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June 22, 2015 $4.99

BERAN on the MARK HELPRIN: OUR INADEQUATE DEFENSE Wright Brothers ROSEN on IAN TUTTLE: Enviros vs. an Alaska Town John Lennon

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON ON THE Colorado Pot Experiment

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TAKING YOU ON THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE

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JUNE 22, 2015 | VOLUME LXVII, NO. 11 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 22 The High Way John J. Miller on the Pluto of Colorado wants legal weed while Nebraska and our imaginations Oklahoma are asking for federal action. One p. 20 can sympathize with the desire of people in the prohibition states to keep drugs BOOKS, ARTS out of their communities, but it is & MANNERS more difficult to sympathize with their desire to avoid paying the 34 THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE Florence King reviews The Road freight for their decisions— to Character, by David Brooks. especially when their prohibition 36 WINGS OF THE DOVE im poses costs on legalization Michael Knox Beran reviews states just as legalization states The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough. impose co sts on them. Kevin D. Williamson 37 GENERATION GAPS COVER: © SWIM INK 2, LLC/CORBIS Robert VerBruggen reviews Disinherited: How Washington ARTICLES Is Betraying America’s Young, by Diana Furchtgott-Roth and 15 THE CASE FOR COVERAGE by Ramesh Ponnuru Jared Meyer. Why conservatives should help people get health insurance. 40 THE BALLAD OF JOHN WORK-VISA WISDOM by Reihan Salam AND CYN 16 James Rosen discusses a famous infidelity. Priority should go to the extremely talented. WRITING BRAVE by Jay Nordlinger 42 FILM: A ROUSING RETURN 18 Ross Douthat reviews Mad Max: A conversation with a staffer at Charlie Hebdo magazine. Fury Road. TO A PLANET UNKNOWN by John J. Miller 20 43 THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE Our first photos of Pluto will end a pleasing mystery. Richard Brookhiser discusses an emigrant’s visit home. FEATURES 22 THE HIGH WAY by Kevin D. Williamson SECTIONS Along the interstate, a Colorado–Nebraska border war erupts over marijuana. 2 Letters to the Editor 25 INDEFENSIBLE DEFENSE by Mark Helprin 4 The Week We have sacrificed military preparedness and strength. 32 The Long View ...... Rob Long 33 Athwart ...... James Lileks 29 DEADLY ENVIRONMENTALISM by Ian Tuttle 41 Poetry ...... Lawrence Dugan For an Alaska town, the price of a wildlife refuge is paid in human lives. 44 Happy Warrior ...... Daniel Foster

NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by N ATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2015. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., N ATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONALREVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00A.M . to 10:30 P.M. Eastern time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NATIONALREVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-679- 7330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to N ATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters--FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/3/2015 1:45 PM Page 2 Letters

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EDITOR Richard Lowry Senior Editors Carry On? Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts Literary Editor Michael Potemra Jerry Hendrix is not the first to disparage the Navy’s and the Congress’s deci- Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy Washington Editor Eliana Johnson sion to continue building and improving the large aircraft carrier. Critics have Executive Editor Reihan Salam Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson disparaged this decision all the way back to the Eisenhower administration, yet National Correspondent John J. Miller Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty the construction and maintenance of large aircraft carriers in our fleet has Art Director Luba Kolomytseva withstood all attempts to end this vital defense program. I personally partici- Deputy Managing Editors Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz pated in several studies of the issue, and the answer was always the same. Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Carol Anne Kemp Nothing can replace aircraft carriers, with their combined high speed; unlim- Research Associate Alessandra Haynes ited endurance; simultaneous attack, strike, and self-defense capability all in Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Roman Genn one package; and service life of 50 years. It is all about mission effectiveness, Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long and with no way to base the U.S. Air Force overseas, there is no other accept- Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C . McCarthy Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen able option. I note that Mr. Hendrix does not offer a viable alternative to the

NATIONALREVIEWONLINE large carrier. No one has persuasively done so. Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez Managing Editors Katherine Connell / Edward John Craig Opinion Editor Patrick Brennan Peter M. Hekman Jr. National-Affairs Columnist John Fund Staff Writers Charles C. W. Cooke / David French Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Retired) Political Reporters Joel Gehrke / Brendan Bordelon Reporter Katherine Timpf San Diego, Calif. Associate Editors Nat Brown / Molly Powell / Nick Tell Editorial Associate Christine Sisto Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt JERRY HENDRIX RESPONDS: It is gratifying when an individual of Vice Admiral Web Developer Wendy Weihs Web Producer Scott McKim Peter Hekman’s professional reputation takes notice of the ideas presented. I EDITORS- AT- LARGE would be remiss, however, if I didn’t note that the carrier-effectiveness studies Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan he alludes to occurred in the 1980s, well before several nations that would NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE BUCKLEYFELLOWINPOLITICALJOURNALISM make themselves competitors of the United States began to invest in anti- Ian Tuttle Contributors access/area-denial technologies intended to push American carriers far from Hadley Arkes / James Bowman their shores and outside the range of our current carrier-based aircraft. To take Eliot A. Cohen / Dinesh D’Souza Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman Vice Admiral Hekman’s arguments in order: I would point out that the carrier’s James Gardner / Dav id Gelernter George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart current “high” speed of 30-plus knots is slow compared with the hypersonic Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune ballistic missiles targeted at them. I would suggest that the air wing, which has D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak shrunk from 80-plus aircraft in the 1980s to 60-plus aircraft today owing to Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber increased costs and complexity, is no longer capable of simultaneous offen- Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman sive-strike and self-defense operations. Last, I would respectfully invite the Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya admiral to note that I did present two alternatives to building carriers: invest Business Services Alex Batey / Alan Chiu in a new air wing that could operate from beyond the range of anti-access/area- Circulation Manager Jason Ng WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalrev iew.com denial weapons; or abandon the construction of supercarriers and build larger, MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 nuclear-powered, guided-missile submarines that would possess large maga- WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 zines of precision-strike cruise missiles and could operate with impunity ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd inside anti-access/area-denial environments. I thank Vice Admiral Hekman for Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet his contribution to our national security while on active duty and for continu- Assistant to the Publisher Emily Gray ing this vital debate regarding the Navy’s future. Director of Philanthropy and Campaigns Scott Lange Associate Publisher Paul Olivett Director of Development Heyward Smith Director of Revenue Erik Netcher Vice President, Communications Amy K. Mitchell CORRECTIONS: The Week (June 1) mistakenly referred to Joshua Tree National PUBLISHER Jack Fowler Park as “Joshua National Park.” Happy Warrior (June 1) mistakenly identified CHAIRMAN James Truslow Adams as “James Breslow Adams.” John Hillen

CHAIRMANEMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes

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

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n The Clintons have created a shell corporation that exists solely to advance their interests and shield them from accountability. It's called the Democratic party.

n Fox News, which will host the first Republican presidential debate in Cleveland August 6, announced that it will restrict the field to the top ten candidates according to an average of five national polls. RNC chairman Reince Priebus, relieved not to have a mob scene onstage, quickly agreed. We say, the hell with it. How would Abraham Lincoln have polled one year before the Republican Convention of 1860? Fox should split the field in half and hold two debates, with candidates assigned by lot. Except for Donald Trump, who is a boob, every announced can- didate has stature (even Carly Fiorina—Wendell Willkie was a businessman; even George Pataki—three-time governor of New York). Let them fight, and let the viewers decide.

n The question for Rand Paul watchers is, is he his father all over again, or something different? Conspiracy-minded grass eater, or conservatarian? A recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe found him in the grass eaters’ enclosure. “ISIS ex ists and grew stronger,” Paul said, “because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of these arms were snatched up by ISIS.” We could fight ISIS our- selves—we were fighting its forerunners in the Iraq War, which Happy Hearts Fund, the New York Times reported. Clinton re - Paul has criticized—or we could back local allies, who would ceived a lifetime-achievement award from the charity, founded have to be armed. If Paul falls back on paleo rants in intra-GOP by model Petra Nemcova after the 2004 tsunami. Clinton’s fights, how will he manage policy against real enemies? award money is earmarked for building schools in Haiti. So why didn’t Happy Hearts just spend it directly on Haiti (most n Rick Santorum announced that he is running for president, of its work is done in Indonesia)? Did Happy Hearts and this time with a greater focus on economic than on cultural is - Nemcova want to get close to the Clintons? And if some of that sues, and in particular on the economic challenges facing what money stays with the Clinton Foundation as traveling expenses, a sociologist might call the lower middle class. He says that is that the cost of closeness? “I find it,” the Times quotes Doug low-skilled immigration is hurting Americans’ wages, and White, director of the masters’ program in fundraising man- therefore advocates a crackdown on illegal immigration and a agement at Columbia, “—what would be the word?—distaste- 25 percent reduction in legal immigration. That would probably ful.” Just think how many lifetime-achievement awards the help people at the bottom of the pay scale, disproportionately former president will collect when he once again has the run of including immigrants who are already here. Less helpful is San - the White House. tor um’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, which would make it harder for people to start working their way up the lad- n Sidney Blumenthal worked in Bill Clinton’s White House der. The former senator’s advocacy of the Export-Import Bank and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign as cup bearer. fits poorly with his self-portrait as a skeptic of big business. During her tenure as secretary of state, he had a new task: un - Also potentially at odds with his campaign theme is the flat tax official adviser on Libyan affairs. Blumenthal, who was one of he says he will unveil soon: Previous versions have hiked taxes a group of Americans interested in post-Qaddafi business on the very people Santorum says he wants to help. For San tor um, opportunities, sent Mrs. Clinton at least two dozen memos in who defended “compassionate conservatism” against its critics 2011 and 2012 outlining intrigues among Libyan politicians in these pages, it has always been important to prove that con- and suggesting various figures as possible allies. She circulated servatism’s heart is in the right place. He needs to show that his his brainstorms to her subordinates at State, even though, as the head is, too. New York Times put it, they responded “not infrequently . . . with polite skepticism.” Many leaders—e.g., Winston Church ill, n The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation earned half Franklin Roosevelt—rely on freelancers and back channels. ROMAN GENN a million dollars last year when Bill addressed a gala of the But Churchill and Roosevelt had more to show for it than Mrs.

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Clinton, and many of their oddball sources were more knowl- wonderlands produced by the policies Senator Sanders prefers. edgeable than Blumenthal of Arabia. (He honeymooned in the Soviet Union, where varieties of deodorant were presumably pleasingly limited.) n George Stephanopoulos is an old Clintonista, a master n Former congressman (R., Ill.) and House speaker Dennis of stonewalling in the 1992 Hastert has been charged with lying to FBI investigators about presidential campaign. Since a million dollars in cash he withdrew from banks over the years. then, he has climbed the He told them it was because he did not trust the banking system, heights of the American but he stands accused of using the money “to cover up past mis- media: An anchorman on conduct.” Investigators have told the media that the misconduct Good Morning America and was sexual and occurred during Hastert’s tenure as a high-school host of This Week with teacher and wrestling coach from 1965 to 1981. Pre-trying cases George Stephanopoulos. Re - via leaks is regrettable, but common. Also regrettable and com- cently, he was hectoring Peter mon is an ex-congressman’s having over a million bucks to Schweizer, the author of spend in hush money; Hastert has been a lobbyist since he left Clinton Cash, over anti- office. Finally, though the media panopticon in which we all Clinton and pro-Republican now live is not much like God, there is one resemblance: They bias. Stephanopoulos himself both know everything. “Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, has donated to the Clinton our secret sins in the light of thy countenance” (Psalms 90:8). Foundation, something he All public figures should mark that passage. had not talked about. He has since apologized. And he has n Americans are turning more liberal on social issues nearly withdrawn from any prospective moderation of a Republican across the board, according to Gallup. Solid majorities now con- presidential-primary debate. The question has arisen, “Should a sider homosexual relations, nonmarital sex, divorce, and having clear Democrat hold such a prominent position in the main- a baby outside of marriage morally acceptable. Support for sui- stream media?” Wrong question: If the mainstream media were cide, human cloning, and polygamy have also increased, though rid of clear Democrats, there would be no mainstream media. from a low level. The decline in the percentage of Americans affiliated with religious institutions is surely driving much of n Readers may not be shocked that Hillary Clinton supports the this trend. Support for abortion has not significantly increased: reauthorization of a sleazy big-business favor factory run by the Perhaps people are making a distinction between acts based on federal government. But still, the zeal with which she talked up whether they have victims. (Or are seen to have victims, at any the obscure Export-Import Bank on the campaign trail recently rate: Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing do affect the wel- was a bit surprising. Many Republicans, to the consternation of fare of third parties.) For a long time, social conservatives could groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, are determined to let rest their case on tradition and majoritarianism. Those days are the bank die when its authorization expires in a few weeks. It is over, and we will have to make our case with a winsomeness and just a tiny part of the federal government’s subsidy machine, but confidence that are rooted somewhere else. conservatives—rightly—see this as a winnable fight and a chance to take a principled stand against cronyism. Hillary apparently n First responders were sees it as a chance to remind corporate America that her taste for still picking through the the Big Business–Big Government cocktail has not diminished. wreckage of May’s Am - trak derailment when for- n When he is not meditating upon odd theories about women’s mer Pennsylvania governor GETTY IMAGES / secret desire to be gang-raped—the subject of an old essay of Ed Rendell, appearing on his that came to light when he announced his challenge to Hill - Morning Joe, blamed the a ry Clinton for the Democratic nomination—Senator Bernie deadly wreck on insuffi- DREW HALLOWELL

: Sanders has some views about underarm deodorant he’d very cient infrastructure spend- much like to share. The proliferation of consumer choices is ing. Republican stinginess RENDELL

; starving American children: “You don’t necessarily need a became the go-to explana- choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs tion of the left-wing blog o - of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he pro- sphere over the next several claimed. Well . . . Sanders has fallen victim to a very old and days—even when it was

ABC VIA GETTYvery IMAGES primitive economic superstition to which men of his revealed that the train had / so cialist ilk are especially vulnerable: the view that free mar- been traveling twice the kets are irrational and that if they could only be put under dis- speed limit around the cipline—the discipline of men such as Bernie Sanders—then fatal curve when it de -

LORENZO BEVILAQUA resources could be reorganized in such a way that all those railed. Manhattan and Beltway liberals’ mania for passenger- : deodorant choices we don’t need could be reincarnated as train travel is part of a larger affection for all things European, healthy snacks for children. Of course the reality is that children and Amtrak’s fiscal insolvency—since it started operations in are hungry most often where there are few if any consumer 1971 it has not turned a profit, and in 2002 its then-president STEPHANOPOULOS choices, e.g., Venezuela, North Korea, and the other socialist told a Senate committee it never would—should be reason

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enough to doubt whether pleasing those rail-friendly sensibili- workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse ties is the best use of taxpayers’ money. But even more notable, customers we serve.” Whether that workplace is filled with in this particular instance, was the inability of liberals to wait people who can keep planes from colliding is apparently a sec- for the facts to come out—or even the bodies to be gathered— ondary consideration. before using the tragedy to hawk their agenda. n A new study finds that inequality of incomes within firms has n Far more predictable than extreme weather is the deluge of not increased over the last 35 years. Rising inequality is instead “science” that now seems inevitably to follow it. Such was the the result of the diverging fortunes of different firms. You may case over Memorial Day, when liberal media outlets rushed to recall that just last year, the intellectual Left was fêting a tome blame the storm system that soaked Texas and Oklahoma over explaining that inequality in the U.S. was the result of “top the holiday weekend on, of course, climate change: “A steadily managers of large firms,” who had convinced “incestuous” escalating whipsaw between drought and flood is one of the compensation committees to fork over more and more of their most confident predictions of an atmosphere with enhanced companies’ wealth. Now Vox, the liberal “explainer” site, is dis- evaporation rates—meaning, global warming,” wrote mete or - tancing itself from what it condescendingly calls the “simple ol o gist Eric Holthaus at Slate. “Going from one extreme to story” about top managers, without mentioning the book. The another is a hallmark of climate change,” noted Samantha Page sound you should be hearing is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the at ThinkProgress. Given that the storm system responsible for Twenty-First Century sinking to the bottom of the ocean. the flooding is linked to this year’s El Niño, which occurs every two to seven years and is caused by anomalous warming in the n Federal law requires a judge to recuse himself from a case Pacific Ocean that scientists cannot explain, the insinuation that when his “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” In the the disaster stemmed from global warming is not only ludi- matter of same-sex marriage, the impartiality of Supreme Court crous, it’s unscientific. But going from one extreme to another justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not even be reasonably as - is a hallmark of climate-change campaigners. serted, and she should absent herself from proceedings on the matter. Justice Ginsburg herself, while being questioned in her n In a characteristic offense against basic property rights and confirmation hearings, described the ethical standard at issue simple common sense, the EPA expanded its jurisdiction on the thus: “A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no fore- nation’s bodies of water with a new administrative addendum casts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the to the Clean Water Act, known as “Waters of the United States.” specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the Sixty percent of American water, including ponds, streams, and entire judicial process.” She has gone on to preside at same-sex irrigation ditches found on taxed private property, can now be weddings and to use those as occasions of activism (placing an regulated by the federal government, thanks to a statute intended unsubtle emphasis on the word “Constitution,” as the New York to clean up drinking water and large bodies of water. There is Times reports), and she has gone so far as to outline judicial reason to rethink the Clean Water Act: The Supreme Court has opinion on the issue—assigning weight to federalism and had to weigh in three times on the limits of the law’s jurisdic- equal-protection claims—in interviews and to argue that cultural tion. But the EPA’s latest, 297-page manifesto manages to be as shifts have prepared the way for a legal change: i.e., hints and unclear as the cesspools the government imagines backyard forecasts. She should step aside, and let the Court treat the ponds to be. The EPA will no doubt leverage this ambiguity to same-sex marriage case as an issue of law rather than a cause. unfairly penalize farmers who want to plant trees, create drain- age infrastructure, and otherwise go about the suspect business n The riot ended in Baltimore, but the violence didn’t. The city of making a livelihood. Let’s not remind President Obama that had its most murders in one month, a total of 43, since August the human body is 70 percent water; he’ll want the EPA to reg- 1972. Clearly, one cause of the spike in killing was a steep de - ulate that too. cline in arrests. Police might have been less active on the streets because their resources were overtaxed by the unrest after the n Until recently, candidates for entry-level air-traffic-control death of Freddie Gray, or because continued harassment in positions were required to take an aptitude exam. It measured tough neighborhoods deterred them from doing their job, or their cognitive ability and tested how they would react to sce- because they adopted an informal work slowdown in protest of narios that can occur on the job and involve split-second deci- the grandstanding of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, or some mix- sions entailing mathematical calculations. The trouble was that ture of all this. Regardless, the mayhem shows how important not enough black, Hispanic, and female candidates were pass- good, robust policing is to maintaining order in dangerous ing the exam or completing training programs at colleges. So, a neighborhoods. The price of its absence is paid in lives, often Fox Business investigation has revealed, the Federal Aviation those of young black men. Administration has scrapped those qualifications and replaced them with a “biographical questionnaire.” The new question- n What could possibly go wrong? Organizers of a meeting held naire asks respondents about such things as the number of at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco—the chain is an even more sports in which they participated during high school, what their embarrassing knockoff of Hooters—invited members of a self- ideal job would be, and whether people describe them as hum- proclaimed outlaw motorcycle club, the Bandidos, who were at ble or dominant. It is now the only necessary qualification for the time engaged in hostilities with members of other motorcycle the job, along with a high-school degree, English proficiency, gangs in the area. Nine dead, 170 arrested, one Twin Peaks fran- and citizenship. The new policy is in line with the FAA’s pro- chise agreement nullified. What began as a parking-lot brawl fessed “historic commitment” to “a more diverse and inclusive ended in a gunfight, and in the course of making arrests police

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A Multi-millionaire’s Personal Blueprint For Surviving the Coming Currency Collapse “This is what I’m doing to protect my family DQGP\¿QDQFHV²,UHFRPPHQG\RXGRWKHVDPH´ Dear Fellow American, America is in for some strongly encourage you to take these All I ask is that you pay $5 to I have a question for you… Do major changes to our simple steps, too. cover the costs of shipping. you think the U.S. economy is really economy, our country, and My new work is called: America If you are interested in this work, “back to normal” when: our very way of life over the 2020—The Survival Blueprint. please act soon. next five years. » Roughly 75% of Americans are In America 2020 you’ll learn: Get started today by going to still living paycheck to paycheck, The way you live, work, travel, * The three assets you www.newamerica15.com. with essentially zero savings? retire, invest… everything is going (legally) do not have to report to Here you’ll find a secure Order » Or when the “Too Big To Fail” to change. 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One investor I respect says silver will ultimately reach more than $150… that’s more than 700% higher than today’s price. (page 41) Getet your free printed copy at: www.NewAmerica15.com week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/3/2015 1:53 PM Page 10

