"The Collapse of the Dream Palaces"

A remarkable essay, insightful, imaginative, and (I think) prescient, by David Brooks at The Weekly Standard, dated Apr. 28:

.... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are....

These dream palaces have taken a beating over the past month. As the scientists would say, they are conceptual models that failed to predict events. But as we try to understand the political and cultural importance of the war in Iraq, the question is this: Will they crumble under the weight of undeniable facts? Will the illusions fall, and the political landscape change?...

Many of his thoughts are many of mine, frankly, though as yet largely inchoate; I am delighted to see them so well expressed.

(Thanks, Steven.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 08:28:17 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"The Constitution Be Damned"

Brendan Miniter points out how left-wingers on the Senate Judiciary committee seem to count against judicial nominees their sincerely held religious convictions:

.... The lightning rod here, of course, is abortion. It's no secret that the pope and the Catholic Church are squarely against abortion on demand. And Mr. Holmes, who once served as president of Arkansas Right to Life, is an orthodox Catholic. He's written articles against abortion and has even -- God forbid -- defended the rights of people to peaceably protest against the practice.

Abortion gives the Democrats some of their most fanatical supporters. So Sens. Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin feel safe in demonizing Mr. Holmes. They even dug up a 23-year-old letter in which Mr. Holmes argued against rape exemptions. Mr. Holmes says he no longer holds this view, and Sen. Durbin for one should sympathize, since 23 years ago he was pro-life.

Mr. Schumer is particularly critical because Mr. Holmes admitted to him that Roe v. Wade was one of the Supreme Court decisions he didn't agree with and because he refuses to promise to recuse himself if any of the right-to-life groups he's defended ever comes before him. Such pre-emptive recusals aren't in line with judicial ethics, which require federal judges to weigh the circumstances of each case before deciding on whether to recuse themselves....

What the Senate's left-wing extremists have been trying to do to the judiciary the past couple of years is very, very dangerous. It is imperative that the Bush administration not give an inch.

(Thanks, Ryan.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 01:34:24 PM
Categorized as Political.

"Pseudoscience vs. Snobbery"

John Derbyshire comes out swinging today at NRO:

.... The essence of the modern Left, from Lenin to the Clintons, is a contempt for ordinary people — for their blindness to their own interests, for their inability to see that society needs radically reorganizing, for their reluctance to let themselves be shoveled around like truckloads of concrete in order to accomplish that reorganization, for their degraded tastes in everything from food to mode of transportation, for their selfish determination to hold on to the rewards of their own labor rather than hand over those rewards to people who believe themselves wiser, for their absurd attachment to outmoded prehistoric concepts like “family,” “nation,” and “liberty.” ....

(Thanks, Kathy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 01:07:57 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"Red, White, and Blue-Baiters"

A phrase coined by historian John Moser in his article yesterday at History News Network:

.... To characterize today's pro-administration forces as "McCarthyite" misses what truly distinguished the original McCarthyites from the broader community of conservatives and anticommunists — that is, their hostility toward "the Establishment." Those who rallied behind Joe McCarthy's crusade were largely lower middle class, and more often than not of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European descent. They resented the fact that American politics and society were dominated by upper class WASPs who seemed too eager to make accommodations with communism. They concocted elaborate conspiracy theories allegedly proving that the State Department and other federal agencies were under communist control. They argued that the mainstream media were not to be trusted; that the newspapers were havens for "parlor pinks," and the publishing industry was overrun with "commies" and "fellow travelers." They railed against American corporations who wanted to trade with "Red China," accusing them of dealing in "blood money."

To be sure, there are still people on the American Right who continue to harbor such fantasies — one finds them in organizations such as the John Birch Society and the various "militias" that we heard so much about in the mid-1990s. But in the context of the current war, the essence of McCarthyism — that is, hatred of "the Establishment" and espousal of conspiracy theories — is today almost the exclusive domain of certain elements among the antiwar Left. Instead of "Red-baiters," they might more appropriately be called "Red, White, and Blue-baiters."

An examination of some of the rhetoric heard during antiwar demonstrations confirms this. There are suggestions that American policy is secretly being made by Texas oil companies, or, more strikingly, Israel (a clear point of comparison to the McCarthyite accusation that the Soviets were directly running U.S. diplomacy). There are other conspiracy theories as well-about Halliburton and the "Carlyle Group" orchestrating the war (how long can it be before the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations are mentioned?), about the allegedly "stolen" election of 2002, about how the television networks and other mainstream media outlets are owned by military contractors, and hence hopelessly biased in favor of war (Katie Couric-Merchant of Death?). And behind it all one detects, above all, a seething resentment of those that hold power in America; just the sort of resentment that Joe McCarthy was so successful in exploiting in his day....

