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RAMESH PONNURU DOUGLAS MURRAY HEATHER WILHELM Trump’s First Year The Tragedy of Basquiat The Post-Weinstein World

A Man on Why EPA boss a Mission Scott Pruitt Kevin D. Williamson terrifies the Left

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www.nationalreview.com Original Photograph: Kainaz Amaria/NPR, Cover Design: Darren Haggar BESTSELLER AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD AVAILABLE NEWTIMES YORK and think.” American.” BOOK REVIEW BOOK REVIEW NEW YORK TIMES TIMES NEW YORK of every educated to argue, disagree WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON be on the bookshelf legendary Supreme Court Justice Supreme legendary “Scalia Speaks should read, are provocations “His words, even when “His words, even Rediscover the wisdom and wit of a a wit and of wisdom the Rediscover base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 11/28/2017 3:04 PM Page 1 Page PM 3:04 11/28/2017 22.qxd base_new_milliken-mar TOC - FINAL_QXP-1127940144.qxp 12/20/2017 2:21 PM Page 1 Contents

DECEMBER 31, 2017 | VOLUME LXIX, NO. 24 | www.nationalreview.com

ON THE COVER Page 25

Scott Pruitt’s Reformation Douglas Murray on Jean-Michel Basquiat Pruitt is, he says, doing the same p. 34 thing as EPA administrator that he was doing in litigation against the BOOKS, ARTS EPA as attorney general in Oklahoma: & MANNERS trying to get it to do its job, to stay 39 A TURN TO DARKNESS within its legal authority, and to abide Jay Winik reviews 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of by the rule of law. Kevin D. Williamson the New World Disorder, by Arthur Herman. COVER: THOMAS REIS 40 QUEST FOR ARAB ARTICLES DEMOCRACY David Pryce-Jones reviews Realism ROBERT MUELLER’S MISSING CASE by Andrew C. McCarthy 14 and Democracy: American So far, the special counsel has found nothing to incriminate the president. Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring, by Elliott Abrams. 16 A STRONG START by Ramesh Ponnuru Trump’s first-year report card. 42 HABITS OF MIND THE CITY OF THE TEMPLE by David Pryce-Jones Kelly Jane Torrance reviews How to 17 Think: A Survival Guide for a Recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capital is right and good. World at Odds, by Alan Jacobs. REFORM THE ANTIQUITIES ACT by Shawn Regan 18 44 THE GREAT CONVERSATION Trump’s reduction of national monuments is a stopgap, not a solution. Nick Ripatrazone reviews Rift of 20 GOOD KING MICHAEL by Jay Nordlinger Light, by William Logan. Steering between Nazis and Communists, the Romanian 45 BONNIE AND CLYDE AT 50 monarch did ‘his bravest best.’ Peter Tonguette considers the 23 BEFORE YOU SAY NO . . . by Aloïse Buckley Heath gangster movie. A correspondence, nonfictional, between a young boy, a housewife, 47 LOST IN SPACE a headmaster, and the young boy’s brother. Ross Douthat reviews Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi. FEATURES 25 SCOTT PRUITT’S REFORMATION by Kevin D. Williamson SECTIONS The challenge at the EPA is deeper than policy. 2 Letters to the Editor THE SEXES AFTER WEINSTEIN by Heather Wilhelm 31 4 The Week Don’t encourage women to see themselves as powerless. 37 Athwart ...... James Lileks The Long View ...... Rob Long BASQUIAT’S TRAGEDY by Douglas Murray 38 34 41 Poetry ...... Stephen Scaer How the world of Warhol failed an artist in making him. 48 Happy Warrior ...... David Harsanyi

NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by N ATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, NY 10036. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2017. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., N ATIONAL REVIEW, 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, NY 10036. Address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONALREVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00A. M. to 10:30 P.M. Eastern time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., N ATIONAL REVIEW, 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, NY 10036 or call 212-679-7330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to NATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters-Dec31 - FINAL - NEW_QXP-1127940387.qxp 12/20/2017 2:59 PM Page 2 Letters DECEMBER 31 ISSUE; PRINTED DECEMBER 21

EDITORINCHIEF Richard Lowry Senior Editors Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger City of Light, City of Magic Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts Literary Editor Michael Potemra Cleveland has suffered dismal, frustrating, or tragic sports franchises, without excep- Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy tion, since the Eisenhower administration (“The Week,” November 13)? Come west Executive Editor Reihan Salam Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson of the Hudson sometime and stop relying on “fake news.” See for yourself. National Correspondent John J. Miller Since the Eisenhower administration, the Cleveland Cavs have made the NBA Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty Art Director Luba Kolomytseva playoffs in 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2017, winning the basketball championship in Deputy Managing Editors Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz 2016! The Cleveland Indians made World Series appearances in 1995, 1997, and Robert VerBruggen 2016, and had 102 wins in 2017, second only to the Dodgers’ 104. How about those Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden Lake Erie Monsters winning the 2017 ice-hockey championship in their division! Contributing Editors For the record, the beleaguered Browns have won a football championship since the Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster Eisenhower administration, albeit in 1964! And, yes, another bright spot for the Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long Browns has been Joe Thomas. He personifies perseverance, consistency, excellence, Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi and character. Thank you for acknowledging a class act. Andrew C. McCarthy / Andrew Stuttaford Before casting further aspersions on a city moving forward, come take a look and NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Editor Charles C. W. Cooke discover in Cleveland a world-renowned orchestra, a first-rate hospital that is Managing Editor Katherine Howell arguably among the world’s best, a thriving Playhouse Square theater district, the Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright Senior Writers “Emerald Necklace” park system, and outstanding museums, including: the Michael Brendan Dougherty / David French Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Cleveland Critic-at-Large Kyle Smith National-Affairs Columnist John Fund Botanical Gardens, the Crawford Auto and Aviation Museum, the Great Lakes Reporter Katherine Timpf Science Center, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Visit delightful ethnic neigh- Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell Manager, Office & Development Russell Jenkins borhoods including Asiatown, Slovak Village, Little Italy, and the whole shebang at Senior Content Manager Grant DeArmitt West Side Market. Even the Republicans were amazed during the convention, Web Producer Scott McKim including those who still like Ike. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan David Spencer Kent, Ohio BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM Alexandra DeSanctis / Theodore Kupfer

COLLEGIATENETWORKFELLOW Philip H. DeVoe THE EDITORS RESPOND: “Almost without exception,” we wrote. The Cavaliers broke the rule when they won the NBA Finals in 2016, but that’s okay. The city’s tradition THOMASL. RHODESFELLOW Jibran Khan didn’t die. It only nodded: Months later, the world watched in wonder as the Indians, Contributors true to the Cleveland genius for the tragic, roared back to lose Game 7 of the World Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen Series in extra innings—again. Everyone says it was the best baseball game ever. Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder And this year! What about those 102 wins? That late-season 22-game winning Jeffrey Hart / Charles R. Kesler / David Klinghoffer streak? We noted it in The Week (October 2). The best team in baseball, hands down, Anthony Lejeune / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber the Indians were, according to the sabermetricians. Congratulations, 2017 world champion Houston Astros. Vice President Jack Fowler Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge We know Cleveland well and agree that it’s misunderstood. The institutions of Accounting Manager Galina Veygman University Circle do belong in any list of its attractions, but the Cleveland Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya Circulation Manager Jason Ng Orchestra deserves special mention. The downtown museums—the science cen- Head of Integrated Sales Jim Fowler ter, the rock-and-roll museum—are slick and still too new to have absorbed and Senior Account Executive Kevin Longstreet radiate the city’s character. Get back to us about them in a hundred years. The

PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN people of Asiatown are “delightful,” but let’s not sugarcoat the truth about the E. Garrett Bewkes IV John Hillen neighborhood. It’s dreary. Agreed, Cleveland has a fun Little Italy. Save us a spot FOUNDER at La Dolce Vita. William F. Buckley Jr. About 1 percent of Americans live in the Western Reserve, but from reading PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS NATIONAL REVIEW, online as well as the magazine, you might think it was more. Robert Agostinelli Dale Brott Cleveland enjoys, and suffers, a disproportionate amount of our attention. We have Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway been a consistent and spirited defender of Chief Wahoo, for example. To know the Mark and Mary Davis Virginia James city’s distinctive culture is to be charmed by it. We believe in Cleveland exception- Christopher M. Lantrip alism. With an eye on spring training, just around the corner, we shout out a hearty Brian and Deborah Murdock Mr. & Mrs. Richard Spencer “Go Tribe! Wait until next year!” Mr. & Mrs. L. Stanton Towne Peter J. Travers

Letters may be sub mitted by email to [email protected].

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n All things considered, we’ll take Roy Moore soliciting re- count donations over Roy Moore soliciting minors.

n Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and our embassy should be in that city. In a well-crafted speech, President Trump announced that he would end the lamentable tradi- tion of presidential waivers’ deferring the implementation of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. The move both corrects an error of American policy and signifies our respect for Is - raeli sovereignty. Tensions between Israel and the Pal es tinian territories have been inflamed by Trump’s decision, but breathless predictions of a new intifada have not come to pass. The charge that this move will derail the peace process is similarly unfounded: Any conceivable peace agreement between Israel and Palestine would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Move the embassy to Je - rusalem with alacrity, and move the peace process toward reality.

n The Federal Bureau of Investigation is in need of a hard See page 12. look. It has recently emerged that Peter Strzok, an FBI agent assigned to the Clinton investigation, texted his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in August 2016 (a month after the Clinton investigation was dropped) to the effect that the FBI n Michael Flynn, the retired general and top Trump cam- could not afford to take the “risk” of a Trump presidency paign aide who fleetingly served as the president’s national- and needed to employ an “insurance policy” against the security adviser, pled guilty in the Mueller investigation to possibility. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving the so-called lying to the FBI. Flynn appears to have committed no crime Steele dossier, which James Comey has described as “sala- in his contacts with Russians during the transition. His of - cious and unverified.” The dossier, paid for at least in part fense was to mislead interviewing agents about them. The by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, was compiled by conversations with the Russians concerned American sanc- former British spy Christopher Steele, working for the re - tions on Russia, which Flynn would not commit to lifting, search firm Fusion GPS. Fusion’s Russia expert on the pro- and a U.N. resolution against Israel, which the Russians ject was Nellie Ohr—the wife of Bruce Ohr, a top deputy to would not commit to opposing: some collusion. The terms of then–acting attorney general Sally Yates (who was fired by the deal also suggest that Mueller has no case about Trump- President Trump). After getting the Steele dossier, the Obama campaign “collusion” with Russia. If Flynn’s contacts had Justice Department convinced the Foreign Intelligence been part of a conspiracy, the normal prosecutorial practice Surveillance Court to issue a warrant targeting a Trump asso- would have been for Mueller to pressure Flynn to plead ciate, Carter Page, as an agent of Russia. We thus have the guilty to that scheme. A prosecutor does not usually build a possibility that Clinton’s opposition research helped to gen- larger case by establishing that his cooperating witnesses are erate governmental surveillance of the Trump campaign. By convicted liars. contrast. Justice took a see-no-evil approach to the Clinton investigation, failing to use the grand jury to obtain key evi- n ABC had a bombshell: Trump ordered Flynn to contact the dence, placing significant restrictions on FBI interviews and Russians during his campaign. Eight hours later, ABC issued evidence collection, granting immunity to suspects who should what it called a “clarification”: Trump gave the order as have been pressured to plead guilty and cooperate against higher- president-elect. Reporter Brian Ross had discovered part of the ranking players, and declining to prosecute investigative sub- routine of a presidential transition, not a collusion plot. The net- jects who made false statements in FBI interviews. Russia’s work, to its credit, suspended Ross. A few days later, CBS, interference in the election is surely worth investigating, but it MSNBC, and CNN reported that Donald Trump Jr., among oth- is high time the Justice Department appointed a solid United ers in the campaign, had been emailed advance news of the States attorney from outside the Washington area to scruti- WikiLeaks trove of Democratic emails. They had the date nize the conduct of the FBI and the Justice Department dur- wrong: The emails to the campaign came after WikiLeaks had ROMAN GENN ing the 2016 election. released the information to the public. Sarah Huckabee Sanders,

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THE WEEK

the White House press secretary, used these fiascos to claim, been deported five times before shooting Steinle, and San falsely, that reporters “regularly” and “purposely” spread Francisco had a sanctuary-city policy in place that protects ille- false information. The truth is bad enough: Reporters are com- gal immigrants, including those convicted of violent crimes, ing at these stories with a predisposition to believe Trump from federal law enforcement. Supporters of sanctuary- guilty of conspiracy, and not doing due diligence when they city laws bitterly protest that most illegal immigrants are not think they have evidence to prove it. violent criminals, and they are correct about that. But it is also true that their policy protects those illegal immigrants n On a weekday rush-hour morning, Akayed Ullah, a Ban - who are. gla deshi immigrant, detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his waist in a pedestrian tunnel leading to the Port Authority Bus n The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was designed Terminal, one of New York City’s busiest transit hubs. by liberals to be “above politics”—i.e., to remain eternally Thanks to Ullah’s incompetence, only he was seriously liberal. So when the term of Richard Cordray, Obama’s injured; four others sustained light injuries. But if his home- appointee as CFPB head, was about to expire, Cordray made device had worked as planned, the nails with which it hatched a scheme to give his side a few more months in was packed would have claimed many lives. Ullah claims to power before politics—specifically, the results of the last have acted alone, as a self-taught acolyte of ISIS. He was not election—could intrude. Cordray appointed Leandra English, entirely discreet, however; Ban gla deshi authorities say he a veteran bureaucrat, as his deputy and then resigned. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was designed by liberals to be ‘above politics’—i.e., to remain eternally liberal.

tried to radicalize his wife, who lives back home in Dhaka. English and Cordray claimed that English was henceforth in Who else knew his plans remains to be seen. Evil losers of charge of the bureau, because the law establishing the CFPB the Third World lash out at New Yorkers, natives and new- said that the deputy director shall “serve as acting Director comers, trying to make it here: a characteristic tale of the in the absence or unavailability of the Director.” The fact that new millennium. the Director was neither absent nor unavailable but in fact nonexistent did not seem to concern them. President Trump n Enough women came forward to accuse Al Franken of then appointed a legitimate acting director, English sued to groping them that his Democratic colleagues began to call “retain” the position, and Democrats spent a few days high- for his resignation from the Senate. They wanted to establish fiving each other before a court ruled in favor of Trump and the principle that multiple accusations of sexual misconduct the English language. should force out officeholders, and then apply it to Trump and Roy Moore. Franken announced that he would resign at n Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night host, has become a fre- some unspecified date. Then Moore lost his race, and quent liberal scold, delivering monologues supporting gun Democrats began to voice second thoughts. Senator Pat control and Obamacare. Most recently he used his infant Leahy of Vermont has said he regrets calling for Franken’s son as a prop while excoriating Republicans for passing a resignation, asserting the Minnesotan deserves due process. tax cut for the rich while neglecting to renew funding for the Franken may yet make good on his pledge, if only to avoid Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Some re - exactly that. porters amplified Kimmel’s claims, with Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast saying that Republicans “are threatening to n President Trump retweeted the anti-Muslim blasts of eliminate” the program. House Republicans had in Britain First, a far-right group. The British prime minister, Theresa May, let it be known that this was not a group to pro- mote. Trump fired off a tweet to May, rebuking her rebuke. But he addressed the tweet to the wrong Theresa May, another British woman, as it happened. This “wrong” Theresa May got off a nice line—to the effect that you don’t want a U.S. president to push the wrong button.

n A jury has found an illegal immigrant not guilty in the fatal shooting of Kate Steinle in July 2015 in San Francisco. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was acquitted of murder and involuntary-manslaughter charges after a contentious trial, in which the defense claimed the shooting had been acciden- tal. Over the last two years, this case became a focal point for the national immigration debate, as Garcia Zarate had

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actuality passed a bill funding CHIP weeks before Kimmel wrong to acquit the officer who killed Shaver, though it is worth spoke, as had the Senate Finance Com mittee. Nobody has noting that police officers are trained to respond immediately treated the program as a “bargaining chip” for the tax bill, as when a suspect reaches toward his waist, as it doesn’t take much Kimmel claimed. Glenn Kessler, the Wash ing ton Post’s fact time to produce a weapon and pull the trigger. May Shaver, a checker, to his credit cried foul on Kimmel. Stern’s false report father of two, rest in peace, and may his family’s lawsuits is still up, and Kimmel has made the transition from comic against the city of Mesa, Ariz., succeed. with a political edge to political hack in record time. n Remember the Wisconsin “John Doe” investigations—the n The Department of Justice may be preparing to launch an political inquisitions of Wisconsin conservatives that fea- investigation into Planned Parenthood. It has asked the tured pre-dawn raids of conservative activists’ homes? Senate Judiciary Committee for documents from its 2016 Remember how they used criminal statutes as a pretext for investigation into allegations that the abortion provider prof- investigating constitutionally protected speech and expres- ited from the illegal sale of fetal tissue. The previous year, sion? Well, it turns out that the investigations were worse and the Center for Med i cal Progress had released video of more abusive than we knew. The Wisconsin Department of Planned Parenthood executives negotiating prices and Justice released a comprehensive report that detailed, among describing in gruesome detail procedures for extracting var- other things, how partisan investigators scooped up the pri- ious fetal body parts intact. Planned Parenthood objects that vate correspondence of Wisconsin conservative activists and the videos were “heavily edited.” In reporting on the contro- their families—often without their knowledge—and kept versy, media routinely repeat that characterization, but CMP vast amounts of personal information in files marked “oppo- from the beginning has made the full undercover footage sition research.” It discovered that partisan investigators tried available online. Reporters are free to compare it with the to launch a new investigation even after courts had ordered shortened versions and explain what about them they think earlier investigations stopped. Progressive-activist investiga- is misleading. tors were a law unto themselves, doing their best to criminal- ize political disagreement. The scandal isn’t just that they n James O’Keefe has always been a hit-and-miss proposition, tried, it’s that they came so close to succeeding—with virtu- and he’s been taking more bad swings of late, especially in his ally the entire Wisconsin progressive establishment cheering attempt to embarrass the Washington Post by feeding it a sala- them on. cious and phony story about the Alabama Senate race. O’Keefe had an accomplice approach the Post with a story n Despite very similar environments, California and about having been molested and impregnated by Roy Moore Mexico are experiencing two very different wildfire sea- when she was 15 years old. The young lady apparently had sons: While fires tear through Southern California, Mexico been hunting around for work in right-wing activism, and it is left relatively unscarred. Experts contend that the differ- did not take the Post very long to figure out what she was up ence is thanks to Cali for nia’s sloppy policy of fire suppres- to. So the Post turned the tables, videotaping her during their sion, the practice of eliminating all fires when they start. In The world is awake to the tragedy in Venezuela. Or is it more a crime than a tragedy?

interview and making her squirm as they dissected her slan- Mexico, firefighters allow the fires to burn within a natural der. O’Keefe et al. have fallen victim to a fairly common mis- cycle of homeostasis: Brush builds up, a fire burns the brush conception: The mainstream media, including the Post, do in away, the fire dies out. Wild fires are scarcer in regions that fact suffer from a problem of left-leaning bias, but that is not preserve the natural cycle than in California’s artificial the same as simply making stuff up and printing it or publish- cycle, because the fuel that enables wildfires to grow out of ing obviously sketchy accounts without doing any reporting. control is absent. What will it take to change the policy? State That kind of malfeasance is rare and is a separate question leaders will have to convince Cali fornians that small fires from the more familiar problem of ordinary bias. Advice to year-round are better than the perennial threat of a season of O’Keefe from friends: Do better. huge fires.

n Daniel Shaver’s killing by police is incredibly disturbing. Re - n The world is awake to the tragedy in Venezuela. Or is it more spond ing to a complaint about a man waving a rifle out of a hotel a crime than a tragedy? The European Parliament gave its window, a group of officers arrived at the scene and ordered him Sakharov Prize to Venezuela’s political prisoners and dem o - and a companion out of the room. An officer then issued a series crat ic opposition, collectively. The New York Times had a mov- of confusing instructions that included crawling; drunk, crying, ing, almost unbearable, report on the death of Venezuelan unarmed, and begging not to be killed, Shaver did his best to children by starvation. The toppling of that regime in Caracas comply—but eventually reached behind his back, presumably to ought to be a high international priority. pull up his pants, and another officer shot him. (It turned out the rifle had been a pellet gun he was showing off to some guests in n Ireland forbids abortion in the eighth amendment to its con- the room.) Given the totality of the circumstances, the jury was stitution. Pro-choice activists in Ireland point out that, despite

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the law, thousands of Irish women seek abortions in Britain anywhere and everywhere. Alexander Zhukov, president of each year. Their campaign to repeal the eighth may lead to the Russian Olympic Committee, has apologized, and that reversal of traffic and make Ireland a destination for Euro - really is un precedented. peans seeking later-term abortions that would never be al - lowed in Germany or France. A referendum on repeal will be held in May or June, and the parliament is recommending that n Prince Harry of Wales, fifth in line for the British throne, a post-repeal Ireland make abortion legal for any reason up to is to marry Meghan Markle on May 19. Harry has been the twelfth week of pregnancy and for “health” reasons there- much in the headlines, whether flying a after. The proposal makes no distinction between physical and helicopter in Afghanistan or at parties mental health. Americans know this as the “Doe exception,” either taking his clothes off or putting which effectively allows abortion on demand so long as the on a Nazi uniform. Meghan is person seeking it testifies that continuing the pregnancy Harry American, an actress, and a divorcée. involves mental distress of any kind. There is a gap between Harry’s great-great uncle David, the political class and the public. Just one example: Even otherwise King Edward VIII, though the party leadership mostly supports repealing the wished to marry Wallis eighth, Fianna Fáil’s party conference saw delegates rejecting Simpson, also an American calls to alter or repeal it. Pro-lifers have to hope that the polit- who had previously been ical class is overreaching. married. The British es - n Only one head of state is an tablish ment from the emperor, and that is Akihito, the prime minister downward 125th emperor of Japan, accord- thought that the public ing to an order of succession so wouldn’t stand for it, and the king ancient that no other country can was obliged to abdicate. Today’s begin to match it. His father, establishment speaks of joy, and Emperor Hirohito, never quite the crowd cheered Meghan at her shook off the stigma of Japan’s first public engagements. militarism in the 20th century. The post-war constitution had transformed the emperor into a n “Lead us not into temptation,” the sixth petition of the constitutional ruler. Succeeding Lord’s Prayer, has long baffled many Christians. Why even his father to the throne in 1989, assume that God would lead us astray? In an effort to correct Akihito gave a flawless perfor- the misunderstanding, the French Catholic bishops recently mance of the ceremonial role introduced a new translation, “Let us not enter into tempta- that this involved, with never a tion” (Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation). On Italian tele- word out of place. He might vision, Pope Francis criticized traditional translations, appear dignified in a morning following the usual lines of the debate. He praised the French coat and top hat at official duties revision, although it strays from the original Greek, in which or informal in white shorts on we ask God unambiguously not to lead (or bring) us into Emperor Akihito the tennis court. He has pub- peirasmon: a peril, or trial, such as martyrs face under the lished research papers on marine sword. Jesus prayed “Let this cup pass from me” and taught biology. Twice in his reign he addressed his people on televi- his disciples to pray the equivalent. The word “temptation” sion, the second time just now, to announce that, considering (together with its cognates in modern languages) is no longer he is 85, he will be abdicating in the coming year. His son recognized as a derivation of the Latin word for “trial.” So Naruhito, 57, is to be the 126th emperor. substitute “trial” for “temptation.” Problem solved. The verb GETTY IMAGES / is fine. Stop fiddling with it. n During the Cold War and now after it, Russia has been ea- PRUCHNIE

. ger to claim superiority by having its athletes win gold medals n In 8 A.D., the emperor Augustus exiled Publius Ovidius

BEN A in all sports, taking, for the purpose, forbidden performance- Naso, better known to us as Ovid, to the frontier of bar- : enhancing drugs. Obtaining firsthand evidence of this from barism, the Black Sea. With Putin in Ukraine, barbarism is HARRY ; Russian whistleblowers, the International Olympic Com mit - back. But Ovid can come back too, now that the City of tee speaks of “unprecedented systematic manipulation.” Rome has re voked Augustus’s banishment. A masterly versi- That involved breaking into laboratories and substituting fier, Ovid was best known for his cold-hearted NSFW love GETTY IMAGES /

AFP clean samples of blood or urine for contaminated ones—in poetry and for the Metamorphoses, retellings of the myths of / plain language, stealing and lying. Evidently shocked and Greece and Rome. Clunky Hesiod first recorded them; the angry to have been fooled, the IOC has banned Russia from tragedians mined them for pity and terror. In Ovid’s hands the 2018 Winter Games to be held in Pyeonchang in South they became style, spectacle, and human interest. He was the

TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA Korea. The sports minister responsible for the programming Hollywood of his day, George Lucas plus Marvel and DC, : of forbidden drugs, Vitaly Mutko, is one among other gov- only a hundred times more talented. Welcome home; you are AKIHITO ernment officials prohibited from attending Olympic Games suited to our moment.

