You Didn't Build That Teepee!

Trump Talks Parenting & Politics The Guns of August at 100 Do Botched Executions Matter? UKIP Triumphs! JEFFREY LORD PETER HITCHENS JESSE WALKER vs. WILLIAM TUCKER JAMES DELINGPOLE

JULY/AUGUST 2014 A MONTHLY REVIEW EDITED BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. You Didn’t Build That Teepee! Elizabeth Warren arouses the worst progressive fantasies.

By Ira Stoll

PLUS:

Summer Books and Cocktails James Taranto, Jonathan Tobin, Freddy Gray, Helen Rittelmeyer, Eve Tushnet, Daniel Foster, Katherine Mangu-Ward…and more!

Ukraine: A River Runs Through It Matthew Omolesky

Schlesinger’s Excellent Bow Tie R.J. Stove

Why I Quit Batman Tim Cavanaugh 1 5 1 5 1 5 1 5 25 50 75 95 25 50 75 95 25 50 75 95 25 50 75 95 100 100 100 100

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1074482 • American Spectator - JULY-AUG14 • 10 x 12 table of CONTENTS

July/August 2014 • VOL. 47, NO. 6

2 About This Month 45 Politics ARTS & LETTERS Here Comes Summer What GOP ‘Establishment’? by wlady pleszczynski by grover g. norquist 60 The Great Bow Tie View of History The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 4 The Continuing Crisis 47 Hot and Bothered Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and by r. emmett tyrrell, jr. Apocalypse Not Stephen C. Schlesinger by stephen moore reviewed by r.j. stove 6 Odds & Ends 49 Constitutional Opinions 64 Scared Vittleless 8 The Bootblack Stand Tub to the Whale Salt Sugar Fat: by george washington plunkitt by seth lipsky How the Food Giants Hooked Us By Michael Moss 10 In the Colosseum Man of the People The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto by david allen martin About the Politics of Your Plate By Jayson Lusk 12 Ten Paces Can we abide the death penalty after Fear of Food: A History of Why We Oklahoma’s botched execution? Worry About What We Eat by jesse walker and william tucker By Harvey Levenstein reviewed by kyle peterson 14 Summer Books and Drinks by sundry luminaries 66 In a Sentimental Mood Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism FEATURES By Thomas Brothers

20 Teepee Populism Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington Elizabeth Warren’s shrewd anti-capitalism By Terry Teachout has progressives on the war path. reviewed by c.w. mahoney by ira stoll 69 Nobody’s Fools 24 The Foul Tornado The Rule of Nobody: On the centenary of World War I. Saving America From Dead Laws by peter hitchens and Broken Government By Philip K. Howard 28 The Dnieper and the Lethe reviewed by f.h. buckley Ukraine’s geographic destiny. by matthew omolesky p. 14 50 Letter from Paris 32 Father’s Days France’s Simmering Intifada 70 Current Wisdom A father and son travel America back by joseph a. harriss by assorted jackasses when it mattered. by gerald nachman 52 Presswatch 72 Last Call Church and State Bat Guano DEPARTMENTS by james taranto by tim cavanaugh

38 London Calling 54 Capitol Ideas Kipper Time My Day at the United Nations COVER ART: SHAFALI ANAND The American Spectator is published monthly, except for by james delingpole by tom bethell combined July/Aug and Jan/Feb issues, by The American Spectator, LLC at 1611 N. Kent St., Suite 901, Arlington, VA 22209. Printed in the U.S. Periodicals post- 40 The Spectator Interview 56 Ben Stein’s Diary age paid at Arlington, VA, and additional mailing offices.

A Trump Card More Than We Bargained For One-year subscription is $39 (new subscribers only). by jeffrey lord by benjamin j. stein Publication number: 0148-8414. Vol. 47, No. 6. POSTMASTER: send address changes to The American Spectator, P.O. Box 171, Congers, NY 10920-0171. 43 Up in Arms 58 Conservative Tastes © 2014 The American Spectator, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproductions without permission are express- Our Gun-Shy Justices Removing the Magic From Mozart ly prohibited. To request permission to republish an arti- by josh blackman by james bowman cle or for reprint information call 703-807-2011 ext. 32.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 1 about this MONTH

VOLUME 47, NO. 6

Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Editorial Director Wladyslaw Pleszczynski Managing Editor Kyle Peterson by WLADY PLESZCZYNSKI Assistant Managing Editor Matthew Purple Assistant Editor Matthew Walther

Senior Editors W. James Antle III, T om Bethell, F.H. Buckley, H.W. Crocker III, John H . Fund, Quin Hillyer, Ned Ryun, Roger Sc ruton, Ben Stein Here Comes Summer Chief Saloon Correspondent Aram Bakshian, Jr. Economics Editor Stephen Moore Paris Bureau Joseph A. Harriss Movie and Culture Critic James Bowman Senior Editorial Advisor Robert L. Bartley (1937-2003) Kapellmeister Baron Von Kannon believe in American exceptional- he’d found a clever way out by agreeing ism with every fiber of my being,” to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Contributing Editors David Aikman, Jed Babb in, Florence King, our president told the graduates exchange for five Taliban terrorists, only Herbert London , Jeffrey Lord, of West Point on May 28. Not to see the deal blow up in his face. Per- Shawn Macomber , G eorge Neumayr, bad for someone who five long haps he will find consolation in Peter Grover G. Norquist, John Train, Brian S. Wesbury

years ago thought his country no Hitchens’ reflections on the continuing Art Direction/Production Jeffrey P. Macharyas more exceptional than Greece. disastrous results of World War I (p. 24). Advertising Danny Macaluso He came up with other uncharacteristic No doubt he’s hoping we’ll be feeling the Lester Publications Inc. 866-954-8168 howlers, too: “America has rarely been consequences of his foreign policy a cen- Fax 877-565-8557 I www.lesterpublications.com stronger relative to the rest of the world.” tury from now. Circulation Circulation Specialists, Inc. “Our military has no peer.” “Our econo- There’s no escaping him, unless it’s by my remains the most dynamic on Earth.” returning to an earlier time for a six-week Editorial Interns He bragged about trouble spots where summer trip by train across the U.S. Natalie deMacedo, Russ Belli-Estreito under his leadership America has made from one coast to the other and back. Editorial Office a huge difference, most notably Ukraine. Gerald Nachman (p. 32), our lucky trav- The American Spectator He praised Ukrainians for voting in the eler, grew up in an America that didn’t 1611 North Kent Street, Suite 901

millions on May 25. “Yesterday, I spoke need a president to tell it that it’s not in Arlington, Virginia 22209 703-807-2011 to their next president,” Obama added, decline, an America that had dreams and [email protected] without naming him. Perhaps he didn’t excitement and a great ballpark in Chi- www.spectator.org

catch his name on CNN, or was afraid cago and stunning new musicals in New The American Spectator LLC to be provocative. A week later he had York City and fathers who seemed dis- is a subsidiary of a chance to meet him in Kiev, but that tant but larger than life and adults who The American Spectator Foundation would have been doubly provocative. were grown up and children who hoped President Scott Russell So it had to be in Warsaw, with fingers to be so one day. There was a big world New Media and Visuals Benjamin Brophy crossed. Now the Vistula, Poland’s larg- out there. Office Manager Patrick Gallivan New Media Associate Patrick Ryan est river, is great in its own right, but Mr. There still is, and summer is the perfect New Media Associate Anne Hobson Obama would have been better off had season for it, especially if in fine compa- he caught a glimpse of the Dnieper. If ny, such as the engaging contributors to Legal Counsel Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short he wants to get to know Petro Poroshen- our symposium on summer fun (p. 14).

ko’s country, its psyche, its perspectives, My memory keeps going back to the SUBSCRIPTION REPRINTS BACK ISSUES its longevity, its place, we recommend he one time I swam in the Dnieper, on a QUERIES: 703-807-2011 800-524-3469 read Matthew Omolesky’s elegant essay nice wooded beach on a small island 800-524-3469 * * * ADVERTISING DEVELOPMENT (p. 28). Knowing him, alas, we expect along Kiev’s left bank. At a certain point P.O. Box 171 Danny Macaluso Scott Russell he’ll save it for a rainy day on Martha’s far in the distance I detected a ship of Congers, NY * * * [email protected] Vineyard. And then neglect to take it sorts slowly coming down river. I paid it 10920-0171 866-954-8168 703-807-2011 with him to Hawaii. no mind until suddenly it was nearer— To be sure, Mr. Obama has more in and huge, and moving steady and true. The American Spectator was founded in 1924 by George Nathan and Truman Newberry over a cheap domestic ale in McSorley’s Old Ale mind than his upcoming vacations. He A coal-filled barge about thirty yards House. In 1967 the Saturday Evening Club took it over, rechris- is, after all, commander in chief and directly in front of me. I didn’t see my tening it The Alternative: An American Spectator; but by November 1977 the word “alternative” had acquired such an esoteric fragrance must regain the confidence of a military life passing in front of me, just relentless that in order to discourage unsolicited manuscripts from florists, he has badly served. The Veterans Affairs time. I worry our president would have beauticians, and other creative types the Club reverted to the magazine’s original name. Published remarkably without regard to gender, scandal was the last straw. He thought only seen the coal. lifestyle, race, color, creed, physical handicap, or national origin.

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by R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

As May takes a powder and summer be- was in perfectly good health and, according was taken to a hospital. In New York City, gins, a delightful collection of anthems from to reporters, even looked quite “buff.” As Mr. Alec Baldwin, the actor, was arrested for the Mussolini era is now available over the we go to press, it is not known what Mr. riding his bicycle the wrong way down the Internet under the Italian title “iMussolini.” Bechard planned to discuss with the presi- middle of Fifth Avenue, though he was fully Such stirring and seldom heard songs of dent, though he had a foreign passport so clothed. The arresting officers, two rather the epoca as “Cara al Sol” and “Caro Papà” presumably he was one of Our President’s demure policewomen, were accused by Mr. are available, and they just might be put to foreign intelligence agents. In Portland, Or- Baldwin of not “even know[ing] who I am.” good use by President Barack Obama. His egon, a respected nudist could not even play Who else could you be, you dinkelspiel! Ev- administration is moving steadily in the di- his violin in front of eryone in New York rection of Friendly Fascism as he promises the Mark O. Hat- knows your smirk- to rely evermore on government by presi- field Courthouse at ing face. dential decree, thrusting aside cumbersome the corner of South- institutions such as the House of Represen- west 3rd and South- The Clintons are tatives, the Senate, and even the federal ju- west Salmon Street. again in the news. diciary. He promises to wave his presidential His name is simply According to Mr. wand over the environment, immigration, Mr. Matthew Thom- Karl Rove, Hillary and racism in public life. On CNN, John as Mglej, and now he is a very sick, fat, King reports that even Democrats are call- languishes in jail on old lady with wrin- ing the president “detached,” “flat-footed,” an indecent exposure kles, having suf- and—stealing a page from The American charge. In Garden fered brain damage Spectator—“incompetent.” Well strike up Grove, California, from a 2012 fall, the band! Wait until the popolo minuto another nude male possibly induced by hears the Marine Band break into a rous- was taken away in excessive drink. Yet ing performance of that old fascist hit “Ciao handcuffs, despite former president Biondina.” Incompetent, indeed! Moreover, his cultural admo- Bill Clinton was there is welcome news from the Occupy nitions against such quick to defend his Ohio Movement. In Cleveland’s Lakeview encumbrances. The wife. On May 14 Cemetery late-night Occupiers broke into man who had accost- he was quoted on the monument to Republican President ed a woman—also CNN as denying James A. Garfield and made off with a set of nude—in her car at that she is a very commemorative spoons. Perhaps they could an intersection was sick, fat, old, lady present them to President Obama at an offi- detained by a group with wrinkles— cial White House celebration. of “Good Samari- though she is no tans”—read: busy- Walk it on home, Alec. Miss Monica Lew- There is an apparent crackdown taking bodies—until the insky. The former place on nudists across the country. At the police arrived. It is not known what hap- president did, however, admit that his wife White House front gate on May 23, the Se- pened to the woman, though most likely suffered brain damage in her 2012 fall (he cret Service arrested a man who had stripped some “Samaritan” provided her with a cape. never mentioned her use of alcohol as a naked in preparation for his 3 p.m. meeting And in Dallas, Texas, the persecution con- coping mechanism). He also revealed that with President Obama. He is Mr. Michel tinued when police arrested another nudist, it took her six months to fully recover from Bechard who, according to a reporter for once again a male, after he leapt headlong that concussion, contrary to the State De- the Daily Caller, was politely awaiting his into a woman’s car through its sunroof in partment, which pronounced her “fully appointment when a couple of uniformed one of the innumerable ceremonies of hom- recovered” a month after the incident. In ruffians fell on him and whisked him away, age that nudists make to their favorite celes- addition, Mr. Clinton said Mrs. Clinton reportedly to a nearby hospital, though he tial body, Sol Magnifico as it is called. He too works out slightly more frequently than he. Munoz/Reuters/Newscom /Eduardo Ordonez/Infphoto.com/Newscom Infusny-160/Elder Photos:

4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 She bounces the old medicine ball around ing of his Dupont Circle home to pay off “once a week” using heavy weights, some the $550,000 balance of his $750,000 fine as heavy as two pounds! And while on the to the federal government. He had intend- subject of Miss Monica Lewinsky, she ap- ed to pay off the balance by auctioning off

Monica in Vanity Fair. She learned her lesson and the dress is white. peared in a 4,000-word piece in Vanity Fair his fabulous collection of Michael Jackson that was strangely sympathetic. Possibly memorabilia, but the authenticity of several now the former president will call off his items is in doubt, and let us face the facts: goons, stop claiming that she is a stalker No one wants this junk. and possibly the two can get back together. They made a cute couple back in the The electric chair is back! The state of 1990s, and Monica has aged beautifully! Tennessee announced plans to revive the hot seat after lethal injections in Oklahoma Plans to turn Pakistan’s province of were deemed dangerous and even lethal. In North Waziristan into a tourist attrac- First Amendment news, a delegation of porn tion complete with casinos and spas may stars known as “The Free Speech Coalition” have to be put on hold. In May, Pakistani is contesting a California bill requiring them troops killed an estimated sixty militants to use condoms while they perform, presum- there, throwing peace talk into doubt. Ap- ably on their tongues. In Louisiana, Mr. An- DRINK parently Mrs. Michelle Obama is not the thony Alvey, 22, an inmate at the Shreveport only Democrat seeking to improve the nu- jail, apparently forgot to remove a cell phone tritional content of our children’s lunches. from his rectum upon passing through a The Honorable Joe Garcia, a congressman scanner and was sent to a local hospital where from Florida, appeared on C-Span picking he finally removed it and turned the vibrator UP! earwax from his ear and then, after giving off. He was subsequently charged with bring- $39* buys you one year his finger close scrutiny, putting it into his ing contraband into a correctional facility, a mouth. The congressman even lines up with charge that seems harsh in this high-tech age. — 10 issues — Mrs. Obama on politics, saying later in the Finally, in St. Augustine, Florida, Miss Ana of America’s cleverest magazine! month that “Communism works” along Maria Moreta Folch, a local environmen- the Texas border with Mexico, where cities talist, was charged with criminal mischief with large numbers of federal immigration after she employed a heavy duty equipment Call 800-524-3469 workers are relatively peaceful. Good show, operator to bulldoze a nearby mobile home or visit Congressman Garcia! From the federal that was not her own. She has been released prison facility in Montgomery, Alabama, on $10,000 bail. More on Miss Ana Maria www.spectator.org comes word that former congressman Jesse Moreta Folch later. *New subscribers only. L. Jackson is going ahead with a refinanc- —RET

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 odds & ENDS

ohn derbyshire’s ambivalence in pursuing the “Ghost in the Ma- chine” puzzle (“Chasing Down the Ghost in the Machine,” TAS June 2014) may be due to the fact that it may forever remain an ultimate Jmystery. But he is right to sense that it entails something of prime import. If, as some neuroscientists claim (slipping unconsciously beyond physical science into metaphysics), we are mindless mecha- nisms completely determined by our brain activity, then we are not free, responsible agents. (See Michael S. Gazzaniga’s book Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain.) Criminals are no more responsible for their crimes than an automobile that breaks down. Who we “choose” to love and marry, the art we “create,” the scientific hypotheses we “construct,” etc., are all causally necessitated by brain mech- anisms totally beyond our conscious control. Reasoning, valuation, and conscience are all logically “unscientific” remnants of a primitive age. (See Tom Wolfe’s essays “Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill,” and “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” in his Hooking Up.) Ergo: Don’t blame (or praise) these scientists for believing such incredible dogmas—their brains made them do it! They just need to be “fixed.” (Or perhaps subjected to B.F. Skinner’s technology of behavior “beyond freedom and dignity.”) mechanical determinism or disembodied Thus we have the all-important image of The philosophical error is mechanis- mind (“Ghost in the Machine”). Reason a three-legged stool: physical science, social tic materialism, the useful fiction under and personal experience, however, suggest science, humanities. What Wittgenstein which many physical scientists fruitfully the more subtle third possibility: di-polar referred to as “different language games” operate. It is a simplistic form of monop- monism. No minds without bodies—but (with different rules), S.J. Gould called olar thought, in some respects the mirror self-consciousness emerges to develop top- “non-overlapping magisteria.” Neurosci- image of literalistic religious supernatu- down causal power, partially determining ence studies physical causes; social science ralism. Derbyshire echoes their either/ events in our bodies, minds, and external studies psycho-social conditioning; and or mentality which reduces our choic- environment. (See Thomas Nagel, Mind the humanities—philosophy, theology, lit- es to either matter or mind. Either dead and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Dar- erature, visual arts—trace the powers and winian Conception of Nature is Almost Cer- patterns of mind, soul, and spirit. Send correspondence to [email protected] with tainly False. Note references to Whitehead William Gillham the subject line “Letter to the Editor.” and Hartshorne.) Albion, Michigan Love Yogi Illustration:

6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 Flashback I’ll give you an example. One night during Editor’s Note: my first week on the job, Richard Carlson, the veter- as I strolled the crowded an broadcaster and onetime boardwalk done up in my spectator.org director of Voice of Ameri- new cop’s outfit, practicing ca—and the father of Tucker nightstick twirls for the Your daily source Carlson, of CNN and Daily amusement of passers-by, of conservative wit and wisdom. Caller fame—wrote in our someone shouted my name summer issue seventeen years from a restaurant door. Not ago about his escapades as a the name I preferred, but a Recent Articles boardwalk cop. He had been dreaded childhood handle: on the wrong side of the law “Dickie, Dickie Carlson! Is Shock Waves in Mississippi just months earlier, and was that you? My God, Topper, by Robert Stacy McCain gratified to find, on the con- it’s Dickie!” McDaniel’s Tea Party fight has nation- crete wall in one of the cells at Ocean City Cop This loud cry was com- al consequences. the back of the station house, By Richard W. Carlson ing, I realized, from Mrs. “that my initials, scratched in August 1997 Topper Jones, the mother of UKIP’s Tremor the year before with a ball- my closest boyhood friend. by Peter Hitchens point pen, were still there.” Mrs. Jones had always liked me, even during Here’s to hoping it turns into an my most ill-behaved period. Her husband (a earthquake. 2 Rhode Island state senator and on-fire New Deal liberal) was much less forgiving in his Killing the Internet n the spring of 1962, age 21, I became judgments. The last time I had seen Mr. and by Jed Babbin a policeman for the summer in Ocean Mrs. Jones was when Topper Junior and I Two new threats to our Second ICity, Maryland, a ten-mile-long island had been arrested for buying booze—and Amendment rights. on the Atlantic and the state’s most popular for stealing the car in which we were caught summer resort. drinking. Gun Control Won’t Stop the To hear cops on TV shows like “Ameri- Mrs. Jones, at least, was apparently no lon- Next Elliot Rodger ca’s Most Wanted” tell it, they all joined the ger holding that against me. She ran out and by Jeffrey Lord force because they wanted to “give some- grabbed my hands. She was laughing. She But mental health laws just might. thing back to the community” or because said, “Dickie, you were such a little hood- police work is “about helping people.” Etc., lum. I cannot believe you are a policeman. The Obvious Lessons of the ad barfum. TV cops these days all sound I thought you might be a criminal by now!” VA Scandal like that scary-looking Dr. Joyce Brothers. My feelings were a little hurt, but I had been by David Catron Also, they are lying. They wanted to be cops working to perfect the cynical and semi-clever Government health care is bad for so they could be paid to be adrenalized; to riposte as a good defense. “Well,” I said, “it’s your health. see trouble and drama and dark emotion; to always been a choice of one or the other—or chase cars and people, to exercise authori- the priesthood. But, this is just for the sum- Know-Nothing Know-It-Alls ty, to exact a little justice, maybe to impose mer. I still have time to become a criminal.” by Daniel J. Flynn their will on somebody else. Or maybe they Ocean City boosted the size of its police Campus Jacobins and their record of just needed a job. force from a dozen or so in winter to for- censorship. I certainly had my motives. The strongest ty-five in summer. I knew this because I had of them was that I wanted to be a writer. I spent a night on the floor of the Ocean City thought being a cop would help me psyche jail the previous Labor Day weekend in the people out, license me as a kind of pragmatic stumbling wake of the “2nd Annual Ocean shrink to analyze the orb’s patients up close. City Riot,” a gathering in which I was pe- Be sure to check out Also, the fact was that I had read too many ripherally involved. The Spectacle Blog Nelson Algren and James Jones novels, and The cop who had locked me up was a had become impressed by jacket blurbs list- high school history teacher in Delaware spectator.org/blog ing colorful and incongruous descriptions of during the winter. The next day, after he the author’s past, like”rodeo rider, short-order cut me loose, I sat in the morning sun out- cook, private eye, merchant seaman, hobo.” I side the jail pampering my hangover and needed some future book blurbs of my own. chatting him up. Good guy. He said it was “Cop” was a natural. a fun job. All winter in college I nourished A final motive: I had already developed the the idea of coming back the next summer writer’s infatuation with irony. To a once re- and signing up.… bellious, pretentiously literate former teenager like me, being a policeman was irony tasty Read the rest online at enough to bring home to feed Mama. www.spectator.org/oceancity

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 the BOOTBLACK STAND

Dr. George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has recently retired from a staff position with the House Ethics Committee and is working on volume sixteen of his memoirs, tentatively titled I Know Why the Caged Bird Cha-Chings. But he has graciously consented to once again advise American statespersons in these times of trouble. Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/[email protected] .

Mr Plunkitt— at our disposal no longer include hordes of to be a newspaper, not Weeping with Oprah we beat the gormless bastards! At last a frogs, and we’d lose public opinion—not to Quarterly. So: What’s the scuttlebutt in the taste of victory has passed our lips, with a mention make an enemy of the World Health GOP these days? Who’s up? Who’s down? great, stonking win for UKIP! The night re- Organization—if we tried to turn the waters Who’s messin’ around? Please, do tell. sults were announced was one for the history of the Nile into blood. How can we convince Marty Baron books. Everyone at the party was decked out leaders in Cairo to do the right thing? Executive Editor in purple. I must’ve had fifteen bacon rolls, Kevin, son of Nekoda, son of Libni, The Washington Post six or seven cartons of fags, and at least twen- son of Shearjashub, etc. etc. etc. ty pints. We were beyond pissed, beyond Chairman Mr. Press Baron— blotto, beyond squiffed—I do believe we Exodus Was Not Enough Coalition no potential avenues of inquiry spring were quite positively trolleyed. to mind? Benghazi? IRS? Obamacare? Veter- I know, I know…what are a few more Eu- Kevin— ans Affairs? Don’t worry. I’m sure your enter- ropean Parliament seats? It’s not as if we’ve the first step is to lay your reparations pro- prising reporters will think of something. Ted chased the EU’s wispy gremlin of a president, posal out in specific detail—and have the Cruz probably gave a kid a noogie in the first Herman Van Rompuy, into hiding, or even so numbers audited by a reputable firm, such grade, and you can cite firsthand accounts to much as marked the datebook for a referen- as Ernst & Jung. These types of things always draw broad conclusions about the forty-some- dum on membership. Nothing, at bottom, has get hung up on questions of accounting! Who thing senator’s character. Or there’s always sto- yet been achieved. But can you blame us for gets paid, and how much? Ancient Egypt ries about diversity and disparate impact. Did celebrating? This is the most nothing we’ve ac- used hard currency (and subscribed to tri- you know that only 17 percent of federal jobs complished in twenty years of arduous labour! metallism—gold, silver, and copper—which are held by people with attached earlobes— Nigel Farage must’ve pleased the William Jennings Bryan this despite the fact that such people make United Kingdom Independence Party of the day), but workers were generally paid in up 61 percent of the population? A nefarious commodities, such as grain or beer. If a laborer scheme must be afoot! —GWP Mr. Farage— earned 50 sacks of wheat per year, we can mul- you simply must keep your eye on the goal! tiply by a modest 3 percent rate of inflation, George— While you were besotting yourself, the evil times four thousand years, and figure that you i swear, I didn’t know about this stuff with Count Van Rompuy abducted one child from are each owed about 250,000 sacks. Unfortu- the VA until I saw it in the news. Heck, until each EU country to use in an old pagan Bel- nately no records remain indicating the size of I heard Wolf Blitzer talking about the VA on gian ritual to increase the power of his dark the sacks Egyptians used… —GWP CNN, I never even knew it was an acronym. bureaucratic magick. By the time the forces of (For years I have been pronouncing it “vaa,” light can once again be marshaled, the Count George— like the sound a sheep makes.) Anyway, now may have already shape-shifted into another any hot news tips? Washington is just too I’m in trouble over this whole business with form. Vigilance, good sir! —GWP placid in August. Congress recesses, all the Eric Shinseki—who is more like Eric Shin- bureaucrats go on vacation, nobody returns sucky-at-his-jobby. What to do? Mr. Plunkitt— our calls. We’re always scraping the bottom Barack Obama we are happy to see that the idea of repa- of the barrel in the summer, and we inevi- rations for slavery is being discussed seriously tably end up with some puff story about a Mr. President— once more. Our ancestors were exploited for chihuahua that got hit by a car, but he was simple: “Wag the Dog.” No, literally. Take the generations, toiling ceaselessly in the sun to an organ donor, and his liver was transplant- First Pooch, Bo, out for an impromptu walk build monuments to the power of a growing ed into somebody else’s pet ferret, and the around D.C. and the public and press will fawn. imperial state. We have waited to be made tragedy bonded the families into best friends, Just make sure that Bo has his organ donor card whole for more than four millennia—and and now they go to the beach together and on him. You never know what might happen— now the time has come for the people of Egypt they only rent one bungalow because they’re or when your grief could save the life of a humble to offer amends. Alas, the tools of persuasion so close. Crap. Total crap. This is supposed ferret. Did you see last week’s Post? —GWP

8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference

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by DAVID ALLEN MARTIN Man of the People Jimmy Duncan’s quarter century of constituent-minded conservatism.

magine you’re an incumbent Re- is no place Duncan would rather be than to go out into the communities he serves to publican member of Congress in the with his constituents in this tucked-away forge important relationships. months leading up to a contested pri- corner of Southern Appalachia. But while Duncan puts in long hours mary election, and Fox News calls to For Duncan, that’s par for the course. to log as much face time with his elector- see if you’d be interested in doing an Since he was first elected to the House of ate as possible, his successes at the polls on-air interview to roast the Obama Representatives in 1988, he’s earned a repu- are also helped by the fact that Tennes- administration’s continued Beng- tation as a man of the people, and the mar- see’s Second Congressional District is one hazi sham. Without pause, you’d clear the gins of his wins at the polls have been some of the most conservative in the United Icalendar for a great opportunity for expo- of the most enviable in the country—in a States. In 2012, Knox County, the most sure—one your upstart opponent certainly bad year he only gets 70 percent of the vote. diverse county in the region, voted almost won’t get—with a national audience. It’s a When I ask him why he enjoys such over- two-to-one in favor of Mitt Romney over no-brainer, right? whelming support, especially when con- Barack Obama. Not if you’re Jimmy Duncan, the thir- gressional approval ratings are so dismal, he Duncan is a lifelong conservative whose

teen-term representative from Tennessee’s{ leans back in his seat to think before rock- entire first paycheck as a grocery bagger Second Congressio- ing forward with a two- went to support Barry Goldwater’s presi- nal District. Instead part answer: “While I dential campaign. The political issue near- of hopping into the Duncan is a life- don’t like to ever miss est to his heart—one that resonates deeply make-up chair for a votes, I make a point with the people who vote for him—is fiscal Saturday morning ca- long conservative to spend more time responsibility. When I ask him to sum up ble TV hit, the con- whose entire first in Tennessee than in the crux of his political philosophy, he of- gressman is in the Washington, and only fers a one-word response: “freedom,” and teacher’s workroom at paycheck as a 1 percent of the events then quickly adds that the biggest threat Dandridge Elementa- I attend at home are to that freedom is the federal government’s ry School during one grocery bagger Republican events.” out-of-control spending. Though he takes of his “constituent went to support Though he’s unques- the matter very seriously, Duncan laughs days” doing back-to- tionably a conservative, when he tells me that the first question he back meetings with Barry Goldwater’s Duncan is deliberate usually asks about any legislation is “How anyone who wants to presidential about connecting with much will it cost?” chat him up. The small all of the residents of Nine times out of ten, this question town of Dandridge campaign. his home district, re- makes him a very popular man among his rests sleepily between gardless of political af- peers. But on a few occasions it has gotten

the front range of the { filiation. He talks with him in hot water, both in Washington and Great Smoky Mountains and Knoxville, equal pleasure about attending Eagle Scout Tennessee. Duncan recounts from his earli- the largest city in Duncan’s district. It’s a ceremonies, ribbon cuttings, and com- er years on the Hill the times he and Tom pretty place, but not one you end up at un- mencements, and the time he was asked to DeLay tussled over GOP spending bills that less you mean to go there. And on this par- be the grand marshal of a local Martin Lu- party leadership wanted to pass through the ticular Saturday morning, it seems there ther King Day parade. Since political events House, but that Duncan didn’t think rep- can often be too narrow in their appeal, resented the core Republican principles of David Allen Martin is a columnist who Duncan says he likes to break free of the smaller government and limited spending. writes from Chattanooga, Tennessee. typical glad-handing scene, opting instead This habit of bucking party orthodoxy has

10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 probably cost Duncan some of the sexier of the most popular.” As the government fore there was a Tea Party.” And that remark committee appointments and leadership threw billions upon billions of dollars into a isn’t too much of a stretch when consider- positions during his Washington tenure, protracted American stay in Iraq, and those ing his voting record. In addition to voting but nothing he’s done has ever put him in infamous weapons of mass destruction nev- against the second war in Iraq, Duncan was a tougher spot than his refusal to vote for er materialized, Duncan’s position—that one of only forty-five House members to U.S. forces to invade Iraq and oust Saddam the U.S. should have never gone into Iraq in vote against No Child Left Behind and one Hussein from power roughly a decade ago. the first place—moved him from near-pari- of ten to vote against opening the Depart- Duncan voted for the Gulf War in ah status to that of a sage statesman. ment of Homeland Security, which to him 1991, he says, after listening to Norman The lesson was clear: Sticking to prin- has ushered in the creation of a security-in- Schwarzkopf’s briefings on the vast inter- ciples may often sting in the short term, dustrial complex. national dangers posed by the Iraqi regime. but in the long run refusing to waver can If a bill represents government growth, “Then, when I watched their elite troops bolster a legacy. there is a very good chance Jimmy Dun- surrender to CNN cameramen,” he can will vote against it. With that remembers, “I realized the threats in mind, I ask him if it’s fair that had been greatly exaggerated.” congressional productivity is now Fast-forward to the months leading heavily equated with how many bills up to the post-9/11 Iraqi escapades are passed into law. “David,” he says, and Duncan was staunchly opposed “we’ve passed so many laws, rules to any military intervention. and regulations that there’s barely a One of only a handful of Repub- computer—let alone a human be- licans who were outspoken against ing—that can keep up with all of squaring off with Iraq a second time, them.” I jot down “no” in my notes, Duncan says he was corralled to the and he continues, “The number one White House on multiple occasions goal of conservatives should be to de- to be lectured on the importance of crease laws and regulations.” a unified Republican vote, as well Of the laws passed recently, very as the necessity of deposing Amer- few substantially address America’s ica’s longtime antagonist, Saddam monstrous spending problem, ac- Hussein. Sitting across a table from cording to Duncan. On his official then-Secretary of State Condoleezza website, he keeps a running calcu- Rice, Duncan asked his usual ques- lator of America’s real-time debt tion: “How much will it cost?” Ac- accumulation. Before heading to cording to Duncan, Rice ballparked Dandridge to meet the congressman, the total price tag at $50 billion, a I checked the site, and the total was bit less than America’s previous Iraqi speeding towards the $17.5 trillion adventure. He balked at her lowball mark. Duncan tells me that “if ev- estimate. ery member of Congress voted like Duncan knew that his opposition I have, we’d have no debt.” If reck- to the invasion would be unpopular less spending is the country’s biggest among his congressional colleagues, threat, I pose, then why doesn’t it but he also worried he was also run- get more serious bipartisan action? ning afoul of the wishes of most East “Because,” he says, “17 trillion is an Tennesseans. In the days just before the de- After the 2008 elections, Duncan’s long- incomprehensible number.” cisive vote, he says over 70 percent of his held small-government values were in vogue And this is what’s truly scary to conser- district’s residents were in favor of taking out across the country as his political twin in vatives who share a like mind with Dun- Saddam Hussein. Congress, Ron Paul, became a household can. If the national debt has reached a level Exhaling and staring over my head in the name. This popularity, though, doesn’t of incomprehension and the economic sky teacher’s workroom, Duncan remembers mean Duncan has been without competi- falls, the negative impact of that financial casting the most widely disliked, yet most tion for the seat he’s occupied for the past liability will also be incomprehensible. principled, vote of his life. “As I pushed the quarter century. Every few years, he’ll get After about half an hour of talking, we button to vote against the war, I seriously a challenger, and of late they’ve ironically both look at our watches. I can tell Duncan’s wondered if I was ending my political ca- come from the Tea Party elements of the anxious to get back to his meetings. I ask reer.” He says that in the wake of it, he ex- right wing. him why he does these “constituent days” perienced more abrasive treatment at home Before I met with Duncan, I asked his so often instead of the ever-popular town than ever before, to the extent that he was longtime chief of staff, Bob Griffitts, how hall forums, to which he responds, “Folks even disinvited from speaking at a church Tea Party courtiers propose to out-conserva- either want to express their opinions to me about twenty minutes outside of Knoxville. tive the man who’s been referred to as Ron personally or ask for help.” He looks past “But guess what?” he continues without Paul’s ideological heir. “I’m not sure, you my shoulder to his staff and signals them to a hint of gloating. “The most unpopular know?” he says, shrugging with a bit of an bring in the next constituent. “And it’s my

Illustration: Yogi Love Yogi Illustration: vote I ever made slowly, slowly, became one eye-roll. “I mean, we were the Tea Party be- job to hear them out individually.”

