The New Tory Prince

As the song goes, “I been down so long that down don’t worry me.” That
is what the British Conservative Party has been singing after three successive
defeats at the polls. But in last week’s party conference a new star was born singing a new
song: David Cameron,
who electrified the Tory Party with the best speech of the week.

In this opinion article in The Daily Telegraph
Cameron
attempts to advance his campaign to be party leader in Parliament, and hopefully Prime Minister at
the next general election.

Happy Columbus Day

How should we celebrate Columbus Day? As a celebration of western European values and expansion?
Or as a shameful conquest of noble savages that lived in harmony with nature?

Edward Hudgins celebrates the ordinary people that came out from Europe to America.
It may have been that the stout Cortez and his ilk enslaved the Meso and South Americans. But
in North America, the conquerors were workers who came to carve a new life out of the wilderness.

They had to clear the land, plant and sow crops. They had to practice
the trades of carpenters, masons, loggers, miners, blacksmiths and tailors to build
their towns and to create the necessities for life and prosperity. In the centuries that
followed, their descendants -- including Americans today -- built the richest, most prosperous
country on Earth.

Instapundit, on the other hand celebrates the change that Columbus’s discoveries
had on the Europeans back in Europe. Quoting Samual Eliot Morison:

"A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after
the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating
as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future."

In all this celebration though, we should remember those swept away in the triumphant European
expansion as its adventurers spread out across the oceans
and the continents of the world, trading, dominating, killing,
and ruling. The victims. It ain’t fun when your world gets turned upside down by strangers that
suddenly appear over the horizon.

We like to present history as a triumphant narrative of progress from darkness to light, from
simplicity to sophistication, from cruelty to compassion. Others like to present it as a
death spiral of evil and despair.

But the big question is: What does it all mean?

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.