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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thursday, March 19, 2009
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Still Completely Unqualified and Wholly Unprepared The Obama administration is still making a great impression on the British: While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington. Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem. The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words "wrong region" came up on his screen. Although he mournfully had to put the popcorn away, he is unlikely to jeopardise the special relationship – or "special partnership", as we are now supposed to call it – by registering a complaint. A Downing Street spokesman said he was "confident" that any gift Obama gave Brown would have been "well thought through," but referred me to the White House for assistance on the "technical aspects". A White House spokesman sniggered when I put the story to him and he was still looking into the matter when my deadline came last night. By the way, when Obama's unlikely gift was disclosed, a reader emailed me to ask if Clueless was among the films. Funnily enough, it was not. Brown, on the other hand, presented a rather more thoughtful gift to the American President in the form of a penholder carved from the timbers of an anti-slavery ship. The sister ship, in fact, of the one that was broken up and turned into the desk in the Oval Office. Needless to say, had the Bush administration done something so blockheaded, and tawdry, the howling ridicule would be deafening. As Obama's "comrades in the mainstream media exaggerate the positives and ignore the negatives", hardly anybody who doesn't read blogs will even know about it. John Hinderaker puts it very well: Can you imagine the Democrats' reaction if the Bush White House had given a European head of state a set of DVDs that can only be played on North American machines? It would have been conclusive proof of Bush's provincialism, lack of sensitivity to our allies' sensibilities, ignorance of the wider world, techno incompetence, failure to appreciate the superiority of European civilization, blah blah blah. That's how it would have been reported and editorialized on in every newspaper. So let's check tomorrow's papers and see whether that's how Obama's gaffe is covered. Or whether it's covered at all. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 03/19/09 10:07:33 PM |
Havel's Observations Václav Havel, sometime Czech president, gave an address, May 24, 1993, upon receving The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind: .... Small city states, where all those who shared in the rights of citizenship could easily assemble in one square, and where nearly all citizens may have known one another, have given way to states with a population of dozens and sometimes hundreds of millions. Consequently contacts, including communication between members of the public and the politicians who represent them, have to go through a variety of instruments, be it a stratified system of representative democracy, the powerful megamachineries of large political parties or the communication system most characteristic of the present times, that is, the media. Under these circumstances, many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators. If they want to ask a politician a question they can usually do so only in writing, and receive a reply from a nameless member of his staff. If they decide to vote for him in an election they often cannot give their vote to him alone but have to vote for a political party as well, and with it, for a number of other politicians about whom they know nothing and for whom they do not care, on a list they could not influence because such lists are put together by party secretariats the voters neither know nor elect. Politics ceases to be a part of the citizens' immediate life and becomes something like a peculiar TV show, which could be comic or tragic, but which they can only watch.... I find it fantastic that today's civilization makes it possible for the whole world to witness important events, no matter where they happen, in the same instant. It is marvellous that people can communicate with each other immediately when they want to, and that they can meet at a few hours' notice. I also deem it immensely important that politics is under the scrutiny of a free and independent press. The only thing that worries me is the depersonalization and dehumanization of politics that has come about with the progress of civilization. An ordinary human being, with a personal conscience, personally answering for something to somebody and personally and directly taking responsibility, seems to be receding farther and farther from the realm of politics. Politicians seem to turn into puppets that only look human and move in a giant, rather inhuman theatre; they appear to become merely cogs in a huge machine, objects of a major civilizational automatism which has gotten out of control and for which nobody is responsible.... (Thanks, Charles.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 03/19/09 08:57:51 PM |
More Government Cures, More Government Problems And so on and so on and so on and so on. Thanks to Lead and Gold for the following quotation. Between the late 1950s and the early 1980s government in the United States became so big and so complex that it all but lost the ability to function. A medical term, "iatrogenic disease," illness resulting from treatment by a physician, fairly well describes what happened. Starting with the New Deal, government attempted to solve problems of a nature and magnitude beyond the capacities of a limited constitutional system and perhaps of any system. Some remedies worked, others did not. When they did not, the tendency was to create a new program on top of an old one, rather than to scrap the old. By the early 1960s this jerry-built machinery was beginning to produce, or aggravate, social problems of a scale previously unknown in America. Every governmental "remedy" produced a new governmental-caused sickness; and yet Americans had become so addicted to the habit of believing that government could cure everything that the response of the late sixties was wave after wave of crash programs. These created new problems that, in the seventies, resulted in more programs. By the time considerable numbers of people began to suspect that they were overgoverned, the reality was that, though government interfered in their lives from cradle to grave, it scarcely governed at all, in the original constitutional sense of the term. Government had ceased to be able to protect people in their lives, their liberty, and their property; and it had lost the capacity to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. [Forrest McDonald, A Constitutional History of the United States, 1984] Lane Core Jr. CIW P Thu. 03/19/09 09:15:56 AM |
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