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 11 ten PACES

Can we abide the death penalty after Oklahoma’s botched execution?

No Messing With Death Does anyone seriously doubt that inno- Several states have recently seen stunning cent people have been put to death in the numbers of prisoners who were not on death United States? From 1973 through the early row use DNA evidence to clear their names. by JESSE WALKER months of 2014, 144 people sentenced to Those injustices can be undone, at least part- die in America have been exonerated of the ly: If you imprison a man for a crime he he typical conservative is well in- crimes that landed them on death row. A didn’t commit, you can’t restore the years he formed about the careless errors rou- study this year in the Proceedings of the Na- lost, but you can at least give him the years Ttinely made by the Internal Revenue tional Academy of Sciences of the United States he has left. The death penalty removes even Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and city hall. If of America estimated that “if all death-sen- that option. he’s a policy wonk, he may have bookmarked tenced defendants remained under sentence Yes, most of the people on death row are the Office of Management and Budget’s on- of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would guilty. But while the percentage of cases the line list of federal programs that manage to be exonerated.” A 2000 study at Colum- courts get right might make for a good set of issue more than $750 million in mistaken bia Law School examined 4,578 appeals in statistics at the ballpark, the error rate is far too payments each year. He understands the in- state capital cases from 1973 to 1995. The high for a policy that takes lives. If there are centives that can make an entrenched bu- courts, the researchers wrote, “found seri- prisoners on death row who landed there by reaucracy unwilling to { ous, reversible error in mistake, you have to reconsider the death pen- acknowledge, let alone nearly 7 of every 10 of alty altogether—and that’s true even if you ac- correct, its mistakes. the thousands of capi- cept the idea that some acts are so monstrous He doesn’t trust the There is no tal sentences that were that the people who commit them have for- government to manage fully reviewed during feited their right to life. Otherwise the incen- anything properly, even reason to think the period.” (And no, tives become absurd. The death penalty ap- the things he thinks it the kinks have not peals process has to be open to everyone, since should be managing. the government been worked out of we can’t be sure in advance whether a prison- Except, apparently, will always get the system over time: er was wrongfully convicted. We can know the minor matter of “In half the years, in- that he’s guilty, of course, if he confesses to who gets to live or die. the business of cluding the most re- the crime. But if confession makes execution Bring up the death punishing cent one, the error rate more likely, he has every reason not to admit penalty, and many con- was over 60%.”) his guilt. An indefinite appeal may amount to servatives will suddenly criminals right. The naïve response a life sentence, but life in jail still beats dying. exhibit enough faith in to this is to take those No, better to remove the possibility of error government compe- numbers as a sign that altogether. We aren’t talking about a split-sec- tence to keep the Cen- { the system works. Most ond decision to kill a criminal who poses an ter for American Progress afloat for a year. Yet of the prisoners were guilty, after all, and those immediate threat to people’s lives. This is a the system that kills convicts is riddled with 144 innocent inmates were eventually found years-long process that ends with the premedi- errors. And I’m not just referring to the inept- and freed. But as the Columbia study notes, tated slaying of a convict who has already been itude on display in that slapstick snuff film of it often took multiple appeals to uncover the subdued and confined. Mistakes that might an execution in Oklahoma this past April— mistakes in the original trials. And for how be acceptable in the first case should not be the event that has gotten everyone talking many innocent men was the truth discovered acceptable here. about capital punishment again, whether or too late, or not at all? On several occasions, an The government regularly bungles every- not it has actually changed anyone’s mind. I investigation raised serious doubts about the thing from the day-to-day delivery of the mail mean mistakes that are far worse. prisoner’s guilt after the execution, from the to the rollout of health insurance exchanges. Chicago Tribune’s probe into the prosecution There is no reason to think it will always get the Jesse Walker ([email protected]) is of Carlos DeLuna, killed by the state of Tex- business of punishing criminals right either. At books editor of Reason magazine. His most as in 1989, to the Houston Chronicle’s look at the very least, that means the decisions it does recent book is The United States of Paranoia: the case against Ruben Cantu, executed in the make should be as reversible as possible. And A Conspiracy Theory (HarperCollins). same state four years later. that leaves no room for the death penalty.

12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 We Need the Deterrent

by WILLIAM TUCKER

here’s a concept in economics I think ought to be introduced into Tthe public discourse. It’s called the “marginal value of wealth.” It means that the wealthier you become, the less each additional dollar means to you. That’s why we have environmentalism—because some people have grown so affluent that they really aren’t much interested in further economic development. The same concept also applies to crime. There’s a “marginal value of safety” that people take into account when evaluating policies such as the death penalty. Most affluent Americans now feel safe enough in their suburban retreats or gated communities with private police patrols so that they can express more concern for a condemned criminal suf- crimes less than homicide. In The Spirit of the els. The 500,000 murders committed during fering a few minutes of pain in a botched exe- Laws (1750), Montesquieu wrote: this interim took more lives than any con- cution than for what the person did to end up flict in American history save the Civil War. on death row in the first place. (As many have It is a great abuse among us to condemn to the Moreover, by the 1980s murder in the act pointed out, all this blundering could be fast same punishment a person what only robs on of another crime had risen to about half the eliminated by returning to the firing squad.) the highway and another who robs and murders. much larger total. It’s a different story, however, if you’re Surely, for the public security, some difference But of course these murders were not evenly

running a bodega in a low-income neigh- should be made in the { distributed across so- borhood or working in a 7-Eleven on a punishment. ciety. Instead they are lonely Texas highway. You are completely In China, those still highly concentrated vulnerable. You may be protected by security who add murder to The purpose of in minority neighbor- cameras or a locked cash register, but to an robbery are cut in piec- hoods. Although Afri- amateur with a handgun this means little. es: but not so the oth- the death can Americans make Murder is the third cause of occupational ers; to this difference it up only 13 percent of death among men, behind vehicle accidents is owing that though penalty is to the population, they and falls by construction workers, and the they rob in that country draw a bright line constitute 48 percent of leading cause of occupational death among they never murder. all murder victims—93 women. There’s a very simple reason. For a In Russia, where between a felony percent of whom are criminal pulling off a holdup—or a rapist, or the punishment of rob- and felony killed by other blacks— a “surprised” burglar caught by a homeown- bery and murder is the and they commit 51 er—there’s a very simple logic at work. The same, they always mur- murder. percent of the murders victims of your crimes are also the principal der. The dead, they say, in which the case is witnesses. They will call the police the min- tell no tales. solved. A standard argu- ute you depart. They can identify you. They { ment against the death will probably testify at your trial. There’s a In the 1960s we stopped executing people penalty is that it is racist because 40 percent of very simple way to prevent all this: kill them. altogether. At the time homicides were at those on death row are African American. But The purpose of the death penalty is to an historical low and 90 percent were “ac- in fact judges and juries are six times less likely draw a bright line between a felony and felo- quaintance” murders resulting from disputes to impose capital punishment if the victim is ny murder. If the penalty for rape or robbery between friends or relatives. “Stranger mur- black. There is racism in the system, but it is is jail time, and for murder is more jail time ders,” which are generally committed in the not the kind people think. after that, there isn’t a huge incentive to pre- course of other crimes, had been reduced to The late Ernest van den Haag used to sug- vent you from pulling the trigger. This was 10 percent. What happened next is well-es- gest that we should only execute people for well known to reformers of the eighteenth tablished. After the death penalty was abol- murders on odd numbered days, just to see century, who tried to resolve the same di- ished, murder rates nearly tripled, rising to whether criminals would shift their activities. lemma by eliminating the death penalty for an all-time high in the 1980s. Only when the In fact, we have been conducting just such an death penalty was reinstated and states start- experiment by race for decades. What better William Tucker is author of Vigilante: The ed executing people in significant numbers proof could we have that the death penalty . Photo: Splash News/Newscom Splash Photo: Backlash Against Crime in America in the 1990s did they again fall to 1960s lev- makes a difference?

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 13 Summer Books Drinks

Pour yourself a cool one and savor some tips from our distingushed& panel of bookworms.

Helen Andrews even more so than Byron. It surely was about his priorities, he accused skeptics of starry-eyed of them to dispatch endless re- wanting to “censor the press.” With such european history is easily tailored to suit visions of their draft Greek constitution to buffoonery running high from first page to the seasons: France in spring, the Balkans native warlords who, even when they were last, keep ouzo handy. in winter, German-speaking nations in au- literate, cannot have had much time to tumn, and in summer, Greece. I therefore contemplate provisional bills of rights with Helen Andrews (née Rittelmeyer) is a held off reading Roderick Beaton’s new his- the revolt against the Turks still raging. The policy analyst at the Centre for Independent tory of the Greek War of Independence, By- Benthamites’ man in Missolonghi, Colonel Studies in Sydney, Australia. ron’s War, until the sun was shining bright enough for me to imagine myself on the Kalamata waterfront, W. James Antle III dragging a café table into the knee-deep waves like as the dog days of summer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who beckoned, one could discern pioneered this dining ar- the usual signs: longer hours rangement in the 1950s in of sunshine; ever-balmier cooperation with a singular- breezes; a growing pile of ly unflappable Greek waiter. review copies of the latest Alas, in Beaton’s book the books, perilously stacked high adventure of the Phil- on the desk. hellenes’ story is crowded Megan McArdle’s out by a great deal of The Up Side of Downis close analysis of Roman- a wonderfully written tic poetry. A far better book brief for the benefits of is William St Clair’s That failure. It’s part wonk- Greece Might Still Be Free: ish—McArdle makes a The Philhellenes in the Greek persuasive case in favor of War of Independence (1972). St America’s relatively lenient Clair relegates Lord Byron to bankruptcy laws—and part the walk-on role he deserves personal, a memoir of sorts. compared with the more ac- I found her career trajectory tive members of the London easy to identify with. Like me, Greek Committee, who far from she came from an information tech- being Romantics were radical Benthamites Leicester Stanhope, insisted on unloading nology background and more or less fell almost to a man. the printing press from his London-spon- into journalism. These doctrinaire utilitarians were low- sored shipment of supplies before unload- Ken Adelman’s Reagan at Reykjavik is ercase-R romantics in their way, perhaps ing any food or arms. When questioned the best, most comprehensive account of Tudor Russ Illustrations:

14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 the 1986 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev my stoop every evening after work with a Leithart’s A Son To Me as a guide for 1st and I’ve seen. He argues convincingly that it sweating glass of the stuff, watch the fire- 2nd Samuel. Leithart’s A House for My Name, was a major turning point in the Cold flies, and read something sultry: Robert and The Four are the best introductions to War. But the passages about the defeated Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, maybe the Old Testament and Gospels respectively Soviets in the waning days of the Evil Em- a hard-boiled local noir by George Peleca- that I can recommend to a beginner student. pire—such as the 1991 suicide of military nos, Henry Miller once I was a few glasses What’s on the counter? I plan to open a adviser Sergei Akhromeyev in despair over deep: books about mendacity, sex, power, few bottles of McKenzie Bourbon Whis- the USSR’s collapse—may give us more and downfalls. In retrospect, that was a key and McKenzie Wheat Whiskey, both insight into what motivates Moscow now. terrible summer, but the books and the gin of the very lovely Finger Lakes Distilling in Daniel Kelly’s memoir of L. Brent Bozell and the ginger ale helped. my home state. Either works neat. And the Jr., Living on Fire, is a fascinating biogra- Bourbon works really well in a New Yorker: phy of a troubled but underrated figure in C.J. Ciaramella is a reporter for the Wash- mix 1.5 ounces of Bourbon, with 1 ounce the modern American conservative move- ington Free Beacon. of lemon juice and .5 ounce of homemade ment. It traces Bozell’s rather unconven- grenadine (just cook down some pome- tional life from National Review to granate juice with sugar until it’s syrupy). Triumph to his final triumph. Pour over ice and forget the week. I’m a firm believer in the separation of fruit and Michael Brendan Dougherty beer, but in the summer is a senior columnist for the I relent somewhat. Bell’s Week. Oberon Ale smells more of citrus than it tastes, though one can detect Daniel Foster apricot, like a Magic Hat No. 9. And there i drink cut-rate booze— is something appealing and enough of it that it to the summer shandy, needs to be. even Leinenkugel’s This isn’t to say I’ll pass mass-market version, on a bottle of Montrach- with its refreshing blend et if I’m expensing it, or of lemonade and beer. that I’ve never cleaned a wound with a tumbler W. James Antle III is edi- of iodiney Laphroaig 18. tor of the Daily Caller News But for practical purposes Foundation. (and drinking is my most practical of purposes) I’m looking for value in my C.J. Ciaramella hooch. I have had the follow- after d.c.’s two or three ing conversation at half the weeks of spring end, when bars on the Acela corridor: weather becomes muggy and “I’ll have a bourbon, light oppressive, I switch from brown lion the rocks.” quor to gin. Gin is a low-class tipple “What kind of bourbon do that put on airs over the past century, so you like?” I prefer to pair it with low-class weather “Cheap.” and literature. But not tonic water. The Now, there are rail bourbons and there classic G&T was an invention of neces- Michael Brendan are rail bourbons. I try to stay away from sity. British troops stationed in equatorial Dougherty the inaptly named “Kentucky Gentle- regions found that getting drunk was the man” and his confederate the “Virginia only way to make tonic water—an an- Gentleman.” But—and you might want ti-malarial—tolerable. For those of us not what’s on the nightstand? Larry Mc- to write this down—the key is to chase living in malarial zones, I recommend the Murtry’s latest work, The Last Kind Words bad bourbon with good beer. That’s why far superior gin and ginger ale. The gin Saloon, seems like the obligatory novel to if I’m late to the bar or drinking with in- and ginger possesses all the fine qualities read this summer, despite some mediocre re- veterate nursers, the conversation goes of its more common relative—crisp, re- views. And I’m still waiting to get down to like this: freshing, simple—with a better balance Walter Kirn’s part-memoir, part-true crime “I’ll have a bourbon, light on the rocks, of flavor. book Blood Will Out. I’ve been rereading and an IPA.” The first summer I lived in D.C., when the Old Testament with the help of good “What kind of bourbon do you like?” I didn’t really know anyone, I would sit on commentaries, and I’m anxious to use Peter “Cheap.”

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 “Okay. We’ve got two IPAs on dra—” Freddy Gray an out-of-print but still easily findable “Pick your favorite.” copy of Peter Farb’s Man’s Rise to Civi- You could chase turpentine with a at the london spectator, we have just lization. well-balanced IPA and end up having a established a “Cad of the Year” prize, to decent night. be awarded (we hope) by James Hewitt, Thom Hartmann is host of the national “Hey Foster,” you might ask, “is there the cavalry officer and serial rogue who syndicated radio show The Thom Hartmann no way to get sippin’ bourbon flavor at seduced Princess Diana. We invented the Program and of The Big Picture with Thom rail bourbon prices?” prize partly in reaction to Country Life’s Hartmann on RT. Reader, there is. Evan Williams. I get “Gentleman of the Year” award, but more mine at $20 a handle from a Virginia gen- as homage to the Flashman novels, which tleman (no relation). are enjoying something of a revival at the Jeremy Lott As for books. I’ll be reading my friend moment. Jim Geraghty’s romp The Weed Agency and Flashman, in case you didn’t know, is summer in my own Washington, the good my friend Megan McArdle’s The Up Side English fiction’s greatest anti-hero. He one on the West Coast, is the best and of Down (and so ought you). first appeared as Thomas Hughes’sTom shortest season of the year. The sun stays I’ll make a weakly resolved and ulti- Brown’s Schooldays as the bully who tor- aloft until well after nine. It doesn’t rain mately abortive attempt to find the sup- ments Brown and his pious little friends, nearly so often or so much. The heat and posed genius in Allan Bloom’s Plato that gets “beastly drunk,” and is then expelled humidity are moderate and tempered by a I’ve been looking for for a decade. from Rugby. George MacDonald Fras- cool breeze. Events switch from cramped I’ll breeze through a thriller or two (like er then had the genius idea of taking on indoor affairs to wonderful parades, street The Martian, a science-packed, funny one Flashman’s life and wrote a series of ad- fairs, dirt races, and softball games. about a lone astronaut stranded on Mars venture novels, narrated by the bounder Reading for this too-short season thus that is already being developed as a Matt himself, Sir Harry Flashman. (Starter for needs to consist of books that you can ab- Damon vehicle.) ten: What’s the difference between a cad sorb outdoors, preferably in a hammock in And I’ll dip into Sir Edward Shep- and a bounder?) Flashman gets into all the back yard. A good rule of thumb for herd Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Bat- sorts of scrapes, meets the greatest figures summer reading is: no politics. Sure that tles of the World: From Marathon to Wa- of the nineteenth century, and pulls one new biography of the Koch brothers might terloo. over all of them. He ends up a decorated look inviting, but it can wait until Labor Creasy was an eminent Victorian and a military hero—even though he is always a Day. A better bet is genre fiction. It’s easy to functionary of the Empire, a fact about coward, a liar, and a scoundrel. follow and is aimed at telling readers a story which it never occurs to him to apologize. The books are, almost without excep- in an entertaining way, with minimal fluff. Each chapter—with titles like “Victory of tion, outrageously funny. It’s like P.G. First up for the season is the G.M. Ford Arminius over the Roman Legions under Wodehouse, only filthy rather than inno- mystery Chump Change, his eighth novel as Varus”—is a piece of a bigger story about cent. So I’ll be re-reading the best Flashy told by Seattle PI Leo Waterman. My book- the construction of Western Civilization. novels in the evenings this summer—and mark finds us at this perilous point in Wa- Creasy’s writes with a great command of getting pleasantly unsober on white port terman’s recollection: “I was naked. Don’t the contemporary historical sources and throughout. Only white port though. know why that was the first thing my senses a genuine affection (his garment-rending Like Flashman, I know better than to mix detected, but it was. Seemed like they would lament prefacing the chapter on Bur- my drinks. have noticed how much my nipples hurt, goyne’s defeat at Saratoga is a favorite). or that my hands were shackled behind my And what military historian since Thu- Freddy Gray is managing editor of the Lon- back, or that there was something stuffed cydides could write a sentence like this: don Spectator. in my mouth that my tongue couldn’t dis- “Arletta’s pretty feet twinkling in the lodge. None of that seemed to matter to my brook gained her a Duke’s love, and gave central nervous system as much as did my us William the Conqueror. Had she not Thom Hartmann lack of clothing.” thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal As I learn what happens next to our hero, of Normandy, Harold would not have i’ll be sitting on the flybridge of our I shall be sipping on my own concoction: fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman Chris Craft Constellation, where we live a mix of spiced rum and unsweetened iced dynasty could have arisen, no British in the public harbor on the Washington tea. In the backyard hammock, of course. empire.” Channel off the Potomac in downtown I have read and reread parts of the book Washington, D.C., sipping my favorite Jeremy Lott is an editor at Rare. over the years but dread the thought of wine from the Organic Wine Company, finishing it all. So I consume Creasy slow- 2010 Saint Chinian Prestige Chateau ly, ruminatively but with pleasure, and Bousquette. Katherine Mangu-Ward only once in a while. I’m re-reading Dan Sisson’s Revolution Sort of like expensive hooch. of 1800, about how Jefferson saved the jesuits! In! Spaaaaaace! Humanity picks up republic (first published forty years ago, the transmissions of an alien species. While Daniel Foster is a consultant in Washing- coming back into print late summer), the world’s governments fart around, the ton, D.C., and former news editor of Na- the latest Ace Atkins version of Robert Vatican hollows out an asteroid and hurls a tional Review. Parker’s Spencer series Cheap Shot, and motley crew of scientists and missionaries

16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 off to make First Contact. The Sparrow is sister’s disapproval), while he nonchalantly Several years later I spent three summer Maria Doria Russell’s first novel, but mi- ordered a gin and tonic, which he might months in Kiev, half of that time baby-sit- raculously manages to touch on colonial- as well have termed “the usual.” On top of ting the cats of two U.S. diplomats who ism, faith, sex, and the law without being that, he spoke perfect French. We Ameri- were part of a small contingent setting annoying, heavy-handed, or hackneyed on cans, such rubes. up a U.S. consulate in Soviet Ukraine’s any of those forbidden-at-the-dinner-table A few years later, I was of official drinking capital. (The effort would be cut short topics. Come for the wacky space adven- age and tasted my first gin and tonic, at an after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.) tures, stay for the lyrical prose and bitter- afternoon garden party in Montecito. It was I can’t recall if I had a single drink my sweet musings about what it means to be wondrous, especially the lime. It was about entire time there—but I did have access fallible and human. this time that margaritas arrived in Santa Bar- to the diplomat couple’s books, including They say space smells like burnt sugar, bara, another summertime a major collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s so I’ll pick Jacob Grier’s fussy but fabulous stories, brilliant reading for someone in Smokejumper cocktail, which involves gin, his twenties. Local bookstores lemon, Chartreuse, and smoky lapsang weren’t exactly stocked, but souchong tea. I still have the Soviet high Runner up: The Goldfinch by Don- school editions of To Kill a na Tartt and a handful of mixed pills Mockingbird and A Farewell washed down with stolen vodka. to Arms I bought and reread that summer. Say what you Katherine Mangu-Ward is will about Hemingway, but managing editor of Reason. that’s his greatest book ever, about the girl who got away, in the cruelest way. Fitzger- Wlady ald never topped that. Pleszczynski Wlady Pleszczynski is editorial director of The Ameri- turns out I have can Spectator. something in common with Wojciech Jaruzel- ski. An obit I saw of James Taranto him after his death in late May had his daugh- my drink of choice is a ter calling him an “absty- martini with the merest nent,” which sounds rather hint of vermouth and more defiant than “teetotal- copious quantities of er.” Not that my nondrinking Chopin, a Polish pota- is based on principle. It’s just to vodka, chilled in the that alcohol has never mixed freezer. I realize there well with my metabolism. But are purists who insist I do have some memories to fall that a true martini back on, when summers and drink must be made with made their lasting impressions. gin. To them I say When my parents had com- cheers, even though pany it was I who got to fix the I prefer my spirits un- drinks, not just high balls but adulterated by the taste whiskey sours and Tom Col- of juniper berries. linses. Back then I never could un- The next book in my derstand why adults felt the need to Kindle queue is Marriage spoil the perfect taste of ginger ale and Markets: How Inequality Is other Canada Dry mixers. I was maybe Remaking the American Fam- eleven. This was in Santa Barbara, where ily. According to the publisher, every day was summer. authors June Carbone and Naomi Then right after high school I found Cahn argue that “a stable two-parent myself in Europe, meeting not only the discovery during a vacation break from home has become a luxury that only the old world for the first time but also many graduate school. The salted rim was the well-off can afford. The best educated and family members. There was my cousin clincher here. The following summer I most prosperous have the most stable fam- Andrzej, six months older than I, visiting studied Czech in Prague. Everyone drank ilies, while working class families have seen Paris from Warsaw. There we sat, on the the local beer, the world’s best I kept hear- the greatest increase in relationship insta- Champs Elysées. I ordered a Coke (to my ing. I preferred a Slovak winery. bility.” The latter point is indisputable, but

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 I suspect Carbone and Cahn overstate the very funny. They’re also timeless. As for a seeking escape from the world of poli- degree to which economic forces are driv- libation to accompany the provocative Per- tics and punditry, I hope to be sipping ing social change as opposed to the other cy, I’m in full accordance with that other cognac and devouring Fools Rush In, the way around. Southerner, Louis Armstrong, who taught latest collection of essays by Bill James, us in his fine old song that “Life is a caber- the god of Sabermetrics. And when even James Taranto, a member of the Wall net, old chum.” that doesn’t work to calm my fevered Street Journal’s editorial board, writes the brow, I will, as I so often have, seek the Best of the Web Today column for wsj.com. Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa. solace of familiar friends and return to my favorite novelist Patrick O’Brian and his immortal tales of the sea about Jack Larry Thornberry Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and their adventures on the dear H.M.S. Surprise. as this is supposed to be a symposium on summer reading on the Jonathan Tobin is online editor of Com- porch, full disclosure requires me mentary. to state that Central Florida summers—I live in Tampa—are long, hot, and oppressively humid, so Eve Tushnet most of my reading will be done inside, under the purr- well, my favorite summer drink ing air conditioner (at least is probably still a Seabreeze. But until Obama’s energy policies if we’re talking about things I can make my AC too expensive still drink: homemade lemonade to operate). Only mad dogs on the porch swing, as the tiger and tourists spend much time mosquitoes start their second outside hereabouts in July and shift and the fireflies clock in. August, and even they catch Orange soda, because I like on pretty quickly. If one must things that taste like colors read on the porch in this sea- rather than foods. son, a bit of Sam Adams Bos- And Coca-Cola in a can. ton Lager is refreshing and an Andy Warhol wrote, “What’s aid to comprehension. great about this country is As the climate here gets that America started the sultry, I’ll devote some of my tradition where the richest reading time to A Climate of consumers buy essentially Crisis, Patrick Allitt’s history of the same things as the poor- the environmental movement est. You can be watching in America. Allitt is a professor TV and see Coca-Cola, and of history at Emory University you know that the President who has had his academic ticket drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks punched at such temples of pro- Coke, and just think, you can gressivism as Oxford (England, drink Coke, too. A Coke is a not Mississippi), UC Berkeley, Coke and no amount of money Harvard, and Princeton. In spite of can get you a better Coke than these obstacles to coherence, notices the one the bum on the corner is of the book assert Allitt is sensitive to the drinking. All the Cokes are the same and constant exaggeration and fearmongering all the Cokes are good.” of the environmental movement, which in Not all the Cokes are the same now. its early years could take credit for some Jonathan Tobin I’ve experimented with Mexican Coke, needed changes and real achievements, but but you can only get it in glass bottles, in later years has become a feel-good exer- there’s a growing pile of books on and I’ve always loved the silvery Star cise for Lexus liberals and a threat to the my night table and I’m hoping to make Trek taste of the lip of a soda can. So republic. a dent in it this summer. While sitting I’ll have a can of Coke and curl up with For both pleasure and enlightenment, on my balcony, downing a lemonade in something Japanese, I think: Tanizaki’s it’s about time to re-read the late novelist the afternoon, I hope to be delving into Naomi, Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Walker Percy’s compendium of non-fic- two complex yet very different histor- or Yumiko Kurahashi’s Adventures of tion pieces, Sign-Posts in a Strange Land. ical figures with Lynne Cheney’s James Sumiyakist Q. Like his six novels, keen observer Per- Madison: A Life Reconsidered and Daniel cy’s non-fiction essays are enlightening, Gordis’ Menachem Begin: The Fight for Eve Tushnet blogs for the Catholic channel thoughtful as to first things, and often Israel’s Soul. But in the evening while of Patheos.

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by IRA STOLL

f elizabeth warren ends up being the ceptive—like, well, an awful lot of Democratic Party’s presidential nomi- things about Elizabeth Warren. nee in 2016, don’t be surprised if she Take something that seems basic, runs as a centrist, or even as a cultural like what cars her family drove when conservative. The senator from Massa- she was younger. In her new memoir, A chusetts and Harvard Law School pro- Fighting Chance, Warren tells the heart-tug- fessor known as the scourge of the banks ging tale of two autos. The family station and the inventor of the federal Consumer Fi- wagon—“a glowing bronze color, with Inancial Protection Bureau will talk about her leatherette seats and an automatic transmis- lesser-known roles as a Sunday school teacher, sion”—was repossessed after her father, the devoted grandmother, and loving dog-owner. main breadwinner in the family, had a She’ll talk about how she enjoys drinking beer heart attack and couldn’t make the and eating fried clams, McDonald’s, Burger payments on it. According King, and Mounds chocolate bars. She’ll talk to the book, that left the about her Air Force pilot Vietnam veteran Warrens, who lived in brother and about baking “four trays of peach Oklahoma City, with cobbler” and cleaning up the dishes afterward a Studebaker so old while wearing her “long white apron.” and rusty that She’ll discuss how as a senator she reached her dad used to across party lines, joining Republicans Ted drop Elizabeth Cruz and Mike Lee to co-sponsor a resolu- off a block away tion by another Republican, Rand Paul, to from the school repeal the Authorization for Use of Military to avoid embarrassing her. Re- Force Against Iraq. She’ll tout how she joined porting during the Senate yet another Republican, Marco Rubio, to campaign on Warren’s back- sponsor a bill to help prevent children from ground, however, the Boston being trafficked as sex slaves. She’ll mention Globe turned up a third how she worked with the GOP’s Senate sage car: a high-school friend Mitch McConnell to try to overhaul the fed- remembered driving “in eral regulations governing sunscreen. Warren’s white MG to Her allies might even whisper, as they did the Charcoal Oven in her Senate campaign against Scott Brown drive-in for lunch in in 2012, that she was a registered Republi- their senior year.” can until 1996. They might mention that as There’s no men- a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tion of the white she opposed granting tenure to a feminist le- MG in Warren’s gal philosopher who later sued the law school book, perfor gender discrimination. haps because All of this will be accurate in some technical the idea sense, but on another level it will be deeply de- of a high

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism. com and author of JFK, Conservative. He lives in Boston.

20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 school senior tooling around in a sports car circumstances, which by all accounts are pretty In a later paper—one that Megan McArdle doesn’t quite mesh with her carefully con- swell: a $740,000 apartment in Washington, described in the Atlantic as “not just wrong, structed pathos. D.C., and a 3,728-square foot, three-and-a- but actively, aggressively wrong,”—Warren Or take the story of Warren’s divorce. As half bathroom house in Cambridge, Massa- and her colleagues concluded that the prob- A Fighting Chance tells it, her first husband, chusetts, with an assessed value of $1.8 million lem had grown: 69 percent of 2007 of bank- Jim Warren, “moved out” and eventually that she and her husband appear to own mort- ruptcies met their previous definition of being “met a very nice woman and remarried.” In gage-free. Her total assets, according to Senate “medically caused.” But they only cited their the next section of the book, Warren intro- personal financial disclosure records, are some- findings in percentages, and noted nowhere duces the law professor who would become where between $3.8 and $10.2 million. that the absolute number of bankruptcies dra- her second husband, Bruce Mann: “I fell in In 2010 she and her fine-legged husband, matically declined after Congress changed the love with Bruce because he had great legs. who is also at Harvard, reported joint income filing rules in 2005. As McArdle notes, 1.45 Really….I was completely crazy about him.” of $954,721, according to tax information million households went bankrupt in 2001, The real timeline is less tidy. As theGlobe released by her campaign. Automobile-wise, and only about 727,000 did in 2007: put it in an article about Warren’s family that she’s traded up from rusty Studebakers and was published during the Senate campaign: repossessed station wagons to a BMW 528i, This is elementary social science. A huge change in “She did not file for divorce until the fall. By though the Boston Herald reports that she the composition of your sample needs to be not- then, she had already met Mann.” ditched hers for an American-made hybrid ed. It certainly should not be artfully disguised. If Then there’s Warren’s version of her activi- SUV (one thirty-second of the parts are from the 2005 bankruptcy form made it more difficult ties in 2008 and 2009, when she was chairman a Jeep Cherokee, the joke goes) just in time to file bankruptcy, the people who still file bank- of a Congressional Oversight Panel created to for the Senate campaign. ruptcy will largely be those who are forced to it by keep an eye on the Troubled Asset Relief Pro- events totally beyond their control.… gram that Congress created after the econom- f shading a campaign biography to Elementary googling reveals that the two doctors ic crash. According to her memoir, this was a fit the candidate’s political purposes were who co-authored this study are prominent spokes- frantic, sleepless period devoted to government Ia crime, it would be a misdemeanor, one people for Physicians for a National Health Pro- service: “We needed to get organized, and we of which few politicians would be entirely in- gram, and thus have an obvious agenda, one that needed to do it fast…right now, we didn’t have nocent. Such selectivity when it comes to the Elizabeth Warren has not been shy about sharing. a second to lose…the COP staff worked late.” use of data in academic research, however, is She doesn’t mention directly that, in addition a higher order of no-no, one that has earned Nor have substantive concerns about to TARPing away at all hours and teaching at Warren some harsh critics over the years. Todd Warren’s work been expressed only by her Harvard Law School, she was also spending Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason ideological foes. Reviewing Senator Warren’s time on lucrative corporate consulting work. University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal signature first-year legislative proposal, a bill She was reportedly paid $212,000 by the Trav- that Warren has “a track record of using ques- that would have lowered interest rates on elers insurance company between 2008 and tionable research to advance policy ends.” federal student loans to the rock-bottom rate 2010 for work on asbestos litigation. While Take Warren’s research attributing a large that the Federal Reserve charges on money head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, she share of personal bankruptcies—46 percent it loans to banks, the center-left, Washing- was also reportedly paid $90,000 to be an ex- in a study of 2001 data—to illness and med- ton establishment Brookings Institution de- pert witness for retailers suing credit card com- ical bills. As Zywicki wrote: scribed it as an “embarrassingly bad propos- panies and banks for price-fixing, and $20,000 al.” Two Brookings fellows wrote that: by the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale First, the study provided an implausibly broad defi- and Dorr (representative clients: Citigroup, nition of “medical bankruptcy”—including any filer Sen. Warren’s proposal should be quickly dismissed Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan who reported uncontrolled gambling, drug or alco- as a cheap political gimmick. It proposes only a Chase) to have lunches with its lawyers. hol addiction, or the birth or adoption of a child. one-year change to the rate on one kind of federal Warren’s supposed status as an American Equally dubious, the authors classified a bank- student loan, confuses market interest rates on long- Indian—her mother’s mother was “a little ruptcy as having a “major medical cause” if the term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with bit Delaware, and her father was more Cher- individual had accumulated more than $1,000 the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to okee,” she said, though “it might have been in out-of-pocket medical expenses (uncovered make short-term loans to banks), and does not re- the other way around”—is another example by insurance) over the course of two years prior flect the administrative costs and default risk that in- of Warren reshaping the narrative in her fa- to filing—regardless of income, and even if the crease the costs of the federal student loan program. vor. Her ancestors reported themselves on the debtor did not cite illness or injury among the Census as white, and she is not an enrolled reasons for bankruptcy. Writing in the New Yorker, Warren’s Har- member of any Indian tribe. When it came In 2001, average per capita out-of-pocket medi- vard colleague Jill Lepore concluded that time for Professor Warren to apply for law fac- cal expenses were $683. During the two-year period “the solutions that Warren has proposed of- ulty jobs at a time when schools were under Ms. Warren and her co-authors studied, in other ten fail to convince.” One Warren idea, “a pressure to add minorities, though, she conve- words, Americans spent an average of $1,366 on universal public-school voucher system in niently checked the box as Native American. uninsured medical expenses, or 30% more than which parents could send their kids to any The new book dwells on Warren’s hardscrab- their threshold definition of a “major medical public school,” she called “reckless.” ble upbringing—“the daughter of a telephone cause.” There was no larger context for their thresh- Even Timothy Geithner, in his new memoir operator and a maintenance man,” she went old figure: A debtor with $1,001 in uncovered med- Stress Test, writes that Warren’s oversight hear- to college on “a full scholarship and a federal ical expenses and $50,000 on a Saks card would ings “often felt more like made-for-YouTube

Illustration: Shafali Illustration: student loan.” Less is said about her current constitute a “medical bankruptcy” in their study. inquisitions than serious inquiries,” and that

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 “she was better at impugning our choices—as roughly 1.5 million registered Democrats. in Andover, Massachusetts. In her now-fa- well as our integrity and our competence— An exit poll showed Warren won 41 percent mous words: than identifying any feasible alternatives.” of the independents. As a rookie senator, Warren managed to get Further, that crossover appeal is based on a There is nobody in this country who got rich on the Senate to pass resolutions congratulating message—taking on the big banks, demoniz- his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? the Red Sox on their World Series win and ing Wall Street—that has the potential to res- Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved condemning the Boston Marathon bombing. onate not only with the Occupy progressive your goods to market on the roads the rest of us TheNew Republic credited her for blocking— crowd, but with the anti-bailout, Tea Party paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to behind the scenes—the potential nomination rural right. The Republicans created this educate. You were safe in your factory because of Lawrence Summers to chair of the Federal trap for themselves when George W. Bush, of police forces and fire forces that the rest of Reserve. But when it comes to crafting legisla- Henry Paulson, and Ben Bernanke decided us paid for. tive compromises that become law, or build- to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis ing coalitions for policy ideas, results for War- by injecting capital into Goldman Sachs, Less than a year later, President Obama ren have been less than forthcoming. Citigroup, and other big-name financial echoed Warren’s theme in his “you didn’t Her most significant legislative accomplish- institutions. When Warren waxes nostalgic build that” speech, which offended millions ment may have predated her election to the about anti-usury laws that cap interest rates of hardworking Americans without hurting Senate. That was pushing for lawmakers to on loans—as they did “ever since the days of him in the polls, much less costing him the include in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul the Founding Fathers,” she writes in A Fight- election. bill a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ing Chance—it’s not hard to see where she’s funded by the Federal Reserve. And even that headed. ill professor warren, Senator has been off to a rocky start. Auto dealers Some of this backlash against cronyism is Warren, try to become President managed to get car loans carved out from the legitimate, and Republicans like Rand Paul WWarren? At first blush, it seems like CFPB’s oversight. The Bureau has been in the will try to tap into some of the same feel- a long shot for some Harvard Law School-cre- news for paying $22.3 million to lease tempo- ings. Some of it, though, is dangerous and dentialed professor type with little manage- rary office space for two years while its future exploits age-old grievances against cardboard ment or private-sector experience (other than headquarters undergoes a $145 million reno- cut-out versions of shady New York bankers. the aforementioned lucrative legal consulting) vation. President Obama chose not to fight a Warren’s rhetoric depicts the entire financial and no foreign policy chops to beat out Hillary battle for Warren’s confirmation to head the industry as a cesspool of Shylockian fraud- Clinton in a Democratic primary. But crazier agency; he didn’t even try a things have happened. That’s recess appointment, instead what they said about Barack tapping her to get the agen- Obama, and look where he cy up and running from the ended up. In a contested pri- platform of a staff job at the mary, Mrs. Clinton would Treasury Department. A se- be an easy target for Warren’s nior attorney at the agency populist anti-Wall Street dem- recently testified to Congress agoguery. One can imagine that the bureau has a “per- her making sport of Clinton’s vasive culture of retaliation $200,000-a-pop speeches for and intimidation that silenc- Goldman Sachs. And if for es employees and chills the some reason Hillary doesn’t workforce from exposing run, those who had been ar- wrongdoing.” The lawyer, dently invested in the “first Angela Martin, says she was woman president” dream sidelined after complaining of seem somehow more likely to sex discrimination, a charge turn to Professor Warren as that her supervisor disputes. their backup candidate than to An investigator brought in someone else with more exec- to look into the complaints utive experience and national found “exclusion, retaliation, discrimination, sters, conniving to trap innocent old ladies standing, like, say, Sarah Palin. nepotism, demoralization, devaluation and into tricky adjustable rate mortgages and sad- Of course, if Professor Warren were to other offensive working conditions.” dle struggling families with penalty fees and run and win, “woman president” wouldn’t credit card debt. She forgets to mention that be her only first. Comedians have suggested o if elizabeth warren is not just a banks and other financial institutions em- that the Republicans nominate the governor phony, but an ineffectual phony, why ploy a lot of people, including in her home of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, and make it an S bother to take her seriously at all? state, and that the credit they provide makes Indian American versus an American Indian. For one thing, she’s an ineffectual phony possible a lot of things that families and busi- It’s about time we had a Native American with crossover appeal. In the 2012 election, nesses would be worse off without. president, don’t you think? The way she feels she blew away Scott Brown, 54 percent to But Warren has already proved that her about Wall Street, the bankers will have to be 46 percent, in a state where the roughly 2.3 ideas can travel far and wide. During her careful that she doesn’t try to give Manhattan

Photo: Mary F. Calvert/ZUMA Press/Newscom MaryPhoto: F. million independent voters outnumber the Senate campaign, she spoke at a house party Island back to the Lenapes.

