France Against Itself Charles C

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February 9, 2015 $4.99

BERAN on HEATHER MAC DONALD: Bill de Blasio versus the NYPD Napoleon BROOKHISER on JOHN J. MILLER: ALLEN DRURY’S WASHINGTON Robert E. Lee

FRANCE AGAINST ITSELF CHARLES C. W. COOKE FROM THE PARIS SUBURBS PLUS: THEODORE DALRYMPLE w ROB LONG w THE EDITORS

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FEBRUARY 9, 2015 | VOLUME LXVII, NO. 2 | www.nationalreview.com Heather Mac Donald on Bill de Blasio and the NYPD ON THE COVER Page 27 p. 33 ‘Je suis . . . qui?’ Tourists inquiring as to whether Paris is safe in all areas are often told that they will remain unmolested if they stay within BOOKS, ARTS the Périphérique, the 20-mile-long ring & MANNERS road that encircles the city. Broadly 41 THE LAST CONQUISTADOR speaking, they will be, for it is outside Michael Knox Beran reviews Napoleon: A Life, this barrier that almost all of Paris’s by Andrew Roberts. darknesses lie. Charles C. W. Cooke 43 CALLS OF DUTY Richard Brookhiser reviews COVER: MOMENT/GETTY The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision ARTICLES That Changed American History, by Jonathan Horn. 17 MOVED TO KILL by Theodore Dalrymple The Islamist mindset. 46 AN ODD COUPLE FOR THE AGES RIRE IN THE REAR 20 by Rob Long James Rosen reviews The Professor Charlie Hebdo, insolent child among philosophes. and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon FATHER KNOWS LAST 21 by Kevin D. Williamson White House, by hen Step Hess. The strange and necessary ‘putative-fathers registries.’ 49 MUSIC: BACON BITS APPRENTICED FOR SUCCESS by Reihan Salam 22 Jay Nordlinger on rediscovering an Work experience, more than community college, is what students need. American composer. 24 THE GREAT WASHINGTON NOVEL by John J. Miller FILM: THINGS THAT GO BUMP Rediscovering Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. 51 Ross Douthat reviews The Babadook. FEATURES 27 ‘JE SUIS . . . QUI?’ by Charles C. W. Cooke SECTIONS A report from les banlieues. 4 Letters to the Editor 6 The Week 33 THE MAYOR WHO SLANDERED THE POLICE by Heather Mac Donald 39 Athwart ...... James Lileks Bill de Blasio has lost the NYPD’s trust. 40 The Long View ...... Rob Long 37 SAVERS’ REAL PROBLEM by Ramesh Ponnuru & David Beckworth 42 Poetry ...... Len Krisak To help them, target nominal-spending growth. 52 Happy Warrior . . . . . Daniel Foster

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FEBRUARY 9 ISSUE; PRINTED JANUARY 22

EDITOR Richard Lowry Senior Editors Greyhound with Wings Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts In your January 26 issue, Kevin D. Williamson (“Unholy Alliances”) charges Literary Editor Michael Potemra Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy airlines with a “cascade of incompetence” because he has apparently been rou- Washington Editor Eliana Johnson tinely and unfairly inconvenienced by them. I have been a pilot for a major U.S. Executive Editor Reihan Salam Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson airline for the past 26 years. Not once has my airline “failed to get a flight crew National Correspondent John J. Miller Art Director Luba Kolomytseva to the airport to man scheduled routes” due to its own incompetence. I find it Deputy Managing Editors Katherine Connell / Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz laughable that after he acknowledges the ridiculous practices and “shady union Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Carol Anne Kemp goons” of the TSA, the airport authorities, and the NTSB, it never occurs to Research Associate Alessandra Haynes Mr. Williamson that the FAA and air-traffic control are similarly staffed. Yes, Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Roman Genn I have waited for takeoff—or been rerouted through airspace for “weather”— Jim Geraghty / Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But it has never once been my decision, Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen or the decision of my company, to burn fuel, waste time, or miss passenger con- NATIONALREVIEWONLINE nections. Mr. Williamson might want to educate himself about onerous and Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez Managing Editor Edward John Craig undecipherable flight-duty limits (imposed on airlines by the FAA) or the unin- News Editor Tim Cavanaugh Opinion Editor Patrick Brennan tended consequences of the “Passenger’s Bill of Rights” (imposed on airlines National-Affairs Columnist John Fund by politicians) before he attributes flight delays to incompetent airline employ- Staff Writer Charles C. W. Cooke Political Reporter Joel Gehrke ees. Capitalism indeed. No one is forcing Mr. Williamson to fly. Maybe he can Reporters Andrew Johnson / Katherine Timpf submit his next diatribe about wasted time from the comfort of a Greyhound Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nat Brown bus seat. I hear they offer WiFi these days. Editorial Associates Brendan Bordelon / Christine Sisto Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Developer Wendy Weihs Bob Perry Web Producer Scott McKim Cincinnati, Ohio EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE KevIN D. WIllIAMSoN ReSPoNDS: of course the FAA and air-traffic control BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM Ryan Lovelace / Ian Tuttle are part of the problem—a part that the airlines should have figured out how Contributors to deal with by now. In a sense, the airlines have developed a method for Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman Eliot A. Cohen / Dinesh D’Souza dealing with it—shifting the burden onto their customers. Travelers assume M. Stanton Evans / Chester E. Finn Jr. Neal B. Freeman / James Gardner very large costs in the course of accommodating bureaucratic dysfunction David Gelernter / George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler at our airports; there is no natural reason that one should have to allow two David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak hours or more to get on an airplane at JFK. But travelers deal with that, annoy- Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber ing as it is, while the airlines refuse to take any responsibility. The flight-duty Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge limits are indeed complex and onerous. But coping with them is, in the end, a Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya scheduling problem, something that a gigantic global corporation—one that Business Services Alex Batey / Alan Chiu is mainly in the logistics and transportation business—ought to be able to Circulation Manager Jason Ng WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview. com solve. MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 While the last time I found myself on a Greyhound I did not find the ex - SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 perience satisfying, the bus business does provide rather an apt point of ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd comparison: The emergence of well-organized, comfortable, affordable Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet alternatives to Greyhound is the type of thing that needs to happen with air Assistant to the Publisher Emily Gray travel. Director of Philanthropy and Campaigns Scott Lange Associate Publisher Paul Olivett I don’t expect to be making my next oRD-to-lAX journey on a bus, but I’d Director of Development Heyward Smith Director of Revenue Erik Netcher be tickled if I could make it on Singapore Airlines or one of the other over- Vice President, Communications Amy K. Mitchell seas carriers barred from our domestic market by the backward protectionism PUBLISHER Jack Fowler that allows our familiar carriers to continue to be organized for the con - CHAIRMAN venience of their employees rather than that of their customers. John Hillen

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n It’s great that they’ve got a friend. Now could they have an ally?

n President Obama’s State of the Union address was full of liberal proposals that thankfully stand no chance of being enacted by this Congress: community-college subsidies prem - ised on the idea that increased federal regulation is the path to improved performance; a global-warming agenda that does not pause to consider costs and benefits; subsidies for a form of child care that most American parents try to avoid; tax increases on the capital that is a prerequisite for the growth of the economy and wages; and so on. He is trying to pull politics to the left so that a future Congress will enact some of these ideas. Congressional Republicans would be wise to follow his example in this one respect: to set their si ghts on accomplishments beyond the next two years, and work to achieve them—not least by helping to elect a better president.

n Mitt Romney says he is interested in running for president again, this time with a greater emphasis on fighting poverty and increasing economic mobility. He ran an honorable campaign last time, and the time before that. But they were not campaigns that even sought to show that conservatism benefits the broad mass of society rather than an elite. That fact helps to explain why his declaration of interest has drawn a lukewarm response at best. If Romney runs he will enjoy certain advantages—name recognition, a national donor base, a measure of respect—but he will also find that the competition for the nomination is stiffer this time. n The Supreme Court said it would take up a case about same-sex marriage, and the betting is that the Court will find, n Romney told a meeting of the Republican National Committee be cause it wants to find, that the Fourteenth Amendment guar - that, under President Obama, “income inequality has gotten antees a right to it. Some Republicans think that this decision worse.” Jeb Bush’s new organization, the Right to Rise PAC, will take an issue that costs them votes out of politics. They are released a mission statement that also complained about rising multiply mistaken: There is not much evidence that the issue inequality under Obama and promised that conservative policies costs them votes, and a Court decision mandating governmen- would “solve” the “income gap.” Yet while sensible policies tal recognition of same-sex marriage will at least slightly raise might make it easier for the poor to rise, something both men the temperature of judicial-confirmation fights and could even rightly seek, it is not at all clear that they would reduce inequali- lead to calls in the Republican presidential primaries for a ty. Good policies might, after all, also enable the rich to become constitutional amendment. The justices, in any case, should of even richer. Polls find that the public is more concerned about course put any idea of helping or hurting the GOP out of their fighting poverty and raising middle-class incomes than it is about minds and instead decide the case on the merits. And whether inequality. Conservatives should have the same priorities. or not they hold the traditional, conjugal conception of marriage—in which the law recognizes marriage as a gentle regu- n Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.), speaking at the Heritage lation of the type of sexual behavior that can produce Foundation, put in a good word for “judicial activism,” saying children—they should decide that the Fourteenth Amend ment that the courts should step in when a legislature “does bad allows states to act on that conception. things” or states “do wrong.” If by “bad” he means unconsti- tutional, then his statement is awfully banal given his long n Spending authorization for the Department of Homeland wind-up. If his statements are read more naturally, then they Security expires at the end of February, which offers an opportu- express a view of the role of the courts that Earl Warren would nity, though a narrow one, for Congress to push back on the pres- have found breathtakingly expansive. He should rethink this ident’s executive amnesty. The House has passed a bill to extend

CHARLIE HEBDO matter, or maybe just think it through for the first time. that authorization while blocking President Obama’s recent exec-

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THE WEEK utive amnesty for adult illegal immigrants, alongside a couple of class job. The president hopes to use federal funding leverage other Obama immigration edicts. None of Obama’s immigration —over a system that, for now, is within just about anyone’s unilateralism is acceptable, but Con gress cannot fight it all effec- means—to force “best practices” upon the nation’s communi- tively at once, and should not try to. The emphasis must be on the ty colleges. Rather than establish a dominant position for pub- president’s most recent, dramatic arrogation of power. Using lic community colleges, a much better solution would be to roll Homeland Security funding as leverage, however, will be a dicey back existing strictures on schools, allowing them to offer in - game politically. Re pub li cans would put themselves in a better ten sive programs or on es closely tailored to what local em - position by splitting DHS funding into two bills. In one they ploy ers need. Financial aid could also be made much simpler. should fund all of DHS except for the federal immigration But Washington thinks it knows best how all manner of insti- bureaucracy; in another they should fund that bureaucracy while tutions should be run, and it appears to be ineducable. restricting it from implementing amnesty. That way it would be impossible to say Republicans were holding up counter-terrorist n Attorney General Eric Holder has taken a small step in the efforts. What ev er strategy the Republicans employ, they should right direction on the matter of civil forfeiture, the odd and not pass a bill that funds the immigration service without much-abused practice by which state and local police and pro - restricting the amnesty. That would be tantamount to surrender secu tors enrich their agencies by taking property from criminal and, indeed, complicity. suspects without ever charging them with crimes. Holder’s policy will disallow state and local authorities to seek forfei- n It’s Obama’s kind of surge: The president is stepping up the ture under federal law, except when they are working as part of pace at which he releases Islamist terrorists from Guantanamo a joint task force with federal authorities. Previously, local Bay just as the global Islamist terror threat intensifies. Since police had relied on federal law to get around narrower state the November elections, more than two dozen jihadists have laws. The feds will of course still have free rein—the federal been transferred out, reducing to about 122 the number of government never shortens its own leash—while state and remaining detainees. Most are dispatched to Muslim countries, local authorities will still be able to use state forfeiture laws, from which many have rejoined the jihad, helping execute the which are frequently more restrictive but frequently abused When it comes to environmental news, the politics is in the headlines and the science is in the footnotes.

Benghazi massacre, establishing ISIS cells in Afghanistan, nonetheless. Local police agencies have pronounced them- running al-Qaeda cells in Syria, etc. Senate Republicans have selves thoroughly cheesed off at the prospect of being required proposed legislation to halt the release of detainees who have to follow their states’ laws rather than use federal law to cir- been assessed as likely to return to terrorist activity—i.e., most cumvent them, which says a great deal about the perverse in - of them. The proposal would also bar transfers to al-Qaeda centives at work here. When it comes to our ill-advised “war strongholds such as Yemen. But Senate Democrats can block on drugs,” piecemeal reform is all that is on offer, and any ad - the bill, and Obama would otherwise veto it. Even if it were vancement is welcome. somehow enacted, the Constitution gives the president broad power over the disposition of enemy combatants in wartime. n When it comes to environmental news, the politics is in the This president is disposed to release t hem, while they are dis- headlines and the science is in the footnotes. Global-warming posed to continue the jihad. alarmists trumpeted a NASA report finding that 2014 was the warmest year since temperatures started being recorded in the n There is a bill in the Senate that would require new sanctions late 19th century. “2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging on Iran if Iran misses the deadline for concluding a nuclear Global Warming Skeptics,” the New York Times insisted. That agreement. That deadline is June 30. The Senate bill is spon- is not quite right, of course: The amount by which 2014 tem- sored by Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.). perature readings exceeded those of 2010—two hundredths of President Obama has vowed to veto it. At a closed-door meet- a degree Celsius—is far smaller than the margin of uncertain- ing of Senate Democrats, he said that he understood the ty in the study. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies predicament of senators such as Menendez: They are facing rates its confidence in 2014’s being a record-breaking year at pressure from “donors.” Menendez then stood up and said he 38 percent. Working from a larger data set, researchers at the took “personal offense” at the charge. His position on sanc- Berkeley Earth project came up with similar findings, and tions stemmed from his understanding of Iran and the world, re port ed that, therefore, “the highest year could not be distin- not from any pressure applied by “donors.” Having killed guished. That is, of course, an indication that the Earth’s aver- the Keystone pipeline at the behest of Tom Steyer, though, age temperature for the last decade has changed very little.” As President Obama might think everyone else has the same moti- a matter of statistical probity, a study that identifies a varia- vations. tion smaller than the degree of uncertainty is very close to meaningless. But the alarmists are determined to sound an n The impulse behind the “free” community-college program alarum, even if that means that the New York Times must pro- President Obama recently announced is understandable: Post- nounce itself more confident of NASA’s numbers than high-school study is increasingly necessary to secure a middle- NASA is.

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THE WEEK n The environmental movement, being categorically opposed rudimentary (“Which of these are the three branches of gov- to the development of natural-gas infrastructure, is committed ernment?”), facts that should be acquired over the course of a to exaggerating the risks of “fracking,” the nickname for cer- basic general education. In reality, most Americans—to say tain high-tech methods of gas extraction. Most recently, it has nothing of high-schoolers—cannot name the three branches of focused on earthquakes, with the Daily Beast insisting that it government, the length of a senator’s term in office (Senator has uncovered the “smoking gun” linking a series of small Schumer only makes it seem like an eternity), etc. Education earthquakes in north Texas to gas drilling. Never mind that reform has long been a matter of particulars: One year, we’re those studying the issue professionally are of a different opin- worried about math and science; another year, about literacy; ion: Seismologist Craig Pearson, who is investigating on be - now, civics. At some point, we as a country are going to have half of Texas gas regulators, says he sees “no linkage between to do something about the f act that the failures in our education oil and gas activity [and] these recent earthquakes.” Heather system are systemic rather than a mere succession of specific DeShon, professor of geophysics at Southern Methodist Uni - deficiencies. ver sity, says “we cannot say yet” what’s causing the earth- qu akes. The Left cares about science mainly when it can be n The United States is the only major free country with a First used to annoy creationists; when it proves inconvenient, it can Amendment, or the equivalent; all the others have anti-hate- be ignored. The fact is that Irving, the city experiencing the speech laws. But do anti-hate-speech laws actually work? temblors, sits near the Balcones Fault. And while Texas is no Since 1972, France has forbidden “provocation to discrimina- California, detectable earthquakes are not unheard of there, tion, hatred, or violence” on ethnic or religious grounds. In the and have been happening since long before hydraulic fractur- wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a few dozen offenders ing began. There are environmental challenges related to were scooped up, including Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, an fracking—mainly the disposal of wastewater—as there are anti-Semitic comedian, who said on Facebook that he identi- with all methods of producing energy. It is always a matter of fied with (je suis) one of the murderers. The French leave trade-offs, at least among thoughtful and responsible people. themselves open to a perception of unfairness: A scurrilous But the environmental movement intends to oppose every new rag, which Charlie Hebdo proudly is, is defended, while a gas well, pipeline, oil-shipping facility, coal terminal, etc., scurrilous clown is penalized. Meanwhile, French laws don’t because the movement is not working against pollution but diminish hate. Polls taken over the last few decades show that against abundant energy per se. anti-Semitic attitudes in France have burgeoned, while in the wide-open U.S. they have held steady (as shown by Sam Schul- n How far we have come. How man in The Weekly Standard). France has to cope with a large, far we’ve gone. Kelvin Cochran disaffected Muslim population, which we do not. Yet France’s recently lost his job as fire remedies have not helped it. We’ll stick with the blessings of chief of Atlanta because he dis - liberty, thanks. tributed to colleagues a self- published book in which he n Pope Francis muddied the waters about Charlie Hebdo. He argued for the Judeo-Christian forthrightly condemned the violence against it, of course, but proscription of sexual activity also said that one must not insult others’ religions. It was un - be tween people of the same clear whether he meant that the law or individual conscience sex. Those who object that he should keep this from happening. Worse, drawing an analogy, in cluded homosexuality in a list he said that a man who insults someone’s mother is likely to of “unclean” sexual practices get punched in the nose. We suspect he meant only that delib- evidently agree with him about erate insults lead to legitimate expressions of anger. He did pederasty and bestiality. Every - not mean that anger, even where legitimate, justifies or even Kelvin Cochran one draws the line differently, ex cuses mass murder. But his comment could all too easily and for Coch ran, the zone of morally acceptable sexual activity be misread. Even the pope’s greatest fans must admit that is narrower than it is for the culture of the moment. Mayor Kasim his open and conversational style, the source of much of his Reed said he fired Cochran for poor judgment, not his faith, ap peal, has its dangers. meaning that he can keep his faith but not share it. Reed says Cochran never cleared publication of the book with him; n Saudi Arabia’s “criminal” “justice” system has an alarming Cochran says he cleared it with the city’s ethics department. Both understanding of both words, as the ongoing case of Raif Ba - may be correct, but one of you, Mayor Reed, is clearly wrong. da wi demonstrates. In 2012, Badawi, a blogger and human- rights activist, was arrested for his blog “Free Saudi Liberals,” n As a condition of their graduation, Arizona high-school stu- which criticized certain Saudi clerics—or, in Saudi legal par- dents will be required to pass the same civics exam given to lance, “insulted Islam.” Badawi was sentenced to seven years those seeking to become naturalized citizens. The state’s new in prison and 600 lashes, but his sentence was overturned. Republican governor, Doug Ducey, signed the requirement Then he was reconvicted and sentence d to ten years, a fine of into law after a campaign by former Arizona senators Jon Kyl 1 million riyal ($267,000), and 1,000 lashes. The first 50 lash- (R.) and Dennis DeConcini (D.). A dozen and a half other es of that sentence were administered in mid January; one states are expected to vote on similar laws this year. The re - week later, the second round of 50 was postponed—according quirement is a step in the right direction, but it is also an unde- to Amnesty International, because Badawi had not recovered DAVID GOLDMAN /

AP niable admission of failure: The material on the civics exam is from the first set. The case has prompted an international

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U.S. Costs, Foreign Benefits

RESIDENT OBAMA came into office with a plethora of The second column provides the cost-benefit analysis policy objectives, from passing “card check” legis- if the benefits to the rest of the world are included. In this P lation to halting the rise of the oceans. For the most calculation, the regulation passes the test. The remainder part, and perhaps as a student of the Constitution, he of the table includes estimates of the domestic health pursued these objectives in his first term with legislative benefits of reduced particulates in the air (correlated action. Lately, though, the administration has used exec- pollutants). These are much larger than the benefits of re - utive orders and regulatory actions to enact policy objec- duced carbon emissions—again, by the EPA’s own esti- tives by decree. mates. By far the most economically significant of these ac - To be sure, this analysis is fairly tendentious. For exam- tions is the EPA’s decision to require states to reduce ple, the EPA predicts fairly low compliance costs by their carbon emissions by 30 percent. Such a reduction assuming that the cost of carbon capt ure will be about would increase the cost of coal-fired electricity, for exam- half of what it is today. Such a calculation assumes cost- ple, by about 80 percent. Most observers believe that saving effects from technological breakthroughs that states could meet this objective only by enacting a cap- have eluded scientists for a generation. Inclusion of and-trade system, an approach Representatives Henry health benefits having to do with correlated pollutants is Wax man (D., Calif.) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.) tried and also sketchy. Since these are 94 percent of the benefit, failed to legislate into federal law in 2009. wouldn’t a regulation that addresses the correlated pollu- The courts will eventually decide whether Obama’s tants directly be more cost-effective? team has the legal authority under the Clean Air Act to But the really striking component of the analysis is en act such sweeping changes. In the meantime, the the inclusion of the global benefits of climate reduction analysis that the Obama team provides to support its reg- in a cost-benefit analysis of U.S. policy. The Obama ulatory action sheds fascinating light on the global- administration appears to have concluded that our gov- climate debate. This fact was made especially clear by a ernment is by the people and for the people of the Earth, recent analysis of the EPA’s own data by Harvard profes- not Americans. This sets a dangerous precedent that sor Rob Stavins, a supporter of climate action but also an could easily lead to the adoption of policies that harm all old-fashioned, honorable academic (who perhaps should 316 million Americans, so long as they provide a small be protected under the Endangered Species Act). benefit for the 7 billion or so other individuals on the The accompanying table, which is reproduced from planet. Stavins’s website, dissects the cost-benefit analysis that Such policies might well be ivory-tower nirvana, but the EPA has provided to support its carbon actions. The they clearly would not have been acceptable to our na - first column provides the EPA’s estimate of the climate tion’s founders. Nor would a president who has decided benefits of this large carbon reduction. Since climate is that laws can be interpreted in whatever manner best affected by global carbon concentrations, U.S. action suits his policy objectives. would be a drop in the bucket, and would actually fail the EPA’s cost-benefit test. —KEVIN A. HASSETT

Benefits and Costs of EPA’s Proposed ‘Clean Power Plan’ Rule in 2030 (Midpoint Estimates, Billions of Dollars)

Climate-Change Impacts Health Impacts (Co-benefits) of Correlated Pollutants Plus . . .

