The President Plants a Stake in Iraq

In his speech on Iraq on October 6, 2005,
President Bush
clarified, finally, the war aims of the
United States in the global war on terror. It is to oppose and neutralize the forces that
“call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.”

But how? That was the meat of the president’s speech. What he called the fifth element of his
strategy is in fact the centerpiece of his strategy, which the other elements support:

to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred
and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East

We can understand this better by turning to political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel.
For him, the point of a successful politics is to create a mild and friendly politics of civility in place of
the alternative, a ruthless and murderous politics of hate. Every faction is “some part of a people... joined together in a bellicose spirit against
some other part.” The intent of leaders of sects and factions is to set citizens at war with each other. The goal of
friendly politics is to set citizens to work with each other.

The point of modern democracy is to reduce revolutionary combat and assassination with symbolic combat,
and replace battle with friendly rivalry.

Maybe that is why President Bush is avoiding a knock-down drag-out fight over his Supreme Court nominations.
Maybe he wants the culture wars of the last decade to cool off a bit—lest they escalate into real war.

Ronnie Barker R.I.P.

They don’t make them like that any more, certainly not like
Ronnie Barker, the British
TV comedian and writer who died October 3, 2005, aged 76.

American public TV viewers will remember Barker as the fat half of The Two Ronnies,
a show characterized by wordplay, stock British caricatures, and the “honest vulgarity” of
double-entendres. He
also exceled as the crafty imprisoned career criminal Fletcher in Porridge, and the corner
shopkeeper in Open All Hours:

Arkwright, the waddling, stammering
Yorkshire shopkeeper who divided his time between satisfying his roaring avarice and
attempting to control his lust for the district nurse, Gladys.

Barker was a modest man who began as a bank clerk and looked like one, but who slowly created a
career for himself in the theater the hard way by climbing up through regional repertory until he
caught the eye of rising stars like Peter Hall and David Frost.

Then, in 1988, in his late fifties, he gave it all up.

On New Year’s Day 1988 Barker retired to his converted
watermill in Oxfordshire, devoting his energies to ordering his collection of 70,000
Edwardian and Victorian picture postcards (some of the saucier ones were published in
anthologies such as his Book of Bathing Beauties), and to running his antique shop,
The Emporium, in Chipping Norton High Street.

After all, somebody has to do it.

August Wilson R.I.P.

In an era in which American theater has driven theatergoers to despair as it
panders to
elite fashions about race, class, and sexual orientation, there
is at least August Wilson. But not any more. The African American playwright who died October 2, 2005 aged 60.

The question about any lionized African American in the United States
at the turn of the twenty-first century is: Was he any good, or was he just
another average performer boosted into celebrity by fawning liberals? It’s
a pity, but that’s the reality.

Having seen Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jitney I’d say that the
answer is a definite Yes. Wilson did not serve up received liberal notions
about race, but human drama about real people.

So in Ma Rainey we may see condescension from the white recording studio
execs, but we also see them cowering and accommodating the prima-donna rages
of the impossible singer Ma Rainey. And we see the destructive rage of the strutting
black trumpeter.

In Jitney we see an African American father and son battle it out. The son gets sent
up to jail for murdering a white man, father of the white girl he’s been seeing, and
returns twenty years later seething with rage. Meanwhile his father has learned to live
under law. So when the city wants to raze the shopfront and redevelop the shopfront
he’s using he sends for a lawyer to deal with his conflicts instead of reaching
for his gun. And he’s become a respectable member of the community, a deacon
at his church. How do we deal with power, Wilson asks. With a lawyer or with a gun?

You can find lots of obituaries. Here’s one by
Joe Adcock.
There’s a better one at The Daily Telegraph.

The Chavez Plan to Wreck Venezuela

As we thrill to the excitements of US politics, let us not forget Venezuela as Hugo Chávez flushes
it down the toilet.
As Carlos Alberto Montaner
writes: “The raid on private property in Venezuela has begun.”

Chávez and his thugs are moving in “factories and large land tracts that are supposedly unproductive.”
That is Spanish for pouring oil money in and fat salaries and wages out—for Chávez supporters.