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by PETER HITCHENS

o say that that the First The astonishing thing is that so many War, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War World War was the great- conservative, Christian, and patriotic peo- (Knopf, $35), is that it at last dispels the be- est cataclysm in human ple have yet to understand the damage this lief that the ordinary people of that age were history since the fall of the event did to their causes. It is at least partly fools who thought the war would be either Roman Empire is to put it because we can barely begin to imagine the quick or joyful. He has looked more deeply mildly. The war destroyed world that we lost. into the truth, and into newer sources, than so many good things and Stefan Zweig’s ambiguous description of other writers. The peoples of Europe knew, as killed so many good people that civilization a “Golden Age of Security” in his curious war began, that evil and loss were being un- Thas not recovered and probably never will. memoir of Austria-Hungarian twilight, The leashed into the world. They feared what was Long after it officially ended, it continued World of Yesterday, is one of the few attempts. to come. As the French mobilization proceed- to cause millions of deaths and tragedies, But the civilization that Zweig portrays as ed, announced by the urgent jangle of church most obviously during its encore perfor- stifling and repressed seemed to many who bells, Hastings tells us misery spread though mance of 1939-45. But it did not stop even lived in it to be safe, calm, and free. His own that most beautiful of countries: then. Many of its worst consequences came mixed feelings, as he describes the woebegone during official periods of peace and are un- departure of the Imperial Habsburgs from Nobody spoke for a long while. Some were out known or forgotten, or remain unconnect- their domains, and the shocking sense of pain of breath, others dumb with shock. Many still ed with it in the public mind. which beset him at the sight, are the truest carried pitchforks in their hands. “What can it The loss cannot be measured in cash be- thing in the book—a realization, far too late, mean? What’s going to happen to us?” asked the cause it was paid in the more elusive coin of of what has been lost forever and of what was women. Wives, children, husbands—all were faith, morals, trust, hope, and civility. The now coming: unthinkable inflation, turning overcome by anguish and emotion. The wives war is the reason why Europe is no longer the modest life savings of the gentle into dust, clung to the arms of their husbands. The children, a Christian continent, because too many along with the destruction of every known seeing their mothers weeping, started to cry too. churches supported it. Pointing to the pov- landmark and of all customs and manners, erty and scientific backwardness of the pre- ending in the pit of tyranny, racial mass mur- There is far more weeping than cheering 1914 world is a false comparison. Who is der, and yet more war. in this account. In Germany, Peter and Hans to say that we could not have grown just as If they could hold a parade of the twenti- Kollwitz, patriotic sons of leftist artistic intel- rich as we are now, and made just as many eth century’s war dead, how long would it take lectuals, departed for war leaving their parents technological and medical advances, had we these dark, hollow-eyed battalions to march, “weeping, weeping, weeping.” Nor were they not slain the flower of Europe’s young men night and day, trundling their enormous guns mistaken when they wept. As Hastings con- before they could win Nobel Prizes, or even behind them, through the once-tranquil capi- tinues: “Peter left for the front, and a grave, beget and raise children? tals that ordained their deaths? Could anyone bearing in his knapsack his mother’s parting bear to watch? And yet the argument is still ad- present, Goethe’s Faust.” Perhaps most un- Peter Hitchens is a columnist for London’s Mail vanced in histories of the world before 1914, bearable of all is the scene he describes a thou- on Sunday. He is not and hopes never to be a war that the great nations viewed war as a release, as sand miles to the East in the immense, remote reporter, but has blundered into the edges of several a door opening from a stuffy room into fresh, peace that then enfolded rural Russia. As Ivan armed conflicts, in Romania, Lithuania, and Soma- clean air, and so they rushed toward their deaths Kuchernigo was summoned to mobilization, lia, and has seen the after-effects of modern war in with smiles of joy on their faces. It was not so. his five-year-old daughter sat in his arms, Iraq. He was also a resident correspondent in Moscow One of the many good things about Max pressing against him and saying, “Daddy, why during the dying years of the USSR. Hastings’s new book about the First World are you going? Why are you leaving us?”

24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 hy indeed? What gain, what socially liberal Left, while conservatives have conservative journal refused to print it. The nation- hope, what conceivable thing justi- tended to defend it, even to stand up for its alistic radicals had their way, with the consequences Wfies tearing a father from his child dreadful generals and its unspeakable carnage, that we all know—Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, and sending him off to kill other fathers of oth- as some kind of necessity or patriotic duty. depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of er small children? We seem anxious to avoid The opposite should be the case. Those Europe and all but universal famine. this question, for fear that the answer will not on the Left should defend it and rejoice over suit us. I think this is why so much time and ink it. It was the fulfillment of their dreams. No All this is absolutely true, though it is barely is still expended over the worn-out and settled single event has done more to advance the mentioned in most school histories, with their question of how and why it all started. Oddly power of the state and of state socialism. Brit- wearisome accounts of the various bloody enough, the argument is now mostly pointless. ain barely had a state before 1914. By 1918 it offensives, which churned the narrow battle Since Fritz Fischer’s great and damning ac- was one of the most tightly governed and bu- zones of the Western Front. The offensives count of his own country’s undoubted attempt reaucratized patches of soil in the world. The were militarily almost entirely useless, but to seize world power by shock and force, the Russian revolution would never have hap- were politically essential for a simple reason, truth has been quite clear. pened had there been no war in 1914. The prophetically stated by Winston Churchill in Germany started the war because she want- great Christian and conservative empires of 1901: “Democracy is more vindictive than ed and hoped to gain enormous prizes through the world would probably all still exist. War Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more a swift victory, first over France and then over also brought about the sexual, social, and terrible than those of kings.” Russia. She encouraged Austria to be inflexi- cultural revolutions that are still convulsing The Marquess of Lansdowne, who sought ble toward Serbia in the hope that this would what used to be Christendom. to end a war that was costing far more than happen, and the plan worked. It was not the The person who saw this most clearly might be gained, was not some marginal first time that a country had carefully fostered was not a conservative but a radical: Aldous pacifist, but a mighty figure in the pre-1914 a pretext for war, and it will certainly not be Huxley. He wrote in his 1946 preface to the British ruling class, a former foreign secre- the last. Most readers in Britain and the U.S. tenth anniversary edition of Brave New World: tary, viceroy of India, and secretary of state will be able to think of recent examples. for war. But a conflict styled “The Great War There is a strong argument for saying that it For the last thirty years there have been no conser- for Civilization” (words actually inscribed on was reasonable for Germany to want what she vatives; there have only been nationalistic radicals my great uncle’s campaign medal, awarded to wanted, and that it was and is a great pity that no of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The him and hundreds of thousands of others in peaceful way could be found of reaching a sen- last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of 1918) could not be called off just because it sible compromise over her legitimate demands. Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to The Times, was going badly and had no military, diplo- There is an equally strong argument for suggesting that the First World War should be con- matic, or economic purpose. wondering why the main critics of the Great cluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the The demagogues of London and Paris had

Photo: Everett Collection/Newscom Everett Photo: War have been those of the anti-capitalist or eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once summoned up the popular will, proclaimed

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 the war a crusade for justice and goodness als—tokens of the value of each individual in modern times, slithered out of a much against black evil, and were now controlled by life. But now the corpses were flung crudely more specific commitment to Denmark in the very force they had called into being. And into pits or left unburied to be devoured by the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of 1864. Britain so it went on, leading directly to the Bolshe- rats, in violation of one of the most enduring worried over Alfred von Tirpitz’s powerful vik Revolution—financed and encouraged by rules of civilization. Imperial Germany, without whose help Le- Yet to begin nin’s putsch could never have taken place. Er- with few realized it Most British historians of World War I ich Ludendorff, whose work this mainly was, would be like this. probably had no idea what he was unleashing, Max Hastings de- look almost entirely at the Western Front, though it is worth noting that this odd, brave, scribed the elabo- clever, and evil man was personally opposed to rate and respectful where our own troops were mostly engaged. Christianity. He wanted only to remove Rus- funerals given to sia from the war but succeeded in releasing a the early dead. But This is understandable, since the poets of terrifying political plague into the world. rapidly it became It seems to be a mere matter of chance that clear that this could the trenches forever fixed the war amid the the Russian peace did not lead to the defeat of not continue. By Britain and France in early 1918. But because Easter 1915, that shell-holes and blasted tree trunks of the great final German offensivedid fail, the very gentle poet Brest-Litovsk Treaty that Lenin made with Edward Thomas Belgium and Northern France. the Kaiser was canceled before the world had could write (in a a chance to see in practice what Germany re- few small words ally wanted in the East—a hold on what is which explode slowly in the mind, becoming new navy, which as it turned out played hard- now Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, the vast as the reader grasps their actual meaning): ly any part in the conflict, because the empire Crimea, and Georgia. What the Kaiser really Germany sought was reached by land, not desired all along was a diminished and weak- The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood by sea—and as the Kaiser himself was fond ened Russia, a clear road to Turkey and the This Eastertide call into mind the men, of joking, “Dreadnoughts have no wheels.” Middle East, the great wheat fields and coal Now far from home, who, with their sweet- In one of the great paradoxes of our age, it mines of Ukraine, and the oil fields of Baku. hearts, should would be the U.S. Navy that eventually sup- It is what the great German liberal think- Have gathered them and will do never again. planted British sea power, and America that er, Friedrich Naumann, believed Germany wound up the British Empire and dethroned needed to secure its future. He was right. No Englishman gathers flow- the Pound Sterling, while the two countries Alas, most British historians of World War ers for his sweethearts in the woods any more. were fighting on the same side. I look almost entirely at the Western Front, That world is dead. Everyone who lived in it What in fact caused the whole problem was where our own troops were mostly engaged. is dead, having had no time to pass on its cus- France, still refusing to recognize the unpalat- This is understandable, since the poets of the toms to his sons and daughters. able truth that she did not have the men or trenches forever fixed the war in the Western the industrial strength to prevent Germany’s imagination amid the shell-holes and blasted his concentration on Flanders dominating Europe. tree trunks of Belgium and Northern France. Fields, where Owen and Thomas After 1870, this was what needed to be re- It is the landscape we see when we read Wil- T died, has been a powerful unac- solved. France, in her pride, would not do the fred Owen’s “Dulce and Decorum Est,” knowledged influence on historians, always sensible thing and accede to reality. Only by which opens with the lines: less interested in the Eastern struggle, which pulling Russia into combat, or later by drag- was just as feral, and which was fought over ging the U.S. into the war, could Germany Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, lands that Germany genuinely hoped to be prevented from asserting its natural dom- Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed conquer, rather than against countries it inance. It was a hopeless and dangerous delu- through sludge wanted to keep from interfering in its pri- sion of Napoleonic grandeur, well-symbolized vate quarrel with Russia. by the absurd scarlet and blue uniforms, per- And it is evoked still more strongly in Germany in 1914 hardly cared about fect targets for German guns, in which legions Siegfried Sassoon’s boiling denunciation Britain at all, and quite reasonably could not of French soldiers rushed to their deaths in of the great memorials we built afterward understand why London entered the war. It mad, suicidal attacks in August 1914. Max with their “intolerably nameless names,” was more or less incomprehensible. To this Hastings rightly reminds us of these forgot- in which he imagines the dead who once day it is hard to see any British interest that ten battles, at least as wasteful of life as the “struggled in the slime” rising to “deride was served, and dozens that were damaged. more famous butchery on the Somme. They this sepulchre of crime.” The British Cabinet had never been consulted achieved absolutely nothing important against Owen first described, then denounced. about the secret military and naval pacts that Germany’s modern, camouflaged army. Nor Many do not realize that his “Anthem for were the true reason for London’s declaration did the gallantry of the Belgians who held on Doomed Youth” is a miserable recognition of of war. Had it been asked, it would have for- to their forts at Liege under the most terri- the absence of all the great comforting ritu- bidden them. The violation of Belgian neu- fying bombardment yet inflicted on human als of Victorian death: the ringing of church trality, the populist pretext, was of no real beings. Nor did Britain’s tiny, colonial field bells, the lowering of blinds in the street, the importance. Lord Palmerston, one of Britain’s force, whose supreme commander was one singing of candle-lit choirs at stately funer- most warlike and cocksure national leaders of the most pitiful incompetents in military

26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 history. What saved France in 1914 was the now taken on almost exactly the shape that Here we go again. But this new post-mod- simple fact that it is virtually impossible to win Berlin dreamed of in 1914. ern offensive is waged not with howitzers a quick war on two fronts. The diversion of The old eastward impulse is still taking or tanks or Zeppelins or U-boats, but with important units to the east, to fight a Russian the old eastward paths across the Oder and people power, and civil-society organiza- advance, prevented a German triumph. the Bug, the Dniester and the Dnieper, tions, and foreign politicians openly inter- The question we must ask, over and over toward the Don and the Caucasus, even vening in other countries’ internal affairs, again, is whether this was a pity. Max Hast- perhaps the Caspian sparkling on the far and little flags, and dim, sheep-like TV re- ings argues that a German-dominated Eu- horizons beyond Georgia, and the magic, porters taking what they see at face value. rope in 1914 would have been grim and op- mysterious lands (and oil fields) that lie And it is also waged with referendums and pressive, and would have threatened Britain beyond. Russia’s equally ancient dislike of unmarked uniforms and telephone inter- (and so the rest of the world). such incursions is likewise stirring again. cepts. Instead of the Guns of August, we It is hard to see why. The Hohenzollern But this time, the eastward impulse has the have U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victo- empire was far from free, but it was certain- support of the United States, which twice ria Nuland handing out cookies to the Kiev ly not an insane despotism. The “September did so much to restrain it. crowd, which later oh-so-democratically Program,” its plan for European domination People have come to associate Germany’s drives the elected president out of office and drawn up when victory seemed certain in drive eastward with Hitler and Nazi fanat- replaces him with someone more acceptable 1914, is not in reality very different in shape icism because it was spectacularly demon- to Washington and Brussels. or nature from the European Union. A thor- strated and defeated in the Nazi era. But it Yet the real vicious battle over the limits oughgoing German victory over France in was not Hitler’s idea. Like many—but not and nature of German power in Europe is 1914 would have saved millions of lives and— all—of his policies, it was standard German flickering into life again as I write, in the still more important—preserved European establishment thinking. It has its origins shabby, weedy, concrete towns of Ukraine, Christendom, culture, and civilization, all of among enlightened democrats. Friedrich repeatedly ruined by the same unceasing which perished somewhere amid the mud, Naumann is the direct ancestor of the mod- contest. Thuggish, drunken men ambush slime, rats, and corpses of the endless battle- ern Free Democrat Party, an unimpeach- each other in ignorant, savage encounters, fields. If Britain had had the sense to stay out ably respectable grouping devoted to that terrified non-combatants die in burning of continental squabbles (as she did in 1864 enlightened modern project, the EU. To buildings or are slain pointlessly by stray and 1870), there is no reason to believe that adapt and reverse Clausewitz: The Europe- bullets. They do not even realize that they she would have undergone the descent into an Union is the continuation of Germany are re-enacting the sepia conflicts of a cen- poverty and irrelevance that swiftly followed, by other means. tury ago. Who has even heard of the Peace exposed by her terrible defeats at Dunkirk and What is it that prevents us from seeing of Brest-Litovsk? Singapore, and her actual bankruptcy in 1940. this? Does the Union’s bland, bureaucratic, The Ukrainian quarrel has been the work The war was re-fought in 1939 largely be- bespectacled face make us view it as a gi- of young, inexperienced men who have not cause the 1918 outcome was not a true re- gantic if officious charity, or an annoyingly seen war and who enjoy posturing, and push- flection of the real balance of forces. In 1918, large but essentially harmless corporation, ing things as far as they will go, assuming Russia was prostrate and ablaze with civil war, something like AT&T? Or perhaps we wrongly that there is a limit. Britain had for the first time in her history cre- confuse it with an international sporting Old men know better. Helmut Schmidt, ated a vast conscript army on the continental event such as the Olympics, or one of those West German Chancellor from 1974 to pattern, and the U.S. was prepared to send men obscure branches of the United Nations, 1982, actually saw combat (on the wrong and lend money to Britain and France without a large building with lots of colorful flags side) in the 1940s, and is one of the few worrying too much about when and how she fluttering outside? It often seems so. Yet in major Cold War statesmen still living. He would be paid back. By 1938, Britain and this century no political unit in the world, knows some history and can read a map. France were passive, weak, and fearful of war, not even the People’s Republic of China, has He warns of “megalomania” and points out, and the U.S. once bitten and very much twice so aggressively absorbed its neighbors and correctly, the rather obvious fact that Geor- shy. When the USSR agreed to allow Germa- so rapidly extended its external frontiers in gia is not in Europe, and that it is therefore ny a war on one front, German victory in the one relentless direction. The unsatisfactory rather odd to consider making it a member West was more or less assured, and if Britain official outcome in 1918 has been utterly of the European Union (it is also nowhere would not make peace, she could be left for lat- undone by the 1985 Schengen Agreement, near the North Atlantic, so it is not an obvi- er. Again, British and American historians tend which finally reversed Woodrow Wilson’s ous candidate for membership in NATO). to concentrate on this part of the war, not real- Versailles Treaty without anyone even notic- Nobody paid any attention, nor did they izing that for most Germans the true conflict, ing. Many of President Wilson’s borders are when he also said that the Ukraine crisis and the true aim of the war, did not begin until still on the map, but they no longer exist in is all too reminiscent of 1914, when the 1941. And when it did, Germany lost. reality. This has been peaceful only because great powers sleepwalked into war. Did they the EU’s new vassals—exhausted, poor, and sleepwalk? Or is that an excuse? It is truer to ut the truly extraordinary in many cases glad of any ruling power that say that they were greedy and stupid, and thing is that now, in 2014, one-hundred is not the USSR—have acceded to its sov- unwilling to believe that they could ever do Byears after Tannenberg, ninety-six years ereignty with a sigh, and hoped for a large as much harm as they actually did. But this after Brest-Litovsk, seventy-two years after check to ease the mild pain. explanation is more disturbing than “sleep- Stalingrad, and following forty years during France and Britain are neutralized. Cen- walking.” For it is equally true of the leaders which Germany was partitioned and neutral- tral Europe is happily subjected. The south- of today, who (as we know) are quite capa- ized by the Cold War, Western Europe has ern flank in the Balkans is almost settled. ble of idiocy while wide awake.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 The Dnieper and the Lethe

Ukraine’s geographic destiny.

by MATTHEW OMOLESKY

he silver thread of the lasted between 1657 and 1687—that Ukraine of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Dnieper stitches a winding was rent in two from top to bottom. This pro- and the several partitions of Poland, making seam through the fabric duced two polities named for their relation to for a Ukraine that served not as the hoped-for of the Ukrainian steppes, the southward-running Dnieper: In the east, bridge between east and west, but rather as binding together a variegat- the Left Bank; in the west, the Right Bank. the front line of civilizations. ed national patchwork. Its This disastrous partition gave rise to such igno- The long-term ramifications of this histor- dark-rolling waters “pierce ble figures as the Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky, ical divide are profound. In the 2010 presi- the stone hills,” as the ancient Tale of Igor a strongman whose slavish devotion to Mos- dential elections, for instance, the western Tputs it, irrigating Ukraine’s countryside while cow foreshadowed that of Viktor Yanukovych Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk nourishing its spirit. So central was this river vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin. Describing himself in provided the Europhile candidate Yulia Ty- to the medieval castellans of Kyiv that their cringe-worthy fash- territory was properly known as Poddnieprska ion as “the most ser- Ukraina, or Dnieper Ukraine, and so signifi- vile Hetman-foot- Ukraine’s disastrous partition between 1657 cant was this river to the serf-born Romantic stool of the throne writer Taras Shevchenko that he asked to be of His Most Noble and 1687 gave rise to such ignoble figures as buried on its dark shore, Tsarist majesty,” Briukhovetsky en- the Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky, a strong- In a place from where the wide-tilled fields tered into a par- And the Dnieper and its steep banks ticularly one-sided man whose slavish devotion to Moscow Can be seen and treaty with the tsar, Its roaring rapids heard only for a Cossack foreshadowed that of Viktor Yanukovych When it carries off mob in the town of The enemy’s blood from Ukraine Budyshchi to seize vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin. To the deep blue sea. him, lash him to a cannon, and cudgel This, Europe’s third largest river, would him to death, a trenchant political morality moshenko with 86.2 percent and 88.8 per- become the very embodiment of a nation play if there ever was one. cent of their votes, respectively, while the caught between powerful geopolitical forces. Such dramatic reassertions of Cossack Russophile Viktor Yanukovych garnered 90.4 “How many thoughts,” mused the Lviv- self-respect notwithstanding, Ukraine’s terri- percent of the votes in the eastern city of Do- based geographer Stepan Rudnytsky in 1910, torial fragmentation continued apace, and the netsk. Such numbers put into perspective the “arise about the glorious, and yet so unspeak- “ancient rights and privileges” of Left Bank partisan divides between, say, California and ably sad, past of the Ukraine, about its misera- Ukrainians recognized by the Kremlin in the Texas, or Kensington and Newcastle. ble present and the great future toward which 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty would give way to di- The notion of geography as destiny has al- the nation tends, amid great difficulties, as rect control from Moscow. Successive tsarist ways had a certain amount of purchase in a does the Dnieper toward the Black Sea over governments would funnel Ukrainian exports region that, from time immemorial, has been the porohs [cataracts].” It is telling indeed that toward the empire’s northern emporia, and cast as sort of informem terris, wholly lacking neither of these writers could avoid the spec- away from traditional markets like Wroclaw in obvious natural frontiers. ters of bloodshed and strife—for what binds and Gdansk in order, as historian Mykhailo can also tear asunder. Hrushevsky later lamented, “to ruin Ukraine’s amstrung by the partitions of It was during The Ruin—a chaotic period of trade in general, hand it over to Muscovite the past, and unable to capitalize on intestine conflict and foreign intervention that merchants, and bind Ukraine economically Hthe valuable north-south axis of the to the northern centers of Great Russia, St. Dnieper while priorities and threats were ar- Matthew Omolesky is an attorney specializing Petersburg, and Moscow.” rayed to the east and west, Ukrainians found in international and human rights law, and a re- On the Right Bank, to complicate matters themselves in a geopolitical bind only partly searcher for the Laboratoire Europeen d’Anticipation further, the influence of the Polish gentry held of their own making. But rather than wrangle Politique. sway for centuries to come, even after the end with modern divisions and Mitteleuropean

28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 “Dnepr in the Morning” by Arkhip Kuindzhi (1881).

contradictions, it was far easier for public intel- hopes on receiving help because of our orienta- Ukrainian nation follow its natural inclination lectuals to befuddle themselves creating myth- tion but, on the contrary, we should anticipate westward, away from the “scare tactics, physical ical roots for the Ukrainian nation—like the that various outside forces will hinder us in this as threats, moral torture” endemic to the east. claims of one author that Ukrainian anscestors much as possible. Some might take issue with the rather are mentioned in the Bible as the Magog, “who grandiose claim that Europe cannot endure through the ages, fought to the death in battle That is as neat an encapsulation of without Ukraine, but the European Union against the rapacious Gogs of the steppe, and Ukrainian historical pessimism as one is like- has long had designs on it. Brussels funneled shielded Western (Christian) civilization from ly to find. The slogan “seeking a third way” some €389 million to Ukraine between 2011 fatal inroads and invasions.” began to be bandied about by narodnyky, or and 2013 alone, and distributions were made Hence the firm insistence on the part of the “nativists,” which the scholar Ola Hnatiuk to a host of civil society NGOs, such as the geographer Rudnytsky and likeminded think- correctly perceived to constitute “a retreat All-Crimean Association of Voters for Civil ers that the “autonomy of Ukraine must be put from European identity” and “a path towards Peace and Interethnic Harmony. The 2014 forward so forcefully and defended so skillfully isolation, which would allow Ukraine to be protests, touched off by Yanukovych’s rejec- against any encroachment by Moscow central- pushed back towards authoritarianism,” and tion of a European Union association deal, ists that Ukraine might profit from its advan- necessarily towards Russia’s vise-like embrace. constitute the natural and immediate conse- tageous geographical position rather than lose quence of groundwork undertaken in Brus- by it.” Servitude, however, is precisely what the he pro-western Ukrainian revolu- sels, much to the Kremlin’s chagrin. Kremlin expects from a purported vassal state, tions of 2004 and 2014 constitute the To extend the overall poetic conceit further, though Vladimir Putin has gone even further Tequal and opposite reaction to that line it could be argued that just as the Dnieper by saying on record that “Ukraine is not even of reasoning. In a stirring December, 2004, is central to Kyiv, so too does the European a state.…Part of its territories is Eastern Eu- address to the European Parliament in Stras- Union have its river: the Lethe, one of the five rope, but the greater part is a gift from us.” Yet bourg, writer Yuri Andrukhovych summed rivers of Hades, whose waters bore away strife attempts made during The Ruin, and during up the position of the Europhile camp by de- in a stream of blessed forgetfulness. Oblivion, the national liberation struggle between 1917 nouncing the “quarantine line that divides one of all things, was given a central place the politi- and 1920, to counter Russian influence with Europe from the other,” while insisting “that cal life of the earliest democracy. It was a “good Polish, Turkish, Tatar, Austrian, or German al- Europe is waiting for us, that it can not endure policy,” wrote Plutarch, “to rob hatred of its liances, invariably went awry. without us, that Europe will not continue to be perpetuity,” and after episodes of upheaval it The politician Vyacheslav Lypynsky sad- in all its fullness without Ukraine.” Andrukho- was not uncommon for the Greeks to swear ly concluded, in his 1926 Letters to Brother vych’s speech reached its crescendo with a poet- solemn oaths “not to recall the misfortunes of Farmers, that ic defense of his country’s European geography: the past.” Crippling fines for “recalling public “in Ukraine there is not a single drop of water evils” could even be levied on those chroniclers at present no one in Europe wants a strong and that does not belong to the Atlantic basin. This immune to Lethe’s charms. It mattered little great Ukrainian State. On the contrary, there are means that with all its arteries and capillaries that lethe is the linguistic negation of aletheia, many forces which are in fact interested in there it is stitched right to Europe.” Just as the water or “truth.” Oblivion’s political utility was un- being no Ukraine or that it be as weak as possible. of the Dnieper spills out into the Black Sea, deniable, and not just to the Hellenes. This is why in restoring our traditions of nation, making its way via the Mediterranean to the Similar acts of forgetfulness are to be found

Illustration: Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Illustration: statehood, and Hetmanate we must not pin our Atlantic, Andrukhovych predicted, so will the throughout the subsequent course of western

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 European history. The Edict of Nantes, which der, and watched in horror as its neighbours Yatsenyuk in a March press conference fol- granted French protestsants religious protec- set about slaughtering one another. This was lowing the signing of the political chapters tion in 1598, declared that domestic troubles not supposed to happen.” It was made readily of the European Union-Ukraine Association were to be “obliterated and forgotten, as if no apparent that the forms of the past could not Agreement, while declaring, in reference to such things had happened.” The Peace of West- so easily be cast off, or the command to forget the tension between economic and humani- phalia ending the Thirty Years War insisted on so easily heeded. None of which would take tarian interests, that “it’s up for everyone to de- “perpetual oblivion and amnesty.” Closer to our away from just how comforting the thought cide: do we share value, or do we share values.” present era, in the immediate aftermath of the of an escape from history could be. Yatsenyuk and his fellow westernizers may not Second World War, Winston Churchill called In the years since the Balkan slaughter, the appreciate the equivocations and tergiversa- European Union’s tion they have been, and will continue to be, eastern and south- met with by their tentative western allies. The The Treaty of Lisbon is in fact an act eastern borders still authorities in Kyiv, led by president-elect Petro crept steadily for- Poroshenko, cannot simply pin their hopes on of historical oblivion writ improbably ward, encompass- receiving much-needed assistance solely due ing former Warsaw to their current westward orientation, even as large, one that occasionally crosses the Pact states and the they grapple with a proto-insurgency in the once unlikely acces- east, one which has involved bloody “anti-ter- collective psychological border between sion candidates of rorist” operations at the Donetsk airport, and Romania and Bul- with the downing of a Ukrainian helicopter paramnesia and outright amnesia. garia. Even Serbia, gunship over Slavyansk by a suspiciously so- once utterly non phisticated surface-to-air missile. grata, became a Eu- for an “act of oblivion against all the crimes and ropean Union “associated state” on September here has always been something follies of the past,” the better to pave the way 1, 2013, while of course Ukrainian western comforting, at least, in the equation of for a European post-war renaissance. ambitions have touched off a crisis more or Tthe Dnieper with the Ukrainian state, in It is hardly surprising that European regimes less unprecedented in recent European affairs. the permanency and predeterminacy of the riv- across the spectrum of time and space would The imposition of a Brussels-imposedacquis er, in its succor and its centrality, though there express this sort of sentiment about the incon- communautaire was expected to uproot the has always been something equally disconcert- venient past. But they have perfected it in the firmly ensconced antagonisms of the various ing in the hazards of its cataracts, and its capaci- modern age, with the grandest act of political states that lie to the east. Ukrainian westerniz- ty to separate a land and its people. Two lieux de damnatio memoriae of all, the present incarna- ers like Yuri Andrukhovych may be forgiven mémoire situated along the banks of the river— tion of the European Union. While the Treaty for hoping that the historical juncture had at Taras Hill and Mezhyhirya—provide a poi- of Lisbon pays lip service to the “cultural, re- last arrived at which Time would no longer gnant illustration of this dichotomy. “No one,” ligious and humanist inheritance of Europe,” represent a violent torrent, but something the geographer Rudnytsky would later posit, “is it is in fact an act of historical oblivion writ rather gentler. Yet Russia in particular re- able to repeat the impressions which fill the soul improbably large, one that occasionally cross- mains a tense, as opposed to relaxed, society, of every Ukrainian when he looks down from es the collective psychological border between according to scholar Ewa Thompson, where this beautiful observation point of Shevchen- paramnesia and outright amnesia. “memories are still grievances calling for ac- ko’s grave upon the majestic river below.” It was tion against the Other, rather than being sig- also along the Dnieper that the deposed Yanu- or jean monnet, the architect of Eu- nals to commemorate the events of the past.” kovych built his secret estate at Mezhyhirya, ropean integration, “Europe has never Life in the public square of such a society can, that obscene monument to malfeasance and ap- Fexisted. It is not the addition of sovereign particularly for those of a more liberal bent, palling taste, with its €8-million chandeliers, its nations met together in councils that makes an be utterly taxing. Ukraine has historically personal zoo, and its floating banquet halls—a entity of them. We must genuinely create Eu- partaken of this cultural tendency, no doubt, site that has been transformed into a decidedly rope; it must become manifest to itself.” It was but its liberal and Europhile elements are in- instructive “museum of corruption.” with considerable clarity that Harold Macmil- creasingly attracted to the alternative. And From that grave on Taras Hill, the journey lan described Monnet’s plan as “not just a piece yet an existential threat still looms from the upriver to Mezhyhirya—a world away—is of convenient machinery,” but rather “a revolu- east, and as European Union policymakers less than a hundred miles. The Dnieper, once tionary and almost mystical conception.” like Jean-Claude Juncker and Carl Bildt find again, offers an invaluable lesson to Ukrainians The end of the Cold War only seemed to themselves warning anyone who will listen and outside observers alike. For just as Ukraine vindicate this bold attempt to put paid to that the “old debate between peace and war in is obliged to straddle east and west, it is obliged the traditional European nation-state. Com- Europe is not behind us” and that a “danger- to balance the need to remember with the mentators aligned events with the prophetic ous landscape” has been created by an “open- need to forget, the need to maintain what Yuri “end” of history and the triumph of liberal ly revisionist Russia.” It is unsurprising, then, Andrukhovych called the Ukrainian “Book of democracy. Yet, as we know, the great wheel that the European Union flags that graced Memory tens of thousands of pages long” with of history had not actually ground to a halt. Independence Square during the dramatic the need to repudiate and reconcile the worst “For whilst the ‘end of history’ theorists could protests of last winter have quickly given way elements of that very same book. And all the chatter about the triumph of liberalism,” the to national flags and nationalist rhetoric. while, the Dnieper dependably discharges its jurist Ian Ward wrote, “the European Union “God knows what is the final destination,” flow down toward the Black Sea, half the time peered anxiously across its south-eastern bor- admitted Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny tranquil, and half the time in spate.

