriot pound would mean a devaluation that would wipe Presentations and Concerts: out much of what’s left of the republic’s shredded savings, threaten massive infla- Kevin O’Brien from Theater of the tion, and further disrupt an economy that has already lost its bearings. But the argu- Word and EWTN’s “The Journey ment is not all one way: There’s a decent case to be made that an eventual exit from Home,” as Orestes Brownson the single currency would, for all the pain, be the best possible way of repricing Cyprus back into the global economy. This is a debate that is far from closed. Troy Quinn and the Portsmouth In any event, the most intense phase of the Cypriot storm appears to have sub- Institute Orchestra present, “Bernstein sided for now, but it has left the euro zone even more battered than before. The two Symphonic Dances” most dangerous threats to the survival of the currency union in its current form are a massive bank run and voter revolt. The disaster in Nicosia has made both more For more information and to register likely. visit www.portsmouthinstitute.org or contact Cindy Waterman at (401) 643-1244 ET’s start with the banks. Depositors throughout the currency union have or cwaterman @ portsmouthabbey.org. now been given a sharp lesson. Deposits above €100,000 are riskier than L they had previously assumed, a message reinforced by a series of comments

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from various euro-zone leaders who in the wake of the Cyprus that would be not only bad housekeeping but a quick way to deal, despite some hemming and hawing, made it clear that a new antagonize the voters. The bailouts have long been unpopular template is being put in place. Large depositors, bondholders, and among the electorate in the euro zone’s (reasonably) solvent other sources of wholesale money to a euro-zone bank are being north, but the eurofundamentalism of most of its political class warned that they should expect to take a hit if that bank runs has meant that, despite some heroic efforts in Finland, this senti- into trouble. Properly tweaked, that’s a good principle—moral ment has done little to derail the trainloads of cash and commit- hazard and all that—but, with confidence in the euro zone and ments heading toward the currency union’s embattled periphery. its often undercapitalized banks still shaky, now was not the That’s not to claim that relatively frugal sorts such as moment to assert it. That was especially so in a week that had Chancellor Merkel have enjoyed making the handouts. They seen the introduction of strict controls on the free movement of have not. The tough line that they are taking on Cyprus and, by capital—supposedly temporary (time will tell; precedents are extension, on banks throughout the euro zone is clearly intended not en couraging)—within a currency union that had allegedly to show that there are limits to their generosity with their taxpay- consigned such restrictions to history. ers’ money and to the risks that they are prepared to take with This will mean that banks seen as vulnerable (or banks located their voters’ patience. In a recent poll, some 26 percent of in countries seen as vulnerable) will find it even more difficult— German voters said they “could imagine” voting for a party that and more expensive—to attract funds. (Well, would you deposit was opposed to the single currency. In late February, a new, more than €100,000 with an Italian bank?) This is a perception achingly moderate center-right party, Alternative für Deutsch - that feeds upon itself, and, in the right wrong circumstances, can land, was formed to appeal to just such voters. AfD won’t win, easily set the stage for panic. Even those with (supposedly but if it takes even a few percentage points in September’s vote, insured) deposits below €100,000 will have been left uneasy by it could make the election rather closer than Mrs. Merkel would those few days in which it appeared that the euro zone’s leader- like. She won’t want to give AfD any more ammunition than she ship was prepared to go along with a deal in which smaller depos- has to over the next few months, which is just another reason to itors took a hit. Since then, there have been repeated reassurances think that the next bailout drama (keep an eye on Slovenia) may that such deposits are safe. Protesting too much? Just maybe, and be even uglier than the last: Bank depositors in the euro zone’s there’s no getting away from one uncomfortable truth: Those other struggling regions will, doubtless, be watching carefully— insured deposits are guaranteed at the national level, not by the and anxiously. euro zone as a whole. A guarantee is only as good as the guaran- But while politicians in the euro zone’s north have to contend, tor. Insured depositors in Greece have, therefore, to hope that, in for the most part, only with the threat of voter revolt, those in the the event of a crisis, the Hellenic Republic is good for the money, periphery have to contemplate dealing with far tougher opposi- or at least for a third bailout. tion. If parliamentary approval for the final memorandum of One possible, partial response to that part of the problem understanding that seals the deal is required, there may be some would be to institute a deposit-insurance scheme jointly guaran- sweaty interludes in Cyprus (the parliament’s speaker has already teed by all euro-zone members, but that would risk inflaming the signaled his opposition), but the best guess must be that Cypriots source of the second great threat now stirring within the euro are likely to be too traumatized to do anything but go along with zone: democratic politics. One reason that deposit insurance has the terms of their rescue for now. But the spectacle of their pau- not expanded beyond national borders is the suspicion, most perization will not play well with their kin in Greece, already rad- notably in Germany, that signing up for a broader European icalized by years of slump and increasingly hostile to the idea of scheme would be signing yet another blank check, something sticking with the painful austerity that many of them regard (not always completely incorrectly) as self-defeating. That austerity is the price of continued support from the north, not least because, without it, voters in Finland and elsewhere would likely finally say that they had had enough. Rock, meet hard place. For now the somewhat unwieldy Greek coalition government is sticking to the troika’s script, but its leaders can read the opinion polls—and their message of growing anger—as well as anyone else. Meanwhile, in Italy the success of Beppe Grillo’s insur- gent (and anti-austerity) Five Star Movement (M5S) in the February elections has led to political paralysis. At this writing, there is still no government in Rome, and the prospect of new elections cannot be ruled out. M5S continues to ride high in the polls. The humiliation of Cyprus will be unlikely to have hurt its case. Mean - while, Silvio Berlusconi’s PDL, itself deeply skeptical of the troika’s agenda, is also polling well. In the after- math of the Cypriot deal, Italian bond yields rose, and Italian bank shares fell. To repeat myself, if you had a deposit in an Italian bank, what would you do?

Tick tock. ROMAN GENN

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS A Portrait of the Columnist as a Young Nerd