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recovered some 118 handguns and a rifle. Bikers have subse- n De Blasio presents himself as a champion of the city’s quently tried to Ferguson-ize the events, calling them an example technology industry. Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, and of police overreaction. These efforts are comically stupid: Even others disagree, having signed a letter protesting the mayor’s in the critics’ own accounts, the police came in force when a fist- attempt to impose new regulations on taxi-hailing apps Uber fight escalated into a gunfight. Protests are planned, and a civil- and Lyft, among other things demanding $1,000 every time rights lawsuit has been filed. Some outlaws. they upgrade their software. This is fairly typical stuff. New York City’s transit industry is dominated by two forms of n The unions that dominate California politics have two de - economic organization: on the one hand, socialism, in which mands: One, that the minimum wage be raised to $15 an hour. the government owns the means of production (the city’s dys- Two, that they be exempted from the minimum wage. The Cal i- functional and rat-infested subways), and, on the other hand, for nia state senate has just passed a bill that would raise the a cartel, in which the taxi regulator colludes with the taxi- state’s minimum wage to $13 an hour, but Los Angeles is way medallion owners to prevent new competitors from entering ahead of Sacramento, having voted to raise its local minimum the market. New York’s taxi situation is comically hostile. wage to $15 an hour over the next five years. Other cities, not - Shift changes are scheduled to coincide with the rush hour, ably San Francisco and Seattle, have taken similar steps, with ensuring that it is impossible to get a taxi in midtown Man - predictable results: San Francisco’s newspapers are full of sto- hat tan between the hours of 5 and 6 P.M.—and that belea- ries about locals who are inexplicably shocked that their favorite guered New Yorkers embraced Uber and Lyft. But the taxi independent bookstores are closing their doors, while Seattle has cartel was a major financial player in de Blasio’s mayoral seen companies such as Cascade Designs shift jobs to places campaign, and while we would never argue that the mayor of such as Reno. The economics are fairly straightforward—they New York can be bought, he apparently can be rented, and are in fact so easy to understand that the Los Angeles Federation without an app. of Labor, which campaigned for the minimum-wage hike, is demanding that its members be protected from higher wages, n Dominique Sharpton, daughter of the Reverend Al, has i.e., that businesses with union contracts be exempted from the sued the city of New York for $5 million because she $15/hour minimum. Why? Because if “a business owner and the sprained her ankle on uneven pavement in Lower Manhattan employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both,” as last year. Given her father’s long history as a wheeler-dealer union boss Rusty Hicks put it, then it’s nobody else’s business. activist and her own fling with a shady nonprofit whose pur- Which is, you’ll notice, an argument against the minimum wage pose and payroll are shrouded in deep mystery, she might be per se, and against the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, too. forgiven for assuming that she can get away with anything. “It’s all a scam,” a source close to the Sharpton family said of Education for a Better America (EBA), the organization run n New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, along with by Ms. Sharpton and her boyfriend. “It’s a cover for money, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and economist basically, to subsidize” their high-roller lifestyle. NATIONAL Joseph Stiglitz (of New York City), introduced a policy REVIEW’S Jillian Kay Melchior, who has been relentless in agenda the three called a liberal “Contract with America.” her mission to shed light on dubious Sharpton-family enter- The plan is presumably intended to push a potentially mod- prises, recently captured those and corroborating observa- erate Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, to the left. It’s tions in the course of laying out the details—or rather the light on the new and serious and heavy on the old and glib: murkiness of the details—that EBA has provided in tax fil- Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, provide ings and other public records. It shares board members, universal pre-K, “invest in schools, not jails,” etc. Senator phone numbers, and apparently office space with National Warren already has some leverage over the Democratic Action Network—the longer-standing shady nonprofit run by party; this looks like de Blasio’s attempt to build some of his Sharpton père. own. As David Marcus pointed out on NATIONAL REVIEW’s n website, there is a precedent for an ambitious New York ISIS took Ramadi, in the latest sign that President Obama’s City mayor’s attempt to drag his party to the left nationally: desultory campaign against the group is failing. The president John Lindsay tried the same thing about shrugged off the city’s fall as a mere tactical setback, al - 40 years ago, neglecting management though, at the very least, it delays the planned Iraqi campaign of the city in the process. Wherever to try to retake the strategic city of Mosul. It is increasingly de Blasio’s effort takes him, he clear that we will have to either step up our air campaign con- does have a head start on the siderably and begin to introduce more forces on the ground to neglect and mis- bolster Iraqi security forces, or tolerate ISIS’s holding and management. gaining ground, with the Iraqi government turning to Iranian- backed militias as its fighting force. The president clearly will choose the latter, content to leave an unraveling, terrorist- ridden Iraq to his successor and congratulate himself on his statesmanship. GETTY IMAGES / n President Obama was talking to Jeffrey Gold berg of The At - lan tic, who asked him about his nuclear deal with Iran, in light of the insane anti-Semitism of that dictatorship. “Well,” said Obama, JULIE JACOBSON

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“the fact that you are the Cuban dictatorship and the Obama administration. De - anti-Semitic, or racist, fending itself on Cuba, the administration likes to cite the doesn’t preclude you pope’s “moral leadership.” The Vatican described the mood from being interested between Pope Francis and Raúl Castro as “very friendly.” The in survival.” True, as far pontiff is scheduled to visit Cuba in September. May his atti- as it goes. Obama went tude toward the dictatorship’s victims—who are, really, the on to say that “there Cuban people at large—be equally friendly. were deep strains of anti-Semitism in this n For years, soccer has been sold to the American public not country,” i.e., America. only for its inherent qualities—speed, continuous action—but Deep strains? By the because it is the international game, the new world order at historical and global play. Nemesis vindicated the second claim when the Justice standards of anti- Department charged nine current or former executives of Semitism, those strains FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, plus five cro - were mercifully shal- nies, with wire fraud, money laundering, and racketeering in low. You had to build a decades-long scheme to assign international tournaments your own country club, via bribery. So struggling Third World countries (Brazil) or instead of getting into the established one, and they had a quota despotisms (Qatar) got stuck with Ozymandian sports com- on you at Yale. The Iranian mullahs could tell you about varsity plexes while soccer bigwigs pocketed big bucks for making anti-Semitism, as opposed to the JV kind. the deals. FIFA is the rotten face of internationalism: unac- countable insiders working with corrupt local allies in the n Jason Rezaian is a reporter for the Washington Post. He name of high-sounding slogans (in this case, sportsmanship). holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship. For ten months, he has Congrats to Attorney General Loretta Lynch for making the been imprisoned in one of the worst places on earth: Tehran’s case. No word yet on how the FIFA execs will defend them- Evin Prison. The regime has charged him with espionage and selves, though they are likely to claim that they were kicked the spread of propaganda. Rezaian and the Post respond that in their shins. he merely carried out his duties as a journalist, within the law. He is now being tried in a “revolutionary court,” secretly. The n Ireland last month became the first country to approve judge is known as “the judge of death”—a moniker he has same-sex marriage by popular vote. It wasn’t even close: The earned. We realize that President Obama is very eager to cut yeas won, 62 to 38 percent. “The most Catholic country in the a nuclear deal with Iran. But the United States should let it be world,” Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI, once known that if this prisoner is not released soon, there will be called the isle of saints and scholars. Less than a century later, hell to pay. It’s one thing for Washington to be unable to help social conservatives are scolding its hierarchy for being shy in Iranian political prisoners; it’s another to be unable to help the pulpit while, outside church walls, not just Catholic doc- American prisoners. trine but the most fundamental institution of Western civiliza- tion was being steadily deconstructed by media voices and n China-watchers have been warning for years that the coun- popular culture. Over the past decade, millions of dollars from try has serious, dangerous ambitions to dominate the East and U.S. and other overseas sources were channeled into an effort South China Seas—waters to which it has weak historical and to sway public opinion by legislating “incrementally, waiting legal claims but in which it has great economic and strategic to advocate for civil marriage until the population was accul- interests. Those predictions elicited little response from Pres i- turated to the ordinariness of same-sex unions,” according to dent Obama, who has been committed to avoiding the percep- one major funding source. Unlike California in 2000 (Prop o - tion that the U.S. might be blocking “China’s rise,” even as si tion 22) and 2008 (Prop 8), Ireland voted the wrong way, in China remains a one-party dictatorship and its rise involves our view. Unlike the California votes, however, the Irish vote wholesale violation of international customs. Now, Chinese will stand, thanks to what remains of popular sovereignty and ambitions are taking concrete form—literally: The regime is judicial restraint in the younger republic (est. 1922). Let the constructing artificial islands on small rocks and reefs in the U.S. Supreme Court take note. South China Sea. The Obama administration re cently prom - ised, in response, to begin patrols of the region by U.S. planes n Claire Cain Miller reports in the New York Times that policies and ships. It’s a good idea, but it could mean confrontation designed to help women combine work and family in other coun- between the U.S. military and the sundry Chinese forces that tries—policies that are always held up in contrast to America’s al - dominate the islands. Protecting our allies and in ter national leged backwardness—have backfired, lowering women’s wages norms will not be without risk; it’s a shame Pres i dent Obama and reducing job opportunities. (“In Spain, a policy to give par- doesn’t have much experience in it. ents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women—even n On their way to Mass every Sunday, the Ladies in White, those who are not mothers.”) Not to worry, though: According to campaigners for human rights in Cuba, are regularly detained “people who study the issue,” governments can make these and beaten, until their bones are broken. Yet they try again as policies effective by getting men to assume more of the respon- soon as they can. At the Vatican, Pope Francis met Raúl Cas tro. sibilities of child care. To find out how well that works, consult The pope is credited with brokering the new relations be tween editions of the newspaper 20 years from now.

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n Muscovites in their thousands are objecting to the erection ple of graduate students lodged a complaint against her alleging of a statue of Saint Vladimir the Great, due to rise in their that her essay had violated federal laws against gender discrimi- city to the height of a six-storey building. This enormity nation. One student contended that Kipnis’s essay had created a must disfigure wherever it is finally placed, especially if the “chilling effect” that would discourage women from reporting site is on what little high ground there is along the Moscow sex crimes. The other accused Kipnis of “retaliation” for men- River. The Orthodox Church and an official but shadowy tioning in passing publicly known allegations of sexual mis - Military-Historical Society are in favor. But many well un - conduct that the (un named) student had made against a male derstand that the statue is intended to serve the neo-Soviet professor. Rather than dismiss the complaints out of hand, political purposes of the much lesser Vladimir Putin. A thou- North western hired a team of law yers to conduct a lengthy in - sand and more years ago, Saint Vladimir was the founder of vestigation of Kipnis. After she recounted her Kafkaesque ordeal the Russian state with its capital then in Kiev, and he con- in another published essay, North western cleared her of most verted to Christianity in the Crimea. Putin is excavating this of the charges. Her ac cusers can nonetheless comfort them- past in order to justify today’s aggression. In the tactful selves with the knowledge that in such cases the process is the phrase of a friendly propagandist, the monument will be “a punishment. sort of spiritual talisman.” Naturally, in Ukraine they see things differently. n You’d think President Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, who became famous for her writing on n “Skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg wants an genocide and other human-rights atrocities, would have a Australian home for a Consensus Center, a research institute good sense of perspective and a disdain for false equivalence. like the one he already runs by the same name in Co pen - But you’d be wrong, to go by a recent tweet of hers: She hagen. The Australian government has pledged to contribute expressed her support for Emma Sulkowicz—the Columbia $4 million to the center, and the University of Western Aus - student who carried a mattress around campus to protest the tra lia had planned to host it—that is, until climate activists university’s handling of her sexual-assault complaint—and convinced the university to pull the plug. The university’s suggested that Sulkowicz’s struggle is something like that of vice chancellor explained that they didn’t predict the “strong women in Afghanistan. (She repeated her admiration for Sul - and passionate emotional reaction” to the idea. These days, ko wicz in a commencement speech at Barnard College.) The isn’t fanatical opposition to free and open inquiry what one problem: The university’s exceedingly accuser-friendly sys- should expect? Mr. Lomborg thinks the planet is warming tem cleared the accused male student in 2013. He has always due to human activity, but rejects the standard regulatory maintained that the pair engaged in consensual sex and is now solutions. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lom - suing Columbia (under Title IX, no less) for harassment and borg had this to say: “What is the lesson for young academics? intimidation. Columbia will nonetheless now require all stu- Avoid producing research that could produce politically diffi- dents to attend training workshops or complete an art project cult answers.” Which is precisely the lesson his opponents on sexual respect. Although Sulkowicz carried her mattress meant to teach. for the last time at Columbia during graduation, “Mattress Girl” may live on: She said the mattress is up for sale to any n A feminist professor was recently subjected to an investigation museum willing to exhibit the piece. If no museum steps for- under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act for what amounted to a ward, no doubt her supporters will chalk it up as another thought crime. Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern Uni - depraved act of the patriarchy. ver si ty, wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education de - crying the bureaucratization of rules governing sex on campus n It is difficult to know what the rules are these days. After the and the creeping “climate of sanctimony about student vulnera- fight over Indiana’s ill-fated Religious Freedom Restoration bility.” She warned that it was becoming impossible to openly Act, America’s devout business owners were issued a set of express opinions about such matters without being “labeled anti- instructions. “Sure,” they were informed, “you may believe feminist, or worse, a sex criminal.” As if to prove her point, a cou- what you wish; just don’ t expect to be able to run your busi- nesses in line with your consciences. Open for one means open for all.” How quickly this standard slipped out of fashion. In May, a religious Canadian jeweler made the news after the les- bian couple for whom he had agreed to fashion wedding rings turned on him and sought to exit their contract. There had been no bigotry involved, nor a denial of service or a renegingn o promises made; the couple had merely discovered that the jeweler opposes same-sex marriage, and they were worried that associating with him might “taint” their nuptials. “One of the reasons my family chose to come to Canada,” he noted in exasperation, “was the freedom of rights.” How touchingly naïve. That was last week. COM . n B. B. King was born a couple of months before William F. BREITBART . Buckley Jr. and had an oddly similar career: He made his name WWW in the 1950s within a vibrant but insular subculture, brought it to

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Visit alphapub.com to read Natural-law Essays and Online Books

This Essay is to tell readers that they are still not obeying a natural Law of Right Action identi ed by Richard Wetherill decades ago. This law requires the human race to be rational, honest,

and morally right, “Just found your website thereby enabling human and I was quite impressed. I look forward to hours of life to continue. enjoyment and learning. Thanks.” - Frank Scripture starts with the creation of the physical realm and continues with the creation of the rst man, Adam. The creator told him what to do and what not to do, and Adam followed those instructions. One instruction was that he should not eat the fruit of the tree in the center of the Garden, or he would surely die. Adam happily obeyed. But when given a female to help Adam tend the Garden, they both dis- obeyed by eating that forbidden fruit. Suddenly they became aware of their nakedness and hid from the creator’s sight. Their disobedience drove them from the protection of the Garden, and later they surely did die.

Even today, people have not learned from that incident to obey instructions “I have nished reading found in the creator’s natural Law of Right Action. They have not stopped the book How To Solve engaging in much forbidden wrong action but instead do as they please. Problems. So simple, yet so profound and powerful. Most people know that certain of the creator’s natural laws if not obeyed Thank you.” - Alex are able to cause sudden death—gravity, for example. While other natural laws if not obeyed cause a plethora of unwanted, disagreeable results and eventually people die. It is imperative to emphasize that persons wanting to live and not to die, strive always to obey the creator’s natural Law of Right Action: think, say, and do what is rational, honest, and morally right.

Visit alphapub.com for more information or for a free mailing write to The Alpha Publishing House, PO Box 255, Royersford, PA 19468.

This public-service message is from a self- nanced, nonpro t group of former associates of Mr. Wetherill. week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 6/3/2015 1:53 PM Page 14

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calls, and not even the names of the phone subscribers involved. The program allowed the NSA to store huge amounts of data, but it could be accessed and analyzed only by a tiny number of agents, subject to congressional and judi- cial oversight. The president bowed to the media firestorm nonetheless, convening a task force to examine intelligence procedures, which produced a number of recommendations that made it into the USA Freedom Act. He backed the bill, even though he had defended the usefulness of the Patriot Act as it existed. The underlying issue was the same, but the poli- tics had changed—and our commander-in-chief went along with the crowd. The Freedom Act reforms did not go far enough for Senator Paul, who blocked its advancement, repeatedly and single- handedly ensuring that the NSA’s abilities went dark for widespread notice in the 1960s, and thereafter achieved world- some time. The practical significance of that blackout is prob- wide fame as his work became mainstreamed into the larger ably not great, but Senator Paul’s crusade against the NSA and culture. Both men were strongly influenced by their Christian politically feasible reforms to it has done much more for his faith, and King’s music, like Buckley’s thought, evolved and notoriety than it has for anyone’s civil liberties. gained subtlety through the years but was always bracingly Mitch McConnell had the right idea all along—reauthorize honest and true to its essential core. In 1977 King even matched the metadata program as is—although the statute should have Buck ley’s Yale degree when the university awarded him an been clarified to unmistakably authorize the continuation of the honorary doctorate in music. Dead at 89. R.I.P. program as it exists. (A federal appeals court recently ruled that the law did not authorize collection as broad as that which the NSA has carried out.) NATIONAL SECURITY Unfortunately, too many members of his own party still in - D.C. Gambles with America’s sist ed—albeit on more reasonable grounds than Senator Paul Safety —that metadata collection was too intrusive and needed to be restricted. They certainly got some restrictions: Under the USA N June 1, three sections of the Patriot Act expired, only Freedom Act, metadata will reside with companies and be one of which is controversial and frequently used: the accessed only when the NSA comes to them with a request O National Security Agency’s Section 215 metadata pro- tied to a specific investigation. The new law curtails what data gram. There are three people primarily responsible for the NSA’s can be considered relevant to that request, and, while it will being stripped of this useful counterterrorism program: Edward allow 90 days of live data collection, will mean the only past GETTY IMAGES

/ Snowden, Rand Paul, and Barack Obama. On June 2, President records available are those the companies decide to keep. Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which replaces the meta- Considering the fever pitch that the Snowden controversy data program with a much weaker one. The result is not a cata- reached, we could have ended up with something much strophe for our national security, but it does reflect the outcome worse. In fact, there are a few useful fixes to the original OLIVIER DOULIERY : of a bruising few years for national-security priorities and our Patriot Act included in the new law. But a president and a Re - OBAMA

; intelligence community. publican party willing to make a more forceful case for the Two years ago, Snowden broke the law to expose the meta - useful powers in the Patriot Act might have secured us some- data program, feeding details of it (and many other intelligence thing much better. GETTY IMAGES / operations) to the Guardian and the New York Times rather than pursuing the proper official channels. The media, zealous privacy advocates CHIP SOMODEVILLA : such as the ACLU, and libertarians PAUL ; including Senator Paul used the un - law ful disclosures to construct a GUARDIAN frightening, and frighteningly mis- THE : leading, narrative: that the NSA was constantly monitoring what you did SNOWDEN ; with your phone, if not outright lis- tening in on your calls. This wasn’t true, as many national- GETTY IMAGES / security hawks pointed out re peat - ed ly, and President Obama did once or twice. First, metadata is SCOTT HARRISON : just the numbers called and dura- KING tion of calls—not the content of the

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ance. State governments have further weakened that market with regulations. They require insurance policies to cover certain services—hair transplants in one state, in vitro fertilization in another— which raises costs and hinders the devel- opment of national risk pools. These government policies (and other ones) have made insurance, and health care generally, more expensive for peo- ple who don’t have e mployer coverage. By preventing the emergence of a robust market in cheap, renewable catastrophic insurance for individuals, they have created serious problems for some peo- ple when they get sick. They often find it difficult to get insurance if they do not have employer coverage or need to change employers. Almost nobody is calling for an end to all federal tax breaks for health insur- ance or to state regulation of it, and any- one who did call for those things would get nowhere. But it is possible to modi- The Case for Coverage fy government policies so that they do Why conservatives should help people get health insurance less to suppress the emergence of a market in cheap, renewable individual BY RAMESH PONNURU insurance policies. A number of health-care plans pro- posed by conservatives would do just UST how important is it that focus: Cost control has more to offer that. The Burr-Hatch-Upton legislation, everybody in the United States most voters than coverage expansion the reform advanced by a group called J be able to get health insurance? does, since most voters have health the 2017 Project, and a new bill from Conservatives are ambivalent, at insurance and did before Obamacare. House Budget Committee chairman best, about that goal. Many of them think These are reasons for putting the value Tom Price would repeal Obamacare, cur- that it is more important to restrain the of high levels of coverage in perspective, tail the tax break for employer-provided growth of health-care costs; many of but not for considering it slight. Health coverage, and provide a tax credit to them worry that putting insurance within insurance can benefit people even if it people who buy insurance on the indi- reach for everyone would involve exces- does not improve their health: It can pro- vidual market. The credits would be set sive government power. They are right to tect them from financial calamity. For a at a level to enable people to purchase be concerned about costs and about big significant number of economically policies that cover at least catastrophic government. They should nevertheless insecure voters, that’s likely to be a mat- expenses, and more depending on how overcome their ambivalence. There are ter of intense concern. And having more much they wish to supplement the credit good reasons to embrace a conservative people in the insurance pool can lower from their own pockets. These proposals health-care policy that enables coverage premiums (even if the Obama adminis- would also enable people to buy individ- for all Americans who seek it—not the tration exaggerated that point when it ual policies from out of state, thus by - least being that in the present political was pushing for the enactment of its passing the most onerous regulations in context, that policy might be the best way health-care law). their own states. to restrain both costs and government. Being protected against the risk of cat- The Center for Health and Economy There are certainly grounds for skepti- astrophic health expenses is a valuable has estimated that the Burr-Hatch-Upton cism about the intense emphasis that the good—but it’s one that government poli- legislation would cover nearly as many Obama-era Democrats have put on cov- cies in the United States have done a lot people as Obamacare does. It would erage expansion. A recent study of Medi - to keep people from getting. The federal come up 3 million short, though support- caid recipients in Oregon—the best tax code has since World War II encour- ers of the plan suggest that there are study of its kind—was unable to find any aged people to get health-insurance ways to close that gap. Premiums would significant differences between their policies through their employers, and also be lower, according to the estimate. physical health and that of uninsured en couraged expensive employer policies Many of the insured would have inferior people. (Other research has yielded over cheap ones. That policy has both coverage, by the standards of proponents more-positive findings.) There’s also a raised costs and stunted the growth of the of Obamacare, since their policies would ROMAN GENN hard-headed political case for a different market for individually purchased insur- not cover everything that federal and