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by GERALD NACHMAN

ne summer in 1953, Methodically, he had listed the names of rarely been beyond the Bay Area—not even seven years before his all the cities we would visit in his distinc- to Lake Tahoe or Yosemite, where it seemed death, my father and tive, neat, squared-off lettering, like words as if everyone in my class at school vaca- I went on an unlikely on a blueprint. He wrote with a big pencil tioned regularly. coast-to-coast odyssey. from the furniture store he worked at, E. It was strange that my father and I should The first I heard of our Bercovich & Sons. go on a long train trip together, for we had journey east by train On that sheet of graph paper, which I still spent little social time in each other’s com- was a night in early May when I noticed him own, he inscribed the cities and the mileage pany—just the occasional Oakland Oaks Oat the dining room table, his downstairs desk. between them, and the days and times of our ball game or weekends grimly toiling with He was bent over a sheet of graph paper on arrival. We were to begin June 14, a week af- the mower on the front lawn. which he had written out an “itinerary,” a ter school let out, and return July 30, a day Exactly why he devised the trip, why new word to me, for our trip. before my mother’s forty-first birthday. he decided to bring me along and not my We would travel aboard the gleaming mother, remains part of the mystery. He Gerald Nachman is the author of Seriously new “Vista Dome” train, departing from must have seen it as a coming-of-age rite. Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s the Oakland “Mole,” the dingy downtown It might have been my father’s way to get and 1960s, Raised on Radio, and Right Here station, with our first stop in Denver two to know me better, or perhaps his attempt on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan’s Amer- days hence. I knew nothing of Denver, ex- to show me the world, wise me up, take me ica. He currently working on a book about the cept the omelet named for it, nor indeed of out of myself, give me a little sophistica-

great Broadway musical show-stoppers. most of the places I was about to see. I’d tion, and perhaps cure me of what he saw Tudor Russ Illustration:

32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 as my fears and inhibitions. I don’t recall an even flat surface on top of which he gen- even resembled Sanders. A Peoria critic (in my mother’s role in all this, just as I don’t tly laid his folded slacks, jackets and neck- a crumbling review I once found pressed remember much of her presence in my early ties, which had been wrapped around an old in an old Theatre Arts magazine) predicted life except as a calm, quiet, reassuring wom- Life magazine, the ends pressed flat inside. a bright future for him in New York. “We an dutifully slipping tuna sandwiches into Only a small hole remained, into which he expect much of Leonard Nachman in years paper bags for my lunch each day. set his shaving kit. Everything fit snugly, to come,” it read. When we chugged east via Union Pacific, nothing jammed into I was fifteen and my father was fifty-one. place, no forcing the I never really thought about how old he lid shut. He snapped I now sense that he was as unsure was—he seemed that same vague age that the clasps closed, all all parents appear to a kid—much less what ready to go. of how to be a father as I was it meant to be a man in your early fifties My dad was a ves- then. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would tige of the classic Vic- uncertain of how to be his son. ever be fifty. I seemed permanently stuck in torian-era father—a my mid-teens, and it wasn’t until I stepped man who believed I thought of him as—and remark- off the train six weeks later, back home, that that parents ruled I felt a little less un-stuck. and were not pals to ably even called him—“father,” But whatever would we—this confident, their kids, as warmly strong-jawed, middle-aged man and part-time depicted in Life with like a child from the 1890s. actor so at ease in the world and his gawky, Father, Father Knows stuttering teenage son—find to say to each Best, or The Adventures other on a six-week journey? How would we of Ozzie and Harriet. In the 1950s, parents The merriest sound I recall in our home manage, forced to confront one another con- fussed much less over their kids, who were is of my father holding forth with friends in stantly without my mother to intervene or my left to their own devices. the living room as I listened avidly on a top school and his job to keep us apart? When he wasn’t warning me against be- stair (“Lenny, tell that story about…”). I can We would soon find out. My father and coming a “lunkhead,” his favorite term of still see him in his big chair, legs crossed, cig- I set out that summer of ’53 to discov- derision, he would caution, “Don’t be a arette stuck sideways in his mouth, squint- er America, or at least to see some of it. schmo,” the cleaned-up version of schmuck. ing through smoke as he entertains. He was Whether we would get to know each other He had a certain correct way to do every- never without a pack of Chesterfields and was another matter. thing, whether it was parting his hair, mak- a large chrome Ronson lighter. He wielded ing a bed, cracking an egg, or sterilizing his cigarette like a prop. ur journey was itself an exciting a safety pin to extract a splinter from my but scary notion. The ultimate des- thumb, one of his medical specialties. He he highlight of the train ride Otination was the convention of a fra- seemed to have mastered much of life’s de- was sitting in the Vista Dome, watch- ternal organization called Pi Tau Pi, sort of a tail work. Ting in all directions as the countryside Jewish Shriners, held in Virginia Beach. But In the end, though, I now sense that passed by outside, as in a travelogue, with the route was circuitous: Denver, Chicago, he was as unsure of how to be a father fast-shifting scenery. I was also fascinated Peoria, Lansing, Buffalo, New York, Wash- as I was uncertain of how to be his son. I ordering meals in the dining car, a new con- ington, D.C., then back to Oakland via the thought of him as—and remarkably even cept. Puzzlingly, you had to write out your Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. called him—“father,” like a child from the order instead of having a waiter take it down. For some reason, one of my most viv- 1890s. Now and then, to experiment, I Couldn’t waiters write, I wondered, or was id memories is of watching my father, a would call him “Dad,” but it felt unnatu- this some old railroad ritual? The waiters and one-time traveling man, pack a suitcase—a rally chummy and never quite fit him; nor porters—all black, of course—were friendly, thing of beauty that typified his precise, tidy, was he ever “Pa” or “Pop.” He called me at our beck and call. The cramped Pullman authoritative nature. He would neatly lay “son” or sometimes “Jer.” berth rocked to and fro until you slipped into everything out on his bed next to the suit- I was both wary of and in awe of him. sleep like a baby in a cradle. case, then sit at the end of the bed, cigarette It was an odd anomaly; the cheeriness he The trip was also notable as the time my clamped in his teeth, studying the clothes, exuded with others as opposed to the re- teenage libido kicked in, perhaps triggered mentally packing them beforehand. Then, moteness I felt at home. A suave and at- by the rolling train ride itself. Trains are as with great resolve and in total silence in tractive man, he stood five foot ten but sexy as they are mysterious, the setting of what seemed an almost religious ceremony, seemed taller because of his outgoing man- countless thrillers and film noir classics, he would carefully, delicately, fold items into ner, virility, and presence. Engaging and from North by Northwest to Strangers on a squares so that everything fit against every- dapper, he moved with the easy grace of an Train and Dark Passage—an entire movie thing else perfectly, like a cloth jigsaw puzzle. actor, which he was, though he never made genre, really. Walking up and down the First he would arrange the shoes in their a nickel at it. He earned his living selling narrow aisles brings you up close and per- heavy wooden shoe trees (relics today), then sofas and dining room tables. sonal with female passengers. his shirts, then rolled-up socks around the From his days with the Peoria Players, he I remember nothing of Denver ex- shirts, then the sweaters and pajamas and performed in “little theater,” as it was then cept sweating (or “shvitzing” as my dad shorts, then two belts wound and tied with called, playing acerbic, wise guy best friends, called it). I had never before experienced a rubber band. When he finished, there was much in the George Sanders manner; he hot, damp, sticky, humid weather, not to

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 33 mention warm rain. Chicago was equally shabby Oaks ballpark was a crumbling park—not just wider but much higher. sweltering and moist, the first blast of the stadium made of wood, ringed by liquor I’d never been in a stadium with an upper horrid heat and humidity we encountered stores, card rooms, and pool halls, but it deck; it felt like an open-air opera house. during the entire trip. But nothing could had an intimacy. My image of where pro- I found it hard to believe that the dia- dampen the experience of seeing my first fessional baseball was played got formed mond was the same size as the one at home. Major League Baseball game at hallowed there, and left me utterly unprepared for It was so smooth, with dirt the color and Wrigley Field. We had only been in Chi- the splendor of Wrigley Field. silkiness of milk chocolate, the infield art- cago a day when my father fully manicured with sharply announced that his old boy- etched foul lines, not a pebble hood chum had got us tickets to disturb the satiny surface. to a Cubs-Phillies game the And against the outfield brick next day. wall tumbled the fabled ivy, I was a baseball fanatic, my baseball’s Hanging Gardens of bedroom walls plastered with Babylon. In Oakland, outfield photos of my heroes—Phil fences were plastered with fad- Rizzuto, Ted Williams, Stan ed advertisements for Hertz Musial. I followed the dramat- Shoe Repair or Big Ben Da- ic saga of my hometown Oak- vis Overalls (“Hit Fence, Win land Oaks as rabidly as any Suit”). Chicago Cubs fan. Now I was As luck would have it, the about to actually see some of Phillies’ pitcher that day was the famous names I had only their ace, Robin Roberts, read about in Baseball Digest. whose name sounded ficti- I knew all the numbers of the tious, too alliterative to be stars, their nicknames, even genuine, like a hero out of one a few batting averages. I de- of the John R. Tunis baseball spised math but loved poring books I devoured. Yet there over arcane baseball stats. Roberts stood on the mound. It’s a cliché now, but base- I didn’t pay much attention ball was the major strand that to the game itself, too mes- tied my father and me togeth- merized by the setting and the er, a passion we shared (along surging roar of the massive with The Jack Benny Show). crowd, unlike the sparse Oaks He had taken me to Oakland Oaks ball- I’d heard of Wrigley, but it hadn’t oc- crowds of some six-thousand nattering fans. games at home, often with his friend at the curred to me that it had any connection We sat on the third-base side, in the store, Sam Bercovich, or the bridge-playing to chewing gum. It just had a wonderful lower deck, above the dugout, where my pals who could make my father laugh by ring to it, like “Polo Grounds,” “Fenway father kept score, as he always did, in telling jokes too sophisticated or dirty for Park,” “Busch Stadium,” “Forbes Field,” that neat legible hand, saying little but me. These were the men, with their wives, and “Ebbets Field.” The very word “field” watching intently, never cheering or boo- who made up my dad’s circle of wisecrack- evokes sandlots and pastures (as outfields ing, a true spectator of the sport, always ing cronies. were once known), but what or who were disgusted when a hotdog runner tried to We were not a family that played together Fenway, Forbes, and Ebbets? score from second on a weak single and or traveled together—no circuses, movies, My dad and I would be seeing a day got thrown out at home, whereupon my or picnics—so going anywhere with my dad game, of course, as this was long before dad would exhale his familiar exasperated was an occasion. A ballgame was a way to be lights were installed at Wrigley. One of sigh. together, to fulfill a parental duty without the vivid moments of the trip (indeed of The Cubs game was just a routine mid- really engaging each other. We sat side by my life up till then) was walking through week ball game, but for me it felt like the side with our eyes fixed on the field. shadows under the stands into the bright seventh game of the World Series, and no As a Pacific Coast League kid, totally sunlight and grandeur of the biggest, game since has come close to surpassing the wrapped up in the fortunes of the Oakland greenest outfield I had ever imagined. rush I felt that afternoon in Chicago, not Oaks, I had no rooting interest in any Ma- You had to be there and you had to be even when we got to New York and took jor League teams—to me just glittery names fifteen. I was overcome, more speechless a subway to Ebbets Field to see a Brooklyn unlike the very real San Francisco Seals, than usual. Dodgers game in which Jackie Robinson Portland Beavers, Hollywood Stars, or Sac- I had no idea that a baseball park could stole home—about the last time any Major ramento Solons (whatever a “solon” was). be so vast and so beautiful and so—well, League runner ever did that. Fabled Ebbets The National and American Leagues existed intensely green, a bright jade hue I’d nev- Field looked puny, a “bandbox” park com- in another galaxy far, far away. er seen before, not a blade of grass out of pared to Wrigley. Emeryville, “Home of the Oakland alignment. Here was a lawn I would glad- We pushed on to Peoria, my dad’s home- Oaks,” was a dingy region of the city that ly mow. Wrigley Field seemed ten times town, to visit his boyhood chum Louie later became a low-rent artist’s colony. The as big as the ramshackle Oakland Oaks Fleischer, in whose liquor store backroom I

34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 sat while he and my dad laughed out front. I I’d ever heard, a parody of a New York ac- York, with old ladies trying on fur coats, had never met any of my father’s childhood cent. She and Bob, a tall, square-shaped strutting up and down before long mirrors pals, which gave him a reality other than as man with a pink face, white hair combed as I sat in the back room amid piles of stoles my dad. He had a past, a boyhood, just as I back smartly, and a booming voice full of and remnants, thumbing trade journals did. He had once been me. crude wisecracks, also had a driver and were about the fur-coat industry and wondering From Peoria we headed for Springfield to on first-name terms with Vincent Sardi, at the weirdness of it all—such as why buy- visit Lincoln’s home and grave. My dad, I founder of the famous Broadway restaurant ing a fur coat required endless discussions learned, was intensely American. Beyond I’d read all about. Through Sardi, she could about cuffs, pockets, collars, and linings. To patriotism or name, all the coats tionalism, he just looked alike. In her loved the coun- shop, I felt like an try and its lore, a outsider in every trait that I inherit- way, as a boy in an ed. Like him, I’ve adult world, as a always been far hayseed Oaklander more fascinated on sophisticated by America than Fifth Avenue, as a Europe. My father male in a female never traveled out- domain, and as a side the United middle-class kid States, content to in a mink-lined stay home and read world. about the world in Sadie loved National Geograph- showing off New ic. Going to Europe York—or just then was like a trip showing off for to the moon. her small-town We rode to Lan- cousins, like the sing, Michigan, to day she strode into visit my father’s dy- Sardi’s and, in her namic sister Mary, asthmatic voice, her husband, and embraced its own- my first cousins, er: “How ah ya then on to Detroit to meet my very rich snag tickets to any hit show with a quick tahday, Vincent? Ya got a nize table faw us?” great Aunt Julia, who showed up in a chauf- phone call. Vincent did indeed, bowing slightly as he feur-driven car, wearing a spooky black veil Sadie was absurdly generous, forever be- personally escorted us to a prize red leath- and smelling of face powder. That courtesy call stowing gifts on guests for any and all occa- er booth. With its burgundy walls and tiny made for a drab afternoon. I was more inter- sions. Whenever we came down to dinner yellow-shaded lamps on the tables, Sardi’s ested in talking to Aunt Julia’s black chauffeur in their Great Neck home, a small package seemed to me the pinnacle of New York than in her stories of life with Uncle Dolph would be waiting on our plates. The house sophistication, the epicenter of Broadway, (changed in the war from “Adolf”). Family was equipped with an unused swimming which of course it was. stories never failed to bore me. Most of the pool, a vast back lawn, and a black cook I was then deeply immersed in cartooning aunts, uncles, and cousins I met on this trip I named Dorcus that Bob kidded naughti- and transfixed by the famous wall-to-wall never saw again. ly. I accepted the daily gifts with fumbling caricatures of celebrities that festooned the thanks. It was a manner of displaying affec- showcase restaurant, hundreds of sketch- t long last we aimed toward New tion, their New Yorkers’ way of garnering es as far as the eye could see. I asked if it York City, the place I most wanted to appreciation and respect. was OK if I walked around to examine the Asee, home of still more distant cous- Sadie waddled but did so with great au- caricatures up close, difficult to do without ins, Bob and Sadie, much talked about in our thority, barking raspy orders over the phone leaning across people’s salads. I was struck family because of their wealth and connec- to her saleswomen and to husband Bob, not just by the drawings but by the inspired tions. Bob ran a Cadillac agency in Jamaica, who obeyed her every command. Sadie notion of decorating a restaurant with them. Long Island, and Sadie operated a Fifth Ave- boasted how she had worked her way up in Even now, when I meet someone for a drink nue fur salon, Corbo Furriers. It would have the garment trade in classic fashion, starting at Sardi’s, I secretly want to gaze at the walls been hard to meet a more representative cap- at sixteen sewing linings into fur coats. She for new caricatures. italistic couple in Manhattan. once casually mentioned that Edna Ferber More thrilling was my first Broadway They seemed definitive New Yorkers in was a customer. It never occurred to me that play and musical. Sadie got my dad and me every way. Sadie was a short squat lady with anyone in my family might have known center-row orchestra seats for two big hits a commanding presence and a wheezing anybody of interest to me. that summer of ’53, Dial M for Murder and voice (every sentence ended with her gulp- Sade ordered lunch for us every day at Can-Can, a new Cole Porter musical. I was

Photo: Tsn/Zumapress/Newscom Photo: ing air) who spoke in the broadest accent her salon, the most tedious place in all New shocked how small Broadway theaters were,

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35 nothing like what I was led to expect by Can-Can oozed sex: not just the cho- the female guides stuffed into colonial the mythology of the New York theatrical rus girls or even Gwen Verdon slithering blouses as they demonstrated spinning world, where every theater promised to be across the stage as the snake in a slinky wheels and pewter forges—cute, but no as grand as Versailles. The gilded interiors soft-core “Garden of Eden” ballet, but also match for those hot saucy can-can girls I’d were pretty, with huge chandeliers, but no Porter’s risqué lyrics, full of leering dou- left behind in New York. bigger than the Fox and Paramount movie ble entendres in songs like “Never Give Finally we had reached Virginia Beach, houses in downtown Oakland. Anything Away,” “Come Along with Me,” site of the Pi Tau Pi conclave, the business- I had envisioned every theater as Radio and the show’s big hit, “It’s All Right with men’s organization whose actual purpose City Music Hall, which we had toured Me,” whose theme—that it’s OK to be I was unsure of, except to hold annual attracted to a wom- conventions. My father was greeted by evan other than your eryone: “Lenny! Over here! Ed Ziegler— I’d gotten to know my father a little girlfriend—startled Cleveland!”…“Len Nachman? Henry the romantic in me; a Friedkin—Miami!” “Nice to see ya again, better just by watching him interact scandalous concept, I Len.” “That your boy, Len?Fine looking thought. young man!” with old friends, boyhood buddies, But easily the most Most of the men had their wives or girl- dazzling number was friends along, all having the time of their and far-flung family members. But its brilliant title song, lives. I was the only teenager present and which exhaustively lists spent most of the three days reading in nice as it would be to say that my all the people, creatures, my room or on the beach, trying to keep and even machines that out from underfoot so my dad could mix father and I bonded during our long can can-can. Like the with fraternity brothers. I turned up at chorus girls, the aston- meal times, feeling like an alien. I’d never trip East, in fact I wasn’t much ishing, cart-wheeling, been around partying grownups before, a mind-boggling dou- raucous, semi-boozy scene I was glad to closer to him than the day we’d left. ble and triple rhymes escape from each night after dinner, re- left me agog at Porter’s treating to our room to watch TV or read fertile mind and lyric a book. a day before, when my dad whispered facility (“If an ass in Astrakhan can / If a bass When the three-day convention end- to me that we were joining the “yokels.” in Saskatchewan can / Then, baby, you can can- ed, we took the return train home via the Majestic “Broadway” was surrounded by can, too!”). southern route, a long stretch about which tacky Times Square joints, swirling litter, There may be better, deeper, greater all I remember is stops at the Grand Can- hot dog venders, Good Humor carts, and shows than Can-Can, but for me it still de- yon and Los Angeles, where my flamboy- bums of every description—not quite the fines a certain kind of musical now mostly ant big shot Uncle Carlyle had just pur- splendor I had long imagined. vanished—a musical with a light tread, a ro- chased a high-tech gizmo called a “tape Can-Can was playing at the Shubert The- mantic twinkle, and innate pizzazz. When recorder,” with a microphone he let us ater in fabled Shubert Alley. Sadie had got it arrived in ’53 nobody could have known speak into. He took us to Sportsmen’s us tickets to a matinee, a strange experience. that it would be among the last of its kind, Lodge, the presumed home of Jack Benny’s I hadn’t realized Broadway shows were per- then entering its final golden decade. Four famed Sportsmen Quartet, where we ran formed during the day. It seemed to me then, years later, West Side Story arrived with a into radio’s famed announcer Ken Carpen- and still does, that a musical needs the splen- bound, packing heat. ter (a Peoria boy!). dor of nighttime to glitter properly. A musical, Can-Can opened me up to everything a And then, after a day at the Farmer’s to work its wiles, should disrobe in the dark. great musical can be. It beguiled, moved, Market and Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Your first musical is as special as a first and excited me in equal parts, blend- suddenly we were home again, six weeks af- kiss—or so Can-Can was for me. I was ing all of the most bewitching elements ter we’d pulled out of downtown Oakland knocked out by the frisky energetic dances of theater into one delicious, explosive, bound for Denver. I’d gotten to know my and by the sexy, frilly, dance-hall hostesses. I brilliant, irresistible package, everything father a little better just by watching him was both embarrassed and turned on by the performed with high energy, great skill, interact with old friends, boyhood buddies, line of can-can girls as they leaped high in personality, and style. And yet the show’s and far-flung members of the Nachman the air, skirts lifted to reveal lacy petticoats, greatest appeal, and miracle, is how it clan. But nice as it would be to say that my garters, and pink panties, before landing in all felt fresh and tossed-off, polished but father and I bonded during our long trip perfectly executed splits—a highly erotic ex- playful, unlabored, extemporaneous, ut- East, in fact I wasn’t much closer to him perience for a lad of fifteen from out west. terly of the moment. than the day we’d left. Those saucy chorines set my head swim- We had gotten along fine and somehow ming and eyes bulging. I’d never glimpsed y dad was more fascinated found enough to talk about, but there were anything quite so exciting except for my Es- by Colonial Williamsburg, a no heart-to-heart chats, no revelations or in- quire desk calendar Vargas girls, but each of Mmuch-hyped mid-Fifties phe- sights, no transcendent life lessons, nothing the girls on the Shubert stage was alive and nomenon that struck me as a bland his- nearly that dramatic. I think we both just throbbing, only yards away, jumping and tory lesson (a much livelier theme park, felt relieved that we had survived each other. kicking and whirling. Disneyland, was just a year away), despite It was a start.

36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014

london CALLING

by JAMES DELINGPOLE Kipper Time What does UKIP’s victory mean for Britain?

bunch of fruitcakes, The next thing Edmunds knew, she’d ereignty to the unelected bureaucrats of the loonies and closet rac- received a letter from the Lewes District European Union; they want to overturn the ists”: this was how Prime Council informing her that she must attend status quo of a world run by politically correct, Minister David Cameron “equalities training for councilors” in order nanny-state types like the ones who harassed once characterized the to “gain a better understanding of the Coun- Edmunds. Now they think they’ve done it. UK Independence Party cil’s equality obligations.” An anonymous UKIP, they believe, is the future of democracy. (UKIP). And now those complaint had been made; a self-appointed lunatics are taking over the asylum. In one of the panel of three councilors from rival political ut is it? The big temptation when writ- Abiggest upsets in recent British political history, parties had formed a tribunal to discuss her ing for an American conservative audi- Nigel Farage and his maverick outsiders beat all case and chose her punishment. Edmunds Bence is to overegg the pudding and make three of their mainstream rivals (Conservative; wrote back to tell them where they could claims that owe more to wishful thinking than Labour; Liberal Democrats) in May’s European stick their decision: “We do not live in a fas- to observed reality. Yes, there is much that is re- Union elections to become Britain’s dominant cist state quite yet.” markable and encouraging about UKIP’s rise. party in the Brussels parliament. But there are reasons to be wary of UKIP also performed spectacular- pinning more hopes on Britain’s frag- ly well in Britain’s local government ile, new, and untested Tea Party than elections, in some places capturing it can realistically bear. as much as 51 percent of the vote. For all its recent successes, UKIP UKIP hit British politics like an remains a party without representa- earthquake. Were there any seismic tion in the place that really matters, indictors? Ought we to have seen Westminster. While it now has twen- this coming? Consider the case of ty-four Members in the European Donna Rachel Edmunds, one of Parliament—eleven more than it did UKIP’s newly elected representatives last time round—their role is essen- and local councilor in the South East tially a ceremonial one. All the Eu- English borough of Lewes. ropean Union’s most important new Shortly after her victory, Edmunds legislation is enacted by an unelected outlined her views on liberty for a body of twenty-eight commission- local newspaper. Though personal- ers, not by MEPs. So if the EU wants ly opposed to discrimination of any to create some fatuous new legisla- kind, Edmunds told the reporter, she tion outlawing a key ingredient from believes that business owners ought to Nigel Farage in a dour moment after the vote. Chanel No. 5 perfume, as it did in be free to choose their customer base. So, May, there’s not a damn thing any of for example, gay hoteliers should be able to de- Not all UKIP’s members—“Kippers”—are UKIP’s MEPs can do to prevent it. clare their lodging a gay-only establishment, if hardcore libertarian like Edmunds. Indeed, This democratic deficit, of course, is why they wish. Jewish shop owners should be able to they hold such wildly varied views that Farage UKIP was founded in the first place: as an act turn away neo-Nazis. And so on. “It’s their busi- has likened party business to “herding cats.” of protest against an iniquitous system where- ness,” she argued. “Why should they be forced But if there’s one thing they all have in com- by as much as 80 percent of all new legislation to serve or sell to anyone?” mon it’s Edmunds’ Tea Party-esque attitude. imposed on Britain originates not in London, They’re sick of the conventional political class but from those faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. James Delingpole is executive editor of they dismissively call LibLabCon; they’re ap- No one has captured this absurdity more

Breitbart London. palled by the way Britain has ceded its sov- memorably than Farage did in his 2010 wel- Press/Newscom Lock/ZUMA Stephen Photo:

38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 { coming speech to the dient: weapons-grade and infrastructure but also served to give many EU’s newly chosen dullness. Like Sovi- Britons the uncomfortable sensation of living president, an insipid UKIP may not et-era committee meet- in a country they no longer felt was their own. Belgian by the name of ings, the workings of Immigration, above all, was the hot-but- Herman Van Rompuy: hold a working the EU have been de- ton issue that UKIP exploited in the recent majority on a liberately devised to be elections. It was a potentially risky move: We were told that when so mind-numbingly Since 1968, when Enoch Powell made his we had a president, we’d single British boring as to repel close infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, even see a giant global political town council, scrutiny by the millions discussing immigration has been widely figure, a man who would of ordinary people who viewed as tantamount to racism. But Farage be the political leader for nor does it have would be appalled if had cunningly pre-empted this by con- 500 million people, the they understood what ducting a purge of his party’s membership. man that would repre- any MPs. What was really going on. Anyone who had previously belonged to an sent all of us on the world it does possess, This was what the avowedly racist organization, such as the stage, the man whose job surreptitiously Euro- British National Party, was forbidden from was so important that of however, is a phile David Cameron joining UKIP. course you’re paid more bridgehead. tried to exploit when, This didn’t stop UKIP’s opponents from than President Obama. on becoming leader of trying to tar it with the racist slur, anyway. Well, I’m afraid what the Conservative par- The campaign against UKIP by both the we got was you….I don’t { ty in 2005, he urged left and right of the political and media want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma members to stop “banging on about Eu- class was conducted with a relentlessness of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade rope”—as if somehow it were a tedious issue and viciousness unprecedented in recent bank clerk. And the question I want to ask is: “Who of no real consequence best swept under the British politics. It even saw an unlikely al- are you?” I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe carpet. Tactically this made some sense: Since liance between Conservative Central HQ had ever heard of you. Margaret Thatcher’s 1990 “No! No! No!” and its traditional enemies at the Guard- speech rejecting further integration, there had ian: The former anonymously leaked The speech went viral on YouTube and led been a huge, potentially election-losing rift stories to the latter, designed to expose to Farage’s being “summoned to the head- within the Tory party between Europhiles and UKIP’s candidates as racists, homophobes, master’s office,” as one UKIP spokesman Euroskeptics. Strategically, however, it would and unelectable weirdos. memorably described the stern rebuke and prove disastrous, for it enabled hefty fine the party leader received at the UKIP to reposition itself—in con- hands of Jerzy Buzek, president of the Euro- trast to Cameron’s “heir to Blair” pean Council. (There are lots of presidents Vichy Tory party—as the true in- in the EU.) Farage’s remarks may have been heritor of the Thatcherite tradition. cruel but they were hardly inaccurate. How on earth did a nation as proud, independent, kip was founded in 1993 and bloody-minded as Britain ever land itself by Alan Sked, a London in a predicament where everything from the USchool of Economics history degree of curvature on its imported bananas lecturer, but until the driven Farage to the brightness of its light bulbs is dictated took over as leader in 2006, it had by sallow, dreary, communitarian drones like been very much a fringe outfit, riv- Belgium’s Mister Rumpy Pumpy? en—as so many small, new parties And the answer: “engrenage.” This is the are—by factional disputes. Farage, French word for the ratcheting process by a privately educated, Mr. Toad-like which the European Union enlarges itself former City of London metals trader by stealth. As the EU’s founder, cognac with an apparently boundless capaci- salesman Jean Monnet recognized from ty for drink and a charmed life (so far the start, no nation would willingly sacri- he has survived testicular cancer, be- UKIP campaign message. fice its sovereignty for some pan-European ing run over by a car, and a light aircraft crash), ideal. Therefore, from its inception, the EU brought a new energy, mission, and purpose to The campaign backfired badly, cement- was arranged in such a way as to grow in the party. ing UKIP’s image in the public imag- stages, keeping its supranational ambitions He was helped by a number of factors: a ination as a group of plucky outsiders a secret from all but the ruling elite. First, better-informed public growing increasingly speaking up for the common man (and it would pose purely as a free trade zone; aware of the menace posed by the burgeon- woman) against the remote and mono- only when member states were enmeshed ing European socialistic superstate; a breached lithic Establishment. And it wasn’t just too deeply to escape would it reveal its true electoral promise by Cameron to offer voters a natural Thatcherite strongholds such as ambitions for a full political union. referendum on Europe he never subsequent- Essex that fell to Farage’s purple-roset- To this toxic brew of Machiavellian de- ly delivered; and, above all, a massive wave of ted insurgency. Equally vulnerable, it viousness and labyrinthine complexity, the immigration that threatened not only to overturned out, were traditional Labour seats EU’s inventors added one final deadly ingre- whelm Britain’s hard-pressed public services in working class Northern towns such as

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39 Rotherham, where UKIP won ten of the the spectator INTERVIEW twenty-one seats up for election. So far, then, so very good for UKIP. It may not hold a working majority on a single British town council, nor does it have any MPs. What it does possess, however, is a bridgehead. Its strategy now will be to build on its local power base and focus its considerable resources (the party is generously by JEFFREY LORD funded by several rich former Tory donors) on capturing marginal seats where the local Tory/Labour/Lib Dem majority can most easily be overturned. A Trump Card hat farage calls a new era of “four-party politics” in Britain The Donald on Paul Ryan, Al Sharpton, and child-rearing. Whas sent all three of UKIP’s mainstream rivals into a state of panic. Especially hard-hit have been the Liberal Democrats, e is one of the world’s JL: What should be the approach to help- who lost all but one of their seats in Europe most famous businessmen, ing business thrive again? Has President to UKIP and are now in the throes of a lead- the founder of the Trump Obama poisoned the atmosphere? ership crisis. Labour leaders, too, have been organization’s global em- DT: The president has absolutely poisoned completely wrong-footed: They now realize pire of glittering towers, people’s minds, and he’s using a very popu- that their pro-EU, anti-austerity message just hotels, and golf cours- list approach—where, you know, everybody isn’t carrying the traction they’d hoped with es—and on the side, he is the host of one of can live very nicely and nobody has to work. their natural working class constituency. HAmerica’s hottest television shows. Relaxing But this was always a country that was based But Cameron’s Conservatives have the recently in his New York City office with on work. And the sad fact is that this is not most complicated challenge. Britain’s fast-re- stunning views of Fifth Avenue and Central the first time this has happened to a coun- covering economy ought to be, in theory, Park, Donald Trump spoke to me about his try. Those countries have all failed eventually. enough to scrape them a working majority at take on a range of issues. A lightly edited It’s only upon the failure that something can the 2015 general election. This won’t happen, transcript follows: come out of it. Because it’s very hard to beat though, if UKIP splits its vote, which puts the rhetoric of “gee whiz, we’re going to have Cameron on the horns of a dilemma. Some Jeffrey Lord: China is now about to over- an income redistribution in this country.” on his party’s right are urging a pact with take the U.S. as the world’s number one Problem is nobody’s going to be working. UKIP, which is highly unlikely. Cameron economy. What’s the problem with Amer- That’s when it gets corrected, historically. and Farage cordially loathe one another, and ican leadership? And that’s something that shouldn’t happen UKIP’s membership are so belligerent they’d Donald Trump: They don’t understand the to us. probably never allow it anyway. The other ob- challenge. And the challenge is only going Hopefully we don’t have to go down that vious solution would be for the Conservatives to get worse, and China is two years ahead path. But when it gets fixed is when it blows to toss their frustrated right wing constituen- of schedule. Our leaders are impotent. They up. It will blow up, if that’s going to be the case. cy more red meat, but this is equally implausi- have no idea what’s going on with respect to But the minds of so many have been poisoned ble given Cameron’s mushy centrist instincts. China—I can also say with respect to Russia, by President Obama that it’s really an incredible So this time next year, Britain may reluc- and virtually every other place on the planet. thing. An incredible thing has taken place. tantly end up voting in by default a govern- But China, what they have done economi- ment led by a Labour leader, Ed Miliband, so cally is incredible. They have taken our jobs, JL: The French economist Thomas Piket- uncharismatic and odd that in normal times they make our products, they have done so ty has written a book called Capital in he would be deemed unelectable. brilliantly for themselves and it’s hard to be- the Twenty-First Century, in which he These, however, are very much not normal lieve we allow it to happen. opposes almost any accumulation of times. On the contrary, they are what the an- We have all the cards. We built China. Be- wealth. How would you answer him? cient Chinese curse calls “interesting” ones. cause the money they’ve sucked out of this DT: You’re not going to have very many Thanks to the UKIP insurgency, almost any- country has gone to build bridges and schools people working in this world if that were the thing is now possible, from a hard-left Labour and roadways and everything, things that we case. People need the incentive and it’s a tre- administration pursuing the high tax-and- don’t have, that we can’t build. And on top mendous incentive. A thing like that would spend policies that have recently proved so of it they then loan us money. So China is a destroy jobs, it would destroy health care, it ruinous for France, to an aggressively anti-Eu- huge problem and it’s only gotten worse. It’s would destroy education, it would destroy rope, small-government, pro-liberty coalition inconceivable that our leaders don’t see the the world as we know it in free-market soci- of the right, to most permutations in between. China problem in this country. eties. And many of them are doing extremely Whatever else can be said of UKIP, one well. You need the incentive to create wealth, thing is certain: British politics for years hasn’t Jeffrey Lord is a contributing editor to The and that incentive brings about jobs and all been half this exciting. American Spectator. the other things that jobs mean.