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n An eleven-year-old boy from Tennessee—we purposefully ger). The author has her own blind spots: Robert’s parting withhold his name—became famous when his mother posted a shot, which Roupenian says she planned from the first, video of him complaining about bullying at school. It went seems tacked on, the formula ending of a modern melodra- viral, and celebrities offered their moral support. A third party ma. The moral seems to be: Men are lousy, so we throw our- set up a GoFundMe account (why? how does money stop bul- selves into bed with them. Ladies, ladies: You wanted lying?). Then the world noticed that his mother had posted a third-wave—or are we on fourth-?—feminism; you’ll have family picture on Facebook that included a Confederate flag to do better than this. (plus Old Glory). The victim was a racist! A false report claimed that he had been bullied because he called school- n Rufus Wainwright was a guest artist of the Minnesota Or ches - mates “n****rs.” Then it emerged that his estranged father is tra. During the concert, he made some political remarks, be - an actual white supremacist. Stop stop stop stop stop. In the moaning the Republicans’ recently passed tax bill. The principal age of devices, the rascally journalists of Scoop and Miss trumpet, Manny Laureano, made an exasperated gesture and Lonelyhearts are, potentially, everyone. But your life is in your walked off the stage. Under contract to an orchestra, you’re not hands, not in your handheld. Live it, don’t broadcast it. And supposed to do this. But Laureano had had enough, and so have don’t feed on the lives of others. we, of the intrusion of partisan politics into such events as or - ches tra concerts. Bravo, Mr. Laureano. n “Cat Person,” a New Yorker short story by Kristen Rou - pen i an, caused a minor firestorm. It describes the hookup of n The College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Margot, a college kid working at a movie-house concession Sciences at the University of Minnesota has some advice at stand, and Robert, a thirtysomething patron. They meet cute, holiday time: If you’re going to throw a party, bill it as a “win- as Hollywood says, flirt by text, then have an awkward date ter celebration.” And avoid “specific religious iconography,” capped by bad sex. When Margot leaves Robert alone, he such as Santa Clauses, “wrapped gifts,” and menorahs. Fur the r - sends her a string of texts, desperate then angry, ending with more, avoid red and green, and blue and white or silver, as “Whore.” It says something about the way we live now that those combinations can denote Christmas and Hanukkah. so many young women identify with the heroine. Margot is Since the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource narcissistic and rather foolish (she drinks too many beers for Sciences is so generous with advice, we have some advice for a first date, especially a first date with an almost-total stran - it: Get a life.

Free Speec ch is Under Asssault on Collegge Campuses

TTakake a Stand for attempting to hos st a dialogue with ACTTAA is an independent higher Campus Free Spe eech him. Ayaan Hirsii Ali, George WWill,ill, educatiion policy organization and Ben Shapiro were Jooin the fight for free speech. ech. ollege campuses should d be “disinvited” Pre-order ACTA’s Campuss Cplaces where freedom tto think from Free Speech information Brandeis, and learn is unassailable. Buut this packet with exclusive past yearr,, concerned citizenns have Scripps, and reesources for concerned watched as colleges have be ecome DePaul, places where free speech is underu respectivelyy.. citizens and alumni. daily attack by censors who o are ready e list goes GGoACTA.A org • 202.467.6787 to silence anything that cha allenges on and on. their ideologyy.. On too A new set of campus rulees has many college cam mpuses, students, that proomotes academic freedom, emerged that has little to do o with facultyy,, and administratorsadmi inistrators expect excellennce, and accountability at educating youngyoung minds and d much freedom from spe eech, not freedom Americcan colleges and universities. more to dod with i h enfor f cingi political li i l off speech. h i is iis s no way to prrepareparree correctness. At YYaleale, studen nts students for adu ulthood. WWee areenn’’’tt afraid to ght the tough waged furious protests after r a e good newss is that the battles. WWillill yyouou join us? professor criticized attempt ts to American Counc il of TTrrustees and regulate Halloweene costum mes. At Alumni (ACTTA)A) works with alumni, Middleburryy, students disruupted the parents, and dono ors to stand up invited remarks of social sci ientist against these prac ctices that betray Charles Murray—and assau ulted their America’s long tra adition of free own political science professsor for expression and lib bertyy..

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n A college-football coach, such as Alabama’s Nick Saban, things were on the early Mets. That same year, he also lost the has plenty of responsibilities, from game plans to press confer- longest game in major-league history up to that time. He fin- ences to recruiting (and many more). Now a New York sports- ished his career with the 1966 Cardinals—just missing the writer wants to add another job to the list: political 1967 club, where he would have been Maris’s teammate and commentary. Before the Alabama senatorial election, in a col- won a World Series. In later years, Stallard was philosophical umn titled “Nick Saban is a clueless, gutless, selfish coward about the fame he won by serving up Maris’s record shot, for his silence on Roy Moore,” Chuck Modiano of the Daily pointing out, “I played in a lot of golf tournaments because of News reviewed the case against Moore (with which we broadly it”—including, in 1990, the Roger Maris memorial charity agree) and then suggested that being paid a large salary by tournament . . . which Stallard won. Dead at 80. R.I.P. Alabama taxpayers imposes on Saban a duty to tell them how to vote. One might more logically argue the opposite. PUBLIC POLICY A Tax-Cut Triumph n John B. Anderson, son of a Swe - dish immigrant, was first elected to S we hoped, the Republican tax legislation improved as Congress from Illinois in 1960. it moved through Congress. Harmful ideas such as elim- Early in his career he offered a con- A inating the adoption tax credit were abandoned. Some stitutional amendment acknowl- tax relief for the working poor was added. The final bill should edging “the law and authority of increase investment, reduce the distortionary effect of tax breaks, Jesus Christ.” The amendment and lighten the especially excessive burden that the federal gov- went nowhere, and Anderson went ernment puts on parents. While the bill is nobody’s idea of per- slowly to the left. In the 1980 cycle fection, it is nonetheless a solid accomplishment and we are glad he sought the Republican presiden- that Congress has moved quickly to pass it. tial nomination—a vanity cam- Our 35 percent corporate-tax rate has stayed in place for paign that caught the media’s decades as our major trading partners have cut their rates. The attention and did surprisingly well new tax rate of 21 percent should help us compete better for cap- in early New England primaries. ital. Allowing businesses to write off the cost of investments After Ronald Reagan and George more rapidly is another pro-growth win in the bill. H. W. Bush won and placed, An der - The legislation rightly pares back two major deductions: the son ran on as an independent, win- ones for mortgage interest, which will be capped at mortgages of ning not quite 7 percent of the vote $750,000 rather than the current $1 million, and for state and (mainly from liberals who could not stomach Jimmy Carter). local taxes, which will be capped at $10,000 rather than being Anderson was the harbinger of the do-it-yourself presidential unlimited. In both cases we would have preferred more aggres- campaign, and thus the forerunner, however remote, of sive action, but the course chosen has the virtue of reducing the Donald Trump. Dead at 95. R.I.P. number of people who will face tax increases thanks to the bill. If some high-income households react to this change by leaving n Christine Keeler was at the center of a great British scandal in high-tax states, perhaps those states will in turn be moved to the early 1960s. A good-time girl, she was picked up by Stephen rethink their policies. Ward, a social climber who took her to grand houses, one of The bill’s major contribution to tax simplification is the expan- them Cliveden, belonging to Lord Astor. There she began an sion of the standard deduction. That expansion will make tax affair with Jack Profumo, secretary of state for war in the cabinet deductions less important: Only a small percentage of taxpayers of Harold Macmillan. It came out that she was also having an will find it worthwhile to itemize. The bill also reduces the num- affair with Evgeny Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet embassy. ber of people who will have to calculate their taxes twice, by lim- Military secrets, the media rumored, were coming out of Profu - iting the reach of the alternative minimum tax. mo’s mouth and passing via Keeler to Ivanov’s ear. Profumo Thanks largely to the interventions of Senators Marco Rubio foolishly lied to Parliament that there was no “impropriety” (his and Mike Lee, the legislation expands the child tax credit. We word) between him and Keeler. Unwittingly, she helped bring have long favored a large tax credit for children as the most prac- about the collapse of the Conservative government. At the age of tical way to remedy a disparity in our old-age entitlements: They 75, she died. R.I.P. overtax parents, who pay the same tax rates and get the same ben- efits as childless adults no matter how much they have con- n Tracy Stallard was a baseball workhorse who made the most tributed to those programs by raising children. of a series of negative achievements. Most famously, as a Red The House bill eliminated the dependent exemption and Sox rookie in 1961, he gave up Roger Maris’s 61st home run expanded the child credit by roughly enough to make up for it. on the last day of the season (a record that endured until the Very roughly: A lot of families would have paid higher taxes. The steroid era). Stallard, who had been told he was starting just 45 Senate bill included a real expansion, worth about $400 per child minutes before the game, always said the pitch Maris hit was a for families in the middle of the middle class. Senators Lee and good one, “a knee-high fastball on the outside corner,” but Rubio argued that the credit should apply against payroll taxes as CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES / Maris knocked it out for the game’s only run. In 1964, with the well as income taxes. Most Republicans in Congress, unfortu- Mets, Stallard led the National League in losses (one of which came nately, remain wedded to the peculiar belief that relief from in Jim Bunning’s perfect game), going 10–20 on the season— income taxes is wonderful but relief from payroll taxes is wel- WALLY MCNAMEE which still left him second on his team in wins; that’s how fare. Senator Rubio had to threaten to vote against the bill to

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secure a little payroll-tax relief for families with earnings too low to pay much income tax. Republicans added a repeal of the individual mandate—the fines Obamacare puts on people who refuse to buy health insur- ance that complies with its regulations. That step will be a boon for people who have been priced out of the market by regulations and then fined on top of it. Ending the mandate is unlikely to lead to as many people going uninsured as the Congressional Budget Office says. By the same token, it won’t save the federal govern- ment nearly as much money in insurance subsidies. Which brings us to the main drawback to the bill: its likely tendency to raise the national debt. Most Republicans say that the tax cut will generate so much extra growth that it will increase revenues. No economic model of the tax cut, not even any of the models produced by conservative economists, backs this claim. It is convenient, though, in letting Republicans offer tax cuts to various constituencies without having to impose any restraint on spending. Better legislation would have held off on some tax cuts pend- ing that restraint. The corporate-tax cut could have been smaller while still marking a vast improvement. Pass-through businesses got, in general, a sweetheart deal in the legislation. The bill cuts tax rates on households making more than $500,000. Not even the editors of the Wall Street Journal, who crusaded for these tax- rate reductions, pretend that they will do anything significant to promote economic growth; and these households will benefit from many of the bill’s other provisions. (If they own stock, for example, they benefit from the corporate-tax cut.) Without these excesses, the legislation could have promoted growth while pro- viding more tax relief to parents and doing less to raise the deficit. But while the tax cut is likely to increase the national debt over Doug Jones during his Election Night party the next ten years, it is nearly a rounding error in comparison with the growth of entitlements. A tax code that places less of a burden There were 22,800 write-in votes—more than Jones’s margin on investment, by businesses and by parents, could be had with- of victory—most of them evidently Republicans disgusted with out any increase in the debt; but it is worth having even in return their standard bearer, so some honor clings to the Alabama GOP. for a modest increase. Only some: Moore had won the nomination in a fair fight. Republicans are therefore justified in voting for this legislation Steve Bannon, Trump’s soi-disant Svengali, campaigned and celebrating their victory. But only briefly. Many of the tax hard for Moore as part of his plan to trash the current Re pub li - cuts in the bill are temporary, and Republicans will have to find can political establishment. Moore’s loss sets him back, but the votes for future legislation to extend them or make them per- there is no guarantee that Bannon will always find cat’s-paws of manent. And their victory will not hold if they do not reform the such low quality. entitlements. Perhaps someone could mention that fact to President Trump showed himself to be vacillating and dishon- President Trump at the signing ceremony. orable. He campaigned for the incumbent, Luther Strange, who had been appointed to fill the seat until the special election was POLITICS held; then switched to Moore; then announced, in a post-election The Moore Fiasco tweet, that he had been right to back Strange all along, since the deck was stacked against Moore. The only Trumpist the president EMOCRAT Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in a will stand by is Trump. D special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Ses- Other Republican officeholders did no better than the presi- sions. Jones is the first Democrat to win an Alabama sen- dent. After a show of displeasure, they resigned themselves to atorial election in 25 years. The margin was 20,700 votes. Moore’s eventual victory. One of the few exceptions, Senator Jeff How lousy a candidate and a man was Moore? Let us count Flake, went too far in the other direction, making a contribution the ways. He was bounced out of the state judicial offices he to Jones (who is among other things a pro-abortion zealot). held, not once, but twice, for failure to understand the suprema- Senator Richard Shelby steered the right course, writing in some- cy clause of the Constitution. He ran a charity that paid him a one else and making it public. cushy salary. He was credibly charged with pursuing teenage Republicans should not write off the debacle as an anomaly. BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES / girls—allegedly as saulting one and molesting another when she Black turnout was strong, and strongly Democratic, which was underage. His loss should be the end of him, but he is ask- will not matter in deep-red constituencies with normal candi- ing for donations to contest the result: one more way, if past is dates, but which will matter a great deal in competitive races NICOLE CRAINE prologue, to squeeze out a Roy Moore payday. next fall.

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dent was not a suspect. I believe it was this Janus-like performance that ulti- mately led an irate Trump to dismiss the director. In retrospect, though, it’s clear that Comey was ratcheting up pressure on Trump subordinates, reasoning that there must have been fire under all the Russia smoke the bureau was seeing. Comey knew that, around the time the Kremlin appeared to have been hack ing email systems of the Democratic Na - tional Committee (DNC) and Clinton- campaign chairman John Podesta, there were contacts between intriguing Russians and such Trump-campaign hands as Paul Manafort (the campaign chairman for a time), Michael Flynn (a top campaign aide and later, fleetingly, Trump’s national-security adviser), Carter Page (a tangential campaign adviser), and George Papadopou los (a young campaign adviser of even less stature than Page). Still, American intel- ligence agencies had found no evidence that these contacts had anything to do with Kremlin espionage. Indeed, their Robert Mueller’s January report noted en passant that Russia had sought to compromise both So far, the special Missingcounsel has found nothing Case to incriminate the president Democratic and Republican communi- cations—they’d just struck paydirt with the former. BY ANDREW C. M C CARTHY In speaking with Trump, Comey ex - plained his reluctance to say publicly OES Robert Mueller have a testimony, Comey announced that the what he was saying privately—viz., that case against President Donald FBI was investigating Russia’s meddling Trump was not a suspect—by claiming D Trump? The answer increas- in the election. This was a striking depar- that it would be worse for Trump if the ingly appears to be no. ture from Justice Department protocols FBI cleared the president only to have It has been seven months since against publicly acknowledging investi- new troubling information arise later. Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, gations. Yet it merely confirmed what That, according to Comey, would call for and well over a year since the FBI began was obvious from the U.S. intelligence a damaging public announcement that investigating possible Trump “collusion” agencies’ January report on Russia’s the case was being reopened. This, of in Russia’s 2016 campaign interference. “cyberespionage” operation during the course, is what happened in the Hillary A few important things have become campaign. Comey’s purpose in making Clinton–emails investigation: The direc- clear. The most apparent is that Mueller this extraordinary disclosure was not to tor’s initial exoneration press conference has no prosecutable collusion case. finger Russia but to rattle the Trump in July 2016 was followed by the uncov- This is clear from the three sets of camp, as he did in his next breath: the ering of new emails, leading to Comey’s charges Mueller has filed so far. Not- explosive disclosure that the FBI’s Russia public reopening (and re-closing) of the withstanding the frisson for Never probe included scrutiny of any contacts case on the eve of the election. Trumpers who’ve morphed into Impeach between Trump associates and the It was a specious rationalization. Trumpers, more-objective observers Kremlin, as well as any possible “coordi- Comey’s problem in both the Clinton deduced from the charges that Mueller is nation” between the Trump campaign and the Trump situations was of his own probably about where James Comey was and Russia’s election interference. making: Had he not made inappropriate a year ago. Between Trump’s November It was an astonishing revelation that public statements—outlining damning 2016 election and his firing of the former Comey had to know would signal to the evidence against Clinton when he was FBI director in May (the explosive event media, and thus to the public, that the not going to charge her, raising public that triggered Mueller’s appointment), nation’s premier law-enforcement agency suspicions about Trump when he did Comey repeatedly assured the new pres- regarded the sitting president as a sus- not regard Trump as a suspect—no later ident that he was not a criminal suspect. pect. Yet, in private meetings, Comey clarifications would or could have been This was not for lack of trying to make was telling both congressional leader- necessary. For present purposes, how- ROMAN GENN him one. In his March 2017 congressional ship and Trump himself that the presi- ever, the point is that, no matter what

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assurances he had given Trump, Comey the collusion narrative. Both men are Mueller’s problem does not end with plainly believed a case connecting the cooperating with Mueller, who filed the inaccessibility of key witnesses. The president to Russia’s perfidy remained detailed factual statements in connection Obama Justice Department indefensibly well within the realm of possibility. It with each plea. Both, moreover, colluded failed to force the DNC to surrender its wasn’t there yet, but it might emerge if with Russia: Papadopoulos in sundry server system for FBI forensic examina- investigators kept digging, if the bureau meetings with allegedly Kremlin- tion. Astonishingly, the government’s kept the heat on the likely accomplices. connected contacts in an unconsum- conclusion that Russia is the culprit—the Well, seven months after Comey’s mated effort to bring Trump and Putin finding that has roiled the nation for a departure, they’re still digging, still together, or at least to arrange meet- year—hinges on an examination by keeping the heat on. And Donald Trump ings between their respective subordi- CrowdStrike, a private contractor of the is still not a suspect. In fact, a “collu- nates; Flynn in discussions with DNC. That would be the same DNC that sion” case seems farther away than ever. Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador refused FBI requests to surrender its Not just against Trump; against anyone. to the U.S., about a United Nations res- server and has a powerful motive to por- As far as we can tell, Mueller’s probe olution condemning Israeli settlement- tray Russia, rather than Clinton’s inept has two fundamental flaws, a theory building and about sanctions President campaign, as the reason Clinton lost. problem and a proof problem, and both Obama ordered in response to Russia’s CrowdStrike is a reputable firm, so it are fatal. election-meddling. is perhaps understandable that the intel- First, “collusion,” which is just con- Nevertheless, the pleas Mueller took ligence agencies would trust its work in certed activity of some kind, is not a were not to offenses somehow related their probability analysis. They are not crime. Prosecutors have to prove that to collusion with Russia; each man burdened, as Mueller is, by the obliga- contacts rose to the level of conspiracy— pled guilty to the process crime of tion to prove essential facts beyond a an agreement among two or more peo- making false statements in FBI inter- reasonable doubt. If Mueller cannot ple to violate some federal criminal law. views. If the cooperators had given prove Russia’s espionage in court, it is Whatever the various contacts between Mueller testimony about an espionage inconceivable that he could prove that Trump associates and Russians may conspiracy, he’d have had them plead the Trump campaign conspired in have amounted to, investigators have guilty to that—a prosecutor does not Russia’s espionage. not come close to showing that they build a major case by establishing When it comes to Trump personally, implicate the Trump campaign in the merely that his witnesses are liars. then, Mueller seems reduced to estab- only crime we know of—Russian espi- Plus, Papadopoulos’s fact statement lishing that he obstructed an FBI onage, the hacking of the email system claimed that he was told, implausibly, investigation. But that, too, is a dead of the DNC. that Putin’s regime had thousands of end. To begin with, Trump has always Consider the three sets of charges Clinton’s own emails, which it was had the power, as president, to shut Mueller has filed. The indictment against considering providing to the Trump down the Russia investigation, but he Manafort and his partner Richard Gates campaign. Put aside that Papadopoulos has never done so—and he even told has nothing to do with the 2016 cam- never saw any such emails and there is Comey it would be helpful to know if paign and only indirectly involves no known evidence that Russia had any of his “satellites” had done some- Russia. (Manafort worked for many them (the hacked emails were from the thing wrong. While it was unsavory of years as a consultant for a Kremlin- DNC and Podesta, not Clinton her- Trump to lean on Comey to drop the connected political party in Ukraine self). If Russia had to tell a Trump- Flynn investigation, Trump has the and is alleged to have failed to register campaign adviser it had ob tained such constitutional authority to exercise as a foreign agent and to have laundered emails, that means the Trump campaign prosecutorial discretion, and he did millions of dollars in fees.) Mueller is had no involvement in Russia’s acquisi- not actually order Comey to stop the patently squeezing Manafort for coop- tion of them. probe—which continued and led, eration, hoping to uncover any evi- Even more fundamental than this eventually, to Flynn’s guilty plea. And dence that the Trump campaign had lack of a coherent legal theory that Trump had undeniable authority to fire either foreknowledge of Kremlin efforts could inculpate Trump in Russia’s espi- Comey; as president, he did not need a to undermine the Clinton campaign or onage is Mueller’s proof problem reason to terminate a subordinate serv- some other corrupt arrangement with regarding the espionage itself. The ing at his pleasure, and, again, the Putin’s regime—such as a quid pro quo intelligence community’s finding that investigation has continued despite deal involving some form of Russian Russia interfered in the election, pri- Comey’s dismissal. campaign assistance in exchange for marily by hacking, is merely a proba- To be sure, if Democrats flip the the lifting of sanctions against Russia if bility assessment, not courtroom proof. House in 2018, articles of impeachment Trump were elected. (The United As the intelligence agencies’ own re- could be filed against Trump regardless States and other nations imposed sanc- port concedes, the announcement of a of what Mueller does. Impeachment is a tions against Russia over Putin’s finding does not mean the agencies are political remedy, not a legal one, and annexation of Crimea and other anti- in a position to establish the finding as a Democrats could be rabid enough to act Ukraine aggression.) matter of fact. The agencies say they on sheer political will. For now, though, Yet Mueller’s other two prosecu- cannot make their evidence public for it appears that Mueller has no prospect of tions, guilty pleas from Papadopoulos fear of compromising their methods and proving crimes, let alone high crimes and Flynn, underscore the emptiness of sources of intelligence. and misdemeanors.