SCHOOL BOARd has decided that children coach looked on, nodding approval. Scores could be set- should not experience one of the most impor- tled, too: Those rock-hard balls could remind the tubby lit- tant and instructive moments of youth: getting tle brainiac on the other side of the wisdom of sharing test A hit in the head—hard—by a sphere hurled by answers when the teacher’s back was turned. A pal who’d some grinning cretin who has yet to graduate to other made it known he had designs on your best gal could get a amusing pursuits, like tying firecrackers to a cat’s tail. Put brushback that made him double over and think of the last another way: A school in Windham, N.H., has banned time he’d jumped on the bike seat wrong. In short, it was dodgeball. human nature given its reins, a way to settle every griev- The Windham superintendent was quoted by CBS News ance, blow off steam, howl like a savage, and channel all as saying that the game “creates conditions inconsistent that testosterone that built up in the classroom and made with [the] message” that students should respect one you feel like a pop can after an hour in a paint shaker. another. Yes, their heads spin. One moment they’re told It usually came down to two kids. Happened to me in that everyone should be nice to each another, and then junior high. I was an uncoordinated dork with glasses and dodgeball turns them into brutish mercenaries because “husky”-sized gym shorts. On the other side of the room conditions have been created that foster was a red-haired wolf who grinned and an environment where respect is not walked back and forth picking up balls, respected. The kid comes home crying, testing them for hardness, settling on a the parent asks what’s wrong, and the red Voit with a pebbled surface. I did not child blurts it all out: “It’s the school’s want to be hit. On the other hand, if I messaging, Mom! It’s fraught with inter- got hit, then everyone could play again nal contradictions!” before the bell, and I’d be a hero sort of, This leads men to shake their heads at but on the other hand there was Pride at the soft modern world. Why, in my stake, personal OWWWW—didn’t even day—and it was night, incidentally; we see it coming. Right in the head. Glasses didn’t get day until I was six—all the went flying, the time-honored emascula- kids would get some blasting caps for a tion of the nerd. The coach blew the fun round of Lose-a-Toe or bust thermometers to gargle whistle and the war began anew. My “team” was mad the mercury. Kids today! You think the Red Chinese are because I’d held out as long as I had. afraid of dodgeball? I gleaned a lesson from the public shaming: Better find Well, men say things like that, because they’re no longer something else you can do with your head, since getting it getting hit in the head. Or were hit in the head too much. out of the way of moving objects isn’t your forte. Perhaps there’s something to be said for dodgeball, and Should a parent want to bring back dodgeball, it won’t that something is “Ouch.” Nothing prepares you for life’s be hard. Start a private league and make it boys-only. figurative blows to the head like literal ones. Anything that smacks of a gender distinction will rile up First: Sides were chosen. The lean, confident favorites some other parents, who’ll believe their daughter is of the coach would select teammates, leading the butter- deprived of an opportunity. A local TV station will do a balls and the mouth-breathers and the weaklings who story on her Struggle to enter the boys-club world of smelled of milk to await the humiliation of being the last dodgeball, how she wants to break down the barriers that ones called. have kept young lasses from getting beaned on the brain- Balls were distributed. Some were large and wobbly, pan throughout history. The government will get involved and throwing them was like lofting a sack of trash filled because the club meets in a building served by a public with water balloons and frightened cats. Others had been road, and uses air that has been purified by EPA standards, inflated beyond design specifications until they were hard and hence receives federal benefits. So Title IX or XCML as something Romans would use to soften a fortified wall; or whichever comes into play. get hit with one of these on the side of the head and both When she’s admitted, the newspaper will quote one of eyeballs would temporarily occupy the same socket. the young Neanderthals about his reluctance to hit a girl, On command, each side scrambled for the balls and and interview the coach about the difficulties of squaring began throwing them at the other. The nonathletic kids the nature of dodgeball with the Message of Respect, but liked it because a) it wasn’t running, b) a lucky shot could it’s all about equality, and frankly she’s got a helluva arm! take out someone with more ability, and c) it wasn’t run- Then the boys will have to go out and throw the ball as ning. The athletic kids liked it because they had license to hard as they can at the girl, because it would be disre- throw things as hard as possible at other students while the spectful to pull their punches. Eventually the boys all drop out and it’s an all-girls Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. league. Then dodgeball is the greatest thing ever.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

@youthcaptain just ousted @kimjongil who forgot the dressing on the side and as the Mayor of Missile Control Room, an Air Force general who didn’t laugh). Pyongyang, Korea. #foursquare #showbiz #theindustry #nextcareer

Long, long, long meeting today about Don’t worry, @ellendegeneres! Will let our newly forceful foreign policy. I keep you know when missiles are headed to From the Twitter telling my generals to push harder and L.A. Follow me back so I can DM you. make more noise. Have played #bigbigfan #sayhitoportia stream of @kanyewest “Through the Wire” a #lovetodance million times for them, get blank stares. Kim Jong Un— Time to clean house? Just found out that the iMac I’m using isn’t a real iMac but a Chinese ripoff. @youthcaptain Much respect to @johnmccain and Learned the hard way trying to upload @lindseygraham for standing up to the @spotify playlist. Spent an hour today studying missile- radicals and fringe elements in their launch and -guidance technology. Or party. Need to find common ground Very disappointed that it’s already thought that’s what I was doing. and reach across the aisle. Thursday and we haven’t launched a Turned out it was only @angrybirds! #bipartisanship #nolabels missile yet. Watched TMZ this Hilarious! #gottalaugh #humorheals afternoon and saw zero mention of a @paulryan Although we have our Hollywood in ruin. Simply do not Do not really understand this whole differences, would love to hear details understand why everything takes me #sequester business. Agree with of your workout regimen. How many getting PO’ed or having someone @presidentbarackobama. Failure of trainers have you had to put to death impaled slowly during a meeting. Republican leadership. to achieve that killer bod? #nohomo #butitdoes #dowhatittakes

Do I look fat in this Speedo? Thinking about doing a podcast. Help, By the way, the Abdomenizer thing you Twitpic.87h4.33ed tweeps! Which topics am I best at? Art, see on TV is a total piece of junk. #downto2500caloriesaday music, stand-up comedy, fashion? All #stillfat #caveatemptor four? BLUSH! Are there carbs in kimchee? Anyone? Watched @jayleno tonight and con- Tweeps? Help! #nothingisworking Wondering about the gay-marriage vinced he’s getting a raw deal. Hey, issue. Hard time getting the whole @jayleno, will build a stage for you at Don’t worry, @jimmykimmel. Missiles deal. Yes, it should mean you can the @pyongyangmediacenter. And will won’t hit your tapings! Too much of a marry a donkey or a sister. launch a satellite, too, just as soon as fan! Follow me back so I can DM you @generalunclejoon has done both! one of our rockets is free. They’re advance warning! kinda busy right now. #targetingusa Previous tweet is part of my opening #missiles #makingnoise Cannot imagine a scenario in which jokes at the Pyongyang @hillaryclinton isn’t running. Just Correspondents Dinner. Thoughts? Pretty bummed to learn from our makes political sense. Plus she’s hot. Punch up? @sethmyers, I’m talking to Science Council that we’re actually ten Am I right? #gottalovethemoldgals you! years away from an effective nuclear launch. Not as bummed as they were Hey, @therealjustinbieber, think U R Looking at the missile-trajectory lines to be covered in hot plastic and turned getting a raw deal. I know something on the map in the #situationroom and into my new recording studio. about starting v. young in a biz. Stay wondering if they’re really accurate. #mistakeswillbepunished #sixsigma frosty! Need to hit Los Angeles, not #qualityassurance Bakersfield. Hey! Check me out in these new Congratulate me, tweeps! Found out skinny jeans! And check out the waist Turns out the skinny jeans I’m wearing that the missile-trajectory calculations size. 28 inches! Finally they’re sizing aren’t 32’s. Turns out they’re are not, in fact, accurate. Getting them them right. Thanks, North Korean jean mislabeled. Actually 52’s. So I haven’t corrected now. But gives me a perfect industry! You rock. Twitpic.34rd.961 lost any weight at all. Nork Jeans opportunity to have @generalunclejoon Manufacturing LLC is now headed to a strangled to death! #mistakeswill- Spoke to @generalunclejoon about work camp. #mistakeswillbepunished bepunished #neverletacrisisgotowaste how cool it would be if I could figure #sixsigma out a way to ride one of the nuclear What’s the over-under on whether missiles into L.A. He looked at me like Just finished the first annual @hillaryclinton likes younger Asian he always does. Like “who is this kid?” Pyongyang Correspondents Dinner! dudes with athletic builds? #olddognewtricks #thinkoutsidethebox They loved me! I killed! (two waiters #askingforafriend