40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 JL: How should Republicans structure a everybody it was the best speech, it had House. Right smack in the best location, message to counter class warfare rhetoric the biggest applause. It was by far the big- the old Post Office. And we’re creating that paints them as anti-poor and an- gest applause. By the way, I was the only tremendous numbers of jobs. We’re ba- ti-middle-class? one on the front page [of the Manchester sically rebuilding it as one of the great DT: Well, I see firsthand the dishonesty of Union-Leader]. And a couple of the articles hotels of the world. See, there’s a thing the press, because probably you couldn’t do without nobody gets more press than I tremendous incentives. You do. As an example, last week I know it’s a very expensive was on a Fox program, and I project. A lot of people are very much lambasted Donald going to be employed, a lot Sterling. And then at the very of jobs created. And as you end I said: “On top of which, know, I’m in the process he has the girlfriend from of—pretty close to—finish- hell.” And the haters and the ing up at Trump National very dishonest reporters who Doral, eight-hundred acres have their own agenda, they right in the middle of Mi- didn’t cover what I said about ami. So you know, I mean, Donald Sterling. They only we have tremendous jobs, took the girlfriend from hell we have jobs going up all and they said, “Oh he’s not over the world. blaming Donald Sterling. He’s defending Donald Sterling. JL: What’s your take on Al He’s blaming the girlfriend.” Sharpton and his career? The press is extremely dis- DT: I know Al Sharpton honest. Much of it. Some very well. In fact he was up of it I have great respect for, to my office not so long ago and they’re great people and to apologize ’cause he made a honorable people. But there’s statement that was false, and a large segment of the press he came up and apologized that’s more dishonest than to me actually. Which people anybody I’ve seen in business don’t know, but that’s okay. or anywhere else. And the one Al is doing his thing. He’s just thing you have to do is you doing his thing. He’s been a have to inform the public. The survivor for a long time, a lot public has to know about the of bad things have happened dishonesty of the press because to him—Tawana Brawley these are really bad people and was a disaster—and yet he they don’t tell the truth and survived it. Very few people have no intention of telling could have survived that, be- the truth. And I know who cause, you know, what hap- they are and I would expose pened was wrong. them 100 percent. And I will I’ve always had a very good be doing that. I mean, as I go relationship with Al Sharpton. down the line, I enjoy expos- We are from different worlds ing people for being frauds and, you know, I said, “Mr. Trump had a smattering of ap- in a sense. I thought it was very nice when he would be definitely doing that. I think it’s im- plause.” And I said to myself, what is it—I came up to apologize. I know more about Al portant to know. Because a lot of the public, had a five-minute standing ovation when Sharpton than Al Sharpton knows about him- they think, oh, they read it in the newspaper, I finished. And nobody else got that. You self. But I think this: We have a very disunit- and therefore it must be true. Well many of know, again, they have to reflect what’s go- ed country. More disunited I think than it’s the things you read in the newspaper are abso- ing on. And even people that were up there ever been—not including the Civil War. But I lutely false and really disgustingly false. said “Wow! That was amazing!” ’cause they think other than bullets flying, we’re probably actually said he had a smattering. The fact even worse. I would know how to unite the JL: You recently spoke at a GOP “free- is, you know, I do draw big crowds. country. I get along with many of the peo- dom summit,” sharing the stage with ple that you would say—as an example, Al Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike JL: How many jobs have you created over Sharpton. I mean Al Sharpton, whether he is Lee. What does it say that people respond the years? admits it or not, really likes Donald Trump, to someone like you who is not a Wash- DT: Oh, tens of thousands. Even now, I OK? And you know, he did actually come up ington insider? mean, in four weeks I start work on Penn- to apologize ’cause he said something that was DT: I went to New Hampshire recently sylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a little bit too far out, and he came up and

Illustration: Yogi Love Yogi Illustration: and I made a speech. And I was told by right between the Capitol and the White apologized, and I thought that was nice. But

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41 { Al Sharpton, whatever he does, really does like making America rich weakness. You know, Donald Trump. I don’t know if it’s good for again. You can’t be when you’re weak his people, the people he’s catering to, to hear great if you’re not rich. terrorism comes. Ter- that, but that happens to be the fact. I mean And when I see the Once you make rorism is a terrible I’ve gone to fights with Al Sharpton—Don Republicans wanting the country rich, thing. You don’t see King is Al Sharpton’s friend—and I’ve been to cut Social Security, them; it’s not an army with them at, you know, many fights. But you wanting to cut Medi- you don’t have to fighting an army and know what? The bottom line with Al Sharp- care, wanting to cut worry so much everybody has a dif- ton? He’s doing his thing. He’s doing his thing. all of it—by the way, ferent uniform. You the Democrats nev- about cutting peo- don’t know who they JL: What does American Exceptionalism er mention this, they are, what they are. mean to you? want to do a big num- ple’s medical care But one thing we DT: Well, I think it’s a very dangerous ber on Medicaid—I and cutting Social need is strength. The term in one way, because I heard Putin say- feel differently. I feel other thing, I mean, ing, “Who do they think they are, saying that I want to make Security and the this court system is so they’re exceptional?” You can feel you’re ex- this country—if I were kind of things Paul messed up that these ceptional, but when you start throwing it in president—I’d want terrorists, they go on other countries’ faces or other people’s faces, to make this country Ryan and others trial, they’re on trial I actually think it’s a very dangerous term to so rich, we have such are talking about. for twenty-five years. use. Well, I heard that Putin was saying to potential, that you And people who you somebody—you know I had the Miss Uni- wouldn’t have to take know are guilty—this

verse contest over in Moscow recently, six away and start cutting { isn’t a question of “I months ago, and Putin, by the way, treated people’s Social Security and Medicare. Now, wonder whether or not they did it?”—you us unbelievably well. And it was at that time you do want to take all the fraud and abuse have trials that are going on for twenty and that Putin said, “Who do they think they out, which is a huge number. It has to run twenty-five years. And these guys die of are saying they’re exceptional?” And I under- properly. natural causes before the trial is over. You stand that. You know, he said, “Why are they And you know Obamacare is a disaster. have to do speedy justice and it has to be exceptional? They have killings in the streets. You can have a much better plan for far less very severe. Very severe. Look at what’s going on in Chicago and dif- money. And what we have now is a total ferent places. They have all of this turmoil, catastrophe. But what I would do is make JL: Your children are all involved in the all of the things that are happening in there.” the country strong and make the country Trump organization in a major way. Not And I can tell you that there are many coun- rich, and once you make the country rich, all children of famous or successful par- tries throughout the world that are extremely you don’t have to worry so much about ents turn out so well. Do you have a mes- angry with that term American Exceptional- cutting people’s medical care and cutting sage for parents in this area? ism. Countries that are doing better than we Social Security and the kind of things Paul DT: One thing that was always import- are—far better than we are. You’re looking to Ryan and others are talking about—be- ant to me with my children is no drugs, no get along with the world, and you say you’re cause I don’t think, frankly, that they’re alcohol, no cigarettes. And I used to, from exceptional? So I never particularly like the doing the right thing. I think that peo- the time they were two years old and start- term. I think you can think it, but I’m not sure ple have worked all their lives—you have ed understanding words, I would always it’s something that you should necessarily be many great people in this country—and I say no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes. I talking so much about. By the way, when Rea- don’t think they should be talking about would say it to them loud and clear, and gan used it we were a more exceptional coun- cutting their different elements of life after I would say it strongly. To a point where I try, OK? We were a more exceptional country. a certain period of time. That’s something remember Ivanka once saying, “Dad, don’t When Reagan used it you had no idea that you’re not hearing from Republicans. Un- say it anymore.” But I would say it, because China would be beating us economically and less our country is going to be rich again, I have so many friends that have very smart taking over in two months the mantle of being you’re going to have no choice but to cut kids, but they got involved with drugs and the great economic power. everything and cut it down to the bone. alcohol and other things, and their kids are And I don’t want to see that happen. a basket case right now. JL: How do you see the role of govern- Life is tough anyway, and when you start ment versus the individual? JL: Well before September 11, 2001, you drinking or when you have, you know, DT: Well, I think you want to keep govern- suggested that the U.S.—New York in things like drugs available, start taking drugs, ment as small as you can. We need govern- particular—could be hit by a serious ter- you don’t have a chance. You don’t give your- ment. We need military protection. We need rorist attack. What should be done about self a chance. A lot of people ask me about certain things from government that are vital. terrorism? my children—and so far my children have I mean, you have some people who would like DT: Well, I actually said a long time done very well. You always have to say “so to see us have no government at all, and that’s ago—and some people say I was the first far,” ’cause you don’t know what’s around the obviously called anarchy. But you certainly to really say it—that terrorism would be corner. And you could get some really un- want to keep government as small as possible. a huge problem. I wrote it in my book. pleasant surprises that you never knew about. One of the things that I feel strong- But I predicted terrorism. To me it was But I would always lecture my children, no ly about is making America great again, inevitable. Terrorism also comes through drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes.

42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 up in ARMS ruling, wait for arguments over the minutiae to trickle back up, and then clarify. Patience is the name of the game. But this patience has been met with total silence. In the four years since McDonald, citizens denied the right to bear arms outside the home have challenged gun control laws in California, Illinois, Maryland, Mas- by JOSH BLACKMAN sachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere. Lower courts have grappled with the meaning and scope of Heller, and implored the high court for further guidance, but to Our Gun-Shy Justices no avail. The Second Amendment is trapped somewhere between legal limbo and constitutional purgatory. The Supreme Court abandons the Second Amendment. Let’s examine eight of the most high-profile cases that the justices turned away.

fter two hundred years Because Heller nixed only a federal law 1. In Williams v. Maryland (2010), the of solitude, the Second covering D.C., a second ruling was needed Maryland Court of Appeals limited the Sec- Amendment now means to determine whether the right would ex- ond Amendment to the four walls of one’s what it has always said: tend (or be “incorporated,” in legal lingo) home, finding that the right to bear arms Our Constitution guar- to the states. Thus, immediately after Heller elsewhere was “outside the scope of the Sec- antees the people a right was decided, a follow-up lawsuit was filed in ond Amendment.” Pleading for clarification

to keep and bear arms. Chicago, challenging the Windy City’s{ hand- from the justices, the court concluded, “If But since McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Su- gun ban. In 2010, the the Supreme Court… Apreme Court’s landmark decision of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled meant its holding [in justices seemingly have taken a vow of silence in McDonald v. City of Heller and McDonald] on the meaning of this fundamental right. Chicago that the right Lower courts have to extend beyond home Over the last four years, in case after case, to keep and bear arms implored the high possession, it will need lower courts have accepted interpretations of protected by Heller did to say so more plainly.” the Second Amendment that have rendered indeed apply to the court for guid- The Court did not speak it weak or nonexistent. Each time, a gun con- states as well. Chicago’s ance, but to no plainly, since it denied trol scheme was found constitutional. Each ban on handguns went review on October 3, time, once Second Amendment advocates out the window. avail. The Second 2011. reached the final request for appeal, the Su- Second Amendment preme Court declined to review the ruling. advocates, now two Amendment is 2. In United States v. With each additional attempt, a sense of for two before the high trapped between Masciandaro (2010), the déjà vu sets in, always with the same emp- court, drew up a com- Fourth Circuit Court tiness: “The petition for a writ of certiorari prehensive, multi-stage legal limbo and of Appeals similarly is denied.” There is no indication whether litigation strategy to constitutional declined to recognize the lower courts are right or wrong, wheth- challenge various types a Second Amendment er they have strayed from precedent or of gun regulations: li- purgatory. right to bear arms out- followed it faithfully. The Supreme Court, censing regimes that side the home: “On the

content with the status quo, has know- bar or unreasonably { question of Heller’s ap- ingly and willingly abandoned the Second burden carrying firearms outside the home; plicability outside the home environment, Amendment to the judges below. excessively high registration fees; onerous we think it prudent to await direction from registration requirements; restrictions unduly the Court itself.” Imprudently offering no di- n the 2008 case District of Columbia infringing the sale of firearms; and countless rection, the Supreme Court denied review on v. Heller, the Supreme Court invalidated others. It was understood that this litigation November 28, 2011. ID.C.’s complete ban on the ownership of would take time, and that different courts handguns. For the first time in its existence, of appeals would likely split and fracture on 3. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in the Court recognized a constitutional guaran- the questions in various ways. But the plan Kachalsky v. Westchester County (2012), up- tee to individual ownership of a firearm. But all along was that the Supreme Court would held New York’s onerous handgun licens- the legal battle was just getting started. take one case at a time and incrementally ing system, which requires an “applicant to clarify the scope of gun rights—starting with demonstrate ‘proper cause’ to obtain a license Josh Blackman is a professor of Constitu- the threshold issue of whether the Second to carry a concealed handgun in public.” tional Law at the South Texas College of Law Amendment even applies outside the home. This “proper cause” mandates that a person and author of Unprecedented: The Consti- Indeed, this is the Court’s preferred path in jump through countless hoops to exercise his tutional Challenge to Obamacare. many other contexts: Hand down a broad constitutional right of self defense. The Sec-

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 ond Circuit, like its sister courts, recognized a “justifiable need,” as determined by law strictions on the right to keep and bear arms. that Heller “raises more questions than it an- enforcement. This is a high burden, which According to the Brady Center to Prevent swers.” The Supreme Court let them remain requires the applicant to show a specific, im- Gun Violence, since Heller there have been unanswered and denied review on April 15, mediate threat to his safety, and to demon- 800 challenges to gun laws, and the lower 2013. strate that the only way to avoid that threat courts have upheld 96 percent of them. The Supreme Court, with the 4. In Woollard v. Gallagher exception of McDonald, (2012), the Fourth Circuit has not deemed a single Court of Appeals upheld case worthy of reconsider- Maryland’s handgun licens- ation. ing rules that limit the right Several of the cases men- to carry a concealed weapon tioned earlier involved to those who have prov- messy facts—defendants, en a “good and substantial for example, who had been reason.” In the absence of convicted of gun crimes. clear standards, the judges This may have given the “merely assume[d] that the justices reason enough to Heller right exists outside the pass. The principles may home.” Letting that assump- have been worthy of de- tion stand, or maybe not, bate, but the cases suffered the Supreme Court denied what are known in busi- review on October 15, 2013. ness as “vehicle problems.” But many of the recent 5. In Chardin v. Police petitions were well-craft- Commissioner of Boston ed “test cases.” They were (2013), the Massachusetts designed by organiza- Supreme Judicial Court Dick Heller after the 2008 ruling in the case that bears his name. tions—the National Rifle upheld the Common- Association, the Second wealth’s firearm licensing statute, which requires is by carrying a firearm, as opposed to calling Amendment Foundation—that know how an applicant to show a “good reason to fear inju- 911. Even assuming the police chief grants the to present issues to the justices cleanly. The ry to his person or property.” The ruling found permit—which seldom happens—the process cases were brought against the most onerous that this high burden “does not infringe on a is not over. Next, the applicant must appear gun regulations, with law-abiding plaintiffs, right protected by the Second Amendment.” before a judge to state his case. To make it even in jurisdictions where the legal issue had not Without comment, the Supreme Court denied tougher, the local prosecutor can oppose the yet been settled. Yet the Court has continued review on November 4, 2013. permit. And even if the applicant can nav- to demur. igate this labyrinth, the permit is only valid Alan Gura, the attorney who successful- 6 & 7. In National Rifle Association v. McCraw for two years, and the process must be begun ly argued Heller and McDonald before the (2013), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over from scratch. If the right to keep and bear Supreme Court, places the impact of these upheld a Texas law denying the right to carry arms means anything outside the home, this unguided lower court opinions in context. handguns outside the home to those between gauntlet could not possibly be constitution- “Unless the Supreme Court decides to enforce the ages of eighteen and twenty. The court al. Yet, remarkably, the Third Circuit Court its pronouncements, the Second Amend- based its ruling on a previous decision, NRA of Appeals upheld this tortuous process. The ment will apply only to the extent that some v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Ex- impossible-to-satisfy burden of seeking the lower courts are willing to honor Supreme plosives (2012), finding constitutional a federal approval of two branches of New Jersey’s Court precedent.” In other words, the Second law that bans adults between those ages from government, the court found, “does not bur- Amendment means different things to differ- purchasing handguns. Six judges from the den conduct within the scope of the Second ent people in different states, at the discretion court who dissented on the latter case wanted Amendment.” Effectively, carrying a firearm of lower court judges. This is not how any oth- it to be reheard and found the implications of outside the home is beyond the “scope” of the er fundamental constitutional rights work. the majority’s reading of Heller “far-reaching” Second Amendment. Over a strong dissent, But gun control advocates have taken this as and “simply wrong.” They lost by a margin of the majority “decline[d] to definitively declare encouragement. Jonathan Lowy of the Brady one vote. Right or wrong, we cannot know— that the individual right to bear arms for the Center has said that that the Court’s refusal to the Supreme Court simply denied review of purpose of self-defense extends beyond the take any Second Amendment cases reaffirms both cases on February 24, 2014. home.” Continuing its practice, on May 5, its “satisfaction with lower courts upholding 2014, the Supreme Court denied review. all gun laws that have been challenged, so long 8. Drake v. Jerejian (2013) is the most recent There are hundreds of other ongoing chal- as they allow responsible citizens to keep a gun appellate decision that upheld a draconian lenges to gun laws, and lower courts across in the home.” The Brady Center’s research limitation on the right to bear arms. New the country are continuing to weigh in on the arm notes that, “These denials make clear that Jersey is a “may issue” state, meaning that a Second Amendment without guidance from states still retain the discretion to pass strong license to carry a firearm outside the home the Supreme Court. And, in virtually every laws regulating the carrying of firearms in

Photo: Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI L. Roger Photo: may only be granted if the applicant proves single case, the lower courts have upheld republic even after the Heller decision.”

44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 enerally, when the Court denies POLITICS review of a given case, it is a fool’s Gerrand to try to figure out why. But when the Court denies, in sequence, many cases that address the same constitutional issue, one that has divided lower courts, a pattern becomes clear. So what do we make of the Supreme Court standing idly by while other judges fire away at the right to keep and by GROVER G. NORQUIST bear arms? It only takes four justices to grant certiorari on a case, in contrast with the five votes needed to craft a majority opinion. What GOP ‘Establishment’? Perhaps there are four justices who would rule that the Second Amendment protects a right to carry outside the home, Republicans are unified. The Tea Party won. but those same justices know that there are also five votes to place a limit on the Second Amendment. Perhaps, then, four epublicans are poised to only awoke in anger when the tax hikes or five justices would rather maintain the capture the Senate this year, arrived to cover the bill. awkward status quo than see Heller rolled and the mainstream press The first casualty of this change in the back. has already telegraphed that political winds was Senator Arlen Specter All hope is not lost, though. There are it will report this as a terrible of Pennsylvania. Specter was trying to ma- several cases still in the Second Amendment defeat for conservatives. Ac- neuver for re-election in 2010 between the pipeline (or barrel, as it were) that will af- cording to the false narrative Scylla of a possible conservative challenger ford the Supreme Court an opportunity peddled by reporters, we live in the midst of in the GOP primary and the Charybdis of to rectify the situation. In Peruta v. County Ra titanic struggle between the Tea Party move- the Democrat machine in Philadelphia in of San Diego, a divided panel of the Ninth ment and establishment Republicans—either the general election. Specter had commit- Circuit Court of Appeals found that the a repeat or a continuation of the battle between ted to voting with the GOP against liber- Second Amendment protects the right to a the Republican wings of Robert Taft and Ei- al judges, against all tax hikes, and against handgun carry license. The court threw out senhower in the 1940s and ’50s, or Goldwater card check legislation that would have al- San Diego’s system that required applicants and Rockefeller in the 1960s and ’70s. lowed unions to bypass elections in forc- to demonstrate “good cause” prior to receiv- The truth is that there is no such battle. ing workers to pay dues. This, he felt with ing permits. Never has the Republican Party been more some justification, would get him past the In an odd procedural move, California unified around a conservative agenda than it GOP primary. The likely challengers took Attorney General Kamala Harris (who was is today. The Tea Party movement, which rose a pass. Then Obama promised to stay out not a party in the proceedings) intervened, up in February of 2009 and exploded that of Philly get-out-the-vote efforts in return and asked the entire Ninth Circuit to re- summer, demanding that “spend less” be add- for Specter’s vote for the stimulus. In nor- hear the case. If this petition is granted, ed to “cut taxes” in the Republican catechism, mal times, Specter might well have been a nine-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, has been an absolute success. correct in believing that this deal would known as an en banc court, will rehear the The Tea Party movement burst onto the secure his re-election. Instead his poll num- case. The decision may well be reversed, political scene just short of three months bers plunged. and the en banc Ninth Circuit may in turn into the Obama administration in reaction Did the Tea Party shift the bulk of the con- uphold the law. If this comes to pass, as I to TARP spending (half by Bush and half gressional Republicans or did they move at the suspect it will, then at some point in 2015 by Obama), the $800 billion stimulus bill, same time? One notes that the entire Repub- Peruta will land, like so many cases before the trillion-dollar hike in Obama’s first lican caucus in the House voted against the it, at the steps of 1 First Street NE, Wash- budget for domestic discretionary spend- stimulus bill on February 13, 2009, months ington, D.C. ing, and the health care “debate” that ul- before any Tea Party rallies. Imagine the temp- But if the Supreme Court denies review timately led to Obamacare. America had tation facing Republican appropriators who in Peruta, we may find ourselves running witnessed tax revolts going back to the were offered billions in goodies to share with out of options. By ignoring this issue, the original Boston Tea Party and the Whiskey the courthouse boys back home. Yet only Court will have left the Second Amend- Rebellion, and more recently California’s three Republican senators succumbed to the ment to wither on the vine. The right to Proposition 13 in 1978 and the Reagan-led pressure: Specter and Maine’s Susan Collins keep and bear arms will be reduced to a Kemp-Roth tax cut. But a political move- and Olympia Snowe. The entire Republican hollow privilege in many states. Regardless ment targeting government spending was caucus in the House voted “nay.” At the time, of how the Court would resolve the tan- new. Before the Tea Party movement, tax- Republicans looking forward to the 2010 elec- gled mess of lower precedents, the failure payers slept through enormous outlays and tions believed they would lose several Senate to even confront it, and rule on it, stands seats and saw no likely pickups. Yet the caucus as a jurisprudential abdication of the Sec- Grover G. Norquist is president of Ameri- held strong even staring into what looked like ond Amendment. cans for Tax Reform. the mouth of an abyss.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 ut the tea party’s ascension can Party. This agreement is found among and governorship, spending including federal proved that rules had changed. Big both rank-and-file voters—remember how funds has increased 5.55 percent and state-on- Bspending was now a liability—even Newt Gingrich’s presidential bid collapsed ly spending has increased by 9.95 percent. in Pennsylvania. Other Republicans in the in mid-2011 when he said he opposed the If the Tea Party was, as its many leaders House and Senate watched Specter’s one-man Ryan plan?—and among elected officials, also stated, a movement to limit spending and train wreck and realized there was a new issue known as the establishment. constrain the government to live within the that could kill political careers. This solidified When the Democratic president, the Dem- bounds of the Constitution, its victory was the conservative con- { ocratic supermajority in broad and deep—and it brought along most sensus within the party. the Senate, and the en- of the Republican Party. The fiscal year 2010 tire establishment me- budget—Obama’s There is no fight dia demanded a budget o where does this narrative of first—added $1 trillion deal in 2011 that in- liberal Republican leaders battling the Tea in spending over the between the Tea cluded tax increases in Party grassroots come from? next decade, above and Party and the return for promises of S Talk radio hosts created some of this confu- beyond the stimulus spending restraint, John sion by focusing on tactical differences, for in- splurge. It received zero Republican Boehner and Mitch stance Senator Ted Cruz’s attempt to “defund” votes from Republicans establishment; McConnell stood firm. Obamacare in the fall of 2013. Cruz argued in the House or Senate They fought for and that the GOP House could force Harry Reid when it was voted on in the Tea Party is won an agreement with to repeal Obamacare, and then somehow get April 2009. the ten-year sequester, Obama himself to agree to destroy his life’s Every single Repub- the Republican clawing back $2.5 tril- work. These tactics, which led to a government lican in both cham- establishment. lion. Unlike the great shutdown, did not work as advertised. Polls bers also voted against “compromises” of 1982 showed support for Republicans hit new lows Obamacare. Four years and 1990, there was not and approval of Obamacare hit new highs. Both later, every single na- { a dime of tax hikes and turned around only after the shutdown threat tional Republican remains committed to re- the spending cuts were written in law, not stat- disappeared and the nation could focus on the pealing it and has so voted at every possible ed as meaningless promises. That victory had problems with the Obamacare rollout. Tactics occasion. Compare this to past entitlement real consequences. Federal spending, which may be wise or foolish, but disagreements over legislation. Social Security was passed in 1935 had jumped from 20.2 percent of GDP in them does not change the underlying unanim- with seventy-seven Republican votes in the 2008 to 23.4 percent in 2010, has now fallen ity within the Republican Party, top to bottom, House and sixteen in the Senate. Medicare to 20.4 percent in 2014. that Obamacare should be repealed. and Medicaid passed in 1965 with seventy The Tea Party has driven Republican poli- A second reason many see an imaginary fight Republican votes in the House and thirteen tics in the states as well. Republican governors between the Tea Party movement and the es- in the Senate. More recently, when President have cut taxes by $38 billion since 2011. In tablishment is that both terms are rather amor- Bush expanded Medicare in 2003, he received the twenty-four states where Republicans have phous, and are often used and defined dishon- 204 Republican votes in the House and for- full control of the legislature and the gover- estly. Fringe candidates with little or no support ty-two in the Senate. have cried out that they are the true The world spun further off its Tea Partiers, and some national groups axis when the House voted to ban foolishly echo these claims. Local ac- earmarks in January 2011. The tivists who support the more electable Senate Appropriations Committee conservatives are drowned out by na- followed suit. Only a few years ear- tional voices claiming to speak on the lier, bringing pork back home was Tea Party’s behalf. For instance North a sign of virility and status. Now it Carolina’s Speaker of the Assembly is akin to shoplifting or smoking at Thom Tillis, who is running for U.S. the dinner table. Senate, was attacked by national “Tea Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which Party” groups as the establishment can- reforms entitlement spending, didate. But Tillis has a solid conserva- block grants most welfare pro- tive record, and real-life polling in the grams, and strictly limits discre- state found that he won strong support tionary spending, has passed the from self-identified Tea Party voters. House each of the past four years. The national media loves to cover The number of Republicans voting fights between conservatives, which “no” numbered only four in 2011, three in norship, spending including federal funds has damage the Right and distract from the very 2012, ten in 2013, and twelve in 2014—and increased only 1.1 percent between 2011 and real divisions on the Left. But there is no fight most of those “no” votes were conservatives 2013 and state-only spending has increased between the Tea Party and the Republican es- showboating to let their constituents know just 6.25 percent. In contrast, Democratic tablishment; the Tea Party is the Republican they wanted deeper cuts. So the most radical governors have raised taxes by over $58 bil- establishment. Fewer political victories have anti-spending and anti-tax budget in recent lion since 2011. In the thirteen states where been more rapid and more complete than the history is a consensus item in the Republi- Democrats have full control of the legislature one it has won in five short years.

46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 hot and BOTHERED How about this claim that garnered front- page newspaper attention and a flurry of TV coverage: “droughts, wildfires, and floods are all more frequent and intense.” But are severe weather events really more likely or catastrophic now than they were fifty or 100 years ago? Much of the evidence counter- ing that president’s conclusion comes from by STEPHEN MOORE the government’s own data records, from NASA, NOAA, EPA, and the National Weather Service. Let’s look first at hurricanes. The presi- Apocalypse Not dent’s climate change report says: Reading Obama’s Chicken Little climate change report. There has been a substantial increase in most measures of Atlantic hurricane activity since

{ the early 1980s, the pe- any of my friends all too well, this past riod during which high on the Left can’t winter was the second quality satellite data are understand why coldest in at least the Politicians available…Numerous so many people on last forty years. You factors have been shown the Right disregard could practically walk should show a to influence these local the doomsday sce- across Lake Michigan little more sea surface temperatures, narios about global and not fall through including natural vari- climate change. My response is always the the ice. If we add the humility instead ability, human-induced Msame: If the science is beyond dispute, then 2014 data point, the of pretending emissions of heat-trap- why do liberals routinely cherry-pick their trend looks a lot less ping gases, and particu- data and exaggerate their conclusions? alarming. The report that they have a late pollution. Consider the Obama administration’s her- was issued in May alded National Climate Assessment, which 2014. So why did the magical Here is what the Na- was released in May. The president put on Obama administra- crystal ball. tional Hurricane Cen- his Chicken Little outfit and gave a primal tion omit last winter? ter said in 2013: “there scream, warning that the research proves The climate change were no major hur- that global warming “is a problem that is af- lobby dismisses the { ricanes in the North fecting Americans right now. Whether that 2014 arctic conditions in the Midwest and Atlantic Basin for the first time since 1994. means increased flooding, greater vulnera- Northeast by explaining that a single year of And the number of hurricanes this year bility to drought, more severe wildfires—all cold weather proves nothing. That is true. was the lowest since 1982.” Meanwhile, in these things are having an impact on Ameri- But alarmists are perfectly satisfied to ac- 2013, the Pacific Ocean had only one ma- cans as we speak.” Head jor such storm. Ryan Ice Coverage of the Great Lakes By Season for the high hills before 100 Maue of Bell Weather 94.7 (1979) 90.7 (1994) 92.2 it’s too late! 90 (2014) Analytics wrote in the A splash of cold water peer-reviewed Geophys- is in order. Take a look 80 74.5 (2003) ical Research Letters in at the chart, adapt- 70 2011 that “the global ed from the report. It 60 frequency of tropical shows the percentage 50 cyclones has reached a of the Great Lakes cov- historical low.” 40 38.4 ered by ice dating back (2013) Tornadoes, mean- to the 1970s. And— 30 while, haven’t exactly yikes!—it shows an Coverage Percent 20 spiked either. The Na- unmistakably negative 10 18.1 (1983) tional Climate Assess- 11.5 (1998) 9.5 (2002) 12.9 (2012) trend, especially over ment claims: “Recent 0 2010 the past three decades. 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2013 research has yielded But the chart suspi- insights into the con- ciously stops in the winter of 2012 and ’13. cept a single data point as evidence when nections between global warming and the As anyone who lives in the Midwest knows it suits them—such as when they suggest factors that cause tornadoes and severe that one damaging storm like Hurricane thunderstorms.” There’s just one problem: Stephen Moore is chief economist for the Sandy demonstrates that climate change is according to the National Oceanic and At- Heritage Foundation and economics editor of happening “right now,” as Barack Obama mospheric Administration (NOAA), “there The American Spectator. puts it. has been little trend in the frequency of the

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47 stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.” ing GMCO2 [global mean carbon dioxide gases emissions should be limited—still The White House climate action plan concentration]. One region, the southwest, told the Senate last year: “It is mislead- also draws attention to the fact that in 2012 showed a statistically significant negative ing, and just plain incorrect, to claim wildfires burned a near-record 9.3 million relationship between GMCO2 and flood that disasters associated with hurricanes, U.S. acres. It emphatically asserts that “cli- magnitudes. tornadoes, floods or droughts have inmate change is contributing creased on climate time scales to increases in wildfires across Hurricanes/Tropical Storms either in the United States or the western U.S. and Alaska.” globally.” Yet, the 4 million acres burned Making U.S. Landfall Yogi Berra said it best: by wildfires in 2013 was actu- 30 Prediction is very difficult, ally less than half the level of 25 especially about the future. 2012—a statistic suspiciously 20 One fatal flaw with so much left unreported, although the of the analysis is that it draws information was available at the 15 conclusions based on very time of the report’s release. 10 short-term data of 100 years Droughts are another bee un- 5 or less—in part because the der the White House’s bonnet. 0 data beyond that isn’t very According to the administra- reliable. In some cases it cov- tion’s report: 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s ers only a few decades. Our planet is millions of Higher temperatures lead years old. Even a cen- to increased rates of evap- Wildfire Acres Burned By Years in US, 1960-2013 tury is a nanosecond oration, including more in climate patterns. loss of moisture through 12,000,000 My professor at the plant leaves.…As soil dries University of Illinois, 10,000,000 out, a larger proportion of the late, great Julian the incoming heat from 8,000,000 Simon, once showed the sun goes into heating me a chart from sev- the soil and adjacent air 6,000,000 eral hundred years rather than evaporating its ago of the rise in the moisture, resulting in hot- 4,000,000 water level of the Nile ter summers under drier River. The trend over climatic conditions. 2,000,000 a few decades indicat- ed that if this pattern But the reality is 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 were extrapolated out more complicated: over several decades, Take a look at the chart below Average Drought Conditions in the Contiguous 48 States, 1895-2012 Egypt and every other na- of 100-plus years of droughts. 8 tion along the Nile would be There is no trend in either di- 6 underwater. But, of course, Wet

rection. As recently as 2008, the that “trend” was merely a U.S. Climate Change Science 4 blip, and the water level of Program’s report on extremes 2 the Nile today is not much in North America conclud- different from what it was ed that droughts have “for the 0 1,000 years ago. most part, become shorter, less -2 Politicians should show a

frequent, and cover a smaller little more humility instead portion of the U.S. over the last -4 of pretending that they have -6 century…The main exception a magical crystal ball. Even Washington Post is the Southwest and parts of Dry -8 the ran a the interior of the West, where 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 piece in May headlined, increased temperature has led “Does National Climate to rising drought trends.” Assessment lack necessary Climate change will also lead to greater To be clear, a “negative relationship” nuance?” Answering its own question, flooding, according to the White House. means increased carbon dioxide may actual- Post meteorologist Steve Tracton wrote, But a 2012 study in the Hydrological Scienc- ly be partly responsible for diminished flood “Understand the political rationale to go es Journal concluded: magnitudes. ahead with this report—motivate action Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colo- to reduce emissions. So this should not be In none of the four regions defined in this rado environmental science professor— read as a purely science-based document.” study is there strong statistical evidence for who, by the way, has said that he believes Yet the administration lectures us about flood magnitudes increasing with increas- in global warming and thinks greenhouse following the science?