Domestic Global Domestic Climate Impacts Global Climate Impacts

Benefits $0 $0 $0 $0

Climate Change $3 $31 $3 $31

Health Co-benefits $0 $0 $45 $45

Total Benefits $3 $31 $48 $76

Total Compliance Costs $9 $9 $9 $9

Net Benefits (Benefits – Costs) -$6 $22 $39 $67

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THE WEEK outcry, and is a striking reminder, as the Obama administration “a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown teams with Saudi Arabia to strike the Islamic State, which con- people.” To Max Blumenthal, of the left-wing blog Alternet, tinues to metastasize across Iraq and Syria, that there are dis- Kyle was “the perfect recruiter for ISIS,” little different from turbing similarities between the Islamic State and an Islamic Beltway-area serial killer “John Lee Malvo, another mass- state. murdering sniper.” Filmmaker Michael Moore declared snipers “cowards.” It should not need to be said that Kyle was no n HarperCollins certainly knew its audience. The publisher indiscriminate killer. He proclaimed his duty to “God, country, cre ated an atlas for schools in the Middle East, with Israel family”—in that order—and maintained that he killed only per- omitted. The West Bank and Gaza were there. Israel, no. A petrators of “savage, despicable evil” who threatened the lives of spokesman explained that denoting Israel would have been his comrades and peace-loving Iraqis. If only he had thrown his “unacceptable,” and a company has to satisfy “local prefer- decorations over the Capitol fence; then the Left would have ences.” WFB often quoted Willi Schlamm: “The problem with made him secretary of state. socialism is sociali sm; the problem with capitalism is capital- ists.” Fortunately, HarperCollins withdrew the atlas and n Bill Maher produces so much verbiage that it is statistically apologized. inevitable that he should from time to time say something sensible, as he recently did about those calling for boycotts of Rush n At the Miss Universe contest, Limbaugh. Noting that those seeking to stifle Limbaugh for his Miss Israel snapped a photo of her- conservative views should not be considered “proper liberals,” self along with three other contes- he described them thus: “You’re just a baby who can’t stand to tants, including Miss Lebanon. The live in a world where you hear things that upset you.” He went on picture appeared on the Internet. to add that the words “bigot” and “racist” are thrown about with And immediately, people in Leba - irresponsible, cynical abandon: “Liberals hate bullying all right, non called for their representative but they’re not opposed to using it.” From having teachers boy- to be stripped of her title: be cause cott Florida orange-juice producers for buying time on his show she appeared in the photo with to being denounced by President Clinton as the proximate cause Miss Israel. The Lebanese govern - of the Oklahoma City bombing, Limbaugh has endured his share ment launched an investigation. In of silly shenanigans, and has maintained the most popular radio 1993, the government stripped Miss program of its kind for almost 25 years. Maher’s principles may Leba non of her title for exactly the not be ours, but at least he seems to understand his. same offense: ap pearing in a photo with Miss Israel. Lebanon forbids n The lily grows from manure, or can. Homer plucked his its beauty queens to have any contact with Israelis. The current poetry not primarily from the hothouse of Paris’s well-appointed Miss Lebanon apologized profusely. She said that Miss Israel bedroom but from the grime and gore of the battlefield outside sabotaged her, taking a photo that included her against her will. the walls of Troy; Dante plucked his from Hell. After running This may seem a silly kerfuffle—a tiff in tiaras—but there is a through the catalogue of his most annoying passengers, Michael broader point to make: When assessing the Arab–Israeli con- Spence, a bus driver for 30 years, writes that, “reaching the end flict, people ought to remember the insane hatred that Israel of the route,” he imagines “a huge hose / blasting them out.” His has to contend with. Bus Driver’s Threnody, a collection of poetry on motion, was published last September. For his forthcoming collection, Um bil - n Jett Morris celebrated his first birthday recently, about a year i cal, he has won this year’s New Criterion Poetry Prize, which after doctors working in Britain’s National Health Service rec- has as its only criterion artistic merit. Anyone is eligible, we’re ommended killing him in the womb. When Mhairi Morris’s told; perhaps next year it will go to someone who bears initials water broke while her pregnancy was at 20 weeks’ gestation, her after his name or wears tweed jackets—if he writes as well as doctors told her that she should prepare to be wheeled into the Spence. operating room for an abortion. “They didn’t see him as a child yet; they just called him a ‘non-viable fetus,’” she told the Daily n Dartmouth College has suspended most of the 64 students it Mail in January. She and her husband refused, and her son was has accused of cheating in a class on sports ethics. Attended born five weeks later, weighing 1.4 pounds. He spent his first mostly by varsity athletes, “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” had the months in an incubator and on an oxygen machine and is now largest enrollment, 272, of any course at the college last semes- doing well, his parents say. Insisting that the Morrises were in ter. The class’s lessons don’t seem to be taking. fact given “a range of options,” an NHS executive professed to be “delighted that, over a year on, both mother and son are n Mount Holyoke College is for women only, but they’re not healthy.” No thanks to the advice from their “health” workers. super strict about the gender thing. According to official guide- lines, you don’t need to have the usual anatomical features to be n It’s a sure indication of the moral confusion of America’s anti- considered female; a student can apply for admission if he or she war Left that it thinks Chris Kyle was the real villain of the Iraq is “biologically born male; identifies as woman” or even “bio- War. The release of Clint Eastwood’s Kyle biopic, American logically born male; identifies as other/they/ze and when Sniper, which chronicles the life of America’s deadliest marks- ‘other/they’ identity includes woman.” So basically, if you’ve man, has provided the Left ample opportunity for potshots aimed ever thought about getting a mani-pedi, you’re in. This pro-

VIA TWITTER at the late Navy officer. According to GQ’s Lindy West, Kyle was transsexual policy is intended to make Mount Holyoke hos-

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THE WEEK pitable to all women, no matter how tenuous their gender identi- Jaffa, his graduate-school classmate at the University of Chicago, ty, and now it has resulted in the additional benefit of getting The where both were students of Leo Strauss. Berns and Jaffa died Vagina Monologues removed from campus. This pudendum- within hours of each other, on January 10. Berns was 95. R.I.P. positive theater piece, solemnly recited at colleges nationwide every Valentine’s Day like the Haggadah at Passover, will no n How could Abraham Lincoln need rediscovering? There he is, longer be performed at Mount Holyoke . . . because it is demean- on the cent, in the Memorial, and on Mount Rushmore. Yet in ing to “women” who have penises. The play is demeaning, all 1959, just after the centennial of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, right, and so is this campus debate. Harry Jaffa, a political philosopher by training, argued in The Crisis of the House Divided that revisionist historians had n As his first official act, Texas’s newly elected agriculture com- revised Lincoln down to the scrum of ordinary politics. But missioner, Sid Miller, granted amnesty to the Lone Star State’s Lincoln’s debates with fellow Illinoisan Stephen Douglas, Jaffa cupcakes. He then celebrated the occasion by eating one. The rea- insisted, settled the shape of the oncoming Civil War, and the son for these proceedings was a 2004 law that had banned par- nature of America itself. Large claims, and he would defend ents of public-school students from bringing cupcakes and other them largely over the years, grappling with a multitude of crit- sweets to school to share with their kids’ classmates. The press ics: As WFB, Jaffa’s friend and frequent publisher, said, if you conference was partly Texas bluster, as the ban had already been think Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him. Time will weakened in 2005 and then repealed last year, but Miller wanted dispose of Jaffa’s contentions, not of his defining insight: “The to make sure everyone knew that Texas is no longer in the only re li ance, the only rock upon which man’s political salvation business of regulating students’ dessert choices. The original law might be built, was man’s moral sense, the determination of rested on the assumption that if youngsters are made to eat veg- some men to be free, and the awareness that no man can right- etables prepared by school-cafeteria staff, they will become con- fully achieve freedom for himself . . . if he would deny [it] to any verts to healthy eating. Its repeal entrusts to local school boards other man.” Dead at 96. R.I.P. the job of formulating cupcake policy—which is almost as good as not having a cupcake policy at all. n There were better actresses than Anita Ekberg, even more beautiful ones: There was something unreal, almost inflated, n Martin Anderson was one of the brains behind the Reagan rev- about her bosomy blonde ripeness. But how many achieve the olution. His 1988 book, Revolution, is a valuable account of that perfection of icons, and do it twice? In La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s movement and that period. Anderson was a Reaganite to his fin- 1960 masterpiece, she is the object of Marcello Mastroianni’s gernails. We might say, too, that Reagan was an Andersonian. desire; after a night out on the town (the town being Rome), they Both men believed in a free economy, a strong national defense, stand, in evening clothes, in the Trevi Fountain, the image of and a unique American destiny. Anderson was an egghead and an romantic yearning. Then in Intervista, Fellini’s last movie, Mas - activist. He earned a Ph.D. in management at MIT. Then he troi anni and Ekberg meet again, as themselves, old stars; they taught at Columbia. But he kept jumping into politics, being one shadow-dance behind a screen on which, suddenly, their former of those intellectuals who relish the arena. (Jeane Kirkpatrick was selves reappear. When the lights go up, there they are, old again: another who served at Reagan’s request.) Anderson spent most of the image of relentless time, gracefully accepted. The two se - his career at the Hoover Institution. He produced many books quences together last about ten minutes, and they bookend art about Reagan, including Reagan, in His Own Hand (2001). He and life. Dead at 83. R.I.P. edited this volume with his wife, Annelise, and Kiron K. Skinner. It helped put the lie to the idea that Reagan was a dope who leaned on people like Marty Anderson. But leaning on Marty was AT WAR a smart thing to do. He has died at 78, leaving a helpful mark on The Muslim Challenge the world. R.I.P. HE death toll of the massacre in Paris did not stop with the n For Walter Berns, America was “an object of our passions or, ten journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Heb - more precisely, an object of our love. For love is a passion, not a T do and the two policemen who tried vainly to protect judgment arrived at by a process of ratiocination.” The professor them; it included four hostages at a kosher market in eastern of constitutional law and political philosophy was a patriot first. Paris, plus a third cop at yet another location, the last five mur- Berns produced a large body of impressive scholarship, includ- dered by an accomplice of the Charlie Hebdo killers in an effort ing nine books, without ever succumbing to the academic dream to distract police from running them down. of detachment for detachment’s sake: In the 1960s he talked back These 17 deaths prompted nationwide marches, under the slo- to the campus protests that swept Cornell, where he taught, and gan “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), including a million-plus responded to New Left rhetoric by doubling down on his enthu- march in Paris: larger perhaps than those that celebrated the lib- siasm for the Constitution as the indispensable foundation on eration of France in World War II. which they could spar. His book Making Patriots, published in American troops played an essential role in the drama of 1944. 2001, took on magnified significance after September 11. Over This time around, however, the United States was shamefully the course of his long career he taught at several institutions and MIA as the Obama administration sent—not the president (doz - eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where he taught at ens of other heads of state participated), not the vice president Georgetown and served as a scholar at the American Enterprise (whose main job is to attend such functions), not the attorney Institute. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2005. general (who happened to be in Paris that day), but—Jane Hart - He held up his end of a longstanding public quarrel with Harry V. ley, our ambassador.

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THE WEEK It is no fault of hers that her bosses did not take France’s trauma seriously. America’s no-show was of a piece with the Obama administration’s inability to utter the words “radical Islam” in dis- cussing such matters. In this it follows, and expands upon, the bad precedent set by the Bush administration (which warred on a fea- tureless Terror). But now clear thinking is further muddied by President Obama’s self-regard. Even as he sees himself, thanks to his black father and white mother, as the solution to America’s race problems, so he sees himself, thanks to having grown up in Indonesia with a Muslim stepfather, as the bridge between Amer i - ca and the Muslim world. Who needs generous gestures or straight talk when we are fortunate enough to be led by such a paragon? Secretary of State John Kerry added a dash of baby-boomer cluelessness when he brought James Taylor to France to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.” No offense to Carole King, who wrote the song, or to Taylor, who made it a hit, but a Brill Building tune- smith and a Seventies soft rocker were poor substitutes for “La - fay ette, we are here,” or, better, “Aux armes, citoyens!” It fell to Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Muslim mayor of Rotterdam, to give the best foreign reaction to the Paris massacre. Aboutaleb, son of a Moroccan imam, told his coreligionists to do what he has evidently done: live in the world in which one was born, not the eighth century. “If you don’t like it here because some humorists Delivering the State of the Union address, January 20, 2015 are publishing a little newspaper you don’t like, may I say that you should just f*** off. . . . Leave the Netherlands if you cannot These portions of the plan concern familiar divisions between find your place here or accept the society we want to build.” the parties. More gratuitous are the plan’s slaps at mothers out- Modern European society, unfortunately, has (like ours) sever- side the paid labor force. Obama would triple the tax credit for al deep flaws. One of them has been a feckless policy of immi- child care and create a new tax credit for second earners. Take gration for refugees and citizens of its defunct empires, coupled two families making $50,000 a year, one in which a mother with an unwillingness (even greater than ours) to require assimi- does paid work and one in which she does not. Under Obama’s lation as the price of the freedom and prosperity that immigrants plan, the first couple receives a large child-care credit and a new and their descendants enjoy. If you don’t want to live in the slums second-earner credit. The second couple does not—and so pays of Lahore or the villages of the Maghreb, then you should learn higher taxes than the first one. the ways that made Europe different from Pakistan and North Most mothers, especially of small children, prefer to work Africa. Many immigrants, like Rotterdam’s mayor, understand part-time or drop out of the labor force for a while. Commercial this; but too many others, and too many European politicians, do child care is the least favored option for most parents. The presi- not. dent’s plan encourages families to do what they do not wish to do Meanwhile, France is experiencing a record outflow of Jews to and penalizes them for refusing. Israel. If alienation and terrorism are not combated, then the An alternative would be to provide tax relief to all parents who assimilated and the law-abiding must leave. pay taxes, however they structure their lives, by expanding the tax credit for children. Parents would then be able to spend the extra money on commercial day care, or use it to finance a shift PUBLIC POLICY to part-time work for one parent, or save it for future educational All the President’s Taxes expenses—or do whatever they choose with it. That alternative would combine better policy with better poli- hE tax proposals released in advance of the State of the tics. It would offset the large implicit tax on parents contained in Union address were significantly worse than we expected, our entitlement system, which does not recognize the financial T combining several tax increases on investment with an sacrifices involved in raising children as a form of contribution to es pe cially destructive form of social engineering. the system’s future. And while the polls may smile on the presi- Republicans are likely to concentrate on the plan’s attacks on dent’s proposal, we suspect that letting families keep more of investment—including a hike in the capital-gains tax, which is their money to spend as they wish would be more popular than already higher than the developed-world average as it stands, and his notion that mothers should work and send their kids to day new restrictions on 529 education plans and IRAs—because they care to get their money back. know that case by heart. The president and his aides believe that A less prescriptive plan would not, it is true, induce mothers to saving and investment are given tax “advantages,” and that, for increase their hours of paid employment, which the White the rich, these should be scaled back. In truth, the tax code is house, in its promotional material for its plan, treats as crucial POOL heavily biased against saving and investment; most tax breaks for to economic growth. But there are better ways to encourage , saving merely reduce this bias. Rich people naturally do a dis- economic growth, and a good b eginning would be to go in the proportionate amount of the country’s saving; they should not be re verse of the direction the president favors for the taxation of MANDEL NGAN /

encouraged to consume their incomes instead. saving and investment. AP

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suits (though his wife never wore West - ern clothes), say to two younger doctors, “Remember, we are doing this for Allah.” But what was this? I never found out, though subsequently the proportion of Muslims appointed to senior positions increased dramatically. I confess that the most paranoid thoughts ran through my mind, though this might have been something entirely innocent. In my heart of hearts, how ever, I couldn’t, and didn’t, believe it. In the wake of the terror attacks in France—which, incidentally, started be - fore Christmas, when a Muslim convert of Burundian origin entered a police station in a suburb of Tours, took out a knife, cut a policeman’s throat, and injured two others while shouting “Allahu akbar!” before being shot dead by a policewoman, the assailant’s relatives of course complaining afterward that she had not merely incapacitated him by, say, shooting him in the leg, and all kinds of conspiracy the- ories being immediately propounded and spread in his banlieue—it is hardly surprising that a cacophony of interpretations soon erupted; for no event in the post- modern world has a settled or unequivo- Moved to Kill cal significance or meaning. The Islamist mindset What was the nature of the connection between Islam and the violence? Was BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE Islam a necessary or a sufficient cause, or neither? How many Muslims in France supported it, inwardly if not outwardly? e Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the This morning, however, a former col- How far were Muslim protestations of 60-acre public park in which the league of mine, a Muslim doctor of kind- disagreement with such violence to be Kouachi brothers, who carried ly and peaceable disposition, phoned trusted in the light of the theological per- L out the murderous attack on the me to ask whether there was anything missibility for Muslims to dissimulate offices of Charlie Hebdo, participated wrong. My wife and I had not sent him a friendship while harboring enmity, on the in an extensive jihadi network, is a short Christmas card this year. So much for the grounds that the end justifies the means? walk from where I stay when I am in notion of Muslims’ being offended by Was it generous or naïve to believe such Paris, and I pass by it often. And, as it Christmas. protestations? How far should free speech happens, I left Paris after a three-week The two temptations, to see evil every- extend, and are there any proper limits to stay the day before the attack on Charlie where and to see it nowhere, are equal and it? If so, what are they? What was the re - Hebdo. opposite. The first is exciting and the lation between the “disaffection” of the As it also happens, I was in Wallonia a second reassuring, and we all want both terrorists and their experience of life in couple of days before police there raided excitement and reassurance, preferably France, and the relation of that “disaffec- suspected terrorist cells and killed two at the same time. Alas, this is not easy to tion” with colonial history? And so on and terrorists who fired on them. If I were the achieve. The rational man wants to per- so forth. type, I might start to see terrorists and ter- ceive danger in exact proportion to its real For myself, as soon as I saw pictures of rorist plots all around me. Paranoia is existence, with no false positives and no the Kouachi brothers, I knew elements of almost the default setting of the human false negatives. This is by no means easy their biography without having to be told brain: a thousand conditions or situations of accomplishment, perhaps impossible, them. Someone would come forward to will uncover it. especially when so much remains hidden attest to their politeness, their normality, or subterranean. their lack of aggression, their helpfulness Mr. Dalrymple is a retired doctor and writer. Once in my hospital corridor I over- to old ladies, etc. On the other hand, on His forthcoming book, Admirable Evasions heard the recently appointed medical reaching adolescence they would have (Encounter), is an essay on the uselessness of director, a sophisticated Muslim internist involved themselves in “petty” crime,

academic psychology. who wore the most beautifully tailored such as robbery and drug dealing, and ROMAN GENN

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they would themselves have taken the receives. The desire to kill precedes the of Egypt, for example, have often struck drugs in which they dealt. They would justification; the justification—in this me as among the most charming and hos- have been fans of rap music, perhaps even case, Islam—is necessary but not suffi- pitable in the world, as did the Syrians in aspiring performers of it. (I secretly har- cient. the good old days of uncontested secular bor the belief that rap music is the funda- What is the appropriate response to dictatorship), or how troubling or hurtful mental cause of terrorism in the Western this? Clearly there must be properly di - they find the thought. What is so is so. world. The BBC, with its eternal and rected surveillance of susceptible types, The pope’s recent performance on deliberate state-sponsored tin ear for though no system will ever be perfect and the papal plane to the Philippines was a reality, wondered how a rap-music-loving some will escape the net. For the moment textbook example of what not to say, the youth or young man could possibly have it will have to be accepted as a regrettable product of deep intellectual and moral become a vicious terrorist. Of course, fact that there are substantial numbers of cowardice, but alas by no means untypi- there is the chicken-and-egg problem young people in European countries—not cal of prominent Westerners who should here: Does rap music make young men just France—susceptible to the siren song know better. I am no Catholic theologian, violent, or are violent young men attract- of idiot Islamism. but I should have thought that his argued to rap music? Or is the relationship a But surveillance will never be enough: ment that a man who insults another’s dialectical one?) Then, having hitherto Criticism of Islam itself must be free and mother should expect to be hit—he imi- lived a purposeless existence of sin unconstrained and relentless. For exam- tated the action—was not exactly in keep- and crime, they, the Kouachis, would ple, in the very small town in France near ing with the teachings of Christ (see, for have come under the influence of a which I live some of the time, there was example, Matthew 5:39). Furthermore, radical preacher, either in prison or a demonstration against terrorism in his implicit suggestion that criticism of out, who would easily have persuaded the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. religions is on a par with insults offered them that much greater violence had a The small and generally well-integrated to the mothers of interlocutors means that pur pose—Islamism in the modern world pop ulation of Maghrebis there was con - an important realm of human existence being the continuation of crime by other spicuous by its absence from the demon- would be placed beyond reproach, what- means. And so indeed it proved to be. stration. Of course, citizens are free to ever the contents or practices of those re- The message of Islamism fits perfectly demonstrate or not demonstrate as they ligions. Islam does not partake of such with the wounded narcissism of so much wish; but it is at least possible that some inhibitions, and I do not reproach it with modern youth, a narcissism that is evi- of the young Maghrebis did not demon- that, only with the fact that it does not dent in the comportment of the Kouachi strate because of fear of denunciation, of allow non-Muslims the same liberty. brothers after they had killed twelve accusations of apostasy. Muslims live in It is not sufficient for the National As - people. They wanted to be seen, and no fear of one another more than in fear sembly to break out spontaneously in the doubt filmed, strutting their 15 minutes of others, at least in the modern world, “Marseillaise” during the minute’s silence of world fame, so different from their and this is because of a fundamental for the victims of the attacks, moving as it previous, humiliating anonymity in such incompatibility of Islam with the modern was. Some might say that there was irony unglamorous work as pizza delivery, world. in the choice of that particular song, for its which is more in keeping with the level of The accusation of apostasy in Islam lyrics are a ringing call to bloodshed and their educational efforts and attainments. is a serious one, potentially fatal to the terrorism: And their wish for death—they could accused. I hardly need prove this since it hardly have thought they would sur- is admitted on all hands, Muslim and non- To arms, citizens! vive—was, paradoxically, perfectly com- Muslim alike. So long as this is so, so long Form your battalions! Let us march! Let us march! patible with their narcissism. Having as Muslims fear to adopt another religion That impure blood . . . listened to thousands of immature young or publicly proclaim their atheism or people who have made suicide attempts, detestation of Mohammed and Islam, Moreover, the characterization of the I came to the conclusion that their intellectually justified or not, the religion enemy of the citizens is not exactly the concept of death is often of a shadowy is incompatible with our notions of what epitome of multicultural political correct- continued existence as observers of the our polity should be, even if our polity ness: sorrow they leave behind, particularly at sometimes betrays its own principles and their own funerals, reveling in the re - ideals—as all principles and ideals are Do you hear in the country venge they wreak on parents or others sometimes betrayed, man being an imper- These ferocious soldiers roar? who denied them what they wanted or fect creature. They are coming right into our arms To cut the throats of our children and thought they were entitled to. Islam was In other words, the ideological gloves women. the answer to the young men’s prayers should come off. There should be no in - (their secular, psychological prayers, that sincere (and cowardly) homage to Islam Of course, the deputies, or most of is): It gave them the reason, the permis- as a religion of peace and tolerance. No them, knew that this was no longer to be sion, the justification for acting as they religion that makes apostasy a punishable interpreted literally, and no one suggests did. As the current leader of Nigeria’s crime is tolerant. On the contrary, it more that the “Marseillaise” is the unmediated Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, once resembles a criminal conspiracy, at least word of God. said, “I enjoy killing anyone that God when the punishment is severe. And Aux armes, citoyens! But let your arms commands me to kill.” Of course, he mis- this is so no matter what proportion of be intellectual ones as well as a good takes the locus or origin of the orders he Muslims are decent people (the people intelligence service.