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district-court nominees appears to be Many Republicans credit Trump for significantly lower.) presiding over a strong economy, too. It’s The administration has begun to rein in a point that requires some context. Job ATrump’s Strong first-year report Start card regulation. It has withdrawn and modified growth has not been quite as fast as it was several of the Obama administration’s reg- in Obama’s last year, but you’d expect it ulations, often in concert with Congress. It to slow after an expansion this long. Re - BY RAMESH PONNURU has stopped or slowed the progress of publican economic policies may have many others that were barreling down the played a role in keeping the expansion ORSUCH confirmed, ISIS de - tracks. The Environmental Protection going. Certainly the predictions of eco- feated, taxes cut: The Trump Agency, now run by Trump appointee nomic doom made right after the election G administration has compiled Scott Pruitt, has also taken steps to end by some Trump opponents—chiefly Paul a solid record of accom- the practice of “sue and settle,” in which Krugman—have not come to pass. plishment in its first year, one that com- activist groups get the agency to adopt It’s not the only bad outcome that has pares well with the records of many of new policies through lawsuits. been avoided. Trump has started no trade its predecessors. Trump killed President Obama’s war and has not blown up the World Two of the biggest accomplishments Clean Power Plan, which would have Trade Organization. He has merely en - came late in the year. The prime minister imposed significant economic costs while gaged in the low-grade protectionism of Iraq declared victory over ISIS on doing little to reduce the risks of global that is routine for presidents of both par- December 9. Republicans reached a deal warming. He has effectively ended the ties and withdrawn from the Trans- that seemed to secure passage of a tax Obama administration’s mandate that Pacific Partnership—which may not bill on December 15. Until then, it employers provide contraceptive cover- have been able to win congressional appeared possible that 2017 would end age: Employers who object to providing approval even if Trump had stayed in. without an all-Republican government that coverage, or providing forms of that NATO is still standing, too, and Trump’s enacting any major legislation. coverage they consider to cause abor- complaints about allies’ burden-sharing Now the Republicans’ policy record tions, are to be exempt. If the new policy may be arresting Western Europe’s slide looks better, at least from a conservative stands, the Little Sisters of the Poor will into functional pacifism. perspective. The tax bill advances several longstanding conservative objectives. It cuts tax rates for most Americans, slashes On policy matters, conservatives are the corporate-tax rate for the first time in decades, expands the tax credit for chil- getting what they want from Trump. dren, limits the reach of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, and scales be spending less time in court. Trump’s How much Trump contributed to what back the tax break for expensive homes. education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has has gone right in 2017 is debatable. He By scaling back the deduction for state withdrawn Obama-era regulations that had less influence over the shape of the and local taxes, it may encourage a more led colleges to lower the burden of proof tax bill than most presidents exert over conservative fiscal politics in the states. for sexual-misconduct allegations and to major laws. His unpopularity has proba- And it allows drilling to proceed in the monitor professors’ speech. bly dragged down the bill’s poll numbers. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Most conservatives cheered two sym- He has reportedly complained that he The tax bill also partly makes up for the bolic actions by the administration: wants to go further in imposing tariffs but failure of Republican efforts earlier in announcing that our embassy in Israel his advisers keep thwarting him. 2017 to repeal Obamacare. The health- will move to the country’s capital city of People who voted for Trump in No - care law imposes fines on people who go Jerusalem and that the United States will vember 2016 on the theory that he would without insurance. The tax bill sets the withdraw from the Paris climate accord. deliver policies radically different from fines at zero. The least popular feature of (I count that planned withdrawal as sym- what other Republicans would do should Obamacare is thus effectively nullified. bolic because the accord did not bind us be disappointed. Those who voted for him Some conservatives would have con- to any policy commitments.) because he would usually line up with con- sidered voting for Trump in November Conservatives of various types have servatives and sign Republican bills, on 2016 worth it just for Justice Neil thus seen progress on their agenda in the other hand, have reason to be pleased. Gorsuch. His appointment to the Supreme 2017. Economic conservatives got tax They may not like everything about Court means that Justice Scalia’s seat will cuts and some deregulation. Legal con- this presidency, the effects of which will remain filled by an originalist for the next servatives got judicial appointments not be limited to changes in public policy. few decades. If one of the Democratic and an executive branch more mindful Many of Trump’s conservative support- appointees or Justice Anthony Kennedy of the limits of its policymaking author- ers wish the president had spoken more leaves the Court, Trump will have the ity. Social conservatives also benefited firmly and consistently to denounce the opportunity to create the first conserva- from the judicial appointments and white supremacists in Charlottesville, or tive majority in modern constitutional welcomed Trump’s policy of blocking had kept his distance from Roy Moore, or history. Trump has also nominated international family-planning funding had contained himself on Twitter. On pol- many well-qualified conservative jurists from going to organizations that pro- icy matters, though, they are getting what to the appeals courts. (The quality of his mote or perform abortions. they wanted from him.

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have put them up to it. Imams in the life becomes really unpleasant, the set- mosque and supposedly learned men on tlers will prefer to leave for some other, television unceasingly drum such stuff quieter place. The City of into the heads of people who have no Every time the Arabs have resorted to means of finding out anything other. In opening the gates of hell they have ended The Temple reality, Zionism is a typical 19th-century in a worse position than before, with less Recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli movement of national liberation, one territory and more refugees. To adapt the capital is right and good among many that brought all sorts of dif- much-quoted witticism incorrectly attrib- ferent peoples into the modern era. In the uted to Einstein, Arab leadership has kept BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES 20th century, Arabs themselves had suc- doing the same violence to Israel over and cessful national-liberation movements over again, invariably losing but always N the face of it, President with means and ends similar to those of expecting a different result. Between Trump’s announcement that Zionism. In spite of experience, the Arab 1937 and 1947, the Arabs could have O the United States recognizes misrepresentation of Jews as either inca- taken possession of the major part of Jerusalem as the capital of pable of founding a state or undeserving Palestine; but now, after the sequence of Israel is no big deal, or as he puts it, of it seems to go too deep into their history riots and intifadas and wars, only shards “This is nothing more or less than a and culture ever to be corrected. of it are left for them. The Israelis are not recognition of reality.” He was careful to A wise course for the Palestinian lead- settlers: They are citizens willing and able say nothing about the general under- ership would have been to put President to defend their national identity. For rea- standing that Jerusalem would also serve Trump on the spot by insisting that he sons that must go deep into the history and as the capital of a future Palestinian state. clarify what he has in mind for the capi- culture of the West, Israel is never allowed Yet for all its apparent simplicity, this tal of a Palestinian state. They chose oth- the benefits of victory, and the Arabs are statement has profound implications. To erwise. Mahmoud Abbas, president of never obliged to shoulder the costs of accept that Jews have rights in the issue the Palestinian Authority on the West opening the gates of hell. Conferences of Jerusalem destroys the illusion Arabs Bank, declared that the United States is and road maps and peace processes, entertain about Jews. “biased” and can no longer be consid- arranged by parties with interests of The Arab and Muslim world believes ered an honest broker in negotiations their own, maintain a condition of per- as an article of faith that Israelis are set- with Israel. Hamas spokesmen in Gaza petual crisis by obscuring the distinction tlers, colonists, imperialists who are in the called for another intifada and promised between reward and punishment. Failure land not out of conviction but only be - for the umpteenth time “to open the gates to impose costs for going to war is a cause some wicked and powerful persons of hell.” This assumes that, once daily standing inducement to have another

Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock

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round of fighting. Hamas proves the to be an educated man. His family origi- point, pretty well daily. nally were from a Bedouin tribe in Saudi Thanks to President Trump’s decision, Arabia, yet he asserts his Canaanite for the first time in this dispute the Arabs descent, dating it to 1500 B.C.E.—when Reform the are having to pay for their misperceptions there were Jews but no Arabs or Islam. and policies. From their point of view, United Nations Resolution 2334 could Antiquities there is no knowing how bad the next not make it plainer that Israel does not step might be. Trump’s statement about have, and never did have, legal or histori- Act Jerusalem had another sentence not as cal rights anywhere in Jerusalem, and Trump’s reduction of national simple as it looks: “We cannot solve our President Obama refused to veto this con- monuments is a stopgap, not a solution problems by making the same failed sidered opinion. U.N. agencies—including assumptions.” The European Union has UNESCO and the Human Rights BY SHAWN REGAN long since stuck to the same assumption Committee—openly manipulate history, that all costs should fall on Israel. wiping the Jewish presence out of it. Intellectually, morally, and politically Never mind the Wailing Wall, the Bible, HE President Stole Your incoherent, Federica Mogherini, the and the testimony of visitors down the Land,” the outdoor retail- Italian official in charge of EU foreign centuries. It so happens that Benjamin ‘Ter Patagonia proclaimed policy, holds that the decision on Mazar, a professor of Biblical history in a widely circulated Jerusalem “speaks of our darkest hours” and an archaeologist originally from advertisement earlier this month. The and has a “very worrying potential Germany, once took me round his excava- company was reacting to what it called impact.” The latest accounts show that the tion of the Jewish foundations under “an illegal move” by President Donald EU is the largest donor to the Palestinian Herod’s Temple. King Hezekiah’s seal Trump to reduce the size of two national Authority. Substantial amounts are dating from the eighth century B.C.E. monuments in Utah. Patagonia’s founder, siphoned off into terrorism and the con- has recently been found there. The U.N. Yvon Chouinard, didn’t hold back his struction of palatial villas in Ramallah. At has given the Temple Mount the name contempt, deriding the Trump adminis- the same moment, Mogherini wishes “Al-Buraq Plaza” in honor of the horse tration and “the wacko politicians out of Utah and places” for scaling back the land protections. “I mean, it’s evil,” he told CNN. With a little bit of luck, Trump will have Utah’s crime? Its elected officials had saved some Palestinians from being the audacity to oppose executive actions, made by prior administrations, marched pointlessly towards gunfire. that imposed unwanted restrictions on large amounts of federal public land in transactions were “more transparent, that, according to tradition, the Prophet the state. The two monuments, Bears more accountable, and more democratic.” Mohammed mounted there and so Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante, President Emmanuel Macron of France is ascended to heaven. Rachel’s Tomb, a which together comprise more than 3 rumored to be considering recognizing Jewish monument outside Hebron on the million acres, were unilaterally created Palestine as part of the EU. The ambas- West Bank, has similarly been Islamized by presidential proclamation in the face sadors to the United Nations of Britain, as “Bilal bin Rabah.” CNN has put the of opposition from Utah’s congressional Sweden, France, Germany, and Italy Dome of the Rock, an architectural gem representatives. On a visit to Utah on signed a joint statement that Trump’s under Israeli protection, at the top of its December 4, Trump partially reversed decision was not in line with Security list of the most endangered structures in those decisions with an executive action Council resolutions and was “unhelpful.” the world; the mosque’s entrance still has of his own, cutting the Bears Ears mon- Inexplicably, the EU finds the nation-state the bullet marks left when Palestinian ument by nearly 85 percent and Grand retrograde for its members but progres- gunmen shot and killed King Abdullah of Staircase by half. sive for the Palestinians. Jordan. Palmyra, Hatra, and the al-Nuri The fight centers on the Antiquities The Palestinian leadership, the imams, mosque in Mosul are among historic sites Act of 1906, a vaguely worded law that and the supposedly learned men on televi- blown up in inter-Arab fighting. grants presidents broad authority to des- sion maintain that Jews cannot have a American presidents have frequently ignate federal lands that are of histori- claim to Jerusalem because there were intervened in the Middle East. This is cal, cultural, or scientific significance none there until Zionists were herded in. different. This president has given an as national monuments and to restrict The indigenous inhabitants were alleged- unprecedented lesson in “reality enforce- livestock grazing, timber harvesting, ly Canaanites, dating from around 5500 ment,” a phrase coined, I believe, by Saul energy development, and other land B.C.E., and today’s Palestinians are to be Bellow trying to make sense of what he uses. The act states that such designa- classified as their descendants. Mahmoud could see and hear. By and large, Israelis tions should be limited to “the smallest Abbas himself said so, the moment he know how to look after themselves, but heard the news about Jerusalem. Saeb with a little bit of luck, Trump will have Mr. Regan is a research fellow at the Property Erekat has led negotiations with Israel; I saved some Palestinians from being and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, have met him several times and know him marched pointlessly towards gunfire. Mont.

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Ancestral Puebloan ruins at Monarch Cave, Comb Ridge, Utah, part of the newly created Shash Jaa National Monument

area compatible with proper care and gain more control of the lands within its Monument designations such as management of the objects to be pro- borders, even calling for some federal these run roughshod over the legisla- tected,” originally meant to include lands to be transferred to state ownership tive process that is at the core of archaeological sites, historical struc- in recent years. Those efforts have been American governance. In the case of tures, and “other objects of historic or fought tooth and nail by environmental Bears Ears, Obama’s designation scientific interest.” But presidents have groups, which seek to restrict livestock bypassed a multi-year legislative com- often used the law to place large areas grazing, motorized-vehicle operation, promise, known as the Public Lands off limits to many traditional uses— energy development, and other public- Initiative, that sought to reach a “grand without congressional approval, public land uses—often at the expense of many bargain” across the region. That effort, input, or local support. of the state’s rural communities. For envi- led by Representa tive Rob Bishop (R., The Antiquities Act has, in effect, ronmental groups, the Antiquities Act is Utah) and former congressman Jason become a tool for the executive branch an effective tool to do just that. Chaffetz (R., Utah), would have protect- to impose wide-ranging conservation Last December, after months of spec- ed wilderness areas while also opening protections by presidential fiat. Since ulation, Obama created the 1.35 million– other lands for re source development, 1996, more than 11 million acres of land acre Bears Ears monument in southeastern but it was thwarted by Obama’s monu- have been designated as national monu- Utah during the final weeks of his presi- ment designation. ments, primarily in rural western areas, dency, despite opposition from Utah’s The law undermines the potential for and about 760 million acres of ocean as governor, its state legislature, and its such collaborative solutions to public- marine monuments. Past presidents entire congressional delegation. The land-use conflicts. With the Antiquities have used the act to justify setting aside region is home to numerous archaeo- Act at their disposal, environmental geological formations and natural land- logical sites, but many Utahns objected groups are less likely to come to the scapes and even to protect biodiversity, to the size of the designation, which bargaining table in good faith to find as in the case of Oregon’s Cascade- encompassed far more land than just the common ground with competing groups. Siskiyou monument, created by Presi dent sites containing Native American antiq- Indeed, in the case of Bears Ears, envi- Bill Clinton in 2000. President Barack uities. This wasn’t the first time such an ronmentalists were able to stymie leg- Obama was especially fond of the act, outsized designation had been made in islative efforts to establish a grand using it to create more monuments than the region. In 1996, over similar local bargain in eastern Utah by simply hold- any other president. resistance, President Bill Clinton estab- ing out for a lame-duck monument des- While such designations are contro- lished the nearby 1.9 million–acre Grand ignation from Obama. And why not? versial elsewhere, they are especially so Staircase–Escalante monument, which After all, there’s no reason to bother in Utah, where two-thirds of the land is nixed a proposed coal mine that was pre- with the pesky details of conventional owned and managed by the federal gov- dicted to provide hundreds of jobs for lawmaking, with its incessant demands JASON LEE STEORTS ernment. The state has long sought to nearby communities. for compromise and local buy-in, when

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a president can simply declare a nation- In light of past monument abuses, al monument from afar. And since the Trump’s efforts to downsize monuments designations can be made in the wan- and loosen land-use restrictions may ing days of an administration, as many indeed be righting the wrongs of prior Good King of them are, others are left to deal with administrations. But what’s really need- the consequences. ed is an overhaul of the Antiquities Act, Michael Utah’s political leaders, however, were and that may be on its way. This fall the Steering between Nazis and determined to fight back. In February, the House Natural Resources Committee Communists, the Romanian monarch governor, Gary Herbert, signed a resolu- approved a bill, introduced by Bishop, did ‘his bravest best’ tion, approved by the state’s legislature, that would limit the size of monuments calling on President Trump to rescind the that can be designated by unilateral exec- BY JAY NORDLINGER Bears Ears designation. In April, at the utive authority. Monuments of more than request of Utah’s congressional delega- 640 acres would require public input, HAVE met a few kings, thanks to my tion, Trump ordered his interior secretary, and large monuments, up to a maximum practice of journalism. One was Ryan Zinke, to review large monuments of 85,000 acres, would need approval I Leka of Albania—a pretender to the designated since 1996, when Grand from local and state lawmakers. throne, but countable nonetheless. Staircase–Escalante was established. The proposed legislation would also He was born to King Zog and Queen Trump said the review was intended “to clarify the scope of the Antiquities Act Geraldine on April 5, 1939. Two days end another egregious abuse of federal by limiting the types of resources that it later, Italy invaded—and the royal fami- power.” Zinke’s final report, released can be used to protect. Bishop’s bill ly fled. this month, calls for reductions to the two would define “objects of antiquity” as It was 2005 when I met Leka. He was Utah sites and several other large monu- “relics,” “artifacts,” “skeletal re mains,” in Albania, and very ill. Behind him ments elsewhere, as well as for easing “fossils,” and “certain buildings” was an Albanian flag. Leka projected land-use restrictions on some monuments. already constructed. The bill would great sadness and great dignity. He was The fight will now turn to the court- also codify the president’s power to the nominal head of a political party, and room. Several groups, including Pata- reduce the size of monuments designated that very day was election day. “Did you gonia, have filed suit to challenge by predecessors. vote?” I asked. He answered, “I don’t Trump’s reductions of the Utah monu- Regardless of the bill’s outcome, the vote. I am above all political parties, ments. While the Antiquities Act gives Antiquities Act should be recognized as even my own.” presidents seemingly limitless power to an ineffective and inappropriate law that This is the most kingly thing I have create monuments, it is unclear whether is incompatible with our American sys- ever heard said. Leka may have been a it also provides them with the authority tem of government, which typically faintly ridiculous or pathetic figure, but to abolish or shrink monuments, as rejects such wide-ranging executive he was clearly a patriot, and he had not Trump has done. (Several presidents— authority. If nothing else, this much exactly chosen his path in life. He was including Woodrow Wilson, who nearly should be clear: If monument designa- following what he considered his duty. halved the size of Mount Olympus tions were good public policy, they He died in 2011. National Monument—have in fact wouldn’t require presidential proclama- Michael of Romania died a few weeks shrunk national monuments, but none of tions. The same, of course, could be said ago. He was roughly a generation older those reductions were challenged in of Trump’s unilateral monument reduc- than Leka, born in 1921. Like Romania court.) The ensuing court battle could tions, should they withstand legal chal- itself, he was caught between Hitler’s take several years. lenges. As long as such decisions are Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In his life But regardless of how the legal made by presidential decree, any particu- was reflected some of the turbulence of action shakes out, one thing should be lar outcome will be hopelessly uncertain the 20th century. noted: The lands in question are still and may last only as long as a president’s When Michael was born, his grandfa- federally owned. Despite Patagonia’s tenure in the White House—and that’s ther, Ferdinand, was on the throne. His claim that Trump “stole your land,” hardly an effective conservation strategy. father was Carol, the crown prince, and the lands remain public. Monument or The only real solution is to get rid of his mother was Helen, a princess of not, they are still subject to strict laws, the antiquated law that got us in this Greece and Denmark, and a wonderful such as the National Environmental position in the first place. Congress woman. His father was not wonderful: Policy Act and the Endangered Species should make the Antiquities Act a He was a Class A ass. A rake, he took up Act. And, like all public lands, they thing of the past and require that with a woman named Magda, who was remain protected through other, yet- national monuments be established not a suitable mistress from Romanian broader federal laws such as the through individual legislative action, society’s point of view. She was redhead- Archaeological Resources Protection as is the case with national parks and ed, Jewish, Catholic, divorced . . . The Act, created in 1979 to protect ancient federal wilderness areas. After all, if crown prince was given a choice: your artifacts on public land from looting government is simply the word for the future throne or Magda. He chose the lat- or desecration, and the National things we do together, as progressives ter, running off with her to Paris. Historic Preservation Act, established like to tell us, then let’s actually govern In 1927, King Ferdinand died. His in 1966 to protect historic structures together—even when it comes to our grandson Michael, age five, was pro- on federal property. land-conservation policies. claimed king. “Really?” the boy said,

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when he got the news. Then he asked for ally settled in Switzerland (as royal exiles a piece of chocolate cake. He knew his do). Michael worked as a farmer, a pilot, royal prerogative. a stockbroker, etc. Money was often a A regency governed the country, of concern, but the family had supporters. course. But forces hostile to this regency The family consisted of mother, father, staged a coup d’état in 1930, bringing and five daughters. No sons is often a back the king’s father, who became Carol problem for a king (and a queen). II. Michael, now eight, was demoted to Michael tinkered with the rules of crown prince. Carol proved a nasty king, succession—not that they matter too creating a personal dictatorship. This was much for mere pretenders—declaring his brought down in 1940, in yet another eldest, Margareta, his heir, or heiress. coup (by equally nasty people). Michael looked the part—the part of Michael, 18, was on the throne again. king. He certainly looked like an aristo- He may well be the only man ever to pre- crat: tall, thin, erect, handsome, beauti- cede and succeed his father as king. Yet fully dressed. He had beautiful manners. the real power in Romania lay with the He was not a fortunate speaker—he either prime minister, Ion Antonescu, who was, mumbled or had a speech impediment (it essentially, a local Hitler. Indeed, Michael was hard to tell)—but this did not impair would refer to him as “the führer.” his manners. “He was very, very shy,” Incidentally, Michael had lunch with the says Jessica Douglas-Home, a writer real führer, twice. with long experience of Romania. And Antonescu “treated me like a child,” “he had an aura of goodness and duty.” Michael would recall. But Antonescu had Ion Mihai Pacepa knew him too. He respect for the queen mother, Helen, lis- had been a general in the Securitate, i.e., tening to her even when he didn’t like the secret police of Communist Romania. what she was saying. Helen intervened to He had also been a top adviser to the dic- save thousands of Jews (a fact that infuri- The late King Michael of Romania tator, Nicolae Ceausescu. In 1978, he ated Adolf Eichmann). In 1993, she was made a spectacular defection to the recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust cousins Princess Elizabeth and Prince United States. He says that the Securitate memorial in Jerusalem, as a “righteous Philip. He knew that he faced danger back had copious files on Michael—including among the nations.” home. He could have taken asylum then “hundreds of false testimonies ‘docu- In the summer of 1944, Michael was 22 and there, but refused. A month later, in menting’ that he was an American, and coming into his own. The war was Bucharest, the Communists gave him a British, French, and German spy.” He going badly for the Axis, which included choice: He could abdicate the throne and also says that, in his judgment, Michael Romania. Opponents of the Antonescu leave the country; or they would execute lived “a heroic life.” regime within Romania treated the king a thousand students—supporters of his In 1989—on Christmas Day—the as a focal point. He led a daunting coup whom they had rounded up. Talking Communist regime at last fell. It was against Antonescu, toppling him, and about this later, he asked, “What are you replaced by a government not entirely un- swinging Romania to the side of the supposed to do in a situation like that?” Communist. Michael tried to return to Allies. This shortened the war by some He abdicated and left. Romania at Easter 1990, but they blocked weeks or months, sparing both combat- During this terrible period, there was him. He managed to reach Romanian soil ants and civilians many more casualties. something pleasant: Michael met a girl. that Christmas, but they expelled him After the war, Michael received an He met her in London, when his cousins after twelve hours. “He came like a thief,” award from Stalin and an award from were getting married. She was Anne, said a government spokesman, “lying and Truman. The first was the Order of daughter of Prince René of Bourbon- physically forcing his way into the coun- Victory. (Eisenhower received it too.) Parma and Princess Margaret of Den - try.” Princess Margareta said, “It’s obvi- The second was the Legion of Merit. mark. She had grown up in France, and ous that the powers-that-be in Romania Truman’s citation read, “By his superior had spent some of the war in the United are terrified of him.” judgment, his boldness of action and the States—in New York, specifically. She Yes, they were. high character of his personal leader- attended the Parsons School of Design They let him come at Easter 1992 ship,” Michael “has made an outstand- and worked as a salesgirl at Macy’s. and were further spooked. This quiet ing contribution to the cause of freedom Then, for the French army, she drove king attracted huge, teeming crowds. and democracy.” ambulances. She would receive the Croix Forbidden to give a formal address, he Needless to say, freedom and democ- de guerre. gave an informal one from a hotel bal-

SYGMA VIA GETTYracy IMAGES was not to be the lot of Romania, Michael and Anne had a religious prob- cony. You never heard or saw a less / for many years. The country would be lem to overcome—he was Orthodox, she charismatic speaker. (There are films CORBIS / under Communist dictatorship, with its Catholic—but they finessed it, and were of the event.) But at least he wasn’t a own Stalins. married at the royal palace in Athens in demagogue. He exhibited an integrity In November 1947, King Michael trav- June 1948. They bounced around several and a decency that apparently captivated PATRICK ROBERT eled to London for a wedding: that of his countries, as royal exiles do, and eventu- the crowd.