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the Sarajevo visit had been ill timed; minister Leopold Berchtold, a late con- June 28 is the anniversary of the Battle of vert to militarism, and General Franz The Great Kosovo, in 1389, in which the Ottoman Conrad, the ferociously bellicose army Empire crushed a Serbian uprising and chief of staff. Berchtold wished to efface Abyss consolidated its rule in the Balkans. By his reputation for indecisiveness; Conrad 1914, Austria-Hungary had governed wanted desperately to impress his mis- MICHAEL F. BISHOP Bosnia for more than four decades, since tress. Such were the motives that helped wresting it away from the Ottomans, but lead to war. together they assured their it had formally annexed the province just cautious sovereign that, with German six years earlier. Neighboring Serbia, help, victory would be swift. which had enlarged and consolidated its But others feared a wider conflict. territory during the recent Balkan wars, the chief obstacle to the plans of the wished to gather fellow Slavs in Bosnia Austrian war party was the Hungarian and elsewhere under its own rule. to that minister-president, Stefan tisza. Jealous end, elements of the Serbian government of his prerogatives as head of govern- armed the assassins and dispatched them ment of a coequal half of the empire, and to Sarajevo. determined to preserve the precarious the assassinations evoked little sym- political advantage enjoyed by his fel- pathy; despite his pacific tendencies, the low Magyars (which would be threat- July 1914: Countdown to War, by Sean archduke was an unpopular figure at ened if a large population of Slavs were McMeekin (Basic, 480 pp., $29.99) home and abroad. And yet the Sarajevo absorbed into the country in a successful murders set off an international crisis war), he bitterly opposed the plans of t was the most momentous act of that led in five weeks to World War I. A Berchtold and Conrad. In tense meet- terrorism in history. peaceful continent at the height of its ings with his Austrian colleagues, he On June 28, 1914, Archduke prestige and cultural influence tore itself raised every possible objection to war I Franz Ferdinand, heir to the to pieces, and liberal civilization suf- with Serbia. But in McMeekin’s telling, throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, fered a devastating blow. this apostle of peace may have inadver- his morganatic wife at his side, traveled this diplomatic dance of death is the tently contributed to the catastrophe. in a motorcade along the Miljacka River subject of Sean McMeekin’s gripping Left to their own devices, the warlike in Sarajevo, capital of the restless pro - and well-researched new book. In prose Austrians might have swiftly committed vince of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Seven of admirable clarity, he relates the enor- the empire to a localized conflict with conspirators carrying guns, bombs, and mously complex events of that fateful Serbia, attacking Belgrade before the suicide pills lined the quay. One of them summer. Knowledge of the carnage to other European powers could react. It hurled a bomb at the royal automobile, come increases the narrative drama; in might have been just another Balkan but it missed its target and struck the car chancelleries all over Europe, statesmen spat, of which there had been many. behind, injuring the occupants. Stiff and strolling cool marble floors made deci- But it was not to be. Austria-Hungary, priggish but undeniably brave, the arch- sions that consigned millions to cold, before delivering the harshest possible duke carried on with the day’s events. muddy trenches. As Christopher Clark ultimatum to Belgrade, secured a “blank After a formal but ironic welcome at the has written in his recent and more com- check” for military support from Ger - town hall, the motorcade returned along pendious account of the 1914 crisis, many, its sole ally. the mercurial Kaiser the same quay, the lead driver having “causes trawled from the length and Wilhelm II had been close to Franz been instructed not to turn onto Franz breadth of Europe’s pre-war decades are Ferdinand, and had a vested interest in Josef Street, the previously published piled like weights on the scale until it punishing homicide against royals. A route. But the archduke’s driver, unin- tilts from probability to inevitability. grandson of Queen Victoria, he was formed of the change, turned as origi- Contingency, choice, and agency are related to most of Europe’s sovereigns— nally planned. When he realized his squeezed out of the field of vision.” George V of England and tsar Nicholas mistake and stopped the car, another McMeekin concurs and, in his day-by- II of Russia were his cousins. But these conspirator, a Bosnian Serb named Gav - day and even hour-by-hour account, blood ties did nothing to prevent blood- rilo Princip, fired two shots from a few brings a sprawling cast of characters to shed. feet away. Minutes later, the royals were life. So it was Germany, squeezed uncom- dead. Austrian emperor Franz Josef was a fortably between France to the west and survivor; after six decades on the throne, Russia to the east, and jealous of its Mr. Bishop has held several posts on Capitol Hill and he was wary of war. But his ministers imperial rivals, that gave the Austrians in the White House and is the former executive yearned to retaliate against Serbia and license to pursue revenge. the treaty of director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial bolster the empire’s fading prestige. Versailles formally blamed Germany for Commission. Chief among the hawks were foreign causing the war, and most historians

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS since have agreed. But McMeekin Sarajevo murders), British support for rejects this: “So far from ‘willing the France helped ensure war with Germany. war,’” he writes, “the Germans went into Had the foreign secretary been clearer Where She’s it kicking and screaming as the Austrian about his commitments, the other pow- noose snapped shut around their necks.” ers might have acted more cautiously. Coming From He disputes the long-dominant Germano - But both sides in the rapidly brewing centric interpretation of the war’s out- conflict convinced themselves that FLORENCE KING break, faulting all the major powers but England would keep out. This was pre- pouring particular scorn upon the con- cisely what most of Grey’s Liberal col- duct of Russia. leagues wished, but Germany’s threat to It was the mobilization of that vast Belgian territory yielded a British decla- country that, McMeekin believes, pushed ration of war. The drafters of the 1839 the world over the brink. The tsar’s treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality regime was brittle; defeat at the hands of could hardly have imagined the apoca- Japan a decade before had sparked rebel- lypse that would result. lion, and modest political reform had As Niall Ferguson argued in his bril- done little to shore up his rule. But the liant The Pity of War, British restraint

The fumbling statesmen of 1914 My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor ignited a flame that consumed (Knopf, 336 pp., $27.95)

10 million souls and set the 20th ANy young girls devour Nancy Drew mysteries, but century on a disastrous course. those books fed a special M hunger in our newly minted Russian government felt bound by ties of might have allowed a swift German vic- U.S. Supreme Court justice when she ethnic kinship to support Serbia, and was tory, the likely result of which would was growing up in the Puerto Rican sec- lashed to the fortunes of France by formal have been German dominance of a Euro - tion of the South Bronx. Nancy Drew treaty. A five-day “Period Preparatory to pean customs union. In other words, a cracked her cases with logic and reason- War” saw the Russian war engine stir to brief continental conflict might have ing until everything fit together and made life, and, despite its officially preliminary led to a Europe much like the one we sense. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor’s nature, it imposed great strain upon the know today, without the intervening hor- grandmother and aunts studied the evi- already desperate diplomacy going on rors of Nazism, the Holocaust, and all dence and concluded that someone had abroad. The sheer relentlessness of the the other disasters that made the last cen- put a hex on a troubled neighbor by leav- process calls to mind A. J. P. Taylor’s tury the bloodiest. Some look askance ing chicken guts on his doorstep. phrase “war by timetable.” And yet upon counterfactuals, but consider the Sonia shrank from their time-honored human agency played a primary role: butcher’s bill: 10 million dead, millions practice of juris without prudence. She Mobilization was briefly halted by the more wounded, the rise of Bolshevism was one of those extremely intelligent equivocating Nicholas II, who peered with all its attendant horrors, and the children (usually girls) who, however into the abyss and cried, “I will not be festering hatreds that enabled the career much they might love their families, do responsible for a monstrous slaughter!” of Hitler. not want to be like them. Her mother was But this was but a momentary stay of exe- Recent and magisterial histories of a native Puerto Rican who joined the cution. The troops and trains soon moved the war by Hew Strachan and David WACs in World War II and remained in again, ushering Europe into the abyss. Stevenson have tried to invest “The New york, where she met and married The British cabinet, vexed as ever by Great War”—as it was known until its Sonia’s father, a mainland Puerto Rican. unrest in Ireland, only reluctantly cast savage 1939–45 sequel—with purpose. At first, the very extended family lived in their eyes toward the Balkans. Prime But the facts speak for themselves: The the old three-story tenements, one gener- minister Herbert Asquith gave foreign fumbling statesmen of 1914 ignited a ation to each floor, with singles and chil- minister Sir Edward Grey a free hand in flame that consumed 10 million souls dren divided according to sex. Later they diplomacy, putting the fate of the world and set the 20th century on a disastrous moved into the new public-housing in the hands of an aristocrat happier on course. It might have been Germany’s “proj ects.” Sonia loved her grandmother his estate than in the Foreign Office. An fault; it might have been Russia’s. best (despite her hex theories); coped avid outdoorsman and author of the clas- Whatever the case, the key image is not with her moody mother, who played sic Fly Fishing, Grey was suspicious of that of a smoking gun, but that of a cir- either good cop or bad cop as the spirit Germany and partial to France. And, cular firing squad. The world’s most moved her; and developed an affection- given the Franco-Russian alliance (solidi - sophisticated, interconnected, and tech- ate tolerance for her kid brother. She fied by a summit, vividly depicted by nologically advanced civilization de - McMeekin, between the French presi- stroyed itself. A century later, we still Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, dent and the Russian tsar soon after the suffer the consequences. Fredericksburg, VA 22404.