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when we talk about Charlie Hebdo and ing quickly—over 40 percent of all the right to free speech and the sacred art French citizens define themselves as Rire in the of satire, because if you ask a typical atheist—and the pomposity of French American what, exactly, is funny about politicians has been on the wane since the Rear any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons—the corruption scandals of former president kisses between Mohammed and a rabbi, Chirac and the image of current presi - Charlie Hebdo, insolent child the homosexual embraces between Mus - dent François Hollande, in disguise and among philosophes lim clerics and papal caricatures, any clutching onto the back seat of a moped, of them—what you’ll get is probably a on his way to meet his (other) girlfriend. BY ROB LONG shrug and something along the lines of In today’s France, unmarried presi- “Well, it’s two guys making out who dents cheat on their live-in girlfriends, t’s been more than two weeks since probably wouldn’t want to make out. It’s politicians routinely appear on television the deadly attack at the Paris offices not funny to me, but what do I know? the of Charlie Hebdo, the French satiri- French are weird.” I cal magazine, which is enough time true enough. But compare any of the to allow me to say this: Charlie Hebdo offending cartoons with a recent Broad - isn’t funny. way hit, the tony Award–winning musi- Not really, anyway. Charlie Hebdo is cal The Book of Mormon, written and French, and the French—who can be conceived by trey Parker and Matt stone, subtle and nuanced about things like creators of the movie Team America: cheese and marital fidelity—are remark- World Police and South Park, the closest ably ham-fisted about humor. For them, thing we have in the United states to a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed en - Charlie Hebdo. The Book of Mormon is a gaged in a wet kiss with a rabbi is hilari- rude and utterly hilarious multilateral ous, because, well, how can that happen? attack on the Church of Jesus Christ of In real life? On ne fait pas ça! Latter-day saints and its beliefs. “You know what I love so much about It is also, in some odd way, sweetly the American show Friends?” a French sentimental and even nuanced in its por- writer once asked me. “I love the dia- trayal of faith, belief, mission, and moral logues,” he said, slipping back and forth goodness. the lead character struggles— between English and French. “Les dia- comically, of course—with the tenets of logues sont drôles! J’adore les dialogues his religion, and it’s clear that the authors en double sens!” “Ah, yes,” I said. “In of the piece find most of the specific En glish we call them double entendres.” beliefs of Mormonism to be ridiculous, He looked at me funny. “that is not but there’s also a lot of heroism in the English,” he said. “that is French.” story of Mormon missionaries in the “Yes,” I said. “I was making a joke. middle of a nasty African despotic dic - Because in English we use the French tatorship trying quixotically to make the term. And so I thought it was funny to say lives of its citizens more free and healthy that a French phrase was an English and decent. the biggest number of the phrase because . . . well . . .” show—“I Believe!”—is both a sharply I trailed off. He looked baffled and nasty satire on LDs doctrine and a decla- utterly lost. My (admittedly weak) witti- ration of the power of faith. cism was lost somewhere in the gray Which, for me anyway, is why it’s zone of French humor. It was neither funny. boldly scatological nor a simple play of Charlie Hebdo, since its inception, has unshaven and tieless, rock stars sing opposites, so it was rejected by the rigid made a mission out of shock. the blas- duets about incest with their daughters, and often robotic French funny bone. phemy of the Muslim-themed cartoons everyone’s a rebel. surrounded by the the French—and they’ll be the first to that resulted, in a twisted way, in the icons and monuments of Western civi- tell you—are rationalists. there’s not a massacre of January 7 had rich and deep lization—cathedrals and opera houses, Frenchman alive—from bus drivers to precedent in the cartoons and features of academies and châteaux, parks and café waiters to tV talk-show pundits— previous years—sexual and scatological boulevards—it’s irresistibly tempting, who doesn’t fancy himself a rational renderings that took aim at the Roman and ultimately very safe, to pose rebel- thinker, an unsentimental philosophe. In Catholic Church, at sacred institutions liously with a dangling Gitane, to shrug at France, if you want to throw some seri- like the Académie française, at often re - the middle-class values of the Roman ous shade at a debate opponent, you dis- motely lofty politicians like Jacques Catholic Church, to draw cartoons of GETTY miss his argument with an airy wave and Chirac and François Mitterrand. cultural figures in flagrante or on the toi- / AFP a condescending Ce n’est pas logique. If In contemporary French society, let or both. / you do, prepare yourself: Fists will fly. though, these were hardly tough subjects Put it this way: During the tumultuous

that makes it tricky for Americans to go after. the Church has been shrink- post-war years in France, the political DON EMMERT

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and social establishment would dine reg- case of Jake Strickland in Utah, a father ularly at the Brasserie Lipp. The political who had been happily furnishing a nurs- and artistic rebels would dine across the Father ery and planning to raise a son jointly street at Café de Flore. But it could have with the boy’s mother was shocked to easily been the other way around, be- Knows Last learn that she had given birth a week be - cause to be French—truly French—is to fore a scheduled caesarean section and be French first, to be part of a large and The strange and necessary finalized adoption papers before he ever fractious (but ultimately unified) family ‘putative-fathers registries’ saw the child. of rational Cartesian philosophes. And Fathers who attempt to secure their in any family there’s a (basically harm - BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON rights through the courts face both a hostile less) ten-year-old boy making flatulation legal environment and a prejudice against sounds in the back seat, or drawing filthy C. lost his children before he single fathers. When M. C. sued for cus- pictures of the local priest, or saying dirty knew he had any. tody of his twin sons, the court agreed that words to watch the grown-ups splutter. In M. C., as he is known in his parental rights had been terminated France, that ten-year-old boy is named M.court documents, had had a by fraud and that the adoption proceeding Charlie Hebdo. long-distance relationship with J. Z. for was consequently void. But that was not CharlieHebdo is funny in context, if about six months. Upon learning that she enough—not nearly. He was granted lim- you imagine someone really uptight—a was pregnant, he invited her to live with ited visitation rights, and a guardian ad cleric, say, or some humorless religious him in Des Moines, Iowa, which she did, litem was appointed to evaluate him and zealot—reading it. In fact, the cartoons for a week, after which time she told his relationship with his children. are funny—and even then it’s a stretch M. C. that she’d suffered a miscarriage Unsurprisingly, the guardian ad litem for me—only with the image in mind of and, citing homesickness, broke things off found that he had no substantial relation- the target, face red with rage, offense with him before returning home to Grand ship with them—he was given only a few very much taken, holding the magazine Junction, Colo.—where she later gave four-hour visits, and those required his with specks of foam around the mouth birth to twins. traveling from Iowa to Colo ra do. The and spittle flying. And since 1970 or so, J. Z. lied to her children’s father, and guardian also deprecated his capacity for that outraged grown-up has been some she also lied about him when she decided fatherhood, declaring that while he was member of the French national estab- to put her children up for adoption. She “not in any way objectionable” and cer- lishment. The magazine or its direct ante - told Adoption Choices, a licensed place- tainly not unfit under the law, the people ce dents have been banned—yes, in France ment agency, that she knew only his first who had adopted his children—through some publications can be “banned”—half name and had only very vague notions fraud; not of their own, but fraud nonethe- a dozen times or so. And each time, after about how he might be contacted. After a less—were really, really nice. They were, what progressive parents might call a pro forma attempt to inform the father of the guardian’s report said, “extraordi- “time-out,” the magazine has gone right the birth—an announcement in the Den- nary” parents, “even to the point of mak- back to work being childishly offensive verBusinessJournal, which is not widely ing all of the children’s baby food at home and funny-in-context. read in Des Moines—both parents’ paren - from organic ingredients.” The father, on Even, it must be said, when the humor- tal rights were terminated by a district the other hand, was “naïve about the less targets of CharlieHebdo’s mockery court as a prerequisite to the children’s needs of his children,” who had grown weren’t French first, but Islamist reac- adoption by a couple working with Adop - “attached to their nanny, who cared for tionaries with primary allegiances not to tion Choices. them approximately four days a week in coolly rational French logic but to death The unhappy truth is that a great many their own home.” If you were wondering cults in Yemen and Syria and elsewhere. men in M. C.’s position—perhaps even a how deeply lifestyle liberalism has in - This is where the boy in the back seat, majority of them—would have been fected our national consciousness—there who can be tiresome and crude and un - happy to leave things there. Chronic and is no scientific evidence that so-called funny, faces a choice. It’s one thing to put widespread paternal absenteeism is the organic foods are healthier—then there’s a stick in the eye of a pompous cultural depressing new normal: More than a your answer: What’s the “in no way or political grandee. It’s another to do it third of American children live in homes objectionable” flesh and blood of a fa - to an irrational and violent adversary without their fathers, and there can be ther when there are homemade strained who, despite holding a French passport, little doubt that that number would be organic carrots to be considered? doesn’t know the first thing about being higher but for the fact that one in five M. C. lost in the first round but won a truly French. The cartoonists of Charlie pregnancies (and two in five unintended reversal in the Colorado Court of Ap peals. Hebdo knew for certain tha t the mem- pregnancies) end in abortion, very often There is no better emblem of the cha os bers of the French establishment would with the father’s consent and far too often of our contemporary family arrangements never come for them with guns blazing. under his pressure. But it is also the case than the existence—and the necessity—of But they also knew that the Islamist tar- that fathers across the country who want the “putative father reg is try,” a legal in - gets most definitely would. That they to raise their children have been denied strument for securing the parental rights of continued their offensive and utterly the right to do so, often under dodgy cir- men who wish to be fathers to their chil- blasphemous campaigns against Islamic cumstances. Often, adoptions are carried dren but not, for whatever reason, hus- sensibilities is a sign of their reckless out before fathers even know that the bands to their children’s mothers. Some 34 courage. child has been born; in the high-profile states already offer such registries, and the

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Na tional Council for Adoption, among It is both astonishing and profoundly dis- other advocates, is petitioning Congress to turbing that in this case, a biological create a national registry. mother and her parents, with the aid of Apprenticed “The 34 registries only work if all the two licensed attorneys and an adoption parties are in that state,” says Chuck agency, could intentionally act to prevent For Success Johnson, president and CEO of the Na - a biological father—who is in no way alleged to be an unfit parent—from legal- Work experience, more than tional Council for Adoption. “Starting ly establishing his parental rights and around 1997, there’d been several nation- gaining custody of a child whom the community college, is what al cases that had a ripple effect of concern mother did not want to keep, and that this students need among those of us who were doing adop- father would have no recourse in the law. tions and those adopting children, when, The facts as pled indicate that the defen- BY REIHAN SALAM even years af ter the fact, a biological father dants went to great lengths to disguise was able to come back into the picture and their agenda from the biological father, RESIdENT ObAMA is committed undo a completed adoption. The putative including preventing notice of his daugh- to making community college father registries give them an opportunity ter’s birth and hiding their intent to have as accessible as high school, to make their intentions known, secure an immediate out-of-state adoption, in P and he is convinced that doing order to prevent the legal establishment their notice of any adoption proceedings.” so will greatly improve America’s eco- of his own parental rights. Among the many bills that sank in the bot- nomic prospects. Specifically, he is call- tomless pit of Harry Reid’s Senate was In that case, the father was a Virginia res- ing for a new federal program that will Mary Lan drieu’s Protecting Adoptions ident contesting an adoption that had hap- cover 75 percent of the first two years and Pro mot ing Responsible Fatherhood pened in Utah, and the Utah su preme court of community-college tuition for all Act of 2009, which would have estab- ruled against the father, among other rea- students who maintain at least a C+ lished a national registry. sons because he had not used the Utah reg- grade-point average. Moreover, under The problem, as Johnson acknowledges, istry, registering instead in Virginia, where the president’s proposal, Pell grants and is that the registries themselves can be used he lives. Utah is infamously narrow on the other aid that poor students might once as a legal tool to override the rights of subject of the legal rights of unmarried have used to cover tuition can instead be fathers if, as in the case of M. C., they were fathers, and not especially helpful, either: used to meet living expenses. Indeed, you unaware of the pregnancy until after the Un like practically every other state with a could say that the president hopes to fact, or if, as in the case of Jake Strickland, father registry, it does not even make its make community college even more they failed for one reason or another to forms available online, requiring that they attractive than high school, as poor high- avail themselves of the registry’s benefits. be picked up in person even when the school students don’t generally receive Strick land, who is involved in an ongoing father lives thousands of miles away. several thousand dollars for showing up effort to regain custody of his son, Jack, Johnson worries that registries will be and not flunking out. One wonders how thought about putting his name on the reg- used as a weapon against fathers rather many community-college professors istry but says he was dissuaded from doing than as a way to ensure that they are con- would be willing to hand out ds and Fs so by the child’s mother, who complained sulted in adoption decisions. “We don’t under these circumstances. but I digress. that it would be a sign of distrust. Strick - want them used as a legal way to get rid of For now, at least, the president’s pro- land accompanied the mother to doctor the father,” he says, “but as a safety net for posal is mainly symbolic. Republicans in appointments, paid her medical bills and fathers.” The only real solution, he says, is Congress aren’t about to sign up for a $60 gave her other financial support, and pre- due diligence on the part of legal authori- billion spending initiative that many fear pared his home for his son, only to learn ties and adoption agencies, along with will entrench federal control over com- on the day of the scheduled C-section that “exhaustive searches” for fathers. munity colleges. A cynic might suggest Jack had been born a week earlier and There was another solution, once, that the president’s proposal has more to already had been adopted. something or other about “for richer or do with rallying the 2.5 million Amer - To make things more complicated, poorer, in sickness and in health,” but icans employed in public higher edu - Strick land also learned that the mother was that’s all long gone, and the comprehen- cation, most of whom will no doubt still married to a man from whom she had sive failure of efforts to repeal so-called welcome his praise, and with his convic- become estranged when she became preg- no-fault divorce laws suggests very tion that the most important barrier to the nant with Jack, and that she’d listed Jack’s strongly that, pious lip service not with - success of public higher education in father as “Un known” on birth records; stand ing, no one much misses it. The America is a lack of funding. under Utah law, her estranged husband is problems experienced by these fathers are The president has performed the useful the presumed father. Strick land has never an inescapable feature of the prevailing service, however, of highlighting a very met his son, who will turn five this year. In model of family life, in which marriage serious problem, which is that many addition to cus to dy, he has sued the moth- and parenthood are separated. While they young Americans are ill prepared for er for $130 million in damages, charging are nonetheless necessary, no registry or the work force. Given that the president that the adoption was the result of “gross legal reform has the power to reverse that. spent much of his adult life in an aca - misdirection and clandestine conduct.” Our era’s rising sexual and social chaos demic setting, it’s hardly surprising that Ruling on a similar case in Virginia, has been quite hard on women and chil- he sees “college for all” as the cure for state supreme court justice Leroy F. dren, but spare a thought for the fathers, underemployment, wage stagnation, and Millette Jr. wrote: too. a host of other ills. Yet his emphasis on

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formal education overlooks the central come naturally to all young people, yet importance of work experience. Instead these so-called non-cognitive skills are of focusing so much attention on com- absolutely crucial to finding a job and munity colleges, policymakers, particu- keeping it. Apprenticeship helps level the larly on the right, would do well to think playing field for students who aren’t

harder about apprenticeships. socialized into work through their fami- eative Commons Cr

For years, Robert Lerman of the Urban lies. This is particularly important in light Please joinj usu e, Institute has been making the case for of family breakdown and the chaotic cir- February 11 in expanding apprenticeship training, in cumstances in which a growing number which schools partner with employers to of American children are raised. By WashingtonWashington forf offer students a combination of vocation- giving young people an opportunity to dinner,dinner, drinks,drinkks, al education, formal work-based learn- master difficult tasks, apprenticeship ing, and paid-employment opportunities. helps them develop confidence and self- dancing, and d quist photos: Gage Skidmor Among other things, Lerman has found esteem, qualities that can prove benefi- conservativee

that apprenticeship programs increase cial even if the student in question never Commons Creative photos: Gage Skidmore, Paul and Norquist Nor earnings far more and far more quickly seeks employment in the field in which camaraderie!camaraderiee! than do community-college programs, he was trained. This is particularly im- while costing substantially less. So what’s portant for young men who find tradi- The not to like? tional academic environments dull and Robert L. Bartley Gala Consider the problem facing many disempowering. employers: You’d like to find workers For all our focus on college for all, the with a set of job-specific skills, but these United States still faces an enormous skills are in short supply. You could hire high-school-dropout problem. The share workers without the skills and then train of public-high-school students who earn them, yet there is a risk that, once trained, regular high-school diplomas in the they might abandon you for some other standard four-year window is 80 percent, employer offering a higher wage. That is and 69 and 73 percent among black and K S a risk that few employers are willing to Latino students respectively. Some of S R P take, especially as many workers, partic- these students manage to complete high ularly women without children and men, school by staying behind a year or two, H change employers relatively frequently. and some complete GEDs, but outcomes R. E T, J. If employers could share the burden of for this latter group are only slightly less investing in the human capital of their grim than those for high-school dropouts workers, they’d be far more inclined to as a whole. Because students from disad- take on the risk. This is exactly what vantaged backgrounds face such long apprenticeship programs are meant to odds when it comes to finishing high M C bring about. By providing students with school and college, many grow disillu- G G. N vocational education, these programs sioned with formal education, choosing ensure that they are ready to take part in instead to seek low-wage paid employ- F S on-the-job training. Students gain skills ment at the first opportunity. The problem, J R while also producing more and more of course, is that the low-wage work value for their employers over time. available to high-school dropouts rarely To many Americans, however, the very offers a path to middle-class stability. Com - idea of a vocational track seems inegali- bin ing vocational education with paid- tarian, as it suggests that some students employment opportunities might prove B O A J R are simply not suited to college-level attractive to students on the cusp of drop- work. Others maintain that apprentice- ping out. Even students who are at no risk ships are too rigid, as they lock young of dropping out might find the prospect of L A J V K people into a specific vocational track. earning as they learn attractive, and struc- Both of these charges are wrongheaded. tured work experiences might help them If anything, apprenticeship programs can form social ties with employers and more- Wednesday, February 11, 2015 do much to redress entrenched inequali- experienced workers that could prove Reception 6:30 P.M. | Dinner 7:30 P.M. ties. Most Americans find employment advantageous later in life. JW Marriott | Washington, DC 20004 opportunities through their social net- Apprenticeship looks even more at - works. Success in most entry-level jobs is tractive when we consider that o ur col- determined not by one’s ability to master leges and universities are doing an awful For tickets or more information, formal coursework, but rather by one’s job of serving at least half of their stu- visit spectator.org/gala or contact familiarity with the ways of the work- dents. Those who finish college can, gen- Patrick at [email protected] place. The ability to work independently erally speaking, expect to be better off or 703-807-2011. or to persist in difficult tasks doesn’t than those with no more than a high-

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school diploma. Unfortunately, college- problem, which is that a large and grow- completion rates are stagnant, as Andrew P. ing number of graduates are employed in Kelly of the American Enterprise Insti - jobs that don’t require a college edu - The Great tute observes in a recent paper. The share cation. One scholar, Richard Vedder of of students who start college but never Ohio University, estimates that 48 per- Washington finish is somewhere between 40 and 45 cent of employed college graduates are percent. Those with “some college” tend currently in jobs that fall into this cate - to earn substantially lower wages than gory. In a similar vein, Peter Cappelli, a Novel those who earn degrees, which makes professor of management at the Wharton Rediscovering Allen Drury’s their student-loan debt all the more bur- School, has suggested that employer densome. There is a decent case that demand for college-level skills might Advise and Consent simply giving some of these students actually be declining, and that as college BY JOHN J. MILLER more aid would help them finish col- graduates have been forced to take jobs lege, particularly those for whom the that require less education, they’ve been NE of the best descriptions of need to balance coursework and paid squeezing out the less educated. One Washington, D.C., and its per- employment is the chief barrier to get- obvious explanation for why completion manent political class comes in ting a degree. rates are so low is that students fail to see O the second chapter of Advise But what about the many students the connection between getting their and Consent, the 1959 novel by Allen who are simply not ready for college- degree and getting ahead, particularly Drury: “It is a city of temporaries, a city of level coursework? In 2012, a study from when going to community college forces just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on Complete College America, a nonprofit them to forgo employment opportunities. the shifting sands of politics, filled with advocacy group, found that 51.7 percent Community-college courses that are es - people passing through. They may stay of first-year students attending two-year sentially vocational are an exception, and fifty years, they may love, marry, settle colleges were in need of remediation, an instructive one. down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while.” Yet they’re lying to themselves and everyone else, because even when they leave they always “hurry back to their lodestone and their star.” Two-thirds of the way through this long paragraph, Drury inserted a line that may have been about himself: “They come, they stay, they make their mark, writing big or little on their times.” When Advise and Consent appeared, Drury was 40 years old, entering the middle of this career, and probably won - der ing if he would write big or little. He had spent the previous 16 years as a re - porter, mostly covering the Senate. His work was well regarded, but like so much while among first-year students attend- In fairness, the Obama administration of the content of newspapers and maga- ing four-year colleges the share need- has proposed increasing the number of zines, its individual parts were fishwrap ing remediation was 19.9 percent. This apprenticeships. In December, the pres- by Friday, and he must have known it. wouldn’t be a disaster if colleges did a far ident announced a new $100 million So in 1950, Drury started to write a better job of serving these students than American Apprenticeship Grants Com - book, but he made little progress as he VIA GETTY the high schools that have so clearly petition to encourage employers and battled the demands of a daily job and a failed them, but the evidence from Com - local governments to expand their ap- bad illness. Then, beginning around the plete College America suggests that they prenticeship offerings, an amount far launch of Sputnik in the fall of 1957, he don’t: It estimates that only 9.5 percent of smaller than the $60 billion over ten years worked furiously for 13 or 14 months, community-college students who enroll he hopes to spend on his community- composing what may be the most suc- in remedial courses will complete a de- college initiative. He might consider cessful novel of Washington politics ever THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR / gree in three years, a share even lower taking the advice of Lerman, who last written—and one that has annoyed liber- than the already dismal 13.9 percent summer called for shifting resources als almost from Day One. three-year-completion rate among stu- from community colleges to apprentice- Following a long stretch in which it dents with no need for remediation. ship programs. And if not, one of the con- could be found only in libraries and Even when students manage to finish servatives looking to succeed him ought used-book shops, Advise and Consent has

MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN community college, they face yet another to pick up the baton. returned in a new edition. It’s amazing