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In 1996, a government of the center pleatly gentle kind of tap so he would go Right was elected, led by Emil home so Georgie Cun ning ham wouldn’t Constantinescu, a bulwark of Romanian beat him up, because you know how democracy. Unafraid of Michael, they Before You Georgie is when he gets mad. Because restored his citizenship, handing him his John threw a mud ball at him on his new passport right on the tarmac at the Say No . . . bicycle. Not that you were wrong, but airport. Later, Michael became an unof- A correspondence, nonfictional, that I’m ex planing now, because you ficial diplomat-at-large for Romania, between a young boy, a housewife, a were so mad then you wouldn’t give me arguing for its admission to NATO and headmaster, and the young boy’s a chance to explane, because John got the EU. brother their first and he fed you a lot of He was shaken by the material depriva- garbage. But I still like John, he is a fine tion of Romania—its poverty. But he was ALOÏSE BUCKLEY HEATH young boy, he has been well brought up even more shaken by the lack of a “moral by his Mother. sense,” as he called it. No one was instill- But even if sometimes you don’t get ing this sense in young people. “This is March 7 along with me too well, I always think not to say that we should all be priests or Dear Mrs. Heath: of you as my “Oldest Friend” so I hope monks,” he explained, but “the rules of I wish to ask you a great favor. My you will do me this great favor of writ- God” should be taught. brother David goes to Cranwell and he ing me a letter of recommandation. You know an old expression: “It is says they go easier on brothers, so I Thanking you for your trouble, good to be king.” It can be, sure—but it might have a chance to get in even Respectfully yours, can also be something else. There was far though my grades aren’t so terribly PETER BAILEY-GATES more drama, far more turbulence, in King good. But I need three letters of recom- Michael’s life than I have sketched here. mendation and I have one from a priest P.S.: Thank you for the pennies of which “I had four years with the Nazis and three and one from a nun and my father says I already had the 1926 San Francisco years with the Soviets,” he once said, he thinks the third one better be from mint but I did not have the 1921 Den - referring to his second reign (after the someone who is not a priest or a nun. ver. Do you have a 1905 Indian Head, I childhood one). That is not necessarily You are not a priest or a nun but yet you will pay one nickel, clear profit of what a king bargains for. But it’s what know me intamitely from me having four (4)¢? this one signed up for—or was born for. delivered your paper even that bad day Respectfully yours, A few days after Michael died, Rahul right after Christmas when their was no PETER BAILEY-GATES Gandhi was elected president of the school and the Times boy didn’t deliver Indian National Congress—like his his customers, and from those Catholic March 7 great-grandfather, grandmother, father, Christmas cards you always buy, and Dear Peter: and mother before him. (Nehru, Indira from the jack lantern pumpkins I helped I would be glad to write you a letter of Gandhi, Rajiv, and Sonia.) A person you carve three years in a row, and the recommendation to Cranwell, and I am might resent him, as a privileged dynast. Easter Eggs, and a lot of other things. very flattered that you asked me. Of Or envy him. Or pity him? Bear in mind, (Like the time I picked up John when he course, I will have to tell the Truth, the two of those predecessors were assassi- broke his arm and taught Priscilla Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, nated. You and I might not sign up for how to ride a two-wheeler.) so I hope nobody will be care- Rahul’s job. Before you say no, I less enough to allow my letter We would also balk at “Your Majesty,” did break the trampo- to fall into the hands of the being good republicans, or red-blooded line but I didn’t hon- police. I can’t tell you Americans. But Michael was a model of estly know how how much I would miss humility, particularly as contrasted with heavy I was, be - you if you had to spend Ceausescu, say, who styled himself the cause I grew very the next ten years in a “Genius of the Carpathians.” Leka of suddenly and the reforma tory. Albania may have had a pretension or only reason I was Respectably yours, two, but he would never have called him- always on the roof MRS. H. self what the Albanian dictator, Enver was because of my Hoxha, did: “Sole Force.” Kings can be as gliders which you said P.S.: No, I haven’t got a tyrannical as the next leader, but they can I could get if they were 1905 Indian Head, which also exemplify patriotism, national iden- on the roof, and the time saddens me very much, but what tity, and salutary tradition. you wouldn’t let me come in your saddens me more is the fact that even Michael once said, in his fumbling, backyard for three weeks that time, after three years’ acquaintanceship you mumbling way, “It’s queer how history Catholic Word of Honor, John started it don’t know me well enough to realize does things,” and he is so right. My col- and it was not my fault because Scout’s that I also know that this particular league David Pryce-Jones did not know Honor, I only gave John the most com- penny is worth $6! You and your 4¢ Michael, but he knew his mother, Helen, profit—hah! I’ve told you and told you and he has just the right words for the late A Christmas story by the late Aloïse Buckley Heath is about my high IQ. Don’t you believe king: “He did his bravest best.” a NATIONAL REVIEW tradition. me? However, just to show you I bear no

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grudge, I will give you my duplicate of inches of space for the slogan “HOORAY March 15 the 1911 no mint mark—for free yet! FORMRS. HEATH,” Peter offered to CRANWELL PREPARATORY SCHOOL Respectably yours, refund my dollar be cause he had Office of the Principal MRS. H. caused my ad to appear as “COMPLI- Mrs. Benjamin Wild Heath MENTSOFAFRIEND.” I must, however, 29 Colony Road P.P.S.: Don’t worry about my letter. I state categorically that Peter has faith- West Hartford, Connecticut will bet you one dollar (from me) to fully and conscientiously fulfilled his one doughnut (from you) that you will share of every and any contract be- Dear Mrs. Heath: get into Cranwell—not because you’re tween us, what ever it may have been. I am very grateful to you for your de - such a hot-shot, you understand, but (And the fact that one or two of these tailed and colorful description of Peter because if I’m crazy enough to like contracts have been rather clearer to Bailey-Gates. you, your priest and your nun are prob- Peter than to me has been indignantly Many of Peter’s accomplishments can ably suffering from the same form of attributed by my own children to my be put to good use at school. Leaf-raking insanity. On the other hand, they may habit of doing jigsaw puzzles, reading, and snow-shoveling are part of the punitive know you even better than I do, God watching tele vision programs, and curriculum. Endowed with all the energy help them! saying “Uh-hunh” simultaneously, which you describe, I am sure that Peter Respectably yours, when I should have been listening. My will be an early candidate for de merits. MRS. H. husband affirms this judgment.) We will try to keep pace with Peter. Lest my young friend sound barely What substitute we will have when the March 9 lower than the angels, I must add that occasion arises for Peter to “retire to his To Whom It May Concern: his fertile imagination combined with own backyard” we will try to figure out Peter Bailey-Gates has been in and his 13-year-old’s sense of humor has during the year. out of my house almost daily for the led, on occasion, to my addressing him Sincerely yours, past three years—by “almost” I mean with words harsh and unkind (“You CHARLES E. BURKE, SJ those short sentences of exile which I know perfectly well that when I told (Rev.) Charles E. Burke, SJ have been un kind enough to impose you last Tuesday you could climb up Principal upon Peter—and in that time I have on the roof to get your glider, I didn’t come to know him very well indeed: as mean you could buy ten more gliders March 15 friend, paper boy, fellow penny-collector, and aim them at the—and by the way, I Dear Mimi and Dad: and combined decorator, waiter, and hope you didn’t buy them with the lot- Please excuse the paper, for I’m in entertainer at my younger children’s tery money for the bicycle horn— study hall, and since something hap- birthday parties. when are you going to have that pened to night, which made me feel I have found Peter to be unfailingly lottery, anyway? I bought those tickets pretty proud of my little (little? Ha Ha) good-humored, well-mannered, and six weeks ago!” And much more). brother Peter, I thought I’d tell you about considerate—all of which qualities These irrational, if predic t able, crises it, unless you already know. This has also stand him in good stead in his relations of the adult world leave Peter possibly changed practically my entire attitude with the public, which are many and re pentant, probably remorseful, but toward Father Burke who has practically varied. I am sure that no boy in New certainly un ruffled. He is more sophis- never been known to crack a smile in the En gland, much less in West Hartford, ticated today than three years ago, memory of the oldest graduate. has been engaged in so many intricate when, at the age of ten, he frequently Not more than five minutes ago, dur ing business enterprises as Peter Bailey- urged me not to get my liver in a the break between study-hall hours, Father Gates. I have bought, hired, subscribed quiver. Today, when Peter and I have Burke called me and showed me a letter to, invested in, paid and been paid what he refers to as “a difference of which Mrs. Heath had written to him about interest on fully a dozen of his ventures opinion,” he retires with complete Peter. It described Peter to a tee. All of the in the last three years—not even count- equanimity to his own backyard until letter was praiseworthy about him, and had ing his snow-shoveling, leaf-raking, such time as my ill-humor subsides. been written just about Peter and nothing apple-picking, and garbage-can-toting, My change of mood is apparently else. Father Burke was astonished and asked for which my own young sons are picked up by Peter’s extrasensory per- me if it was all true, and I told him it was, recruited. Peter’s financial sense is, ception within the hour, for whenever I and he said in that case PETER GETS IN!! . . . however, no deterrent to his feeling for decide that the time has come for for- Say hello to the little kids for me please, what is fitting and proper: When he giving and forgetting, he appears at my and tell them “Big Dave” will be home soon. washed the car of the 70-year-old spin- front door within 15 minutes, to assure Love and prayers, ster who lives nearby, for instance, he me he has forgiven and forgotten. By YOUR SON DAVID was careful to explain (lest I should way of proof (or pen ance?) he then find out, I suppose!) that he had resumes without rancor his status as March 15 refused payment only because she had our daily visitor. Dear Pete—Boy, does Mrs. Heath sure “no man to make money for her”; Needless to say, our friendship is have your number. Father Burke said he again, when he asked me to take an ad steadfast. can hardly wait to get you up here to in his projected Colony Road News and ALOÏSE BUCKLEY HEATH knock it out of you. Love and Kisses. I was so irreverent as to reserve two (Mrs. Benjamin Wild Heath) DAVE

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Scott Pruitt’s Reformation The challenge at the EPA is deeper than policy

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

Des Moines COTT PRUITT likes coffee. Seriously likes it. He’s all and the EPA, which has long been dominated by it—is not inter- riled up and hopped up and caffeinated and talking 100 ested in stewardship. It’s interested in prohibition, in a lot of S mph in front of a group of rural electrical co-op officers THOU SHALT and a whole heck of a lot more THOU SHALT NOT. in Iowa and if we’re all telling the truth here seeming “You have two different approaches, two different worldviews, just a little bit overstimulated this midmorning in Des Moines two very different sets of assumptions,” Pruitt says. when he stops to intone the praises of the glorious steaming cup “One side says we exist to serve creation,” he explains. of coffee he’s holding in his hand, obtained from a Scenic Route “The other side says creation is there for us to use and manage Bakery down the road. “The problem is that I keep talking, so I to the benefit of mankind. Those are competing ideologies, don’t get to drink it, and I have to keep heating it up.” And talk and they drive decision-making. They drive regulation. If you and talk he does, letting his coffee go tepid again, intoning his are of the side that says we exist to serve creation, then you have speech with a lawyer’s emphasis on certain words that crop up no trouble putting up a fence and saying DO NOT USE. Even repeatedly in his description of his mission as the Trump admin- though people may starve, may freeze, though developing coun- istration’s EPA boss: ephemeral and intermittent, for all those tries may never develop their economies. That’s something drainage ditches and pasture puddles the Obama administration they’re comfortable doing, and I think that’s wrongheaded.” insisted were Waters of the United States—“WOTUS” for short; He shies away from characterizing this as a religious point of fanciful, for this and other interpretations of federal statute; and view but will allow that it has a deep ethical component. And he two words that he will repeatedly arrange in opposition to doesn’t always shy away from the religious overtones, either: He describe what he’s up to and the fundamental conflict of visions says he is “prayerful” that a reasonable bipartisan consensus on that is the reason he is (perhaps second after Betsy DeVos) the the environment might emerge, and he jokes with a friend later in member of the Trump team who gets most irritatingly up the day that the difficulties of his job put him in mind of the Book Democrats’ noses: stewardship and prohibition. of Joshua: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Stewardship, Pruitt says, is making responsible use of our Seen from that point of view, what Pruitt is up to at the EPA national blessings, including our natural resources: “Feed the isn’t just reform—it’s a Reformation. And he’ll preach that ROMAN GENN world and fuel the world,” he says, over and over. But the Left— gospel up and down I-35 at a number of Iowa events on a bright

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THE NATIONAL REVIEW Sailing December 1–8 on Holland America’s Oosterdam 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise Join Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin D. Williamson, Andrew McCarthy, James Lileks, Scott Rasmussen, Kyle Smith, John O’Sullivan, Kathryn Lopez, Lee Edwards, Charles Cooke, Cal Thomas, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jim Geraghty, Katherine Timpf, John J. Miller, Alexandra DeSanctis, David French, John Hillen, Reihan Salam, Rob Long, George Nash, Nick Adams, Daniel Mahoney—and more to come—as we sail the sunny Caribbean and visit the delightful ports of Ft. Lauderdale, Half Moon Cay, Amber Cove, Grand Turk, & Key West

t’s time for you to sign up for the National Review and national affairs. Confirmed speakers include NR edi- 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise, certain tor-in-chief Rich Lowry, NRO editor Charles C.W. I to be the conservative event of the year. Featuring an Cooke, NR senior editors Jonah Goldberg, Jay all-star cast of your favorite National Review writers, this Nordlinger, and Ramesh Ponnuru, NR essayists John affordable trip—prices start at $1,999 a person, with a $100 O’Sullivan, Andrew C. McCarthy, David French, per-person discount for anyone who signs up by February Kevin Williamson, Kyle Smith, and Reihan Salam, NR 28th—will take place December 1–8, 2018, aboard columnists Rob Long and James Lileks, ace political Holland America Line’s beautiful MS Oosterdam. writers Jim Geraghty, John J. Miller, and ace reporters Throughout the year, we’ll mark the 10th Anniversary of on the cultural scene Kathryn Jean Lopez, Kat Timpf, our founder’s death by looking at Bill Buckley’s profound and Alexandra DeSanctis, plus syndicated columnist legacy, and what it means for the future (and for the pre- Cal Thomas, pollster Scott Rasmussen, conservative sent!) of conservatism. On the voyage, we’ll also discuss historians George Nash and Lee Edwards, scholar the legacy of other important figures—late 2018 will also Daniel J. Mahoney, FLAG USA founder Nick Adams, mark the centennaries of Russell Kirk and Aleksandr and military expert John Hillen. Solzhenitsyn—plus the Congressional elections, the status And we have many invitations—to other leading conser- of the Trump Presidency, domestic policy and the econo- vatives—outstanding. We expect 400 people to attend my, national security and foreign affairs, et al. NR’s 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise. We That’s precisely what our conservative experts will do are confident they—you!—will enjoy our exclusive event on the Oosterdam, your luxury getaway for fascinating dis- program, which wil include eight scintillating seminars cussion of major events, trends, WFB, and the 2018 elec- featuring NR’s editors and guest speakers; two fun-filled tions. We’re beginning to assemble a wonderful group of “Night Owl” sessions; three revelrous pool-side cocktail speakers hand to make sense of affairs cultural, worldly, receptions; late-night “smoker” featuring superior H. Upmann cigars (and com- JOIN US FOR SEVEN BALMY DAYS AND COOL CONSERVATIVE NIGHTS plimentary cognac); and inti- DAY/DATE PORT ARRIVE DEPART SPECIAL EVENT mate dining on at least two evenings with a guest speaker SAT/Dec. 1 Ft. Lauderdale, FL 5:00PM evening cocktail reception or editor. SUN/Dec. 2 Key West, FL 8:00AM 4:00PM afternoon seminar “Night Owl” session In addition, NR Institute will once again sponsor the spe- MON/Dec. 3 AT SEA morning/afternoon seminars cial three-part “Burke to TUE/Dec. 4 Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos 8:00AM 5:00PM afternoon seminar Buckley” program (a funda- evening cocktail reception mental of conservatism refresh- WED/Dec. 5 Amber Cove, DR 8:00AM 5:00PM afternoon seminar late-night Smoker er) that has proven quite popu- lar on recent voyages. THU/Dec. 6 AT SEA morning/afternoon seminars “Night Owl” session Surely, the best reason to

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SPECIAL EARLY-BIRD OFFER: SIGN UP RATES START AT JUST $1,999 P/P! BY FEB. 28TH FOR $100 P/P DISCOUNT! Superior service, gourmet cuisine, elegant accommodations, and great entertainment await you on the Oosterdam. Prices are per- person, based on double occupancy, and include port fees, taxes, gratuities, all meals, entertainment, and admittance to and partic- will also be a spectacular week of world-class cruising on the ipation in all National Review functions. Per-person rates for beautiful and luxurious Oosterdam, as it sails an Eastern third/fourth person in cabin (by age and category): Categories C to J 17-younger: $ 1,000 18-up: $ 1,100 Caribbean itinerary that will include Ft. Lauderdale, Key Category V 17-younger: $ 1,050 18-up: $ 1,150 West (its tanned, rested, and ready!) Grand Turk, Amber Categories SS & SA 17-younger: $ 1,100 18-up: $ 1,200 Cove (a beautiful first-time destination in the Dominican NEPTUNE SUITE Magnificent quarters (from 506 Republic), and Half Moon Cay, Holland America’s pri- sq. ft.) features use of exclusive Neptune Lounge, vate island (home to a most pristine blue lagoon, and tons personal concierge, complimentary laundry/dry- of fun). cleaning, large private verandah, king-size bed, whirlpool bath/shower, dressing room, And for those times when we’re “at sea,” or if you simply large sitting area, flat-panel TV/DVD, mini- feel like staying on board rather than descending the gang- bar, refrigerator, safe, much more.