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state policies now encourage. But some the budget than a tax deduction, and of those Obamacare policies, while man- leave less room for cuts in income-tax dating some forms of routine care, also rates, capital-gains taxes, and so on. expose people to very large bills in the Whether that price is worth paying Work-Visa event of a major health problem. People depends in part on the answers to two who prefer lower premiums, lower de - questions. First: Should we regard PriorityWisdom should go to the ductibles, and catastrophic coverage Republican health plans’ use of tax would come out ahead. So would people credits to help people buy insurance as extremely talented who prefer larger networks of providers, a distasteful concession to the Left, or BY REIHAN SALAM according to the estimates. as a way to build the markets the gov- Under all of these conservative pro- ernment has suppressed for decades? posals, the government would do much Arguing in favor of the latter interpre- O understand the future of the less to distort health-insurance markets tation is that the tax credits would not immigration debate, one must than it does now. It would do less, even, necessarily entail an increase in the T first understand the H-1B visa than it did before Obamacare. In that total amount of government subsidies program. Though not very well important sense, the government role for health care. (The conservative tax- known among ordinary Americans, the would be greatly reduced. credit plans generally shrink Medicaid program, first established in 1990, has A few conservatives have expressed and pare back the tax break for employer- grown enormously, and at least some misgivings about these proposals. The provided coverage.) The subsidies would lawmakers are hoping to expand it fur- most prominent of the conservative crit- be redesigned, though, to do much less ther still. ics is Bobby Jindal, who is a former to distort markets. What exactly is the H-1B visa pro- health-policy official, the current gov- Second: Is it politically viable to re - gram? Essentially, it is a guest-worker ernor of Louisiana, and an aspiring place Obamacare with a plan that signif- program for the college-educated set. president. He has his own plan to re- icantly reduces the number of Americans H-1B-visa holders are foreign nationals place Obamacare, with three main parts. with health insurance? Republicans who agree to come to the United States He would get rid of the tax break for would have to campaign on a plan that to work for three years and to return to employer-provided coverage, offer a tax could fairly be described as taking health their native countries when this period deduction that covers insurance whether insurance away from many millions of draws to a close, unless they renew their or not it is bought through employers, and people—not just failing to extend it to H-1B visas for one (and only one) addi- offer $10 billion a year to state govern- them—win on that platform, and then get tional three-year period. There are other ments to help people who cannot buy it through Congress. The unlikelihood of types of visas for other categories of insurance even with the deduction. this happening is exactly what the Left guest workers, from agricultural workers Jindal concedes that many fewer peo- has been counting on to keep Obamacare to workers “of extraordinary ability or ple would have health insurance under in place. The Left believes that conserva- achievement,” a category that famously this plan than under the Republican tax- tive principles can’t be applied in a way smoothes the way for film starlets and credit plans or Obamacare. That’s be - that yields coverage for everyone who other glamorous people to settle in cause tax deductions are not worth much wants it. Conservatives have to decide Williamsburg and West L.A. Yet it is the money to people in low tax brackets, and whether they agree. H-1B, for workers in “specialized occu- those are the people who tend to have the This argument could matter before pations,” that attracts the most attention, most difficulty getting insurance. He the next election. The Supreme Court is since this is the visa program that Silicon prefers his lower-coverage solution considering a challenge to Obamacare’s Valley and Wall Street see as absolutely because it involves lower levels of taxes insurance subsidies in a majority of essential to their financial health. and spending. He charges that the Burr- states, and might strike them down. This is no small thing, as technology Hatch-Upton bill spends more money, Republicans could then move to let the and finance employers have a great deal and imposes higher taxes, than was the affected states replace Obamacare with of political influence. This influence case before Obamacare. Thus, he argues, a better, freer system: one in which stems not just from political contribu- it retains some of Obamacare’s higher people used tax credits to buy insur- tions, though there is that, but also from taxes and spending and does not fully ance on an open, deregulated market their prestige. If you’re an elected offi- repeal Obamacare. rather than having to accept the insur- cial, you might aspire to work one day It is not at all clear that Jindal’s math is ance products Washington, D.C., has for a Goldman Sachs or a Google. You correct. The Burr-Hatch-Upton bill may designed for them, and one in which a look up to their senior executives, who cut spending and taxes even compared large number of consumers draws in represent the meritocratic elite of Ameri - with the pre-Obamacare baseline. And it new entrants and sharpens competi- can business. You are inclined to believe would become law only under a Re - tion. Republicans would then be what they say. publican president who would almost roughly even with Obama care on cov- And, by and large, employers in these certainly be cutting other taxes too. So erage numbers while beating it on cost sectors and their advocates claim that they there is no real reason to fear that the bill and coercion. are facing a grave shortage of skilled would lead to the preservation of any of Or they could decide that they don’t workers and that their only hope for Obamacare’s taxes. It is true, however, care about coverage numbers, and gam- expanding their operations is to hire for- that a tax credit would take more room in ble that not many voters will either. eign workers. There is, however, another

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explanation for why high-tech employers First, it’s not at all obvious that there is are so keen to expand the H-1B-visa pro- in fact a grave shortage of tech workers. If CRITICAL PRAISE FOR gram: Hiring skilled workers is a cost of anything, there is evidence that the oppo- JAY NORDLINGER’S doing business, and employers would like site is true. In Learning by Doing, the to keep that cost as low as possible. economist James Bessen reports that U.S. Earlier this year, a bipartisan gang of colleges and universities graduate twice six—Senators Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), as many scientists and engineers each Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Jeff Flake (R., year as the number actually hired. To be Ariz.), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), Chris sure, it could be true that this doubling Coons (D., Del.), and Richard Blumenthal still hasn’t been enough to meet the insa- (D., Conn.)—introduced the Immigration tiable demand for skilled tech workers— Innovation Act of 2015, which they’ve except that wages for computer and IT dubbed, in a cutesy homage to tech- jobs have remained flat over a decade. If speak, the “I-squared bill.” Among other employers aren’t willing to offer higher things, the bill lifts the H-1B cap on wages to fill these positions, they proba- workers with advanced degrees in sci- bly aren’t so desperate after all. ence, technology, engineering, and math- Peter Cappelli, a management professor ematics (the “STEM” fields, as they’re at the Wharton School of Busi ness, has sometimes known) and greatly increases observed that, for a variety of reasons, the cap for all other H-1Bs. employers have grown more reluctant to It’s easy to see why this new gang is train workers. One could argue that instead calling for a higher cap. In April, U.S. of recruiting a larger number of H-1Bs, The New, Acclaimed History of the companies filed 233,000 petitions for the em ployers ought to be more willing to Nobel Peace Prize, ‘the Most Famous 85,000 H-1Bs available this year, a sharp train U.S. workers and to pay them attrac- and Controversial Prize in the World’ increase over the 172,500 petitions filed tive wages. Of course, many employers last year. These numbers are slightly fear that if they invest heavily in training, JOHN BOLTON in The Weekly misleading, as it is not uncommon for they will find themselves at a disadvan- Standard: With this “erudite and companies to file multiple petitions on tage when their employees then leave for insightful history,” Jay Nordlinger “has behalf of a single worker, and some other jobs. Governments could partner written not only the go-to reference workers have more than one company with employers to expand apprenticeship book for the prize and its laureates filing petitions on their behalf. To have programs, which would allow employers but also an important philosophical reflection on the nature of ‘peace’ in multiple petitions filed on one’s behalf to pay somewhat lower wages while modern times.” would be very flattering indeed, as the young workers gain experience. legal fees involved are notably high. But let’s assume that Silicon Valley SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line: Each petition sets a company back some- and Wall Street are right and the U.S. “. . . a brilliant, thought-provoking, where between $2,000 and $4,000, and badly needs more skilled workers. Why enraging, inspirational, fascinating, of course there is no guarantee that filing increase the number of H-1B visas rather moving book.” a petition will help the company land its than simply grant more green cards MONA CHAREN in her syndicated chosen candidate. There is a voracious (which confer permanent-resident status) column: “Nordlinger is an engaging appetite for H-1Bs. But does that neces- to people deemed sufficiently qualified? and wise tour guide.” sarily mean that Congress ought to greatly One thing to keep in mind about the H-1B increase their number, as I-squared would program is that its recipients are allowed National Review, 215 Lexington Avenue, NY, NY 10016 have us do? to bring their spouses and children, Send me ______copies of Peace, They Say. My cost is $27.99 each (shipping and handling are included!). I On the surface, the I-squared bill has which is why the 85,000 H-1Bs granted enclose total payment of $______. Send to:

much to recommend it. Instead of trying to in a given year can account for tens of Name address unauthorized immigrants, border thousands of additional immigrants Address security, and everything else related to who receive H-4 visas, for dependents. City State ZIP immigration all at once, I-squared tries to (Green-card holders can also do this, but e-mail: tackle one small but important piece of the they have to file a petition and the process phone:

immigration debate in a neat little pack- can take years.) PAYMENT METHOD: age. If you believe, as I do, that there is a And not all H-1B-visa holders intend Check enclosed (payable to National Review) case for restricting less-skilled immigra- to return home. Though no one can de fin - Bill my MasterCard Visa tion and increasing high-skilled immigra- i tive ly say how many H-1Bs see their tion, I-squared is, in theory, a perfectly temporary status as a stepping stone to Acct. No.

reasonable approach. Scratch beneath the something more permanent, I’d hazard Expir. Date surface, however, and it becomes clear that it’s more than a few. Though the H-1B that I-squared is a bad bet. If we really visa has a six-year maximum, any time Signature want an immigration policy that serves spent overseas is not counted against the America’s national interest, we ought to maximum, nor is time spent in another (NY State residents must add sales tax. For foreign orders, add $15, to cover additional shipping.) go in a very different direction. visa category. So a couple could, in theory,

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trade off. Say a wife is residing in the motivation of employers seeking H-1Bs U.S. on an H-1B while her husband is is to restrain growth in labor costs. I can residing on an H-4. Eventually, the hus- see why this is excellent news for em - band could get hired on an H-1B, at ployers. But why should our elected rep- Writing which point his wife would switch over resentatives place a higher priority on to an H-4. There are a few other visas to expanding the H-1B program than on, A conversationBrave with a staffer at choose from too. And hopping from visa say, expanding apprenticeships? to visa isn’t the only way to extend your None of this is to suggest that we Charlie Hebdo magazine “temporary” stay. Some H-1Bs wind up shouldn’t welcome extraordinary immi - having U.S.-born children, or marrying grants who can make outsized contri- BY JAY NORDLINGER locals. Why continue with the charade butions to U.S. society. Yet the H-1B that H-1Bs are guest workers who will program is not limited to extraordinary Oslo eventually return home? people—if it were, it would not be used OES Zineb El Rhazoui ever One plausible reason is that guest chiefly as a means to lower wage costs. think of going off and leading workers are less likely to press for wage So I have a straightforward proposal D a quiet life, maybe teaching increases than their U.S. counterparts. for reforming employer-based immigra- school somewhere? Must she Why would that be? Part of the answer is tion: Let’s lift the cap on H-1Bs, but let’s remain in the fray? “It’s too late for me, that guest workers are less likely to de - also limit the program to workers who regardless. There is a Sword of Damocles fect to other employers, because not all will be paid an annual wage of at least hanging over my head.” Wherever she employers would be willing to take on the $155,817, or three times the median went, whatever she did, her opponents cost associated with filing a new H-1B household income in the United States. would try to hunt her down and kill her. petition and because guest workers tend to Think of this as a simplification of the Besides, “I owe something to my col- have more limited social networks than H-1B program’s current prevailing-wage leagues. I can’t abandon them,” not after U.S. workers or green-card immigrants. provision. Granted, $155,817 would be a so many were killed. “It’s my duty as a Recently, the economists Kirk Doran, higher-than-average wage. But this is in survivor, I think.” Alexander Gelber, and Adam Isen re- keeping with the idea that we as a country Rhazoui is a journalist, a staff member leased a study that attempted to measure should roll out the welcome mat for the with Charlie Hebdo. This week, she is the impact of hiring a capped H-1B best of the best—not workers who are participating in the Oslo Freedom Forum, worker. To that end, they compared two just average in their fields. This H-1B the annual human-rights conference here groups of employers: those that applied visa would last for five years, not three, in the Norwegian capital. She is a chic, for H-1B visas and managed to secure and those workers who manage to earn an even a glamorous woman in her early thir- them, and those that applied for them but average of $155,817 or more over this ties. There is also a sense of purpose about failed to secure them. Doran et al. com- entire period would then be invited to her. She’s an intense communicator. pared these two groups of firms along sev- apply for permanent-resident status. Charlie Hebdo is the proudly left- eral different dimensions, e.g., the number True, some of the low-wage tech work- wing and atheist satirical magazine in of patents they issued, as a crude measure ers who now work in the U.S. as H-1Bs Paris. Among its many targets have been of innovative activity; whether they hired will remain in their native countries, Islam and Islamism. Last January 7, two more or fewer U.S. workers; and overall where they might staff outsourced back- Islamists, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, went profits. They found that H-1Bs don’t office operations for U.S. tech firms. I see to the magazine’s offices. The Kouachis appear to make firms more innovative, but no problem with that. Just as garment were Parisian-born brothers of Algerian they do lead them to hire fewer U.S. work- manufacturing has gone overseas, so will parentage. They murdered twelve peo- ers than they would have otherwise, and a fair amount of basic IT work, whether or ple, afterward yelling the usual tri- they do make them more profitable. not we expand the H-1B program. The umphant slogans. Zineb El Rhazoui was How can this be, when under current question is whether U.S. taxpayers want not present that day. She was on vacation law employers are required to pay H-1Bs to pick up the tab for the safety-net bene- in Casablanca. the “prevailing wage” for a given occu- fits that low-wage tech workers will She was born and raised there. Her pation in a given location? It turns out require when offshoring and automation father was Moroccan, her mother French. that employers routinely circumvent this render them less employable. My guess is Zineb came to her political ideas—secu- provision. For example, Ron Hira, a fel- that the answer is no. Better to recruit tech larist, nonconformist, individualist—early low at the left-of-center Economic Policy workers who will pay much more in taxes on. “In childhood, I started asking myself Institute, reports that in 2013, the average than they’ll ever receive in transfers. about my condition as a girl and as a wages for H-1Bs employed by Infosys There is another downside to my future woman in Morocco, a country and Tata, two leading offshoring firms, approach, and it’s a big one: Limiting where women don’t have the same rights were $70,882 and $65,565 respectively, H-1Bs to high-wage workers would keep as men, a country where your whole sta- far lower than the average annual wage of out younger, less experienced foreign tus is ruled by religion, or by laws inspired $91,990 for a computer-systems analyst workers who might eventually become by religion.” A woman, she says, is “con- based in Los Angeles that year. superstars. Fortunately, there are many demned to be a half-citizen.” She formed All of these findings are compatible younger, less experienced Amer i can a desire to “contest” this system. with the notion that H-1Bs and non- workers, both native- and foreign-born, After high school, she went to Paris, H-1Bs are substitutes, and that the chief who would happily take their place. where she studied languages. She eventu-

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ally earned a master’s degree in the much joking, of the darkest kind. sociology of religion. She wanted to And the team planned the next understand the world from which week’s issue. she sprang, the better to contest it. Since that time, Zineb El Rhazoui In 2007, when she was 25, she has received countless death threats, returned to Morocco, becoming a from Islamists and jihadists. These journalist. She worked for Le men are angry that Rhazoui was Journal Hebdomadaire, an inde- not killed in the January 7 attack. pendent magazine. (Hebdomadaire Their threats are highly specific, means “weekly,” and hebdo, of and completely in earnest. The course, is its shortened form.) killers, or would-be killers, have Rhazoui wrote about religion and vowed that they will not rest until irreligion, seeking out underground this woman is dead. atheists, for example. She has been living the life of a She also co-founded an organiza- vagabond, going from friend’s sofa to tion—a clandestine organization— friend’s sofa, and from hotel to hotel. called MALI. That is the French She has never stayed in a hotel more acronym for the Alterna tive Move- than a week. Usually she changes ment for Individual Liberty. Mali, in every day, or every two days. “I have Moroccan Arabic, also has the sense had to invent a new life and try to of “What’s wrong with me?” find a significance in it.” In September 2009, the group tried As a journalist, and as a sociolo- a little civil disobedience. Muslims gist, Rhazoui prides herself on under- were observing Ramadan, the month standing the world, or at least trying of fasting. In Morocco, it is forbid- to do so. But, like the rest of us, she is Zineb El Rhazoui den to eat publicly during fasting perplexed by much. “I grew up inside hours. In fact, it’s a jailable offense. Islam. I know the Koran and the So, MALI staged a picnic. Rhazoui ex- Rhazoui went back to bed. A few hours Arabic language better than the Kouachi plains, “We wanted to say, ‘We are citi- later, a friend called, in a panic, saying that brothers, who killed my colleagues, but I zens and we don’t fast.’ There were also there had been reports of a shooting at don’t understand what’s happening in the people with us who do fast but who op- Charlie Hebdo. Rhazoui figured it was world today.” pose this unjust law. No one should go to nothing. “I was sure at that moment that She can’t understand how the Islamic jail because he’s eating a sandwich.” the atmosphere at Charlie was funny and State has gained so much ground—literal The picnickers did not get very far jokey. I couldn’t imagine that anything ground, in several countries. “How come before being arrested. And the country’s horrible had happened. I thought I would all the modern countries, with all their theological council issued a fatwa against call them and they’d say, ‘Oh, don’t worry science and all their armies, can’t destroy Rhazoui. The council declared her an about it. There was one guy, and he broke a bunch of madmen who don’t even have enemy of Islam. Rhazoui maintains, a couple of windows.’” showers and believe you can heal cancer “The picnic was not an action against Throughout the day, Rhazoui learned by drinking camel piss? I don’t under- Islam but an action for freedom.” who had survived and who had been stand how we cannot win this war.” In the months and years to follow, killed. Charb, her close friend, was killed. I point out to her what she well knows: Rhazoui was subjected to near-constant Another close friend, Simon Fieschi, the that many people fault Charlie Hebdo threats and harassment. The newspaper, webmaster, was very badly wounded. The for being “provocative.” What does she Le Journal Hebdomadaire, was shut receptionist, Angélique, had been spared have to say to them? Many things, of down by the government. It was virtually because she had gone out for a smoke. which I will relate a few. impossible for Rhazoui to work. She “I didn’t know whether I would have First, these critics “may have a lack finally left the country, winding up at the courage to buy a ticket and fly back to of culture.” The satirical press is an old Charlie Hebdo. It seems to be a spiritual Paris,” says Rhazoui. “I was on my sofa, tradition in France, and “it is not meant home for her. hiding under a cover, just crying. And then to please the one who is cartooned. By On January 7, 2015, however—as I when I heard that Simon was still alive, definition and necessity, it is provoca- have said—she was back home in Casa- that gave me the courage to go.” She flew tive. But that does not mean that, if you blanca. She woke up early that morn- back the next day, January 8. At the airport provoke, you deserve to be killed.” ing. She e-mailed her friend and editor, in Paris, security agents were waiting for Second, “we are a French atheist maga- Stéphane Charbonnier, known as “Charb.” her at the door of the plane. They were zine. Why should we accept a rule of their She had an idea for her next piece: The there to protect her. Such agents have been religion?” (By “rule,” she is alluding to the Islamic State had just issued regulations with her ever since. Sunni taboo on depicting Mohammed.) for the buying and selling of women. The The next day, January 9, the surviving “In France, do we work under sharia law regulations answered such questions as members of Charlie Hebdo got together. or French law? Just tell me!” “Can I buy two sisters? Can I sleep with Rhazoui told them, “I never thought I’d Third, “you don’t have to buy Charlie OSLO FREEDOM FORUM both of them?” be so happy to see you again.” There was Hebdo. It’s not a compulsory product.”