48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 constitutional OPINIONS back to life and read what Griswold made of the Third Amendment, they’d fall over in a dead faint. The broader point is that if the shadows and penumbras of the Third Amendment could hide birth control and abortion from the gaze of the state, one would think they might be enough to also cover the right to by SETH LIPSKY own and carry, say, a .38. But it turns out that with the Second Amendment, everything is reversed. Suddenly it is the liberals who are caterwauling about original intent. This is Waldman’s tactic. The general claim Tub to the Whale? of his new book is that the framers intended—even if they did not make it clear in Was the Second Amendment intended as a distraction? the plain language—to protect the right to keep and bear arms only in the context of military service. That individuals should carry guns for other reasons was alien to new assault is under- make it unambiguously conform to the the Founders, he suggests. way on the palladium original intent of its draftsmen.” He was distraught when the high court en- of our liberty, as the Ordinarily, your average liberal regards shrined an individual right to gun ownership Second Amendment is original intent the way a nudist regards in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. sometimes known. It a patch of poison ivy; he prefers the cal- Waldman reckons the ground was laid with was underway even be- amine of the “living constitution.” He’ll the accession of the GOP to the leadership fore a mentally ill Cal- parse the parchment to mean whatever in the Senate in 1981. Orrin Hatch, the new ifornian named Elliot Rodger committed best supports his policies. This was most chairman of a key Judiciary subcommittee, Aa massacre in Santa Barbara. The Supreme famously the case in respect of the{ Third commissioned a study that uncovered what it Court, after ruling famously for Dick Amendment, one of called “clear—and long Heller’s right to keep a gun in his home, is the simplest, most lost—proof that the caught like a deer in the headlights, as Josh straightforward of all The Second Second Amendment to Blackman makes clear elsewhere in this the articles in the Bill our Constitution was magazine, having turned down a string of of Rights. It says: “No Amendment is the intended as an individ- cases testing the contours of the Second. Soldier shall, in time ual right of the Ameri- Now comes the president of the Bren- of peace be quartered only part of the can citizen to keep and nan Center for Justice at New York Univer- in any house, with- Constitution on carry arms in a peaceful sity, Michael Waldman, with a book called out the consent of the manner, for protection The Second Amendment: A Biography. I first Owner, nor in time of which the liberals of himself, his family, read about Waldman’s tome in a column war, but in a manner are trying to hold and his freedoms.” by Joseph Nocera, the New York Timesman to be prescribed by Waldman likens this who has made gun control one of his sig- law.” That is the plain- the court to what to the cryptologists in nature causes. His purpose is to limit the est prose since Dick the Disney movie Na- right to carry firearms to those Americans and Jane. Yet to the they insist was the tional Treasure discov- serving in a militia. He’s convinced this liberal eye it means “original intent.” ering invisible writing would reduce the number of those who that no state can ban on the back of the Dec- perish in massacres. the dissemination of laration of Indepen- Waldman’s book is a reminder of one of birth control. { dence. He writes as if the unique features of the Second Amend- You say that’s impossible. Yet it happened he’s the only honest man on the case. In fact ment: It is the only article of the Constitu- in 1965, in the case brought against Con- it is not only the Supreme Court that had tion on which the liberals are trying to hold necticut by an executive of Planned Par- concluded that Second Amendment rights the court to what they insist was the “orig- enthood, Estelle Griswold. The Nine—or are independent of any militia. So did a ma- inal intent” of the Founders. For instance, seven of them—discovered that the Third jority of the D.C. Court of Appeals, which retired justice John Paul Stevens, who Amendment, among other articles in the first heard Heller. Law professors have even dissented in Heller, proposes in his latest Bill of Rights, cast shadows and emanated testified to the Senate on the point. book “adding five words to the text of the penumbras, in which could be found a right One of these was Eugene Volokh, who Second Amendment”— the right of the to privacy that protects citizens’ access to teaches at UCLA and publishes a blog called people to keep and bear Arms when serving contraceptives (and, extending the logic in the Volokh Conspiracy, now hosted at the in the Militia shall not be infringed—“to Roe v. Wade eight years later, to abortion). If Washington Post. In 1998 he told the Senate George Washington, James Madison, Gou- that he’d recently changed his mind on the Seth Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun. verneur Morris, and the boys were to come question of whether the Second encompass-

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 es an independent right. After researching letter from PARIS the matter in preparation to teach a course, he concluded that the historical evidence “overwhelmingly points to one and only one conclusion: The Second Amendment does indeed secure an individual right to keep and bear arms.” Included in his testimony were citations from contemporaneous documents. “The by JOSEPH A. HARRISS people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state,” the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 put it. Volokh lists similar language from one state after another—Connecticut, Indiana, France’s Simmering Intifada Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, to name but several specifying that the right is for both The Islamists’ ‘long war’ goes on, and on. the common defense and individual defense. Five states, when ratifying the federal Constitution, demanded that a Bill of hen gendarmes and the Middle East is estimated at five Rights be written, and that it include the arrested seven million—no official figures exist, it being right to keep and bear arms. Among them Muslim mili- head-in-the-sand policy to forbid collec- was New York, whose governor today tants in Stras- tion of statistics based on race or religion. boasts of being the most “progressive”—he bourg in a pre- Crammed into bleak, crime- and drug-rid- means anti-Second Amendment—state in dawn sweep last den suburban public housing tower blocks, the country. May, it was the the banlieues, their numbers are increasing Waldman’s book is notable as a marker first major move in the government’s stepped- so fast around Paris that they will soon out- for the direction of the debate on the Con- upW attempt to stem the flow of French jihadists number the two million inhabitants of the stitution today. It concludes with three les- to Syria to join al Qaeda’s fight against Bashar city center. sons. First, that “originalism” as a way of al-Assad. Not that France has any interest in Rage and resentment have been building reading the Constitution is, he says, “un- propping up his regime, au contraire. Rath- in the banlieues since at least the 1970s, tenable.” Second, that “judicial restraint” er, French authorities have reason to fear that when the government authorized immi- is important in defense of liberal, but only when they return battle-hardened from Syria, grant workers to bring in their families. liberal, laws. Third, that the “fully en- as the seven had, they will put their guerrilla These were boom years for the postwar gaged” public makes constitutional law “as training to deadly use in the restive Arab barri- French economy. Jobs were plentiful for im- much as jurists and lawyers”—or, to put it os of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and other major migrants and they and their families were in plain language, forget what the Consti- cities. soon French citizens. But the dream began tution actually says. France’s new campaign to rein in its to sour as they ran up against the country’s He has a chapter called “Tub to the Whale,” home-grown jihadists is prompted by innate, visceral xenophobia, with ethnic which likens the Second Amendment to the alarming statistics from domestic intel: epithets about Muslims, Jews, and oth- tubs or barrels whalers used to throw into Whereas in January some 250 French na- er minorities the stuff of everyday French the water to distract dangerous cetaceans. tionals were known to be fighting in Syria, conversation. Moreover, the official policy Waldman adopts this view in his conclusion. that figure had doubled by April. Hundreds of laïcité, or secularism, meant that Muslim “After all,” he writes, “the Framers added the more, recruited directly in France’s Muslim immigrants were expected to be loyal citi- Second Amendment to the Constitution not communities or incited by jihadist websites, zens of the republic first and Muslims sec- because they solemnly believed it necessary, are either en route to there or have returned. ond. For many of the devout, taught that but as a ‘tub to the whale’—a concession to Thirty-odd are known to have died in the Islamic-style theocracy is Allah’s way, this popular discontent.” fighting. “Now there are not only more of was impossible. Why, then, respect it? That’s his line. Of them,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius The result has been growing hostility course, one could say the same thing about said recently, “but they are younger, includ- toward the secular French state. Now the the confounded House of Representatives. ing boys and girls as young as fifteen.” Arab neighborhoods often constitute virtu- Or the frilly First Amendment, with its pro- In any case, it seems the problem will al free-fire zones, delicately known as “sen- tection of religious freedom that so troubles only worsen. France is home to the largest sitive urban districts,” where alienated, job- the state. Are these, too, “tubs to the whale,” Islamic population in Europe. The number less young people do dope and burn cars for designed to distract the commoner? It is of Muslims from North and West Africa kicks—some 30,000 go up in flames annu- hard to imagine a more cynical construction. ally. Boom boxes throb with angry gangsta But it was the way the anti-Federalists—the Joseph A. Harriss is our Paris correspon- rap. A popular one goes: opponents of the Constitution—predicted dent. He reported from Algiers for Time history would turn, and the Second Amend- during the early years of the country’s indepen- France is a bitch ment could emerge as the clearest test yet of dence. His latest book is An American Spec- You have to f--k her to exhaustion whether they were right. tator in Paris. You have to treat her like a whore, man.

50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 At international soccer matches, individuals of Arab and African descent sometimes jeer when the Marseillaise is sung before the game. Teenagers speak a mix of French, English, and Arab slang salted with Ameri- can hip-hop. They derisively call hereditary Frenchmen “sons of Clovis” (a reference to the sixth-century ruler of the Gauls) or “natives,” unless they happen to be Jewish, in which case they are “filthy yid.” Any police who venture into the area hear, in English, “F--k the cops,” when it’s not Na’al abouk la France! (“F--k France!”). Many will inevitably end up in jail—fully 70 percent of France’s prison population is Muslim— where they will be preached jihad and radi- calized by other inmates. One commentator calls the country’s prisons “the engine room of Islamic radicalism.” Sometimes the whole explosive mixture blows. In 2005 the spark was the deaths of two Muslim teenagers accidentally electrocuted in a power station while running from police. The leader of the radical Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC from its French initials), Abdel- malek Droukdal, a.k.a. Abu Mossab Ab- delwadoud, declared France enemy num- train station for a day of mayhem, and the back. But whereas the British were motivat- ber one. “The only way to teach France to northern city of Amiens. There dozens of ed mainly by trade and economics and did behave,” he preached, “is jihad and Islamic masked youths set upon police with buck- not attempt to change local cultures, en- martyrdom.” Islamist websites picked up shot and other weapons, wounding sixteen abling them to exit their Asian and African on that, praying “Allah, grant us victory” while wrecking schools and police stations, colonies relatively unscathed, the French and urging French Muslims to join the causing several million dollars’ worth of insisted on cultural conquest. As part of fight against a “land of infidels.” Many did, destruction. Andrew Hussey contends that their mission civilisatrice they would export as fired-up youths poured out of theban - these are no ordinary race riots: The sav- their political culture and Catholic religion lieues across the country to loot, burn, and age, eight-year Algerian war of the 1950s to the benighted natives of Indochina and wreak havoc. and ’60s is still being played out, he says— North and West Africa by force if neces- Coordinating their attacks via cell this time in France itself. sary—turning them into ersatz Frenchmen phones, for two weeks they burned thou- Hussey, a British journalist and aca- whether they wanted it or not. sands of automobiles and trashed hundreds demic who heads the University of Lon- The Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh, of schools, public buildings, and post offic- don Institute in Paris, casts a critical eye sounded the death knell of the French co- es across France, causing $300 million of on France’s volatile situation in his timely lonial empire at the battle of Dien Bien Phu damage. President Jacques Chirac declared new book, The French Intifada: The Long in 1954, but Paris still didn’t get it. Alge- France’s first nationwide state of emergency War Between France and Its Arabs, out now ria, French leaders insisted, was as French since World War II. Police and riot troops, from Faber and Faber. Drawing on the tor- as Burgundy, and would remain so. This attacked to cries of “Allahu Akbar,” were hit tuous history of France’s colonial period, despite that, beginning with the first French with everything from Molotov cocktails to as well as writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, army landing in the bay of Sidi-Ferruch, fif- pickaxes and steel pétanque balls. Catholic Albert Camus, and the anti-colonial activ- teen miles from Algiers, on June 14, 1830, churches were firebombed. After the worst ist Frantz Fanon, he describes an “unac- the occupation was marked by increasing was over, police netted two dozen Islamic knowledged civil war” in which France is resistance. It culminated in the horrendous radicals, several with links to al Qaeda. They under attack “from the angry and dispos- Algerian War starting in 1956. also found caches of AK-47s with ammu- sessed heirs to the French colonial project.” With France’s War Ministry running its nition, plastic explosives, and bulletproof It amounts to nothing less than the start of colonies, its rule of Algeria amounted to a vests, indicating meticulous, professional the Fourth World War, resulting from un- 130-year combat to bring it under control preparation. resolved conflicts due to the sudden, often by systematically erasing its national iden- Similar, if less spectacular, confronta- chaotic breakup of the nineteenth-century tity. The army razed and burned whole vil- tions occur so routinely that they no lon- European colonies. lages where resistance was strongest. It per- ger make the evening news. Among the With hindsight, it’s obvious that the Eu- fected torture techniques like electrocution more notable have been at Paris’s Gare du ropean empires could only breed seething and waterboarding, and dropped bound

Photo: Facelly/SIPA/Newscom Photo: Nord, when rioters took over an entire resentment that would one day lead to pay- prisoners from helicopters into the Bay of

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51 Algiers. The Algerians, led by the National PRESSWATCH Liberation Front, responded with their own terrorism, slitting throats, slicing off ears, decapitating bodies, and mutilating geni- talia, which were then stuffed into victims’ mouths. Prefiguring today’s jihadist tactics, veiled women carried bombs into popular cafés and theaters in Algiers. France threw in the towel and signed a peace agreement by JAMES TARANTO in 1962. But the hurt and humiliation Al- gerians suffered lingers on in the banlieues, making them fertile ground for preachers of jihad against the former colonial masters. Church and State o one can predict when the next explosion will come, but come it Jill Abramson is tossed from the New York Times. Nsurely will. As Hussy points out, the rioters in the banlieues often describe themselves as soldiers in a “long war.” Nonetheless, ill abramson overflowed with remained a true believer. The week after her the French government tries to deny that Is- praise when the New York Times pro- firing became public, she delivered a com- lamic jihadists can be behind the violence. It moted her to its top editorial position. mencement address at Wake Forest Universi- prefers to call the periodic uprisings merely “In my house growing up, the Times ty. She told graduates a student had asked if a “spontaneous popular revolt” by kids re- substituted for religion,” she said in she planned to remove the tattoo on her back, acting to racism and poverty, and similar eu- a June 2011 interview with her own the gothic “T” from the Times logo. “Not a phemisms. As one prime minister put it after Jpaper. “If the Times said it, it was the chance!” she answered. some serious car-burning, cop-baiting riots, absolute truth.” Although the dramatic manner of “There have been no riots in France, only Abramson probably meant to sound hum- Abramson’s ouster made it a shock to some social unrest.” This at least has the merit ble, but she instead came across as arrogant, Times-watchers, the turmoil didn’t come out of historical consistency: Denial until events like a new pope boasting about his infalli- of nowhere. A year earlier, Politico’s Dylan forced sudden, catastrophic change was how bility. Someone at the Times must’ve been Byers had reported that “Abramson is already France mismanaged revolt in Vietnam and embarrassed, because the quotes Algeria—and how French kings of the ancien appeared only online in the initial régime dealt with popular unrest in the eigh- report of Abramson’s appoint- teenth century. ment. They had been excised The mainstream media generally go by the time the next day’s paper along with this, downplaying the rioting rolled off the presses. For Times as just another form of the usual rebellion religionists, that presumably cre- by malcontents against the powers that ated a theological quandary: If the be. “Many French political commentators Times says it only on the website, are blind,” says Gilles Kepel, a professor is it still ex cathedra? at Paris’s Institut d’Etudes Politiques who The print version of the story has studied and written extensively about included a less newsworthy, if still Muslims in France. “They do not want to somewhat odd, quote: “We are see the world beyond France. And so they held together by our passion for do not understand that what happens our work, our friendship and our here is because of our relationship with deep belief in the mission and in- the Arab world, and our history there.” dispensability of the Times,” Abramson said. on the verge of losing the support of the news- He likens the current tensions to the con- “I look forward to working with all of you to room. Staffers commend her skills and her vulsive 2011 Arab Spring revolts in the seize our future. In this thrilling and challeng- experience but question whether she has the Muslim world. ing transition, we will cross to safety together.” temperament to lead the paper.” Byers and his Neither he nor Andrew Hussey attempts That turned out to be far from the absolute sources unpacked their adjectives, describing to predict where this may lead. But as Hus- truth. Less than three years later, Abramson Abramson’s leadership style as “stubborn,” sey surveys the French scene, he sees little was excommunicated—fired from the pa- “condescending,” “disengaged,” “uncaring,” reason for optimism. “There is a lot of an- per this May by publisher Arthur “Pinch” and “demoralizing.” ger and a lot of young men willing to turn Sulzberger, Jr. and replaced by managing ed- Most of Byers’s newsroom sources were themselves into soldiers for God,” he writes. itor Dean Baquet. Evidently, however, she anonymous, but one notably was on the record: “Most importantly, the rioters, wreckers, even the killers of the banlieues are not look- James Taranto, a member of the Wall Street Baquet, who spoke positively of Abramson and of ing for reform or revolution. They are look- Journal’s editorial board, writes the Best of the their relationship, acknowledged these frustrations ing for revenge.” Web Today column for WSJ.com. but didn’t lend them much credence. Photo: Kena Betancur/Reuters/Newscom Kena Photo:

52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 “I think there’s a really easy caricature that Abramson had been dishonest, according to some people have bought into, of the bitchy wom- Byers’s sources. He sacked her the same week. an character and the guy [Baquet himself] who is But there was another version of the sto- sort of calmer,” he said. “That, I think, is a little bit ry, which Abramson’s supporters told to Ken Re-Elected of an unfair caricature.” Auletta of The New Yorker, who reported it on the magazine’s website. Auletta’s sourc- Obama, In fact there was nothing positive about that es said that a few weeks before the firing, quote. Baquet was using an ancient rhetorical Abramson learned her pay and pension were device, paralipsis—saying something by assert- “considerably less” than those of Bill Keller, Re-Elected ing one’s intention not to say it. Cicero, in his her predecessor, who was male. One un- 56 B.C. speech in defense of Marcus Caelius named Abramson associate told Auletta that His Friends! Rufus, drew attention to the crimes of Clodia, “she had a lawyer make polite inquiries about Caelius’ spurned lover, by pretending to for- the pay and pension disparities, which set give them: “I now forget your wrongs, Clodia, them [Sulzberger and Thompson] off.” How much do we I set aside the memory of my pains.” Similarly, In a later post, Auletta put numbers behind really know about some 2,000 years later Baquet presented an the claim: utterly vicious description of Abramson (to Mr. Obama? whom, for good measure, he contrasted him- As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary self favorably) by claiming to disavow it. Af- in 2011 was $475,000, compared to Keller’s sal- ter his erstwhile rival’s defeat this year, Baquet ary that year, $559,000. Her salary was raised to More importantly, how much do displayed his rhetorical versatility by damning $503,000, and—only after she protested—was we know about his friends—the her with faint praise. TheTimes itself reported raised again to $525,000. She learned that her sala- people who advise him daily, who that he “praised Ms. Abramson for teaching ry as managing editor, $398,000, was less than that him ‘the value of great ambition.’” of the male managing editor for news operations, shaped his political decisions, and According to Byers’s 2013 story, there had John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as helped get him re-elected? long been bad blood between Abramson and Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was Baquet. Byers began with an anecdote in a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her which she summoned Baquet to her office successor in that position, Phil Taubman. The American Spectator to complain that the paper’s news coverage launched a special investigation wasn’t “buzzy” enough. “A debate ensued, Sulzberger denied—first through a spokes- into Obama’s inner circle which gave way to an argument. Minutes woman, then in his own May 17 statement— later, Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, that Abramson had been the victim of sex that exposes their ties to slammed his hand against a wall and stormed discrimination. As he put it in the statement: communism, corruption, out of the newsroom.” and terrorism. This May 17, three days after Abramson’s We are very proud of our record of gender equality firing became public, Sulzberger put out a at The New York Times. Many of our key lead- statement attributing his decision to “a series ers—both in the newsroom and on the business Subscribe to of issues, including arbitrary decision-making, side—are women. So too are many of our rising The American Spectator a failure to consult and bring colleagues with stars. They do not look for special treatment, but her, inadequate communication and the pub- expect to be treated with the same respect as their today and receive our lic mistreatment of colleagues.” male colleagues. For that reason they want to be FREE* special report, Byers reported that the triggering event was judged fairly and objectively on their performance. Obama and Friends— another spat with Baquet. Abramson intended That is what happened in the case of Jill. to hire Janine Gibson, an editor at London’s Exposing the Inner Circle! Guardian, as a co-managing editor—that is, It’s possible both that Abramson was fired Baquet’s equal in the Times hierarchy. Accord- on the merits and that there were good reasons www.spectator.org/obama ing to Byers’s sources, “Abramson led both Sul- Keller and the other men earned more than zberger and [Times Co. CEO Mark] Thomp- she did. (For one thing, Keller had thirteen *New subscribers only. (Book available for sale. $10. Call 800-524-3469) son to believe that she had consulted with years’ seniority on her.) But as conservative other newsroom leaders about her decision” critics noted with glee, Times reporters and to offer Gibson the job. But Baquet learned of editorialists seldom acknowledge such nuanc- the offer, after the fact, from Gibson. es in their crusades for “equal pay.” He felt sandbagged. “The next day, he went One might charitably observe that this code: H13P27 into Sulzberger’s office and, according to the proves the paper is maintaining its strict sep- sources, told him he could not work in an envi- aration between editorial and business opera- ronment where such important decisions were tions, or “church and state” as they call them at being made without his knowledge,” Byers re- the Times. The uncharitable view is that hyp- ported. “Sulzberger was shocked: As far as he ocritical moralizing is an occupational hazard knew, Baquet was not only aware of the offer, of the clergy, even—perhaps especially—of but supported it.” Sulzberger concluded that the clergy in a substitute religion.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 capitol IDEAS and they speak many languages. A former Israeli ambassador published a book called Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos. I’m afraid I haven’t read it but it sounds interesting. The 193 nations put out press releases galore, and I dare say most of them are never read. No- tices and signposts are restricted to English by TOM BETHELL and French, however. At one point I found myself in the Batiment du Secretariat—but you can figure that out. In 1958 the John Birch Society launched a campaign to get “the U.S. out of the UN and the UN out My Day at the United Nations of the U.S.” Their warning that the UN planned to impose “world government” A ship that exists for the benefit of its crew. sounded plausible at the time. The EU has an analogous ambition for Europe. We met Austin Ruse, the president of t was my first visit to the Unit- ed Nations building, and no doubt my last. Many times I had seen the forty-story, Le Corbusier-designed flat slab, but never had reason to go there. As we drove by taxi through the East River tunnel to Manhat- tan, I was reminded that Cuban exiles once Ilaunched a bazooka at the building to protest the presence of Che Guevara. That was in 1964—the good old days, one might almost say. The missile fell short and exploded in the East River. Guevara, a left-wing hero, was giving a speech at the time. TheNew York Times reported:

A single shell from the bazooka, a portable rock- et launcher used by the Army, arced across the river from Queens and fell harmlessly about 200 yards from the shore. The blast sent up a gey- ser of water and rattled windows in the U.N. headquarters just as Major Guevara, Havana’s Minister of Industry, was denouncing the Unit- there in May I was not surprised to find that the Catholic Family and Human Rights ed States. entry involves various security checks. Institute, who was writing an article for My wife had been invited by a delegation Breitbart.com. When I asked him how Guevara “paused not a moment in his from the Holy See to join a panel on the fam- many people work at the UN, he said that speech.” Later, strolling through the dele- ily and give a speech. So I tagged along. Out- it is “not exactly a transparent institution.” gates’ lounge in his green fatigue uniform side we were met by Archbishop Vincenzo That I can believe. The UN’s biennial bud- and highly polished boots, he said, “with a Paglia from Rome, president of the Pontifical get is about $5.4 billion, of which the U.S. languid wave of his cigar, that the explosion Council for the Family. The UN was cele- pays 22 percent. But that doesn’t include has ‘given the whole thing more flavor.’” brating the “International Day of Families.” peacekeeping forces—another $7 billion. Less than three years later he was captured Plural, notice—just in case anyone might The U.S. is often in arrears in its dues, as in Bolivia by forces assisted by the CIA and think same-sex marriage was out of bounds. are many other nations. In 1984, the U.S. summarily executed. The leftist hero lives The secretary general said that he welcomed actually defunded the Paris-based UNES- on in poster images. “families, regardless of their structure.” The CO, and did so for eighteen years. It had At the time of the bazooka shot, another UN “High Representative for the Alliance of become too anti-American, and I think Cuban woman was apprehended with a big Civilizations,” a Muslim, shook our hands. there was an improvement after the cutoff. knife at the UN entrance. She vowed to kill We had some time before the event, so I (More recently the U.S. defunded UNES- Guevara if she could find him. So when I was wandered about, went to the UN cafeteria, CO once again, this time over its admission and took a few notes. of “Palestine.”) Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The Amer- The UN was founded in 1945 by fif- Thousands of people who work at the

ican Spectator. ty-one countries. Now they number 193 UN are paid huge tax-free salaries (U.S. Commons Brasil/Wikimedia Jr./Agência Casal, Marcello Photo:

54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 employees do pay taxes), and they certain- ty”) but he included nothing provocative ly boost the economy of Manhattan’s East either (such as Leviticus 20:13—sorry, CLASSIFIEDS Side. My glance around the cafeteria sug- you’ll have to look it up). gested that not many people were present Archbishop Paglia tried to hold the line, PERSONALS that day. (Writing press releases? Attending telling the audience that the family is made meetings? On urgent travel?) of “male/female” and “parent/child.” It MISSED CONNECTION—We caught As I see it, the UN is a ship that exists for combines “in a lasting fashion two kinds of each other’s eyes in May at the liquor the benefit of its crew: no cargo, no destina- relations characterized by radical differenc- store on 38th Street in Tulsa. Your tight, tion, few external constraints. The UN Se- es, one being male and female, and the oth- black shirt displayed the outline of your curity Council issues many resolutions but er being parent and child.” The family had toned pectorals, and I noted the curve of the veto power of permanent members en- not always been perfect, he added, but over your bicep as you lifted the revolver and sures that little action is taken. On balance time it had “purified itself little by little.” told the manager to empty the cash reg- that is probably a good thing. He was referring to a time when the father ister. You might remember me: While the Americans today pay little attention to literally owned his wife. (But is that still not rest of the patrons ducked into the tequi- the United Nations—or to any organiza- true in much of the Muslim world?) la aisle for cover, I was the girl staring, tion with “International” in its title. In- My own suspicion is that, in the West- salivating. My eyes were drawn to your ternational Labor Organization, anyone? ern world, the family is not so much pu- kissable lips by the black ski mask you International Monetary Fund? The IMF rifying itself as falling apart. Further, the were wearing. But then you dashed—too began as a system of international pay- U.S. has become the world leader in that quickly, before I could say hello. Would ments to maintain fixed exchange rates. disintegration. Over-generous welfare ben- love to share in your ill-gotten gains, if But when floating rates arrived in 1971, efits encourage pre-marital sex because we you evaded capture. I’m a sucker for bad the IMF somehow survived. No surprise know that the government will pick up the boys. Write BOOZE BRIGAND, c/o TAS. there. As a friend of mine said of the rul- child-care tab when needed. I don’t need to ing class’s ambition to have a cushy life, remind you (but President Obama should) MERCHANDISE “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” of the most striking outcome—the destruction of the black family. BUILDING A HOUSE? Conserve energy. inston churchill once said Our politically correct judges—widely Go subterranean! Detailed architec- that to “jaw-jaw is better than to praised whenever they find laws against same- tural schmatics for your dream under- war-war,” and that I do agree with. sex marriage to be unconstitutional—make ground cave dwelling, only $175. Send W check or money order plus a large The UN could do worse than to display it on matters worse. That such assaults on tradition the wall. Today, a leading UN goal is “to keep are today considered meritorious shows just self-addressed, stamped manila enve- peace throughout the world.” During the how anti-Christian our times have become. lope to Brumco, 1325 12th Street, Ad- Cold War, it went through a strong disarma- My wife was the last to speak. Inciden- dison, ON, K0E 1A0. ment phase; I saw an old disarmament display tally, she is also on the board of the Sandia in a corridor. My own belief is that the Ameri- National Laboratories, which is responsible NECK TIE NARROWING can and Soviet possession of nuclear weapons for the maintenance of nuclear weapons. Save your wide ties from fashion ob- kept the peace between the superpowers quite I’m sure we all hope that they still work. As solescence! We’ll narrow your ties to satisfactorily for over forty years. to the family, she said that it is under at- a stylish 2” width (or state preferred On “World Peace Day” a few months tack “from cultural, economic, and political width). Great for college students or ago, Pope Francis called for the “disar- forces that are both new and far more ag- upwardly mobile homeless men! Send mament of all parties, beginning with gressive than ever before.” It is no longer the $25 for each set of three ties to Teeny nuclear and chemical weapons disarma- age-old force of human concupiscence that Tie Co., 121 Lighthouse Lane, Atlanta, ment.” Question: Who starts disarming challenges it, “but organized, well-funded, GA 30305. first? As a comment on world affairs, it and persistent activists who want to change strikes me as being out of touch. There all social structures.” BUMPER STICKERS: “Nuke Harry must be a Vatican secretariat that dreams Reid”; “Have You Slugged Your Kid To- up these things. The Pope is supposed to Our task must be to counterattack, to rally all day?”; “Frack the Whales.” Three for $5. live in the real world, not a utopian one. available forces to reestablish the indispensable Write Saturday Evening Club, P.O. Box But ensconced as I was in this heartland unit of the family founded on marriage as the soci- 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47402. of diplomacy, I decided not to bring it up etal norm.…We must begin our own “long march with Archbishop Paglia. through the institutions” to take back our culture. MISC. Our panel discussion was held in a big, bowl-shaped conference room. In addi- When she finished people rushed up and Before someone CHOPS YOUR HANDS tion to the two archbishops, there was a praised her bravery. I agreed with all that OFF write a request for information and super-tactful Muslim—a UN regular who she said but the response showed that con- enclose a self-addressed stamped enve- said nothing memorable—and a rabbi troversy is not expected in these precincts. lope to: World-Wide Handicide, PO Box from Argentina. Focusing on the Torah, Delegates were already pouring in for the 731, Youngstown, OH, 44420. he avoided the usual UN cant (“promote next pow-wow. Ours had exceeded the time dialogue,” “sustainable development,” limit. Someone told me what the new topic PLACE AN AD: [email protected]. “message of tolerance,” “respectful diversi- was but I forgot to write it down. ONLY $5 PER WORD (12-WORD MINIMUM).

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 ben stein’s DIARY powerhouse called WNET, was doing on Columbia. By chance, it was graduation day and security was tight. I was supposed to go into Butler Library, the main library, by a certain entrance, but the guard would not let me in. So, I hoofed it along 114th Street to try another entry. As I did, I saw the Alpha Delta Phi house by BENJAMIN J. STEIN right there at 526 as it always has been. Its flag was flying. I felt an immense emo- tional rush. My days at AD were probably the happiest of my life until then. In fact, they definitely were. We had a great broth- More Than We Bargained For erhood, spectacular parties with black-tie dress and rock bands and beautiful girls and liquor flowing like in a speakeasy. We had lunches and dinners there and Monday I felt—for the first time in my life—as if ere i am in New York She’s going places. One of the best things I were truly part of a band of brothers. I City. The weather is you can know is when someone is trying to cannot speak highly enough of AD. One perfect. Last night I had con you. A far better thing to know is when brother in particular, Stuart Reynolds, was a fine flight up on a tiny to admit that you don’t know something. the one who got me in. I am on my hands little U.S. Air regional The girl has got it going on. and knees with gratitude to him at all times. jet. Its air conditioning We had Japanese food at a little place Getting into AD got me a dose of male was broken and it was right across the street from the immense strength and encouragement that in many an oven, but I slept most of the time anyway. Time-Warner Center. The service was swift ways has lasted all of my life. Larry Lis- HI checked into my usual room at the Mar- and the food was tasty. I have known this girl sitzyn, Grant Roberts, Rad West, Clem riott Essex House on Central Park South. For since she was born and I have been helping Sweeney, Clay Maitland, Tom Bolton, Mott decades it was a Marriott, and then an Arab her for her whole life. I am extremely proud Greene, Jan DeVries, Neill Brownstein, hotel firm bought it, spruced it up, and ran it of her. She’s going to be a junior in the fall. Chuck Hamilton, Charles Chase Hewes, for about ten years. Now it’s a Marriott again She’s casting about for what to do. I told her Rudy von Bernath…many, many, many and it’s just great. The doormen, bellhops, and that in my life, I could not imagine a job that others. BROTHERS. Ed Wallace. Henry desk people are all kind and remember me did not involve self-expression. She looked Milgrom. Barry Solomon. I think men need from stays over many years. It feels like home. thoughtful and said she agreed. to be around other men in a comradely way. I met up with the college-age daughter of She’s just a wonderful human being. Her If I had not gotten into AD, I would not a close friend from Los Angeles. She’s a stu- grandmother was a prisoner at Auschwitz have met Larry Lissitzyn, the president of dent at the Jewish Theological Seminary at and a slave laborer for four years. She sur- the house, later a decorated Marine officer Columbia University and also takes many vived and now has this glorious twenty- war hero in Vietnam and super successful courses at the School of General Studies at year-old as a granddaughter. Just a miracle. lawyer. I would not have met his girlfriend, Columbia. I watched her walk to a subway and then Susan. She would not have introduced me She was right on time and we went out went to my room to take my mountain of to MMJ, who became my girlfriend when for a walk in the balmy evening of New fiber. Time passes so quickly. I used to carry I was a senior in college. She was probably York in spring. The girl and I discussed Pres- that child around in one hand while I wa- the first wonderful woman to ever love me. ident Obama’s concerns about rape on cam- tered the bougainvillea in Malibu with my The combination of the love of the broth- pus. She was extremely concerned about the other hand. ers of AD, the love of MMJ, incredibly great situation, too. This young woman has learned to get teachers like C. Lowell Harriss—whose son, “Have there been a lot of rapes at Colum- along well with other people. It truly is an Gordon, was also a brother at AD—and by bia?” I asked. immense gift—though perhaps it’s not real- far the best roommates in history, Arthur “Oh, yes,” she said. “A lot. And only five ly a gift. She fought for it and got it. For her, Best and David Paglin, gave me the kind of percent of the ones that happen get reported.” unlimited horizons as far as I can see. year that most men only dream of. “How do you know they’re happening if That was last night. In November of ’65, MMJ and her pals they don’t get reported?” I asked her. Today, I got up early and headed up to threw a surprise party for me at our apartment The young woman is smart. She literally Columbia for an interesting errand. I had at 380 Riverside Drive—doorman building, stopped in her tracks and said, “You know, a confused driver, though. He thought river view, 2 bdrms., 1 bath, $200 a month. that’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought Broadway was one-way south. That’s about It was the high point of my life until that mo- of that. I don’t know how they arrived at the as big a traffic mistake as anyone can make ment. I can still so perfectly remember how five percent figure.” in New York. beautiful MMJ looked that night. However, after much guidance from me, Enough. AD was paradise. Senior year Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and we arrived. I was there to do some video for at Columbia was happy days. To be young lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu. a documentary that the local PBS outlet, a was heaven.