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LARGE INSIDE Cozy but ample cabin quarters For more information or to apply online go to (from 152 sq. ft.) features queen-size bed (convertible to 2 twins), shower, sitting area, www.nrcruise.com flat-panel TV/DVD, safe. Category J or call The Cruise Authority at DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 1,999 P/P 1-888-283-8965 SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE: $ 2,699

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The National Review 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise Mail to: National Review Cruise, The Cruise & Vacation Authority, 1760 Powers Ferry Rd., Marietta, GA 30067 or Fax to 770-953-1228

Please fill out application completely and mail with deposit check or fax with credit-card information. One application per cabin. If you want more than one cabin, copy this application. For questions please call The Cruise & Vacation Authority at 888-283-8965. Personal MAILING AND CONTACT INFORMATION (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY)

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Passport Number Expiration Date Citizenship CREDENTIALS Are you a past Holland America cruiser? o Yes o No Your legal first and last name are required for travel documentation. If you have an informal name you would like reflected on your name badge, please indicate it here: PASSPORT INFORMATION This cruise requires a valid passport. Passports should expire after 6/9/19. Failure to provide this form of documentation will result in denied boarding of ______the Oosterdam. For more information visit www.travel.state.gov. Guest #1 Guest #2

Cabins, Air Travel, & Other Information IV. AIR / TRANSFER PACKAGES o We will provide our own roundtrip air and transfers to and from Ft. Lauderdale All rates are per person, double occupancy, and include all port charges and taxes, all (arriving there on 12/1/18 by 11:00AM and departing after 11:00AM on 12/8/18). gratuities, meals, entertainment, and National Review activities. Failure to appear for embarkation for any reason constitutes a cancellation subject to full penalties. Personal items not included. PLEASE CHECK ALL APPLICABLE BOXES! o We would like The Cruise Authority to customize roundtrip air (fees apply) from I. CABIN CATEGORY (see list and prices on previous page) ______o Coach o First Class Air First cabin category choice:______Second cabin category choice:______Arrival date: ______Bedding: Beds made up as o 2 Twin beds o 1 Queen bed Departure date: ______BOOKING SINGLE? o Please try to match me with a roommate. (My age: ______) Preferred carrier: ______II. DINING w/ FRIENDS/FAMILY: I wish to dine with ______V. MEDICAL / DIETARY / SPECIAL REQUESTS o Every Night o 3-4 times o 2 times o Once Please enter in the box below any medical, dietary, or special needs or requests we should know about any of the members of your party: III. PRE- AND POST-CRUISE TOUR PACKAGES o Send me information on pre-/post-cruise packages (for 1 or 2 nights) at the Hilton Marina Ft. Lauderdale Hotel (or similar). Payment, Cancellation, & Insurance o The card’s billing address is indicated above. o The card’s billing address is:

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December day, from the electrical co-op convention to a smaller until he gets his way on ethanol. Pruitt is positioned to cut that event at a nearby cattle ranch to a public appearance with Kim Gordian knot by simply issuing a year-round waiver on 15E, as Reynolds, the charismatic new governor of Iowa, a Republican the 15 percent–ethanol–blend gasoline is known. That would and the first woman to hold the job. make his farm-state friends very happy, and it would also be a But you’re probably wondering what the head of the EPA is potential boon to his oil-and-gas allies back home in Oklahoma. doing on a tour of Iowa, which is one of those places you usually But he isn’t sure he can do it. The administrator of the EPA is hit when you’re running for president, and nobody seriously himself an endangered species: a Washingtonian who cares thinks Scott Pruitt is running for president. whether he actually technically has the power to do what he They think he’s running for governor of Oklahoma. wants to do. “I very much hope we can get there, but it’s a matter of whether the statute permits it or not,” he told a farm-lobby group earlier INCE his swearing-in last February, Pruitt has made a pret- this year. The issue is still under consideration. And there’s a lot ty good tour of the country, touching down in more than more on the Trump administration’s agenda that’s of keen interest 30 states and meeting with people he describes in the to Iowa ethanol producers. Right at the very moment the Trump Sinvariably saccharine language of modern politics as “stake- administration is threatening to undo NAFTA, the government of holders,” which is to say, the people most directly affected by Enrique Peña Nieto has moved to allow the sale of 10E gasoline what it is the EPA does all day, about which there has been some in Mexico, where ethanol had been capped at 5.8 percent of gaso- dispute—a fair amount of it initiated by Scott Pruitt when he was line blends. Mexico’s state-run oil company produces a little bit the attorney general of Oklahoma, in which position he sued the of ethanol as the result of other petroleum-related activity, but agency on many occasions. There are a few federal agencies— Mexico—which already is the top foreign consumer of U.S. EPA, Education, and Labor prominent among them—toward corn—imports much of its ethanol. Guess from where? which the Left takes a proprietary interest, and from the time of It may very well be that Pruitt giveth but Wilbur Ross Pruitt’s nomination his critics insisted that the fact that he had so taketh away. often sued the agency in an attempt to rein in its regulatory ambi- tions was in and of itself disqualifying. The unspoken argu- ment there (usually unspoken—not always) is that anybody RUITT’S in an awkward position as I stalk him around who is anything other than a progressive crusader cannot legit- Iowa. He gets a lot of bad press, and even if he laughs it imately serve as the administrator of the EPA, because the EPA off—“It’s only the New York Times,” he says with a smirk exists to undertake progressive crusades. The same argument Pwhen asked about former New Jersey Republican governor Tom is leveled at DeVos, a frequent critic of federal education policy Kean’s column calling for his dismissal—he’s obviously mindful and of the underperforming unionized monopolies that have of the damage the media can do. At the same time, his boss is made the Cleveland public schools what they are. famously jealous of the spotlight, and good press can be a prob- Pruitt takes a different view. He is, he says, doing the same thing lem for a member of Donald Trump’s administration—especially as EPA administrator that he was doing in litigation against the good press from NATIONAL REVIEW, a magazine that dedicated a EPA as attorney general in Oklahoma: trying to get it to do its job, special issue to arguing that Trump is unfit for the office he cur- to stay within its legal authority, and to abide by the rule of law. rently holds. Pruitt, a deeply intelligent man and a natural politi- Contrary to the cartoon version of him generally offered up in the cian, surely must be mindful of this. But nobody thinks that press, Pruitt in many ways desires to lead the EPA to take stronger serving as chief of the EPA is going to be the end of his career in positions on some environmental problems, especially air quality. public life—or that he wants it to be. And he does seem to enjoy “We still have a lot of work to do on clean air,” he says. “The prob- the heck out of politicking, the glad-handing and the interviews lem is that for the past decade we’ve been so focused on CO2 that and the standing ovations (of which there are more than one on we’ve let a lot of other things slide.” Regulating the greenhouse this particular day in Iowa) and the posing for pictures: “I’ve gas as “air pollution” was a cherished and ultimately failed prior- always been short of stature,” he says while lining up for press ity for the Obama administration, and, in Pruitt’s view, this took shots with a group of local worthies. “But that’s helpful for a attention away from more ordinary concerns, such as industrial politician—I’m always in the front of the picture.” emissions and smog. “People come to me and say, ‘Why don’t Pruitt, who is not yet 50 years old, has been a politician for a you do this?’ or ‘Why don’t you do that?’ And some of those I long time, having served in the Oklahoma state senate before would. But Congress hasn’t given us statutory authority. If you being elected attorney general. Oklahoma has a part-time legisla- want to change the policy, you have to change the law.” ture, which left him a fair amount of time for his law practice and For example, Pruitt’s buddies in Iowa—he seems to know his great passion outside of politics: baseball. He owned Okla - everybody by name and to have had long relationships with many homa City’s Triple-A affiliate, which was part of the Texas of the people he’s meeting—would love to see some changes in Rangers organization, and he says it was an attractive business: the ethanol rules, because the corn-fed economy of Iowa is mad The major-league affiliate picks up most of the payroll, the players for moonshine. The ethanol industry is characterized by an insane and manager, but the local owner gets the sponsorship money and mix of subsidies, mandates, and regulations. Most American the concessions. When he’s asked by a friendly interlocutor what gasoline contains 10 percent ethanol, but some of it is 15 percent, he wishes the reliably critical news media would report about him, which retailers can sell most of the year—but not in the summer. he answers: “That I batted .300 for Kentucky.” I ask for a fact Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, along with three corn-state col- check on that. “I did a little better, sometimes.” A natural politician leagues, has been holding hostage an unrelated energy measure with roots in the energy business who owned a baseball team? He (relaxing Obama-era methane-emission restrictions on drillers) shrugs off comparisons with George W. Bush. “Other than that . . .”

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He didn’t summer in Kennebunkport. He came up hard in sistent with the law, and what’s reasonable. As Pruitt points out, it Kentucky, with teenage parents and tight finances, and he spent a isn’t as though the plan is to replace the current interpretation of great deal of time with his grandfather, a Teamster. He played WOTUS with nothing. “We aren’t deregulating,” he says. “We’re baseball at Kentucky on a scholarship, but that ran out after his regulating in accordance with the law.” The United States is out of sophomore year, at which point he transferred to Georgetown— the Paris agreement, thanks in no small part to Pruitt’s countervail- not the prestigious university in Washington, but a small Baptist ing influence on the president, who nearly was convinced by his liberal-arts college in Kentucky. Around that time, it started to daughter and son-in-law to break his campaign promise to quit the sink in for him that baseball was not going to be his future, and global-warming accord. Pruitt has ended the “sue and settle” he settled on the idea of law school but took two bachelor’s process under which the EPA effectively outsourced regulation to degrees first. There was an opportunity at the University of activist groups and paid them for the courtesy, and he has barred, Oklahoma law school, and he’s been singing “Boomer Sooner” as an obvious conflict of interest, parties receiving EPA grants ever since. from serving on EPA advisory panels. He is rhetorically sharp, but Oklahoma was good to him, and instead of a politician’s blue his administration so far has been far from slash-and-burn. suit and solid tie he sports a rich guy’s wardrobe—fine dark And that’s worth understanding about Scott Pruitt. His critics sports coat, expensive-looking tie, big watch—along with a rich may dismiss him as a creature of oil and gas, as an ogre who is guy’s confidence. But he remembers a very different milieu back willing to see the water and air despoiled in the service of his cor- in Kentucky, and he seems genuinely ticked when he talks about porate allies, but he is in fact a true believer. He’s serious about progressive do-gooders who never think about what their policies this rule-of-law stuff. He’s the last thing the Left expects to see in would do to the grocery and electric bills of people struggling to a Trump appointee: principled. keep it together financially. “The mindset is very arrogant and very elitist,” he says. “And who benefits? The elite. The folks who can least afford HICH is not to say he isn’t squirrelly. He’s plenty squir- those kinds of decisions pay the most. Go look at Ceausescu’s relly. After he’s done with his public events, we meet Romania. They regulated the wattage of bulbs and told you for more of that coffee he was talking about: His tipple when to turn out the lights. You know why? Because they wanted isW called the “Honey Bee,” and it’s a concoction of espresso, to reserve power for the elite.” honey, and cinnamon. “You’re going to like this,” he promises. He Which is to say, he speaks fluent Trumpkin, and his allies in talks easily and with great command of the relevant policy details Iowa are, as is typical with populists, a mix of down-home and but is extraordinarily guarded about many things. Strangely, he serious money. At a local farmhouse, he’s served a very Iowa- refuses to answer the question when I ask him whether he actively looking lunch—meat and potatoes and gravy, rolls and butter, sought his current job as administrator of the EPA or the Trump green beans, salad, shortbread, and some local Norwegian- administration came to him. He doesn’t seem like the sort of man American cream roll that everybody raves about, all of it present- who’d be ashamed of a little hustle, but the question momentarily ed by the blue-jacketed young ladies of the Future Farmers of interrupts his equanimity. “It . . . was . . . a conversation,” he says. America, overseen by a caterer wearing a jacket emblazoned “A process.” with the eternal words of wisdom: MIND YOUR OWN BISCUITS Well, isn’t everything? Presumably, Pruitt’s taciturnity on the AND LIFE WILL BE GRAVY. They say grace, and a Secret Service question is an artifact of his having been a Jeb guy rather than a guy dressed down for the occasion (meaning brown shoes Trump guy early on. But there’s no question that Pruitt is fully on instead of black) hovers discreetly off stage right. There’s more the Trump team now. security at the door. A veteran of untold numbers of rubber-chicken He is genuinely excited about the possibilities we have for political dinners, Pruitt puts his head down and eats like he means improving the environment. He speaks at some length about it when someone else takes the floor, but he more than holds up Disney’s arrangement with Harvest Power, an alternative-power his side of the conversation. These people did not come for idle company that takes the Magic Kingdom’s food waste and uses it chitchat. His hosts and their guests are far from what people who to generate electricity that it sells back to Disney. “What was don’t know much about Iowa farmers would imagine Iowa farm- even more impressive was to spend time with the Disney ers to be like: They are serious beef and commodity producers employees, because they understand that this is purposeful.” who are overseeing millions of dollars in capital and who have That’s another one of those words he keeps coming back to: pur- detailed questions and complex public-policy concerns. There is poseful. “A lot of times, we think of recycling as being charitable a positively Hayekian exchange about policy uncertainty regard- without realizing it can be purposeful, that it can truly contribute ing ethanol-volume obligations and interpretive conflicts be - something. For example, over 20 percent of our landfills in this tween statutes and regulations. This is Pruitt’s element, and he country are food waste. That’s a lot. If we made progress with respects his hosts enough to forgo pretending that there are easy respect to how we deal with food waste in a more productive way, answers to their concerns or that they’re going to get everything it would have a tremendous impact on the environment.” He is they want—even if he were personally inclined to give the unsparing in his assessment of the Obama administration, which Iowans their way on every jot and tittle, he’s serious about hew- he views as having been so strangled by its ideological commit- ing to a conservative interpretation of his legal power. ments that it not only deformed the EPA but also failed to achieve That’s an ongoing concern. And for that reason, his regulatory- any number of realistic, near-term environmental goals. He has reform agenda is moving slowly. WOTUS and the Clean Power been visiting Superfund sites and insisting that the involved par- Plan are going to be reformed—there are executive orders to that ties come up with plans to get them “mediated,” as they say, end—but none of that has actually happened yet, as Pruitt’s EPA meaning cleaned up and detoxified enough that they’re no longer slowly works through what its statutory authority is, what’s con- on the long list of permanent federal environmental emergencies.

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“If you look at the previous administration’s environmental record, I would be hard pressed to point to any successes. If their goal was to use their authority to pick winners and losers in the The Sexes marketplace and shut down sectors of the economy, they were pre- vented ultimately”—by a lot of lawsuits filed by Scott Pruitt and others—“but they made progress toward that end. But you look at air-quality standards, water quality, land remediation, the After Weinstein Superfund sites, they did not achieve very much.” There is, he says, an opportunity for bipartisanship. “The criticism of Paris Don’t encourage women to see was as strong on the left as it was on the right. You’re going to allow China to skate until 2030? Allow India to skate until 2030? themselves as powerless It was all a bumper sticker, and that’s all it was. The previous administration was all talk, very little action. We’re trying to BY HEATHER WILHELM focus on results. We’re going to get results on land remediation under Superfund. What’s so radical about that? We’re going to focus on air quality and measure that every single day. What’s so HINK back: Do you remember your first boy–girl radical about that?” Though he doesn’t put it exactly this way, party? “Perhaps we all have the same memory,” New what Pruitt really objects to is repurposing environmental policy T York Times columnist Anna Quindlen wrote in 1988. as industrial policy, as backdoor central planning. Alternative “The boys stood on one side of the room and the girls fuels and clean energy are all good and fine, but the Obama on the other. . . . None of us would consciously know it then, administration’s Clean Power Plan wasn’t about that: It was about but what we were seeing, that great empty space in the center bankrupting the coal industry. “Generation-shifting is not at all of the floor as fearful as a trapdoor, was the great division consistent with the authority given to the agency,” Pruitt says. between the sexes.” And there is the question of what Robert Higgs calls “regime If you grew up the way I did, deep in middle America, it takes uncertainty.” just a moment to bring it all back: the drafty gym or basement, “We have private-property rights here,” Pruitt says, warming the fidgeting feet, the weapons-grade awkwardness clouding the to his subject. “Those folks who have natural gas, coal, other air like Aqua Net. It would take a few brave souls to cut the ten- resources—that’s their asset. They own the mineral rights. The sion, cross the floor, choose a partner, and edge out to the dance United States government does not. Should we be able to use our floor. (The “dancing,” at least at my early boy–girl events, usu- authority to take that natural resource away? It’s not just a philo- ally involved extending two arms in a ramrod-straight line, plac- sophical discussion. It’s also recognizing that private-property ing them upon the shoulders of your dance partner, fixing your rights and the self-governing principles that we have lived under gaze into middle distance, and swaying like a slightly terrified as a country are actually the greatest asset we have to improve robot Frankenstein until “The Lady in Red” wound to a close.) environmental outcomes. You look at countries that are top- “It was wonderful to think of the time when it would no longer down, like China or former Communist countries: How do they be there,” Quindlen continued, referring to the giant invisible do with the environment? Not very well.” But it’s a different chasm between the boys and the girls, “when the school gym world in the Asia of today. “India’s going to use its natural re - would be a great meeting ground in which we would mingle sources. China as well. Our goal should be to partner with them freely, girl and boy, boy and girl, person to person, all alike.” and export our technology and innovation to help them. We can Then comes the kicker: “And maybe that’s going to happen also export hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to help sometime in my lifetime, but I can’t say I know when.” them understand how to get to those resources.” Exporting frack- ing: You can see why Al Gore is probably not going to send Scott Pruitt a big bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day. ERE we are, almost 30 years later, and it sure hasn’t Not that Pruitt is going to notice. He lives in a different and happened yet. When it comes to the tangled mess that much more concrete world: so many acres of corn, so many tons is 2017, Quindlen’s symbolic dance-floor chasm seems of food waste, so many cubic feet of natural gas. He returns to Hto have morphed into a minefield—or, perhaps more accurately, stewardship-versus-prohibition. a churning, stormy medieval sea vaguely labeled HERE BE VAR- “There are two tracks to the dialogue. One track is more gran- IOUS MONSTERS. ular in the sense that we talk about process, statutory authority, Imagine a run-down haunted house. Next, imagine its rickety rule-making, those sorts of issues. There should be much more doors suddenly blown open, revealing a pack of groping, grin- understanding, in my view, of how those things should work. We ning, Stephen King–style clowns spilling down the steps. The can’t just say, ‘Well, the Clean Air Act in Section 111 doesn’t give clowns, while terrifying and larger than life, are almost comically us the authority to do this, but we think it’s the right thing, and so socially inept, haphazardly lunging at women here and there, as we’re going to do it anyway.’ There ought not to be any departure if they were born in a barn full of savages (or, for that matter, in on things as fundamental as the rule of law. But when you talk a rickety haunted house). Here’s the real mind blower of the about the other issue”—the question of whether we were made whole spectacle: Many of these lurching clowns somehow also for creation or creation was made for us—“we need to have that manage to earn millions of dollars making widely acclaimed discussion. What do we as a culture, as a nation, believe about this? And that’s the question I’ve been asking everywhere I go.” Heather Wilhelm is a NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE columnist and a senior Where he’s going next is an interesting question, too. contributor to the Federalist.

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movies, opening fancy restaurants, and gracing the screens of severed ties with Lizza. Due to a request for privacy, we are not respectable nationally televised talk shows. commenting further.” For media-consuming Americans, this is the sordid story Lizza, for his part, fired back: “I am dismayed that The New dominating the daily news. Allegations of sexual misconduct Yorker has decided to characterize a respectful relationship with against prominent men spool out, sad and predictable, seemingly a woman I dated as somehow inappropriate. The New Yorker every day. They are so frequent, in fact, that it is difficult to keep was unable to cite a company policy that was violated. . . . This track. The stories are beginning to blur. decision, which was made hastily and without a full investiga- We could go back into the painful details, but hundreds of arti- tion of the relevant facts, was a terrible mistake.” cles, essays, and think pieces have done just that. The alleged Perhaps it was; perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps, in the coming serial sex abuser and high-profile producer Harvey Weinstein is days, the door to the proverbial haunted house will fly open, largely credited as the tipping point of 2017’s sexual-assault exposing Lizza-related allegations that would make Charlie “reckoning,” as some like to call it. Since then, men ranging Rose, he of open-robe fame, blush. Perhaps it won’t. Either way, from Charlie Rose to Matt Lauer to Mario Batali have toppled it won’t matter, at least not when it comes to the most worrisome like dominoes, with sometimes jaw-dropping accounts of sexual part of the story: When the news of the firing broke, few seemed misconduct trailing them out the door. to care about actual details. There goes another one! Who’s next? Even now, the post-Weinstein cascade continues. On social Similar vagueness soaks the now-infamous “‘Shady’ Media media, the “Me Too” movement has celebrated women for pub- Men” list, exposed on the Internet in the late months of 2017. licly airing their experiences with everything from catcalls to Edited anonymously, the list accuses various men in the publish- rape. Over private email, a group of female journalists swapped ing, journalism, and television worlds of serious sexual crimes an Excel database detailing anonymous accusations against sup- such as rape. But it also includes accusations of “inappropriate posedly sexually shady—they used a different word from communication,” “those weird lunch ‘dates’ that aren’t about “shady,” but it’s not fit for print—“media men.” work,” and “flirting.” Lunch dates? Flirting? It’s akin to the problems that haunt the hashtag “#MeToo,” which sweeps be - tween heinous crimes and socially awkward comments. It RE we indeed witnessing a massive reckoning when it appears we’ve got some rough sledding ahead. comes to sexual harassment and assault, bound to change The “reckoning” may be strong, and it may be fierce, and it may life—and certain unspoken social mores—forever? Has be just beginning, but it is anything but clear-cut. It is not simply Athe tail end of 2017 brought about, as Anita Hill declared in a the horrors of the likes of Harvey Weinstein, who may end up fac- recent New York Times Magazine roundtable discussion, “a great ing criminal charges for his alleged sexual assaults. In certain cor- consciousness-raising moment”? That, I would argue, is still up ners, it seems to sprout from a genuine bafflement as to how the for debate, but we’re certainly in the midst of a very weird time sexes can work together as functional adults in the real world. to be alive. It’s a time that’s been labeled “The Perv Apocalypse,” “The Perv-a-thon,” and “The Pervalanche.” It’s a time when big-name HEN a young person reaches maturity, he or she often television anchors can reportedly terrorize staffers with secret stumbles upon a startling realization: In this wild, under-the-desk “lock the door” buttons in their cushy suites at wild world, there is no proverbial man behind the cur- NBC. It’s a time when, at least according to the latest YouGov tain.W Adults, once seemingly confident, omnipotent, and in polls, close to a third of Americans aged 18–30 think compli- charge—at least in the eyes of a child—are revealed to be as ments on personal appearance equal sexual harassment. Most clueless and confused as anyone else. Strangely, however, many bizarrely, it’s a time when the Police Service of Northern Ireland reckoning-related discussions seem to yearn for that invisible found it a good idea to earnestly tweet—then delete!—the fol- score-settling adult in the room. lowing holiday message: “If you bump into that special some- In the New York Times Magazine roundtable, television vet - one under the mistletoe tonight, remember that without consent eran Soledad O’Brien related a story from early in her career— it is rape. #SeasonsGreetings.” “I was probably 28”—when a “very famous anchorperson” gave Ho ho ho! Heaven help us all! The “reckoning,” if it is one, is her an unwanted shoulder massage at an awards dinner. If she laced with significant confusion. had said something, she argued, it could have hurt her career. By now, social-media users have mastered a bleak ritual when “The answer is change the culture,” she said. “Imagine if . . . two it comes to reckoning-related firings. First comes the lightning- men at the table who were equal hierarchically said right then quick breaking of the news, followed by occasionally grisly and there: ‘Hey, hey, you can’t do that. Do not touch the young details. Next comes a short burst of barely concealed chortling, women without their permission.’” schadenfreude, and glee. Occasionally, there’s the blasé brush- Perhaps it’s just me, but this approach does not seem aligned off: “Everybody knew.” Finally, inevitably, comes the jaded with feminist empowerment or the concept of female agency. question: “Who’s next?” Certainly, good men should call out inappropriate behavior The recent firing of The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, however, where they see it. But waiting for a man to save you—a man took a different twist. Unlike the cringeworthy reports surround- who is likely self-interested in his career, with little to no inter- ing Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Mario est in calling out a powerful news anchor, either—seems a bit Batali, Lizza’s axing announcement was strangely vague. “The patriarchal, no? How about encouraging young women to New Yorker recently learned that Ryan Lizza engaged in what speak up or otherwise directly and effectively deal with weird we believe was improper sexual conduct,” a magazine spokes - or inappropriate behavior? With all eyes on sexual assault, person said. “We have reviewed the matter and, as a result, have now is certainly the time. In the end, what is the point of “the