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Fourth, “the monsters who killed my what it’s not, such as the “fabricated colleagues in the heart of Paris are the metal ball” that Clifford D. Simak same monsters who kill in Nigeria, Syria, imagined in his 1973 short story “Con - Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other parts of To a Planet struction Shack.” The astonished ex - the world. In Paris, they killed because we plorers of his tale go on to examine depicted the prophet, but in other places Unknown Pluto’s smooth surface and uncover a they kill you because you’re drinking a Our first photos of Pluto will startling secret about life, the universe, beer or because you’re not covering your end a pleasing mystery and everything, in what could have been hair or because you don’t go to mosque. the source for a good episode of The They even kill innocent children, for no BY JOHN J. MILLER Twilight Zone. As Larry Niven wrote in reason. They will always find a pretext to “Wait It Out,” a 1968 story about a trou- kill, so I don’t accept this argument from bled mission to Pluto: “A new world those who say we are provoking.” HEN the astronomer Clyde would hold infinite surprises.” Rhazoui further has no patience for Tombaugh discovered Will Pluto? We’ll probably find that those who say that she and her colleagues W Pluto in 1930, the writer it’s just another ball of rock and ice. are “racist” and “Islamophobic.” She H. P. Lovecraft recognized We’ll collect the cold, hard facts about points out that Islam controls many coun- that this piece of late-breaking news its geology, atmosphere, and tempera- tries, politically. If you criticize Islam in could give one of his far-fetched tales a ture. We’ll debate once more whether it’s one of those countries, you are liable to be hint of ripped-from-the-headlines auth - really a planet. We’ll gain new knowledge imprisoned or worse. “They have legal enticity. He was drafting a story called about our solar system. As we do, how- tools to shut your mouth.” But in a secular “The Whisperer in Darkness,” a blendf o ever, we’ll lose a bit of the here-be- country—a liberal democracy—they have horror and science fiction that involves dragons mystery that surrounds terra no such tools. So, to shut your mouth, they lobster-like aliens, human brains en - incognita—and I’m going to miss it. cry “racism” and “Islamophobia.” cased in metallic cylinders, and “the From the moment of its discovery, In the last ten years, says Rhazoui, dark planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the Pluto has served as a lodestar of the imag- Charlie Hebdo has run 523 covers. Seven solar system.” (It’s better than it sounds.) ination, inspiring both artists and scien- have dealt with Islam; 19 have been Lovecraft was striving to improve the tists. Legend has it that Walt Disney about Christianity; and the rest have been story, and he hit upon the idea of making chose the name of Mickey Mouse’s dog about French politics, the Right, culture, Yuggoth a stand-in for Pluto. In a letter because he wanted to build on the buzz sports, and so on. to a friend, he expressed his excitement from Tombaugh’s discovery. The radio - The “real racism,” as Rhazoui sees it, about what Tombaugh had spotted in the active element plutonium, with its un - comes from those white Westerners who skies: “I have always wished I could live fortunate symbol “Pu,” also took its say, for example, that equality between to see such a thing come to light—& name from Pluto, before it went on to the sexes may be well and good for their here it is!” become the active ingredient in Fat Man, own countries, but not for other people’s I know how he feels. As a boy, I the atomic bomb that destroyed Naga - countries (such as her native Morocco). tracked Voyager 1 as it zoomed by Jupiter saki. (Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Near the end of our discussion, I ask and Saturn, and then Voyager 2 as it Hiroshima, used uranium, also named Rhazoui the most clichéd question in the transmitted stunning images from Saturn, for a planet.) business: “What would you like people Uranus, and Neptune. They filled my The original name, of course, comes to know?” head with wonder, making it a fertile from classical mythology: Pluto is the “I am not merely threatened,” says place for the words of authors such as Roman god of the underworld, a dark Rhazoui, “I am condemned to death. I Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, and place where the souls of the dead wander live under protection, and this protection Lovecraft, as well as the scenes of Star in the afterlife. It’s also a stomping is paid for by the French state. But I Wars and its progeny. If I’d been any ground for heroes. Descents into it were don’t think it’s to protect me personally. good at math, I might have become one staples of ancient storytelling, featuring My life is not worth that much. It’s to of those people who now devote their Hercules, Orpheus, Theseus, and others. protect freedom of speech and to protect careers to detecting planets that circle Their risky journeys serve as worthy a model of society that we want to build distant stars. Or perhaps I would have models for New Horizons as it hurtles at and preserve. So people must under- joined the team behind New Horizons, a speed of more than ten miles per second stand that if people like me are threat- the NASA probe launched in 2006 and into the remote reaches of the solar sys- ened today, tomorrow their own rights scheduled to reach Pluto on July 14. It tem, where the tiniest glitch could doom and freedoms will be threatened, if they promises to send back the first close-up its decade-long mission. do nothing.” look at a previously unvisited major body Tombaugh’s technology was much Zineb El Rhazoui is a brave and ad - in our solar system since 1989, when we more primitive. He found Pluto with the mirable lady. I tell her so, of course. I also saw the majestic blues of Neptune. help of a blink comparator, a device that say, “Atheist though you may be, I’m Except that our pending encounter allowed him to see a dot of light change going to say, ‘God bless you.’” She smiles with Pluto fills me with a peculiar anxiety. position in a pair of photographs he had warmly. I then say that I hope she’ll live to I want to see the pictures of this little taken a few nights apart, from Lowell be a very old lady. Still smiling, she says, world as much as anybody. As we learn Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. (This is “For that, I have to stop smoking.” what Pluto is, however, we’ll also learn another source of Pluto’s name: Its first

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two letters match the initials of Percival Lowell, an astronomer who wanted to see life on Mars through a telescope.) Tombaugh was only 24 at the time of his breakthrough, and for the rest of his life—he lived to 90, dying in 1997—he watched Pluto’s progressive diminution. At first, scientists thought Pluto was about the size of Earth. As measure- ments became more precise, it shrnank i both size and stature. Today, we know that its mass is about two-tenths of 1 percent of Earth’s, and its surface area is somewhat less than South America’s. It has become the lonely runt of our solar system’s litter, with all of the attendant sympathies. Americans have held it in special regard: Europeans found Uranus and Neptune, but Tombaugh was a farm boy from the Midwest. Starting in 1992, however, the star - gazers began to locate a lot more runts: a herd of Pluto-like objects outside the orbit of Neptune, in a region known as the Kuiper belt. In 2005, they found Eris, which is a touch bigger than Pluto. The next year, the International Astronomical Union voted to downgrade Pluto from being one of just nine full-fledged planets to being one of many “dwarf planets.” Despite my fondness for Pluto, part of me wanted to applaud the new designation: In a world of ever-lowering standards, a group had made the daring choice to reassert them, to howls of protest. My fascination with Pluto never had Clyde Tombaugh much to do with an astronomical classifi- cation, but rather with how a speck of light on a photographic plate could open zons and its high-resolution images will in tribute to the writer H. P. Lovecraft.” I vistas of possibility—or impossibility. kill forever, when they reveal that there’s e-mailed the idea to Leslie S. Klinger, E. E. “Doc” Smith, a founding father of no such thing. editor of The New Annotated Love - the “space opera” genre of science fic- Perhaps major revelations really do craft. He replied that this wasn’t quite tion, described Pluto in his 1950 novel await us. As recently as 1978, astrono - right, because Lovecraft clearly de - First Lensman as the home of an alien mers came across a big one when they fined Yuggoth as Pluto, rather than as colony that has not yet noticed Earth. spied Pluto’s moon, Charon. It’s so another thing. Then he mentioned an One of his protégés, Robert A. Heinlein, large compared with Pluto that the two overlooked line from a fevered passage made Pluto a prison for unruly earthlings bodies form a binary system: They re - in “The Haunter of the Dark,” the last in his 1958 young-adult novel Have Space volve around each other, orbiting a story Lovecraft ever wrote: “I remember

HTML Suit—Will Travel. My favorite piece of point in space. Even so, NASA’s web- Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and . Plutonian prose came in 1984, when Kim site boasts that New Horizons repre- the ultimate void of the black planets.”

DISCOVERY Stanley Robinson published Icehenge. sents a kind of conclusion, as it “allows It recalled something that the astrono - / Its title refers to an enigmatic, mega - the U.S. to complete the reconnaissance mer Gerard P. Kuiper (of Kuiper-belt GUIDE / lithic structure, similar to Stonehenge, at of the solar system.” fame) once said to Clyde Tombaugh: Pluto’s north pole. “It had the look of I’m starting to think of the places we “The finding of Pluto was an important ARTICLES /

COM mind marking cosmos, like the paintings haven’t reconnoitered. Last year, when discovery, but what you did not find out . on a cave wall,” comments Robinson’s astronomers announced the existence of there is even more important.” Pluto may narrator. But what was it doing on Pluto? 2012 VP113—a tiny planetoid well come into the clutches of our scientists PLUTOSAFARI . Now there’s an interesting question, beyond the orbit of Pluto—I took to the and engineers, but the rest of us can APP :// evoking memories of 2001 and its black website of NATIONAL REVIEW and made a always dream of Shaggai—a perma- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX HTTP monolith—and a question that New Hori - suggestion: “Its name should be Yuggoth, nently undiscovered country.

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The High Way Along the interstate, a Colorado–Nebraska border war erupts over marijuana

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Denver HE Weed Man has emerged from the shadows, he has Premium Marijuana-Infused Products, cannabis-extraction come out from the seedy backrooms and dank basement machines with the heat provided by CO2 instead of butane T apartments, and he is all up in the Chamber of Com - because we’re all a bit concerned about neural hypoxia, THC- merce. The Weed Man has acquired himself a suit, a tie, bearing chocolates and caramels and Keef Kat bars and Rasta and a marketing department. Drive down I-70 in Denver and Reese’s ganja-packed peanut-butter cups, terrifyingly clinical- you’ll see those Good Samaritan highway-beautification signs looking syringes for the sublingual delivery of concentrated sponsored by Metro Cannabis, along with signs for Green cannabis extract, cannabutter and Taboo Confections Lemon Solutions, “COLORADO’S #1 MARIJUANA DISPENSARY!” and Grow Shortbread Tarts (“KEEP OUTOF REACHOF CHILDREN”) and Big Supply, a purveyor of hydroponic agricultural goods, which Baked brand confections and a hundred thousand resplendently is advertising an “industry mixer,” a good old-fashioned vendor- sumptuous variations on the theme of “C12H22O11 + C21H30O2” is networking, business-card-swapping event for major-league pro bright, bright, bright indeed. potheads, culturally speaking an event one step removed from a Come, come shelter under the sign of the glowing green cross. Rotary luncheon, even if the evening does have the astrologically Colorado legalized the possession of marijuana for medical inevitable Bob Marley theme: “Grow Big Supply is proud to pre- purposes in 2000 through Amendment 20, a constitutional refer- sent Reggae Night, the first Thursday of every month from 6 to endum. That permitted possession of up to two ounces of mari- 10 P.M. Each month we serve different hand-crafted cocktails, a juana or up to six marijuana plants on the condition that at least variety of foods, live music, and, of course, the Grow Big Go-Go three of them be seedlings not yet producing usable weed. There girls.” The Weed Man may not have much of an imagination, but was some tussling over how many patients a caregiver could your local Masonic temple or Elks lodge probably doesn’t have provide with marijuana—i.e., over when somebody stops being a squadron of go-go girls, which is why freemasonry and Elkery a caregiver and starts being a drug dealer—and in 2010 the are moribund but the future of marijuana, weed, hash, Kush, state enacted C.R.S. 12-43.3-101 et seq., the Colorado Medical kind, sticky, nugs, cheeba, Cambodian red, fluffy yellow hydro- Marijuana Code. Medical marijuana was legal, and it was good. ROMAN GENN ponic blossoms from parts unknown, edibles, Dixie Elixirs But it was also kind of a load of bunk—sure, marijuana has some

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therapeutic qualities, but the main attractive quality of marijuana ation expenses have quadrupled since Colorado’s marijuana dis- is that it gets you high as a Georgia pine and makes Super pensaries opened their doors to the public. This in a place that Troopers really, really funny. In November 2012, Colorado voters had been so quiet that there is no county jail—it contracts out its decided to take things one step farther than medical-marijuana jailing to nearby communities. Out of a $290,000 sheriff’s- states such as California had done—which is to say, they decided department budget, some $140,000 goes to incarceration expenses, to stop pretending—and went ahead and ended marijuana pro- and the county’s tax revenue has been strained by the burden. hibition per se, legalizing its recreational consumption and “The interstate brings a lot of trouble,” the sheriff says. establishing an expanded regulatory apparatus, the Marijuana “Sometimes, I wish it wasn’t there.” Enforcement Division, to oversee commercial activity related to that consumption. The stoners in Colorado rejoiced. The cops in Nebraska? Not so much. HAT trouble does not generally take the form of people driving over th e state line with the amount of marijuana that can be sold to them legally in Colorado. Non - ET a little ways out of Denver’s self-consciously hipster- Tresidents are welcome to shop in Colorado’s dispensaries, but ish “we were Austin before people remembered they they are prohibited from buying more than 7 grams in a single hated freezing their hindquarters off” zone of gluten- transaction, and transactions are monitored in order to prevent Gfree urbanity and you are right back in weird old savage prairie bulk purchases’ being disguised as tiny transactions. Legally, America, endless acres of buffalo grass and purple-flowering you’d need to make more than 6,000 purchases from one of skunk weed (not that kind of skunk weed! Polemonium visco- Colorado’s dispensaries to put together those 100-pound pack- sum) with Colorado’s vast empty spaces leading to Nebraska and ages the Nebraska authorities are taking out of cars. But in spite its collection of vaster emptier spaces, the sort of geography that of the regulations, those purchases do get made, though probably makes you constantly aware of how much gas you have in the not from the dispensary operators; Sheriff Hayward theorizes tank. It is the end of May, and the rest of the country is gearing up that marijuana is diverted from a few steps up the production for Memorial Day weekend, the informal opening days of sum- chain, at the grow houses. The Drug Enforcement Administration mer. In Deuel County, Neb., just over the line from Colorado, has even claimed (apply DEA-credibility discount here) that far they’re having a snowstorm. from knocking the Mexican drug cartels out of the marijuana This has been smuggling country since forever, basically. In business, high-quality U.S.-grown weed is so profitable that the the late 1800s, the brutal gunman and dandy Luke Short set up syndicates are trafficking smoke from the United States into shop in nearby Sidney, where he made his fortune selling Mexico rather than the other way around. In 2014, a series of fed- whiskey to the Sioux in violation of federal law, shooting cus- eral raids in Colorado were conducted as part of an investigation tomers who became troublesome. In the Deuel County seat, linking the state’s legal operations to Colombian drug cartels. Chappell (“THE EXTRA ‘L’ IS FOR ‘LIVING THE GOOD LIFE,’” But if the jail records in Sheriff Hayward’s office are any indi- according to the billboard at the edge of town), Sheriff Adam cation, you don’t have to be Pablo Escobar to make a killing in Hayward is dealing with a less colorful sort of outlaw: sundry exploiting the interstate inconsistency of marijuana prohibition. midwestern marijuana aficionados who traverse his state to and Not long ago, his department arrested four young men from from (and it is from that is mostly the problem) the legal-weed Minnesota, ages 16 to 17, who were pulled over driving 86 mph promised land of Colorado, illegally bringing sticky green con- in a 75-mph zone on a Sunday afternoon and discovered with a traband back not only to Nebraska but also to Illinois, Indiana, pound or so of marijuana. As it turns out, this was a regular Minnesota, and places beyond. He estimates that about every thing for them. “They were coming down every week and buy- fifth traffic stop now results in the discovery of something that ing $2,500 to $3,000 worth of marijuana, which they could sell should not be there, and he has to lock up many more people for $6,000 back home,” Hayward says. He pauses. “That’s more than he ever has in the past. money than I make. A lot more.” “Nebraska doesn’t have to arrest them,” one critic says. And He mentions that there is a dispensary about 20 minutes away that’s true at some level, of course. But the reality is that Nebraska in Sedgwick, Colo. He is not the only person to single out the has pretty liberal marijuana laws, and you kind of have to be a bit establishment: Sedgwick has a population of fewer than 200 of a jerk to get locked up for it: First-possession offense with less people, but it is home to a marijuana dispensary as large and than an ounce is basically a parking ticket ($300, no possibility of well stocked as those you’ll find in Denver. In weed as in real jail time), and you have to be on your third offense before you estate: location, location, location. have the possibility of seeing even a week in jail—and seven days is the maximum sentence, on top of a fine of up to $500. You have to be packing more than a pound of weed through the Cornhusker UNNY thing about Sedgwick Alternative Relief (motto: State before you’ve committed a felony. So, no, Sheriff Hayward “THE FIRST DISPENSARY IN COLORADO,” which is a geo- doesn’t have to arrest you for an ounce of marijuana—but 110 graphical rather than temporal claim), the marijuana pounds? Yeah, he kind of has to arrest you at that point. Fretailer nearest the Nebraska border: Among the cars parked out Sheriff Hayward is a local, a youngish and no-nonsense man front, there is not a single one with Colorado plates. There are whose office is wallpapered with certificates from the likes of cars from Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, etc., but not one from the the Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center and the state in which the establishment is actually located. There are Nebraska Law Enforcement Intelligence Network. He is not an some Colorado plates in front of the gardening-supply store next admirer of Colorado’s legalization effort: His office is a big piece door, which, like the dispensary, is marked with the great glowing of the budget in this county of fewer than 2,000, and his incarcer- green-cross sign that has become the universal symbol of legal

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retail marijuana. It is a little discombobulating: Sure, you expect assortment of capsules: “The black one is for nighttime,” Sasha to see a bar nearby with a sign reading “COORS ON TAP” and the says. “It’s a sleep aid. The white one is for during the day. The red Sedgwick Antique Inn, because marijuana tourism is a thing. But one is for pain. The green one is an aphrodisiac, for all that fun to take in the overwhelming vegetal smell of all that high-grade stuff.” She giggles. Sleep aid? I think about the flight home. And doobage, the Mahatma-brand concentrate products and the then I think about dealing with TSA while high on CO2-extracted “recycler bubble oil rigs” (whatever the hell those are), and to THC, and that I am really too old to be thinking about this, but, take in the “awesome, dude” vibe of it all within sight of cattle still, there’s a moment of . . . but, no. and bales of hay—it’s just weird. For those who aren’t feeling too old, there’s a bunch of candy, The clientele at Sedgwick Alternative Relief during my visit which turns out to be sort of problematic from a regulatory was almost uniformly old—not even plausibly middle-aged, point of view. really, but gray and creaky and not looking exactly what you’d Sasha is better versed on the rules than almost anybody I talk call hale or prosperous. But that’s pretty common in remote to, and one of the things she points out is that the Gummi Bear small-town farming America, pop-culture romanticism notwith- doppelgängers are on their way out: The Man has decided that standing, and it’s hard to disaggregate the effects of lifelong weed candy that is designed to look like familiar brands of con- stoner dom from those of simply living the low version of country ventional candy (much of it festooned with similar labels and life. The clients come out of the shop with their brown paper bags given porn-star-style pun names, e.g., BuddahFinger bars) is a of product, get into their cars, and drive toward whatever state danger to the little ones and shall henceforth be banned. But, as boundary it is that they’re really not supposed to be crossing. Sasha points out, the non-copycat candies also can be a problem Inside, there’s a waiting room with a few unhappy-looking old for adults, who sometimes eat the candy like it was candy and get people in it and a security partition separating the general stoner themselves too high, which can be a very uncomfortable experi- public from the green gold beyond. A cute and chipper young ence. Rather than taking the sensible 10-milligram dose and then woman who speaks in the pothead patois that one encounters waiting for a couple of hours to see whether they really want everywhere in Weed World and that seems to be at least as much more, she says, consumers sometimes just wolf down waaaay a product of culture as of chemistry greets me warmly and toooo muuuuch. instantly cools a degree (or seven) when I tell her I am a reporter So that’s one thing. But there is a whole lot more on the regu- and ask whether I can speak to the owner. She does that Japanese- latory front. Not a Colorado resident? Can’t work in a dispensary. style thing where she makes it clear that that is not going to hap- Got convictions? Can’t work in a dispensary. Got unpaid child pen without actually saying “That is not going to happen.” She support? Can’t work in a dispensary. Got bad credit? If your takes my number in a display of pro forma cooperativeness. financial situation is bad enough that the Man thinks that you “Did you want to buy some product while you’re here?” The might be tempted to, say, cut a side deal with some shady price is $17 a gram. I haven’t had marijuana in a long time that is Colombians, you can’t work in a dispensary. Sasha talks about nonetheless not as long a time as it really should be for a man my the “secret shopper” agents dispatched by the Marijuana En - age, and the thought of smoking a joint is vaguely repugnant. But forcement Division, who visit dispensaries unannounced and try the tinctures? The chocolates? The THC lollipops? Television is to trick the bud-tenders into breaking one of the myriad regula- not all you might hope it would be in the motels of rural tions under which they go about their blissed-out business. They Nebraska, and I didn’t sleep well last night, and there’s a moment will talk about transporting marijuana across state lines, at which of . . . but, no. point bud-tenders are expected to give them a stern-faced warn- “Okay! Well, thanks for coming in!” ing that this is a state and federal no-no. The thing about the marijuana business: It’s business. There are rules to the high life, damn it.