56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 However, today the four years, we will AD house was locked have a World War and I could not get that kills most of an in. Heartrending. entire generation The past is a different with industrialized country. Who said that? warfare. We will have I did my video work battles in which for- on the documenta- ty thousand men are ry about Columbia killed in a few hours. for WNET in a quiet “At the end of that room in Butler Li- war, or near the end, brary. How well I re- there will be a revo- call reading Friedman lution in Russia in and Schwartz’s Mone- the name of income tary History of the Unit- equality, among other ed States in that library, things. From that will and much of Keynes’s arise the most ruth- General Theory. That less dictatorship of all reading has served me time. In the name of well. I still make much social justice, it will of my living from that torture an entire large reading. nation and kill fifty Then, lunch at a million people. That cute little French place will be called commu- called Le Monde on nism. Broadway at 112th. I “In Germany, there felt a bit unsettled thinking about how lone- What a mess. If someone had come down will be a revolution in the name of science ly I was at Columbia until I joined AD. But from a mountain after Brown v. Board of and Darwinism and purification of the white soon we were off to WNET’s colossal studios Education in the spring of 1954 and said, race. In the name of science, it will kill six for me to read an immense narration about “Okay, America, now you will live up to the million Jews, all civilians, and millions of Columbia. Then back to my hotel to sleep. principles of the Founders and you will have others, all innocent. In the name of sci- Then a struggle for half an hour to get a equal opportunity in schools. And soon ence, the most monstrously cruel war of all taxi to take me up to an adorable sushi place thereafter you will have equal opportuni- time will come, killing 65 million people. called Planet Sushi on the Upper West Side. ty in employment, housing, everything— It will be so monstrous that even the most Then a ghastly meal at a place I won’t men- BUT by 1994, the public school systems civilized and merciful nations, like Britain tion. Much arguing with my brother-in-law in almost every big city school district in and the USA, will eagerly kill as many ci- about politics. But he did me a big favor. America will have been demolished. The vilians as they can by aerial bombing. He gave me a simple but powerful reference school districts will be marred by violence, “After that war, also in the name of social point for the speech I will make tomorrow. and education for the poor and the lower justice, there will be a revolution in China. Melvin Epstein is one smart guy. middle class will have become just a dim In the name of justice and decency, almost memory. There will be hardly any white 100 million people will be killed by the state Tuesday children in schools. Hardly any white chil- directly and through starvation. Only when ne hour by car from 59th and dren will be born except to the rich and the that country becomes capitalist and em- 7th to 44th and 7th. That’s why I poor because the problems of education are braces income inequality will the standards Odon’t live in New York City. Fifteen insurmountable. The whole educational of life rise and prosperity come. This is your blocks. One hour. and socioeconomic structure of the country future, mankind. How do you like science? Then a speech to a great group, genuine- will be in ruins. But you will have integra- How do you like social justice?” ly fine people from Wells Fargo. Just great tion. Are you sure you want it?” And what if a seer arose in the United people. I left the venue on a cloud, went But, of course, we had to have it. We just States after a Supreme Court decision in the home to the Essex House, and then out to are nowhere near properly addressing the ra- early 1970s that was supposed to protect JFK. I slept the whole way. cial problems in America today. Integration privacy and said, “Very well. You will have Then a flight on a wildly broken Airbus had to happen. But the sequels have been your privacy. But you will kill fifty-six mil- A321A. The air conditioning did not work punishing. Or maybe I am just totally wrong lion totally and utterly innocent babies to in first class. Sweat was pouring off my scalp. about all of this. That’s possible. I often am. do it. Is your privacy worth that?” In coach it was cool. I have had this prob- Then, as I got off the plane and got home Man is made of extremely crooked stuff. lem before on the Airbus. Europeans do not and swam in my pool with the scent of Still, in my pool, with the jasmine in the know how to make proper air conditioning. jasmine all around me, I thought of even subtropical air, all is well. But if this is what That’s just an opinion. worse. If in 1910 a man had appeared in we have become and now the most insane As I tried to sleep, I reflected on our Berlin and said, “Now, we have a booming, murderers will soon have atomic weapons,

Photo: Van Amridge Quadrangle, Columbia University/Wkimedia Commons University/Wkimedia Columbia Quadrangle, Amridge Van Photo: world. peaceful Europe, for the most part. But in can there possibly be a big enough pool?

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 conservative TASTES Monostatos must make his bad impression Without a race, religion or profession.

Even Auden couldn’t have foreseen the de-sexing of Pamina, though as a homo- sexual he will doubtless already have been posthumously conscripted into the cause of gay marriage, wherein notions of Mann and by JAMES BOWMAN Weib (not to mention Gottheit) are either obsolete or fantastical. I think Auden would have been bemused by and unhappy with the idea. He was, after all, a professing Christian, and of his homosexuality he said with typical Removing the irreverence: “Of course it’s wrong. We must just hope that Miss God will forgive us.” I can’t see him taking the sacramental view. Magic From Mozart That piquant take on the matter, like the world of Mozart and Schikaneder, is rapid- ecently, my wife and I Man and wife and wife and man ly becoming incomprehensible to modern attended a performance Together they’re a Godlike pair. audiences who, if they think about it at all, of Mozart’s Magic Flute— must suppose that these eighteenth-centu- which is what German But in Ms. Rourke’s translation it bery Austrians looked at life more or less as speakers call a Singspiel comes: they themselves do. Certainly those who opera, written in the ver- produce plays and operas by long-dead nacular and intended for Heart to heart and soul to soul writers consider it part of the job to avoid a popular audience. In this it was unlike the Love alone will make us whole any reminders that they didn’t. According- Rothers among Mozart’s most famous operas, ly, we are all now accustomed to what the which were written to Italian libretti and Love alone, eh? Well, love plus a healthy New York Times has called, apropos of a intended for a more aristocratic public— dose of political correctness. It’s a neat new production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte though most were also performed in pop- trick, anyway, to have excised any hint in Los Angeles, a “culminating vision—not ular, vernacular versions. The Washington not only of sex but { thoroughly worked National Opera was staging it in an English also of religion from out—of pervasive translation by one Kelley Rourke, who, be- these two lines about androgyny.” How of- sides having the ear for rhyme of your aver- marriage. Elsewhere, Modern ten, by the way, do age rap or hip hop artiste—which is to say, the production also we find that that par- hardly any ear at all—managed largely to removes any refer- audiences must ticular vision is “not extract any residual sense of sex difference ence to race, though suppose that thoroughly worked from the opera’s tale of a young prince’s as Mozart’s librettist out”—especially quest to find and rescue a young princess Emanuel Schikaned- these eighteenth- when it is applied to from imprisonment by (so he is told) an evil er wrote the part, the the works of people sorcerer. You might almost call it magic. villain, Monostatos, century Austrians who, when alive and In act one, for example, there is a sublime- is supposed to be a looked at life writing, would have ly simple duet between the young Princess, black man and is rec- had no idea of what it known as Pamina, and not the young prince ognized as such by the more or less was. Surely it is only but the comic lead, who is called Papageno. other characters. On as they the fact that music is It is conventionally known by its first line in the night we saw the normally written for German, Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen, show, he was played themselves do. either male or female and its refrain goes like this: by a man of indeter- voices which has so far minate race in white- prevented opera, like Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann, face, though no hint { the movies (interest- Reichen an die Gottheit an. of the reason for this peculiar maquillage ingly), from following the theater into the is given in Ms. Rourke’s translation. Ac- murky ways of “gender-blind casting,” (see Or, as we might sing, fitting it to the music, cordingly, there is also no reference to the “Culture Benders,” TAS, November 2008, devil, which is what he and Papageno call and “As She Likes It,” TAS, April 2013). James Bowman, our movie and culture crit- each other on their first meeting, at least as For you couldn’t really call female singers ic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Schikaneder wrote it. W.H. Auden proves in what are known as “trouser roles,” such Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A to have been prophetic when he wrote in as that of Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage History and Media Madness: The Corrup- his “Metalogue to The Magic Flute,” proof Figaro, an example of gender-blindness. tion of Our Political Culture, both published duced for the bi-centenary celebrations of On the contrary, “gender” distinctions are by Encounter Books. Mozart’s birth in 1956: only accentuated by mezzo-soprano voic-

58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 es of women pretending ing the curtain go up “on to be boys—the opposite, the Marschallin, played by of course, of Shakespear- Kate Royal, gyrating—to- ean stage practice in which tally naked—in a shower of boys pretended to be wom- glitter.” It’s almost enough en. As in Shakespeare too, to make you think that the gender reversal is it- Miss Erraught had been self frequently reversed, as chosen for the role of Oc- when Cherubino is sup- tavian, and then dressed posed to dress up like a in extremely unflattering girl. The same thing hap- white satin breeches pre- pens in Richard Strauss’s cisely in order to elicit some great opera Rosenkavalier, such reaction from the me- deliberately modeled on dia. They, of course, can the Mozart operas of over be relied on to take a keen a century earlier, when the interest in any kind of on- mezzo Octavian (known to stage sex—sex, that is, in his married lover, the Mar- a sense much more up-to- schallin, by the pet name date than any that would of Quinquin), dresses like have been understood by a chambermaid. He does Mozart and Schikaneder. so at first in order to cover A similar judgment was up the affair, but later it is no doubt made by their lat- to play a nasty trick on the ter-day fellow countryman, Marschallin’s cousin, Baron Herr Thomas Neuwirth, Ochs, breaking up the lat- who, under the name of ter’s arranged engagement Conchita Wurst (Little to young Sophie, whom Connie Sausage), won this Quinquin has fallen in love year’s Eurovision Song with and for whom he will Contest by singing “Rise leave the Marschallin after Like a Phoenix” in breast- the final, glorious trio sung length hair, high heels, a by the three of them in the gold-highlighted gown, and third act. The three female a full beard. The Danish voices blending produce hosts of this year’s contest quite a different effect from had advertised its theme as anything a man and two “Tolerance,” so contestants women could do. relying only on their musi- As with the cross-dress- cal talents, if any, could not ing, the apparent sexual say they were not given fair homogeneity only serves to accentuate bonpoint of Tara Erraught, the young Irish warning. Nor could the Russians, whose the sense of sexual difference, at least in a mezzo playing Octavian, was a bit difficult contestants finished seventh and who were deliberately archaic context where sexual to reconcile with the ostensible appearance predictably and, to the hypertolerant na- roles are strongly differentiated as they are of her character, a teenage hobbledehoy on tions of Europe, gratifyingly outraged. It in Rosenkavalier. But modern politics dic- the brink of manhood who is supposed to was, said one Russian politician, “the end tate that such differentiation can no longer inspire powerful feelings of lust in an older of Europe.…There is no limit to our out- be represented on stage without a decon- woman, an older man, and a young girl. rage. It has turned wild. There are no more structive explication of its oppressive sub- Well, you can imagine the outcry from men or women in Europe, just it.” That is, text. In the current Rosenkavalier at Glyn- social media’s feminist invigilators against of course, not quite true. Men and wom- debourne, for instance, “Ochs doesn’t just such male—the critics all happened to be en continue to be born as boys and girls, behave boorishly with Sophie; his thuggish, men—“body shaming,” and even, in one and continue, for the most part, to differ proto-Nazi henchmen plonk her on a table or two cases, their ungallant attention to from one another in all the familiar ways, where she is auctioned like a slave.” That, anything unhappy or unbecoming in a including a desire to play in real life those at any rate, is the description of Richard lady’s physical appearance. That, at least, seemingly long outdated roles of Mann Morrison, the opera critic for the Times of had the merit of showing that the polit- and Weib. But the politicized culture both London, who got himself in trouble for a ically correct can be old-fashioned when there and here is increasingly intolerant of quite different critical stricture. He was one it suits them. But as Mr. Morrison of the any artistic or theatrical expression of such of five critics for five metropolitan dailies Times wrote by way of apologia, the Glyn- differences, even when they are set in the who independently mentioned in various debourne production itself had made rath- heavenly music of certain dead white male

Photo: Oronoz/Newscom Photo: and mildly censorious ways that the em- er a point of its singers’ appearance by hav- composers.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 arts & LETTERS

The Great Bow Tie View of History

A U.S. Geographic One of his few early missteps was to be- The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Survey expedition- come, at the age of fourteen, friends with the Edited by Andrew Schlesinger ary force announced Kennedy least capable of benefiting him: poor and Stephen Schlesinger yesterday that it has Rosemary, later lobotomized, with whom he (Random House, 631 pages, $35) discovered an unex- tripped the light fantastic. (“My memory was,” plored and hereto- Schlesinger wrote in old age, “that she insisted Reviewed by R.J. Stove fore unknown land on leading me—probably right, since I was a region between the bad dancer.”) Another misstep: his early reluc- New York and Cal- tance to support young J.F.K., on whom, in rthur Schlesinger, Jr. ifornia coasts. “We a 1946 letter home, he passed a tepid initial never explored the sweep- shall call this land ‘the judgment. “Very sincere and not unintelligent, ing plains of my native Midwest’,” said Dirk but kind of on the conservative side.” Australia—indeed, it is Zachary, New York Yet overall it is less the occasional faux pas hard to imagine him City native and leader of the 200-man exploratory than the predominant canniness that impress- doing so when there re- team. “And its primitive inhabitants shall be known es. Watching the young Schlesinger must have mained parts of Europe as ‘Midwesterners.’”….early reports depict a region been rather like watching the young Mozart still untouched by an Ivy League mission civil- as backward as it is vast. “Many of the basics of a or the young Rimbaud, in that he required Aisatrice. Schlesinger’s attitude toward all things civilized culture appear to be entirely absent,” said no discernible cognitive apprenticeship. With antipodean probably represented a rare politi- Gina Strauch, a Los Angeles-based anthropologist. a Pulitzer already to his name, he released in cal concurrence with Henry Kissinger, who in “They have yet to discover the film industry, and 1949 what almost every thirty-two-year-old 1991 appalled a Sydney business roundtable their knowledge of restaurants is sketchy at best.” writer dreams of producing: a book that, by admitting that “When I am shaving in the whether or not it becomes a commercial morning I am not thinking about Australian If ever a man chose his genes well, that man smash, lastingly changes political debate. foreign policy.” Which brings us to the pres- was Schlesinger. Descended via his mother In The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, ent question: A mere Australian presuming (a Bancroft) not merely from James K. Polk’s Schlesinger hailed Truman as the legitimate to discuss one of modern America’s most rec- Navy Secretary George Bancroft, but from heir of FDR, while rejecting obvious Sovi- ognized public intellectuals? Cut to Ambrose one of the Mayflower arrivals, he also inherited et groupies of the Harry Hopkins kind. The Bierce: “Can such things be?” from his Austro-Prussian father a super-sized Vital Center extended the comfort of an in- Still, in some respects, absence from the continental intellect and a true historian’s out- tellectual pedigree to battle-scarred New Deal Beltway might aid a reviewer of this selection look. After attending the tony Philip Exeter veterans ever more on the defensive against from Schlesinger’s correspondence, which Academy as a teenager, he earned his bach- not just Strom Thurmond but Joe McCarthy spanned more than sixty years and included elor’s degree from Harvard, where the elder and Robert Taft. The sleight-of-hand involved penpals who need no introduction: Kennedy, Schlesinger was on the faculty, at age twenty. in thus minimizing FDR’s own Sovietophil- Humphrey, McNamara, Niebuhr, Kissinger. During the Second World War, he worked ia was hardly unique to, or even a conscious However distant in physical terms Australia for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA of act by, Schlesinger. When Schlesinger and the remains from Schlesinger’s preferred envi- its day, and plugged away at his first book, a New Yorker’s Richard Rovere co-wrote with- ronment, it is no more alien in societal terms study of the Jackson administration that won in three months The General and the Presi- to that environment than is America’s own him his first Pulitzer Prize at the age of twen- dent—a defense of Truman’s 1951 decision “flyover country,” the subject of a gripping ty-eight. From there he joined his father on to fire MacArthur from Korean War com- Onion exposé from 1996: the faculty at Harvard, despite his not hav- mand—Schlesinger prudently sent a copy ing obtained a doctoral degree. The young to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The president R.J. Stove lives in Melbourne. Schlesinger, it seemed, could do no wrong. relished it, and told Schlesinger so:

60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 Arthur Schlesinger (in the bow tie) watching the flight of Alan Shepard at the White House.

Dear Doctor Schlesinger…I think you ana- least it requires extreme agility, to spill any- speechwriting, Latin American and Europe- lyzed the situation just as it is and I certainly thing on a bowtie.” an affairs, cultural affairs, and liaison work appreciate your kindness in sending me a copy All the rewards that comparative propin- with the liberal community.” Bird, meet of the book. quity can give, Schlesinger obtained. He had gilded cage. two advantages over most other Camelot Less decent men than Schlesinger would A man who has received compliments on courtiers: amiability of temperament, and have resented their enforced distance from the White House letterhead before turning thir- the knowledge that with his sheer erudition testosterone-fueled main event. Then again, ty-five can hardly reconcile himself to mundane he could get a non-Camelot job if need be. less decent men than Schlesinger would never notions of academic prestige. Proto-Schlesing- But it is newly remarkable to observe from have sent to Jackie the condoling epistle—qui- er, scholar, therefore metamorphosed by de- the Letters how little JFK (unlike Jackie) ever et, compassionate, and a mere two short para- grees into deutero-Schlesinger, activist. At confided in Schlesinger. Writing to Steven- graphs in length—that Schlesinger did com- first, Adlai Stevenson—witty, self-deprecating, son, who had discreetly queried as to how pose before midnight on November 22, 1963, at ease with professors—seemed the likeli- uxorious “that kid” was, Schlesinger insist- which runs in part: est nationally celebrated politician to meet ed—and doubtless fully believed—that tales Schlesinger’s criteria for a philosopher-prince. of JFK’s extramarital feats were “greatly ex- Dearest Jackie, the love and grief of a nation may The sole trouble with Stevenson as presidential aggerated….The stories about his private life do something to suggest the feeling of terrible timber was that (as Chicago columnist Mike seem to date from 1955 and before. I have vacancy and despair we all feel. Marian and my Royko cruelly observed) he kept losing. Hence heard no reliable account of any such inci- weeping children join me in sending you our the inevitable gulf between Schlesinger and dent in recent years.” profoundest love and sympathy. the “Madly for Adlai” faithful; hence the fatal As early as November 1959, Schlesinger Kennedy embrace. had harangued “Dear Jack” with a scarcely He took on several causes that an Artful believable opening sentence that its recipient Dodger would have left alone. When William alcolm muggeridge, who in must have found impossible to forget or con- Styron’s 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner—a 1966 would call deutero-Schlesing- done: mixed portrayal of Turner’s failed slave revolt, Mer “a slobbering apologist for the written by a white man—prompted Orwellian late President; an undiscriminating adulator I hope I am wrong, but everything I have heard hate sessions from black intellectuals, Schlesing- of the whole turnout, Bobby and Teddy and this weekend confirms my feeling that your recent er’s missive to Styron displayed dignity and all, down to the very Hyannis Port dogs,” dialogue with The New York Times concerning clairvoyance: credited proto-Schlesinger with “luminous birth control may turn out to be a very bad break. and critical intelligence.” (A surprisingly early I thank you for sending me a copy of that sad little demolition job on Camelot appeared under This salvo was fired at a man who, in Nan- book. They so desperately miss the point of ev- Muggeridge’s byline in the New York Review cy Mitford’s memorable verdict, did “for sex erything you were trying to do….The vulgarity of of Books’s January 28, 1965 edition.) To a what Eisenhower did for golf.” It helps ex- prose and argument in this book ensures that it sharp mind, Schlesinger took the sensible plain Schlesinger’s post-1961 confinement will defeat its own purpose. precaution of adding sharp dress. He justified to the White House’s East Wing, where (as his most famed sartorial quirk with the un- the Letters’ editors—two of Schlesinger’s Meanwhile, when writing to William F.

Photo: Cecil Stoughton/Wikimedia Commons Stoughton/Wikimedia Cecil Photo: answerable assurance: “It is impossible, or at sons—note) “His portfolio would include Buckley in 1970, Schlesinger seems to have

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 been more inclined to needle than to de- 1973, Schlesinger popularized the pejora- Schlesinger’s letters for boorishness is to search nounce his antagonist: tive phrase “Imperial Presidency,” although in vain. Many an American public intellectual, he had acquiesced to such a presidency on if given half a chance in Soviet Russia, would Could it be that you are getting a little tetchy in JFK’s watch, finding it objectionable chiefly have not merely embraced the prevalent poli- your declining years?…Is it really lèse-majesté to when Nixon embarked on it. During 1980, tics but imitated the ad hominem frenzies of suggest that I am under no obligation to promote Schlesinger—like Carter and almost every- spoiled brats like Commissar Alexander Fade- your program? As for others, let them make their one else—miscalculated Reagan’s staying yev (“If monkeys could type, they would pro- own decision. Don’t tell me that you have stopped power, televisual gifts, and ability to gain duce poems like T.S. Eliot’s”). Not totalitarian- believing in freedom of individual choice! You literate followers. Lukewarm about a sec- ism alone inspired such sewer-mouthedness. remind me of my other favorite correspondent, ond Carter term, Schlesinger championed A mere twenty years ago, former Australian Noam Chomsky. Best regards. first Teddy (in one last surge of Camelot tri- Foreign Minister Gareth Evans—possessed of umphalism) and then the Illinois third-par- brains, a work ethic, and education—grew so efore that came the Tet Offensive ty candidate John B. Anderson, whose loy- incensed, in Kuala Lumpur, at the delays in and Sirhan Sirhan. Hubert Humphrey, alists sliced chunks off Carter’s base while agreement on a communiqué’s wording that bstung by Schlesinger’s refusal to give leaving Reagan’s largely unscathed. he screamed, “Jesus Christ, we’re not drafting his presidential hopes an unambiguous Twelve years after Carter’s downfall we find the f---ing Koran.” (Evans’s nauseated Malay- endorsement, failed to realize how Kenne- Schlesinger telling “Dear Bill” Clinton: sian counterpart contented himself with silent- dycentric the latter’s world-view remained. ly dragging a finger across his own windpipe.) As a despondent { Bush is a man of a now Schlesinger would no more have talked like Schlesinger wrote to discredited past. Perot that than have planted a bomb. Reinhold Niebuhr, is the Wizard of Oz. (I It is easy, and often justifiable, to keep on who himself had lost To search in hope that Toto will pull mocking the court-jester aspect of Schlesing- most of his previous back the curtain well er’s Thousand Days. (How merciless was Spy political sway: Schlesinger’s before November.) You magazine’s treatment of that aspect in its un- letters for are the man of vision forgettable 1991 comic strip “Kennedy Ba- The murder of Robert with the professional bies”!) But to examine Schlesinger’s letters in Kennedy terminated my boorishness is skills to define the tasks bulk is to be forced into the revisionist con- interest in the campaign, of national renovation clusion that Camelot was not much more and perhaps in Amer- to search in vain. and to get the country central to Schlesinger’s ultimate importance ican politics for some Over six decades, moving again. than the Duke of Wellington at 10 Down- time to come. Hubert ing Street was to the Duke of Wellington at seems to me a burnt-out he expressed He developed a ten- Waterloo. Over six decades, Schlesinger ex- case, emasculated and himself through dresse for even Hillary, pressed himself through brisk, lucid but well- destroyed by L.B.J. and assuring Tina Brown groomed English (the overpraised Edmund unlikely ever to become a brisk, lucid but at the New Yorker— Wilson was tone-deaf by comparison); had man again. the editor likened by an intellectual curiosity that Tony Blair’s or well-groomed at least one contribu- David Cameron’s tame authorial prostitutes Just as Schlesing- English. tor to “Stalin in high could not begin to imagine; energized lots of er never predicted heels”—that “I found people into buying several intelligently con- Humphrey’s sudden, myself seated next to ceived books of his; and stimulated inquiry labor union-backed { Mrs. Clinton. I had a into pre-Civil-War scholarship among people resurgence during the 1968 campaign’s last splendid time.” To some degree he reinvented who, in his absence, would have drowned weeks—which drained votes from George himself in 1991, with his bestseller The Dis- talk of that whole topic by their ostentatious Wallace and almost vanquished Nixon—so uniting of America, as a sagacious opponent of yawns. He could with entire legitimacy have he never anticipated the sheer size of George multi-culti death wishes, whether pedagogic echoed Othello: “I have done the state some McGovern’s defeat. “With all McGovern’s or narrowly administrative. Of course, his service, and they know it. No more of that.” troubles, the party is in a much better situ- own entirely sensible suggestions for curbing In moral terms, echoing Othello beats the ation than it was after Chicago four years these death wishes were ones that his publish- hell out of echoing Iago. ago.” This Schlesinger conclusion comes in a ers would have hurled into the wastepaper Having endured Parkinson’s Disease with- note to Stevenson’s former mistress Marietta basket if propounded by a Nixon—let alone out a hint of whining, the eighty-nine-year- Peabody Tree. Said note followed McGovern’s a Wallace, a Goldwater, or a Jesse Helms— old Schlesinger breathed his last in February dumping of Thomas Eagleton from the Dem- during the Great Society’s saturnalia. 2007, five weeks after his friend Art Buchwald, ocratic ticket, by which McGovern managed who from his own deathbed announced with to antagonize yet another voting bloc: former ltogether schlesinger emerges as a irrepressible brio, “Dying isn’t hard. Getting psych-ward patients. much more likable man than readers paid by Medicare is.” At his best, the protag- Clearly, we have here an advanced in- Acould expect from anyone so close to onist of this book was a decent man who, stance of Pauline Kael Syndrome (yes, Miss General Headquarters. For appreciating the while perhaps not climbing to ethical heights, Kael really did complain “I only know contrast, one need only compare him, in his avoided their depths. A great thinker? Maybe one person who voted for Nixon,” as con- boyish enthusiasms, with liverish supernannies not. But, as the Letters confirm, much more firmed by aNew York Times report). In of the Woodrow Wilson type. To search in than just a great bow tie.

62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 NNEWEW && BBESTEST SSELLINGELLING TTITLESITLES  FROMFROM IGNATIUSIGNATIUS PRESSPRESS 

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If a crunchy conserva- as antagonists seems to mean Ocharacters—politicians, doctors, peo- tive, as defined by columnist Rod Dreher in taking for granted the bounty ple who play doctors on television, Oprah— his 2006 book by that name, is one who loves they produce. For instance, he urge us, command us, beseech us to eat less of granola and Whole Foods, then I am surely a describes Kraft’s discovery that some things, or more of other things, though soggy conservative: soggy like a French fry left it could drastically reduce the the specific diktats are { to linger in a heaping time required to make cheese ever-changing and often pile of ketchup. (Hunt’s, by using enzymes and emulsi- contradictory. Michelle not Heinz. Never Teresa fiers. Cutting out the months- Obama, who has all but Are food Heinz.) long aging and ripening pro- created a Strategic Kale But the great food cess, the company created a Reserve in her attempt companies harangue has become continuous line—milk in one to convince Ameri- beholden to their impossible to ignore, side of the plant, cheese out the cans to nosh their leafy having now reached other—that took mere days. greens, was at it again customers? Or such loudness that I Moss reports flatly, as if the this May in the New can no longer hear the fact were unremarkable, that York Times, urging Re- are consumers waiter. How did we in 1995, after a string of strong publicans not only to just rats trapped get here? Three recent years, Kraft reported it had hit refrain from amending books offer insight two billion pounds (one mil- the WIC supplemental in a Skinner box— into that question, lion tons!) of cheese. It does nutrition program, but albeit one embla- though the answer, not denigrate artisan gouda or also to heed the wisdom of course, depends imported brie to observe that of Kepler and Coper- zoned with the on which author you in a hungry world this accom- nicus. “Right now, the friendly face of ask. In Salt Sugar Fat: plishment is nothing short of House of Representa- How the Food Giants an economic miracle. Similarly, tives is considering a Tony the Tiger? Hooked Us, Michael Moss states that Cargill pro- bill to override science,” Moss puts the blame duces 4.8 million pounds of food-grade salt Obama wrote, “by squarely in the board- every day, and that the high-end varieties are mandating that white { rooms of faceless food sold for just 10 cents per pound. That’s less potatoes be included on the list of foods manufacturers, who, in a sort of caloric arms than a minute’s work at minimum wage, for that women can purchase using WIC dol- race, continually pour more of those three a pound of the stuff over which wars have lars.” The first lady’s comrade in arms, Mi- delicious ingredients into their recipes. Hap- been fought and men have died. chael Bloomberg—notorious for leading a less consumers, the story goes, can’t help but In this way (and many others), Moss lets brigade of Mayors Against Illegal Gulps in stuff their gullets. All of this justifies not only his biases show. He relies upon sources like a war on oversized sodas—has thankfully the harangue, but also, naturally, unspecified a former Coke executive who turned consci- government intervention. entious objector to the cola wars after—no Kyle Peterson is managing editor of The Moss, a Pulitzer-winning New York Times joke—falling in love with a free-spirited, American Spectator. journalist, is at his best when discussing re- Amazon rainforest-wandering health-food

64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 hippie. The executive now sells carrots. Or nter jayson lusk, an agricultural When it comes to genetically modified the daughter of the Oscar Mayer employee economics professor at Oklahoma crops, Lusk concedes that there may be responsible for creating Lunchables, who fi- EState University, who injects costs and some environmental risk, but argues that nally realized what her father had wrought comparative advantages into the conver- this potential future harm is vastly out- after—again, no joke—going to work for sation. Lusk’s latest book, The Food Police: weighed by real immediate benefits. He cites Congressman Barney Frank and being A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of a 2003 study from the journal Science that scolded by an insufferable volunteer: “Do Your Plate, argues that the true culprits in found the introduction of biotech cotton to you realize all that plastic is going into the the great food harangue are the haranguers: 157 farms in rural India reduced insecticide landfill? And all those nitrates in that ham?” kitchen-chair pundits like Michael Moss use by nearly 70 percent and simultaneous- One chapter is simply titled, “I want to see a who create unreasonable fear by peddling ly increased yield by more than 80 percent. lot of body bags,” which sounds damning un- fashionable but romanticized notions about The case against organic food is similar. Lusk til readers find out the context: a Pepsi exec what we should eat. cites a synthesis of fifty-five studies, pub- hammering the com- lished five years ago in petition during a fiery the American Journal sales pep talk. Moss de- of Clinical Nutrition, scribes those in the food that showed no evi- business as men who dence that organics avoided “too much of are more nutritious. the kind of foods and He argues (pointing to drinks their companies yet more studies) that sold,” as if, to make up Americans’ coffee hab- an example, Ben and it is more carcinogenic Jerry are imagined to than any pesticide res- subsist solely on pints idue on their produce. of their Cherry Gar- And he suggests that cia ice cream. I began consumers misunder- to wish the book had stand the organic label. come with a noisemak- Organics can and do er I could press to play come from large, so- a few orchestra hits— called “factory” farms. Hollywood’s dramatic They can be sprayed DUN-DUN-DUN!— with all manner of whenever I reached an fungicides and pesti- anticlimactic line. cides, provided those At best, the con- “Vegetables: Hell yeah!” chemicals are “natu- sumers Moss describes ral.” Yields are 20 to are passive; at worst, they’re mindless. Man- Lusk takes on orthodoxies one by one, cit- 30 percent lower, so converting to organics ufacturers have “pushed more fatty prod- ing scientific journals to bolster his claims. means putting more land under the plow. ucts into the American diet” by creating For instance, in the section on locavorism, Lusk has written a polemic, and his rheto- food “perfectly engineered to compel over- the trend of favoring food grown nearby ric is over the top at times. (Rule of thumb: A consumption” at prices so low as to “turn (variously defined as a radius of 100 or 250 book about food should never, ever contain processed food into the only logical choice or 300 miles), he cities a British study on the the word “Gestapo.”) Skeptical readers will shoppers could make.” And when a compa- efficiency of big-box distribution. According no doubt seize upon his tone, dismiss him ny familiar with addiction, Philip Morris, to its authors, a consumer buying organic as a crank who cherry-picks his data, and dig buys Kraft, cigarette executives—and let’s vegetables who drives much more than four up other research that contradicts his scien- be clear, there can be no greater evil—end miles round trip to the farmer’s market is tific conclusions. That said, Lusk picks phil- up running the show. But this line of think- actually burning more carbon than one who osophical fights too. Specifically, he rebuts ing is fraught with contradiction. For one buys off the supermarket shelf. Further, Lusk paternalists who claim consumers are either thing, Moss acknowledges product failure. maintains, as economists are wont to do, that too confused to know what’s in their best in- He discusses at length the abject disappoint- regions should specialize in the commodities terest, or too weak-willed to do it: “The sup- ment of sliced cream cheese and recounts an they produce most efficiently, and then trade posed proof of this irrational behavior is said early meeting at which General Mills’ mar- for the rest. He recounts writing an article to be found in survey responses in which keting team pleaded for the company to with the sarcastic subtitle, “Why pineapples we say we wished we weighed less or saved introduce sugarcoated cereal: “We’ve got to shouldn’t be grown in North Dakota.” A more. But our current self will always wish be able to move into this area to survive!” reader objected that this was a silly caricature that our previous self had dieted and saved So which is it? Are food companies behold- of locavorism, but neither would the reader more, because we are now in the position to en to the market and their customers? Or concede that the northern state should im- reap the benefits without paying any of the are consumers just rats trapped in a Skin- port the tropical fruit. “The answer, in not so costs.” Nor does he find statistics on diabetes ner box—albeit one emblazoned with the many words,” Lusk writes, “was that people or heart attacks to be convincing. “By say-

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Afp/Getty Images/Newscom Smialowski/Afp/Getty Brendan Photo: friendly face of Tony the Tiger? in North Dakota shouldn’t want pineapples.” ing that a heart attack is evidence of poor