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reckoning”—a time in which we are finally hearing women, or mess has been rolling since the beginning of time. “Hell,” in at least so we are told—if it doesn’t eventually evolve into short, is part and parcel of being a woman. Here are some sam- hearing women in real time? ple lyrics, riffing off the firing of disgraced House of Cards star In a distressing number of the stories surrounding the “Me Kevin Spacey: Too” movement, speaking up doesn’t factor into the equation. Sometimes, as in the Weinstein case, the silence stems from Now House of Cards is ruined, threats, or fear, or intimidation. But other times, it’s a distressing And that really sucks. refrain: “I froze.” “I didn’t move his hand.” “I pretended it Well, here’s a list of stuff that’s ruined for us: wasn’t happening.” Sometimes, the silence stems from what one Parking And walking writer described in the New York Times: “I was so surprised and And Uber naïve, I guess, that I didn’t say anything.” And ponytails, These are all natural responses to shocking behavior. But they Bathrobes also might help explain just how we got to the point where And nighttime anonymous women complain about “flirting” on an online data- And drinking base ostensibly dedicated to harassment and assault. They also And hotels might help explain the sad and bizarre post-Weinstein catch- And vans phrase of our times: “Everyone knew.” (Nothing good happens in a van). “I know from talking to my female students that they’re often Welcome to hell. at a loss about how to deal with the binds they find themselves This isn’t news. in, especially in the context of hookup culture,” Northwestern Our situation’s been a nuisance since we got boobs. professor Laura Kipnis told the roundtable. “What surprises me is that they often feel unable to say no to guys and just sort of Let’s admit it: Any woman can relate. On average, we’re yield instead, even when they don’t really want to. Somehow all smaller and weaker than men, and we sometimes have a tougher the messages about assertiveness from the last few generations row to hoe in this world. About this, there’s not a whole lot we have gotten dissipated, and we’re back to Square 1.” can do, aside from practicing basic safety measures, adopting situational awareness, and learning to use a gun. I’m a runner; so is my husband. He breezily jogs down woodsy trails I would N early December, Saturday Night Live debuted “Welcome never run on alone. That’s life in this imperfect world. to Hell,” a bubblegum-toned satirical music video explor- But is it “hell”? If you read enough about the “Me Too” ing the post-Weinstein landscape. For women, the song movement, you can be forgiven for envisioning modern notes,I 2017’s wave of sexual harassment is nothing new—this American life as a Hobbesian war of all against all. “Like

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most American women, I’ve learned—oftentimes through experience—that I am not safe,” Jessica Valenti wrote in the Guardian on December 12. “Women know that they’re at risk Basquiat’s whether in the streets, at work, or at home.” Really? We do? Everywhere, all the time? Meanwhile, according to Sally Kohn in the Washington Post, “most men hate women” whether we “realize it or not.” Sheesh. Tragedy Thanks a lot, Harvey. Certain feminists go further: Because life is a living hell for How the world of Warhol failed women, it’s only fair to make it a living hell for men. “Men are scared right now, which is good,” writer Amanda Hess said in an artist in making him the New York Times Magazine roundtable. “We spend our whole lives afraid,” wrote Valenti in the Guardian, “but a few months BY DOUGLAS MURRAY into men not being able to act with sexist impunity and it’s a ‘witch hunt.’” Speaking of witch hunts, according to Teen N 1986, just two years before his death, Jean-Michel Vogue’s Emily Lindin, they’re not all that bad: “If some innocent Basquiat sat down for a long interview with his friend Tamra men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the I Davis. The footage shows the then-25-year-old artist in his patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.” best light, as his friends and admirers knew him. The sturdy wall that Basquiat kept up in other interviews—erected apparently through a mixture of shyness and resentment—is absent here. S you might have surmised, we’re back to the “weird Instead the young artist is relaxed, knowing, attractive, and open: time to be alive” portion of the show. Who wants to live in a word, charming. It is a reminder of what was there before the with that level of hostility towards 50 percent of the art-industrial complex, sudden fortune, and drugs wasted him. humanA race? Have we really moved that far beyond a basic A portion of that video appears in Basquiat: Boom for Real, an shared humanity and common sense? exhibition that will be at the Barbican Centre in London until the Perhaps, in certain circles, we have. The panic is palpable, end of January. One of the most comprehensive retrospectives of with offices ditching alcohol at Christmas parties and managers the artist’s work ever staged, it is also timely. In May of this year, worrying about the propriety of inter-sex friendly hugs. at Sotheby’s in New York, a 1982 work by the artist—the son of Hackneyed “harassment trainings”—many that resemble “an a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father—sold for $110.5 mil- episode of The Office,” as the acting chair of the Equal Employ - lion. That sale made Basquiat not only one of the two or three ment Opportunity Commission noted to Time magazine—will best-selling American artists of all time, but one of the highest- undoubtedly mushroom. For a sex-obsessed society, we sure valued artists in history. An overheated Sotheby’s representative seem to need a lot of very unsexy details spelled out. Perhaps we claimed after the sale of Untitled (1982) that Basquiat had do need that adult in the room, but in our anything-goes culture, “joined the pantheon of great, great artists.” we’re not likely to get one soon. Dealers and auction-house salesmen around the world have Twenty seventeen has exposed many monsters, and that is a made similar claims for years. They began during his lifetime positive thing. Breathless reports of a looming monster epidemic, and only accelerated after his overdose, with the prices rising however, seem greatly exaggerated. In a recent op-ed in the New accordingly. As with his friend Andy Warhol, and more recent York Daily News, Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out some artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, his work has seemingly incongruous data from the General Social Survey: In become prized by—among others—people who do not prize 2014, 3.6 percent of women reported being sexually harassed at art. Hedge funds seek out his work to hang in their offices. To work in the previous twelve months. That’s not fantastic, but it’s have a Basquiat on the wall denotes something: mainly, the certainly not “burn it all down” bad, either. presence of cash. Supposedly, we’re all in this together—or, at least, we should It was not obvious that Basquiat would end up the producer of be. Perhaps a step towards sanity would involve some introspec- such trophies. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, he left school at 17 and tion on all fronts. Not all women are fragile, hapless victims. Not first gained attention through his co-invention, with a friend, of a all men are predators or predators-in-waiting. Both men and character called “SAMO.” Graffiti signed with this name women can contribute to a healthier sexual ethic. We can expect cropped up in SoHo and on the Lower East Side in 1978. These more from both. cryptic semi-philosophical musings in spray paint caught the Or not. “There are three ways you could approach the prob- attention of some local media and soon the identity of the people lem of sexual harassment,” Anita Hill told The New York Times behind SAMO got out, at which point—having done the job of Magazine. “You can fix the women. You can fix the guys. Or bringing attention to the creators—SAMO was killed off. you can change the culture. And I think that really, at this point, Friends recall that Basquiat “always wanted to be famous,” what we should be talking about is fixing the guys and fixing and his other early assault on the public’s attention came after the culture.” suggesting to a friend at a party that they should form a band. “Do we have to choose?” asked Laura Kipnis. “Can’t it be Basquiat couldn’t play the clarinet and the friend couldn’t all three?” play the drums. Nevertheless they played clarinet and drums “Well,” Hill replied, “I think if we fix the guys and change the culture, we don’t need to fix women.” Mr. Murray is the author, most recently, of The Strange Death of Europe: “Good luck,” Kipnis replied. Good luck indeed. Immigration, Identity, Islam.

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respectively in a group called “Gray.” And here an oddity of the arts in the 20th century created an opening for someone able to seize opportunities where he saw them. By the late 20th century, perhaps the only art that still required years of dedication, practice, and training was music. Somebody who had not studied the clarinet could not just pick the instrument up and play it by instinct. Even if the person managed somewhat, it was not just unlikely but impossible that he could then be acclaimed as one of the great clarinetists or musicians of all time. Yet—and you may lay the blame at the feet of Duchamp or one of a number of other culprits—at some point in the last century, ability, skill, and practice were no longer required fit- ness tests for launching a career in the visual arts.

O his credit, Basquiat—who never had any formal training and who (as footage of him working,T as well as the work, shows) could not hold a brush properly—saw this gigantic opening and ran for it. He Jean-Michel Basquiat had also learned from the New York nightclub scene, and the mix of people he watched there, that fame had become the gift from which all wearing person,” according to a friend.) Yet he hit a moment of other gifts might flow. the sort that Cortez once summed up in an interview: “I was just When he decorated some postcards, he made sure to thrust tired of seeing white walls, with white people with white wine.” himself in front of Andy Warhol at a restaurant and persuade the Others clearly felt the same. “Getting people in the art world to older artist to buy one. Being noticed was something that both pay attention to his work wasn’t that hard, I’ll tell you,” says men were good at and recognized in each other. Basquiat’s work Cortez. Dealer Annina Nosei picked him up, and at the show of soon moved on from graffiti on scrap metal and rudely doodled his work that she organized, everything sold out in one night. postcards. Diego Cortez, an early supporter, offered to sell the Yet even at that early stage, it was clear that the work was about results if Basquiat bought some paints and painted some things. something other than art. One of the highlights of the show is Dos Cortez subsequently curated the 1981 New York/New Wave show Cabezas (1982; “acrylic and oil stick on canvas with wooden that launched Basquiat. Much of the work from around this time supports”). In October 1982, the art dealer Bruno Bischofberger is in the Barbican retrospective. took Basquiat to Warhol’s Factory for the first time. After some To see some of it, even on the walls of a gallery as urban, gritty, Polaroid snapping, the younger artist dashed back to his studio and indeed bleak as London’s Barbican Centre, is to feel an and painted this cartoonish work (“a really great masterpiece,” unmistakable stab of pity. Even the simplest frames around according to Bischofberger) and had it delivered to Warhol a cou- works such as Airplanes (1980) seem obscene, as—even more ple of hours later, the paint still wet. Given his prodigious output, so—do the curatorial descriptions: Airplanes (1980) is charac- and the amount of time he spent socializing, some people claim terized as “Oil stick on paper. Guarded by Bischofberger, to wonder when Basquiat did all his painting. The simple answer, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland.” All this to describe a large as Warhol learned, is that none of it took much time. On this occa- sheet of paper with seven airplanes poorly placed and poorly sion, receiving this new work, Warhol apparently complained, scrawled on it. The only thing missing is a signature in a corner “Oh I’m so jealous. He’s faster than me.” saying “Age 5.”

BASQUIAT There were other things Warhol was clearly jealous of, too. - Excuses must be made for such work. At the Barbican, I over- Footage from his 1983–84 series Andy Warhol’s TV shows the MICHEL - heard two young women separately whisper to friends in awed elder artist with his arm possessively, uncomfortably draped JEAN / J

/ tones as they surveyed this work, “Apparently he suffered from around Basquiat while Warhol simpers through a conversation. NET . really bad depression.” Other reasons are more commonly Warhol might have struggled in the age of Weinstein. Yet the given, and can be easily refuted. Although his origins were not titanic cynicism of Warhol was not precisely mirrored in his privileged, Basquiat did not come from the poorest part of soci- young friend. Basquiat was clearly an earnest and thoughtful KNOWNPEOPLE ety. (His father was a middle-class accountant, a “blazer-type- young man who attempted to engage with ideas. Only his

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inability to draw or paint presented a problem, though ever the work of such greats: All he could do was refer to it. It takes fewer collectors or curators were willing to identify this as any a considerable amount of investment, and many of the biggest type of impediment. He did what he could with what he had. But claims about Basquiat have always been made by people with it is the reaction of the world, and the art world in particular, that a very serious investment, to see these works in any other way. is the most fascinating element in his career. Like the vast, pretentiously imagined triptychs that (along with framed pages from his notebooks) end the show, they reveal a person pitifully straining to achieve something with next to no ERE the most elementary problems are passed over as technical ability. though unimportant. For instance, again and again the Still, his admirers put him among the greatest artists. The art sheer disposability and impermanence of these works dealer Tony Shafrazi said in a recent film, “I put him in the high- Hmakes itself felt. Throughout a retrospective as lovingly curated est place, like van Gogh, like Picasso.” Another work in the as this one, the viewer wonders whether Basquiat had anything Barbican show is Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984). It consists of like a similar regard for the work. Frames are tied together poorly a sloppily attempted cartoon of a young Picasso with a number and canvases loosely attached. Drips of something (coffee or of red stripes beneath the face that vaguely suggest a Breton paint?) splatter works that their subsequent holders have pre- jumper. According to the exhibition notes, “By conflating these served and here presented as great. The feeling dawns that these two parts of Picasso’s life Basquiat contemplates the entirety of works are not art but relics, and their frames—and the galleries the artist’s career.” Contemplates, possibly. But it is contempla- they hang in—modern reliquaries. tion to no effect. Very occasionally there is a striking image. Self-portrait The truth is that there is more creativity in what dealers and (1983) is one of the few such, the artist’s face all black with critics say about Basquiat than there is in the work itself. It is they white, demonic eyes. It is one of the works that point to a still- who have done the real work. The absurd claims and talking-up subterranean fact about his career: Some early reception of occurred while he was alive, famously catapulting him in a couple Basquiat may have betrayed a certain racism, though not in the of years from poverty to exceptional riches. Perhaps it was form of harsh criticism. Rather it came from people comment- inevitable that he should have tried to escape the situation that ing on, for instance, the “primitivism” of his art. We know that he and his wildest promoters had got him into. He tried first by this stung him, and he appeared to imagine that a white artist escaping to California and then by escaping into heroin. would not have had such attitudes attributed to him. He may Friends claimed that Basquiat was famously independent of have been right, or he may have been wrong, but basic, if not mind and that nobody could tell him what to do. They should at primitive, is what nearly all of his art remains. And the truth is least have tried. If they had said at the outset that, instead of that rather than an impediment, his skin color was the hugest dealing his work, they would help him learn the skills needed possible boon to his career. A society in search of social harmo- to pursue it, then he might not have banged his head so visibly ny, examples, and role models, added to an art market aware of and continuously against his own limitations throughout his its elitist reputation in an anti-elitist age, had need of Basquiat short career. Perhaps he understood that he was only getting or Basquiat-like figures. away with something and worried when it might end. Far Perhaps the over-egging of his place in art history comes greater artists than he have had similar fears and been brought from an effort to cover over this unpalatable truth. As with down by them. most overcompensation, it is an error. There is a whole section Aided by his early death, the Basquiat industry has not seri- at the Barbican dedicated to “art history” and Basquiat’s ously faltered yet. Indeed, owing to the price inflation of his claimed relationship with, and alleged place in, that cosmos. works, today those who turned down his early work have had to Amid stiff competition, stretching across two floors and 14 deliver groveling mea culpas for missing the point. The chief large rooms, it is the most desultory section of the whole show. curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art said, in a recent The nadir is a work called “Untitled (Duchamp, Pollock, documentary interview, “When you first see brand-new work, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein),” from 1986–87, which consists of chances are if it’s really significant it will be uncomfortable to four pieces of brown paper, each framed, and each dedicated to somebody like myself, because I am so immersed in what paint- one of these forebears. All consist only of a few words followed ing up until now looked like. And with Basquiat, many art pro- by Basquiat’s signature. The one honoring Duchamp reads (in fessionals had skepticism about what he was doing because the its entirety), “Duchamp’s main contribution was the ready-made paintings didn’t necessarily fit their idea about museum paint- Fountain (1917). Jean-Michel Basquiat.” The one for Lichten - ing. And yet of course that’s exactly what’s necessary in order stein records that “Lichtenstein did comic strip images.” to create the art of the future.” Like Untitled (Titian) (1982), Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest But this is not so. What is necessary to create the art of the future Hits (1982), and a smattering of books on art history that is the same thing that was needed to create the art of the past: Basquiat owned, these are exhibited as evidence of the place tremendous vision melded with exceptional ability. Watching Basquiat should be recognized as holding in the history of art, the crowds of inner-city children pouring into the Barbican in and the accompanying notes and catalogues make this argu- the middle of the day on their school trips, I found it impossible ment explicitly. The company does not show Basquiat in a to avoid the thought that the problem Basquiat suffered from favorable light. One of the regular refrains of his admirers is was being posthumously exacerbated by his fawning curators. that he never copied the work of other artists, but rather did a Here was an artist being shown to these children as gritty, real, total revision of any work he referred to. Nothing could be rich, and vindicated—and who would therefore merely perpetu- more provably wrong. Basquiat could not have copied ate the problem he could not escape: the fact that ambition with- Leonardo even if he had wanted to. He could not even reflect out discipline is uncapturable and blows away like dreams.

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS Regulation Nation

EGULATIONS empower the government to de - shall be, but not necessarily be, unless there is occasion mand cessation of a million small violations invoked by the Drinkable Paint Act of 1984, subject to cer- buried deep in the compacted sediment of federal tification by the Lead Certification Bureau. Or not. R law. They are a fearsome tool for imposing the Any item proved to contain lead, or suspected of contain- will of the state. Trump wants to cut them. What a Hitler, eh? ing lead, or rumored to contain lead, or whose name can be For reluctant Trump defenders, the drive to reduce regula- acrostically rearranged to contain the word “lead,” or trans- tions is the “But Gorsuch!” of the administration’s second act. ported in a vehicle or bag that passed through a state in For conservatives disinclined to say that anything good can which lead is mined, or a state in which lead mining come out of the Trump term, which they regard as a daily hair- occurred prior to 1962 (SEE ALSO, Lead Mining Waiver ball soaked with Diet Coke coughed up on the national rug, List under section 43,237 of the Omnibus Obfuscation Act the braking of the regulatory express is waved away: Any of 1988), shall, if so deemed, be subject to the Interstate conservative president would have done the same. Substance Transport Act of 1937, under which all samples Yeeeeaaah, well, maybe. Perhaps a President Cruz or must be put into a paper bag and handed off to the lab for President Fiorina would have grabbed a shovel and headed testing by a bucket brigade of 400 unionized workers. into the Augean Stables of the Federal Register, but we’re No part of this regulation shall be construed, or under- used to a GOP president’s announcing a blue-ribbon panel stood, or looked at askance, with the intention of regulat- to study the issue while the organs of the administrative ing the pay, or employment status, of the workers who state pump out more regs like a queen ant producing larvae transport the samples, as they are covered under the Maik- for the colony. Werk Act of 1933, and shall be employed until the point of Trump tweeted this out the other day: death, after which they, or their descendants, shall receive “In 1960, there were approximately 20,000 pages in the half pay in perpetuity. Code of Federal Regulations. Today there are over 185,000 REVISED, 2013: The term “lead” shall include, but not pages, as seen in the Roosevelt Room.” be limited to, “lead-like products,” defined as anything that That didn’t sound entirely authentic. The sentiment, yes, contains an element on the periodic table. Penalties for non- but the tone lacked his usual zesty style. If Trump was compliance with the requirements about the reporting of the watching while an aide typed the tweet, you can note the specifics of the environmental impacts shall be trebled in the exact moment when he leaned over and pressed CAPS event of. Additional penalties will be brillig if an investiga- LOCK on the keyboard: tion demonstrates the intentional gimbling of toves, slithy or “Today, we CUT THE RED TAPE! It is time to SET FREE slightly slithy. OUR DREAMS and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” That’s one page. Multiply by eleventy billion, covering The response was what you’d expect: Millions will die, everything. At least it solves the lead problem! But it creates of course. The Obamacare mandate is dropped? Death a climate of uncertainty. Imagine this conversation: stalks the land. The tax bill passes? The Reaper’s scythe TOY MANUFACTURER TO LAWYER: What the hell does this drips red with its grisly harvest. An embassy is moved? regulation mean? Peaceful, pious family men instantly move to Sweden and LAWYER: No lead, basically. throw gas bombs at Jews. TOY MANUFACTURER: I sell a paste you smear on ceramic Here’s a typical response from Joy Reid, who is on TV sheep and it turns into green moss that looks like hair. somewhere for some reason. Tweeteth the sage: LAWYER: No lead in the sheep? “Every one of those pages protects your food from being TOY GUY: No. I mean, I don’t know, it’s clay. What kid filed with rat droppings, spoiled meat out of your deli, lead breaks a clay sheep and starts eating the shards? out of your paint, your child’s medicine from being defec- LAWYER (googling): You’re based in Iowa, right? I’m see- tive & corporations from polluting the air you breathe or ing a paint factory in Manitoba, operating from 1910 to dumping medical waste in the water you wade in.” 1914. If your sheep were made in a state that bordered a state What some liberals think a regulation says: that bordered another country, we have to do discovery on 1. LEAD. There shall be no lead in anything children their lead-abatement process. may touch or ingest. The end. TOY GUY: Oh, no. Why? What the regulation actually says: LAWYER: The wind could have deposited lead from 1. (d)(92) LEAD. Pursuant to the Lead Exposure Act of Canada in Iowa. 1977 (modified under section 2, subsection C, of the Bacon- TOY GUY: Okay, well, if we have to—oh, geez, there’s a Lehtis Omnibus Chemical Control Act of 1982), all com- hair in my sandwich. mercial products containing LEAD (hereafter defined as an LAWYER: That’s impossible. I can’t tell you how many unreactive post-transition metal, unless otherwise noted) regulations forbid that. NARRATOR’S VOICE: When sent to a lab, the hair tested pos- Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. itive for lead. New regulations have since been proposed.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

my eating; I am as happy as an “Why, bless my soul,” cried angel, mostly because I am very Kellyanne, “is that POTUS?” successful; and I am as merry as a “It’s I. Trump. A merry Christmas, schoolboy, but not in a gay way.” Kellyanne,” said Trump, with an Running to the French doors that earnestness that could not be mistak- opened onto the small patio over- en. “I have had such a night! And I looking the fairway, within sight of have endeavored to change my ways, A CHRISTMAS the eleventh green, he opened them my good Kellyanne! No more will I and put out his head. Sunny, Florida tweet or insult or tell delusional tall CAROL: sunshine! tales! No more will I—” “What’s to-day?” cried Trump, “Sir?” Special Trump calling out to a perspiring “—create needless turbulence and groundskeeper of indeterminate ill will! The ghosts have shown me Edition documentation. a better path, Kellyanne! And the STAVE FIVE “¿Qué?” returned the man, with first thing we need to do is take this all his might of wonder. mobile phone and smash it to—” Trump awoke with a start. “What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” “Sir? Sir? Are you okay?” Yes! and the bedpost was his own. said Trump. “—oh, but I am splendid! Tip- The bed was his own, the room was “To-day,” replied the man, “is top! But I am utterly changed! And I his own. The golden draperies glis- Navidad, señor.” will need your help and counsel, tened in the Palm Beach sunlight. “It’s Christmas Day,” said Trump good Kellyanne, to undo some of The gold-rimmed water glass was to himself. “I haven’t missed it. the wrongs I have done and make still there beside his bed, still filled The Spirits have done it all in one such a name for myself that the with Diet Coke. And miracle of mir- night. They can do anything they word ‘Trump’ will forever mean acles! It was still fizzy! The spirits like. Of course they can. Of course humility and effectiveness, trust- had managed that! they can.” worthiness and wisdom!” The Twizzlers and Starbursts “Do you need something, Señor “Sir? Can you hear us? Can you remained in their jar, ready for his Trump? You no look well.” hear us?” morning snack. It was all as it had Trump chuckled. He would not, Why on earth can’t they under- been the night before, when he had he said to himself, have this man stand me? thought Trump. Why, I’m climbed into his bed and pulled the fired. He would, instead, simply speaking as clearly as I can! bed curtains shut and plugged in his have him moved to catering or Suddenly, Trump’s entire body phone for its nightly charge, slipped somewhere else, where he would shook. The bed shook and the bed on his CPAP unit, and fallen asleep not have to look at him. Yes, he curtains shook and his jowls and midway through his silent daily thought to himself, here’s a one who belly shook and he suddenly sat tally of the people he intended to get shan’t be deported! And as Old upright. back at. Trump sprayed his fingers with hair- Trump had been asleep. It was all It was all as it had been. Despite spray and ran the sticky fingers a very odd dream. Two Secret the visitations of the three ghosts, through his own locks—where was Service agents stood on either side Trump had lived through the night. the valet? where the Secret of him, each holding one of his arms. Best and happiest of all, the Time Service?—and as he plastered down It was they who had been shaking before him was his own, to make the stray hairs and formed the rest him awake. amends in! into his trademark wedge, he “Sir, are you okay? You were hav- “I will live in the Past, the Present, thought to himself, Yes, I will do it. ing a very bad dream.” and the Future,” Trump repeated, as I will stop tweeting, will stop Trump looked at the agents, at the he scrambled out of bed. “The engaging in low behavior, will start bedclothes and Twizzlers, at the Diet Spirits of all Three shall strive with- anew and begin the last chapter of Coke—flat, of course, in its gold- in me. O, Steve Bannon. Heaven my life in kindness and . . . rimmed glass. He waved the agents and the Christmastime be praised Someone was calling his name— away. What a stupid dream, he said for this. I say it on my knees, old “Sir? Sir? SIR?” It was faint, but he to himself. Really stupid. Dreams Steve, on my knees.” could hear it. He looked around and are overrated. “I don’t know what to do,” cried saw that he was, somehow, on his And with that he grabbed his Trump, laughing and crying in the phone. phone from the charging cradle and same breath; “I am as light as a “Sir?” It was the voice of tapped out a Christmas tweet: “God feather, though I honestly do not Kellyanne! Charming, lovely bless us, everyone, even the haters have a weight problem as regards to Kellyanne! and the losers.”