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could have loved her father, a kindly which had bred resistance to desegre- once in the entire book. From the way it drunk, but he died suddenly when she gation, eventually gave way to some reads, it sounds like an attempt to come was nine. The immediate family was left healthy soul-searching. Consequently, across as a streetwise Latina with a cyni- with the mother’s salary as a practical efforts to recruit black students were cal sense of humor, but I get the distinct nurse, and monthly government checks earnest and energetic.” She got in, on a feeling that it actually represents her sub- for the two dependent children. full work-study scholarship. Next came conscious motivation in her decision to Sonia was shortly diagnosed with dia- law school at Yale, with similar benefits, hex Yale. Positioning herself above the betes, sending her mother into perpetual and, finally, job-hunting. battle, she argued that “to doubt the worth panic that a stubbed toe could lead to Her first head-butt with affirmative of minority students’ achievements when gangrene of the leg and amputation. The action came when she was interviewed they succeed is really only to present suddenness of spikes and drops in blood by a partner in a small private D.C. another face of the prejudice that would sugar reminded Sonia of her family’s firm, who asked her whether she be - deny them a chance even to try.” In other emotional fluctuations, and she espe- lieved in it. She replied in her calm, words, she made affirmative action safe cially hated the heavy mental fuzziness measured way, defining it as “searching “in perpetuity,” a blessed status she had that came over her usually agile brain. wider, looking deeper,” but he per - learned a great deal about in the class on Told she would not live much past 40, sisted, asking her whether it was “a wills that she aced. she developed the urgency of the over- dis service to minorities, hiring them Put off by the idea of working for a achiever and asserted her independence without the necessary credentials, private firm, she took New York district by learning how to use a syringe and give knowing you’ll have to fire them a few attorney Robert Morgenthau’s offer of herself her own insulin shots. (She was a years later.” This bothered her. Was he a job as assistant prosecutor. He offered devotee of TV’s Perry Mason, and her saying that it was okay to ignore affir- it to her himself, having gotten her favorite character was the judge because, mative action after the fact—that, once name from José Cabranes, her mentor she says, “he called the shots.”) having practiced it, an employer was from their days in the Puerto Rican To counteract the growing degenera- free to return to discrimination? The Legal Defense and Education Fund. To tion of the South Bronx, her mother next day, she approached him privately know her is to mentor her, and to men- found the money to keep Sonia in Catho- and said she had found his question tor her is to be networked to death. lic elementary school and, later, Cardinal offensive. He reacted with stunned sur- Networking might be pushy, she grants, Spellman High School, where she prise. “You didn’t seem terribly upset,” but “virtue in obscurity is rewarded excelled in her classes, especially formal he replied. “You didn’t make a scene. only in Heaven”: “To succeed in this logic. “I perceived beauty in it, the idea You were perfectly civil.” world,” she advises, “you have to be of an order that held under any circum- That did it: He had stereotyped her! known to people.” She made herself stances. . . . I was amazed that something He was operating under what she calls known to so many people that she has so mathematically pure and abstract the “Hysterical Puerto Rican Syn - developed the writing fault known as could transform into human persuasion drome.” He had looked at her and seen “signposting”: Whenever you read the as words with the power to change peo- Spanish, Spanish, everywhere: Juana words “unassailable integrity” or “worked ple’s minds.” She joined the debating the Mad screaming bloody murder, tirelessly,” you know that a Rolodex card team. Carmen with a knife in her stocking. made flesh is about to come on scene. A measure of her commitment to a life Encouraged by her bevy of mentors and Most books have their good parts and of the intellect is her reaction to the the ad hoc support groups she seems to other parts that are not so good, but My movie Love Story. She must have been collect wherever she goes, she decided Beloved World mixes the very good and the only girl in the country to fall in love to lodge a formal complaint against the the very bad in stunning and sometimes with Harvard instead of with Ryan law firm through Yale’s career office, sudden proportions. Sotomayor is good O’Neal (though it was actually filmed at challenging the firm’s right to recruit on on the gritty life of an assistant D.A. in Fordham, not far from where she had campus. It led to meetings with the dean New York City, where she hunted down lived all her life). It was time for college, and formal hearings by a student/faculty drug-case witnesses in filthy shooting and time for getting touchy over affirma- tribunal. She had struck a nerve. Word galleries. She is good in her account of tive action. She never mentions it without of her complaint traveled to minority- her membership in an elite Manhattan noting that it was “still in the early stage student groups across the country, until firm that dealt in foreign luxury items, at this time,” or that “the first Latino Yale, “clearly uncomfortable with the trademark disputes, and warranty claims. students had not yet graduated when I attention the complaint was drawing, At issue was Italy’s Fendi handbag, started Princeton.” She had tried Rad - was eager to reach a settlement.” The worth $1,000 at legal retail, that was cliffe first. Harvard’s “sister school” from student/faculty tribunal “negotiated” a being knocked off by imitators, includ- the coed era, it oozed blue-book society, full apology from the firm and allowed ing a pushcart vendor who parked on screamed debutante, and threatened her them to continue recruiting at Yale, the sidewalk in front of the Fendi store. enough to make her flee—literally but albeit with a carefully lowered profile. Ever mindful of the Mob, Sotomayor’s only temporarily—back home to the Mind you, Sotomayor does not claim firm equipped her with a bulletproof Bronx. or even hint that the Hysterical Puerto vest. She ended up under a pile of hun- Princeton seemed the best bet, because Rican stereotype inspired her subsequent dreds of Fendi bags that she rescued in its longstanding role as “the northern- official complaint. It’s a standalone, a desperate confrontation in a remote most college for Southern gentlemen, throwaway line that she uses only this warehouse.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS On a completely different note, she is cal of a generation throughout eastern good on subjects I never expected to find europe whose lives had been impover- interesting, such as the treatise she wrote Landscape ished by Communism, but ruined by its that appeared in The Yale Law Journal on fall: seabed rights and admiralty law as After The Velvet Revolution had brought free- sources to assess Puerto Rico’s under- doms they had no use for, and in any water wealth, a vital consideration in the ANDREW STUTTAFORD case had not the money to enjoy. Their question of its becoming our 51st state. whole adult lives they had worked under Then, just when we think she doesn’t the Communist regime, and that regime write like a lawyer, we come to this: “But had promised they would be cared for in let me not overstate the influence of those their old age. Now the social contract innovations, which seem in hindsight had been broken. For their generation more dramatic than they did at the time the revolution had come too late. For and which sometimes were more method- Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová, it ological than theoretical.” would have been better had it not come at all. She can go from stark, frightening real- ism—as in her description of the sudden That, of course, assumes that—had it sugar low she had at a wedding reception survived—the crumbling economy of when she grabbed the cake off another Communist Czechoslovakia would have guest’s plate and crammed it into her The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism been in a position to deliver on those mouth—to the insipid romanticism of in Eastern Europe, by Marci Shore undertakings, something that is by no those people who go around saying “I’ve (Crown, 384 pp., $27) means certain. always wanted to write.” here she is on Shore is an associate professor of his- the heat wave of 1972: “[The heat] sil- he new dawn that broke over tory at Yale, a Generation X intellectual vered Princeton’s leafy vistas, endowing eastern europe in 1989 was of somewhat progressive hue. Thus it everything with a more unearthly aura.” bright, but the landscape it may not be surprising that her description And on a rain forest: “Waterfalls trick the T illuminated was exhausted, a of her time in the eastern europe of the eye, holding movement suspended in territory of shadows and regret, where “post-Communist moment”—doubtless lacy veils.” And on a beach: “At night hope was jostled by apprehension and further skewed, in a form of confirmation there is liquid stardust swirling in the old demons stirred. To read some of the bias, by the views and experiences of dark waters of the phosphorescent bay.” accounts of that time and that place is to those with whom she chose to associ- There’s a lot more of this but you get confront sadness unexpected after the ate—comes with a sigh of disappoint- the general idea. She also claims that jubilation on the Wall, the hungarian ment. history failed again. The rise of the tears “welled” in her eyes. To para- border, or Wenceslas Square—a melan- philosopher king, Vaclav havel, was not phrase Alexander Woollcott, tears choly echoed in Marci Shore’s beauti- accompanied by the rise of a philosopher haven’t welled since East Lynne. This fully written, discursive, and by her own people. is rosy-fingers-of-dawn stuff, proving admission “deeply subjective” new There’s prim tut-tutting about the pro- once again the anonymous editor’s memoir, a work of well-told history and fusion of pornography, and, more justifi- advice: There are two things that can’t perceptive reporting that is both less than ably, about the increase in crime and the be described. One of them is a sunset. its title promises and rather more. either persistence of the inertia, passivity, and No one expects a celebrity to write all way, it could have done with an index. conformity of the “realm of the not pos- of her own book without help, and Soto- Don’t read The Taste of Ashes expect- sible” that was so much of the Com - mayor acknowledges the usual helpers: ing a survey that covers all of the old munist state. There is little about the two editors, a copyeditor, and a ghost, eastern europe. With the exception of revival in free enterprise, but plenty on whose job she calls “collaboration.” That Romania (does that count?), the Balkans the resurgence in national tensions. sounds about right, but they did not cover do not really feature, nor do hungary and Shore spent time “working as an intern their tracks as well as they should have the former east Germany. There’s a brief for an ethnic-conflict project at an and they left their calling cards. In any excursion to Lithuania, but the other American-funded research institute.” case, the purported author undoubtedly Baltics and the rest of the Soviet far west ex-Yugoslavia was in flames, and other wrote my favorite line because too many are notable only by their omission. This long-suppressed conflicts had reemerged people nowadays would be loath to do is a volume centered on Poland, the into the space that Moscow had once so: “I had been a smoker since high Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but quite policed. In Romania, Shore investigated school, burning through three and a half a bit of what Shore discovered there tensions between ethnic hungarians and packs a day.” I’ll bet what’s left of my life could easily have been found elsewhere ethnic Romanians. Fair enough, interest- that it was really four; we always shave in the region. Thus, in early 1995, she ing enough, but all this risks giving an off a little. She says she has kicked the returns to Prague and visits the house of unbalanced impression of a region where habit now, but she can’t kick her memory an apolitical elderly couple, all too typi- most just wanted their lives to be “nor- of her grandmother, who asked for a mal,” an adjective that Shore happens to cigarette on her hospital bed, smoked it, Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of hear used by a Romanian politician, but and then died. NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. that was voiced often in eastern europe