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that it had slipped out of print for a gener- sex, death, and blackmail. Readers plow ment and its actions, real people in fact ation, given its initial run: The novel spent through its pages to discover what hap- operate the levers of power—and they nearly two years on the New York Times pens next. Yet Drury’s real purpose was are motivated in varying degrees by ide- bestseller list, won the Pulitzer Prize, and almost civic-minded. He wanted “to show alism, ambition, and jealousy. At a time became a popular film starring Henry people that this was how their govern- when many Americans worry about Fonda and Charles Laughton. It should ment worked,” as he put it in a 1961 national decline, Drury offers a helpful have kept rolling off the presses in memo (which Kenneth Killiany un - reminder that decline is a choice rather commemorative editions with forewords earthed in his uncle’s papers at the Hoover than a fate. by famous people. But it’s a thick book, Institution). His fundamental point may Advise and Consent presents an abun- noticeably longer than Moby-Dick; with be that although impersonal, determinis- dance of characters, large and small, de - each copy an expensive production, tic forces often appear to control govern- picted in brilliant sketches. Drury writes Double day abandoned the title. The rights reverted to Drury’s estate in the early 1990s. Last year, Kenneth and Kevin Killi- any, brothers who are Drury’s nephews and heirs, took advantage of the revolution in digital publishing to rerelease Advise and Consent and seven lesser- known Drury volumes through WordFire Press, a Colorado imprint. They’ve enjoyed modest success— enough, at any rate, to sustain plans for bringing back about 20 of Drury’s books over the next couple of years. Soon, readers will be able to march through Wash - ington’s major institutions with Drury and his novels, from the courts (Decision) to the media (Anna Hastings) to the military (Pentagon). Yet the greatest service of this publishing boomlet may be to bring renewed attention to Drury’s first and finest book, a modern classic of political fiction. Critics are forever debating the identity of the Great American Novel—a work that supposedly captures the spirit of the nation, the way the epic poetry of Homer embodies ancient Greece. A subordinate debate involves the Great American Po- litical Novel, including the curiosity that for a country founded on a political idea, there are so few good candidates for the honor. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, may be the novel that had the biggest political impact, but it isn’t really about the machinations of democracy. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, may be about the machinations of democracy, but it takes place in the hin- terlands. Most of the great novels set in Washington are thrillers—great because they entertain, not because they will en - dure. Journalism always has ruled D.C.’s literary scene, which prefers All the President’s Men to All the King’s Men. : 888-615-6265 Television producers who want to develop a show to compete with Netflix’s House of Cards would do well to look to Drury. Advise and Consent contains the ingredients of a potboiler: Its tale turns on

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of a Senate chaplain, for instance, who describes his uncle not as a Reagan “was made further insufferable by the fact Democrat but as a “Scoop Jackson Re - that he took with great seriousness the title pub lican,” citing the (real-life) Dem - ‘the Hundred-and-First Senator,’ which ocratic senator from Washington State had been conferred upon him . . . in an who inspired neoconservatives in the unwise moment by a whimsical feature- 1970s (and was a personal friend of writer.” Taken together, these figures Drury’s). Whatever the labels, Drury’s I M P O R T A N T bring to life a Washington whose traits we own views on Left and Right possibly can recognize today. So do several other find voice in the thoughts of Bob Munson, N O T I C E aspects of the book, such as Drury’s the Senate majority leader in Advise and description of how congressional ap - Consent, who worries about “fatuous, to all National Review propriators and federal agencies conspire empty-headed liberals who [have] made it to ensure that “the always-swelling em - so easy for the Russians by yielding them subscribers! pire will continue its steady, inexorable so much” as well as “embittered conserv- growth.” In an era of trillion-dollar bud- atives who [have] closed the doors on gets, that may seem like a truism, but human love and frozen out all possibility Drury noticed it early, when the entire of communication between peoples.” federal budget could fit inside today’s The ideological scorekeepers of the We are moving our HHS. Left never have cared for Drury, largely Drury also targets the media. In Advise because of his anti-Communism. The subscription-fulfillment and Consent, the press functions as a British writer Pamela Hans - office from Greek chorus, explain- ford Johnson denounced ing the action on the Advise and Consent as Mount Morris, Ill. stage—but also comes “politically repellent and to Palm Coast, Fla. in for the critique of a artistically null with a Please continue man who knew its lib - steady hysterical under- eral biases well: “It was tone.” When the novel to be vigilant: almost impossible for became a play on Broad - There are fraudulent them to refrain from de - way in 1960, Howard veloping strong opinions, Taubman of the New agencies soliciting and almost equally impos- York Times rebuked it your National Review sible for them to keep their as a “loaded condem- opinions from showing.” nation of the liberal subscription ! renewal The plot centers on the position.” Drury re - without our authorization. president’s pick for a new plied that his book Please reply only to secretary of state. He nomi- in fact condemns lying to nates Robert Leffingwell, a Congress, “crawling on one’s knees to National Review man who benefits from “a protective Moscow,” and sinning without atonement. renewal notices or screen of press adulation.” Leffingwell is Do liberals support such things? If Taub - an appeaser who would rather accom - man—“this incompetent little man”— bills—make sure the modate Soviet tyranny than confront it. really thinks so, then he has achieved return address is Drury based him loosely on Alger Hiss, something special: “I have never seen a and a Whittaker Chambers–like figure more savage and shocking attack upon the Palm Coast, Fla. emerges to make a controversial claim. liberal position,” wrote Drury, in a retort Ignore all requests for Fred Van Ackerman, a brash senator that William F. Buckley Jr. found so amus- renewal that are not from Wyoming, becomes a left-wing ing he published it in NATIONAL ReVIeW. McCarthy, hurling accusations and rally- When Drury died in 1998, his obituary directly payable ing a group called the Committee on in the New York Times mentioned the old to National Review. Making Further Offers for a Russian scuttlebutt, though it also recognized that Truce, or COMFORT. he wrote “in the tradition of Galsworthy, If you receive any mail or Drury refused to favor one party over Dickens, and Thackeray”—in other words, telephone offer that makes the other: Instead of “Democrats” and he produced long novels full of sharp “Republicans,” he referred to the “Ma- observations about social and political you suspicious contact jority” and the “Minority.” Yet he wanted conditions. Was Drury the Dickens of [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. to defend a few Cold War commitments. D.C.? That’s too grand, but unless Tom Your cooperation As he put it in that 1961 memo, he hoped Wolfe puts out a novel on Washington, to express “certain thoughts on foreign Advise and Consent may come closer than is greatly appreciated. policy in the period of crisis through anything else. Perhaps it’s enough to grant which the U.S. was passing vis-à-vis that Drury wrote big on his times—and

the Soviet Union.” Kenneth Killiany that he still has a lot to say to ours. ADONIS AMERICA

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‘Je suis . . . qui?’ A report from les banlieues

BY CHARLES C. W. COOKE

Paris sums up the theme: “12 dead,” it reads, “and 66 million HIs has long been a city of graffiti and of affiches, but injured.” A little girl with a pacifier in her mouth takes a broken of late the messages have been more poignant than is felt-tipped pen from her anorak and jots down her own tribute. usual. Ambling between the central Place de la Her mother photographs her for posterity—that she might one T République and the Île de la Cité, on which Notre- day say, “I was there.” Dame stands tall, I could not find a single block that lacked a As person after person approaches the shrine, it is easy to tribute to those lost at Charlie Hebdo. In the windows of the presume that, today, the French are genuinely as one. In this boutiques, on narrow apartment doors, and even on the hundred- ritzy, resplendent quarter of their sumptuous capital city, per- foot-tall drapes that hang from the château-esque Hôtel de haps they are. But to focus solely on this place would be to for- Ville de Paris, the denizens of the third and fourth arrondisse- get that there are in effect two distinct Parises—one a city of ments have adopted a common identity. “Je suis Charlie,” the romance and of light; the other a sprawling, incoherent, and standard expression declares. Or, among the less narcissistic, often precarious mess—and that they are separated by a stark “Nous sommes tous Charlie.” On the government buildings line of demarcation. Tourists inquiring as to whether the city is the identification is a touch more official: “Paris est Charlie,” safe in all areas are often told that they will remain unmolest- proclaim the powers that be. “Charlie Hebdo: Citoyen d’hon- ed if they stay within the Périphérique, the 20-mile-long ring neur de la Ville de Paris.” road that encircles the city. Broadly speaking, they will be, for The Monument à la République—a vast tribute in bronze to i t is outside this barrier that almost all of Paris’s darknesses lie; France’s “Marianne”—has in recent days become a shrine. On out there, in les banlieues, where many fear to tread. its stone base, well-wishers leave their messages and their To the upmarket residents of Paris proper, les banlieues prayers, each pilgrim coming to register his solidarity in his might feasibly mean a number of things at once. Literally NEWSCOM /

own style. On the east side, amateur cartoonists have drawn the translated, the word simply means suburbs, and it can be used REX / dead, and one contributor has appended “Killed in combat— correctly to describe any collection of houses and businesses KOIVISTO for liberty” beneath the caricatures. “Laughter is a revolution- that lie beyond the official city walls—including, that is, those - ary act,” reads another inscription; “they didn’t have the right areas in which the rich and connected choose to live. In prac-

to kill you, Charlie.” On an iron support, a prominent offering tice, however, the word has come to carry with it a number of ANTTI AIMO

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unpleasant connotations. In consequence, a Parisian who arcelleS, which is located about ten miles from the brings up the topic almost certainly means to talk not about center of Paris, is a town of just under 60,000 people, the royal grandeur at Versailles, but about the crime-ridden, S and it is primarily known for its large Jewish popula- immigrant-heavy, and disproportionately Muslim purlieus tion, most of which has come from the former French colonies of lore, in which unemployment has reached dangerous lev- of algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. all told, it is an ugly, unin- els, assimilation is a pipe dream, and the government’s spiring town, full of soulless concrete and square, functional good-faith attempts to provide housing and welfare services buildings that could do with a lick of paint and some judicious have yielded a panoply of unintended—and often deleteri- renovations. But it is neither especially poor nor obviously ous—consequences. “I am glad you are going there and not lawless, and in les banlieues this is an achievement. me,” a friend told me the night before. “That area is a disas- Indeed, at first blush the signs of tension are more dis- ter.” cernible from the ubiquitous defacement of property than In the car the next morning, I grasp quickly why he was from anything in the atmosphere. “Baise la police” (“F**k the so apprehensive about my trip. “When I lived there, ten to 15 police”) reads one inscription; another: “Nique la Bac” years ago,” says Kadeen, one of my guides, “there was no (“F**k the Brigade anti-criminalité”). Sarcelles’s rebels are garbage service, and you wouldn’t see the polic e unless some- nothing if not consistent. body got shot. Whether you consider Sarcelles to be a “nice area” seems “Since then,” he adds ominously, “the dangerous areas have to depend largely on whether you are a Jew. Before I left for only become wider as the wealthier people have moved out. France, I was told that, for Jews in France, the situation on Now, only people who don’t know where to live will go the ground was becoming “disastrous.” This, I must confess, I there.” struggled to imagine. Now I will have no such problems. Before too long, the gruesome stories start to flow. “One of In the center of Sarcelles, we come across one of the town’s my friends was shot,” Kadeen recalls, casually. “He was in the two synagogues and, to our considerable surprise, see three drug business. One morning, a squad of men who had dressed armed soldiers standing outside the gate. These, evidently, are to look like police—but weren’t—walked into his house and no mall cops. each one of them is decked out in camouflage- woke everybody up. They assembled the whole family, and pattern battle fatigues, a flak helmet, and a suit of upper-body Before I left for France I was told that, for Jews in France, the situation on the ground was becoming ‘disastrous.’ This, I must confess, I struggled to imagine. Now I will have no such problems.

then executed him in front of them. They hit his mother with a armor, and carries a FaMaS automatic rifle around his shoul- vase. They still don’t know who did it.” der. They wouldn’t look out of place in Basra. as we drive, I learn that another friend died during a dispute Inside, the place is teeming with military personnel. Three over a thousand euros. “I know of about ten people who have soldiers stand outside the doorway, smoking lucky Strikes and been killed over trifles,” he reports. “Some people died eyeing visitors. another three patrol the hallway, bunching because they owed money; some were just in the wrong place together near the entrance to the sanctuary. Upstairs, on the at the wrong time. One year ago, a North african motorcyclist balcony that overlooks the bimah, the army has established a fell off his bike and hurt himself. He asked a black gang for makeshift camp. By my count, there are ten troops up there— help. They said no. later that day, he sent his friends back with each one armed to the teeth. lacking anything much to do, a gun and they shot one member dead.” most of them are alternating between staring into space, Gun violence is a big problem in the suburbs. “lots of my scrawling letters home, playing at playing cards, and, occa- friends have guns,” he explains. “even those not involved in sionally, condescending to talk to one another. It is really quite drugs. It’s easy to buy on e. really, if you have money you can surreal—as if there were a secret war on in Sarcelles and we get anything in the suburbs. Buying drugs is like buying a had just stumbled upon its combatants. Downstairs, I open a baguette.” He characterizes this state of affairs as “normal.” door, hoping it’s a bathroom, and find another 30 or so men, “You just don’t notice it when you’re from here.” busily preparing to relieve the current cast of their duties. He trails off and then changes the subject. “The locals don’t Talking to the captain, I establish that the synagogue is being like journalists,” he says, smiling, “because they associate used as their headquarters. as needs dictate, he explains, the them with police raids.” soldiers are being “dispatched to the main targets”: namely, to My heart sinks a little. On the advice of those in the know, I the larger synagogue across the street, to the Jewish private have eschewed my usual clothes and dressed in a hoodie and a school, and even to the preschool named after anne Frank at nondescript T-shirt that I selected for its insipidity. Off came the foot of the hill. “We are protecting the area in general. But my american-flag belt, the Union Jack socks that I was given this is the main target.” for christmas, and, for that matter, anything that could feasibly The captain impresses upon me that the deployment is a give offense to anyone. On reflection, though, it doesn’t seem direct response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and on Jewish as if what I’m wearing will be the problem. people in Porte de Vincennes, and that this level of force is not

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might find in Picardy or Champagne or even in parts of the is that the few crumbling areas that remain now look bizarrely out Loire. But then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. As we enter the of place. It is, I think, as if someone had plonked a series of cheap, Rose des Vents housing project, Kadeen points to a KFC. whitewashed seaside hotels next to the Bronx River Houses. “That used to be a Renault dealership,” he explains. “They And yet, for all these little victories, les banlieues do not pri- burned it all down in 2005.” marily present a problem of aesthetics. “You can have drugs Half a mile later, we enter a parking lot. “Here,” he tells me, and guns in low-rise buildings, too!” Kadeen tells me. And, by pointing to the bays, “they slaughtered a goat at the end of all accounts, their inhabitants do. In fact, it may now be even Ramadan. worse. Previously, the rival gangs at least lived apart from one “And over there,” he laughs, “there was a giant Palestine another. Now they have been put together. flag.” Worst of all, perhaps, is that the removal of the high-rise Compared with some of the ghettos in America, I suggest, it towers has done almost nothing for those who are trying to get still looks reasonably safe. “No, no; it’s chaud [hot],” he says. on with their lives. In searching for a job, one’s address is a big “It’s full of drugs and guns. Don’t get out of the car.” Naturally, factor. It is difficult to get a job if you’re from a bad area, I obey. “That’s not the worst,” Kadeen says. “It’s winter, so regardless of how tall your apartment building is or how nicely people aren’t outside. In the summer, it’s a different story. Still, landscaped is the parking lot. Meanwhile, the absence of the don’t get out of the car.” towers can make it tough for locals to work out where not to It is clear that the government is trying hard to improve go. The chaud areas, I am told, are not always obvious to the things. After the riots in 2005, I am told, the authorities demol- uninitiated, and, occasionally, this can lead to disaster.

ished many of the high-rise housing projects that had become As we drive on, the view from the car becomes progressive- breeding grounds for organized crime and replaced them with ly more depressing until, eventually, we reach Mille-Mille—a smaller, shorter housing that would be easier to maintain. “In housing project that is described to me as “the heart of the drug the lower blocks, gangs cannot destroy the elevators and trap dealers’ terrain.” Here, the buildings are run down and the people at the top of the stairs,” a nother of my guides tells me. streets are a mess. Nobody moves out of the way when our car “This way, the government can get in and out.” approaches, while many make a point of sauntering around in The public spaces have been renovated, too, on the theory front of us so that we cannot move. Other cars ignore the rules that a little landscaping might engender more of a village feel- of the road, and one driver heads straight at us until we move ing. In some areas, the authorities are giving residents the out of the way. On every corner there are a couple of tall, thin, opportunity to buy their apartments—an experiment intended dark-skinned men in baseball caps, jeans, and hoodies that to change people’s attitudes toward their homes. The police obscure most of their faces—“lookouts,” I am quickly told. station in the project has been shut down and reopened, in an “The gangs will know we’re here,” Kadeen tells me, his eyes attempt to regain some control, and the town has even helped darting from side to side. “They’ll quickly know who’s in the locals to build a mosque, selling the developers the land for a car. They’ll know if it’s the police.” NET . single symbolic euro. We pass one such lookout—a little too closely, perhaps. He Aesthetically speaking, these reforms have been successful. has headphones on and is mouthing something. Perhaps he is Rose des Vents is never going to be a desirable place to live, but singing along? Perhaps he is talking on the phone? Perhaps he

FRAGMENTDETAGS it at least looks cared-for now. In fact, the upshot of the renewal is attempting to intimidate us? Who knows?

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You deserve a factual look at . . .

Should the U.N. Declare a Palestinian State? Palestinians have asked the U.N. for statehood recognition, but would this really lead to an Israeli-Palestinian peace— or to a viable Palestinian state? In 1947, the United Nations proposed independent states for Arabs and Jews, but the Arabs rejected this plan. Since then, Israel has made many offers of land for peace and a Palestinian state, all of which the Arabs rejected. In 2013, Arab Palestinians again walked out of peace talks and instead recently approached the U.N. to recognize their state. But can the U.N. dictate an Israeli- Palestinian peace . . . or create a Palestinian state? Mediterranean Sea. Surely a U.N. resolution recognizing a WhatOver the arepast 66 the years, sincefacts? Israel’s formation, the Palestinians Palestinian state cannot possibly address, let alone resolve these have had numerous opportunities to create a sovereign state. issues. Rather, Israel and the Palestinians must continue the Following Israel’s repulsion of three invading Arab armies in arduous path to peace—and to a Palestinian state—that can be 1967, the Jewish state offered to negotiate peace with the Arabs achieved only through negotiations. and to return land captured during that war. The Arabs rejected Would U.N. recognition lead to a secure and viable Palestinian this overture with their famous state? Palestinian institutions are Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with currently so weak that it’s doubtful their Israel, no recognition of Israel and no A majority of Palestinians state could survive on its own. Despite negotiations with it.” Decades later, still believe their goal should tens of billions of dollars donated during U.S.-sponsored peace primarily by the U.S. and European negotiations with the Palestinians in be to conquer all of Israel. nations to aid the Palestinians, their 2000, 2001 and 2008, Israel offered the economy is in shambles, with few viable Palestinians most of its ancient Jewish lands, Judea and Samaria industries and a crumbling infrastructure. Indeed, without (the West Bank), plus Gaza, plus a capital in Jerusalem for their continued international aid of more than a billion dollars state, but the Palestinians rejected each of these offers. At the annually, the economy would likely collapse. In addition, the heart of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept a lasting peace is their Palestinian political system is dysfunctional, riven by corruption steadfast rejection of the demand that they accept Israel as a and in-fighting verging on civil war. Because the Palestinians Jewish state. have held no elections since 2005, President Mahmoud Abbas is Would it bring peace if the U.N. were to unilaterally recognize now in his tenth year of a four-year term. According to a 2013 a Palestinian state? A peace accord between Israel and the European Union audit, some $2.7 billion in international aid to Palestinians must resolve many thorny issues for both sides. the Palestinians is unaccounted for, believed to have been What should the borders of a new Palestinian state be, since no siphoned off to corrupt leaders within Abbas’ ruling Fatah party. borders ever existed? How should the nations share Jerusalem? Billions more aid dollars have been diverted to help Hamas build How can Israel be assured of security in light of existential rockets and tunnels used to attack Israeli civilians. Finally, threats from the Palestinian terror group, Hamas, which insists continued violent disputes between Fatah in the West Bank and that Israel must be destroyed, as well as from terrorists such as Hamas in Gaza make their “unity government” incapable of the Islamic State and al Qaeda, both based in nearby Syria? If governance. In fact, most analysts believe that if Israel were to Israel relinquishes the territories it controls, what guarantees withdraw its se curity forces from the West Bank, Hamas would does it have that the Palestinians will finally accept its quickly seize control there, too, turning the Palestinian existence—and not continue the six-decade Arab effort to territories into another terrorist state. In short, no decree by the obliterate the Jewish state? Unfortunately, a recent poll shows United Nations can give the Palestinians the strength and stability that a 60% majority of Palestinians still believe their goal should necessary to manage the rigorous, high-stakes demands of be to conquer all of Israel, from the Jordan River to the statehood. A unilateral U.N. declaration of Palestinian statehood cannot resolve the fundamental disagreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, especially the requirement that the Palestinians accept the Jewish state. In addition, such a U.N. resolution will not address the disarray and instability within Palestinian society that makes statehood functionally unrealistic at this time. Perhaps most importantly, a U.N. declaration would only encourage Palestinians to believe that negotiations with Israel are unnecessary to reach their goals—that they can achieve statehood without resolving the tough issues that have to date made it elusive. Thus the U.S. and other U.N. Security Council members must continue to vote against and, if necessary, veto attempts by the Palestinians to avoid good-faith peace talks with Israel.