Anyone who knows a lick of economics knows where that leads. It leads to economic stagnation or worse.
And above all, it leads to dependency. When the government runs everything, then everyone is dependent
on the political process to put bread on the table. How is it possible, we might ask, that
leaders that advocate government control of everything are so often praised as noble souls that
care for the people?

Political leaders like government control because it makes them very powerful. It
allows them to reward their supporters and punish their enemies. Just ask Lenin and Mao and Castro. But it
slowly strangles the well-being of its people. That’s what happened to the Soviet Union. That’s what
happened to the Peoples Republic of China under Mao. That’s what has happened to the unfortunate
Cuban people. Now Chávez wants to try it out on the Venezuelans.

49 Up: Oral History as it Happens

Forty years ago Granada TV in Britain broadcast a documentary, Seven Up, about the lives of twenty children, then aged seven. It was to be a narrative about class, showing how class was destiny. To make the point absolutely clear they anchored the show around three boys and three girls. They showed us three dreadfully conceited boys from a fancy London private school and three charming working class girls from the East End of London.

Last month in Britain they broadcast 49 Up, interviewing the same children at the age of 49. Jonathan Freedland reviews it in The Guardian. Here in the United States we will probably have to wait for the DVD. You can get the DVD of the previous five episodes, The Up Series, at Amazon.

Of course, the hoary left-wing narrative about class has been utterly demolished, not least because Britain has become overwhelmingly middle class in the last half century. Instead what emerges unbidden in every frame is a completely different narrative: “The Consequences of the Welfare State.” You can say, roughly speaking, that the closer each child lived to the welfare state, the more their life suffered. All the middle-class children that went to private school have done well. But the kids that went to government schools, or bust up their marriages and went on welfare—they have not done so well.

So the question is: what was all the money and all the promises and all the social programs about? When it has all led to blighted lives and social decay?

But that is a conversation the producers of The Up Series are not willing to have. They may not even be aware that it is a conversation it is possible to have.

Miers or Less: The Fight Goes On

President Bush
nominated
White House counsel Harriet Miers this morning to be an Associate Justice on the United States
Supreme Court. And conservatives are underwhelmed.

Conservatives want a nominee that can stick it to the Democrats and teach them a lesson. But the
President is clearly signaling that he doesn’t want a knockdown drag out fight. The Roberts nomination
seemed to have been made on the basis of going as conservative as possible without provoking the
Democrats to a fight. And the Miers nomination has to be seen in the same light.

Conservatives should understand that the big problem on the Supreme Court is not in the
character and beliefs of individual
nominees and whether they get turned into liberals by their years on the court and by the need
to be liked and win
“Strange New Respect” from the Washington media. The challenge is for conservatives to create the judicial atmosphere that makes
the conservative philosophy the default position for a go-along-to-get-along justice.

If conservatives want to win on the court, year in year out, no matter who gets on the court, then
we must win in the battle of ideas. When that happens the swing votes on the court, the Souters and
the Kennedys, will weathervane over to our side.

It is easy, when your guy is in the White House, to imagine that he can fire a magic bullet and
change the court to your liking. Reality is not so easy.

Reality is getting up every morning and going to work, determined to change hearts and minds, one at a time, issue by
issue.

The Underclass: Remember Them?

Charles Murray published Losing Ground twenty years ago. In it he told how social policy had created the non-working underclass out of the old working class, a world of fatherless families that lived without working.

Now with Hurricane Katrina we have suddenly rediscovered the underclass. And we will likely pull out a few of the old palliatives to make it go away.

The underclass is not going away. It is still getting bigger, Murray writes. The measure of the size of the underclass is the rate of criminality. “The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.” The crime rate is down because we have tripled the population of our prisons.

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job.

Although we have reformed welfare, we have not shrunk the underclass. That is because we have not shrunk the number of fatherless families.

Think of this. In the United States we have our unsocialized underclass males. In China they have the surplus males from the folly of the One Child policy. In Eurabia they have millions of disaffected males: underclass European males and alienated Muslim males. What do you think will become of all those angry males?