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS in those days. When the old regimes space for Eastern European Stalinism, century, but its role as Stalin’s enabler fell, achieving a “normality” defined in and the link between the war and the trou- needs more nuance than Shore gives it. largely Western terms was a widespread bled decade that preceded it is hardly a Equally, notwithstanding the pantomime objective. secret. The connection to the “unhing- anti-Semitism (a gargoyle hounding of This idea is reflected in a clever phrase ing” 1920s is more novel. Shore uses the phantoms) that still, shamefully, persists deployed by Shore to describe 1989’s microcosm of a group of 20th-century in these lands, the horrors of the Shoah upheavals: “Time, seemingly halted for Polish poets as a window into the revolu- are less critical—other than for the so long, suddenly leapt forward.” And if tionary fervor that enveloped large sec- hideous absence that it left behind—to the results of the leap have been uneven, tions of the European intelligentsia in a our understanding of the region today they have still been impressive: “To tens decade happier, luckier Americans re - than Shore appears to suggest. In a book of millions of East Europeans the end of member for jazz and Al Jolson. billed as wide-roaming, she devotes per- Communism brought countless good Those poets—many of them of Jewish haps too much space to what is now, things—above all a freedom the vast descent—dominated her book Caviar tragically, only a tiny, introspective, often majority of people never imagined that and Ashes and crop up again in The Taste conflicted minority of Polish Jews. A they would live long enough to see.” of Ashes. From the later 1920s onward, minority of a once slightly larger minor- But in one sense, time did count, and it they exchanged the (to them) ultimately ity (the Communists arranged a final counted very much. Shore trains her his- unbearable uncertainties of nihilism for anti-Semitic purge in 1968), they stay put torian’s eye on the impact of the Commu - the messianic determinism of the far left, in a country that groups of visiting Jewish nist years, with a keen focus on the telling a faith that they—and a number of their teenagers—there to mourn at the death detail and defining atrocity. And she associates—were eventually, and cru- camps—regard (Shore recalls) “as a takes a longer view than most. The rise of cially, to put at the disposal of Stalin’s cemetery.” the red flag over what her husband, Yale Poland. That’s a timetable that suggests Theirs is a disturbing, compelling story, professor Timothy Snyder, dubbed the to me that the original sin from which but it crowds out a broader discussion of “bloodlands” in his magisterial book of the nightmares Shore describes were to the encounter with a Communist past in the same name cannot, she correctly flow was the Bolshevik Revolution of which so many Eastern Europeans were stresses, be seen in isolation. The subtitle 1917. After all, it was Lenin’s blood- profoundly compromised and then, “in a of Shore’s book refers not just to Commu - soaked millennial upheaval that fright- world where all the rules had changed,” nism but to totalitarianism. In her view, ened many into Fascism as a supposed left exposed by the opening of files that the different stages in the evolution of last bulwark of civilization. And it was were either devastatingly ambiguous or, Eastern European Communism must be Lenin’s revolution that drove its fol- worse, all too clear. read as links in a chain that stretches back lowers worldwide into a Communist There could have been more too in to World War II, Nazi occupation, and the cult that became dangerously inter- this book on the appeal of totalizing Holocaust and, before that, to the De - twined with Stalinism years before the ideology to so many intellectuals. It is a pression, the rise of Fascism, and even alibi that was Auschwitz. topic that obviously interests Shore (it to “the dizzying possibilities of the To attribute so much of the blame to surfaced in Caviar and Ashes), but she 1920s.” Lenin fits awkwardly with the emphasis gives too little attention to a phenome- It is widely recognized that war and that Shore’s narrative places on Hitler. non that still endures, if more benignly, Nazi misrule were critical in clearing a The Holocaust is justifiably central to our even in the attitude of those such as the political, military, and (perversely) moral reading of Eastern Europe’s dark 20th former dissident and Velvet Revo - lutionary who opts out of the, yes, nor- mal politics of the new era: “To be A BAD FIT engaged” is, in his view, “to forgo clean hands,” an abdication that is itself a The grapeshot of his words makes ribbons of declaration of absolutist thinking. Her vitals. When one hits a major vein, Shore notes that “dissidence . . . had Her heart will burst, and finally her love often been born of communism”: Once Will recognize its efforts were in vain. a believer, always a believer—all that changes is in what. That dangerous He might have dropped her in the deepest ocean, thrill remains. Or pushed her from a pinnacle one day. Shore concludes the book with a tale Then she’d have lost all sense and all emotion. of meeting a “bright young” member of Suppose he’d found another way to play— the Polish new Left, who thanks her for Perhaps a smoking bomb to blast illusions, Caviar and Ashes—a work he regards Eliminate the problem finally? as rehabilitating those Marxist intellec- But he refused the kindness of conclusions tuals of seven decades ago. Shore con- Each time, and helped her up. Why should this be? tradicts him, explaining that their fate He can’t stop talking, she can’t get away. is a “tragedy.” “But I didn’t read it as a They rise, into the bleakness of the day. tragedy!” says the bright young man. “I read it as a romance.” —SALLY COOK We have been warned.