This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your tax- deductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals Facts and Logic About the Middle East I and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We P.O. Box 590359 San Francisco, CA 94159 I have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational Gerardo Joffe, President James Sinkinson, Vice President work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail. 145 To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org 2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/20/2015 11:33 PM Page 32

Everywhere, people stare. There are no women anywhere to I say that I am British but live in the United States. “Fox News be seen. gave the wrong impression!” he exclaims, ignoring me. At the In front of the mosque, they sell hard drugs: mainly heroin, mention of Fox, the other customers come alive. Like the cocaine, and LSD. I am informed that anything stronger than deputy mayor of Sevran, they are irritated by the claims being marijuana used to be considered “bourgeois,” but that the rap- made. “There is not just one nest of radicalism,” one says to pers have now made it seem okay. me. “It can happen anywhere. The Kouachis were radicalized Approximately 80 percent of those who live in Aulnay’s inside Paris.” cités are Muslim, I am told. “So,” I ask, “is this one of those Another fellow, a young white man who doesn’t appear to fit sharia-bound no-go areas that we always hear about?” in, says that he is tired of being asked about the attacks. “We To my surprise, the question provokes laughter. “That’s a talk about it like everybody talks about it,” he complains. “But myth,” my hosts exclaim. “It’s impossible.” There are certain- bad people can be everywhere. I saw Chérif [Kouachi]. He ly serious “tensions” between the police and the locals, one came in and ate sometimes. He was sociable. I never saw his guide says. “Police won’t go and interfere with women illegal- wife—not once. But he is not the image of Gennevilliers. ly wearing niqabs because they don’t want to prompt retalia- People keep coming up to me and saying, ‘But what do you tion. Definitely, there’s tolerance toward this stuff.” Recently, think?’ What do I think? I condemn this, of course. I’m a free I learn, a veiled woman who was stopped by police refused to Muslim.” hand over her ID. Instead, she called for help. Quickly, the Around the corner, three soldiers are guarding the entrance police in the area were surrounded, and, hoping to defuse the to the Grand Mosque. Inside, another eight patrol the court- situation, the local commissioner let her go. Angry at the intru- yard. As I arrive, a crowd of heavily armed police are finishing sion, a gang came back and burned a copy of the civil code. up a meeting of some sort, smiling and joking with one another This, it seems, is fairly typical. But sharia, as we understand as if this were any other day. As they leave, locals begin to it? “No.” arrive for their evening prayers. It is busy. In the nearb y suburb of Sevran, I talk to the deputy mayor, In a back room, I meet with Ben Ali, the head of the non- and I ask him the same question. “The reforms have not profit Ennour Association, which manages the facility. Ali improved things,” he concedes, sadly. Nevertheless, he echoes explains to me that he believes the Kouachi brothers were my guides’ astonishment at the suggestion that the civil author- “criminals” and that he “condemns” what they did. I ask him It seems that the police make some concessions. While they would rather go on foot, they inevitably conduct their cité patrols in their cars for fear of being hurt.

ities have lost control of certain areas. “Did you hear that on what contact he had with them. “Chérif came here sometimes Fox News?” he asks, derisively. “I am angry at Fox News. on Fridays,” he tells me. But he stopped coming after the “There are tensions,” he continues. “But it is not true that mosque ran a voter-registration drive. “He started shouting that police are afraid to go in. If there are stone throwers, the police Muslims should not be taking part in any elections that were do not back out.” not held under Koranic law,” Ali says. For this outburst, he was I am struck by his indignation. Still, it seems that the police escorted off the premises. do make some concessions. While they would rather go on Ali tells me that he doesn’t “agree with terrorism,” but that foot, they inevitably conduct their cité patrols in their cars for he is certainly “not Charlie.” “The cartoons” that were pub- fear of being hurt. Moreover, they simply do not have time to lished in Charlie Hebdo, he proposes, “are undignified and enforce the laws against the burqa and the niqab, or to do much provocative.” Because “the Prophet has a very important place of any thing that might anger the troublemakers. “Some laws in the hearts of Muslims,” he does not consider it to be “a good are low-priority,” the deputy tells me, defiantly; “as every- time to respond to terrorism by humiliating a whole communi- where in Paris.” ty.” Instead, he explains, one should “look for rapprochement, one should look for calm.” I ask where responsibility lies for the acts of radicals— vER kebabs and Cokes, we take Gennevilliers’s tem- “criminals,” in Ali’s words. “It is not just the responsibility of perature. It was here—next door to our café, in fact— the mosques,” he says. There is also a role for parents and O that the Kouachi brothers lived, assembled their cache teachers. Those who commit acts of terrorism, he contends, of weaponry, and planned their deadly attack. have “no stable family and no education” and are in conse- The customers here do not feel that the incident has much to quence a “blank page on which extremists can write.” do with th em. “This place has got a lot of attention,” the cook Ali’s harshest words are reserved for the French education tells me as he gets me a soda. “But nothing has changed. We system, which he thinks is failing in its duty to assimilate were not involved. It was bad luck that he was from here. But immigrants and their children. In this part of France, he tells we don’t feel part of the story.” me, “teachers consider [immigrants] non-French. And so He looks at me suspiciously and asks: “Are you American?” [immigrants] feel non-French and take refuge in their original

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cultures. They should be taught to love France, not anywhere else.” To illustrate this point, Ali has a story. A while back, he says, The Mayor the Algerian soccer team was beaten by the Egyptian soccer team. Noticing that the students were talking about the game, a local teacher told those of Algerian descent that they had “taken a hit.” This, Ali said, was agreed with by the students. Who Slandered On the same night, France was beaten by Argentina. So the kids replied to the teacher, “Well, you took a hit, too.” But, Ali says with passion, “They’re all French!” The Police On its own, this is a reasonable-sounding proposition—perhaps even a lovely one. But one has to wonder what it means Bill de Blasio has lost the NYPD’s trust in practice. On paper, the French are even more committed to the establishment of a single national identity than are Americans. In France, statisticians are forbidden to collect BY HEATHER MAC DONALD information on race and ethnicity when taking the census, and, there being no official concept of “minorities,” there is no EW YORk CITY mayor Bill de Blasio is “comfortable” established concept of “minority rights,” either. This, the state with himself. So the city learned during the biggest cri- claims, helps foster a uniquely “French” culture. In reality, sis to hit a New York mayoralty in recent memory. however, France is now facing a set of serious domestic prob- N “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ve always tried to lems that America—which permits rampant hyphenation and tell the truth and stay true to my values,” de Blasio said in mid frequently encodes racial categorization into the law—is evi- January, as police officers across New York City continued a dently not. To what extent, one has to wonder, has it become work slowdown that had brought discretionary police activity to French policy simply not to discuss what everybody knows is a virtual standstill. De Blasio’s breezy self-assurance was reveal- happening? ing but unfortunate, since it was his belief in his own mission as Which is to say that one cannot help but feel a little sorry for social-justice truth-teller that had pushed the police into revolt the flotsam and jetsam that has settled on the banks of les ban- in the first place. lieues. Having been brought in during the “30 glorious years” William Bratton, New York City police commissioner, has that followed the end of World War II to work the jobs that the now mobilized the considerable management and disciplinary natives didn’t want, a whole raft of people are now stuck in a tools at his disposal to force officers to increase their enforcement country that does not quite know what to do with them—and, activity. But the fault lines that led to the slowdown are still there. for that matter, in which many are actively hostile toward Law enforcement in New York may be on the rise for now, but in them. Indeed, for all their talk of equality, the French are aston- the long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor ishingly racist when compared both with Europe in general who sees his base as the anti-police Left. and with the unusually tolerant Anglosphere, and they have The New York Police Department slowdown was born of shown no signs of actually adopting the sort of idea-driven two emotions: fear and anger. And it triggered an outburst of “melting pot” approach that has made the United States so suc- hypocrisy on the part of the political and media elites that was cessful. As a rule, it is admirable and necessary for existing breathtaking to behold. polities to insist that those who choose to join them adhere to It began on December 20, 2014, when a thug from Brooklyn their values and respect their laws. And yet, for the system of assassinated two police officers sitting in their patrol car in a assimilation to work as intended, the natives must extend a violence-plagued Brooklyn housing project. NYPD cops had warm welcome to the newcomers, and the education system been ambushed and assassinated before, but this time felt differ- must presume its new charges to be equals. As it stands, the ent, a transit captain observed to me. Those prior assassinations question of what it means to be French remains worryingly “were carried out by small bands of radicals” who were not oper- open; immigrants still struggle considerably to find work and ating in a generalized anti-police climate, he said. “Today, the take part in mainstream national life; and the explicitly nativist anti-cop atmosphere is at a fever pitch and is fed by elected offi- National Front is hitting 30 percent in opinion polls. Despite cials and the media.” this, France continues to import people from wildly different The assassinations of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu cultures and, more often than not, to funnel the m into ghettos was preceded by months of anti-police agitation in New York and in which they become useless, or hopeless, or radicalized— nationwide, all dedicated to the absurd proposition that police and, occasionally, all three. Should we really be surprised that officers are the biggest threat facing young black men. Riots had it’s not working? twice broken out in Ferguson, Mo.; activists in New York had At the Place de la République, beside the famous slogans of been allowed by the mayor and police commissioner to shut French republicanism, the locals are affirming their commit- down major bridges and highways with impunity, to the dismay ment to an idea. “Je suis Charlie,” they say, the stirring chorus of the police and vast swaths of the public. Protesters at one of “La Marseillaise” perhaps running through their heads. “Je Midtown Manhattan march had chanted, “What do we want? suis français.” Meanwhile, outside the Périphérique, there is Dead cops!” with no word of condemnation from City Hall; at silence—punctured only by the occasional gunshot, by the sound of a car being set alight, and by a plaintive, nonplussed, Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute disjoined inquiry: “Je suis . . . qui, exactement?” and the author of Are Cops Racist?

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another march commandeering the Brooklyn Bridge, protesters against the NYPD. The mayor worried “every night,” he said, tried to hurl trash cans at officers on the level below them. Two about the “dangers” that his biracial son, Dante, might face from public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video “officers who are paid to protect him.” extolling cop killings. At the time, these remarks—based in thorough ignorance of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the killer of Ramos and Liu, had echoed the the facts about policing and crime—were a body blow to the rank protesters’ hate-filled rhetoric against the police before gunning and file. But after the Ramos and Liu assassinations, carried out the officers down. After the killings, threats of copycat murders in the name of Eric Garner and Ferguson teen Michael Brown, poured in to the NYPD; Brinsley was celebrated as a hero in they became a source of visceral rage, as they fed the atmosphere tweets and Facebook postings. In the weeks following the assas- of escalating cop hatred that led to the killings. sinations, a criminal from Pennsylvania tried to run over two Port Authority officers, yelling, “I want to kill cops,” and vandals hEY were also the last straw in a series of insulting actions loosened the lug nuts on police cruisers in hopes of causing them de Blasio had taken since gaining office on a platform of to crash. T bashing the NYPD. De Blasio’s fawning praise of Al The reaction of the department’s 20,000 patrol officers to the Sharpton as a “blessing for this city [and] a blessing for this killings was anguished and immediate. “All of us have sat with nation”; his elevation of Sharpton to City hall policing adviser; our partner in a patrol car for eight hours being a deterrent,” says his hiring of Sharpton’s press agent as his wife’s chief of staff, a deputy inspector. Officers started texting one other daily: Be on and his stubborn defense of that hire despite her lies on her back- your guard, always carry your service weapon, don’t go out on ground check and the “off the pigs” rhetoric spewed by both her solo patrol. If one officer is writing a ticket, with his head buried convicted-murderer boyfriend and her son—these and other in his summons form or activity log, his partner should keep a alliances with the anti-police Left convinced officers that the lookout. mayor would not support them when they were forced to make Particularly worrisome were low-level misdemeanor arrests for controversial split-second decisions on the streets. Better, then, to offenses such as public urination or turnstile jumping. This so- walk by low-level offenses, especially public-order violations, called broken-windows policing was a frequent target of invective than to risk their careers and possibly their lives making a discre- in New York following the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island. tionary arrest that could be opportunistically turned into a racial Garner, who had been picked up about 30 times before for misde- flashpoint. meanor crimes, this time refused to be arrested for illegally selling In the weeks after the assassinations, the number of summons- loose cigarettes. The police brought him to the ground with what es written for misdemeanor and traffic offenses dropped nearly many observers deemed a banned chokehold maneuver. The 350- 95 percent citywide and 100 percent in many precincts. A former pound asthmatic went into cardiac arrest and died. Garner’s death precinct commander who now works at police headquarters was horrific and heart-wrenching, but it hardly represented the explains what was going on: “We do not want to put ourselves at norm in broken-windows enforcement. In the first half of 2014, risk for a City hall we perceive as illegitimate. Why deliver a the police used force—which can mean simply putting hands [public-safety] utopia to an ingrate who does not support us?” on a suspect—in 0.6 percent of all public-order arrests; De Blasio was facing a major crisis of legitimacy. But force was used zero times in the 321 arrests for acknowledging that fact would undercut a darling of loose-cigarette sales. Nevertheless, the New the progressive movement and keep attention York Times, channeling the most hysterical focused on the assassinations and the slan- impulses of the anti-police protest move- derous attacks on the police that led up to ment, declared that the “siege-based tac- them. De Blasio himself was the first tics” of broken-windows policing were to throw out an alternative explana- not only responsible for Eric Garner’s tion for the slowdown. It was sim- death, they were also a prime way that ply a bargaining tactic engineered the New York Police Department by union chiefs to get a better oppressed minority males. contract with the city, he suggest- Such rhetoric, the cops rightly ed. Bratton echoed this charge believed, increased the chances that on national TV, and the press offenders would resist arrest. And if ran with it. Conor Friedersdorf that resistance escalated into vio- summed up the conceit on The lence, and if the arrestee was black, Atlantic’s website: “What’s un - the arresting officer could expect folding in New York is, at its no support from the mayor or the core, a public-employee union media. using overheated rhetoric and Indeed, following a grand jury’s emotional appeals to rile pub- decision on December 3 not to indict lic employees into insubordi- New York police officer Daniel nation. The implied threat to Pantaleo for the arrest that led to the city’s elected leadership the death of Eric Garner, de Blasio and electorate is clear: Cede attributed the incident to “cen- leverage to the police in turies of racism.” De Blasio then the course of negotiating la -

personalized his racism charge bor agreements or risk an ROMAN GENN

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armed, organized army rebelling against civilian control.” consisted of “withdrawing policing from minority communi- This narrative was utterly false. The slowdown was a sponta- ties.” The irony was stupendous. The Times’s usual charge was neous, grassroots reaction to the cop assassinations, born of fear that the NYPD was overpolicing “minority communities,” par- and disgust. It had nothing to do with contract negotiations. Many ticularly with low-level misdemeanor stops and arrests. Yet here NYPD officers have spent most of their careers working without it was complaining about a drop-off in misdemeanor enforce- a contract, without that fact’s triggering a work slowdown. No ment. In fact, the charge of selective depolicing was spurious. union chief brought up a single item of contractual contention in The enforcement drop occurred equally across the city—in response to the ramos and Liu assassinations. They did, to be southern Manhattan precincts as well as in Central Harlem and sure, blast de Blasio for his contribution to the anti-cop hysteria East Brooklyn. that led to the assassinations. “There is blood on many hands, And it also occurred equally among officers. The nearly 100 from those who incited violence under the guise of protest all the percent decline in summonses could not have happened without way to the mayor’s office at City Hall,” the president of the offi- a universal backing off. Black, Hispanic, white, Asian, and cers’ union, Patrick Lynch, said after the officers’ deaths. It is also female officers, college graduates and officers with only a high- true that union delegates in the precincts were telling officers to school diploma—all signaled their unwillingness to engage in “give [the bosses] nothing” if an officer felt that a particular inter- proactive policing during a period of heightened threat under a vention on the streets would be unsafe. But the union representa- mayor who they believed had repeatedly undermined them. This tives were as much following their members as leading them. unanimity signaled yet again how out of touch de Blasio’s admin- The funerals for officers ramos and Liu produced another istration was with cop culture. City Hall, saturated with identity public-relations fiasco for the mayor. Thousands of officers in the politics, had assumed that minority officers would support the streets for the ramos funeral, the first held, turned their backs to mayor’s policies. It turns out that most cops identify more with the video screens during de Blasio’s eulogy. The press usually their badge than with the presumed dictates of skin color. Says a inflates protest numbers; in this case it reported a few hundred newly retired captain: “At least 95 percent of the New York City turned backs, whereas eyewitnesses at the scene put the number cops that I know, regardless of ethnicity, despise the mayor.” in the thousands. “I don’t know a single cop who didn’t turn his Officers were still putting their lives on the line for felonies, back,” says a commander. however. On January 5, a call came out over the police radio After the ramos funeral, Bratton took a risk and circulated a about an armed robbery in progress at a bodega in the South memo urging officers not to repeat their protest at Liu’s funeral. Bronx. Five plainclothes cops from the local precinct who had Thousands of cops turned their backs anyway, infuriating the already ended their tour of duty sped to the scene to apprehend mayor and his commissioner. At a press conference on January 5, the assailants. One of the robbers, who had posted anti-police de Blasio complained: “I can’t understand why someone would diatribes online, opened fire at the officers and shot two of them do something like that in a context like that. I think they were disin the back and chest before hijacking a getaway car at gunpoint. respectful to the families who had lost a loved one and disre- This time, the officers survived. spectful to the people in this city who honor the NYPD.” Bratton At first, Bratton sent conflicting messages about whether a denounced the “selfishness” of a “labor action being taken in the policing slowdown was in fact occurring. On January 8, how - middle of a funeral.” If you want to protest, he said, “come put on ever, he paid a visit to the department’s weekly Compstat your uniforms and demonstrate outside City Hall.” meeting, the revolutionary crime-analysis gathering that was If de Blasio and Bratton were angry, the New York Times pioneered during Bratton’s first tour as NYPD commissioner in was positively apoplectic. “Mr. de Blasio isn’t going to say it,” an the mid 1990s. Bratton usually left the management of Compstat editorial thundered, “but somebody has to: With these acts of to the chief of department, so his appearance there signaled that passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York something important was afoot. He announced that he expected police officers, led by their union, are squandering the depart- precinct commanders to get summons and arrest numbers back ment’s credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard- up. New York’s two-decades-long crime conquest was in jeop- earned respect.” The Times’s sudden concern for preserving the ardy if the slowdown continued, he said, and he would not allow department’s “hard-earned respect” was hilarious, coming from the city to slide back to the bad old days. a paper that has spent the last 15 years lambasting the cops as racist oppressors of minority communities. ErgEANTS and lieutenants, who were ignoring the slow- The cops and many of their commanders weren’t buying the down at roll calls, would now be under pressure to induce charge that the back-turning “disrespected” the dead and their S enforcement with moneymaking overtime and other plum families. “Liu and ramos would have turned their backs as well,” assignments as a reward, while withholding such assignments asserts an official at One Police Plaza. “This was how we honored from officers with low activity numbers. This was another irony. ramos and Liu: by silently acknowledging that they lost their De Blasio and Bratton had come to office criticizing former lives for a mayor who has contempt for officers.” A cop from police commissioner ray Kelly for an allegedly numbers-driven Brownsville, Brooklyn, argues that Bratton lost credibility in the approach to enforcement, but now they were pushing for num- episode. “Bratton misfired with his request not to turn our backs,” bers (albeit from a lower base) themselves. he says. “The cops know that Bratton has to support de Blasio, but Summons and arrests started inching back up in mid January, where else will we be all together to show our feelings?” though to nowhere near pre-assassination numbers. Mis de - As the slowdown entered its second week, the New York Times meanor criminal summons were down “only” 70 percent in the called on the Justice Department to investigate the police for week of January 5 compared with the same week in 2014, as civil-rights violations. This was standard fare for the Times, but opposed to being down nearly 100 percent in the previous weeks. for one twist: The officers’ alleged civil-rights violations this time gun arrests were down “only” 21 percent. Even without the

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additional pressure from their supervisors, cops would likely pro bono by the tony law firm Paul, Weiss, challenged trespass have upped their activity on their own, driven by their sense of patrols in public housing. The plaintiffs argued preposterously duty. “Cops don’t want to keep doing this,” says an officer that the police singled out housing projects for enforcement assigned to headquarters. because their residents were black. In fact, the NYPD intensely but the tentative return toward the status quo ante means that patrols public housing because it is the most dangerous territory the rank and file has compromised in its feud with de blasio with- of the city, its stairwells and roofs the regular sites of rape, rob- out the mayor’s taking responsibility for his part in that feud. De bery, and shootings. blasio has not only refused to apologize for his remarks after the Eric garner grand-jury decision, he has portrayed himself as the aW-abIDINg residents of housing projects understand that victim in the dispute. He characterized the “blood on many the police are the only thing standing between them and hands” comment of union head Lynch as “totally inappropriate, L anarchy—something that Paul, Weiss partners, who live totally inaccurate, and totally unfair.” Lynch went too far in the in doorman-protected apartment buildings, apparently cannot heat of the moment, but the idea that de blasio’s son is at any sig- grasp. “People would be out of control otherwise. We need the nificant risk from the NYPD is also “totally” false. If Dante de police,” says geraldine Parker, the chairwoman of Staten Island’s blasio is at risk, it is from criminals, not the police. In 2013, crim- council of presidents of public-housing tenants. The proposed inals in New York City committed 1,103 shootings, wounding or settlement of the suit would place new burdens on the ability of killing 1,299 victims. NYPD officers, by contrast, shot 17 people officers to intervene against lawless behavior, all in the name of and killed eight, despite having been dispatched 80,000 times to fighting phantom racism within the NYPD. That bratton acced- investigate weapons reports and having encountered guns and ed to the settlement suggests that he has to carefully marshal his other weapons in over 30,000 arrests. political capital with the mayor. almost all those victims of police shootings had extensive and In the abstract, it would have been useful to demonstrate what serious criminal records; most had threatened the officer with a depoliced city—the advocates’ desideratum—looks like. deadly force. Whites were far more likely to be shot by the police Though the administration denied it, significant categories of than blacks when their crime rates are taken into account. Whites crime were already climbing. Shootings were up 82 percent in were 5 percent of all suspects shot by the police in 2013 though the week of January 5 though January 11, 2015, compared with they committed only 2 percent of the city’s shootings—a 250 per- the same week during the previous year. In the 28 days leading cent disparity. blacks were 75 percent of criminal shooters and 79 up to January 11, shootings were up 12 percent over the same percent of police-shooting victims—virtual parity. (To put those period in 2013–14. This 12 percent spike was an improvement crime figures in perspective: blacks make up 23 percent of the over the 28-day period ending January 4, when shootings were city’s population, and whites 35 percent.) Far from being the main up 17 percent over the previous year. threat faced by minority males, the police have been their savior. Crime fluctuations are natural, of course, but to put this recent Ten thousand more minority males would be dead today had the shooting spike into perspective: a 10 percent shooting increase in NYPD not brought New York’s homicide rate down 80 percent the first half of 2014, which many observers attributed to the fall- since the mid 1990s. The question “Is Dante safe?” has become a off of pedestrian stops following the litigation against the bitter joke among officers who would like nothing better than to NYPD’s stop-question-and-frisk policy, had sent the department be dispatched on a gun run and find a white perpetrator. into a paroxysm of response. It flooded shooting hot spots with De blasio has also continued to portray the NYPD as in need officers over the summer, at considerable overtime expense, and of civil-rights correction—from himself, of course. “In 2013, we managed to cap the outbreak by early fall. Naturally, the victims had a debate in this city about the direction we needed to go in. I of all those shootings were the very minorities whom the advo- believe . . . that what we had to do was build a different kind of cates purport to represent. approach [to policing], . . . so that was the way forward—that was In the real world, however, officers don’t enjoy the luxury of “I the right path, the fair path, the safe path for everyone involved,” told you so” moments. Though their protest was understandable, he said on January 5. Of course no city agency has been more it is a worrisome precedent when a paramilitary organization committed to “fairness” than the NYPD, which focuses relent- rebels against its civilian overseers. Ideally, and usually, cops per- lessly on how to bring to housing projects and other poor neigh- form their duty regardless of their attitudes toward the civilian borhoods the same levels of public safety that New York’s authority under which they operate. That this tradition of neu- wealthy take for granted. trality cracked in this instance shows how deeply de blasio vio- De blasio, however, still embraces the idea that the NYPD’s lated their trust. enforcement actions are driven by race, not crime. In an ill-timed The nightly protests against the NYPD have largely evaporat- slap to the department, he is settling the last outstanding lawsuit ed with the assassinations of officers Ramos and Liu, but the against the NYPD for its stop-question-and-frisk practices. dangerous myth of systemic police racism lives on. New Yorker Fighting the suit, as the previous mayoral administration did, not editor David Remnick, speaking on National Public Radio last only would have been the right thing to do legally, it would have week, compared the post-Ferguson movement black Lives been a perfect opportunity to show his support for the depart- Matter to the unity rally in Paris after the Islamist attacks on the ment. The presiding federal judge, Shira Scheindlin, ruled magazine Charlie Hebdo. a mayor of a city that has been res- against the department in the previous two stop-question-and- cued from catastrophic decline by the efforts of its police force frisk suits before being ignominiously removed from those cases might be expected to do everything he can to rebut such anti- for the appearance of judicial impropriety. Her participation in police nonsense. Though de blasio has modulated his rhetoric in the third case was ground enough for resistance, even had the recent days, he remains all too “comfortable” with his core lawsuit’s claims not been so ludicrous. The litigation, assisted worldview.