3 8 | www.nationalreview.com DECEMBER 3 1 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 12/19/2017 3:58 PM Page 39 Books, Arts & Manners

words spoken. Curiously, the great makes it clear that even as they were A Turn to powers all counted on a short conflict; it different, they were also very much was not to be. After two and a half alike. Both men were less politicians years, little had been achieved except or statesmen (one can quibble with Darkness for incalculable bloodshed along trench- this) than “dreamers, intellectuals” es where gains were measured not in seeking to shape humanity’s true des- J A Y W I N I K miles, but in yards. The Kaiser’s hope of tiny. Both, writes Herman, had sweep- a quick victory turned out to be a mirage. ing, revolutionary visions of “a massive “The Germans,” Herman writes, “had upheaval” on the world stage, and staved off defeat, just barely.” And each saw himself at the center of it. notwithstanding Germany’s unrestrict- They wanted to create a “paradise on ed use of submarines to sink enemy earth”—in Lenin’s case, a Communist shipping without warning, Germany’s one; and in Wilson’s, a liberal democ- options for winning the war were, by racy based on humanity’s universal 1916, fading quickly. desire for freedom. For Russia, the colossus of Europe, it There are absorbing moments in the was a similar story. Despite its being an book. We see Lenin kicking around in empire stretching over three conti- London, Paris, and Geneva. We see him nents, its picture became as bleak as surrounded by his cohorts, including Germany’s: The nation was hopelessly Leon Trotsky and the Georgian dropout 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New strained and demoralized by the bur- from theological seminary known by World Disorder, by Arthur Herman dens of conflict, and it was bordering the revolutionary pseudonym of “Jo - (Harper, 496 pp., $29.99) on anarchy at home and collapse in the seph Stalin.” We see Lenin as head of a war. For Vladimir Lenin, singlemind- ruthless band of revolutionaries, lead- RTHUR HERMAN, a senior ed, impecunious, and exiled in his ing the Bolshevik uprising in No - fellow at the Hudson Insti - sparse apartment in Zurich, this was vember 1917, which destroyed the tute, likes quirky. He has an opportunity to trigger a “mass nascent Russian democratic experi- written inventively about revolt” (in Herman’s phrase) that ment. The result: the world’s first one- howA the Scots invented the modern would change Russia and humanity for- party-state dictatorship. world (a bold and catchy thesis); ever. In the process, he believed, capital- And we see the bitter fights over the Gandhi versus Churchill; Plato versus ism would be replaced by a dictatorship post-war peace. An angry and petulant Aristotle; and declinist thought in of the proletariat. Woodrow Wilson was at the Paris Western civilization. Now, in his latest Meanwhile, in the United States, Peace Conference, where he likely had work, he focuses on the seemingly President Woodrow Wilson was eye- a stroke (his first of three) and where improbable duo of Vladimir Lenin and ing his own opportunities. Taking a he uncharacteristically imposed a hard Woodrow Wilson, who gave birth in statesmanlike tone, he had sought to peace on an embittered Germany, 1917 to what Herman calls “the New keep America out of the war and which would lay the foundations for World Disorder.” called for a “peace without victory” Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. With his The book—part narrative, part biog- that he was prepared to help mediate. proposed League of Nations, Wilson raphy, and part argument—is the story Yet by April 2, 1917, he was singing a was willing for the United States to of 1917, which saw the emergence of different tune. The Zimmermann Tele - relinquish “some sovereignty” for the the United States as a great power and gram had already revealed Germany’s “good of the world”; arrayed against the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in secret perfidy toward the United him were forces led by the tireless Russia. Taken together, these two pro- States, arousing the ire of the Ameri - Senate majority leader, Henry Cabot found events rocked the international can people. By now, America’s march Lodge (R., Mass.), who invoked order. But none of this was expected into the war was virtually unstop- George Washington’s warning about just three years earlier, as the great pable. Wilson poured some 1 million entangling alliances. powers of Europe lumbered almost men into Europe, and ratified the Wilson was committed to the League inexplicably into war. United States as the dominant power Covenant’s Article X, which stipulated At World War I’s outset, Woodrow on the world stage. that if any member of the League was Wilson wrote that “the world itself Herman doesn’t really like or admire attacked, every member of the League seems gone mad.” Never were truer Lenin and Wilson, but he has chosen was in effect threatened as well—just them as his protagonists because they as with NATO today, but on a much Mr. Winik is the historian-in-residence at the Council were the pivotal arbiters of what would broader scale. To critics, including on Foreign Relations. He is the author of 1944, emerge out of the rubble of war, and Lodge, this meant that the U.S. would The Great Upheaval, and April 1865. theirs is a fascinating story. Herman be subordinating its national interests

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to an institution representing the global Nigel de Grey, an Admiralty House community, not the U.S exclusively—a codebreaker, was a “small, narrow- Quest for concern that resonates in 2017. faced man.” A third stroke left Wilson paralyzed Herman raises some provocative ques- on his left side and unable to function as tions. He speaks with a skeptical tone Arab president for more than a year, even as about the idea of self-determination the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of nations, which was invoked by the Democracy tacked one reservation after another onto Western powers less for altruistic rea- the League of Nations treaty. Wilson, sons than for “selfish, even cynical” DAVID PRYCE-JONES unwilling to compromise with his critics, ones. In the planting of the self- doomed the treaty to be, in Lodge’s determination “flag,” Herman says, the words, “as dead as Marley’s ghost”—a groundwork was laid for the transfor- result that Herman applauds. mation of a world war into a revolution The book is filled with what-ifs that would spark global chaos and a about the war. What if Wilson had Communist system that would enslave taken the advice of Lodge, to enter the millions for almost half a century. But war earlier in the first place, and to there is an alternative view: If the accept the League of Nations but with American experience is about one reservations? Herman contends that thing, isn’t it about self-determination? there would have been no Mussolini, When the Founders broke off from no Hitler, no Second World War, no England, isn’t that exactly what they Bolshevik Revolution, and perhaps were about? Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy even not a Great De pression. What if Herman is suspicious of crusading after the Arab Spring, by Elliott Abrams Germany had accepted the offer to halt idealism and fond of realpolitik; he (Cambridge, 307 pp., $20) hostilities, opting for the status quo? approvingly quotes A. J. P. Taylor’s Germany’s evisceration might have judgment that “Bismarck fought ‘nec- NE day in December 2010, a been avoided. Or what if President essary’ wars and killed thousands, the policewoman in a small and Woodrow Wilson had accepted Lenin’s idealists of the 20th century fight ‘just’ rather humdrum town in Tunisia slapped the face of MohamedO Bouazizi. The dispute was over his permit to be selling fruit and vegeta- There is little doubt that 1917 bles off a barrow. The injustice that he encountered, and the humiliation, drove overturned the traditional global order. the poor man to take his life. Just as a but- terfly fluttering its wings is supposed to audacious proposal to become Russia’s wars and kill millions.” He says that cause a cascade of faraway atmospheric principal manufacturing ally? America Wilson’s utopian dream was “impracti- effects, this suicide set off a movement of might have received a surfeit of fur cal and ignorant.” protest and solidarity in one Arab country and oil in return for helping Russia Herman asserts that, before 1917, after another. The monarchies and re - become updated. countries went to war to protect nation- publics in which Arabs live are, in reality, If Lenin and Wilson are the anti- al interests, not ideas. This assertion dictatorships, and the time had apparently heroes of this book, there are two does not fully hold up to scrutiny: It arrived for them to reform and take their heroes: Lodge and Russia’s Alexander ignores the cataclysmic French Revolu - place in what was supposed to be an Kerensky, who were moderate and real- tion, which, in the name of liberty, equal- emerging worldwide democratic order. istic. Kerensky was the man who might ity, and fraternity, mobilized whole What became known as the Arab Spring have saved Russia from political ex- peoples for war and swept across the did not live up to these expectations; far tremism. He was a member of the European continent. It was, in effect, the from it. Since 2010, Arab countries have Duma (Russia’s first legislative body), first world war. suffered civil war, coups, terrorism, inva- later Russia’s minister of justice and Yet there is little doubt that 1917 sion by foreign powers, genocide, the sale war, and then its prime minister. But he overturned the traditional global order. of women in slave markets, the ruin of his- tragically turned a blind eye to the threat In this illuminating, important new toric cities and monuments, the death of posed by Lenin, and eventually was work, Herman goes to great pains to civilians by the hundreds of thousands, overthrown by the Bolsheviks during link the chaos of 1917 with the chaos and the flight of refugees in their mil- the October Revolution. of today’s world, a world marked by lions. The rise of the Islamic State, self- Herman is partial to vivid descrip- al-Qaeda and ISIS (which he calls described as a caliphate, redesigned the tions. Thus, German quartermaster “Lenin’s heirs”), assassinations, hostage boundaries of Syria and Iraq, countries general Erich Ludendorff was “bull- taking, car bombs, and suicide vests. that may not be reconstituted for a very necked” and had a “cold, arrogant Such is the inexorable rhythm of histo- long time, if ever. Islamist volunteers in stare”; British prime minister David ry: One problem is solved and another this misappropriated territory murdered, Lloyd George had a “florid face”; and crops up. beheaded, crucified, or tortured to death,

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often in public, whomever they pleased. acquire it, too. In this view, freedom is the Saddam to hang and gas his own sub- Libya, Yemen, and Lebanon are also states function of democracy, and democracy in jects, crimes that could have been pre- in varying stages of collapse. A whole civ- turn is the function of human rights. In the vented by the American military. The ilization seems to be coming apart. course of his career, Abrams also met and equally indecisive Obama administra- The proper human response to such admired the like-minded senators Scoop tion, notes Abrams, “revealed its skepti- calamity is that something ought to be Jackson and Daniel Moynihan and, last cism of democracy promotion from the done about it. Elliott Abrams takes it for but not least, George W. Bush, the presi- very beginning.” When Obama did no granted in Realism and Democracy that dent who did his best to give freedom to more than pontificate in the media about the United States can and should come Iraqis. Proud to be an unreconstructed what was happening in Syria, he too was to the rescue. His career has given him Reaganite, Abrams further awards himself in effect condoning crime. authority to comment on matters of power the title of neo-con. “Is Islam compatible with democra- politics. In the Reagan administration, he In contrast, he has not much good to say cy?” is the motion now being debated in was assistant secretary of state for human of President Nixon or his secretary of state public and private assemblies every- rights and humanitarian affairs (1981–85) Henry Kissinger, the leading proponents where. Abrams gives a resounding Yes, and assistant secretary for inter-American of the different doctrine that goes by the on the basis of what happened earlier this affairs (1985–89); he later served as name of “realism.” If they judged military decade in Tunisia. Rached Ghannouchi President George W. Bush’s adviser for intervention to be in the national interest, and his party, Ennahda, proposed to set global democracy strategy (2005–09). His they ordered it, but the main geostrategic up an Islamist constitution in that coun- sympathies are very wide, his quotations goal of their day was détente with the try to empower themselves, probably from the academic literature are numerous Soviet Union. The pursuit of democracy indefinitely. The opposition refused to and apt, and his prose is almost miracu- and human rights was bound to be under- participate in drafting such a constitu- lously jargon-free. stood in Moscow as anti-Communist tion. “We could have continued without His introductory chapter, almost a hun- incitement, in particular encouraging dis- them,” Ghannouchi observed, but instead dred pages long, is a kind of handbook to sidents who then were likely to be deport- he and his party gave the first example of the mindsets of American policymakers ed to the Gulag. peaceful power-sharing anywhere in the concerning the Middle East in recent The scandal of Soviet totalitarian prac- Arab world. “Democracy can be implant- decades. The U.S. approach during the tices had the unintentional short-term ed in the Arab world,” he asserted, adding Cold War was perhaps an unfair great- effect of postponing and even invalidating a sentence that covers a lot of ground, power exercise but at least it kept the détente, leaving Communism to do its “So we took a difficult path towards gen- peace after its fashion. The most frequent worst. In the Middle East, the policy of eral consensus.” cause of a clash during that era was some realism rebounds in just the same way. In Egypt, a far larger and more influential independent but rash manipulation on the a classic example of the inbuilt incon- country than Tunisia, had the opposite out- part of one of the superpowers’ clients. gruity, President George H. W. Bush come. Hosni Mubarak had been its long- The superpowers’ balancing of laissez- mounted the campaign to expel Saddam standing president and, two weeks before faire and a tight fist was usually enough to Hussein’s invading forces from Kuwait, he fell, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton keep major clients such as Turkey and rectifying a crime at the level of nations. saw fit to report that “our assessment is Iran, and even Arab-nationalist dictators, When Iraqi Shiites and Kurds then rose in that the Egyptian Government is stable.” on the straight and narrow path of cooper- rebellion, President Bush did not come to (Bashar al-Assad had already launched ation with them. Those times are over. In their rescue on the grounds of human civil war in Syria when she compliment- the absence of the external pressures of the rights at the level of the individual. His ed him as a possible “reformer.”) The Cold War, former clients are now in a posi- indifference, if that is what it was, allowed Muslim Brotherhood is a mass movement tion to pursue their own ambitions, form- ing alliances and enmities without regard for Western interests. Military interven- SHOALS tion in Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere so far has only sustained or increased the The screeching oak planks and the sudden shock announce the gale has pushed them too far east, level of instability. The sole alternative is trapping the whaler on a hidden rock— to make a moralizing speech, but if the the broken molar of a howling beast. decision not to intervene militarily has She’s listing port. He knows what he should do: already been taken, this is pointlessly furl sails and cut the masts before she tips, sanctimonious. supply and board the boats. Then what? The crew Put simply, what Realism and Demo - awaits the first command from his pursed lips. cracy is asking is whether the United At best they’ll reach Tahiti. Odds are narrow States should deal with the present free- they’ll find it, though. He braces for the worst: for-all in the role of policeman or of short straws, scraped femurs cracked to suck the marrow, paramedic. Abrams takes his lead from exposure, madness, all-consuming thirst, President Reagan, once his boss, who was until their blood congeals and sets them free. convinced that whatever Arabs might do He grasps the rail and stares into the sea. or say, basically they want the same free- —STEPHEN SCAER dom as Americans, and they are able to

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of extremists, but its leader, Mohamed ous books as The Pleasures of Reading Morsi, gave the assurance in a television Habits of in an Age of Distraction and The Book interview that he was not seeking power. A of Common Prayer: A Biography, offers few months later, he won a more or less the checklist at the end of his latest vol- fair general election. As soon as he was in Mind ume. As he wrote recently on his blog, office as president, he began to purge the “the chief impetus of this book was the secular opposition, feeble as it was. This KELLY JANE TORRANCE ever-increasing hostility and (often exclusive political Islamism prompted malicious) misunderstanding of one Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to another that became one of the chief stage a classic military coup, become dic- themes of the 2016 presidential election tator, and purge Morsi and the Muslim here in the U.S. and of the debate over Brothers, sentencing many of them to the Brexit referendum in the U.K.” death. Business as usual, then. Who, in such a time, would profit more In the past, I would have agreed unhesi- from a book called “How to Think: A tatingly with Abrams that democracy is Survival Guide for a World at Odds”— the best, indeed the only, hope for recon- or at least from a discussion with some- ciling the conflicting interests of the Arab one who’s read it—than “the people world. The end of the Cold War offered an who fan flames”? opportunity to undertake the obligatory Alas, books about deliberating better reforms, and perhaps that was the direc- How to Think: A Survival Guide for a are usually ignored by the people who need them most: those who don’t delib- tion the Arab Spring initially was taking. World at Odds, by Alan Jacobs As things turned out, though, Muslim erate much at all. But there seems to be (Currency, 160 pp., $23) identity overwhelms politics and gover- a fine line between Jacobs’s target nance. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah audience and the people he advises that Khomeini, seemingly a world-historical MADE it only to the third item on audience to avoid. Never mind Twitter figure on a par with Lenin, had put in place Alan Jacobs’s “Thinking Person’s trolls. Think of your untactful uncle an Islamist order fundamentally hostile to Checklist” before throwing up whose political pronouncements make democratization. Representing the Shiite- my hands in defeat. That rule Thanksgiving dinner uncomfortable for minority branch of Islam, he and then his Ireads, in its entirety, “As best you can, most of the table; an impassioned pundit successors did much to activate al-Qaeda, online and off, avoid the people who trying to turn a complicated argument the Muslim Brothers, and the Taliban—all fan flames.” I’m an editor at a Wash - into a point-scoring soundbite; the piqued counterparts from the Sunni-majority ington, D.C., political magazine, and I politician remaking policy in response to branch of Islam. As Sunni Saudi Arabia make regular appearances on cable needling slights. and Shiite Iran now face off for an all-out confessional war between them, the Arab Spring is well and truly over. Books about deliberating better are Abrams has coined the cautionary phrase “A human-rights policy means usually ignored by the people who trouble.” If I understand it properly, he is accepting the Reaganite assumption that need them most. everybody recognizes and wants freedom, but also the fact that if we who are already news discussing the hottest-button No matter his target, Alan Jacobs is free insist on others’ having the exact same issues of the moment—I wouldn’t be nothing if not ambitious. How to Think rights, we will postpone and maybe inval- able to leave my apartment, let alone is just 160 pages long, and its author idate any real progress toward freedom: pursue my career, if I took that advice. doesn’t take his task lightly. He runs Democratization is misrepresented in I’d already paused at the first of his down the myriad steps one goes Islamic countries as a shameful surrender dozen rules, also troublesome for those through, for instance, when thinking to the West. Abrams’s prescription for the in my profession: “When faced with about purchasing a vehicle—and notes future is that we go on doing what we have provocation to respond to what some- that such a decision is much less been doing up to now, with and for Arabs, one has said, give it five minutes. Take painful to make than those involving only doing it bigger and better: more- a walk, or weed the garden, or chop political and social questions. “If generous aid (especially from private some vegetables.” every thing we have to think about were foundations), encouragement of political I’m being playful, of course, but not as easy as buying a car, then I’d need parties, genuinely competitive elections, facetious. These points go to the very only to write a blog post or a few tweets no truck with dictators, inclusion of heart of Jacobs’s project. Jacobs, a pro- to set us all on the right path. Instead, Islamists in the political process as much as fessor in the honors program at Baylor I’ve had to write this book,” he says. possible, civil society, recognition that University and the author of such previ- Why him? “I believe, thanks in part to Arab democracy is linked to American my years of negotiating mutually hos- leadership. That’s all very nice, but Abrams Kelly Jane Torrance is the deputy managing editor of tile communities, I can help.” He’s an is placing a very large bet on hope. The Weekly Standard. academic and a Christian, a member of

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two groups that regularly clash in the analytical findings. The bottom line: culture wars, and therefore more aware Thinking is a lot of work, and so in than most people are of the false most instances we don’t do it: “The assumptions and lazy thinking that too cognitive demands of having to assess often characterize how we come to every single situation would be so great view our opponents. as to paralyze us.” We tend to believe Jacobs doesn’t argue, however, that that if we want to think better, we we must detach ourselves from our should shed our prejudices and try to be associations to think and think well. more “rational,” but Jacobs says the His central contention is that it’s actu- science doesn’t support this: “We need ally as members of groups, primarily, the biases, the emotional predisposi- that human beings engage in the tions, to relieve that cognitive load. We process of thinking. “Think for your- just want them to be the right ones. As self” might be the mantra of the sage, a wise man once said, one of the key but Jacobs proclaims it both foolish tasks of critical reflection is to distin- and futile. “To think independently of guish the true prejudices by which we other human beings is impossible, and understand from the false ones by if it were possible it would be undesir- which we misunderstand.” able. Thinking is necessarily, thor- On this “key task,” though, Jacobs oughly, and wonderfully social,” he gives us little guidance. He recom- writes. He even goes so far as to say mends becoming “the kind of person that “whatever we think we know, who, at least some of the time, cares whether we’re right or wrong, arises more about working toward the truth from our interactions with other than about one’s current social position.” human beings.” Descartes, for one, The worst groups encourage, explicitly would disagree: If a man thinks in a or not, their members to value the latter forest and no one is around to commu- over the former. One can best become nicate with him, he still knows that he the right kind of person, Jacobs says, exists. But Jacobs is certainly correct by surrounding oneself with the right to declare that discussion and debate kind of people. “These best people will are invaluable to reasoning and the provide for you models of how to treat search for knowledge. It’s surprising those who disagree with them,” he that with so many references to think- writes; they’ll be “temperamentally ers past and present, he mentions Karl disposed to openness and have habits Popper only briefly in a footnote; that of listening.” philosopher demonstrated this insight That might be good advice. But of better than anyone, and used it to what we hear from “people of good- build powerful approaches to science will,” how do we decide what to accept and politics. (at least provisionally, as we remain Man is a social animal, and the “disposed to openness”)? This is the exchange of ideas within society can crux of the problem of how to think, lead to better ideas. But it’s a stretch to and Jacobs doesn’t offer any serious go from this to declaring, as Jacobs suggestions toward solving it. “We does, that “for people of all ages, some shouldn’t expect moral heroism of our- form of genuine membership is selves,” he says finally. “But we can absolutely necessary for thinking.” He expect to cultivate a more general dispo- seems to think that membership in a sition of skepticism about our own “good” group is the only insurance pol- motives and generosity toward the icy against falling into the clutches of a motives of others.” Take the ninth item “bad” group. on his “checklist”: “Sometimes the ‘ick Thinking is an art, not a science, factor’ is telling; sometimes it’s a distrac- Jacobs insists, but “science is our friend.” tion from what matters.” But how can we He summarizes some of the conclusions tell when our “repulsions,” as Jacobs of two of the best-known psychologists calls them, are helpful and when they are of thinking, Daniel Kahneman (author of harmful? Skepticism is only a first step Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Jonathan in the search for truth. About the next Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind: steps, Jacobs is silent. Why Good People Are Divided by It turns out that How to Think might Politics and Religion), with an aim of better be called “How Not to Think.” developing a practical art out of their Worse, it might even be called “How to