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 decision making, the paternalist is drawing Over the course of years and decades, a false comparison between the choice made readers watch as white bread goes from In a Sentimental Mood by a fictitious, all-knowing being with per- bad (because milling stripped nutrients) fect foresight and a real human faced with to good (because it was more digestible Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism trade-offs and uncertain outcomes.” than whole wheat) then back to bad. The By Thomas Brothers The reality, as Lusk sees it, is simple: Shangri-La to be emulated bounces from (Norton, $39.95, 594 pages) Food is safer, cheaper, more abundant, and the remote Hunza valley in the Himalayas, of higher quality than ever before. Since where chronic disease is supposedly nonex- Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington 1950, American agricultural output has istent and lifespans reach 140 years, to Na- By Terry Teachout increased by a factor of 2.75, while land ples, whose residents, seemingly immune (Gotham, $30, 483 pages) use has dropped by 27.5 percent. Beef and to heart disease, inspire the “Mediterra- pork cost 20 percent less, in real terms, nean” diet. Saturated fats fall out of favor Reviewed by C.W. Mahoney than they did in 1970, and poultry costs and cause heart disease and breast can- 50 percent less. Very few of us these days cer…until they don’t. Trans-fats, such as worry about where our next meal is com- in margarine, are a healthier substitute… hen i discovered jazz in the ing from, and having thus fulfilled the base until they aren’t. small Michigan town of my youth, requirements on Maslow’s famous pyramid What makes Levenstein’s book compel- Wit became for me a defining person- of needs, we now argue incessantly about ling, though, is not simply watching the ality trait, something intellectual and obscure its top: self-actualization, self esteem, sense slow zig-zag of progress. It’s seeing claims that only I enjoyed. A neglected Thelonious of belonging. What will give me those we now find wild be made in baldy moral Monk CD I found in my parents’ collection warm fuzzies and make me feel in sync language, with no hesitation and absolute became a conduit for gleeful dis- with the harmonics of Earth? Do I imagine certitude. Jean Mayer, a Harvard nutrition- sonance, brash personality, cool that the duck l’orange I’m chomping was ist and future president of Tufts University, virtuosity. Philip Larkin, another once a happy young creature, cavorting in opined in a ’60s newspaper column that provincial jazz amateur, called the a field of wild daisies and quacking with encouraging low-carbohydrate diets was music he loved “a fugitive mi- unrestrained joy? “in a sense the equivalent of mass murder.” nority interest…that unique pri- Doubleday advertised the anti-fat book vate excitement that youth seems hat we can be sure of, if Harvey Eat Well and Stay Well with the bold head- to demand.” My teachers knew Levenstein’s Fear of Food: A His- line: “Will you commit suicide this year?” nothing about jazz, my friends Wtory of Why We Worry About What J.I. Rodale, who founded Prevention mag- even less. The public library had We Eat can be taken as any indication, is azine, proclaimed, “I’m going to live to be jazz albums, but no one else twofold: that the pleas of Michelle Obama, 100, unless I’m run down by a sugar-crazed borrowed them. Yet there I was, Michael Bloomberg, and Co. are simply the taxi driver,” just weeks before he died of a wearing my pretension like the latest in a long and proud tradition of great heart attack at the age of seventy-two. Har- Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts that national food harangues, and that when to- vey Wiley, the father of the Food and Drug crowded our school hallways. Jazz day’s fads fade, others will be waiting in line Administration, warned errant housewives even sounded like a dirty word, to take their place. Levenstein, a history pro- in 1909 that “The average ice box is a char- an insincere confession slipped fessor at McMaster University in Ontario, nel house, which not only holds death, through smirking lips. Sure, our begins his survey with germophobia around but spreads it.” Levenstein’s bibliography high school had a “jazz” band, the beginning of the twentieth century. contains dozens of citations from the ar- but tepid charts blown by tuneless Flies in particular were thought to spread chives of the New York Times—the perch trombones to the beat of dribbled disease, so Kansas’s director of public health from which Moss and liberal foodies such basketballs wasn’t the straight put bounties of cash and movie tickets on as Michael Pollan make their pronounce- dope I knew and loved. their bulbous, red-eyed heads. The state’s ments today. When I arrived at Berklee schoolchildren took up the call, bringing to Levenstein’s point, elucidated in his College of Music years later, I their teachers thirty bushels of dead flies— book’s coda, is not that modern dietary expected an initiation into some arcane fra- about seven million in all—after just ten recommendations are necessarily wrong, ternity. A successful audition and scholarship weeks. As vitamins began to be discovered, but that consumers should take them with blossomed in my mind ideas of becoming the vitamania took hold, and housewives were a whole shakerful of salt. Individual health next Tony Williams or Elvin Jones. The reality soon spooning cod liver oil into reluctant outcomes involve huge variability. Even se- was that half the school didn’t care about jazz. mouths all across America. Thiamine was rious scientific studies generally come with Peers dozed in jazz history class and skipped of particular interest near the outbreak of caveats and hedges. News reports written out on big band arranging. Berklee, after all, World War II, after a study of ten patients by hamfisted journalists inevitably make had outgrown its jazz school origins by then in a state mental institution suggested a lack research seem more complete and sweep- to embrace pop, rock, heavy metal, hip hop, of it led to sluggishness and fatigue. Leading ing than intended. In the end, Levenstein and any other contemporary genre you could authorities demanded that millers begin en- comes back to that age-old advice: moder- name. There were students, like me, who made riching their flour with the substance. They ation in all things. the pilgrimage in search of improvisational argued that too little thiamine would erode So by all means, go ahead and savor your the national will and might spell defeat were quinoa and organic rutabaga soufflé. But C.W. Mahoney is a writer and musician liv- the country invaded. leave me and my French fries alone. ing in Alexandria, Virginia.

66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 enlightenment. At any given time ouis armstrong’s life is of day, half a dozen Japanese Char- well-documented in various lie Parkers paced outside practice Lbiographies, including his own rooms, slicked back hair and neat, memoirs. The latest in this line, thin mustaches billowing smoke. Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong: Students transcribed and memorized Master of Modernism, is not a tra- endless Bird solos in identical glass ditional biography, but a cultural cubicles. Teachers with impressive ré- analysis of Armstrong’s life and work sumés skipped lessons and seemed to between the years 1922 and 1932. live fractured, frazzled lives. Teaching Brothers’s thesis is that, during this was just another gig. So much for the decade, Armstrong “invented not one romance of my “private excitement.” but two modern art forms.” The first It’s tempting for jazz lovers to look refers to the “new melodic idiom” back to a time when our paradise of Armstrong’s “carefully designed was complete, to the days before jazz trumpet solos.” The second form is killed itself with pretensions of high the unique mainstream song style art. Modern jazz, after all, is a super- that made him the “best-selling per- annuated affair; record sales plum- former in the country, regardless of met while audiences keep getting genre, style, color, or pedigree.” So far, older. Phrases like “the golden age of swing” like pyramids over the desert kingdom of jazz. so good. This is sound, if uncontroversial stuff. and albums titled Birth of the Cool or The Shape Satchmo is the virtuoso soloist, rooted in New Necessary or not, Brothers proves his the- of Jazz to Come evoke an era when everyone Orleans tradition and the blues, whose melod- sis and then some. Indeed, the 132 pages of was tuned in, everyone got it. Of course, most ic style brought him from brothels to Carnegie discography, bibliography, endnotes, source of this is received wisdom, a lot of it courtesy Hall. In old age, he became a beloved public notes, and index lend this somewhat bloated of put-upon marketing men at the dwindling figure, an unthreatening jazz teddy bear. Duke tome an encyclopedic authority. Whether the reissue divisions of record companies and, of is the intellectual composer and bandleader, book makes for good reading is another matter course, jazz critics. As Larkin pointed out, “jazz tirelessly tinkering with tunes into the wee entirely. W.W. Norton, the publisher, describes writers are either Wells or Gibbon, onwards and hours. He challenged his listeners and em- Brothers’s “tremendous skill in making the upwards or decline and fall.” The history of jazz braced modern innovations, craving the re- connections between history and music acces- is one of overblown pronouncements, overea- spect given to composers like Ravel and Delius. sible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives ger judgments, and passing artistic fads. Many But stop for a minute in front of these murals, across the page.” But Satchmo himself must famous musicians have even bristled at the and the contradictions of jazz sneak up. Arm- have danced right out of the book, since so term “jazz,” rejecting it { strong is sometimes many of the main text’s 462 pages have almost as a label for what white disparaged for his nothing to do with the man. Instead, Brothers listeners considered ex- goofy singing, but it burns pages on such ponderous concepts as otic and primitive. Jazz Louis Armstrong made him a star. Duke “blues sociology,” “African-American vernacu- was once the pop music felt he deserved con- lar,” and his own “fixed and variable” model of of the day, but that day and Duke Ellington cert halls but cashed music (no, it’s not a type of jazz mortgage). didn’t last long. To many are jazz’s Chaucer in at the Cotton Club. More annoying is Brothers’s frequent, Americans jazz has al- Satchmo shaped the self-conscious use of the word “Eurocentric,” ways been a curiosity, and Milton, melodic language of (meaning: to the exclusion of all cultures not a niche interest. Jazz is jazz solos but dispar- European), when surely he means “Europe- essentially an art of con- superstars whose aged the innovations an.” Speaking of Armstrong’s wife, Brothers tradiction. A happysad careers spanned of bebop. Ellington writes, “Through practicing and studying in music of the streets, it is was deeply religious the Eurocentric tradition, she developed skill at best a catch-all phrase low and high but far from a model in sightreading,” as if the music or its practice for a loose configuration culture. of clean living. Louis were oppressive conditions. Brothers notes in of artists spanning the came from humble or- his introduction that we must not gloss over last hundred years, a col- igins and was criticized the racial discord of jazz history. But let’s not lective fascination with { by later generations as create any either, since “white imitators” and syncopated rhythm, off-kilter harmony, group a sellout, an Uncle Tom. Edward grew up black “vernacular” musicians so clearly learned collaboration, individualistic soloing, lopsided solidly middle class and developed a digni- from each other, more than occasional acrimo- composition, and improvised madness. fied, socially progressive image. Armstrong nies notwithstanding. No two figures in jazz better represent these was publicly uncommitted but privately po- Throughout, Brothers fields the middle contradictions than Louis “Satchmo” Arm- litical. Ellington flattered politically minded ground between the specialized terminology strong and Edward Kennedy “Duke” Elling- socialites but was a largely apolitical aesthete of formal music theory and the descriptive ton. Born in 1901 and 1899 respectively, these at home. Satchmo detested pretension while imagery of music journalism. The result will two men are jazz’s Chaucer and Milton, su- Ellington thrived on it. Both men made out- please no one. Granted, writing about music, perstars whose careers spanned low and high standing, though very different, music we for academic or popular audiences, is a difficult culture. Even today, their achievements loom now call jazz. enterprise. (Cue everyone’s favorite Frank Zap-

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 pa quote: “Most rock journalism is people who too often like having a joke explained to you, might place dots of red and green side by side can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, wit stillborn and humor MIA. Barraged with on his canvas, finding inspiration in their tech- for people who can’t read.”) But Brothers does nearly 500 pages of Eurocentrisms, periodici- nical limitations.” In this sense, the book de- himself few favors with formulations like these: ties of periods, and sawtooth designs, one re- constructs Ellington’s image as a conventional covers from an hour with this book, unable to composer, making it clear that while being a What made [Armstrong’s] breakthrough possible recall anything just read. Woe unto those naïve weak melodist he was a superior arranger with a was the nearly universal sense of periodicity that jazz studies undergrads this pseudo-textbook keen ear for instrumentation. Indeed, Teachout shaped popular songs and dance of the period, the will be thrust upon. reveals that many of Ellington’s most famous absolutely predictable flow of time through pieces were taken from his sidemen, symmetries of beats, half-measures (two with Duke enjoying the royalties after beats), measures (four beats), two-mea- paying them a small flat fee. Truly sad sure groups (eight beats), four-measure is Ellington’s treatment of his preco- half-phrases (16 beats), and eight-measure cious collaborator Billy Strayhorn, phrases (32 beats). Harmonic rhythm (the who saw him as an idol but became rate of change of chords) contributed in a disillusioned after Duke took nearly fundamental way. The ear naturally fol- all the credit for his work. Mistreat- lows this ground level activity and uses it to ment of his band aside, Teachout understand events on the variable level. In makes it clear that “It took the mind West African music, periodicity is achieved of a composer to turn these fragments through ostinato patterns that can reach into full-blown creations.” considerable complexity all by themselves. The book culminates in Ellington’s famous triumph at the Newport Jazz Or try this inexplicable passage: Festival. Teachout depicts the concert as an unlikely success without over- Blues phrasing often included a sense dramatizing the circumstances. “The of darting in and out of synchrony with most chronic of procrastinators,” a steady, “fixed” foundation to make the Duke seemed likely to defeat himself. music automatically danceable. Fleeting “Fourteen minutes and fifty-nine rhythmic patterns, forming and dissolving quick- erry teachout’s Duke: A Life of choruses after Diminuendo and Crescendo in ly, peppered the melodic flow, and the practice of Duke Ellington is a straightforward, Blue got under way,” however, Ellington and dragging behind a steady beat was common. An Tentertaining biography. In well un- his “expensive gentlemen” revived their flag- ancient melody-type was very strong: a leap up der 400 pages (minus notes), Teachout, ging reputation in a single night. to a high, strained pitch followed by gradual and previously the author of a well-received Teachout writes with style and under- indirect descent, a jagged contour of falls and rises life of Armstrong, makes a case for Duke’s stated wit. Easily digested and emotionally outlining a “sawtooth” design. A feeling of impro- importance but lets the music we love compelling, his book is a delight to recom- visational suppleness conditioned the entire flow of speak for itself. Describing Ellington as mend to the casual fan and those already pitch, rhythm, and tone quality, communicating “a self-centered hedonist who lived a no- steeped in Ellingtonia. qualities of resilience. madic existence” and a “tireless philander- er,” Teachout champions his musical gifts or better or worse, Duke got his wish. Brothers becomes readable only when quot- without cutting Duke any slack for his Jazz is now an institution, a high art. It ing the musicians he studies. Armstrong meets deep character flaws. Fis school curriculum, a museum piece the well-dressed Bill Johnson, who appears “so Central to the book is Ellington’s long- banding all its different artists together along sharp he was bleeding.” King Oliver describes ing for the “establishment approval” of a one happy continuum. Ellington’s own mu- his Creole Jazz Band as “hotter than a pussy proper composer and his struggle to write sic is played at Lincoln Center. One wonders, with the pox.” Armstrong meets Al Capone, the successful long-form pieces that could though, whether we lost something with the whom he paints as a “nice little cute fat boy, earn him that title. Along the way, Duke’s passing of Armstrong’s age. Jazz came from young, like some professor who had just come band loses and gains a diverse cast of musi- hummable melodies, danceable beats, and out of college to teach or something.” Broth- cians, Teachout supplementing the broad- an unabashed willingness to entertain. It also ers’s scholarly approach isn’t without merit. er narrative with character-establishing came from the subjugation of a race and the Some will be surprised to learn that Armstrong anecdotes. (Perplexed by his musicians nod- collision of two cultures. But does contradic- read European classical notation and that, un- ding off on the bandstand in the middle of tion require complexity? Ellington composed like later beboppers, many of his most famous what Teachout calls the “postwar heroin ep- jazz suites based on high-minded topics like solos were “planned, rehearsed, and improved idemic,” Duke shrugs it off, saying, “I don’t Shakespeare and the history of the African peo- over time.” The case Brothers makes against understand it at all. I’m a cunt man myself.”) ple in America, but he was still an entertainer. Armstrong’s reputation as an Uncle Tom is also Teachout clearly understands what made El- For all their apparent differences, these men interesting. If anything, Brothers, a Duke Uni- lington’s big band unique among its peers: “He were much the same, each kindling a love of versity professor of music, knows too much preferred to hire musicians with homemade jazz in audiences the world over. For a young about his subject. His dissections of society techniques that were different to the point of bebop snob, jazz was a secret language of cool. and musical recordings are informed, if not apparent incompatibility, then juxtapose their So as a mature music evangelist, why does it graceful. But reading Brothers on Satchmo is idiosyncratic sounds as a pointillist painter sometimes feel like I’m speaking Latin? Photo: Newscom Photo:

68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 was asked to conduct a be found in Obamacare—for example, the Nobody’s Fools historical survey of ev- “Louisiana Purchase” for Mary Landrieu and ery building in a two- the “Gator Aid” for Florida’s Ben Nelson. The Rule of Nobody: mile radius. Native The second reason is that we Americans don’t Saving America From Dead Laws American tribes had trust anybody, one another least of all. Sur- and Broken Government to be given the oppor- veys show that we are the least trusting people By Philip K. Howard tunity to object, lest in the First World. (Notice how you didn’t (Norton, 256 pages, $23.95) their burial grounds take my word for it just now?) When you be disturbed, and so don’t trust other people, you’re not willing to Reviewed by F.H. Buckley the Shawnee Tribe of cut them slack and rely on their good-faith Oklahoma was given discretion. Finally, it comes down to money. a chance to weigh in. America is one of the wealthiest countries in he best law book in the last twen- Environmental groups the world, and public wealth is concentrated ty years received very little attention worried about secondary effects: If the bigger in Washington more than in any other capital Tfrom anyone in the American legal ships got to Newark, that might increase truck city. That means that the United States can af- academy. That book,The Death of Common traffic, and then God knows what might hap- ford to have more regulators than other coun- Sense by Philip K. Howard, was an indict- pen! Three years into the process, President tries, to serve the public, to administer their ment of the numberless rules and regulations Obama tried to cut through the deadlock by agencies, and to generally gum up the works. in this country that have assumed a life of designating the bridge project essential to the All of this imposes an enormous burden on their own, to the detriment of old-fashioned nation’s infrastructure, but that didn’t seem to the American economy—and that’s not even commonsensical decision-making. Howard make a difference, even with the EPA, whose the worst of it. With all those rules, you’re go- was the kid who said “The Emperor has no staff is theoretically under his command. ing to have a lot of rule-breaking. And when clothes,” with the difference that everyone in What all this exposed, says Howard, is the I say a lot, I mean we’ve all been rule-break- a position to correct things told him, “Shut “Rule of Nobody,” the do-nothing regime ers. And because criminal sanctions are gen- up, kid. He looks just fine to me.” under which too many regulatory bodies are erally imposed on rule-breakers, sanctions Nothing daunted, Howard has now re- given veto powers. We have an administrative that don’t distinguish between guilty minds turned to the fray with a new book, The Rule system designed to identify problems but not and honest ones, that means we’re all poten- of Nobody, which describes how the arterio- to provide solutions. We have officials who, tial felons. You know, like Mitt Romney was sclerosis of regulatory law chokes off our abili- given a proposal, have the power always to say said to be by the Obama campaign in 2012. ty to get things done. Rule is piled upon rule, “no” and never to say “yes.” The Rule of No- Not to worry, though: The decision whether Pelion upon Ossa, until every worthwhile body resembles the executive-legislative grid- or not to prosecute will be made by impartial project is crushed by the weight of the bureau- lock familiar to Washington watchers, except people at the Department of Justice, people cratic mass. If it wasn’t so painful, it would be that the deadlock involves umpteen regulatory guided by the punctilio of an honor the most funny. Howard talks about efforts to open up agencies, staffed by a mixture of incompetents, sensitive. People like Eric Holder. the Port of Newark, the largest seaport on the zealots, and public-minded civil servants, all of So what’s the answer, asks Howard. In a East Coast, to new super-large container ships, whom are committed to their agencies’ nar- word, politics. Right now no one is account- obstructed by the Bayonne Bridge. Built more rows goals and little else, and all of whom need able for the mess, and every politician is able than seventy years ago, the bridge is just over to be on board for a project to proceed. to wash his hands of it. Howard would like to 150 feet above the water. Pretty good for its give the president more authority to oversee the time, but the new ships require a clearance ow did we get here? We wrote ex- regulators. Countries such as Britain and Can- of 215 feet. Presented with this problem, the cessively detailed laws that leave no ada have a centralized bureaucracy with a Privy Port Authority’s engineers came up with plans Hroom for the exercise of discretion by Council Office at the top, a body that reports to either to build a new bridge or dig a tunnel, regulators. This is a peculiarly American dis- the prime minister and to which every bureau- each with a price tag of $4 billion. ease, the elephantiasis of the law. Other coun- crat ultimately answers. I can see problems with That’s when someone suggested retrofitting tries legislate with a broader brush, enunciat- strengthening presidential power, and I might the existing bridge. Just build a higher span, ing general standards rather than minutely want to see an American Privy Council Office demolish the lower one, and everything would detailed rules, writing statutes a fraction of (maybe one with a more republican-sounding be copacetic. And here’s the best part: All this the length of comparable American laws. name) reporting to Congress as well. Neverthe- would cost $1 billion, representing a savings Hayek recognized the ailment and attribut- less, the Rule of Nobody is a bureaucratic night- of $3 billion. A no-brainer, one would think, ed it to the hubris of planners who imagine mare from which we are all trying to awake, a but that’s when the trouble started. The proj- that they can anticipate and prescribe rules classic problem of power without accountabili- ect required forty-seven permits from nine- for the innumerable future states of the ty. The answer must involve more accountabili- teen different government entities, and just world in thousand-page bills. I don’t think ty—oversight of bureaucrats by elected officials finding out who was in charge was a daunting that alone explains it, however. Hubris isn’t a and oversight of elected officials by voters. task. An environmental impact statement was particularly American vice. Rather, I’d put it Howard has written a splendid book, as required, but nobody seemed to know who down to three things. One is the corrupt in- entertaining as it is alarming, about a seri- could put one together. The Port Authority terest-group bargains, the payouts to favored ous problem. His learning is deep but light- donors or constituencies, that work their way ly worn, and I cannot imagine how anyone F.H. Buckley’s most recent book is The into legislation in Washington and in state could read it without responding enthusias- Once and Future King (Encounter). capitals. Think of all the special goodies to tically to his call to arms.

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 current WISDOM

The Nation New Republic In a grisly interview with Mr. Jon Weiner, At the New Republic it has come to this. One Miss Sandra Tsing Loh (this is not a typo) Tony Dokoupil, a gifted senior writer for NBC discourses on the wonder and sadness of her News, publishes a ukase on his recent circumci- plumbing: sion and some idiot publishes it:

Jon Weiner: This is the only menopause I understand the world doesn’t usually book I’ve ever read. Are there others? think much about adult male circumcision. Sandra Tsing Loh: The literature of meno- It’s like having a chat about ball trampling pause is the saddest, the most awful and or the Pentagon’s Kevlar underwear. Even the most medical of all genres. You’re on the covered-wagon side of the circumci- sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re sion wars, where people fight for the fore- depressed—and the advice is always the skins of baby boys, no one wants to talk same: take more walks, eat some kale and about grown men getting their corn drink lots of water. It didn’t help. But shucked. Take it to Craiglist, please. there is one excellent book. It’s a big one— I get all this (and so much more). And yet as the Gravity’s Rainbow, the Infinite Jest of someone who knows the sting of this particu- menopause books: it’s The Wisdom of lar ritual—who volunteered for it, in fact, and Menopause by Christiane Northrup. How- signed his own check to the part-time reaper ever, it is more than 700 pages long, so any who did the job—I have to say: It’s not so bad. woman with a very short attention span (April 10, 2014) and no focus—which is a menopausal woman—will not get through it. The Atlantic (June 2, 2014) And more garbage spiel on comparative genita- lia, this time in the venerable Atlantic. Has a New York Times new literary genre rolled in? What do we call it, On the front page of a great American gazette, Culture Crotch? an alarmed report of the arrival on campus of the New Victorians disguised as the latest gener- For most American women beyond the age of ation of Women of the Fevered Brow: high school gym class, “I’ve got my period” isn’t considered much of an excuse for any- Turning Should students about to read The Great thing. We’re meant to pop an Advil and get on Gatsby be forewarned about “a variety of with things, Red Devil be damned. But in Liberals on scenes that reference gory, abusive and several, mostly East Asian, countries, so-called misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers stu- “menstrual leave” is a legally enshrined right dent proposed? Would any book that for female workers…. Their Heads addresses racism—like The Adventures of Perhaps we should start agitating for a Box- Huckleberry Finn or Things Fall Apart— er-McConnell American Menstrual Leave Since 1967 have to be preceded by a note of caution? Act after all? Do sexual images from Greek mythology (May 16, 2014) need to come with a viewer-beware label? www.spectator.org Colleges across the country this spring Mother Jones have been wrestling with student requests A sophisticated left-wing analysis of Pentagon for what are known as “trigger warnings,” spending starts at the bottom and ends, not sur- explicit alerts that the material they are prisingly, with the Kochs: about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, They say that an army marches on its stomach, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress but another measure of a military’s power may disorder in victims of rape or in war be how it protects its rear. The prospect of veterans. running out of government-issued TP has (May 18, 2014) become a talking point against trimming

70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 defense spending….So who is getting flush on parsed the explicit ways in which other This Vanity Fair story is not Lewinsky’s first the military’s bathroom budget? In 2012, the women failed her, and the ways in which some attempt at reinvention. In the years after the Pentagon’s—and the government’s—biggest women have long been socialized to fail one affair, she designed handbags, got that vendor of toiletry products was Georgia-Pacif- another, rather than making seemingly grand graduate degree, shilled for Jenny Craig. ic, a.k.a. Koch Industries. pronouncements about ‘feminists’ and ignor- Clinton, meanwhile, has become a senator, a (January/February 2014) ing the myriad of ways in which those who secretary of state, a presidential candidate, a think and write about gender politics have women’s leader; she’s cut her hair and changed CBS San Francisco reinterpreted the events of 1998 in the years her wardrobe. The reason that, no matter News of a synergistic alliance between one lone that followed.” what they do, neither woman can ever shake sexual fanatic and the forces of Planned Parent- (May 8, 2014) this old story is that it is never-ending; and hood causes a traffic jam in the City by the Bay: it is important. It is the story of women in the New Republic United States: marginalized, sexualized, and The Hook-Up truck—a conceptual “art” A poor sap named Rebecca Traister expatiates pitted against each other since time began in installation consisting of a box truck convert- on Monica and Hillary, two gals sweating away an attempt to keep them at the fringes of a ed to a sex suite on wheels, including tempera- on society’s margins, one on her knees, the other power structure and very far from the top of it. ture controls, birth control, safe sex still at the fringes but with better hair: (May 7, 2014) accouterments, and a camera option, in case you and yours decide to make the escapade a YouTube sensation, is finally open for service From the Archives: the weekend of May 2nd and 3rd. Timeless Tosh from Current Wisdoms Past The “Hook-Up Truck” is the brainchild of artist Spy Emerson. According to their web- July 1994 site, the box truck is a car service, like a mobile hotel room, available for short-term rentals. Northeastern University Magazine “The room is designed with cleanliness in An example of the tortuous thought process apparently mind. I’ve created a very minimalist room. admired by the editors of this venerable alumni magazine: Everything is wiped down and cleaned before and after every person. It’s probably cleaner While perusing the January magazine, my wife came upon than the BART or any public toilet you’ve the advertisement on pages one and two. The first page used.” read: “What has 250,000 feet and a multibillion dollar Instead, there’s a custom-built metal-and- income?” The next page provided the answer: “The wood bench covered with vinyl, which is 125,000 graduates of Northeastern University.” My wife stain-resistant. asked me if I thought there was anything wrong with the “Instead of a traditional bed— which is advertisement. After thinking about it, I realized that it bedding and absorbent—this is a bench, in should really have read: “What has 250,001 feet and a multibillion dollar income?” I the shape of a C, and designed to facilitate have a spare leg in the closet. positioning for the average-sized bodies,” I realize that sometimes it is easy to forget people are disabled because they don’t fit a Emerson said. certain image.… The point is, there are many “disabled” graduates of Northeastern. I “This is a game for adults who want to play use quotes because we are all “disabled” in one manner or another, even if the “disabil- with sex,” says Emerson. “You have to be nice, ity” is only placing mental or physical limitations on others. It’s stunning that today, and cool,” she said, adding “No Drunks!, but even after passing of legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, this pub- everyone is welcome to join us. There will be a lication would alienate a portion of the population with an advertisement of this type. party going on all the time!” I’m not offended, but I can understand how other people might be. (May 1, 2014) —Patrick M. Pickle, BA ‘91 Mesa, Arizona WashingtonPost.com (March 1994) Something called Nia-Malika Henderson, senior writer for the Washington Post website’s “She the People,” interviews famed feminist Family Life Anna Holmes who dutifully comes up with still Clean up your act and save the Earth! more bilge from the feminist mysteries: Language is a powerful attitude builder. Whenever we say “water down” to mean to “I am uncomfortable with the idea that ‘femi- weaken, we’re sending a message that shows we don’t appreciate how valuable water is. nists’ failed Ms. Lewinsky. I am far more com- When we use animal names as insults, we’re showing disrespect. Snakes are not evil. fortable with the idea that certain high-profile Worms are not lowlifes. Dogs are not ugly. Sit down with your family and work out activists, intellectuals and writers who’d some insults that really mean something. Third graders in Bakersfield, Vermont, got exhibited a measure of sophistication and sen- into the swing of eco-insults when they invented terms such as “smog brain” and sitivity with regards to gender politics failed “landfill breath.” her, and failed her big time,” she wrote in an (May/June 1994) e-mail. “I wish that Monica Lewinsky had

www.spectator.org THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 last CALL

by TIM CAVANAUGH Bat Guano

he release of an obscure Miller’s milestone of edgy darkness was itself Now when I say men in my late father’s photograph in May re- published a generation ago). generation were free to be uninterested in opened a bitter controversy. I’m pretty sure all the above is accurate, but I superheroes, it should be understood that Experts broke down the vi- have to caution that I gave up on Batman years men of my generation have to fight for that sual data with Zapruder-film ago. Like many people who have had to make freedom. I’m pretty sure it would be consid- intensity. Some claimed they a major life change, I remember the exact mo- ered less weird for me to convert to Islam or could identify fine details on a dimly lit fig- ment: I was above the Atlantic Ocean, and make a reality show about myself than it has Ture shown next to a vehicle that appeared to the Batman movie that features Katie Holmes been to tell people I have given up Batman be smoking. Others ridiculed such far-out was playing on the seatback in front of me. It for life. Some batfans make good arguments: claims while passing along equally far-out was dark. It was edgy. It was not my father’s that I missed out on the late Heath Ledger’s notions concerning a drone or robot they Batman. Then I remembered that my father impressive-looking performance as the Joker, believed to be visible in an indecipherable had not been interested in Batman. Because in that the Nolan pictures offered insightful and region of the frame. This was not a newly those more spacious, less thought-tormented surprisingly rock-ribbed ruminations on Oc- leaked image of Pat Tillman or Michael Hast- days, now as remote from us as the War of cupy Wall Street or the Global War on Ter- ings. It was a production still of Ben Affleck Jenkins’ Ear, it was considered acceptable for rorism. I expect Affleck will play the role well, in the new Batman costume. The caped cru- grown men to be uninterested in superheroes. and my withdrawal from the bat-verse will sader superjoint Batman v Superman: Dawn This was a whisper of mortality. I am, as make no difference one way or another to the of Justice is currently shooting in the state of Obi-Wan Kenobi says in some movie about billion- or trillion-dollar franchise. Michigan. And fans are going nuts. a bridge, closer to the end than to the begin- But I’m coming out loud and proud: I don’t Grantland’s Mark Lisanti gave long, in- ning. How long do I have left? Do I want, can care what Batman’s take is on the important is- formed consideration to the rebooted Batman I afford, to spend another two hours (proba- sues of our day. I don’t have time for the para- costume’s shorter, blunter ears. Meredith Wo- bly more, as running times expand to accom- dox of the hero who must probe the borders of erner of io9 briefly claimed that the new bat- modate more ponderous movies) in the com- evil within himself in order to fight the evil out- suit had visible veins, a theory that sparked fu- pany of Batman? What are those two hours side. I’m not interested in the bat-gadgets, in the rious debate among batologists. Other batfans going to tell me about Batman that I don’t al- tragic elements of Batman’s mythos, in whether scanned the suit for the presence of nipples (not ready know? Sure, he’ll be edgier, darker. But the Joel Schumacher Batman films were fran- visible) and even more minute clues to either dark edginess was the selling point of Tim chise lows or subversive gay masterpieces. awesomeness or suckitude. (Affleck, stooped in Burton’s big-screen reinvention of Batman The great comic book writer Alan Moore either shyness or pure, dark, smoldering angst, in 1989, and of Frank Miller’s print-and- recently blasted adult superhero fans for “de- showed a Bigfoot-like aversion to the camera.) ink reboot prior to that. A more tortured, lighting in concepts and characters meant to The photo seemed to meet with general complex, haunted Batman was also the pitch entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.” I approval, meaning that fans expect this Bat- for the recent Christopher Nolan film cycle. don’t begrudge anyone what meager helpings man to be dark, edgy, and brooding. Their What’s the value of all that darkness, anyway? of happiness he can get out of life, but putting hopes are fueled by scuttlebutt that Batman Why is a franchise that maintained its om- away childish things has its small comforts too. v Superman will follow the seminal story cre- inous gloom through seventy-five years still If you’ve ever played peek-a-boo with a kid, you ated by the even more seminal comic-book so spooked by the specter of Adam West that know the kid wants to keep playing long after author Frank Miller in his most seminal it has to announce constantly how grownup you’ve had enough. In fact, the only good thing four-issue miniseries The Dark Knight Re- and serious it is? And isn’t there a danger in about being a grownup is that you’re allowed to turns. In other words, this is not going to be this dark, edgy arms race, that all of Wayne get bored and move on to something else. your father’s Batman (though confusingly, Enterprises might melt down into some su- So here I stand. As Batman says, it’s what I per-dense mass of edginess from which no do that defines me. One thing I choose to do is Tim Cavanaugh is the news editor for Na- light can escape? Think of the effect that remain in bat-retirement. I have earned it over a tional Review Online. would have on global warming. lifetime dealing with the Dark Knight.

72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July/August 2014 sarkes.qxd 11/13/06 9:53 AM Page 84 rAndy e. BArneTT dArcy oLSen

Carmack President, Waterhouse The Goldwater Professor of Legal Institute Theory, Georgetown University Law Center

KImBerLey A. STrASSeL Terry TeAcHouT

Editorial Board Drama Critic, Member and The Wall Street Columnist, Journal and The Wall Street Critic-at-Large, Journal Commentary

Photo by: Ken Howard, 2009

The Bradley Prizes will Be PresenTed on wednesday, June 18 aT The John F. Kennedy CenTer For The PerForming arTs in washingTon, d.C. The Bradley Prizes recognize outstanding achievements that are consistent with the Foundation’s mission statement. Founded in 1985, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it. Its programs support limited, competent government; a dynamic marketplace for economic, intellectual and cultural activity; and a vigorous defense, at home and abroad, of American ideas and institutions. Learn more at www.bradleyfdn.org.