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less profit from production and households expect lower future incomes. As a result, they both borrow less and save more. Their Savers’ conduct pulls interest rates down. Interest rates, in other words, tend naturally to follow the health of the economy. A rapidly growing economy experiences rising interest rates, while a slowing one sees falling interest Real Problem rates. This tendency serves to reinforce the natural healing process of an economy. Rising interest rates provide a natural To help them, target nominal-spending growth check on an economy growing too fast, while falling interest rates provide a natural cushion for a weakening economy. BY RAMESH PONNURU To the extent the Federal Reserve is trying to influence interest & DAVID BECKWORTH rates—and here we will mostly set aside the questions of whether the Fed should conduct monetary policy that way or even exist in common complaint over the last six years has been that its current form—its objective should be to follow this natural the policies of the Federal Reserve are punishing interest-rate path. Holding interest rates above the natural rate savers. According to one line of criticism, the Fed has would be contractionary, holding them below it inflationary, and A engaged in a recklessly inflationary policy that has both should generally be avoided. eroded the value of people’s hard-earned savings. An overlap- During the 1970s, the Federal Reserve attempted to hold inter- ping group of critics say that retirees living on fixed incomes est rates persistently below the natural level and as a result gen- have been hit especially hard because the Fed’s “zero-interest- erated double-digit inflation. In the early 1980s, though, the Fed rate policy” denied them a solid return to savings they had ac - began hewing more closely to the natural rate. It has continued cumulated over a lifetime of toil. These low interest rates are that practice since then, but with notable and regrettable excep- sometimes held to have distorted investment patterns, too, dri- tions. ving life-insurance companies and pension funds to take on more During the early to mid 2000s, the economy experienced eco- risk as the only way to get a decent return. nomic gains from the opening of Asia and ongoing technological The inflation argument can be dispensed with easily. That por- innovations. As a result, productivity soared, firms became more tion of savings not stuffed under mattresses—that is, the vast bulk profitable, and households enjoyed higher incomes. Firms and of it—earns interest. market interest rates assume an expected households responded, as expected, by borrowing more and sav- rate of inflation. most savings can therefore be eroded only by ing less. The Fed, however, was concerned about low inflation unexpectedly high inflation. Yet inflation has been falling, in gen- and kept its interest-rate target at 1 percent. That decision was a eral, for several decades now, and the last six years have contin- key reason for the emergence of the credit an d housing boom ued that trend. during this time. The argument about interest rates has more merit. But the crit- But if judging Fed policy in relation to the natural rate of ics have cause and effect wrong, and therefore reach the wrong interest makes its conduct during those years look blamewor- conclusions about what the Fed should have done to help savers. thy, it also puts its conduct in subsequent years in perspective. It is of course true that, all else equal, savers are better off with The Great Recession of 2007–09 was the worst downturn since higher real interest rates. But the overriding reason that interest the Great Depression, and its severity implies that interest rates rates have been low in recent years is that the economy has been would have fallen significantly on their own. The Federal Re - weak. And to the extent the Fed has been responsible for that eco- serve’s low-interest-rate policies during the recession and the nomic weakness, its role points to a prescription for monetary anemic recovery may to a large extent have followed the natural policy that is very different from what most critics have in mind. rate down. It is even possible that the severity of the downturn The assumption that the Fed sets interest rates permeates most and the sluggish recovery were due, in important part, to interest discussions of monetary policy. But the Fed sets only one inter- rates’ not having been able to fall far enough to reach the natural est rate: the federal-funds rate. Through its target for that rate, and level. its purchases and sales, it influences other interest rates, especial- Economists speak of the “zero lower bound,” or ZLB, on inter- ly short-term ones. That influence is, however, constrained by est rates, referring to the fact that interest rates cannot fall much general economic conditions. below zero, because a negative rate means that putting savings in During an economic boom, firms find it profitable to expand banks or in bonds would actually cost the investor money com- production. They want to invest in tools, machines, and factories, pared with holding cash. In a severe recession, though, the natur- and they finance this investment by either borrowing or using al rate might be negative. For example, if the expected return on their own savings. In the first case they increase the demand for firm investment fell to minus 3 percent, then interest rates would credit, in the second they reduce the supply of savings, and in need to fall at least that low for firms to start investing again. both they therefore push interest rates upward. Households act But that cannot happen if firms can hold physical cash at 0 per- similarly in good times. Expecting higher future incomes, they cent. Similarly, if interest rates on checking, saving, and money- borrow more and save less, sending interest rates higher. market accounts fell to minus 3 percent, then households might During an economic bust the opposite happens. Firms expect decide to start spending again. Here too, households would opt to hold physical cash at 0 percent rather than face negative 3 per- Mr. Ponnuru is a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW. Mr. Beckworth, cent. formerly an economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is an assistant Were interest rates able to fall to negative 3 percent in this professor of economics at Western Kentucky University. example, not only would economic activity pick up, but the

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natural rate of interest would then start rising. Firms and house- induce a panic that raises the demand for money balances, low- holds observing the improved economic outlook would begin ers expectations of returns on investment, and in both ways to borrow more and save less. Interest rates, in turn, would be reduces the natural rate. These relationships can lead to seeming- pushed back up. Retirees’ interest income would be restored, and ly paradoxical situations—ones that can flummox the Fed itself. investment decision-making would return to normalcy. The Federal Reserve said that the objective of its several The ZLB prevents this market-clearing process from working rounds of quantitative easing (QE) was to lower interest rates. and helps explain the severity of the Great Recession and the As Figure 2 shows, however, interest rates on long-term U.S. slow recovery from it—as it helps explain the same phenomena Treasury bonds actually rose during the periods of QE. What in the 1930s. In both cases, the economy hit the ZLB, which appears to have happened is that the Fed, by signaling that it made ordinary recessions into severe ones. And the absence of would maintain a larger money supply in years to come, the normal adjustment mechanism meant that it took a long time increased confidence in the economy’s future health and raised for the natural rate to rise, which made for a sluggish recovery. the natural rate. Figure 1 shows an estimate, based on the health of the economy FIGURE 2 and the market’s risk premium, of the natural interest rate during the Great Recession. It indicates that the natural interest rate U.S. Long-Term Interest Rates during the crisis was indeed negative. 6 QE1 QE2 QE3 FIGURE 1 5

Natural versus Actual Federal-Funds Rate 4

8 t n e c

r 3

6 e

P QE Active Treasury 4 2 Purchases Long-Term 2 Treasury t 1 n Rate e Recession

c 0 r

e Actual Federal- P 0 -2 Funds Rate Estimated -4 Natural 1/1/20059/1/20055/1/20061/1/20079/1/20075/1/20081/1/20099/1/20095/1/20101/1/20119/1/20115/1/20121/1/20139/1/20135/1/20141/1/2015 Rate -6 NOTE: THE QE3 BAR EXCLUDES THE PERIOD OF QE3 TAPERING WHEN THE FED -8 BEGAN TO REDUCE ITS TREASURY PURCHASES.

19921993 1994 199519961997 1998 19992000 20012002 20032004 20052006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Year (First Quarter) The Fed could have avoided these mistakes, and done better by savers, had it targeted the growth of nominal spending. It would The ZLB lies beneath a common explanation of the recent cri- have announced that it intended to keep nominal spending—that sis: that people became over-indebted based on unrealistic ex - is, the total amount of dollars being spent each year on consump- pectations of future home prices, and then cut spending and tion and investment—growing at a rate of 4.5 percent or so, that borrowing dramatically when prices dropped, causing or deep- it would conduct sales and purchases to stick to that target, and ening the recession. That explanation is incomplete, because that overshooting the goal in one year would be corrected by under normal circumstances the flow of money from debtors to undershooting it the next (and vice versa). creditors would have made for increased spending (including A Fed so oriented would not have greeted the productivity investment) by the latter. The decline in debtor spending, there- gains of the early part of the century with lower interest rates. It fore, need not have been catastrophic. Banks, for example, might would have allowed inflation to fall, because it would not have have loaned out new funds and increased the money supply. been targeting it. If it had built up credibility about staying on its Instead, creditors, too, increased their demand for safe, liquid nominal-spending path and correcting for temporary errors, assets, including money balances. Total spending fell; the econo- panic would have been kept at bay in 2007–09 and the recession my contracted. If interest rates had turned sufficiently negative, would have been less severe. The natural rate would not have the demand for liquid assets would have fallen and the supply gone so negative for so long. Savers would have enjoyed higher increased to bring the market back to balance. The ZLB meant interest rates because the economy overall would have been that couldn’t happen. stronger. So savers do have a legitimate grievance with the Fed. But the F that were the end of the story, we could conclude that main line of criticism—that the Fed has hurt savers by keeping the Fed was blameless for the plight of savers. The “zero- the federal-funds rate low—misunderstands that grievance. If the I interest-rate policy” is a misnomer, because low interest Fed had kept the federal-funds rate higher over the last few years, rates were not the Fed’s policy so much as a condition forced on the effect would almost certainly have been to drive the natural it and everyone else by the economy. There is, however, an rate lower, leaving savers even worse off. important complication to the story: Fed policy, and expectations We appear now to be enjoying, at long last, a real recovery, about future Fed policy, can exert a powerful influence on the with interest rates expected to rise. The experience of the last natural rate. decade or so, though, suggests that the Federal Reserve needs to If a central bank creates the impression that it will keep the make a substantial change in the way it does business—for the money supply too low in coming years, for example, it can sake of savers, and everyone else.

3 8 | www.nationalreview.com FEBRUARY 9 , 2 0 1 5 lileks--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/20/2015 11:39 PM Page 39

Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Being Sad Together

wAS never Charlie. I support their right to stick out their Bastille and commentators would insist that “these are not tongue and blow raspberries; I do so from a safe distance French values.” with no thought of personal risk. My workplace does not Two: we must have a conversation about the limits of I have bullet holes in the wall, and I can’t draw. speech, and by “conversation” we mean “Shut up and take It’s a nice expression of solidarity, but when the French notes.” Liberals were keen on free speech for a while, since said, “we are all Americans” after 9/11, you suspected the the boring square wASP establishment had codes and laws sentiment would die on their lips if Bush proposed conscrip- that stifled expression and intellectual diversity. Everything tion of all eligible males to fight a new war. Monsieur ought to be free to be ridiculed, including the ridiculers. why, Chirac, names and addresses, if you don’t mind. Don’t worry, if you put Lenny Bruce on a crucifix in a jar of urine, that we’ll fly ’em here for training. The phrase meant, “we are would be the apex of the west right there. Especially if you sympathetic to your situation and can imagine how we’d feel pulled a string and he swore! Daring. if it happened to us, and we plan on crafting the proper Eventually the liberals were supplanted by the progres- response: gathering in a public space with candles and being sives, who wanted to replace the social order instead of sad together.” improve it. This meant splitting people into groups that sub- Being Sad Together is the west’s secret weapon, apparent- divided like amoebas, each with its own narrative of oppres- ly. The bad guys are supposed to look at sion and supply of self-replenishing rage, the masses crowded into the elegant pub - all united against the symbol of the human lic spaces of a European capital and feel species’ most powerful foe: some married shame, because feelings were hurt. It is guy who likes hamburgers and drives a more likely the terrorists look at these truck. You end up with more genders than events and think what a few stout fellows Heinz has varieties, and each of those sub- strapped with plastic explosives and ball categories can also choose to be offended bearings could do. on the basis of a remark about ethnicity, Being Sad Together is supposed to show national origin, creed, height, appearance, a nation’s indomitable will: we will not be eyeglass strength, preference for paper cowed by this heinous act for at least 48 over plastic, and so on. hours, after which we shall fracture along Thus: If you decline to hire someone the usual lines. Two points emerged as the who is one-twentieth Samoan, has ear- glow of Being Charlie faded and the candles guttered. To wit: lobes stretched to accommodate gauges the diameter of a pie onE: we must not give in to Islamophobia. The ever- plate, and wants you to install a “polygender safe space” in thoughtful overclass had the usual reaction: I may not agree the form of a third restroom, you are a hater, and speaking with your co-religionists’ stoning homosexuals and oppress- your opinion on the matter is hate speech, inasmuch as it ing women, but I will defend to the death your right not to be does not validate the other person’s self-conception. criticized by people with the wrong motivations. well, I’ll If, on the other hand, you put up a website devoted to fat defend it right up until the break, and then we have to go to a people who drive scooters around walmart with a JESuS IS story about how rich Mitt romney is. MY Co-PILoT bumper sticker on the back, you are hilarious. To say that Islam had any connection to the events was Since the purpose of speech has become the reinforcement regarded as a mark of simplistic thinking, like blaming of whatever orthodoxy has been minted over the weekend, germany if someone drove a Volkswagen into a crowd of speech that abrades the tender gums of the vanguard must not people. It was the act of extremists, a word used to cleave be afforded protection, and criminal penalties are necessary certain groups from the ideologies they wish to advance. to bind rude tongues. (“Extremists” on the right, of course, are expressing the fun- A more apt sign would have been JE SuIS CHArLIE. MAIS damental malevolence of anyone who is insufficiently statist . . . The “but” reminds us that life is a balancing act and or secular.) And why are these “extremists” not true rep - there are no absolutes. It is wrong to murder cartoonists, resentatives of the cause? Because they have “twisted” it. oui, BuT we must understand the historical cultural inter- Sometimes they espouse a “warped” view, as if interpreta- sectional orientalist nativist colonialist racist othering at tion of religious texts were like a record that plays another work, which is why we need the State to codify expression tune entirely if you store it too close to the radiator. After the so that all dialogue runs on rails toward the desired desti- next terror attack, an expert may insist that the attackers had nation. If some of those rails take a spur to the reeducation a “folded, spindled, and mutilated” version of whatever text camp and people learn that there are things that cannot was their motivation. be thought, let alone spoken, that’s the best kind of free Terrorists could guillotine cartoonists at the Place de la speech. GETTY / TonguE-BITE MACHT FrEI. Says so right over the camp Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. gates! Must be true. CARSTEN KOALL

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

which is when dr. Jill Biden nudged I woke up she was already dressed and me awake because someone was on heading to work so maybe later today the Today show she wanted me to see. I’ll grab her and download the whole Questions: Who is Wilford Brim - thing. ley to me? Why did the audience Questions: None. From the laugh at my naked body? Where did that come from? Not usually the feed- Dream Journal of back I get re: that. Wonder if Hillary Thursday: Clinton ever dreams about me. Some - Slept fitfully due to late-night bowl of Joseph Biden, thing too personal to ask? Maybe in Cherry Garcia. Must remember No a text or fB message? daIry after 6 p.M.!! Vice President of the felt hot, like I was burning up, and United States I felt the sheets over my face, so Tuesday: when I lifted them off I was in the Slept like a baby. all I can remember blazing sunshine and being dragged Monday: is that I was giving the dalai Lama a along the desert by some tough- tossed and turned. Hit snooze button backrub and he was really thankful. looking ISIS-type guys in those out- several times. Here is the dream I Woke up and smelled waffles. fits they wear, and I was being really remember: Questions: dalai Lama back was stoic and giving it all right back to I am standing on the set of what smooth and surprisingly muscular. them, I was reminding them that I looks like the tV show where they Investigate vegetarian diet for self? was Joe Biden, vice president of the sing—is it American Idol or The United States, and that this was a Voice or something—and I’m sweat- crime that america would avenge ing and panting and I think that I just Wednesday: with full fury, and I saw the small finished nailing a really great number Slept well, though dr. Jill Biden camera one of them was using and I because everyone is cheering for me. kicked furiously in her sleep. was, like, no way am I going to buck- I am doing that thing where you bask In the middle of the night felt the le under. But I was afraid and I want- in the applause and stretch your arms duvet cover wrapping itself around my ed to be very present to that fact, so I wide as if to funnel the applause into neck and jolted awake. dr. Jill Biden turned to the camera and said, “Hey, yourself, and I am suddenly aware of was fast asleep, so I woke her up, too, this is Joe Biden, vice president of the my nakedness. and without really and said, “Hey, dr. Jill Biden, I just United States, and I’m afraid right any warning the applause turns to had the weirdest dream, like I was now and I want to own that. I’m here laughter and I am being jeered at by choking to death.” “Will you stop it with these terrorist dudes and I’m strangers, except one of the strangers with your dreams, Joe?” she shouted telling you right now, this is scary is famous character actor the late at me. “don’t you realize that you’re a stuff.” the honesty of my words Wilford Brimley, who takes me in his national joke? that people laugh at changed the mood and when the guys arms and carries me offstage and you? you keep talking about how let their guard down I started to run. deposits me on what seems like a vel- you’re going to run for president and But I was running in sand so I didn’t vet sofa. He says, “you were the one it’s like you don’t get it, do you? that’s get far. But so were they, so they all along, Joe. you were the one. take never going to happen. you’ve turned didn’t either. When I woke up, dr. Jill what’s yours, Joe,” and then he kisses yourself into a clown. I can’t take this Biden was doing her p90X stuff. me on the lips and as I recoil a little anymore. I really can’t.” Which hurt Questions: Should I do p90X? bit I realize that it’s not Wilford me terribly and I was about to cry but Brimley at all but Hillary Clinton, for some reason I couldn’t, and then I and she’s in a strange kind of leather realized that I was still asleep and that Friday: jumpsuit, and she kisses me again and dr. Jill Biden was also still asleep! It fell asleep during david Muir’s aBC this time I don’t recoil and the kiss was still a dream!! even though it was World News Tonight. Woke up disori- turns passionate, but she sprouts so real it was like we were both awake. ented. fell asleep again and woke up wings and flies away like a wonderful So in my dream I went back to sleep six hours later to the sound of dr. Jill bird of prey, and I am naked and hear and promised myself when I woke up Biden snoring. the crowd roaring for me and I walk I’d share the story with dr. Jill Biden Questions: Will dr. Jill Biden wear back onstage, naked and unafraid, and we’d both laugh about it but when a Cpap machine?

4 0 | www.nationalreview.com FEBRUARY 9 , 2 0 1 5 books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/20/2015 8:39 PM Page 41 Books, Arts & Manners

(What would Boswell’s have been if he had before him, for new concubines to had despised Dr. Johnson?) So convinc- conquer. The Last ingly does roberts bring Napoleon to life The great man thought his life like a that by the end of the volume even a dyed- novel; and roberts’s book, though always Conquistador in-the-wool Anglophile will find the scrupulous in its scholarship, has a charm emperor’s procrastination on the morning and vividness more nearly akin to pica - MICHAEL KNOX BERAN of Waterloo maddening. If only he would resque romance than to sober history. And get on with it, and smash Wellesley before yet for all the exuberance of his narrative, the arrival of Blücher’s corps. roberts cannot resist the importunings of roberts does full justice to the sublime that modern bitch-goddess, utility. rather atavism Napoleon was, a child of the than concede that his romantic charlatan ancients born to mock the complacencies will never pass a greatest-good-for-the- of an age of prose and political economy. greatest-number test fairly administered, He sweeps the reader up into the life of he descends to special pleading. Napo - the last great romantic conquistador, as leon was at heart a philanthropist. The steeped in antiquity as Leopardi, and as “greatest and most lasting victories” of deeply enamored of its mysticisms of the victor of Marengo and Austerlitz, he fortune, destiny, and amor fati. “Oh, Na - writes, were “those of his institutions.” poleon,” Paoli said to him when he was Napoleon used his glory altruistically, to hardly more than a boy, “there is nothing build up the modern administrative state, Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts modern in you, you belong wholly to that useful and benevolent, as well as (Viking, 976 pp., $45) Plutarch!” rational and enlightened, form of civil For there were depths of archaicism, of polity. If the Grande Armée was glorious ever, probably, has there primitive wildness, in him, so much so in battle, it was, more importantly, an been a greater disproportion that, even before he attained substantial agent of Progress and enlightenment, between the splendor of the power, he scared people. “But when I was the instrument by which “modern ideas N career and the insipidness of a little recovered from the confusion of governance could be spread across the result. “I owe everything to my glory,” of admiration,” Mme. de Staël said of europe.” Napoleon said, and the glory was real. But her first sight of him, “a strongly marked Can it be? Is the hero who might have the time is long gone when glory could be sentiment of fear succeeded.” General said with Hölderlin, “I grew up in the its own justification, could be (as Caesar Augereau was inclined to despise the arms of the gods,” to be admired chiefly and Alexander supposed it to be) an end stripling officer sent to command the as the prophet of the fonctionnarisme of in itself. When confronted even with so Army of Italy. But after the first encounter the French administrative state? Is the glorious a trajectory as Bonaparte’s, we he admitted that the “little bastard of a eagle really to be ranged with such crows parsimonious moderns judge by results. general actually scares me.” Command as Jean Monnet, Alexandre Kojève, and What good, we ask, did it do? presence indeed, with a touch of Corsican their fellow projectors of a rationally In his new biography, Andrew roberts, brigandry in it. administered, centrally directed european one of the most accomplished historians “I am not a man like other men,” Na- superstate? Is the man who taught the at work today, does his best to show that poleon said. His lightning intuitions world that, after all these centuries, Cae - the glory of the would-be conqueror of the on the battlefield set him apart, as did sar and Alexander had a successor, to world was preeminently useful. That he his feats of will—in February 1815 he find his ultimate resting place not in the fails to prove his case does not in the least escaped from elba with no force but that Invalides but among the patron saints of detract from the quality of a book that is— of his own character, and France fell a the paper-pushers of Brussels? let it be said at once—magnificent. rob - second time at his feet. The mortal man roberts portrays Napoleon as a knight erts writes about Napoleon for the same seemed simultaneously to live on a plane errant of enlightenment, chivalrously reason that the most devoted of the of timeless myth. “I love power,” he said. seeking to preserve the ideals of the Napoleonic marshals served him, from “But I love it as an artist. . . . I love it as a philosophes from destruction at the hands the pure pleasure of being in touch with musician loves his violin, for the tones, of reactionary cabals in Prussia, Austria, greatness. The book is a labor of love, as chords, and harmonies he can get from it.” and Germany. But this is mostly fantasy: great biographies very nearly always are. He claimed that he had but “one passion, The struggle between Napoleon and Czar one mistress, and that is France. I sleep Alexander was in fact a struggle of rival Mr. Beran, a lawyer and a contributing editor of with her. She has never been false to me. despotisms. Napoleon clothed his ascen- City Journal, is the author of, among other books, She lavishes her blood and treasures on dancy in the language of enlightenment; Forge of Empires, 1861–1871: Three me; if I need 500,000 men, she gives them the romanovs, like the Habsburgs, Revolutionary Statesmen and the World to me.” Nevertheless, after he had bent clothed theirs in the language of religion They Made. her to his will, he hankered, as Alexander and legitimacy. “I know well that nowa-