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piety, and the hope offered in Catholicism in the novels, while real, is muted. In a Evelyn 1960 episode of BBC Tv’s Face to Face, host John Freeman said to Waugh: “you Waugh, don’t seem to find very much which is good in the modern world. . . . are you Catholic trying to scourge us into reform?” To which Waugh responded, with his wide, I M P O R T A N T charming, and rarely used smile: “no, I’m Optimist just trying to write books.” N O T I C E Of course, Freeman was right. Waugh’s MICAH MATTIX work does try to “scourge us into reform,” to all National Review but the reform required is not one merely of habits and manners. It is nothing less subscribers! than a complete inner transformation in which we admit, along with Waugh, that “everything in the world that’s good depends on [god].” Faith, Waugh contin- ues, “isn’t a sort of added amenity of the       We are moving our Welfare State that you say, ‘Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll subscription-fulfillment      have a little icing on top of religion.’ It’s 
   office from the essence of the whole thing.” Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family, In this new book, Michael g. Brennan, Mount   Morris, Ill. by Michael G. Brennan a professor of Renaissance studies at the    to Palm Coast, Fla. (Bloomsbury, 192 pp., $34.95) university of leeds, reminds us of the Please continue centrality of religious belief to Waugh’s    vElyn Waugh defies easy writing, even if Waugh the man often fell to be vigilant: categorization. he was simul- short of the piety to which he aspired (as      There are fraudulent taneously a defender of social he himself was quick to admit). Cathol - E hierarchy and an anarchist (“he icism, Brennan argues, provided Waugh’s agencies
   soliciting liked life,” his longtime friend Christo- post-conversion work with its “three your    National Review pher hollis once remarked, “to be full of key dualities—faith and doubt, hope and disturbance”); a Catholic convert who de spair, and loyalty and betrayal.” Waugh subscription !  renewal had a gift for being a misanthropic ass; shows us how a life devoted to ani malistic without    our authorization. and a father whose defining paternal char- self-gratification dehumanizes us, while, Please reply only to acteristic was, as his son auberon wryly at the same time, it offers, in Brennan’s   (and perhaps unfairly) put it, “his lack of words, “the augustinian consolation that National Review interest in his children.” he was also a no form of personal weakness can over-   
 renewal notices or political conservative and an unapolo- whelm the infinite compassion and mercy     getic aesthete. of a Divine Father who seeks from his bills—make sure the his first two novels—Decline and Fall children only the heartfelt words: ‘pec-     return address is (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930)—show cavi’ (‘I have sinned’) and ‘credo in how a barbaric “modernism” displaced unum Deum’ (‘I believe in One god’).”     Palm Coast, Fla. traditional English values, rendering life Brennan begins, helpfully, with a con- Ignore   all requests for an absurd crapshoot in which only the cise summary of Waugh’s early life—of renewal that are not lucky or witty survive. after his conver- his family’s literary heritage, of his
    directly payable sion in 1930, his work, which had always father’s preference for his older brother,     contained numerous references to the and of Waugh’s early religiosity: he orga- to National Review. Church and religious belief, explored nized daily communal prayers when he     faith more seriously if somewhat idiosyn- was a boy and frequently compiled devo- If you receive any mail or cratically. “To anyone brought up as a tional poems for his family and local con- telephone     offer that makes Catholic,” critic Bernard Bergonzi re- gregations.    you suspicious contact marked in a 1961 article for the Guardian, In secondary school, however, Waugh “Mr. Waugh’s image of Catholicism is, to would become an agnostic. at first, he [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. say the least, peculiar.” among other would continue his odd “theatrical piety, Your cooperation things, his Catholic characters often lack kneeling at chapel during the Creed while     others stood and at night kneeling deep in      is greatly appreciated. Mr. Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at prayer in the dormitory.” But, as he be - Houston Baptist University. came more involved in other aspects of

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS school life, he dropped these pious poses world and the immutability of grace. and, as a result of his discussions with his “They realize,” moreover, “that they are sometimes contentious divinity teacher, no longer alone in a hostile and unforgiv- rejected Christianity in a June 13, 1921, ing world but, instead, may rely on the journal entry: “In the last few weeks I protective and nurturing support of their have ceased to be a Christian. . . . I have spiritual family.” Yet even here the ulti- realized that for the last two terms at least mate value of the Gospel is not found in I have been an atheist in all except the its therapeutic benefits—a conclusion courage to admit it to myself.” In a letter Waugh was keen to avoid—but in its to his friend Dudley Carew, Brennan truth. There is, Waugh remarks, “an his- reports, Waugh explained that he was torical fact behind the Gospel” without open to the idea of God as a force but did which it would possess none of its power. not believe in the personal God of Brennan’s otherwise admirable book Christianity. does fall somewhat short in fleshing out Waugh entered Oxford in January the importance of family in Waugh’s nov- 1922. He was relatively studious that first els. While Brennan states that “the inter- year, but he was a heavy-drinking aes- dependent concepts of family life and thete during his second and third years, dynastic inheritance—with all their joys, taking part in the Bullingdon Dining vicissitudes, and disappointments—lay Club, drunkenly taunting his history deeply embedded within [Waugh’s] cre- tutor, and most likely becoming involved ative impulses,” he devotes far less space sexually with two fellow (male) students. to this than to the author’s Catholicism Yet, as Brennan points out, Oxford was and never explains in detail how Waugh also the beginning of Waugh’s interest in understood “dynastic inheritance” to be Catholicism. Francis Urquhart was the rooted in that Catholicism or central to first Catholic dean of Balliol College Western civilization. since the Reformation, and many of shows, Brennan remarks, how English After 1945, Waugh slowly disen- Waugh’s contemporaries and friends society had reduced God “to the level of gaged from public life. He was con- became Catholic, including Alistair a mere fashionable commodity.” The stantly concerned about money (he was Graham (the model for the Catholic depiction of one character’s taste in notoriously bad about paying his taxes) Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited), church architecture emphasizes “how the and was dismayed at the changes to the with whom Waugh visited various barbarians have irrevocably breached the Mass following the Second Vatican Catholic churches in Ireland on a walk- traditional values of English society.” Council (1962–65). Waugh’s health ing tour in August 1924. In his 1930 newspaper article “Con - continued to decline. He asked Dom Following a deeply unsatisfying year verted to Rome: Why It Has Happened Hubert Van Zeller to celebrate Mass in teaching school, Waugh wrote a couple of to Me,” Waugh noted two discoveries Latin at the Waugh estate of Combe short stories and traveled to Greece (to that were part and parcel of his conver- Florey. Van Zeller refused but Father visit Graham) before determining, in sion. The first was that “Christianity is Philip Caraman, who had just returned January 1927, “to set about being a man essential to civilization,” the second from Norway, said the Latin Mass at of letters.” His first book, a biography of “that Christianity exists in its most the nearby village of Wiveliscombe one Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was published in complete and vital form in the Roman Sunday with Waugh in attendance, 1928 by his father’s firm, followed by Catholic Church.” From here on, Brennan apparently in excellent humor. Later Decline and Fall later that same year. The writes, Waugh’s satirical novels would that morning, Waugh suffered a coro- novel was a modest success, and it was condemn those “superficially glittering nary thrombosis. When he didn’t show followed by Waugh’s commercial break- worlds in which the essential values of up for lunch with Father Caraman, who through, Vile Bodies. the Church and family life were ig - had been invited back to the house after Waugh converted to Catholicism on nored,” while Brideshead Revisited Mass, the family searched and found September 29, 1930, shortly after the pub- (1945) would reassert “the potency of him dead in the downstairs lavatory. lication of Vile Bodies. Two of the imme- Divine Grace over the secular splen- In a 1962 interview with The Paris diate causes of his conversion were his dors” even of a great estate such as Review, Waugh remarked: “I have divorce from his first wife (also Evelyn, Brideshead. done all I could. I have done my best.” though always referred to as “She- A key insight of Brennan’s reading of In his last published piece—a review Evelyn”) and the beauty and “glory” of Waugh’s “Catholic” novels is that they of Van Zeller’s autobiography—he the church architecture Waugh encoun- express a hope that is subtle but nonethe- wrote that death is “a means to a more tered on a trip to Spain, Italy, and the Holy less firm. Waugh’s curmudgeonly, acer- significant emancipation.” This was Land. But, as Brennan shows, Waugh had bic wit can obscure this aspect of his neither pessimistic nor morbid, but an been preoccupied with the Church for work, but, as Brennan points out, both expression of his deep-seated belief in some years. Waugh ultimately sided with Brideshead and the Sword of Honour the reality of a heavenly kingdom in BETTMANN / “anarchic vigour” in Decline and Fall, for trilogy end with the central characters’ which goodness, truth, and beauty