HERE’S that one in, uh, that’s right there at Nebraska, HERE is, in fact, a whole complicated techno-logistical that everybody’s mad at.” Sasha Saghbazarian, a machine at work keeping track of every bud and brownie: “bud-tender” (which is what they call a salesman) at Shipments of marijuana products are RFID-tagged, ‘TPure Medical Dispensary in Denver, is very helpful and a great Tsales are tracked by weight (in the case of actual marijuana) or deal more put together than you might think on first impression, units (in the case of capsules, pills, edibles, etc.), and a govern- given that she has the spacey affect that is apparently universal in ment database (sorry to harsh your buzz with that terrifying her profession. I ask her whether she means the one in Sedgwick, phrase, dude) called “METRC”—pronounced “metric,” the and she communicates the affirmative. Marijuana Enforcement, Tracking, Reporting, and Compliance Pure Medical has an absolutely spectacular showroom, one system—developed by the supply-chain and logistics-technology part mad-scientist’s lair (my bud-tender is very excited to show company Franwell keeps track of every legal transaction in me the butane-free carbon dioxide–based thingamabob that they something close to real time. Sasha utters the name “METRC” use to extract marijuana essence from the plant itself, which with heavy respect; John Hudak of the Brookings Institution calls apparently is the best-practices way of doing it) and one part it “the backbone of Colorado’s regulatory structure govern ing high-end boulangerie, spotless display cases packed with many legalized marijuana.” Nothing’s perfect, of course. “There will varieties of old-fashioned smokeable marijuana—which turns always be a few nugs that fall on the floor,” Sasha says. “They’re out to be sort of passé as the offerings go—and a whole lot more looking for bulk.” in the way of edibles (store brand name: “INCR-EDIBLES”) and So how do people end up in Sheriff Hayward’s jurisdiction concentrates (the dabs and wax and so forth that the old-fashioned with pounds and pounds of Colorado weed that they are not sup- gray-bearded weed hounds warn will mess you up, boy) and an posed to have? “They know how to cheat the system, to grow

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extra,” the sheriff says. “In a way, it’s ten times worse than it was. The problem used to be one guy with 100 pounds of marijuana. Now it’s 100 guys with one pound of marijuana.” And what does Indefensible he think about Colorado’s vast regulatory structure? “Nobody’s following the rules over there.” Regulation is hard work. As Sheriff Hayward points out, his state has 247 different laws to enforce when it comes to alcohol. Defense “In Prohibition, there was just one law: It’s illegal.” And that is how he’d prefer to see marijuana treated. And so would the We have sacrificed military powers-that-be in his state, along with their counterparts in preparedness and strength Oklahoma, who are suing Colorado on the grounds that its mari - juana laws are unconstitutional (the theory being that those laws are a state attempt to preempt federal drug laws) and that BY MARK HELPRIN Colorado’s liberalization has imposed heavy costs on other states. Beyond the instinctive “mind your own damned busi- ness” defense, Colorado points to its colonoscopic regulatory ONTINUAL warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear machinery as evidence of its good faith and political responsi- Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging bility. But if there is one thing that is predictable in matters reg- C patho gens, and terrorism involving weapons of ulatory, it is that the regulators will concentrate their efforts on mass destruction variously threaten the United the parties that are easiest to regulate, which in this case are the States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experi- dispensaries and their gaggles of earnest bud-tenders, who seem enced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena very, very happy to be marijuana professionals. Cartel infiltra- that bloom and fade, and that, with redir ection and augmenta- tors up the supply chain? That’s a different matter. The dispen- tion of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given sary operators have an incentive to keep a lid on criminal hijinks the wit and will to do so. for the same reason that big corporate strip-club operators work But underlying the surface chaos that dominates the news diligently to keep prostitution out of their businesses and that cycle are the currents that lead to world war. In governance by Las Vegas is the American city in which you will be most rigor- tweet, these are insufficiently addressed for being insuffi- ously prosecuted for organizing an illegal poker game: The legit ciently immediate. And yet, more than anything else, how we business pays so much that crime has little attraction to them— approach the strength of the American military, the nuclear in fact, it represents unwanted competition. calculus, China, and Russia will determine the security, pros- The Colorado marijuana business is in its 1963 Las Vegas– perity, honor, and at long range even the sovereignty and exis- casino period: The vice itself has been legalized, the Chamber of tence of this country. Commerce is deploying in force, and the organized-crime tough guys are about to find out what ruthlessness, iron will, and intense singularity of purpose really mean as the publicly traded THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR multinational corporations take over their rackets and hand them their heads. You think you’re a gangster? Try picking a fight PON our will to provide for defense, all else rests. with Walt Disney. It isn’t pretty, but in the end you’d rather be Without it, even the most brilliant innovations and dealing with the Marijuana Enforcement Division and some trenchant strategies will not suffice. In one form or mutant variation of Monsanto or Johnson & Johnson than with Uanother, the American way of war and of the deterrence of war the wild boys from Culiacán or Beltrán-Leyva Inc. has always been reliance on surplus. Even as we barely sur- That is the economic theory behind marijuana legalization. vived the winter of Valley Forge, we enjoyed immense and But how to resolve the realities, which are that Colorado wants forgiving strategic depth, the 3,000-mile barrier of the legal weed while Nebraska and Oklahoma do not, and that the Atlantic, and the great forests that would later give birth to the presence of black markets in prohibition states ensures the pres- Navy. In the Civil War, the North’s burgeoning industrial and ence of black markets and gray markets in legalization states? demographic powers meshed with the infancy of America’s The prohibition states are asking for federal action, but if there technological ascendance to presage superiority in mass indus- is anything we’ve learned from our endless and endlessly stupid trial—and then scientific—20th-century warfare. The way we war on drugs, it is that federal action generally makes things fight is that we do not stint. Subtract the monumental prepara- worse. While one can sympathize with the desire of people in the tions, cripple the defense industrial base, and we will fail to prohibition states to keep drugs out of their communities, it is deter wars that we will then go on to lose. more difficult to sympathize with their desire to avoid paying the Properly subservient, the military implements the postulate freight for their decisions—especially when their prohibition of current civil authority that we cannot afford the defense we imposes costs on legalization states just as legalization states need. This view, however, a commonplace of public opinion, impose costs on them. Weed-whacking is an expensive busi- is demonstrably false, and insensible of a number of things, not ness. In the long run, legal marijuana will probably proceed the least the golden relation of economic growth and military power. way legal gambling and prostitution have: less crime, more- responsible business practices, and the slow, gentle normaliza- Mr. Helprin, author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, is a tion of what once was verboten. The Weed Man is fading—long senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, a defense consultant, and a veteran of mil- live the Chamber of Commerce. itary service in the Middle East.

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China, Japan as early as the Meiji, and Israel have con- apart, we can do better than half of the long-established sciously employed this golden relation to their advantage. In peacetime appropriations. sum, rapid and sustained economic growth increases the marginal income of families and individuals beyond what is needed to survive, so that what under less favorable condi- THE NUCLEAR CALCULUS tions would be a disproportionately high share of gross domestic product can be diverted to military purposes with- THER than restoring military outlays to historically out threatening social cohesion and political stability. In just responsible levels, the starkest and most neglected a few decades, the Meiji went from silks and swords to their challenge to American national security is that of the modern battle fleet’s victory over Russia. Israel enjoyed the nuclearO calculus. Rogue, slightly pre-nuclear states such as world’s fastest economic growth prior to the Six Day War of Iran are a far more volatile and immediate concern, but, given 1967, the results of which are well known. And in only 30 sufficient resolve, they can and should be suppressed by force. years, China has become a military superpower. But established nuclear powers are a different matter, which a The way this works can best be understood in the Chinese single example illustrates. example, which is now most pertinent. In 1988, China’s per During the Cold War, the possibility existed of a tripartite capita GDP was $256, and its purchasing-power parity arms competition. The Soviet Union was arming not only (PPP) military expenditure $5.78 billion. After average against the United States but against China. Thus, although it annual economic growth of 8.95 percent from 1988 to 2007, might achieve equilibrium with the U.S., the USSR would its per capita GDP was $2,539, nearly a tenfold rise, con- forge ahead with an eye to China, potentially stimulating the ducive to political stability, and its PPP military expenditure U.S. to address the resulting imbalance, which would in turn $122 billion, a 21-fold increase. This is the cardinal expla- stimulate the USSR, ad infinitum. nation of China’s rapidly advancing power. This is analogous to the three-body problem in physics, Given a short-term assessment of our economy, we might which, in regard to determining the disturbances of one of the find it intimidating, but it should not be. For whatever the bodies in relation to the principal body that are caused by the cycles of its economy, the United States has long possessed third, states that no general solution is possible. Although we and continues to possess the most potent combination the were alert to the inherent instability of a tripartite arms compe- world has ever known of major population, massive GDP, tition, it did not materialize. Again, analogously, note that in and high marginal income. We have chosen to depart from the three-body problem no general solution is possible. customary and easily sustainable levels of defense spending Particular solutions are possible, however, when the mass of not out of economic duress but only as a result of the ideo- one of the bodies (such as a spacecraft) is de minimis. Stability logical proclivities of most Democrats and growing factions in that case is preserved. And during the Cold War, China’s within the Republican coalition. What, then, has been the military power was sufficiently de minimis not to disturb the norm, and why, contrary to the common wisdom, is it sus- fundamental balance. tainable now? Now we do have a three-body problem, but though it is the From 1940 through 2000—through wars, recessions, panics, gravest threat to the United States since nuclear competition and expansions—average annual American defense expendi- with the Soviet Union, it is invisible to our leadership. To ture, as a proportion of GDP, was 8.5 percent—13.3 percent in understand it, keep in mind that the administration’s deep war and mobilization years, 9.4 percent under Democratic nuclear reductions are based on the false premise of sufficiency: administrations, 7.3 percent under Republican, and, in the that is, that X number of warheads will inflict enough damage peacetime years, 5.7 percent. By contrast, the defense base- to deter an adversary from nuclear war or brinkmanship. budget appropriation (excluding overseas contingency funding) But we don’t define sufficiency, the adversary does. The def- for 2015 is 2.994252873 percent (just less, as if someone some - inition of “su fficiency” depends on culture, doctrine, the be - where had set a limit, than 3 percent) of GDP. That is, roughly liefs and mental state of its decision makers, the stakes half the traditional outlays during peacetime. The resultant involved, concepts of survivability, historical experience, starvation leads not only to diminished immediate resources stress, chance, the tendency to gamble, etc.—and these are but to the slow erosion of the defense industrial base, which is variables whose value in any particular case we cannot always so complex and would take so long to rebuild that, if it were know. Furthermore, in a monumental dereliction of duty, we lost, it could be lost forever. have attempted to define sufficiency only in regard to Russia, Military expenditure need not wait on exceptionally high as if China, the third body, does not even exist. growth. Nor will it break the fisc. In 1931–40, average But it certainly does, with a nuclear-weapons infrastructure GDP was $77.5 billion, and average unemployment 19 per- housed and in part deployed in 3,000 miles of tunnels opaque cent. By 1944, GDP had risen 271 percent to $219 billion; to American intelligence. China can manufacture as many unemployment was down to 1.2 percent, and real dispos- warheads and delivery vehicles as it wishes, all sheltered out able income had doubled—despite the fact that by 1945 of sight. military expenditure was 40 percent of GDP and 86 percent At present, we deploy 1,585 warheads on (by 2018) 700 of the federal budget. The material resources of the average delivery vehicles. Counter-force (i.e., weapons and delivery family were a fraction of what they are now, and therefore systems) as opposed to counter-value (cities, population, the amount of national wealth devoted to public purposes industry) targets that an enemy would have to destroy to was that much more a burden. No one is advocating 40 per- cripple us are our four or five submarines at sea, two sub cent of GDP for defense, but certainly, as the world comes bases, three bomber bases, and 450 missile silos. We have no

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launch on warning, meaning that no American missile is CHINA AND CONVENTIONAL WAR guaranteed to escape an enemy first strike, and China pos- sesses 65 attack submarines that could be assigned to track, orth KoreA is both a “fleet in being” (a military force trap, and kill our four to five “boomers” (ballistic-missile with which one has to reckon even if it lies dormant) submarines) at sea. for use by China against the U.S., and itself an Were China to hold 6,000 warheads in its tunnels (we once Nintractable problem to which the only and incomplete answer had more than 30,000, so this is not a stretch), and were two- is to strengthen conventional forces on the Korean Peninsula thirds to reach their targets, it could put four warheads on and put in place a North American ballistic-missile defense each target and still have 2,000 left for a second strike, on many times stronger than currently envisioned. China is a counter-value targets. that would negate the threat of even weightier though less volatile challenge, but at least it is sane. our counter-value retaliation (counter-force retaliation being the new Middle Kingdom will attempt to lock Japan, South impossible, given the numerical imbalance and that many of Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australasia into its orbit. In a China’s missiles are road- and rail-mobile)—especially in transaction-rich, highly interdependent world, unchallenged view of sufficiency calculations based on the very different domination of Asia might lead to an international system in population and infrastructure concentrations of China and the which China was the single pole. United States. We are in the early stages of this now, as China spreads its the U.S. is 81 percent urban and suburban; China, 53 per- influence globally and aggressively lays claims to territories cent. to use per capita GDP as a measure of economic com- and seas on its periphery. that this is so is attributable both to plexity: the U.S. is at $53,350, China at $6,600. In other China’s rise and to America’s retreat. though the military Unconvinced of American exceptionalism and the legitimacy of America’s interests in the world, the president is overbearing at home and weak abroad.

words, because China can inflict more damage per warhead capacity, naval and otherwise, of the Pacific “core”—the U.S., on the U.S. than the U.S. can inflict upon China, the Japan, and Australia, with Vietnam in aid (South Korea is neu- counter-value threat that China poses to the U.S. is ampli- tralized by the North)—is at the moment superior to China’s, fied beyond any potential advantages or disadvantages in the steady trends of the previous two and a half decades point numbers of warheads. to parity in the near future and Chinese superiority thereafter. What would or could an American president do if such a even now, the tyranny of distance gives an offsetting advan- scenario came to pass? or if, what is more likely, the adver- tage to China in its own neighborhood. sary during a confrontation or limited war revealed its hidden Unconvinced of American exceptionalism and the legitimacy assets and resorted to brinkmanship? the answer is that the of America’s interests in the world, the president is overbear- president would and could do nothing but surrender. the ing at home and weak abroad. he rushes to appease countries United States would be pushed back, most of our threatened far weaker than China is now or will be. one can only hope allies would of necessity follow the stronger horse, and the that when we are faced with real, threatening power, the weak world would undergo an immense transformation. We would force within the American polity will not produce the kind of find ourselves in a position we have not experienced in the more quislings that the Left usually condemns as servants of imperi- than 100 years since the United States became an inviolable alism. It need not be so. great power. to wit—and it is important to note that the ability to win What then is the solution, given that a buildup of nuclear wars is more than equally the ability to deter and obviate arms or even of a ballistic-missile defense is at present politi- them—in any U.S.–Chinese conflict other than the catastrophic cally impossible? First, we need a public clarification of the situation outlined above, the nuclear calculus would render the danger, which is not likely from an administration that appears homelands of both parties (though not our overseas bases) out to be proudly oblivious of both history and defense. (those of bounds. Action would most probably be confined to the sea who state that they can fundamentally remake whole countries and the air, with the possibility of island-based war as in World believe so only because they are practiced in ignoring reality.) War II. In patiently accumulating small but outrageous con- Second, from the next president, a strong and urgent initiative quests of reefs, rocks, and imaginary zones of air defense, to include China in a nuclear-arms-control regime with real, China’s methodology is more carefully incremental than non-Iranian-style verification. that should be acceptable Putin’s. But given its culture and character, China is more across the American political spectrum, and flattering to prone to prideful, explosive outbursts that could quickly lead China, which enjoys flattery. Were China to refuse, we could to a war at sea. immediately begin a modulated buildup, offensive and defen- And to China the most appealing prize is the South China sive, which might elicit a more constructive response. If not, Sea, to which its claim would be analogous to the United we’ve been there before, in the 45 years of cold war. one way States’ claiming the Caribbean all the way to the north rim of or another, i t is urgent that we take into account the lack of South America. historically significant to China, the South Chinese nuclear transparency. China Sea is a commercial artery of the first importance, a

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promising source of offshore oil, and the naval arena contigu- Though there are drawbacks to fighting at great remove, the ous to China that is most remote from the U.S. and its Pacific nature of potential conflict in the Western Pacific favors the bases, and accessible only through a series of defensible U.S., for, rather than continental warfare, the sea and the air choke points. have long been our forte. And the ability to maneuver and If China continues incremental seizures unchecked—and quickly shift fronts on and under the sea and in the air can turn the more it has seized, the more it has seen that we do not react— our challenge of worldwide multiple fronts into a more limited it will have achieved its flatly declared, Obama-invisible objec- but still vexing and unfamiliar problem for an opponent. tive without contradiction. If American resistance is in the In nuclear, conventional, and economic potential, China is offing, when China deems its rapidly developing naval technol- our rival and—if we continue to neglect the balances that keep ogy sufficiently mature, it can, given its 100 major shipyards, the peace—our enemy. China must be convinced simultane- surge production of naval vessels, as we did in the Second ously of our pacific intentions and our massive military power. World War, whereas, given that we have only six major ship- At present, it is impressed only by the former. yards, we cannot. Forty percent of the U.S. Navy, now less than half the size it was at the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, is due to RUSSIA remain in the Atlantic after the under-resourced pivot to the Pacific. By spiking the Panama Canal (both ends of which HINKING with breathtaking naïveté that history had are under Chinese management) and stationing its five ended and Europe had seen the end of war, NATO let nuclear-powered attack submarines as a blocking force at slip the very capacity of deterrence that had made the southern capes of Africa and South America, China Tpossible the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union In nuclear, conventional, and economic potential, China is our rival and—if we continue to neglect the balances that keep the peace—our enemy.

could virtually cut the U.S. Navy in half at the outset of itself. Those who stayed sober predicted even in the early hostilities. With its 60 other, non-nuclear, attack sub- Nineties the apparatchik-led Russian revanche that we now marines, it could stand guard below the surface at the South see. A little less peace dividend and a little more probity China Sea choke points and also attempt to sever our sea might have landed us in a different place, but now Russia lines of communication in the western Pacific, especially invades independent states and, with a resource-dependent, as we have allowed our capacity for anti-submarine war- unstable economy, recklessly falls back upon its increasingly fare to degenerate. modernized nuclear arsenal as the chief instrument of its for- American naval forces that made it into the South China eign relations. Sea would then have to contend with anti-ship ballistic mis- With a nuclear umbrella to shield his incremental aggres- siles, swarms of missile and small attack craft, China’s major sions, Putin delights in concentration of force, speed, and con- surface combatants, and a thousand land-based aircraft. trol of the center (which, in military strategy as in chess, by Improperly hardened and distant American island air bases relegating an opponent to the periphery divides his formations and “lily pad” temporary staging points (if offered by cowed and deprives them of synergy). Whereas he is aware that the allies) would suffer attack by bombers and a barrage of NATO order of battle is superior to his own—roughly (num- China’s intermediate-range missiles. To seal the result, China bers and definitions change day by day), in regular manpower, might bribe and encourage North Korea to embark upon an by a ratio of 2.66 to 1; in combat aircraft, 3.05 to 1; in ICBMs invasion of, or at least an incursion into, the South, thereby and SLBMs, 1.71 to 1; in attack submarines, 1.8 to 1; and in splitting into two fronts American forces already made woe- principal surface combatants, 5.38 to 1—he knows as well fully inadequate by geography, neglect, and lack of strategic that NATO is divided, atomized, and politically and militarily vision. In the absence of credible opposing force, the very fea- devolving. He sees how much it has been taxed as it has sibility of such a scenario is unfortunately the chief reason fought out of area, that its principal military power lies China might pursue it. beyond the Atlantic, and that its populations are weakened, But there is a remedy. As stated before, the Pacific “core” demoralized, and led by technocrats and academics whose order of battle is superior to China’s. To deter or, in the worst mother’s milk is appeasement. case, battle China, we must rebuild our naval and air forces far All he need do is look at the Arab–Israeli wars to understand beyond their current levels, and construct new, properly hard- that, despite an unfavorable balance of forces, coherence and ened bases as well as hardening those already in existence. daring can overcome incoherence, division, and hesitation. He That means securing them not in the Hurricane Katrina style has knocked the West off balance, forcing it to counter Russia’s of preparing for a category-5 event by installing category-3 conventional military operations and nuclear saber-rattling (or, defenses, but by making provision for defenses of category 6 at its current intensity, saber-jiggling) with powerful but still or 7. All such measures should be calibrated to match or only economic and banking sanctions. The danger is that with- exceed the rate of growth in China’s military. out th e ability to wield correspondingly soft powers, Russia

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will increase its reliance on hard powers. Western sanctions may bring Russia to terms, or force it to desperate measures. This is an unstable dynamic directly attributable to the inex- Deadly plicable absence in the diplomatic equation of the West’s mili- tary potential—the very instrument that, without firing a shot in Europe, won the Cold War. Environmentalism Collectively, the NATO economies weigh in at roughly $30 trillion per annum, to Russia’s $2 trillion and fading. The most For an Alaska town, the price of a wildlife powerful counter to Russia’s use of its military (of which dis- refuge is paid in human lives plays in Georgia, the Crimea, and eastern Ukraine are but the experimental tendrils) is to challenge it to an arms competition, implicitly asking, in the best American idiom, “Remember last BY IAN TUTTLE time? How’s that workin’ out for you?” Quite simply, as has been proven by experience, if Russia pushes west and with HE 950 residents of King Cove, Alaska, have been try- military means threatens the international order, the vastly ing to build an emergency road to nearby Cold Bay. superior economic power of the Atlantic Alliance cannot con- T They have been trying to build the road for 40 years. tent itself with economic measures alone. King Cove is near the western tip of the Alaskan Though they may lessen as dangers increase, the centrifugal- Peninsula; a few miles west begin the Aleutian Islands. King ity and political disarray in NATO will not disappear. But even Cove has a school and two churches and a Chinese restaurant, without full-blown augmentation of its forces, NATO’s mili- and its economy is buttressed by the presence of PeterPan tary posture can be adjusted to address problems of coordina- Seafoods, one of the largest commercial fishing operations in tion, division, and the softness of its strategic center. North America, whose seasonal employees constitute about one- With the U.S. as the traditional main pillar, NATO should third of the local population. But like most towns in the Alaskan reinforce and integrate its core (the U.S., the U.K., France, bush, it has only a small clinic and no full-time physician. For Germany, and Italy), moving major echelons to France and everything from minor surgeries to delivering a baby, residents Germany, and then shifting them east or west, like a ship’s sta- must venture to a proper hospital—625 miles away, in Anchorage. bilizer, according to variations in Russian pressure, with con- Rarely can that be done direct from King Cove. The town’s tinual rotations to the periphery, in strengths and numbers 3,500-foot gravel airstrip, built in 1970 in the Delta Creek Valley calibrated according to the same standard. Maximum effec- north of town, cannot accommodate large aircraft, and the single- tiveness would depend upon the long-overdue rejuvenation of and twin-engine aircraft that use it are particularly vulnerable to Western militaries, matching at least the rate of increase in King Cove’s weather and geography—which are, to put it lightly, Russian military allocations. If not, Russia, like China, will forbidding. The airstrip is situated between two volcanic peaks, conclude that it can escape counter-pressure and deterrence which funnel into the valley winds that regularly reach 70 mph. simply via more-rapid military growth and the attendant And while clear, calm days do visit King Cove, bad weather— change in the correlation of forces. This is the principle by thick fog, lashing rain, driving snow—is Mother Nature’s curse which Russia and China are operating now. If it is not opposed, on King Cove a third of the year, sometimes more. they will succeed. So getting to Anchorage requires first getting to next-door Cold Bay, a hamlet of 100 people, mainly transient state and federal employees, that happens to be home to a 10,000-foot, VERYTHING thus far recommended arises from current all-weather airstrip capable of handling the long-distance flight patterns and trends that seem likely to continue. But to the state’s largest city. (Why tiny Cold Bay has such an out- because all projection is imperfect, note that of the sized role in King Cove’s story is something of a historical acci- Emeasures described above the most important is to have a sur- dent: Cold Bay Airport was built in World War II, when this plus of means and equipment—a rich variety, redundancy, and distant patch of the Alaska Territory became a strategic outpost reserve of systems that in peacetime might be judged duplica- against a possible Japanese invasion. The site chosen, Army engi- tive and unneeded but that in the face of the unexpected can neers agreed then, and locals agree now, was the only one in the be braided into the new instruments and new strategies neces- area suitable for an airstrip of such size.) sary for victory and survival. The problem is getting to Cold Bay. In clear weather, that can And everything thus far recommended may be beyond the be done with an air taxi from King Cove’s airstrip. But when the mental horizons of the bureaucrats, academics, and un - weather is foul, making the trip to Cold Bay requires a boat (and lettered politicians who have made American foreign and calm seas) or a medevac helicopter (often supplied by the Coast defense policy a shambles and a wreck. But look where they Guard)—and, potentially, more time than a patient has. have brought us. And consider that, if carefully prepared, the To solve this problem, King Cove residents have sought to kind of approach presented here would not have been shock- build a one-lane, gravel road from King Cove to Cold Bay, across ing at all to Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, the two-mile-wide isthmus that links the towns. Nineteen miles Truman, Eisen hower, or even George H. W. Bush, all of of the 30-mile road already exist. But eleven miles remain—and whom knew how to fight a war and how not to. And in know- they traverse the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. ing war and preparing for it, the greatest achievement is in This is one infrastructure project in which the Obama adminis- deterring and obviating it. Statesmen used to understand this. tration has not the slightest interest. In August 2013, with King It is time they do so again. Cove’s decades-long effort seemingly about to come to fruition—