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Not Think.” Jacobs puts too much tion, with mysteries handed down from emphasis on the work involved in think- The Great the past. We seem to have fewer poet- ing and not enough on its rewards. Near critics now; among them are Dana the book’s end, he quotes extensively Gioia, Michael Robbins, Joan Houlihan, the late novelist and essayist David Conversation Stephen Burt, and William Logan. Foster Wallace. The passage is an Logan’s erudition has become his liter- inspiring discussion of “the Demo- NICK RIPATRAZONE ary calling card. Rift of Light, his new cratic Spirit” and offers a shining book of poems, is an intellectual experi- example of, as Jacobs’s chapter title ence. This is a smart book, but the intelli- puts it, “A Person, Thinking.” But gence doesn’t neuter its emotions. Jacobs ultimately rejects what the read- Logan pairs epigraphs that play on the er thought he was celebrating: “Wallace book’s title phrase: George Gissing and was wrong to say that ‘you have to be William Ingraham Russell see “rift of willing to look honestly at yourself and light” as portending both grace and doom. at your motives for believing what you It’s an appropriate opening; Logan’s believe, and to do it more or less con- poems often turn on his ability to become tinually.’ You really can’t do that, magnificently dark, and yet appealing in which, I believe, he discovered: His his precision. From “Leaf Color”: “A ceaseless self-examination caused him steely torn silver, rusted along the edges; / ceaseless misery and contributed in a Rift of Light, by William Logan the faint acidic yellow, like the backwash major way to his early death.” Wallace (Penguin, 112 pp., $18) / of a polluted pond.” Another leaf is nat- killed himself nine years ago, aged 46, ural crimson, like the “false // bonhomie after almost a lifetime of battling OR years, to be a poet meant to of the maraschino cherry.” He ends with a depression. No one, especially those be a critic—more precisely, a question: “Was it only the spilled-over, who weren’t his intimates, can claim to “poet-critic.” When T. S. Eliot abandoned life / and, from the wastage, know exactly why. And it’s hard to was not writing “Suffer us not the broken buds?” imagine that the man who declared that Fto mock ourselves with falsehood / Teach Logan lingers, watching the world and “fiction’s about what it is to be a human us to care and not to care,” he was writ- projecting it back to us, new. On clouds: being” would have been content with a ing of tradition and individual talent, and “That morning, they resembled nothing, // life less examined. of the emotional distinctions between no Rorschach in the sky kept un-empty / We shouldn’t necessarily settle for Shakespeare and Dante. Matthew Arnold, for the theologies of vacancy.” On a crow: one either. Jacobs doesn’t, in the end, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, Robert Penn “With cocked head, / it raked the ground / tell us “how to think.” But he does Warren, Adrienne Rich, and Randall under one anthracite eye, // a shadow in astutely identify some of the roadblocks Jarrell also practiced this art. shadow.” On suffering: “The day a steam to doing so. “The person who wants to Why did it matter? To be an effective bath, all life mildewed in incident.” think will have to practice patience and critic meant to read widely—of the past What do you get from writing criti- master fear,” he maintains, and he’s and the present—and with certain dis- cism about poetry? You don’t get ency- right. We believe that our age is a par- cernment. A breadth of reading offered a clopedic allusions and forced epigraphs; ticularly difficult one in which to think—recall that recent events spurred Jacobs to write this book—but we’ve The poet-critic knows that the ancient always stumbled on our search for truth, especially when we’ve been unsure even art of poetry is a conversation with how to go about finding it. tradition, with mysteries handed down Jacobs quotes T. S. Eliot encapsulat- ing the legacy of the 19th century: from the past. “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of foundation, an architecture, to the poet’s you get patience. Reading poems teach- knowledge in which the same words own work. This is not to say that personal es you to slow down in your own are used with different meanings, or confessional work is inherently bad, but poems. Slow means methodical, mea- when everyone knows a little about a see what Anne Sexton did in her appropri- sured, and focused. Slow doesn’t mean great many things, it becomes increas- ately titled Transformations: “I knew that moribund; slow poetry contains the pos- ingly difficult for anyone to know the voice / of the spirits had been let in— sibility for surprise. whether he knows what he is talking / as intense as an epileptic aura— / and Logan’s pleasures hinge on that capa - about or not.” That’s as good a summary that no longer would I sing / alone.” city to lift an eye, cause a smirk. His poem of our own time as it is of Eliot’s, as The poet-critic knows that this ancient about Cranach’s Luther portrait contains Jacobs points out. Every politician and art of poetry is a conversation with tradi- the lines “The boy monk’s inkblot cloak / pundit would agree with the poet, if swallows him like a python taking a ever they all sat down and really Mr. Ripatrazone is a staff writer for The goat.” There’s a poetic education to be thought about it. Millions and a contributor to The Atlantic. had in the density, the mouthful of those

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lines. They drag the tongue to the roof of sympathy with Michael Corleone in The the mouth. They bubble up, send you Bonnie and Godfather, or get a kick out of Cody back to the painting, and make you look Jarrett in White Heat, but they are hardly harder. Good poets make us see better. I presented as saints in wolf’s clothing. returned to that art and saw through Clyde at 50 By contrast, Bonnie and Clyde skirts Logan’s eyes: “the dull face slope-jawed, around the horror wrought by the couple bangs unbarbered, long / longing for the PETER TONGUETTE while simultaneously presenting them tincture of the cell.” as objects of pity. Penn achieves this by Elsewhere, Logan is surprisingly HERE are many ways to make alternating laughter-inducing scenes— graceful and quiet, as in “The Field,” a gangster movie. Francis such as the prolonged screaming of where we follow the narrator past “flow- Ford Coppola puffed up the Estelle Parsons and a rather brilliant ers oily in their despairing freshness” and genre to operatic proportions comic vignette featuring Gene Wilder— past the “thumbed portion of stream.” Tin The Godfather (1972) and its 1974 with oh-so-sincere intimate moments, We’re suspended during some afternoon, sequel, an approach subsequently including the golden-hued encounter “gathering in that field, arguing with that adopted by Brian De Palma in Scarface between Bonnie and her dear mother. sky, / as if there were nothing to be done.” (1983) and Sergio Leone in Once Upon This combination led to one of the Logan’s short poems have the feeling of a Time in America (1984). Earlier most notorious negative reviews ever being shaved down to their best portions; directors—such as Raoul Walsh in penned. New York Times film critic the best ones remain in narrative (there White Heat (1949) or Joseph H. Lewis Bosley Crowther berated the film for are a few brief poems that feel like the in Gun Crazy (1950)—instead saw sto- cloaking Parker and Barrow’s crimes poet joking around; the punchlines don’t ries of lawlessness primarily as oppor- with light entertainment. Not realizing always land well). tunities to present action on screen: that he was thrashing a film soon to be At his best, Logan makes the reader Having a couple make a quick exit from christened a classic, Crowther was work, but not because of obfuscation. He a hold-up the way John Dall and Peggy unsparing. “It is a cheap piece of bald- mixes the lyric with the conversational. I Cummins do in Lewis’s masterly Gun faced slapstick comedy that treats the don’t mean to draw a line from Eliot to Crazy is considerably more rousing than hideous depredations of that sleazy, Logan, but “The Waste Land” and “Ash having them quarrel during dinner. moronic pair as though they were as full Wednesday” succeed for many reasons, not the least of which is Eliot’s ability to shift register and reference. Logan’s right The sweep favored by Coppola and the there with him, as in the deceptively direct poem “The Mail.” The young other makers of gangster epics risks narrator watches his family’s rooster- glamorizing miscreants. shaped mailbox, tail “cocked-up, enam- eled.” “Neigh bors kept hens; we waited The least likely approach, however, of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups for bills.” The narrator’s father was a might be that of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie in Thoroughly Modern Millie,” he “gentleman / farmer,” who mowed a and Clyde (1967), which relates the wrote, adding, “This blending of farce “vacant field” once a year on Labor Day. misdeeds of 1930s-era bank robber with brutal killings is as pointless as it is A veteran, he was looking to live in the Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty, dou- lacking in taste.” country, content to wait out the years, bling as producer) and his main Alas, Crowther’s notice inspired com- while his anxious son waits for the mail- squeeze and associate, Bonnie Parker mentary from the likes of Roger Ebert man to arrive. Connecting this with (Faye Dunaway), with both burlesque and Pauline Kael. “How do you make a other poems, including “My Father in and sentiment. In real life, the couple good movie in this country without the Shadows,” where “bills layered his committed murder in addition to rob- being jumped on?” Kael asked in The desk / like drafts of snow,” we get a bery before being felled by law enforce- New Yorker. “Too many people— sense of anxiety, perhaps even darkness. ment in 1934. including some movie reviewers—want That poem ends with a photo, propped Yes, the sweep favored by Coppola the law to take over the job of movie on a desk, of “my mother, feathered hat and the other makers of gangster epics criticism; perhaps what they really want askew, / grinning like a demon / with a risks glamorizing miscreants, and the is for their own criticisms to have the bald baby in her arms.” Good collec- all-action ethos of Walsh and Lewis force of law. Such people see Bonnie tions bounce us back and forth between could be confused with nihilism. Even and Clyde as a danger to public morali- recurrent themes and images. Logan so, none of these other films is as defer- ty; they think an audience goes to a play would give that a nod as a critic as well. ential to amoral antiheroes as Bonnie or a movie and takes the actions in it as Rift of Light is moving, and moored in and Clyde, which celebrates its 50th examples for imitation.” tradition—an appropriate work by one of anniversary this year. We may be in In the short term, Kael’s position pre- our finest poet-critics, who traces the vailed: Bonnie and Clyde was honored outlines of our mundane world while “in Mr. Tonguette has written about the arts for the Wall with two Oscar wins out of ten nomina- the air grew / the feathery sound of Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and tions, while Crowther’s tenure at the wings, / like an Annunciation, / among The New Criterion. He is the editor of Peter Old Gray Lady was finished by year’s other things.” Bogdanovich: Interviews. end. But Bonnie and Clyde actually

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In fact, when speaking his immortal line “We rob banks,” Beatty subtly, almost devilishly, emphasizes the word “banks,” as though the morality of the crime depended on what—or who—is being plundered. During one robbery, Clyde asks an overalls-wearing customer whether a stack of cash is his or the bank’s, and upon learning it’s the former, the robber goes into Robin Hood mode: “All right, you keep it then.” The film asks us to share a felon’s indignation. Penn, who maintained a careful, de - cidedly un-rowdy tone in his excellent films The Miracle Worker (1962) and Night Moves (1975), here lacks the requisite directorial distance. When Clyde shoots and then harasses a Texas Ranger—handcuffing him, turning him around by his badge, and lecturing him using the film’s increasingly obvious New Deal politics (“You ought to be home protecting the rights of poor folk, not out chasing after us”)—Penn does little to communicate the man’s terror. Bonnie decides to force the ranger to sit for photos with the gang, proving that the female of the species can be equally malicious, but Penn saves his outrage for the finale: Prior to being punctured with bullets, Bonnie and Clyde make eye contact in a series of knowing looks, Gene Hackman, Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as though their ardor justifies their anarchy. As Peter Bogdanovich once startles with its acceptance of gangster- The duo’s thievery begins in earnest aptly observed, “The brutal slow- ism. The film’s opening title card about minutes later, when Bonnie eggs on motion massacre of Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie establishes its tongue-in-cheek Clyde to demonstrate his criminal bona was the ultimate (and much-imitated) tone: “In 1931 she worked in a café fides. An easily wounded stripling, Clyde anti-authoritarian deification.” before beginning her career in crime.” nonetheless marches into a grocery store The film’s drowsy sentiment does not The dry wording flattens distinctions and departs with a fistful of greenbacks; extend to the law officers who are killed. between civil and criminal society, a warning shot is fired at the proprietor, Penn is more comfortable with the horde suggesting that the transition from whose life, at least, is spared. But what of Grapes of Wrath types who attend to waiting tables to holding up banks is about that cash? Will it not be missed? a wounded Bonnie and Clyde late in the altogether unremarkable. In a manner that looks ahead to picture—a helpless collective. Even before we see evidence of Beatty’s far better Reds (1981), about Ironically, Beatty found his greatest Bonnie and Clyde’s murderousness, American Communist journalist John artistic success in Robert Altman’s knock- the pair’s indifference to property is Reed, Bonnie and Clyde take what they about paean to capitalism, McCabe & hard to take. In the scene of their intro- find. (“Hey, that ain’t ours!” Bonnie Mrs. Miller (1971), which featured the duction, Bonnie drifts to the window of says when Clyde takes off with a car unforgettable sight of the actor listening her room to observe Clyde poking his that isn’t his, but she soon stops object- to Julie Christie outline a brothel’s busi- head in and around her mother’s car. As ing.) One memorable scene occurs ness plan while she puts away a plate of

. she instantly intuits, he intends to make after a foreclosed-upon homeowner eggs. Later, Beatty embraced law and INC , off with it. “Hey, boy! Whatchyou stumbles on the pair squatting in his old order, in cartoon form, in Dick Tracy doing with my mama’s car?” Clyde residence. Clyde goes wild, blasting (1990). Imagine a version of that strik- insists he was “thinking about buying bullets into the sign affixed to the porch ingly bold, bright film in which “Big me one,” but Bonnie knows better: (“Property of Midlothian Citizens Boy” Caprice or Mumbles were the HOME ENTERTAINMENT

. “Bull! You ain’t got money for dinner, Bank”) and encouraging the kicked-out heroes, while Dick Tracy was an anony- let alone buy no car,” she says, but her homeowner to do the same. But is pri- mous cop! Such is the world Bonnie and manner suggests she is more intrigued vate property less private when belong- Clyde asks us to inhabit, leaving us to won- WARNER BROS than outraged. ing to a bank? der: Was Bosley Crowther so wrong?

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Dark Side–wielding leader of the First Film Order, which is like the Empire but with . . . okay, fine, it’s just the Empire. The Lost in character who shows what Natalie Portman’s Padme could have been to Space Anakin, with a rewrite and some Jedi abilities of her own, is Daisy Ridley’s Rey, an up-from-nowhere Force prodigy ROSS DOUTHAT who is searching for her parents; she bonded strangely with Kylo in the last ERE is the tragedy of the ever- movie and this time finds herself engaged expanding Star Wars saga, in a Force-enabled long-distance dialogue- first hinted at by J. J. Abrams’s cum-courtship, in which she tries to pull third-trilogy-opening Force him Lightward while feeling pulled to HAwakens two years ago and now clarified him in other ways. definitively by Rian Johnson’s follow- She’s dancing with Ren while being up, The Last Jedi. In these new movies, trained, sort of, by Mark Hamill’s Luke Abrams and Lucasfilm and Disney have Skywalker, who lives on a Skellig-like found exactly what the terrible, dreadful, outcropping (complete with fish-faced I-still-can’t-believe-how-bad-they-were monks who tend its Jedi temple) on an George Lucas prequels lacked above all: ocean planet to which he retreated after a compelling human portrait of a young botching Kylo’s training and enabling Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi Jedi slowly being claimed by the Dark Snoke’s rise. Luke was the most earnest Side, and a compelling, sexually charged character in the original story, and Hamill relationship with a young woman who the weakest actor of the bunch, so asking Also, Del Toro is egregiously tries to draw him back to the light. him to reinvent the character as a man bad—though he does get off one good But instead of that human drama being transformed by age and pessimism seems line, speaking dismissively of the embedded in the sweeping story of a civ- like a gamble. But it actually pays off; Resistance–First Order battles: “They ilizational calamity, the fall of an old and the relational triangle formed by his blow you up, you blow them up.” Which, corrupted republic, it is embedded in a interactions with Rey and Kylo are as on the evidence of the B-plot, seems political-military narrative that at best is strong as anything yet depicted in the exactly right: Without explaining why or derivative and disappointing, and at galaxy long ago and far away. how, the new movies have basically wiped worst is just infuriating garbage. But everything outside the triangle . . . away all the military victories of the orig- This means I don’t know exactly how oh, man. The B-plot features Snoke’s inal trilogy and returned us to exactly the to review The Last Jedi, because the con- First Order fleet in pursuit of Leia (Carrie same balance of power that existed when trast between its various elements is so Fisher, R.I.P.), the hotshot pilot Poe we first met Luke and Han and Leia. extreme. Unlike Awakens, the new Dameron (Oscar Isaac), and the ships of The idea is to raise the stakes—can the movie is not a pure homage or beat-for- the Resistance, which is like the Rebellion Resistance survive?—but in truth it lowers beat re-creation; it aspires to be more of a except . . . okay, fine, it’s just the them; if nothing that happens militarily in remix than a remake of its original-trilogy Rebellion. The C-plot sends Finn (John these movies matters from one to the next counterpart, the dark and glorious Em - Boyega), the first movie’s ex-stormtrooper (including the destruction of a huge First pire Strikes Back, and sometimes the turned Resistance hero, and a plucky Order Death Star . . . er, sorry, Starkiller at remixing process produces interesting mechanic named Rose (Kelly Marie the end of The Force Awakens, which set pieces, calls up strong performances, Tran) on a mission to a casino planet to seems to have barely set back what was and yields moments of genuine science- find some sort of locksmith (it ends up supposed to be an Imperial start-up, not a fiction beauty. But the rest of the time, being Benicio Del Toro) who can release full-fledged empire), why should we care basically all the time when the central the tracking device the First Order has a whit about the latest imitation of the young characters and a certain famous placed on the Resistance ships. Battles of Hoth or Yavin or Endor that the older one are not on screen, the movie Their mission is entirely pointless, it Disney nostalgia factory conjures up? goes in circles, insults our intelligence, resembles the worst CGI-addled sequences The answer is that we shouldn’t. As copies the worst instincts of the prequels, in the prequels (culminating in a stampede Driver and Ridley prove, with their and makes a mockery of the stakes and by a herd of racing animals that are sup- charisma and their spark, there is still triumphs of the original movies. posed to be gorgeous but look, well, not), interesting drama to be mined from the The character who shows us what and it advances Finn’s character develop- story of Force-wielders and their various Hayden Christensen’s awful, whiny ment not at all, which is particularly unfor- temptations. But when it comes to the Anakin could have been is Kylo Ren tunate because he’s set up as Kylo Ren’s political story that’s supposed to explain

. (Adam Driver), born Ben Solo, son of rival for Rey’s affections, and let’s just say why the psychodrama of Skywalkers and Han, and now the pupil of Supreme the chemistry between Finn and Rey Solos matters to the whole galaxy, not just Leader Snoke (the inevitable Andy would have a tough time lighting a twig on to their kith and kin, the new trilogy has LUCASFILM LTD Serkis in motion-capture), the deformed fire on a dry day in the Black Hills. completely lost the plot.

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Happy Warrior BY DAVID HARSANYI What’s In a Name?

Y children attend a typical suburban public While in the 1950s around 25 of the most popular baby- high school featuring an atypically beautiful, girl names were used by roughly half the population, these talented, funny, diverse, and precocious days you’d have to include over 100 names to cover 25 per- M group of kids. With the swirling madness cent of American baby girls, and those names are constant- that’s permeated American life, these kids actually imbue me ly fluctuating. with hope for the future. There are a number of reasons for this trend. Obviously, There’s just one tiny problem. I can’t remember any of their some names enjoy cyclical popularity. I’ve begun to notice names. It is, in fact, impossible for me to distinguish one of kids’ sporting names that had been, in my lifetime at least, these young people from another using the labels that have reserved for octogenarians. My instinct is to put “Aunt” in been assigned them by their creative parents. Aaliyah? front of names like Olivia (the most popular baby name for Adalyn? Allegro? Who knows? (The names, incidentally, have girls in 2017), Agnes, or Beatrice. been altered to protect the innocent—primarily myself.) So I Another driver of variation is that fewer men are being am forced to concoct monikers for my children’s many asso- named after their fathers. While there were once many juniors, ciates, such as “the one with the extraordinarily whiny voice,” III’s, and IV’s in areas of the United States that embraced or “the one who is always reading those weird “honor cultures,” today this naming convention Japanese comics,” or “the tall one,” and so on. is becoming rarer in all parts of the country. The failing is mine and mine alone, of Striving for The diversity in names can also be chalked course, but I do come with a generational up to an influx of immigrants who come here excuse. As was the case with many of you, uniqueness from areas outside of Europe. Anglicizing when I went to high school, American kids rather than European names is unproblematic when com- were permitted to have one of perhaps six first pared with Anglicizing names imported from names—and two of those names were the alter- embracing other areas of the world. Habits have changed, native spellings “Michelle” and “Michele.” As as well. While a generation of Jewish immi- far as I knew, the Baby Boomers tasked with tradition is a grants that came before me took on deliberately christening Gen Xers might have been the reflection of American-sounding names—Seymour, Morris, laziest name-givers in history. Because of and such—today newcomers are more prone them, I have met around 2,000 people named contemporary to keep their culture’s conventional names. John in my life but not a single one named There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of Caspian or Magnus. attitudes. those tendencies. My name, David, for instance, was traditionally bestowed On the other hand, some sociologists argue that names to firstborn males in Jewish families in honor of the king of transmit important social information to a wider world. So, Israel. The results were less than regal, given where I grew up, for instance, while in the past we sought to associate our off- as I was not merely one of five Davids in my small class but spring with blessed saints, historic personalities, national one of three David H’s. No Jebadiahs. No Harpers. No leaders, and revered family members, today some of us name Augustuses. Lots of Davids. In the decade of the 1970s, our kids Rumi because that’s what Beyoncé and Jay-Z came nearly 450,000 babies would be named David in the United up with for their daughter. States. Heck, I’ve corresponded with two people who share Striving for uniqueness—and I admit that I am somewhat both my first name and my surname. Most kids today will guilty of this; who doesn’t want his kids to be special?—rather never know such indignity. than embracing tradition is a reflection of contemporary atti- But it turns out I can’t blame our parents alone, as naming tudes. It’s difficult to avoid the fact that our progressively habits have been increasingly individualized and varied over anarchistic naming conventions reflect a collective narcis- the past 100 years. From the 1880s to the 1950s, the names sism. In the past, parents were concerned about their chil- John, William, James, George, Charles, Robert, and Joseph dren’s fitting in or carrying on a legacy. Today, there is strong (and, at the tail end, Michael) dominated the top ten for boys’ emphasis on standing out. A weird name is an easy, if often names. There was rarely any genuine variation to the list other lazy, way to make that happen. than the names’ occasionally switching spots in the rankings. Don’t get me wrong. In many ways the diversity is pleas- Nowadays, according to Nameberry, a site that concerns ing. If you feel compelled to name your child after a New itself with this vital topic, some of the most popular names York borough, or fauna, or something Gaelic, or maybe some- for boys last year were Atticus, Asher, Milo, and Silas. Three thing that makes us think of a blacksmith in a New England of the top ten names of 2017 had changed from the year town circa 1620, go for it. I mean, we should envy the Xaviers before. Some of the biggest movers were Kai, Liam, Cassius, and Logans of this world. No decent scriptwriter would name Finn, and Ryker. a superhero Dave, after all. But sometimes, when I’m flailing to recollect one of my children’s friends’ names, I worry that Mr. Harsanyi is a senior editor of the Federalist. maybe we’re losing something important as well.

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