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS days it requires a rod of iron to rule men,” see the nation of shopkeepers dismantle parte’s enlightened statesmanship was of he told the English officer Sir Henry his empire. But he could hardly adopt the the surface: His soul was that of a roman- Keating on St. Helena, “but it must be English system as a model for France, as tic irrationalist. He was, says de Pradt, gilded, and we must make them believe Tocqueville and Guizot would have liked who served him in various secretarial when we strike them that they direct the to do: It would have obliged him to re - and diplomatic capacities, “all illusion, blow themselves. It is necessary always to linquish his mastery. His reluctance to as one cannot fail to be when one is all talk of liberty, equality, justice, and disin- do this explains why he advocated the imagination. Whoever has watched his terestedness, and never grant any liberty coercive policies of the Continental course has noticed his creating for him- whatever. No change of system is re - Enlightenment rather than the liberating self an imaginary Spain, an imaginary quired, but only a change of language.” ones of the Anglo-Scottish one. Catholicism, an imaginary England, an Certain elements of the Napoleonic Napoleon was the first great nationalist imaginary financial state, an imaginary program—his support for meritocracy, statesman, but his nationalist policies noblesse, and still more an imaginary for example—are, to be sure, attractive to were as tainted by imperial cynicism as France.” The man who, in de Pradt’s the modern eye, but he had his reasons. his enlightened ones. In creating the words, so “poeticized,” so “Ossianized,” He rewarded merit lavishly, but always modern French nation, he continued the his life was a great dreamer—Emma with a view to the preservation of his own centralizing work of the Revolutionary Bovary, endowed with a world-historic mastery, in accordance with his vision of regimes, which had, Tocqueville said, efficacy of will. a Europe under “one Head—an Emperor built up “a central authority with powers He pushed his mastery all the way to whose subalterns should be kings, who wider, stricter, and more absolute than Moscow before Fortune, that fickle should distribute kingdoms among his those which any French King had ever strumpet, turned against him. The specta- lieutenants, making of one, the King of wielded.” The provinces, Balzac wrote, cle is as fascinating to study through the Italy, giving Bavaria to another, raising a became as “stale as stagnant water”; only medium of Roberts’s graceful prose as it third to be Landamman of Switzerland, the capital mattered. In contrast to the would have been harrowing to experience and a fourth to be Stadtholder of Holland, American Founders, whose federal sys- firsthand. “Soldiers,” Napoleon says at while all of them should hold places in tem was intended to prevent the ag- one point to his grenadiers, “I need your the Imperial Household, with titles of grandizement of a national metropolis, lives, and you owe them to me.” Such Grand Cup-Bearer, Grand Butler, Grand Na poleon made France even more sub- words cannot be squared with a utilitarian Equerry, Grand Huntsman, etc.” servient to Paris than it had been before, or even a humane morality; still there was Indeed it is the superficial attractive- and would have made the rest of Europe grandeur in the man, and never more so ness of the Napoleonic ideal of enlight- no less so had not England and her allies than when his star began to wane. “Like ened dictatorship that has made it so stopped him. a Shakespearian tragic hero,” Roberts much more dangerous than the obscur- The man was morally a mistake, but writes of the emperor in the aftermath of antist autocracies of kaiser and czar. The his story is enchanting. Roberts’s skill - Borodino, he “chose the fatal path despite theoretical basis of the Russian and fully contrived narrative allows the reader others being available.” All in all, this German empires—the divine right of to revel in it. I came away from the book book is a masterly revelation of an extra- monarchs—was archaic even in 1815 more convinced than ever that Bona - ordinary fate. and is now quite dead. But the presump- tion and conceit of the enlightened ad - ministrative state is very much alive. CRITIC “The divine right of kings,” Disraeli wrote in 1870, “may have been a plea The black-capped skull obliviously alert for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of (My stare had not yet caught its yellow eye), government is the keystone of human His head jerked left then right. progress.” He might have been speaking Between each stab: the hooked neb, pricking at for many of our leaders today. Kojève thought Napoleon a model ty - An uptur ned breast, its puff of white rant, but model or not, he was, from first In full surrender to the sky. to last, inclined to tyranny. It is notable Two talons clamped it to the garden dirt. that, in his long love-hate relationship To right and left the raptor spat with England, he showed (whenever he was not condemning perfidious Albion) Out tufts of what it would not eat. Each feather- a shrewd perception of the sources of Bit flew sideways to the grizzled snow English greatness. Her hodgepodge of tra- Not half through March’s thaw. ditional institutions, her slovenly admin- All this is what I saw from where I stood istrative habits, her subordination of civil Behind my kitchen window: claw functionaries to the common and the And bill-hook putting on a show Parliament-made law, her press freedoms, That tied me to them on a weightless tether her weakness for merchants, her antipathy And dared me to pronounce it good. to mandarins—Napoleon saw that at some level it worked, and indeed lived to —LEN KRISAK

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career was consumed with get-rich-quick Custis died in 1857, leaving an estate schemes, which he pursued to the point entangled in a self-contradictory will. He Calls of of mania. As soon as one failed, he owned almost 200 slaves, descendants of plunged into another. When Robert was the slaves of Martha’s first husband Duty only six years old, Harry left the country (George Washington had freed his slaves for the West Indies in a vain effort to in his will, but could not free his wife’s). RICHARD BROOKHISER recoup his failing health; the son never Custis directed that they be freed no later saw his father again. Harry not only left than five years after his death, and he his family poor, he stuck Robert with the named Lee his executor. But the estate role of surrogate husband, caring for his could pay off its debts and legacies only valetudinarian mother. Harry was in - if the slaves worked hard for five years, if termittently mindful of his personal fail- not longer. Lee took a leave of absence ings; his only remedy was to hold up “the from the Army to try to untangle the great Washington” as an example to his Custis mess; the slaves were finally freed, son. by order of a Virginia court, in December Lee got another pipeline of Washing - 1862, three days before the Emancipation toniana when, age 24, he married Mary Proclamation. Custis, daughter of George Washington Lee was summoned back to duty in Parke Custis. G. W. P. Custis was the 1859 to subdue John Brown’s raid on The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. grandson of Martha Washington, by her Harpers Ferry. Brown and his abolition- Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed first marriage, and he had been raised at ists seized the federal armory and Lewis American History, by Jonathan Horn Mount Vernon. He was thus the step- Washington, a great-grandnephew of (Scribner, 384 pp., $28) grandchild, really the adopted son, of the George, who lived in the neighborhood. Father of His Country, and he never let Lee overpowered Brown, freed his hos - HILE writing a book about the country forget it. The Mount Vernon tages, and provided security at his execu- Abraham Lincoln, I natu- estate stayed in the Washington family tion. rally thought of Robert E. after George died, but G. W. P. Custis Rebellion crept up on Lee slowly but W Lee. Not often, for I was took a trove of letters, paintings, and heir- inexorably. He was on duty in Texas as determined to avoid that great pitfall of looms to a new estate, just up the Poto - the country began falling apart, and was Civil War historiography, battle porn. Yet mac, called Arlington. He spent his life as irked by the swaggering of secessionist there, across enemy lines, was that other a docent of his relics and a curator of his Texas Rangers. His wife sent him a biog- famous bearded face: handsome and memories, recalling Washington in ora- raphy of George Washington. “How his well-groomed, not angular and scruffy, tions and essays. His daughter Mary was spirit would be grieved could he see the but dyed, like the president’s, with mel - not rich in money (G. W. P. Custis was not wreck of his mighty labours,” Lee wrote ancholy. Well might Lee be melancholy, a provident man), but as far as prestige back. The Lincoln administration wanted for though he had all the virtues, yet at the was concerned, Robert had married a Lee to take command of the Union Army crisis of his and the nation’s life he made millionairess. after the fall of Fort Sumter (Winfield all the wrong choices. What of the man at the confluence of Scott was still the nation’s top general, Jonathan Horn’s fascinating book these two rivers of influence? Robert’s but at 75 years old and over 300 pounds looks at Lee through the prism of yet goal in life was to do the right thing—to he was no longer fit for field command). another famous man, George Washing - live up to the best in his father, without “How can I draw my sword upon Virgin - ton. His subtle and sympathetic examina- repeating his mistakes. He was accepted ia, my native State?” Lee answered. Scott tion of the Washington–Lee connection at West Point and began a military told him, “You have made the greatest helps us understand the Lee question. career, concentrating on engineering. He mistake of your life.” Lee’s family was famous in its own was self-possessed and self-contained; So why did Lee make it? Horn sees it right. Two Lees signed the Declaration of the nickname “Marble Model” was be - as the culmination of a life of dutiful self- Independence. Their cousin and Robert’s stowed on him by cadets when he briefly denial. “At this critical juncture,” Horn father, Henry Lee III (better known as returned to West Point as a supervisor. writes, “Lee surrendered to events. He Harry Lee), was a gallant cavalry officer He found his true talent in the Mexican could not have his own way. So he would in the Revolution. Harry was the first War, on Winfield Scott’s brilliant, hella- have Virginia’s way.” Horn’s textured conduit of the Washington myth in Rob - cious drive from Vera Cruz to Mexico portrait suggests another possible motive, ert’s life, for he had been one of the many City. Lee found routes around the enemy’s though Horn himself does not say so: protégés that the great man had spotted flanks; Scott hailed his scouting as “the After all Lee’s services, personal and pro- and nurtured, along with Hamilton and greatest feat of physical and moral cour - fessional, to the Army, to crazy and feck- Lafayette. When Washington died, it was age” of the campaign. G. W. P. Custis less relatives, to a crushing moral and Harry Lee who called him “first in war, showed his pride in his son-in-law by familial inheritance, maybe he welcomed first in peace, first in the hearts of his giving him one of George Washington’s some destruction. He was certainly good countrymen.” swords. at it. “It is well this is so terrible!” he re- But the Lees also had a crazy streak, Two special tasks faced Lee in the late marked at the Battle of Fredericksburg, well represented in Harry. His post-war 1850s, both Washington-related. G. W. P. as his men repulsed six suicidal Union

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day #4 on THE Nr 2015 ALASKA SUMMER Cruise

-Well, after four nights on the Westerdam, you wouldn’t have known that Mary and I once thought we “weren’t cruisers.” Good thing Jane and Mike convinced us to really check out those NR magazine cruise ads we’d looked at for years. They always sounded like fun. So, since we’d always wanted to go to Alaska, we figured, let’s do it. Did we ever make the right decision! This voy- age is a BLAST--everything my pals said it would be, and more. Take the ship: It’s beautiful. The cabins: beautiful. The food: delicious (on Sunday we dined at the Pinnacle Grill--the osso buco was off the charts). The public spaces: beautiful. We thought, let’s live--how about a couples’ massage? Wow! The Greehouse Spa was great! Make new friends? We’ve made a bunch, including some of the NR speakers. Find quiet places? There are plenty, so you can read, write, nap ... draw! When we embarked Mary handed me a pen- cil and this notebook and gave me that look. So yesterday I took it into Juneau, saw this totem pole, parked myself in front of it and began drawing for the first time in years. It felt wonderful: I think I’ve still got it!) Morning PANEL Every “panel” is an exclusive and intimate 2 1/2-hour session that kicks off with a fascinating one-on-one interview. This morning’s began with Jay Nordlinger quizzing Pat Caddell about the intricacies of polling and how Democrats play political hardball. It was fascinating, and Jay’s way of getting to the heart of any matter is a sight to see. After a break there was an hour-plus panel with Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, Kevin Hassett, and Ramesh Ponnuru--yep, all of them--analyzing the state of the economy. One was better than the other. And we watched it sitting next to Governor Sununu and his wife (we started chatting afterwards about New Hampshire and Mary’s hometown, and made a lunch date for tomorrow with our new pals, “John” and “Nancy”).

SCENIC CRUising We sailed Glacier Bay today, so after the panel we headed to the Promenade Deck to watch the glaciers “calving.” Stunning. But that wasn’t the half of it: a bunch (“It’s a pod, you goof” Mary just said) of whales out a ways was jumping around--I can’t believe I got a picture of it! All of it is staggering to this big-city boy. Next to us while all this was going on were Charlie Cooke and Kathryn Jean two page alaska 2015 cruise new format_no corner:Panama cruise.qxd 1/20/2015 3:13 PM Page 2

Lopez--gosh we had a great talk about the 2016 elections, the EU, the Pope, and even roller coasters. Well, we ended up having lunch with them, and Reihan Salam joined us (the dude is smart! ). You see the ads, you wonder, because we sure did--are these speakers really going to be on the cruise? Are Katie Pavlich and Jonah (got him to sign my Liberal Fascism the first night!) and Yuval Levin and Rich, Ramesh, Eliana and the rest going to be on the ship? Well, they are! And they’re accessible, inviting, fun, friendly. AfternoonPANeL Where to start? Pete Hegseth, Michele Bachmann, and John Hillen made mince- meat of Obama’s national security and defense policies. They were brilliant--what a unique chance this was to hear smart people. And that came after a kick-off interview of Andrew Klavan by John Miller. Drew’s take on the culture and on liberals, progressives, and occupiers was funny and brilliant. I wish he had another hour to talk. That was just one of eight sessions happening this week. When it ended I turned to say something to Mary, and she had such a look of contentment. I don’t think she ever looked so beautiful. This cruise really is proving to be what it claimed: a true once-in-a-lifetime experience.

eVeNINGcocktailParty Great event! Out by the pool hundreds of NR guests were enjoying each others’ company. We met up with Jane and Mike, and then several people just like us (Red State vote, Blue State address) joined in, and before you knew it a dozen of us were talking about the direction the conservative movement is taking and shared our local-level experiences. Then Jim Geraghty and Naomi Riley joined us. That was cool. It only ended when the steward came chiming his bells letting us know it was time for dinner.

LATe-Night“SMOKeR”Now this is the way to follow up a sumptuous meal: H. Upmann cigars and cognac on the back deck! James Lileks and Rich Lowry had a bunch of us in stitches with stories on covering some prominent politicians. What a way to end a phenomenal day. Tomorrow ... Sitka!

DON’TMISSNR’S2015ALASKACRuISe! SeATTLe,JuNeAu,KeTCHIKAN,SITKA,GLACIeRBAY,VICTORIA HOLLANDAMeRICALINe’S WeSTeRDAM . JuLY18-25,2015 WWW.NRCRuISe.COM .1.800.707.1634 books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/20/2015 8:39 PM Page 46

charges. “We should grow too fond of Horn does not touch on is Washington’s it.” political sophistication, and Lee’s lack Lee’s fellow Confederates hailed him of it. Washington collected and read An Odd as a second Washington throughout the American pamphlet literature for a Civil War. Lee sealed the connection by decade before the Revolution. He be- Couple for agreeing, after the war’s end, to become friended his neighbor, the planter/in - president of Washington College, an tellectual George Mason; in 1774 he The Ages institution in Lexington, Va., which had presented Mason’s Fairfax Resolves, an been the beneficiary of a bequest in early statement of America’s rights and JAMES ROSEN George Washington’s will. Lee himself grievances, to the Virginia Convention; hinted at his kinship in a post-war letter to and he served in the first and second one of his former generals. “True patrio- Continental Congresses. When he finally tism sometimes requires of men to act drew his sword, he knew what he was exactly contrary, at one period, to that doing and why. Robert E. Lee owned one which it does at another. . . . At one time of Washington’s swords, but he did what [Washington] fought against the French he was told. In noting this omission I do under Braddock, in the service of the not mean to take anything away from this

The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, by Stephen Hess (Brookings, 150 pp., $24)

T 10 A.M. on January 23, 1969—his third full day in office—President Richard A Nixon signed Executive Or - der 11452, to establish a new executive- branch agency called the “Urban Affairs Council” (UAC). With its interdepart- mental structure and centralized White House control of federal policy for Amer - ica’s struggling cities, then as now beset by decay and radicalism, the UAC was intended to replicate the primacy that the Robert E. Lee, March 1864 National Security Council and its chief King of Great Britain; at another, he splendid book. Horn’s story is fascinat- officer, Henry Kissinger, would enjoy fought with the French at Yorktown, un - ing, thought-provoking, and deeply sad. over U.S. foreign policy. To run the coun- der the order of the Continental Congress Union troops occupied the Arlington cil, the new president—a Republican of America, against him.” estate in the earliest days of the Civil War, from California elected with just 43 per- True enough, but this begs the ques- and the federal government seized it on cent of the vote and facing a Congress tion: Were the calls of true patriotism in the pretext that Lee had not paid taxes on with both houses, for the first time in 120 Washington’s and Lee’s lives the same, it; when relatives of his offered to pay the years, under opposition control—selected or different? Americans broke up the arrears on his behalf, tax commissioners as executive director a leading light of the British Empire because it was taking self- ruled that he would have to pay in person. opposition: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. government out of their hands. Rebels (The Supreme Court later obliged the Six-foot-five, silver-haired and chubby- broke up the American Republic because federal government to compensate Lee’s cheeked, given to bowties and circum - they wanted to take their slaves to Kansas heirs.) It became a cemetery for soldiers, locutory Irish wit, Moynihan was one of and Cuba. many of them killed by Lee’s men. The America’s most prominent public intel- Lee did not see it that way, but how most important Custis relics ended up at lectuals. From Hell’s Kitchen he had

JULIAN VANNERSON could he have? He was, like many a pro- Lee’s college, renamed, as soon as he risen to Harvard University: epicenter of / fessional military man, uninterested in died, Washington and Lee. Washington’s Nixon’s fear and loathing of the eastern politics. In normal times this is a good first portrait, by Charles Willson Peale, thing, but Lee, like Washington before hangs in the college chapel, to the left of Mr. Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent for him, lived in abnormal times. One great the stage. To the right hangs a portrait of Fox News and the author of The Strong Man: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS /

AP difference between the two men that Robert E. Lee. John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

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ction The Bent Pin Colle withering by florence king The new, complete, and unabridged collection of the popular slightsmonthly NR magazine column by America’s most revered misanthropic writer he hallmark of National Review is that it has been home to some of America’s very best writers, and few will argue that there are any of greater style, wit, and caustic wisdom than Florence King, whoseT beloved “second” column, “The Bent Pin,” graced the magazine in every other issue from 2007 to 2012 (her previous column, “The Misanthrope’s Corner,” held NR’s back page for a glorious decade). King fans (who isn’t?!) have so craved her timeless works that over the years NR has published two collections, STET, Damnit! and Deja Reviews. And now we’re delighted to announce a third treasure trove of unrivaled prose à la Florence—Withering Slights: The Bent Pin Collection, 2007 to 2012. On every page of this brand-new, handsome hardcover book is proof positive that in Miss King’s deft hand, the pen is mightier than any sword, and the pin of prose finds and pricks the many inanities bal- looning across the fruited plains and foggy moors—which is why you must get your first-edition copy of Withering Slights right now, hot off the press. The cost of if just $24.95, direct from (and only from) NR, happily shipped and handled at no cost to you. Admit again what you’ve admitted every time you’ve read a King column or review: that through the laughter you’ve chortled, “I wish I’d have said that.” Which is what you indeed will say, without end, when you climb the lofty heights of Withering Slights. Conservatives, curmudgeons, and anyone who thrills to superior writing will delight at this complete “Bent Pin” collection, a 200-proof, rip-roaring, bombs-away exposition of La Firenze at her very best. Brandishing sharp, crafted, tight prose that dazzles and endures, Miss King’s dead-on, no-punch-pulled take on the American scene and its many cultural peccadillos will elicit gasps and guffaws, head-shakes and table-slams, Heck-Yeahs and Damn-Straights (and maybe even a Darn-Tootin’). From her first “Bent Pin” column in 2007 (“Grosser and Grosser”) to her 2012 adios (“Something Ere the End”), and some five dozen more beauts between them (including clas- sics such as “A Broad at Home,” “Facial Politics,” “Softboiled Speech,” “The Defenestration of the Shmoo,” and “With Liberty and Pug Noses for All”), King holds nothing back, letting loose her pen on anyone and anything from atrocious trends (Neo- Cleavage!) to irksome types (Weeping Wardens, LibProgs, TempCons, Pixies, New Changers, and many more)—all of it refreshing and guffaw-inducing. And as ever, you’ll relish the THWACK! when Florence gets National Review w 215 Lexington Avenue w New York, NY w 10016 her grump on to land a two-by-four of contempt upside many a deserving noggin. Send me ______copies of Withering Slights: The Bent Pin Collection. My cost is $24.95 It’s beautiful, brand new, only $24.95, and each (shipping and handling included!). I enclose total payment of $______. Send to:

waiting for a place in your family library: Order Name Florence King’s Withering Slights: The Bent PAYMENT METHOD: Pin Collection, 2007 to 2012 today from NR. Address o Check enclosed (payable to National Review) o Bill my o MasterCard o Visa HOLY WORLD WIDE WEB! YOU CAN City State ZIP Acct. No. Expir. Date ORDER WITHERING SLIGHTS NOW e-mail: Signature AT STORE.NATIONALREVIEW.COM phone:

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS run itself domestically, that what a president was needed for was to manage foreign affairs. As he defied liberal friends who pleaded with him not to join the Nixon White House, what, exactly, can Moynihan have imagined he would accomplish there? Having waited almost 50 years to tell their story, Hess writes of the Nixon–Moynihan relationship in the present tense, a stylistic approach both admirably adventurous for an 82-year-old wonk emeritus and often gripping. Too frequently, however, the author deviates from this effective you-are-there ap - proach to indulge in frivolous asides. (The most egregious of these is when Hess exults that the artist whose work he has chosen to hang on his White House office President-elect Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in December 1968 walls will also, one day, be favored by elite. He was also, worse still, a Kennedy with Earl Mazo, one of the earliest Nixon Michelle Obama.) Mostly, though, this is man. After JFK’s assassination, columnist biographies. On November 22, 1963, a brisk, lively read, a concise and shrewd- Mary McGrory had famously said to Nixon returned to New York from a ly observed portrait of an unlikely po - Moynihan, “We will never laugh again,” speaking engagement the day before litical alliance. Our 37th president, so prompting Moynihan to reply: “Heavens, in—of all places—Dallas and had Hess complex and contradictory, familiar yet Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll meet him at his Fifth Avenue apartment; elusive, is illuminated anew. never be young again.” That same gift the latter watched as Nixon, visibly shak- It is not only Nixon’s selection of Moy - with words had first catapulted Moynihan en, telephoned J. Edgar Hoover to ask the nihan that amazes even today, but the to notoriety in 1965, when he was assis- FBI director who was responsible for the broad sway that the urbane urbanologist tant secretary of labor and published a assassination. As with many of his other came to exert over the president’s intel- white paper entitled “The Negro Family: aides, Nixon would cycle through periods lectual imagination and domestic policy. The Case for National Action.” A product of esteem for and discontent with Hess, Even before Inauguration Day, Moynihan of the Department of Labor’s Office of with H. R. Haldeman’s yellow-pad notes began bombarding RN with chatty and Policy Planning and Research—the mir- recording numerous instances in which discursive memos, invariably literary in roring of foreign-policy architecture by the president wondered aloud whether tone, often focused on topics far from the domestic agencies was already in vogue Hess was a “viper in our midst” who president’s typical purview; the adviser in LBJ’s time—the “Moynihan report” should be fired or wiretapped. (Full dis- also advanced his cause by excelling, in pointedly dissected the “tangle of pathol- closure: Steve Hess has been a friend dreary or contentious meetings, at the ogy” afflicting black America. since college days, when I took a course timely, face-saving quip. “Pat proves to be “Of all the odd couples in American he taught; and, like every other reporter in an amazingly agile bureaucratic player,” public life,” writes Stephen Hess, “were Washington, where Hess has spent 40 writes Hess: they not the oddest?” Hess should know: years at the Brookings Institution, I’ve He was Moynihan’s deputy and confidant quoted him many times. As he notes in his When Pat is invited into Nixon’s exclu- when the flamboyant sociologist-cum- acknowledgments section, I aided his sionary world he charms and entertains policymaker took up residence in the research for this book by supplying docu- the president. . . . Pat is writing to Nixon West Wing, which was run, with dour ments I had reviewed for my book on intellectual-to-intellectual, without a bit of patronizing. Nixon has never been efficiency, by H. R. Haldeman and John Watergate. He appeared on my online treated this way before. He loves it! Now Ehrlichman. (These were the days before program, The Foxhole, to promote the that he is finally to be president, Nixon Watergate, before Nixon attained his book, in December; my criticisms here seems to have room for knowledge other unique coloration in American history, will dispel any intimations of favoritism.) than what he has needed to get there. and when he was seen in simpler terms: Contributing to the oddness of the as a conventional chief executive and Moynihan appointment was Nixon’s al - Soon the leader of the free world is

ARCHIVE VIAcommander-in-chief, GETTY loved or hated but most total lack of interest in domestic pol- requesting—and determinedly plowing not disgraced, judged on his policies and icy. In the final, bitter days of the 1962 through—Moynihan’s annotated list of not through the dark lens of scandal.) California gubernatorial race, already his top ten favorite political biographies. Unlike Moynihan, Stephen Hess had a knowing he had lost, RN exhaled in pri- The foil in this narrative is Arthur Burns, history with Nixon. After serving on the vate to Hess, his speechwriter: “At least the conservative economist who first NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / staff of President Eisenhower, Hess wrote I’ll never have to talk about crap like befriended Nixon in the Eisenhower era, speeches and other material for Nixon in dope addiction again.” Nixon later told and whose personal diary, unpublished

JOHN DUPREY his “wilderness years” and co-authored, Theodore H. White that America could until 2010, records growing frustration

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across the first Nixon term. “Moynihan way to Keynesianism and leviathan-state seems to think that whatever displeases largesse. Nixon by June 1971 had experi- Music liberals is a disaster,” Burns writes. “Have enced an epiphany of sorts, complaining I misjudged Nixon? Does he have real to Haldeman, as captured in the ubiqui- convictions?” Nixon repays his old friend tous yellow pads, about the policy direc- Bacon when the opportunity presents itself, by tion in which ehrlichman and Moynihan naming Burns chairman of the Federal had steered him: Bits Reserve. JAY NORDLINGER Moynihan’s largest contribution to the we’re screwing up so many things have to be tougher on domestic [policy] domestic policy of the Nixon adminis - VeR a recent holiday, I was P. is not lib — is conserve. tration, adopted over Burns’s objections, all our programs are wrong — gain noth- rummaging through my mo - was a proposal for a negative income tax, ing & wrong for country ther’s basement. I found a constructed as a guaranteed income for O book called “Notes on the poor households. The thinking was that Haldeman would further record Nix - Piano,” by ernst Bacon. I had enjoyed it the federal government should get out of on’s lament that he had been “derelict in very much when I was a kid. When I the business of providing services, an not moving on Grt. Society programs” returned to work, I found in the mail a activity in which its performance record and the president’s instruction to aides to new compact disc called “ernst Bacon: was already discredited, and just do what “go for increases in military budget . . . The Complete Works for Solo Guitar.” it does best: cut checks. Although this and squeeze the Great Society programs”: I would not contend that America or idea—embodied in the Family Assistance the world is in a Bacon moment. But I’m Plan—died in Senate committee in 1970, need to move in one, personally. And others may want ahead on gov’t wide [effort] it spawned an early conservative suspi- get a hold of big government to know about Bacon, or get reacquaint- cion of Nixon, which only solidified the ed with him. following year, when he en acted wage By then, however, circumstances had He was a composer and writer, as you and price controls to combat runaway conspired to fuse the president’s foreign- have gathered. He was also a pianist and inflation. policy bent with his taste, nourished in conductor. Bacon was born in Chicago in Quoting from Moynihan’s memos and the Alger Hiss case a quarter-century ear- 1898. (McKinley was in his first term.) Nixon’s replies, formal messages to lier, for intelligence intrigue. June 1971 His father was an American doctor; his Congress, and other contemporaneous brought Daniel ellsberg and the Pentagon mother was an Austrian musician. ernst documents, Hess shows how the presi- Papers; July, the publication, also in the was well positioned to be what he would dent—consumed with Vietnam, Soviet New York Times, of the United States’ fall- become: an American composer rooted diplomacy, and China, and determined to back negotiating posture in the SALT in the traditions of the Old World. harvest what little capital he had with an talks; October, an internal power struggle He went to three of our best uni - unfriendly Congress—embraced, seem- at the FBI that threatened to disclose the ver sities: Northwestern, Chicago, and ingly by default, the weltanschauung of wiretaps that had been placed on NSC Berkeley. He also studied in Vienna with his liberal predecessors and the Great staffers and newsmen in 1969; December, the composer Karl Weigl. early on, he Society edifice he inherited. At the UAC’s the internal revelation—determinedly decided he would not be a merely theo- first meeting, Nixon declared that devel- buried, for the moment, by Nixon and retical or academic composer. He would oping a coherent federal policy for cities Attorney General John Mitchell—that the make real music, fed by a muse, as well offered no guarantee of success in urban joint chiefs of staff had carried out an elab- as a brain. affairs. “But,” he added, “it is a precondi- orate espionage operation against Nixon And he would be an American com- tion of success.” The true conservative and Kissinger, stealing 5,000 classified poser, star-spangled. He loved America: view would have held that the most fun- documents over 13 wartime months. its optimism, its youth, its possibilities. damental fact about urban blight—then All this, in turn, would fuse with Its freedom from cynicism, by contrast and now—is that the onus for redressing other random particles—in the form of with europe. He loved its music and it should reside principally with the local G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, and other poetry and landscape. He was a big out- communities themselves. Nowhere does forgotten figures—to form the Watergate doorsman, doing a lot of hiking and Hess pause to examine, let alone decon- scandal, and Nixon’s singular abdication climb ing. struct, the assumption that animated his of the Oval Office. Reforming his domes- Among his friends was Ansel Adams, mentor’s work: namely, that the problems tic policy, even after the historic re - the photographer, who helped immortal- of “the cities,” which loomed so large in election landslide of 1972, would be ize the West. Other friends were Carl the late 1960s and early ’70s, were chiefly something President Nixon never got Sandburg and Thornton Wilder. These the responsibility of the federal govern- around to tackling. The Haldeman notes were once big, big names. Now they have ment to fix. tantalize with the suggestion that the sec- an air of quaintness about them, which is Only after Moynihan departed the ond term, free of Watergate, might have a shame. They were not quaint, they were White House, returning briefly to Harvard seen a serious effort in that direction; The very good, even formidable. before Nixon named him U.S. ambas- Professor and the President establishes, Bacon wrote all sorts of music, espe- sador to India, did the president shake with scholarly care and a memoirist’s cially songs: more than 250 of those. off the sorcerer’s spell and question how flair, how long the road back would have He particularly liked to set poems of his California conservatism had given been. Dickinson and Whitman, those ultra-

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS American poets. Ansel Adams told and dynamics, in a spirit of zealous You can’t have classical-guitar music, by Bacon, “You are like the clear dawn didacticism or reform.” That is a very anyone, without a touch of the Spanish— wind in the midst of the foul smogs of Baconian sentence and sentiment. and Bacon wrote a piece called “Toro.” It contemporary cultural decay.” He can be fantastically quirky, or, bet- is meant to evoke bullfighting. Though Bacon worked at various institutions, as ter put, individualistic. He is also a sure the piece is obviously Spanish-inflected, a teacher and administrator. Among them puncturer of pretension. Consider this: it is not an exercise in imitation or cliché. were the San Francisco Conservatory, “It is only when music is personal that it It is essentially an American, Bacon-like Converse College (in Spartanburg, S.C.), becomes regional; only when regional, piece. and Syracuse University. He was married national; only when national, internation- Very Bacon-like is Just Wondering: an four times and had six children. He was al. An international music per se has the elegiac, wistful thing. And The Erie prolific in music, wives, children—and artistic attraction of Esperanto.” Canal swings nicely. It’s based on a song years. He died in 1990, just short of his Ever and always, he is the defender of from 1905, “Fifteen Miles on the Erie 92nd birthday. (The first George Bush was music, its champion. And, writer though Canal,” also known by other titles, such president.) he is, he knows that writing about music as “Low Bridge.” He could not only write music, he is a sharply limited activity. It is also, It is good to have these long-buried could write write: prose. In 1960, he pub- often, a fool’s errand. He re is a passage guitar pieces in the light of day. Also, lished Words on Music. Winthrop Sar - from the final pages of the book: “All there is something pure about music for a geant called it “by far the sanest book by words about music are, to the consecrat- single acoustic guitar. Such purity tends a composer that I have read recently.” ed writer, a kind of betrayal, whereby to focus the mind in a noisy world. That is an excellent word for Bacon, as a confidences are squandered to the care- As you can tell, I’m glad to have be- composer and writer: sane. (Sargeant, by less, and secrets revealed to the sacrile- come reacquainted with Ernst Bacon. A the way, was another big name who has gious. In the end, a man in music, as one cello piece by him is included on a CD largely been forgotten. He was a violinist in love, either lives it or talks about it; sel- called “Forgotten Americans.” There are who became one of the most important dom both.” a lot of those—forgotten Americans. arts writers in the country.) Bacon was 65 when he wrote Notes on There are forgotten people of all nation- Three years after Words on Music the Piano, and far from through: He had alities, of course. Not everyone can re - came Notes on the Piano. For once, a more than 25 years to go. But 65 years is main onstage. But fame, fashion, and punny title was a good one. The volume a long time, and the book feels like the durability can be mysterious things. is a compendium of notes about piano expression of a life’s wisdom, certainly Take Walter Piston—another Amer - music and piano playing. Bacon jots where the piano is concerned. I am re- ican composer, whose dates are similar observations, aperçus, impromptus. If we minded of another volume, approxi - to Bacon’s (1894 to 1976). He is better really wanted to get punny, we could re - mately the same size: Harvey Penick’s known than Bacon. But his music still title the book “Bacon Bits.” Little Red Book. Penick was a great golf gathers dust. He wrote eight symphonies, The book has an organization. For teacher, and he published this book in and at least one of them, the Fourth, example, the first section is called “The 1992, when he was 88. It became the is one of my favorite American sym- Performer,” and it has three sub-sections: best-selling sports book of all time. phonies. Or 20th-century symphonies. “Of Interpretation,” “Of Melody,” and Did I mention a guitar CD? I did. Or, hell, symphonies. Do you know how “Of Form and Style.” But the organiza- Bacon published just one piece for guitar, many times I have heard a Piston sym- tion is loose. In his introduction, Bacon Parting (1968). How can you get a CD phony, in 20 years as a music critic, all writes, “This is a book to be nibbled. out of this little five-minute piece? You but three of them in New York? Zero. I Open it wherever you like, for its thought can’t—but a guitarist, Bradley Colten, have never heard a Piston symphony live is not successive nor cumulative. Its last discovered a cache of guitar manuscripts in concert, ever. chapter could as well be its first.” by Bacon. The composer wrote most of Piston was a “neo-Classicist” or “neo- Bacon has the ability to write breezy, these pieces, I gather, for his son Joseph. Romantic,” and there has long been a confident statements without sound - And now Colten has recorded them, bias against that type. But can that alone ing pat. For instance, “The whole rule along with Parting, for the Azica label. explain the neglect? I don’t think so. Part of rubato is grace.” (“Rubato” means In general, the pieces are both natural of it is mere inattention or unawareness, license with time, roughly speaking.) He and learned. They seem almost casual, or the natural and understandable onward also writes, “If there is one trait common but there is serious craft behind them. rush of the world. to all great interpreters, it is their capaci- They are distinctly American—redolent Anyway, I have now written about ty for intensification.” He then goes on to of hymns, folk tunes, and other markers. Bacon, and I could do the same for his discuss the nature, or natures, of inten - Charles Ives would have enjoyed them, I fellow 20th-century Americans, includ- sity. think. Often these pieces are tinged with ing Piston, Norman Dello Joio, Peter Sometimes he quotes others—as in, nostalgia. Whether Bacon himself would Mennin (born “Mennini”), and Vincent “Dullness, remarked Liszt, is the cardinal have seen it that way, I’m not sure. Persichetti (who kept his Italian name sin of performance.” The author contin- A piece called “Quiet Hallelujah” is and wrote me, when I was a boy, a letter). ues, “Nothing contributes to this more well titled. Some of the other pieces here But I have not come across them in my than the ostentation of learning, whereby could bear that title. They are casually mother’s basement lately. And they do a player will emphasize and sometimes sacred. Coon Hollow is also well titled: not have unpublished guitar pieces lying exaggerate structural details, phrasings It is bluegrassy, positively down-home. around, to my knowledge.

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Into this precarious domestic situation and hat hanging in a police department to Film comes—or, probably more aptly, out of it which she pays a fruitless visit—and at emerges—a strange red pop-up book various points things that we assume are called “Mr. Babadook,” which Samuel really happening turn out to be part of her Things That plucks off their bookshelf at bedtime and dreaming state, conjured up while she his frazzled mother reads. The pop-ups dozes in front of silent-era horror movies Go Bump are black-and-white, chalk-and-charcoal, on her flickering TV. with images that look vaguely Edward But if the Babadook is, like many a pol- ROSS DOUTHAT Gorey–ish, and they introduce a top- tergeist, some kind of psychological pro- hatted creature who first peeps out from jection or emanation, he isn’t the work of orror movies are rarely cri - behind a door, his claw waving “Hello,” her own sleepless mind alone. It’s Samuel tical darlings, and horror then shakes the inside of a wardrobe (“a who sees him first, and the monster looms movies released during the rumbling sound then three sharp knocks up out of the interplay between mother H height of prestige-movie sea- . . . that’s when you’ll know that he’s and child: They’re each the monster to the son even less. But the Australian import around”) that looks a great deal like the other, so he’s in the words and looks of The Babadook has worked its way under one in their bedroom, and then . . . well, both of them, which is why neither one the skin of a great many reviewers, and suffice it to say that things get scary can deal with or get rid of him alone. even clawed its way onto a few critics’ enough that Samuel ends up caterwauling Wiseman has a great face for horror, year’s-best lists. As awards-season mo - and the book ends up torn up in the trash. and for this specific part: With bulging vies go, it’s true counterprogramming: Unfortunately (if predictably) that child-eyes, a huge white face, and a toothy Aussie-accented dialogue, no-name stars, low-tech scares, apolitical and intimate themes, and only two characters who really matter—well, two characters plus one uninvited guest. The characters are a mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), and her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who live together in a creaky, underpainted, down-at-the-heels house somewhere Down Under. They have, let’s say, some issues: Amelia’s husband was killed in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth, and it’s quite clear that almost seven years later she hasn’t come to terms with that catas - trophe. Their shadowy basement, where Sam uel isn’t supposed to play or even Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman in The Babadook tread, is a curated archive of her hus- doesn’t get rid of its protagonist. “If it’s in mouth, he’s all aching need and un - band’s things, and her life feels frozen a word, or it’s in a look,” the book informs avoidable reality, popping up like—well, into misery: once a writer, she now works its readers, “you can’t get rid of the Baba - like a horror-movie creature, whenever among the almost-dead at a nearby nurs- dook,” and sure enough it’s true: Soon he his mother thinks she’s got a moment’s ing home, and her social circle has dwin- has become the only monster that the boy peace. Meanwhile, Davis gives us a dled to her exasperated sister, who finds wants to talk about, and then he makes the female variation on what Jack Nicholson Amelia’s home too depressing even to leap into Amelia’s reality as well, announc- did in The Shining: the parent invaded and visit, and a friendly but Parkinson’s- ing his presence with knocks at the door, possessed, except that in her case the afflicted old woman who lives next door. rumblings in the night, and phone calls problem isn’t alcoholism but motherhood Her boy, not surprisingly, is not an in which his rasping voice says “Ba . . . Ba itself, the terrible grind of being alone easy child to love: He’s creative and . . . Dook” and nothing more. with a human being for whom you’re imaginative but also prone to violent act- How much Amelia’s reality corre- absolutely responsible but whom you ing out, often involving the makeshift sponds with actual reality is left mostly up simply can’t manage to control. weapons (darts, slingshot) he’s built for for grabs. She and her son are both deal- How highly you rate the movie will warring against various unseen mon- ing with insomnia already, and after he depend on what you think of the ending, sters. Soon after the movie begins—with has a particularly severe meltdown she which might be brilliant or might over- his seventh birthday looming—his weap - arm-twists the doctor into supplying her literalize the story’s psychological theme. on ry gets him into trouble (yet again, it with sedatives, which drops a further haze I’m still unsure which I think it is, still seems) at school, prompting a painful of unreality over their house. She sees turning the question over in my mind. But SMOKING GUN PRODUCTIONS / parent–teacher–headmaster conference things nobody else does—roaches crawl- I suppose that uncertainty is itself a vin - that ends with Amelia withdrawing him ing out of a hole in the kitchen wall, which dication of the movie’s promise, since it entirely, constricting their circle further closes up the instant a couple of bureau- means that I, too, can’t get rid of the

CAUSEWAY FILMS still. cratic visitors arrive; the Babadook’s coat Babadook.

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Happy Warrior BY DANIEL FOSTER The Vagina Ideologues

’d like to take a moment to talk with you about sex. decidedly odd it is that they bleat on, loudly and vulgarly and Particularly, I’d like to relay a bit of news about the from every possible perch, about how uptight we all are. “By vagina. Ah—that word, surely the most unlyric for that what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What I lyric organ; I promise I won’t use it again. led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, I bring it up only because of the bittersweet news out of to say it is something we silence?” How is it, Foucault might Mount Holyoke College that its annual performance of The ask, that the endless discussion of every act of Gomorrahism Vagina Monologues has been canceled because it excludes on HBO’s Girls is taken as evidence that we’re a nation of “trans” women who—strictly speaking—have penises. cowards on sex? “At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspec- The short answer is that it’s about what everything in pol- tive on what it means to be a woman,” explained a member of itics and culture is about: power. The sexual revolutions of the school’s theater board in an e-mail captured by the group the Sixties and Seventies promised a leveling of hierarchies, Campus Reform. “Gender is a wide and varied experience, an embrace of copulative pluralism. But the lure of a sexual one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical “New City” was a false horizon. Our discourse on sex is not distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the some dialectic heading toward a satisfying . . . climax. As show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting with history full stop, there is no “right side” of sexual histo- material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.” ry, no such thing as a Free Love. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “You promised not to Instead of a liberation, the sexual revolution was a coup use the V-word again.” Well, I didn’t use it. I mentioned it as d’état, and the new boss is only superficially unlike the old part of a name, so get off my jock. one. To wit, the hooha brouhaha at Mount Holyoke is not More to the point, here’s this play that was, upon its re - some mind-freeing breakout, but a skirmish in a doctrinal lease, a transgressive, boldly feminist work. And now, in less civil war so brutal and byzantine that it makes Moscow in the than a Bieber’s age, it has become backward. Chauvin istic Twenties look like a dorm-room bull session. Indeed, the even. What a wonderful reminder that we are all bigots by fight between “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”—who tomorrow’s standards. What an elegant display of the PC think transgenderism is another tool of the patriarchy—and ouroboros eating itself. the inclusionary faction—who think a woman is as a woman But do you doubt the Monologues will come back, this does—has become so pitched that The New Yorker recently time with more penises and less conceptual coherence, and published a 4,000-word dispatch from its front lines. The that its earnest defenders will declare it braver, bolder, trans- tone of the piece, by former Nation scribe Michelle Gold - gressiver? berg, is both grave and studiously neutral, as if she were wait- Way back in 1976, the French theorist Michel Foucault ing to see whether Franco would take Barcelona. understood that this feeling of breaking free from old oppres- The new regime has unsurprisingly erected its capital over sion is the high that such monologists, tugging at the fetters the ruins of the revolution that birthed it, inside the Ameri- of the Victorian order, chase. In his History of Sexuality, can university. There you will find Harvard sponsoring a Foucault writes, “What sustains our eagerness to speak of workshop called “Anal Sex 101” as its deepest minds nod sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to thought fully in favor of “affirmative consent” laws so arch speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and that they enjoy support from many religious conservatives. promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and Foucault didn’t live long enough to see how far around manifold pleasures.” Moreover, this thoroughly modern the bend we’d go, but I doubt he’d be surprised. craving to proselytize on sex Under our new sexual order, every transgression returns as a regulation—thus one Salon writer’s recent reflection on serves as a support for the ancient form—so familiar and the conditions under which incest should be sanctioned. important in the West—of preaching. And by contrast, every old oppression returns as a fetish. A great sexual sermon . . . has swept through our societies How else to explain the hegemony achieved by Fifty Shades over the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced of Grey in the erotic imaginations of—if the sales slips are hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real; it has made people dream of a New City. The Franciscans are to be believed—100 million people? H ere is a bit of smut called to mind. about the complete subjugation of a weak woman by a powerful man, rendered innocuous by ritualizing it, bracketing it But if Foucault understood that the evangelizing of sex has off as a “kink,” relegating it to whispers in bedrooms. The substituted for religion in the modern West—that the evan- patriarchy, with safe words. gelizers of increasingly transgressive sex are seeking, as it The fruit of the sexual revolution is not “anything goes,” were, a rapturous experience—he also understood how but a new contrivance of sexual codes every bit as complex and constrictive as the finest Victorian corset. Mr. Foster is a political consultant and a former news editor of And it is these New Victorians who are now in charge. NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. Gird your loins.

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