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a bill having passed Congress, the president having signed it— But the Coasties are not responsible for the residents of King Sally Jewell, secretary of the Department of the Interior, flew to Cove. From its air station on Kodiak Island, 250 miles south- King Cove and, to people who told her of loved ones waiting west of Anchorage, the closest Coast Guard unit—the largest in desperately for a rescue helicopter, and of friends perishing in the Pacific—is responsible for monitoring the safety of thou- plane crashes in the cloud-swathed mountains, announced: “I’ve sands of commercial fishing boats, freighters, cruise ships, and listened to your stories. Now I have to listen to the animals.” other vessels that chug about the Bering Sea, Bristol Bay, the The animals had the last word. “Building a road through the Gulf of Alaska, and Alaska’s Pacific coastline, an aerial search Refuge would cause irreversible damage not only to the Refuge range of 4 million square miles. Says Gary Hennigh, King Cove itself, but to the wildlife that depend on it,” Jewell said in a city administrator: “When you’ve got a sick person in a com- December 2013 statement, citing a four-year environmental- munity, the Coast Guard can be 400, 500 miles away. We’re impact assessment conducted by her department. “Izembek is an very fortunate and thankful that they do make those stops, but extraordinary place—internationally recognized as vital to a rich that’s not their job.” Consider the danger that threatened thou- diversity of species—and we owe it to future generations to think sands of unwitting sailors and fishermen on March 11, 2014, about long-term solutions that do not insert a road through the when the Coast Guard medevaced—in separate trips—King middle of this Refuge and designated wilderness.” Cove fisherman Walter Wilson Jr., after a 600-pound cod pot The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a 315,000-acre pre- fell on him, dislocating both of his hips and fracturing his serve established in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands pelvis, and his infant son, Wyatt, who was suffering breathing Conservation Act—without consulting the native peoples, King difficulties. And keep in mind: The Coast Guard does this—or Cove residents note—is, indeed, home to a rich array of tries to—for every underserved town. wildlife, notably of the winged variety: 155,000 Pacific black In rejecting King Cove’s proposed road, Secretary Jewell brant (almost the entire global population) visit each fall, as failed to address the risk posed not only to King Cove residents well as emperor geese (6,000) and Steller’s eiders (23,000), to but also to medevac personnel and Coast Guard servicemen— indulge in the eelgrass beds in the lagoons adjacent to the and, by implication, to every sailor and fisherman for whom they Refuge. It is for such species’ sakes that 300,000 of Izembek’s are responsible. Instead, she touted potential alternatives to the acres are “designated wilderness,” the highest level of protec- road, such as the hovercraft that conveyed residents of King Cove tion afforded to federal lands. to Cold Bay from 2007 to 2010. She did not mention, of course, Yet there is something ironic about the federal government’s that that hovercraft not only proved too costly for locals to oper- accusing Alaskan natives of treating local wildlife frivolously. ate (it lost $1 million a year) but also could not operate in waves The majority of King Cove residents are members of the Aleut higher than six feet or winds stronger than 30 mph—in other peoples who have subsisted along this frontier for four millennia. words, about 30 percent of the time it was needed. Additionally, They know how to coexist with the local fauna. And more to the every alternative to a road was dismissed in 2003—in a previous point: The most endangered species in the area is not the eider. Interior Department environmental-impact study.

N 1970, when King Cove built its airstrip, locals knew that UT it is not just the Obama administration that has wind and weather would present a challenge to pilots. In favored this life-threatening status quo. Delegations of 1980, their worst fears were realized. A local fisherman had King Cove residents have been traveling to the nation’s Ihis foot severed when a crab pot fell on him; the local nurse feared Bcapital, at no small cost, since the 1980s, when Senators Ted he would bleed out if he did not get to Anchorage. The fisherman Stevens and Frank Murkowski were championing King Cove’s was hauled aboard a plane, joined by the nurse—the only one in cause in the Senate (their Senate champion now is Frank’s town—and her assistant. A blizzard had blown in. The plane daughter, Lisa). Five presidential administrations have heard crashed before reaching Cold Bay, killing everyone aboard. their petitions. In 2007 the King Cove delegation met with all In July of the following year, bad weather hid King Cove’s 535 congressional offices. Etta Kuzakin, president of King airstrip from an approaching charter pilot. He and his five passen- Cove’s Agdaagux tribe, led the group to D.C. in May. gers were killed when their plane crashed in the mountains nearby. The history of the King Cove road campaign is a depressing Since 1980, 19 deaths—in plane crashes, or waiting for a res- affair, a too-long chronicle of lousy deals in Congress, broken cue vehicle that did not arrive in time—have been attributed to (if well-meaning) promises in Alaska, and that notorious in - the lack of a safe, speedy route between King Cove and Cold Bay. strument of bureaucratic delay, the study, whether the pro-road And the number could be much higher: Since Secretary Department of Transportation reconnaissance study in the early Jewell delivered her fiat, King Cove has required 24 medevac 1990s, the pro-road 2003 study, or the most recent, anti-road rescues, seven of which were performed by the Coast Guard. study upon which Jewell claims her decision is based (and What difference would the road make? In April 2013, Etta which Hennigh says is blatantly, demonstrably biased). But it is, Kuzakin went into labor early. She went to King Cove’s clinic at at root, a story of the institutionalization of environmental 8 A.M. The Coast Guard finally arrived—six hours later. King fanaticism, and of government betraying its purpose. Cove residents estimate the road would cut the average bad- Nothing demonstrates this better than the land-swap tactic by weather travel time—12 to 15 hours from King Cove to Anchor - which King Cove has tried to negotiate a solution. The first land age, including time spent waiting for a medevac—by two-thirds. swap, proposed by King Cove, was written up as the King Cove “I was lucky,” says Kuzakin. “The Coast Guard was in the Health and Safety Act of 1998. It directed the Department of the area. That is really what it was. They were in the area.” She says Interior to agree to trade the 206 acres in the Izembek Refuge she owes the life of her daughter, Sunnie Rae, to the Coast Guard. necessary to build the road for 650 acres of land adjacent to the

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Crash landing on the King Cove, Alaska, airstrip, 2010

kinzarof lagoon (which borders the Refuge) controlled by the designated wilderness. But Sally Jewell, given final authority to king Cove Corporation. (The king Cove Corporation is one of determine whether the land exchange (and so the proposed more than 200 Alaska Native Village Corporations created by, road) was “in the public interest,” was unmoved. The Obama and responsible for administering the provisions of, the Alaska administration (like the Clinton administration before it) has no Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which sought to resolve plan to be the administration that set that precedent. longstanding conflicts over land titles between the federal gov- Yet neither the administration nor environmentalists will admit ernment and Alaska’s native peoples.) The bill required that the that the precedent, in effect if not in statute, already exists—and road be built with minimal impact on wildlife, and that during in the disputed territory itself. The Izembek National Wildlife seasons of high bird concentrations it be restricted to emergency Refuge, including its wilderness areas, is already crisscrossed by use. king Cove agreed, and the bill passed the Senate easily. But 50 miles of roads, left over from the days of rattling Army trucks then–interior secretary Bruce Babbitt announced that he would (which, rest assured, took no great precautions on behalf of the press Bill Clinton to veto the bill. In June 1998, Babbitt pub- eelgrass). Rather than relinquish those roads to the vicissitudes of lished an op-ed in the New York Times—“Road to Ruin”—in nature, the federal government has chosen to maintain them—not which he accused Murkowski and Alaska congressman Don to save the lives of local residents, but to serve the large popula- Young of secretly working on behalf of Alaskan oil interests. tions of hunters who fly to the Refuge yearly to shoot game or The bill was never taken up in the House. waterfowl. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service advertises When Frank Murkowski traded his Senate seat for Alaska’s Izembek’s “world-famous” hunting opportunities on its website; governor’s mansion in 2002, he renewed the idea of a land- the eager sportsman can pursue moose, brown bear, and several exchange bill. In a 2005 meeting with Bush-administration species of duck. You know what else you can hunt in Izembek? interior secretary Gale Norton, Murkowski proposed 4,400 The Pacific black brant. acres (of state-owned land this time) for those same 206 acres in the Izembek Refuge. The next year, when Norton resigned, Murkowski increased the offer nearly tenfold to entice her lASkA, by dint of distance, has always harbored a tem- replacement, Dirk kempthorne: 41,500 acres of state land. peramental antipathy toward the powers-that-be in In late 2006, community leaders from king Cove held extended Washington. Alaskans have been frequently unwilling talks with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall. toA trust that a far-off government is able to recognize, and pur- (Fish and Wildlife is part of the Department of the Interior.) For sue, their best interests. Alaska’s native peoples, who hunted the Hall, 41,500 acres was still insufficient. The final agreement, land long before America’s legal apparatus was erected upon it hammered out over the next several months, would include not but who have nonetheless been cut out of many land-designation just the state’s sizable gift but king Cove Corporation’s origi- decisions, have been even more distrustful. In its dealings with nal 650-acre offer—sweetened by an additional 12,500-plus king Cove, the federal government has validated that skepti- Corporation-controlled acres. Three-quarters of the total would cism. Whether under a Republican or a Democratic administra- become new, federally designated “wilderness” in Izembek. It tion, the federal government has prioritized the preservation of was hardly a fair exchange, says Hennigh. “But residents said, ‘If wilderness over the protection of its citizens. And when the very this is what it’s going to take. Because this is about our lives.’ people in danger sought help, the federal government used the Sometimes the world’s not as fair a place as you might think.” opportunity to wring concessions from them. The terms of the exchange were formalized in the Omnibus “The transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God,” James Public land Management Act of 2009. Madison wrote in Federalist 43, “declares that the safety and The wildly disproportionate agreement—in terms of raw happiness of society are the objects at which all political institu- acreage, the federal government would add to Izembek more tions aim.” But in king Cove, Alaska, where federal authorities than 200 times what it relinquished—was intended by the peo- have put wildlife ahead of human life, neither safety nor peace ple of king Cove to be a show of good faith, a demonstration of mind is to be found. “You pray every day,” says kuzakin, that they understood the gravity of what they were asking for: “that nobody has a life-threatening injury.” DELLA TRUMBLE the first congressionally approved road through a federally In king Cove, when the clouds gather, so does fear.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

(Grand Cayman)–affiliated financial President Sanders is on the LEFT of institutions. the photograph. 0920: Secretary of State the Rever - 1505: President Sanders and end Al Sharpton arrives in the Rose Attorney General Eric Holder meet Garden for the signing ceremony. with legal representatives of former 1000: President Sanders prepares for secretary of state Hillary Rodham lunch by taking Lactaid™. Clinton to discuss a possible presi- POOL REPORT 1040: Informal Lunch with Presi - dential pardon for her conviction for WHITE HOUSE dent Sanders, Vice President Warren, accounting fraud, fundraising illegal- PRESS CORPS and the newly appointed chairman of ities, influence peddling, racketeer- MARCH 22, 2017 the Joint Chiefs, Mr. Edward Snow- ing, tax evasion, evidence tampering, den. The three discussed ways in and violations of the Trading with the 0430: President Sanders wakes and which the national-security and mili- Enemy Act. President Sanders gives wanders around the residence in his tary apparatus of the United States no indication of his thinking on this underwear asking why young people can be “Canadianized.” Press avail- matter. Statement to follow. are so rude these days. He is guided ability later this week. 1545: President Sanders changes his back to his bedroom by White House 1200: President Sanders meets with sandals. Still photos available. domestic staff. members of his cabinet, including 1600: President Sanders prepares 0545: President Sanders receives White House chief of staff Rachel for dinner by taking Lactaid™. his first briefing of the day. He is in- Maddow, to review key milestones in 1630: Formal State Dinner. Ben & formed about who is taking him to his the “100 Days” agenda. General sense Jerry’s “Karamel Sutra” is served. doctor’s appointment later this week, among all members of the administra- Guests include various general man- when tomato soup will return to the tion that the key items have been agers of public television stations across White House Mess lunchtime menu, accomplished or are well on their way. the country. A toast is made by the the person’s name from that show that Marginal tax rates are being readjusted guest of honor, U.N. secretary general was on that one time, and if anyone to 65–90 percent in FY2018, the U.S. the Honorable Daniel Ortega. Several else is itchy. military is being reorganized under the guests need to be helped up from their 0830: National Security Briefing. Coast Guard, and single-payer health beanbag cushions during the final President receives the daily security care is currently on track to becoming sing-along. Pool reporter has audio. update. no-payer health care. The cabinet 1710: Secretary of State the 0831: Daily Speaking Bitterness celebrates with a song and a short Rever end Al Sharpton arrives at the Session. President Sanders sits impas- period of silent reflection. State Dinner. sively as members of his cabinet de - 1223: Secretary of State the 1840: President Sanders thanks his nounce him for his reactionary and Reverend Al Sharpton arrives for the dinner guests and reminds them of the regressive politics since taking office. cabinet meeting. lateness of the hour. Some of the Latin The session is cut short by Secret 1405: President Sanders receives American guests are under the impres- Service personnel when Interior his midday briefing. He is informed sion that this is a witticism until the Secretary William Ayers begins drap- about who is taking him to his doc- president removes a Soft-Pick from ing a “Tool of the Over Class” sign tor’s appointment later this week, his pocket and begins cleaning his around the president and slapping him when tomato soup will return to the teeth and gums. The party breaks up about the face and neck. (Note: Pool White House Mess lunchtime menu, soon after. reporter not present.) the person’s name from that show 2045: President Sanders receives his 0900: President Sanders and Vice that was on that one time, and if any- final briefing of the day. He is in - President Elizabeth Warren sign the one else is itchy. formed about who is taking him to his Investment Banking Nationalization 1445: President Sanders sits in con- doctor’s appointment later this week, Act of 2017 in the Rose Garden, versation with the inanimate body of when tomato soup will return to the accompanied by the chairman of Fidel Castro. Pool reporter has no White House Mess lunchtime menu, Goldman Sachs and one of the archi- information on what was discussed, the person’s name from that show that tects of the act, Lloyd Blankfein. Mr. but both seemed to be absorbed in was on that one time, and if anyone Blankfein made remarks in strong quiet and thoughtful meditation. It was else is itchy. support of the act, which essentially the first such meeting between the 2055: President Sanders falls asleep. nationalizes all American investment- Cuban leader and an American presi- 2059: President Sanders wakes, asks banking operations except for those dent on record. Photo attached. Please why there is so much noise outside. of the GS Holding Companies LLC credit pool photographer. PLEASE NOTE: 2103: President Sanders falls asleep.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Tax Tech

OU’VE heard the promise of nanotechnology: “PASSWORD” between 2 and 3 A.M. Provided it isn’t already Soon tiny machines will repair organs, fight dis- “PASSWORD,” of course. ease, swarm into enemy facilities to disable Maybe the worker can’t stream it, because his computer is Y electronic devices, or even build self-replicating running XP, an operating system so old its “calculator” app machines on Mars to prepare the way for colonists. Why, it’ll is an abacus. Don’t worry, they’ll run something less porous be possible to build a violin two molecules long, which can than a colander, but the project to replace the old computers be used to play a sad song for stories like one recently posted is “severely delayed.” This means the Exploratory Com - on CNN.com about how the IRS is too broke to do its job. mittee to Explore Tasking the Committee That Will Be We’re not talking about the job of sitting back with fingers Tasked with Exploring Options hasn’t finished putting laced over the stomach, snoring gently, while automatic together the Powerpoint on Key Objectives. More excuses: deposits flow into the accounts. No, it’s the job of keeping hackers out of their systems. Interlopers got over 100,000 Some at the IRS tell CNNMoney it’s not just a matter of bud- get versus priorities. It’s insanely difficult to create programs Americans’ tax files last month, and IRS defenders say it’s to stop fraudsters. Consider the current IRS pilot program to because they’re too broke to afford a front-door lock. give Americans special PINs. This six-digit passcode makes it harder for a fraudster to file in your name. . . . But many The IRS says it’s underfunded. Republicans in Congress people lose their PINs. If the program went nationwide, the IRS have slashed the IRS budget for five years straight—the would be inundated with millions of phone calls it can’t answer. same politicians who now criticize the IRS for not having better security. The agency has 10% less money and 13,300 Well, since people cannot be trusted to write down the fewer employees than it did in 2010—but it handles a bigger workload than ever. number and put it in a safe place, we need a nationwide call center (with unionized federal employees, naturally) that will Everyone in favor of the IRS’s handling a smaller work- give you the PIN if you can rattle off your Social Security load, raise your hand. Use the one you use to write checks to number and a special question about your first pet’s name. the IRS. As for those 13,000 fewer employees—the IRS still What? No, it wasn’t “Fido.” I’m sorry, you can’t pay taxes has 92,000 people on the payroll, which would seem to be this year. Try again in 2016. enough when your primary enterprise consists of depositing This story is an instructive lesson on the nature and effi- money people send to you. ciencies of the modern state: The one thing it requires is the constant nourishment of its citizens’ property, extracted Last year, the IRS spent $252 million on just the tech and com- through intervention in nearly every human and commercial puter side of Obamacare—but got no additional funding to pull off the task. interaction—and the bureaucrats still can’t get it right. No one wants a ruthlessly efficient IRS, with armies of grim Last year a lot of people’s premiums went up, and they got men in black suits and dark glasses who dispatch Taser no additional funding, either. drones when someone rounds up a charity contribution too generously. No one, however, wants what we have: an The IRS still uses Windows XP, which is dangerously out- arthritic, gouty colossus incapable of responding to alarms dated, exposed to hackers and no longer supported by and attacks, pleading poverty and overwork but finding the Microsoft. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has said it still uses some tech from the days of the Kennedy administration. employees and money to investigate people for the crime of Its 19-year-old fraud-catching software is antiquated and funding the Wrong Side in an election. ineffective. A project to replace it is severely delayed. Be assured they’ll replace today’s miserable old system with an ugly, confusing program called IRSNET or GOVPROG or The Kennedy administration? Is that why they got SOURCEWORKS, and it will require a week’s worth of training hacked? Someone mailed in a punch card with Frank in a dark room where everyone stares at the instructor with Sinatra’s Social Security number? As for the fraud-catching the blank expression of dead souls ferried across the Styx software, something from 1996 might be calibrated to scan while he drones on about the Multi-Input Task-Selector floppies for Y2K exploits, but things have gotten a bit more Option. It will have a thuddingly dull and incomprehensible sophisticated lately. Some Bulgarian miscreants could set up 57-page manual that goes straight into the drawer, unread. a honey-pot porn site whose name might appeal to naughty Gradually, workers will adapt to the deficiencies of the new IRS Web-surfers—say, an S&M site called “Interest and system as they would to a shortened femur. When it’s finally Penalties”—and while someone streams the video, caught up rolled out to every office, it will be the result of a purchase in the heady moment when the domineering lady really decision made ten years ago, obsolete at its birth, destined to depreciates that asset, a file gets uploaded that spreads rule for a decade. through the network and resets everyone’s password to And hacked on Day One. There’s only one place to store the information where it will never be seen by outsiders, but Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. Hillary’s not renting out space on her server.