CORBIS example, but that novel nevertheless accepting both the fallen state of the reigned.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS transparent eagerness for romance. stocking of the old school played by Film At first the movie makes you expect a Annette Bening, who tries to take Ginger variation on an education, the art-house under her wing. On the hit from several years ago that featured Theirs is a world where joining an Carey Mulligan as a British schoolgirl anti-nuclear march seems like a natural seduced by an older businessman. The part of growing up, and where Roland’s Brink era is the same, and so is the setup—girls grinning response to his daughter’s on the verge of womanhood, chafing activism—“You’re a born radical”—is ROSS DOUTHAT against their parents, in a fog-bound, still- the highest compliment a parent can pay. conservative country on the verge of But it’s also a world where the buzz- inger and rosa, an intense social revolution. words of radicalism double as justifica- little coming-of-age drama But whereas an education was all tions for a monstrous kind of narcissism. from the British director Sally about forsaking one’s family, at least The narcissist is Roland—a martyr for G Potter, begins with three temporarily, for the promises and temp- pacifism, a scourge of conventional think- births: The mushroom cloud goes up over tations of a wider world, in ginger and ing and weak-mindedness, an idol to his Hiroshima, ushering in the nuclear age, rosa the domestic sphere is the place dazzled daughter, and, above all, a brute. and at the same moment two girls are where the real action happens, and He’s to radicalism what John F. Kennedy born in London, one fair and one dark, as where a girl’s illusions about life and (heard on the radio throughout the film) their mothers clutch at one another from men—men, especially—end up being was to liberalism: a compulsive woman- parallel delivery beds. shattered. izer for whom politics, and his sacrifices A few minutes of screen time move That heroine is Ginger, through whose on its behalf, offers a kind of indulgence us 17 years forward, to 1962. The girls sea-blue eyes we watch the story unfold. capable of covering over every other sin. are our title characters, growing up fast Her family seems working-class at first, For the sake of the cause, he expects his friends in the dinginess of postwar but they’re actually bohemians, whose wife to be his domestic drudge; for the Britain, sharing smokes and hitch- penury goes hand in hand with their sake of “autonomy,” he expects her to hiking, making out with boys in alley- radical politics. Her mother (Christina tolerate his philandering; for the sake of ways and exasperating their mothers. Hendricks of Mad Men, bravely strug- his own liberation from conventional Ginger, played by Elle Fanning, has a gling with an English accent) is a painter, morality, he expects his daughter to bursting smile and hair like flame, and or rather a former painter, having given up accept . . . well, I’ll leave it to the film she wears her intellectual ambitions on her art to raise her daughter. Her father, itself to reveal what he expects his daugh- her sleeve—she reads T. S. Eliot and the dashing Roland (Alessandro Nivola), ter to accept—though it’s clear enough in Simone de Beauvoir and wants to save is a pacifist academic who was jailed for the first act what kind of twist Potter has the world from nuclear war. (It is the eve conscientious objection during World in mind. That predictability is a weakness, of the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Rosa, War II. Their social circle includes two and not a small one: There is not enough played by Alice Englert, is earthy and gay “uncles” (Timothy Spall and Oliver misdirection in ginger and rosa, not intense, with a religious streak and a Platt) and their American friend, a blue- enough concealment and surprise, and the dénouement is talky and thudding, with all the major characters crowded in a room shouting at each other, like a stage play transposed clumsily to the screen. But the work that Fanning and Nivola—the poised young talent and the charismatic pro—do together redeems many of the movie’s flaws. Indeed, as large as the titular friendship looms, as the story moves along it feels more like a father-daughter tale than anything else: not a pair of friends’ awakening to adult experience so much as a daugh- ter’s education in the ways that adults can wreck their children’s lives—and others’ along with them. That education doesn’t cast a particu- larly flattering light on the radicalism that Ginger and Roland have in common, PHOTO BY NICOLA DOVE

but neither does it discredit it outright. ; What the movie suggests, instead, is that there are crimes too intimate to have any political solution, and tyrannies that no

Elle Fanning and Alice Englert in Ginger and Rosa revolution will ever overthrow. ADVENTURE PICTURES