(Thanks, John.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 12:57:35 PM
Categorized as Political.

Web Browsing is Ten Years Old Today

Mosaic, the first web browser, was released ten years ago today:

Ten years ago today, the world changed. On April 22, 1993, a group of University of Illinois students released a free piece of software to help people retrieve data more easily from computer networks: the first real Web browser. They called it, appropriately, Mosaic - for it put together the pieces of the online revolution....

The first browser I used when I started to venture onto the Internet, about this time of year, 1995, was Spry Mosaic.

(Thanks, Nick.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 12:13:48 PM
Categorized as Other.

"The Job Ahead" a.k.a. "After the War"

Stanley Kurtz's fine essay at OpinionJournal yesterday is making the rounds of the Blogosphere. But you, Faithful Reader, were way ahead of the pack because of notice in The Blog of the same article's publication in the winter issue of City Journal, Jan. 20. :)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 11:44:18 AM
Categorized as International.

On Saddam's Payroll? And Who Else?

Explosive accusations across the pond.

The Daily Telegraph claims today to have documents showing that one of the UK's most vociferous opponents of the War Against Saddam Hussein was, effectively, on Saddam's payroll. (He denies it.)

If George Galloway, MP, then who else? And where?

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 09:38:04 AM
Categorized as International.

"The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter"

A fascinating article from Saturday's New York Times:

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating....

Finally, a young man with dreadlocks who said he was a graduate student from Jamaica asked, "So is theory simply just a nice, simple intellectual exercise, or something that should be transformative?"

Several speakers weighed in before Mr. Gates stood up. As far as he could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated anyone. "Maybe I'm too young," he said. "I really didn't see it: the liberation of people of color because of deconstruction or poststructuralism."

If theory's political utility is this dubious, why did the theorists spend so much time talking about current events? Catharine R. Stimpson, a panelist and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, offered one, well, theory. "This particular group of intellectuals," she said, "has a terror of being politically irrelevant."

Here's a clue for current "intellectuals" who went from grade school to high school to college to graduate school to tenure-tracked professoriates: Marxism never worked! (Except for the big-wigs who lived the high life while forcing everybody else to live the hard life.)

(Thanks, Justin.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 08:49:40 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"What it Means to Stand Alone"

Margaret sends a poem.

What it Means to Stand Alone

Eleven thousand soldiers lay beneath the dirt and stone,
all buried on a distant land so far away from home.
For just a strip of dismal beach they paid a hero's price,
to save a foreign nation they all made the sacrifice.

And now the shores of Normandy are lined with blocks of white,
Americans who didn't turn from someone else's plight.
Eleven thousand reasons for the French to take our side,
but in the moment of our need, they chose to run and hide.

Chirac said every war means loss, perhaps for France that's true,
for they've lost every battle since the days of Waterloo.
Without a soldier worth a damn to be found in the region,
the French became the only land to need a Foreign Legion.

You French all say we're arrogant. Well, we've earned the right--
We saved your sorry nation when you lacked the guts to fight.
But now you've made a big mistake, and one that you'll regret;
you took sides with our enemies, and that we won't forget.

It wasn't just our citizens you spit on when you turned,
but every one of ours who fell the day the towers burned.
You spit upon our soldiers, on our pilots and Marines,
and now you'll get a little sense of just what payback means.

So keep your Paris fashions and your wine and your champagne,
and find some other market that will buy your aeroplanes.
And try to find somebody else to wear your French cologne,
for you're about to find out what it means to stand alone.

You see, you need us far more than we ever needed you.
America has better friends who know how to be true.
I'd rather stand with warriors who have the will and might,
than huddle in the dark with those whose only flag is white.

I'll take the Brits, the Aussies, the Israelis and the rest,
for when it comes to valor we have seen that they're the best.
We'll count on one another as we face a moment dire,
while you sit on the sideline with a sign "friendship for hire."

We'll win this war without you and we'll total up the cost,
and take it from your foreign aid, and then you'll feel the loss.
And when your nation starts to fall, well Frenchie, you can spare us,
just call the Germans for a hand, they know the way to Paris.

P.S. Michael Marks writes, May 22, 2006, to say he is the author of this poem.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/22/03 08:29:20 AM
Categorized as International & Literary.