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moral aspiration—vaguely wanting to be And, God help us, it is. He starts quot- The Pursuit good, vaguely wanting to serve some ing and analyzing the rabbi in long, larger purpose, while lacking a concrete intense passages. “Adam II lives by an moral vocabulary, a clear understanding inverse logic. It’s a moral logic, not an Of Virtue of how to live a rich inner life, or even a economic one. . . . Self-satisfied moral clear knowledge of how character is mediocrity. . . . You have to give to FLORENCE KING developed and depth is achieved.” receive. . . . You have to surrender to While he’s putting himself down, the something outside yourself to gain rest of the country is bingeing on self- strength within yourself. . . . Failure leads celebration. We live in the era of what he to the greatest success, which is humility calls the “Big Me.” The victory dance in and learning. . . . To fulfill yourself you the end zone, the commencement speak- have to forget yourself. . . . To find your- ers who tell graduates “You can succeed self you have to lose yourself.” Enough at anything you want to do,” the gradu- of this and the lights go dim and the read- ates who justify unrestrained behavior er hears the ticking of a big pocket watch. with “I gotta be me.” The culture as a Anybody who says you can’t be hypno- whole celebrates Big Me opinions and tized against your will is lying. You can. affiliations: Brooks has seen so many The rabbi and his two Adams stick message T-shirts, sympathy ribbons, around through the rest of Brooks’s vanity license plates, boastful bumper book, a collection of ten short biogra- The Road to Character, by David Brooks stickers, threatening protest signs, and phies of people—three women and (Random House, 320 pp., $28) narcissistic tweets that he finds himself seven men—who died with their char- longing for the days when modesty and acters on. My favorite is Frances Per - HE author of this book kicks reticence were such a given that type- kins, FDR’s secretary of labor and the off with the ostentatious writers had no exclamation points on first woman to hold a cabinet post. A claim that “I wrote it, to be their keyboards. graduate of Mount Holyoke who dab- honest, to save my own Character is what gets lost or ignored bled in the usual upper-middle-class Tsoul.” I merely read it, so I don’t know in times like these. Now all that matters good-deeding, she was changed forever how this repetitious, over-explained, are what he calls the “résumé virtues”: when she witnessed the 1911 fire at the quotation-stuffed cri de coeur affected People promote themselves by making Triangle Shirtwaist factory near her my soul, but I do know what plowing sure others are aware of the scholar- Washington Square home. Seeing the through it did to my corporeal self. ships, degrees, awards, and promotions girls jump to their deaths turned her According to my tombstone, “Now she they are accruing to rise to the top of into a serious social worker. She went to belongs to the pages.” their professional lives. Character, on work for Al Smith and specialized in David Brooks is a leading member of the other hand, gets noticed only when workers’ rights, but she did not become the punditry who writes a column for the our good deeds speak for themselves, a radical. On the contrary, she took on New York Times, teaches at Yale, has pub- i.e., after our death. Brooks calls these conservative colors for entirely practi- lished several successful books, and is a the “eulogy virtues” and serves up ten cal reasons. Working with rough, regular guest on public radio’s All figures from politics, religion, and the streetwise labor unionists, she discov- Things Considered and TV’s Meet the arts to answer that fascinating ques- ered that they did not trust attractive, Press. At first glance, his search for char- tion, “What will they say about me feminine women. The only women acter would seem to qualify as the think- when I’m gone?” they respected were their mothers, ing man’s midlife crisis, but Brooks This might have been a fairly good and so she made herself look like one, doesn’t see it this way, because he book if only Brooks had trusted himself taking care to be as frumpish as possi- doesn’t see himself as an authentic more. His résumé-virtues–eulogy-virtues ble. It worked. thinking man. “I was born with a natural construct is a clear and concise expres- She could almost be called the moth- disposition toward shallowness,” he sion of contemporary attitudes, but he er of the New Deal, being the influence confesses. “I’m paid to be a narcissistic shifts immediately to a backstop: an behind the minimum wage, unemploy- blowhard, to volley my opinions, to essay titled “The Lonely Man of Faith,” ment insurance, and “relief,” as welfare appear more confident about them than I by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. was first called, but when her own fam- really am. I have to work harder than Soloveitchik imagines two Adams ily members fell upon hard financial most people to avoid a life of smug super- in the Garden of Eden, Adam I the and medical times, she did not allow ficiality. . . . I have lived a life of vague mover and shaker, and Adam II the them to get on the rolls but paid their humble inquirer. The rabbi’s treatment expenses herself. Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, is, says Brooks, “the source of the The other good chapter is on A. Fredericksburg, VA 22404. methodology” for his own book. Philip Randolph, president of the

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Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and on and on, all the way down to whisper your name.” Naturally Brooks who led the campaign to force defense Harry Emerson Fosdick. quotes 26 lines of it, but neither this industries to hire blacks. Randolph’s Brooks’s greatest challenge is defin- overkill nor his Greek and Roman lifelong goal was not civil rights per se ing the stoic ideal that shapes the char- omnium-gatherum can equal the single but dignity. He strove for perfect En - acter of military men for whom love of familiar line “I could not love thee, glish, building his vocabulary until he country must come first, before any Dear, so much / Loved I not Honour regularly used words like “vouchsafe.” lesser loves. “The cost of his perfect more.” It makes the whole point, but His refusal to call anyone by his first self-denial and self-control was aloof- Brooks doesn’t quote it. name put some people off, but he ness,” he says of General George C. He does, however, quote President reminded them, “We will need [good Marshall, who could not get close even Dwight D. Eisenhower on his method manners] when this is over because we to himself: He opposed the widespread for handling tough questions at a news must show good manners after we have practice of military men of keeping a conference. “Don’t worry,” he told his won.” Above all, he rejected financial diary, because diaries offered a tempta- press chief, “I’ll confuse ’em.” Asked donations by sympathetic whites, say- tion to boast. about the trouble with Russia and ing, “This must be a victory that we Brooks’s search for the attitude of China over the Formosa Straits, he organize and win on our own.” Al warriors toward personal happiness is replied: “The only thing I know about Sharpton, take note. centered on the golden age of classical war are two things. The most change- These two chapters contain fewer quo- antiquity, and ranges from Plutarch to able factor in war is human nature in tations than the others, but much of the Edith Hamilton before settling on “the its day-by-day manifestation, but the rest of the book is virtually unreadable great-souled leader in the Periclean tra- only unchanging factor in war is owing to Brooks’s reluctance to rely on dition,” but this still doesn’t hit the human nature. And the next thing is himself. He seems compelled to quote mark. A better quotation is needed, and that every war is going to astonish you somebody every chance he gets: not just he finds one—one that is also found in in the way it occurred and in the way it pithy one-liners but passages of exposi- millions of American homes because it is carried out. . . . So I think you just tion. Some pages contain two or three was sold suitable for framing after it have to wait, and that is the kind of chunks. Just follow the signposts: was read aloud on Ken Burns’s Civil prayerful decision that may someday “Thomas Aquinas argued . . . Alfred War series: Captain Sullivan Ballou’s face a president.” North Whitehead suggests . . . As Søren last letter to his wife, Sarah, which It took me a second to realize that :: : :: :: : ::-9+,:; Kierkegaard noted . . . Thomas Merton closed with “When my last breath this was Ike. I thought I was still read- believes . . . G. K. Chesterton states . . .” escapes me on the battlefield it will ing Brooks. )*%,'#"(+, )&$+, ,!*+
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

pression, one of his schoolmates in Wright seems for the first time to have Wings of Dayton, Ohio, said, “of a man who lives encountered forms of beauty that were largely in a world of his own.” The the work of human hands. He saw at French aviation journalist François once how superior, in point of civic The Dove Peyrey, studying Wright as he gazed artistry, Paris was to American cities upon a French sunset, was reminded “of built up mechanically on the gridiron MICHAEL KNOX BERAN those monks in Asia Minor lost in plan. “There is always an open space as monasteries perched on inaccessible big as a city square in front of each mountain peaks.” building,” Wright said. “And in addition Like many such austere characters, there is nearly always a broad avenue Wilbur Wright had a passion for beauty, leading directly to it, giving it a view one that early fixed itself on the specta- from a long distance. It is this, as much cle of birds in flight. The 19th-century as the buildings and monuments them- naturalist James B ell Pettigrew said that selves, that makes Paris such a magnifi- the motions of a bird on the wing are cent city.” infinitely more “beautiful than the The Louvre was another revelation. If movements of either the quadruped on Wright was not transfigured by the land or the fish in the water.” Wilbur museum in the way Henry James was Wright, who read and profited from when, in the Galerie d’Apollon, he The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough Pettigrew’s work, would have agreed. crossed the “bridge over to Style,” it (Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $30)

Y first impression of this Wilbur Wright had a passion for book was unfavorable. Emerson said that writ- beauty, one that early fixed itself on ing ought to be an effort M“to drop every dead word,” and thought the spectacle of birds in flight. surprise the first principle of style. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Thoreau had gone to Harvard Col - nevertheless made its mark. “I must McCullough would perhaps beg to dif- lege; the young Wilbur intended to go confess,” he wrote to his sister, Kath - fer; he would seem to think that a writer to Yale, but was prevented from doing arine, “that the pictures by celebrated should never seek for originality where so by a hockey injury. A fortunate masters that impressed me most were the predictable and conventional, indeed escape; had he been liberally educated not the ones that are the best known.” the formulaic, will do. The virtue of in New Haven, the craftsmanship that He thought Leonardo’s John the McCullough’s writing is its ease and was to find expression in the first air- Baptist superior to the Mona Lisa, and readability; its vice is superficiality. plane might have been devoted instead he liked “the Rembrandts, Holbeins, Only once in his new book about the to the production of bad paintings or and Van Dycks, ‘as a whole,’ better Wright brothers did I come across a pen- mediocre verse. Solitude, it has been than the Rubenses, Titians, Raphaels, etrating image, a flash of insight, that said, is the school of genius, and in his and Murillos.” He was drawn especially illuminated the depths of his subject; but father’s house in Dayton, Wilbur edu- to Corot’s skies. as fate would have it, the insight in ques- cated himself, reading voraciously in In June 1908 he arrived in Le Mans, tion was sufficiently arresting to over- subjects that appealed to his fancy or, and in August, on a nearby racetrack, he come my skepticism and make me think more precisely, to some inner necessity conclusively demonstrated to the world the book after all worthwhile. of his nature. Among these subjects the efficacy of his flying machine. What gives The Wright Brothers its was physics, which he studied less as a McCullough does the moment full jus- interest is the character of its central fig- technical discipline than as the poetics tice, even as he shows that the awaken- ure, Wilbur Wright. Four years older of flight. ing that had begun in Paris continued in than the duller Orville, Wilbur had a The Wright brothers’ first flights near Le Mans. Walking about the streets of good deal in common with such demo- Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer the old town, studying its art and archi- cratic monks and Yankee mystics as Banks were conceived as experiments, tecture, Wright sensed an identity be- John Woolman, Johnny Appleseed, and and although both there and at Huffman tween the spiritual yearning latent in his Henry David Thoreau. Like Thoreau, Prairie, northeast of Dayton, their flying own skyward ascents and that of the civ- Wilbur Wright was by nature ascetic, a machines drew spectators, the brothers ilization that built the town’s cathedral, Spartan in all his habits, and to all for some time resisted an authoritative Saint-Julien. (The saint who is the sub- appearances celibate; he gave the im - trial. When, at last, they agreed to a ject of Flaubert’s “The Legend of St. demonstration, it took place not in Julian the Hospitaller” is often said to Mr. Beran is the author of many books, including America but in France, where Wilbur have been born in Le Mans.) The oldest Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome had gone to negotiate a sale of his flying parts of the cathedral, McCullough Slayings behind Our Romance with the machine to the French. (Washington had writes, were “in the Romanesque man- Macabre, which will be published in August. turned the brothers down.) In Paris, ner, and dated back nearly 900 years, to

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the eleventh century”; the “larger, more Wilbur Wright died in May 1912, at spectacular” Gothic portion of Saint- age 45. It is impossible to say where Generation Julien was the work of the 14th and 15th his pilgrimage would have taken him centuries. It was “this, all so plainly in had he lived longer. He might have evidence, that so moved Wilbur.” No- outgrown his zeal for mechanical Gaps where was what McCullough calls the innovation; alternatively, his technical “upward aspiration” of the cathedral aspirations might have coexisted with R O B E R T V ER BRUGGEN more evident than in its soaring choir, his newly awakened passion for old which impressed Wright “as one of the Western forms of beauty and order. finest specimens of architecture” he had Such incongruous cohabitations are not ever seen. In the book’s most perceptive uncommon. Jefferson, the child of the passage, McCullough suggests that modernizing Enlightenment, was deeply Wilbur was fully cognizant of the affinity attached to the traditions of Greco- between his own grammar of ascent and Roman art, the by-product of innumer- that of the medieval burghers of Le Mans. able antique mysticisms; Emer son, the “The phenomenon which I might call prophet of the “American newness” that American medievalism is highly inter- has bred so many golden calves, was a esting,” wrote the German scholar Ernst disciple of the anti-materialist philoso- Robert Curtius. “I believe that it has a phy of Plato. deep spiritual meaning.” McCullough’s The fact that so many of our repub- Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying Wilbur Wright is closer, in spirit, to lic’s sages have been drawn to appar- America’s Young, by Diana Furchtgott-Roth such American medievalists as Henry ently defunct mysticisms ought to and Jared Meyer (Encounter, Adams and Charles Homer Haskins disturb a little our progressive compla- 152 pp., $23.99) than he is to such purely practical inno- cencies. But it is not so; most of us are vators as Henry Ford and Thomas not disconcerted by what these flights ARD-HIT by the recession, Edison. He experiences in France an into primitivism tell us about ourselves. floundering in the job mar- enlightenment not unlike what Henry The truth is that we are, many of us, ket, and suffering under the James’s Lambert Strether experiences more at home in Mechanopolis than we weight of massive debt—of in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In de - care to admit. I used to deplore the bothH the student and the government vari- scribing Strether’s illumination in The weakness of these surrenders, but I have ety—today’s youth are having a rough Ambassadors, James borrows un - more recently found myself thinking time. In their new book, Manhattan Insti - ashamedly from the medievalists: them the fruit of very pardonable real- tute scholars Diana Furchtgott-Roth and ism. Such things as the temple of Nike Jared Meyer say that a small-government The day was so soft that the little party in Athens and the cathedral of Saint- agenda is the way to change this. had practically adjourned to the open air, but the open air was in such condi- Julien in Le Mans may well represent a Furchtgott-Roth and Meyer argue that tions all a chamber of state. Strether had freakish anomaly in our evolution as a in three major areas—entitlements, edu- presently the sense of a great convent, a species; in our modern exchange of cation, and jobs—current policy is failing convent of missions, famous for he marble for plastic, we may simply have the young. Their case is overstated at scarce knew what, a nursery of young reverted to our habitual simianism, our times, but on the whole it is compelling. priests, of scattered shade, of straight default factory settings. Most Americans have at least a vague alleys and chapel-bells, that spread its But the pilgrimage of Wilbur Wright, sense of what has gone wrong with such mass in one quarter; he had the sense of as told, not brilliantly, but serviceably, programs as Social Security and Medi - names in the air, of ghosts at the win- by David McCullough, has somewhat care: Baby Boomers are retiring, they’ve dows, of signs and tokens, a whole restored my older faith. Here you have been promised substantial benefits to range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination. one of mankind’s greatest technicians, a be provided at public expense, and master of mechanical innovation, who there aren’t enough working-age peo- The American who in his pilgrimage found his chief inspiration not in the per- ple around to finance it all. The authors to the Old World comes to the realiza- vasive utilitarianism of his environment provide hard numbers to back up these tion that there is something missing in but in a desire to experience the beauty notions. The federal government is $18 his up-to-date American life is, of and the poetry, what he called the “in - trillion in debt, more than $50,000 per course, a familiar, even a threadbare toxication,” of flight. Wright’s tempera- capita. This is money that has already figure. He is close to the heart of ment was essentially that of an artist and been spent, mainly on older Americans, Adams’s Education and his Mont- a prophet—a recurring type. And so and will need to be paid back, mainly by Saint-Michel and Chartres; he drives a long as the type does recur, we may be those who are today young or unborn. good deal of Hemingway’s fiction, pops justified in thinking that our current Even if a reform measure were passed up in Santayana, and reaches his apogee crudenesses are what the Dutch historian immediately, it would need to perma- in T. S. Eliot, the “latent monk” (as his Johan Huizinga took them to be, the nently raise taxes 57 percent or cut biographer Lyndall Gordon calls him) fatigued but temporary “after-play of a spending 37 percent to cover the short- who sought sanity in the poetry of Dante civilization in decline”—a winter to be fall. The costs will only grow as Wash - and the sacraments of the Church. followed by the longed-for spring. ing ton delays the inevitable.

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The states aren’t doing much better, Even on these reforms, though, the cent, according to the official statistics with $5 trillion in debt of their own. Their authors indulge in what Charles Murray the authors cite (though, in fairness, the public-employee compensation systems calls “educational romanticism,” claim- real number might be significantly in particular are a disaster, having pro- ing that their preferred solutions would lower)—fail to graduate from four-year mised retirees generous payouts and produce incredibly dramatic results and colleges even after six years. health-care benefits without saving wipe away inequality. In the most egre- Here, though, the authors are some- enough money to cover the costs. States gious example, they cite a 2009 study what more sympathetic to the young often paper over the problem with purporting to show that charter schools, than is warranted. They actually say of accounting tricks, such as expecting attended from kindergarten through one of their sources, “If Stacy had investment returns to be far higher than eighth grade, could close 86 percent of known that her women’s-studies major they could possibly be. the math gap and 66 percent of the read- would not land her a job, she might And our bold new entitlement, Obama- ing gap between students in Harlem and have chosen communications or mar- care, only compounds this bias against students in upper-class Scarsdale, N.Y. keting.” (Yes, if only it were common the young. It costs about five times as They even claim the study “likely under- knowledge that employers aren’t clam- much to insure an older person as to estimates” the benefits of charter schools oring for women’s-studies majors.) insure a young person, but the law by neglecting the effects of competition Things aren’t as good for college kids— allows insurers to charge just three over time. especially the many who drop out—as times the amount. Apparently it’s too But these are, as various critics have they could be, and government policy in much to ask that older Americans wait detailed, highly suspect statistics. Among this area is a train wreck. But these folks until they become eligible for Medicare other, more technical problems, they were are some of the most privileged the before they start sending their children calculated by taking the average annual world has seen, and they themselves their medical bills. gain and multiplying it by nine, not by chose to attend college, at great cost to As for K–12 education, by contrast, actually observing students who attended (older) taxpayers. They can hardly the young are definitely not being charter schools for nine years—in fact, claim to have been “disinherited.” shortchanged when it comes to money: the study covered only seven years of What about the job market? Furchtgott- Spend ing is decidedly on the rise. In - data, and the typical student attended Roth and Meyer outline the standard case stead, the problem is that current policy charter schools for only three to five against liberal labor-market policies: The just isn’t working. years. As Furchtgott-Roth and Meyer minimum wage kills jobs by making hir- Furchtgott-Roth and Meyer are a little note, the study’s authors claim that ing more expensive; threats to unpaid alarmist when explaining the issue, high- charter-school gains remain steady as stu- internships could keep young people lighting statistics suggesting that Ameri- dents keep attending, which would justify from building up the experience they can students lag far behind their peers in the study’s extrapolation from the data; need; occupational licensing is often other countries and arguing that the dif- but other studies, in concert with common required in fields where the work isn’t ference is that those other countries sense and the law of diminishing returns, remotely dangerous, just to keep out have better education systems. In fact, suggest that they do not. Further, this competition, harming workers who wish American performance varies from mea- study focused on oversubscribed charter to gain a foothold in an industry. sure to measure (e.g., American eighth- schools in New York City (where admis- This is all true as far as it goes, and the graders are above average on one math sion is decided by lottery), and there is time is especially ripe for reform when it test, the TIMSS, scoring on par with plenty of evidence that charter schools in comes to occupational licensing. Even Finland and England), and aggregate general are not nearly this successful. many on the left have said that it’s ridicu- statistics mask severe disparities within Charter schools are a great idea, as is lous to require, say, hair-braiders to get the country (even on tests in which school choice more broadly, but there are the government’s permission to work. On Americans in general score poorly, no panaceas in education reform. the minimum wage, though, a more care- whites and Asians are much more com- Moving on to college, the authors ful exploration of the tradeoffs would petitive). It’s difficult to compare a coun- highlight a number of highly problematic have been helpful: Even if we assume try that has our demographics and racial trends. Tuition prices and student loans that the minimum wage does reduce history with homogeneous European and have both skyrocketed in recent years, employment to some degree (as the Asian states, and it’s not the case that any and there’s evidence that federal law is authors concede, some studies fail to find difference in performance can simply be playing a role—when the government that it does), we must weigh that cost blamed on educators. offers financial aid with the goal of against the benefit of higher wages for But the problem is real. There are a lot helping students, schools gobble up the those who remain employed before we of horrible schools in this country, typi- money by raising prices, and then use the can declare it to be a loss for the young. cally serving the most vulnerable popula- cash to hire more administrators, jack up Clearly, readers will find a lot to take tions, and there’s good evidence that salaries, and install frivolous amenities. issue with in Disinherited. This is to be various measures—charter schools, hir- Meanwhile, high-school guidance coun- expected given how much ground it cov- ing and promoting high-quality teachers selors promote the notion that everyone ers in so few pages. But the book will while firing bad ones, etc.—could im - should go to a four-year school, even serve as a fantastic introduction to con- prove the situation. Too often, policy- though many students are better suited to servative and libertarian ideas for the makers value the support of teachers’ other options. One result is the dismal young people the government has failed unions over the education of children. fact that many enrollees—about 40 per- so dramatically.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