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Gardening is exercise be - nals of their usefulness. Shape, Country Life cause you always have to go color, and taste must be sign lan- back to the house to get the guage. So the Delphic oracle said tool you didn’t bring with of horseradish, “the Roots Quest you the first time. We set out radish is worth its weight with a shovel and a trowel, in lead, the beet its weight but what we needed in - in silver, the horseradish its stead was a long-bladed weight in gold.” Natu - weeder. that, and our fin- ralists from Pliny to gers. Under leaves and Nicholas Culpeper litter—the snow was pre scribed it for sticking only to pine aches and pains. As boughs, tree stumps, and our taste buds became stone walls—each horse- more sophisticated—cave- radish showed a short, dark men didn’t drink coffee or gin; RICHARD BROOKHISER crown. By summer’s end neither did Caesar—horse- these will have grown into radish began to be eaten for t was not a tough winter in the almost tropical fronds, fit for its taste alone, like mustard, country, but it was a lingering one, fanning Cleopatra. Now they were loca- only meaner, garnishing throwing frosts and squalls right tors—sprout marks the spot. the roast beef of olde I through the equinox and beyond. Horseradish roots look like parsnips, Eng land and the prime rib of Snow would fall, thin to an icy crust, peel only gnarlier—angry parsnips. they old-fashioned American restau- back under the wan sun, then fall again. grow in a way that is both stubborn and rants. So it was in a damp flurry, with flakes the evasive. If there is a rock, they wrap But these horseradishes were size of half dollars, that we went out to around it; a wall, they dig under it. Our reserved for an Orthodox friend in harvest horseradish. soil is full of rocks and our garden Forest Hills. the question was, how the horseradish root overwinters and fence has a hardwood base, so the could we get them to her? there was can be dug up as soon as the ground soft- horseradishes were in heaven. the first I no possibility of her coming into ens. Its early-spring edibility gives it a pursued had chosen a strategy of expan- Man hattan to fetch them. Passover was role in the celebration of Passover. Some sion, dividing itself into three prongs at only a week away, she was so busy she of the ritual items on the seder plate 120-degree intervals. Each went on and could barely leave her kitchen. As reflect the Hindu-ish elements that lurk on, without getting any narrower. I tugged Brahmins we would lose caste by cross- in all the monotheisms (don’t smile, at them, like a man struggling with a ing the East River. A messenger ser- philosophers—I need only mention the jammed zipper. After about eight inches vice would be exorbitant. A neighbor eternal return). Lamb shanks commemo- in every direction, I decided to end the saved the day. She had some bubble rate temple sacrifices, hard-boiled eggs contest by snapping off the tips. Our tro- wrap and a right-sized box, she printed are an obvious fertility symbol. Unlike phy when I lifted it up looked gangly as a out a priority-mail label for the Post these, the horseradish has a Biblical nar- deep-sea creature. Office, I took the horse radishes to the rative function, its stinging taste symbol- the next horseradish was sturdy and Depression-era building four blocks izing the bitterness of exile in Egypt. stout and it grew down, down, and down. away. Next morning our devout friend this is the drab season. Leafless I dug, I eased, I jostled it side to side. My e-mailed us a picture of her seder guests. branches are as bare as bark, there are no mind filled with images, all of them Statism, high tech, and religion—a har- flowers except for a few bold and tiny inappropriate—first love, the miracle of monic convergence. snow drops. Grass is brown, ponds are birth, roto-rooting a drain. “Do you hear the next week it snowed for real, three sheets of metal, the sky settles down like Chinese?” my wife asked. Forgive us, O inches of powder—barely enough to a lid, if casseroles came in battleship Chinese. We grew up in a time when the shovel, more than enough to pull up gray. Only last year’s beech leaves, pale proverbial description of a deep hole was earth’s blanket for one more dream. A and fragile as the pages of old books, that it went “all the way to China,” and prosecutor in the Midwest filed charges brighten the gloom. when China still conjured up coolies in against Punxsutawney Phil, on the We have a fenced vegetable garden— pigtails, even though Mao had already grounds that he “did purposefully, and deer and woodchucks must shop else- killed his first 20 million. I got it out with prior calculation and design, cause where—but we planted our horseradish finally in two pieces—mitosis, a stock the people to believe that spring would outside it. It spares room in the garden split, secession—and we took our crop come early . . . which constitutes the beds, and any creature that tried it for a inside and, that Sunday, to the city. offense of misrepre sentation of early snack would do so only once. We put one Horseradishes are not just for Jews. spring, an unclassified fel ony.” In the city clump by a patch of black raspberries, all the strange tastes of earth catch the we buttoned up our coats for one more barbed wire and witch’s hair at this time attention of men everywhere. If you slog, weather wimps shook their fists at of year. that was showing no action, but believe you are not just a pilgrim in the the jet stream. two other clusters, up against the garden universe but a native, then the peculiari- By the time this is published, there will

fence, were ready to go. ties of plants ask to be interpreted, as sig- be spring peepers. DORLING KINDERSLEY

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Happy Warrior BY MARK STEYN Undead Reckoning

TrY to resist the siren song of metaphor, luring the Amy Wilentz sees them as the unquestioning workhorses polemicist onto the gaudy rocks of glibness and of global capitalism: meretriciousness only for his sturdy column to crack The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable I and sink 400 words before the safe harbor of the final to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor with- paragraph. Honest I do. But a few months ago I was invei- out grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You gled by my daughter into taking her along to something don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in called “Zombie Shopping Mall.” It was in reading, a drab China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of town on the outskirts of London, and I had carelessly North Korea. assumed that it would be a purpose-built attraction. If you say so. The zombie does not seem to me to be obvi- Instead, upon arrival we discovered that the zombie blood- ous labor material. Not for nothing do Boeing and HP pre- fest took place in an actual shopping mall that had gone out fer recruiting an educated Indian work force from Bangalore of business. The new management had left in place the to an army of moldering undead from an abandoned ceme- dangling shingles and abandoned store tery. In fact, the zombie doesn’t seem to windows and hired a bunch of Equity- work at all, but rather feasts on the func- minimum extras to rampage through the tioning members of society, in turn zomb- joint terrorizing those in search of an ifying them—rather as, under the Baron authentic “horror immersion experi- Samedis of American bureaucracy, the ence.” It was so authentic there wasn’t dependency rolls swell remorselessly, even a welcome area: Participants met at perfectly able-bodied citizens are con- the former mall’s padlocked, graffiti- scripted to the armies of Social Security defaced delivery entrance. The bona fide disability claimants, and entire communi- decrepitude added an eerie frisson of ties infected by the EBT voodoo devour verisimilitude to the zombie apocalypse. everything in sight on the first of the Not to mention that it’s oddly poignant month. when something that was once real is reduced to no more But, like Ms. Wilentz’s thesis, that’s too modest. The than a stage set for dystopian fantasy. For a while, back in Western world itself is largely a collection of zombie New Hampshire, every time we passed a shuttered build- nations—Greece’s rotting fingers reaching up out of the ing or an abandoned pasture, we’d joke about opening grave to wrap its decomposing flesh around the ankles of Zombie Sawmill or Zombie Dairy Farm. Cyprus and Germany and beyond. There are still a few tough In tough times, audiences supposedly seek escapism— hombres out there like Vladimir Putin willing to gun down like the frothy film musicals of the Great Depression, with the undead menacing his safe-deposit box in Nicosia, but Astaire and rogers and an army of betailed and begowned most governing institutions of the West seem to have inter- supporting players gliding without a care across vast nalized and accepted zombie psychology, staggering on like unbounded parquet dance floors in art deco palaces. But glassy-eyed cadavers frenziedly hunting down the last some escapisms are less escapist than others, and the pre- remaining non-infected—the “1 percent,” to coin a phrase— sent zombie fever seems an appropriate end point for pop on which to feast. California’s auditor has just announced culture in a fin de la civilisation West. The zombie is of that the state government has a net worth of minus $127 bil- newer vintage than most of his Monster Mash confreres. lion. Yet somehow it will still lurch on infecting everything Americans first ran across him during the U.S. military in its path in hopes of stumbling across something else to occupation of Haiti. Back then it was exotic stuff: Do do devour. In Europe as in America, the state is an animated that voodoo that you foreigners do so well. That a cultural husk whose vital organs no longer function: Everything in archetype from the most impoverished, violent, dysfunc- his life is made elsewhere; everything he spends is borrowed tional, and peripheral part of the hemisphere should seem from a magical future; everything he eats is served by a min- such a perfect fit for the global superpower at the dawn of imum-wage immigrant. But on he totters, somehow, for a the 21st century is itself a little unsettling. But don’t worry, while longer. As Gibbon wrote, “The form was still the same, we Americanized him: The flesh-eating is a local embell- but the animating health and vigor were fled.” ishment, invented by George A. romero 45 years ago for On second thought, that sounds less like a zombie and his film The Night of the Living Dead. As I say, one should more like a belle époque Parisian boulevardier, outwardly beware the temptations of metaphor, particularly for crea- urbane and dapper and enjoying his amusements and tures as thinly delineated as the vast anonymous dead-eyed diversions, but inwardly ravaged by his appetites and GIANLUCA RAMALHO MISITI / hordes, whose rotting shoulders can be burdened with crumbling away from syphilis. Maybe I should pitch it to whatever tickles your fancy. Writing in the New York Times, AMC or Paramount, but, even in a pop-culture twilight, somehow “Syphilitic Shopping Mall” doesn’t have quite Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com). the same ring. GRMISITI PHOTOGRAPHY

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