just days before Paul’s visit, had been called to me in 2011 the time George, the The Ballad startled to find Yoko Ono wearing Cyn’s group’s lead guitarist, came to her with bathrobe, luxuriating in post-coital bliss word of John’s affair with Sonny Free - with the man of the house. Paying man. She was the blonde fashion-model Of John respects to the stricken mother and child wife of Robert Freeman, the photo - was a generous gesture, typical of Paul, grapher whose pictures adorned the And Cyn that neither of the other Beatles saw fit to covers of four early Beatles albums. bestow on the clinging wife who didn’t “‘John’s written this mad song called understand: the posh girl from Hoylake “Norwegian Wood,” and he’s obviously JAMES ROSEN who, starting in 1958, had been the first been hanging out with Bob Freeman’s female to join the Beatles’ inner circle wife in her kitchen,’ which was all made REALLY don’t want to be and had witnessed firsthand their rise to of Norwegian wood,” Pattie told me, looked upon as some kind of godhood. On the drive over, Paul’s quoting George. victim,” Cynthia Lennon told thoughts coalesced into a lilting new John was moved to write about his me in her low, purring voice. It song: “Hey Jules / Don’t make it bad / adultery, but—in all the genius music ‘Iwas 2010, and after a year of rejection she Take a sad song / And make it better.” that poured out of him in this period, the had finally consented to a half-hour tele- The song would go on to spend nine most creatively fertile of his career—he phone interview about her long-ago life weeks atop the U.S. charts, the longest never expressly dedicated a tune to Cyn with her late ex-husband. I reminded reign of any Beatles single. (in marked contrast to his later, near- “Cyn” of the heartbreaking 1968 snapshot Always, Cyn got the short end. When constant expressions of love in song of her and Julian that had appeared in she and John were married at the Mount for Yoko Ono). Nor is Cyn listed by her memoir John (2005), which I had Pleasant registry in Liverpool, in August John’s biographers as having been, even reviewed for the Washington Post. 1962, shortly after she broke the unwel- vaguely, the inspiration for any of his There was the adorable five-year-old, come news of her pregnancy to John, the Beatles-era compositions. In John, clad in a Peanuts sweatshirt and lying in noise from a nearby construction drill Cyn claimed, pitiably, that her husband his mother’s lap, a wan smile across his drowned out the ceremony; the couple’s wrote “All My Loving” for her; in fact, face, as his mother, beautiful at 28 and vows were obliterated, as if never ex - it was Paul’s song. freshly deserted for Yoko Ono, stared changed. For Lennon, whose group had In retrospect, though, the lyrics to sadly into the camera. “It’s hard not to sweated through the dives of Liverpool many of John’s plaintive early Beatles look at that photograph of you with and Hamburg and now stood poised for songs—those three-minute crucibles of Julian, where he has his Snoopy sweat- stardom, having just acquired a record- love and pain—often read less like his shirt on”—Right, she said, wearily—“and ing contract and a crackerjack new own laments and more as if he were chan- not see victims.” “Well,” Cyn replied, “in drummer, Cyn’s pregnancy was the neling, subconsciously, those of the part- the eyes of other people, yes, you can say worst news possible: How could he live ner he was treating so cruelly, the woman that. But neither of us are, because we the rock-’n’-roll life, drink from the watching helplessly as her husband gave have each other. . . . That’s the best thing chalice of fame and female adoration, more and more of himself to the world, that’s come out of it.” with a wife and baby? Being married, he less and less to her. That answer reflected Cyn’s admirable confided, was like “walking about with Wasn’t it Cyn, amid the revelry of stoicism in the face of her abandonment odd socks on.” Beatlemania, who was left to wonder and the deep bond she forged with her The best man, Beatles manager Brian “what went wrong,” where her lover had son. From 1971 to 1974, when the world Epstein, took the newlyweds to lunch disappeared to, and hated to let her disap- swayed to “Imagine” and “Mind Games,” and loaned them a posh flat—and then pointment show, like the singer in “I Julian never heard from his father, “apart ordered Cyn hidden away, so teenage Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”? Wasn’t from birthday and Christmas presents,” girls would still think John “available.” there someone John knew—far more inti- Cyn reported in her memoir, “sent by For a time, Cyn’s life became as closeted mately than Brian Epstein—who had [Lennon’s] London office with no per- and tormented as Epstein’s. When Fleet been forced to hide her love away? The sonal note or card.” The couple’s alimony Street demolished the ruse, the fans’ love sublimation is most marked in “Ticket to agreement was austere, and Julian suf- for John occasionally turned violent Ride”: fered from his father’s neglect and his toward his wife. She put up with all of it, schoolmates’ malign attentions. including his serial adultery and slide into She said that living with me is bringing Paul McCartney knew the score. Right drug abuse, partly in deference to the her down, yeah around the time of the Peanuts photo, norms of the era but mostly for Julian’s For she would never be free when I was around. . . . John’s old writing partner drove to Ken - sake. “I let him get away with an awful Before she gets to saying goodbye wood, the perennially unhappy mansion lot,” she wrote of John in John. She ought to think twice, in London’s “stockbroker belt” that John “I’d always had some kind of affairs She ought to do right by me. had purchased, with newfound Beatle going,” Lennon would tell Playboy in wealth, in 1964. It was also where Cyn, 1980. “I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to Wasn’t it John who felt that living know.” The other Beatles knew, how - with Cyn was bringing him down, who Mr. Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for ever—and even their women knew. Pattie couldn’t feel free when she was around? Fox News. Boyd, George Harrison’s first wife, re - And wasn’t it Cyn who wished he would

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think twice, and do right by her, before tions about how and why the Beatles “I’m so sorry, Cyn. I don’t know saying goodbye? changed the world. Asked what it was what’s come over him.” One wonders He didn’t. After they split, John about the group’s early stage perfor- how history would be different if John never again mustered a kind word for mances that drove people wild, filled had grasped the blessings of his first Cyn. “Divorce is a wonderful thing,” them with quasi-religious fervor, she family and stayed with Cyn. Alterna - he told an interviewer in 1971. In his spoke sharply: tively, one wonders what our world unfinished 1978 autobiography, pub- would look like without Cynthia lished posthumously as Skywriting by Do you know what? They couldn’t give Lennon’s suffering, if she had only Word of Mouth (1986), he ridiculed her a damn about anybody. They used to sought out a more conventional lover: rhinoplasty, accused her of infidelity smoke onstage, swear onstage. . . . a man more like herself. For in choos- Following the Fifties . . . everything was (something she always denied), and ing to be with John, against her better gray. . . . The English music was very mused airily that until he encountered tame. And the combination of the judgment that he was trouble, Yoko, at her London art exhibit in American rock ’n’ roll [with] the Cyn—who died in April, at age November 1966, he’d “never met any- English, and then them, who didn’t give 75—had committed the original sin. In one worth breaking up a happily mar- a damn . . . I think the kids needed to a 2012 interview, Paul recalled her ried state of boredom for.” break out of the mold of post-war [life], telling him once, during the Beatle Cyn also endured countless fabrica- and . . . they allowed them, with their years: “All I want is a pipe-and-slippers tions by others, most notably in The music and with their coarseness, to do it. man.” “This phrase stuck in my head,” Love You Make: An Insider’s Account McCartney told me, “because I of the Beatles (1983), the salacious On his visit to Kenwood that sad thought: ‘That is something that John bestseller by journalist Steven Gaines day, Paul proffered a red rose and said: is not.’” and former Apple Corps executive Peter Brown. The book opened with the Lennons flying back from Rishikesh and John dramatically confessing “hun- THURBER’S VETERANS dreds” of affairs to Cyn. I read her the passage. “He never, ever confessed to They brooded on the porches of Columbus me anything,” she said. “He was a cow- Forty years after ’61, when they went ard. Sorry. He wouldn’t do that.” She South, crossed the Ohio, battled the rebels called the book “rubbish.” And returned. By 1900 there were In later years, through a succession Still dozens of them left in town, little of doomed marriages, Cyn capitulated Suspecting being memorialized by to financial exigency and auctioned The boy with thick glasses who pressed them off her letters from John through For details of campaigns in Virginia Christie’s. She also peddled workman- Or Tennessee and what it was like when like portraits she had painted of her An uncle was the first up Missionary beatified ex-husband—they had met in Ridge at Chattanoog a. When they became art school—and published her life story Distracted and unintentionally three times: first, when John was still Confused rumors of broken dams, or dogs alive, in A Twist of Lennon (1978); the Barking in the night—the Flood of ’87 second time in 1993, across seven issues And the Battle of Fredericksburg twenty-five of HELLO! magazine; and the last time, Years before it—the blended cataclysms to wide critical notice, in John. Of the Ohio Country’s past, perhaps That our interview grew contentious They resumed their ranks in uniforms pained me. Presented with the fact that her three autobiographies sometimes That fit perfectly at last; then were faced diverged sharply on key events, with Only by the monuments of town life, serious implications for historians and The bronze heroes who lifted swords over biographers, Cyn bristled. I realized no Th e ordinary days ahead of them. one had ever treated her as an impor- Perhaps the boy asked because he knew more tant historical or literary figure, as Of baseball than they, even at that age, someone whose words mattered. She But what they had gone through was a struggle was used to tired questions—How did He could only imagine as vivid you feel when John died? Do you and Dreams, nightmares, visions where a far-sighted Yoko get along now?—and ours was Boy could see perfectly everything, floods, not that kind of interview. “My God,” Domestic comedies, dogs in attics she exclaimed, “you frighten the life Chasing ghosts; crossing the river at dawn out of me!” Determined to drive the enemy south. Despite all the painful memories, Cyn was not without shrewd observa- —LAWRENCE DUGAN

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Film A Rousing Return

ROSS DOUTHAT

HERE are few stranger curricula vitae in the movie business than the one compiled by the Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road Australian director George TMiller. In the late Seventies and Eighties, he models), kept sealed away in a seraglio in in front of the camera. That includes, for was the auteur of the apocalypse, helming the hopes that one will bear him a healthy, instance, the war boys on tree-tall poles, the three Mad Max movies that helped mutation-free heir. “metronomes,” who swing back and forth make Mel Gibson a star. Then he briefly Sealed away, that is, until an act of trea- above the vehicles that carry them to drop segued into the adult mainstream, helming son by Joe’s lone female lieutenant, the one- grenades onto the vehicles they’re chasing. The Witches of Eastwick and then Lorenzo’s armed Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, In a different movie, you’d shrug and say Oil, before retreating, disillusioned, back shaven-headed and stunning), who frees his “nice CGI,” but in this one you’re left Down Under and reemerging as an auteur women and slips them into a compartment thinking about what it must have been like of children’s cinema—first with the be - beneath her War Rig—the death’s-head- for the stunt men. loved Babe and its critically praised though decorated truck that becomes the belea- This compelling physicality is one of the little-seen sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, and guered stagecoach of the movie—before a two things that have made the movie mostly then the two Happy Feet penguin epics, the run to his empire’s “Gas Town” for sup- irresistible to critics. Here’s Miller, at 70, first of which actually won him an Oscar, in plies. That run quickly becomes a run for it, returning to his action roots and showing all 2007, for best animated film. a dash through hostile territory in search of those slick fake weightless superhero I wonder very much how many of the the green and pleasant motherland (literally; movies how it’s really done! The other is parents relaxing alongside their kids at it’s a matriarchy) from which Furiosa was that the movie marries its old-fashioned- Happy Feet 2 realized that this was the abducted as a girl, and where she hopes to seeming action to a narrative that can be same filmmaker who had once sent Gib - find refuge from the legions on her tail. read as feminist and revolutionary, in which son’s Max Rockatansky careering across a Among those legions is the captive even the titular hero is ultimately there post-catastrophe Outback, chased by mo - Max, pressed into service as a “blood bag” just to help Furiosa turn the tables on the hawked goons on motorbikes, taking for a young war boy named Nux, who Man. “Who killed the world?” the rescued down grotesques with such names as straps him to the hood of what was once a concubines repeatedly ask of their former Master Blaster and Lord Humungus. vintage Chevy coupe while he roars off master. And the answer might just be what Well, Max is finally back—embodied after Furiosa. It doesn’t give anything away, Immortan Joe’s war machine and sex-slave now by the bulk and grace of Tom Hardy I think, to say that eventually Max ends up operation recapitulates: the patriarchy. rather than the ill-starred Gibson, but still on Furiosa’s truck and fighting at her side. Whether Mad Max is actually this ideo- the reluctant knight errant of the Day Beyond that, there isn’t much to give away: logical is still at least a hundred online After, his steed a black V8 Interceptor and The film really is just a pure chase, all action think pieces away from being settled. I his enemies riding the wildest junkyard and little embroidery, scored by revving won’t take sides, except to say that it’s an war machines you’ve ever seen. engines that almost never fall silent. impressive accomplishment for a 70-year- In the new Mad Max installment, And the chase is one of the more remark- old male director to win social-justice which comes equipped with the superflu- able things recently committed to the points for a film that drops Victoria’s Secret ous subtitle “Fury Road,” those enemies screen. The cars alone are extraordinary models into a post-apocalyptic wasteland catch him early, dragging him back as a creations: Some of them are completely and introduces them with a scene in which prize to their fortress, where a masked rebuilt and fitted out for war and yet still they hose each other down. warlord named Immortan Joe (Hugh recognizable for what they were (a stretch But if there is an ideological statement Keays-Byrne) controls the water supply limo, a Volkswagen Beetle); others, like the being made here, Miller makes sure it and, with it, his subjects’ lives. Some of vast “Doof Wagon,” on which drummers serves the cause of entertainment rather those subjects are the desperate crowds and an electric-guitar player urge the war than dragging the entertainment down . around his mountain; some are his “war boys into battle, are simply fever dreams. toward agitprop. Directors often go back boys,” white-painted and radiation- But the action is even more remarkable, to their genre roots disastrously—think riddled, who are promised the chance to and in a very old-fashioned way: a little George Lucas with Star Wars, Steven ENTERTAINMENT INC

. “ride forever in Valhalla, shiny and Chaplin and Keaton, a little Speed, and a lot Spielberg with Indiana Jones. But Fury chrome” if they die fighting in Joe’s ser- of stuff that probably required special Road is proof that it’s possible to return, vice; a prized few are his concubines effects in the editing process but always has to reboot, and to find you’ve saved the WARNER BROS (played by a cluster of starlets and super- at its core something that really happened best for last.

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He spent his first day back, a Saturday, was to the water. He remembered it being City Desk with his mother. On Sunday he went to clear (clar in his pronunciation, a last church. When his favorite half-sister trace of his former accent), but he had for- The Return (Afro-Chinese, once a great beauty) came gotten how clear it was. “You can look down the aisle, he stood up in the front down five feet and see a dime.” He bud- pew. She collapsed. Other people did not geted an entire day for this element, fish- Of the recognize him at all; after coming here he ing. “I didn’t catch a damn thing. That’s had become first a power lifter, then a why they call it fishing.” Native bodybuilder, and even after retiring from His mother cooked for him: land crabs competition, he carries a lot more muscle from the out islands (the white ones are as than his 20-year-old self. He went to see big as Dungeness crabs, but the black his father (who had left his mother long ones go better with rice); pork rinds, ago), a self-contained, hard-working man, boiled down; tomato paste, thyme, at his restaurant. The old man was out, chopped-up jalapeños; chicken broth. She though his present wife was there. She put this in her mother’s iron pot, which looked at this maybe-not-new face, as if Shawn remembered from his childhood, trying to bring it into focus. “Shawn?” a foot and a half deep, mouth big as a 45- “How did you know?” he asked. “The pound plate. Serve with grouper on the spirit of love told me,” she said. side. “I think I get played by the grouper Other people had vanished. He tried to I get in Chinatown. This was pearly look up his favorite teacher, an English white, and the flesh stays firm.” The RICHARD BROOKHISER

T all hinged on his passport. Shawn The native has become a tourist in time. came here in the mid Eighties on a This is the state, not just of participants work visa, which he overstayed. A kindly bureaucracy might over- in the great migration, Third World to Ilook that, if he could establish the legality First, but of so many born Americans. of his entry. But his passport had van- ished, he thought in a long-ago burglary lady, Mrs. Illingsworth. She once took her passport in his cookbook took him back of his home safe. In its absence the efforts students to London, where they painted a to home cooking. of a series of (predatory?) immigration mural that would hang in the Parliament. For his next trip back he wants to go to lawyers were in vain. Last year, though, She had lived on a farm outside of town. the out island where he spent the first his wife found it—in the depths of a closet, The area was now all developed; no one eight years of his life. His uncle told him stuffed into a cookbook. His permanent- recognized the name, including someone not to bother; his grandmother’s old residency card came through this winter, who had been there for 25 years. It was house, where he once lived, is four lime- and he could now go home. the same with Michael, a Conchy Joe (the stone walls, a roofless shell. His uncle He made arrangements immediately, local term for an indigenous white per- showed him a picture of it; Shawn mar- booking flights and renting a beach son) from one of the out islands. Michael veled at how it had shrunk. I told him his house. His first plan was to show up by stuck out when he moved to the neighbor- uncle was wrong; he can see the place surprise. I thought this was a bad idea. He hood, but he showed Shawn how to catch whenever he wants to make the trip, and his mother, to whom he is devoted, birds in a box propped up by a stick. He Shawn has been on a half-life furlough. have stayed in touch by regular phone too had gone without leaving a trace, His mother’s current house, where he calls and occasional meetings in Miami. except in Shawn’s memory. moved when he was nine, also seemed But she is 75 years old, and a woman of Junkanoo happened when he was small to him. “This was the room where ardent emotions. If he appeared suddenly home—a raucous parade downtown. my grandmother died, this is where I on her doorstep, the consequences Paraders are divided into squads (Shawn’s slept. But I had more leg room.” could be medical. He was spared from was the Saxons). They march to the sound “You did; your legs were shorter.” making the experiment by his inability of goatskin drums, cowbells, and lots of The native has become a tourist in time. to deceive her. She said, in one of their brass. The traditional dates for this This is the state, not just of participants in phone calls, that she was planning to brouhaha are Boxing Day and New Year’s, the great migration, Third World to First, go to a funeral on one of the out but the government, hoping for tourist but of so many born Americans. The islands during the time he was to be dollars, has added a spring fling to architecture professor Vincent Scully home. “Do you have to go?” he asked. mimic/compete with Carnival. Another liked to show paired pictures, of a tepee, “Why are you asking?” she asked in dramatic change, in his telling, was to the horse, and sledge and a house, car, and turn. The truth came out; she dropped streets. He drove down many a familiar trailer: America the mobile. Gray wrote the phone, weeping. When she picked road, only to find that it was now one- about rude forefathers sleeping in the it back up they agreed that she would way, the other way. Fortunately the locals country churchyard. They do, but their tell no one else, so an element of sur- are used to tourists in rental cars driving children move on—till they sleep, else- prise remained. wrong. A third change, apparently at least, where.

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Happy Warrior BY DANIEL FOSTER The Sex-and-Gender Interregnum

ESEMBLING a third-place finisher in a Rene It’s interesting to note that even as the trans-able are peti- Russo lookalike contest—and I’m honestly tioning to have BIID moved from an appendix into the main confused about whether I mean that as a body of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental R compli ment—the celebrity formerly known as Disorders, many in the transgendered community are peti- Bruce Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair this month in tioning to remove gender-identity disorder from the DSM his new personage: Caitlyn, the female soul Jenner told altogether. Perhaps this is to be expected, given that the for- Diane Sawyer he’s always had. mer community views the lopping off of a penis as obtaining Jenner is probably the most famous person to come out as a physical impairment and the latter as realizing an identity. a lady, but not the first professional athlete. That distinction, This dialectical two-step, from medicalization as legit- you’ll remember, belongs to Renée Richards, née Richard imization to de-medicalization as redemption, has its roots Raskind, the former captain of the Yale men’s tennis team in a revolt of homosexual psychiatrists during the formu- who successfully sued to join the women’s tour in 1977. lation of an earlier draft of the DSM in the 1970s. For three Richards peaked at No. 19 in the world straight years these insurgents demanded and endured bitter public protests and that the American Psychia tric Associa- death threats for the trouble. tion re move homosexuality as a dis - Contrast Jenner, whose transition order. After the third year, not only did has taken the form of a publicity tour in the APA relent, it voted to add “sexual- support of a reality show. All but our orientation disorder,” describing a person crustiest mandarins dare not voice any- who cannot accept his or her homo - thing but effusive Attagirls, and the locus sexuality due to social stigma, as a dis- of the cultural fight among the social- ease of its own. justice warriors, led by the likes of Salon As journalist Gary Greenberg de - and fellow cover-trans Laverne Cox, is scribed the event in the pages of Mother whether the first wave of compliments on Jones: “It may be the first time in history Jenner’s appearance reified noxious con- that a disease was eliminated by the ceptions of “cisgender” beauty. stroke of a pen. It was certainly the first Jenner has already had breast augmen- time that psychiatrists determined that tation and one or more “facial feminiza- the cause of a mental illness was an tion” procedures—not to mention the intolerant society.” pending matter of a castration—as part of Of course, the reality of the main- her transition. streaming of homo sexuality was not so pat, and though If you were into such morbid thoughts, you might reflect that fight is all but over, the fights surrounding other iden- on the possibility that “gender-identity disorder,” as the tity dysmorphias are just beginning. psychiatric community calls it, is really a special case of a I—we all, no doubt—have had more occasion to think broader dysmorphia called “body-integrity-identity disor- about this front in the culture war of late. That’s because, der.” What’s BIID, you ask? I’m convinced, we’re living in an interregnum between “We define [BIID] as the desire or the need for a person master cultural narratives, the punctuation of a punctuated identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or equilibrium, and I don’t think any of us really has any idea her body to obtain a physical impairment,” said Alexandre what the next epoch will look like. Some slopes are slip- Baril, a researcher in “critical disability studies” at Wesleyan pery and others are not, which is why they named a logical University. The ranks of the so-called trans-able, described in fallacy after them. a recent National Post article for which Baril provided his Look, I have no interest in what anyone does in the comments, include individuals who have voluntarily ampu- boudoir, and I will call Caitlyn Jenner by whatever noun, tated their hands, crushed their legs with large stones, or pro- or proper, she likes. But what I do know is this: Like all sought out operations to blind them, deafen them, and, yes, evolutionary processes, this interregnum is producing destroy their genitals. grotesqueries, neither fish nor fowl, that cannot coherently As human beings and sinners, we are by nature in the busi- endure—from the schizophrenia, if you’ll forgive the term, ness of self-destruction. But if you ever wanted a litmus test over the medicalization of identity, to a sexual culture of whether you’re more of a conserva- than a -tarian, in whiplashing from the libertinism of “free love” to the new Charlie Cooke’s formulation, ask yourself whether surgically Victorianism of “affirmative consent.” induced paraplegia falls under the aegis of “Live and let live.” Functional liberal societies can tolerate just about any- thing. But they can’t tolerate absurdities—not forever, and Mr. Foster is a political consultant and a former news editor of NATIONAL maybe not for long. I don’t know what the new regime will REVIEW ONLINE. look like. But the revolution keeps getting weirder. VANITY FAIR

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