kevin d. williamson`s the end is near

2013_05_20 subscribe:cover61404-postal.qxd 4/30/2013 8:38 PM Page 1
May 20, 2013
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KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON’S THE END IS NEAR
JOHN O’SULLIVAN
ON TOM WOLFE
BOSTON & ITS AFTERMATH: Kurtz w McCarthy w Steyn
DAVID FRENCH
ON ROD DREHER
RUBIO’S
FOLLY
Mark Krikorian
The Editors
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TOC:QXP-1127940144.qxp 5/1/2013 3:22 PM Page 1
Contents
M AY 2 0 , 2 0 1 3
ON THE COVER
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V O L U M E L X V, N O . 9
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 27
Jay Nordlinger on George W. Bush
p. 22
The Rubio Amnesty
In the months leading up to the
introduction of the Senate
immigration bill, conservatives
looked hopefully to Rubio as
their representative. But he is
now much less the
conservative ambassador
to the Gang of Eight than
the Gang’s ambassador to
conservatives. Mark Krikorian
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
39
40
COVER: AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
THE COVER IMAGE WAS ALTERED SLIGHTLY, TO REMOVE PEOPLE STANDING IN THE BACKGROUND.
42
by Andrew C. McCarthy
19 ACCULTURATION WITHOUT ASSIMILATION
44
by Stanley Kurtz
by Jay Nordlinger
Some notes on a dedication ceremony.
24 DONALD KAGAN’S LAST LECTURE
BIG BROTHER AT YOUR TABLE
Julie Gunlock reviews
The Food Police: A Well-Fed
Manifesto About the Politics of
Your Plate, by Jayson Lusk.
We reject American identity at our peril.
46
by Eliana Johnson
FILM:•THE PLACE
OFF THE A-LIST
Ross Douthat reviews The Place
Beyond the Pines.
An important career ends memorably.
47
FEATURES
27 THE RUBIO AMNESTY
NO AQUATIC TARTS?
Charles C. W. Cooke reviews Worlds
of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of
the Dark Ages, by Guy Halsall.
The radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers.
22 GEORGE W. BUSH DAY
THE TRIBES OF
POST-AMERICA
John O’Sullivan reviews
Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe.
ARTICLES
16 AMERICAN DAWA
A GRIEF OBSERVED
David French reviews The Little
Way of Ruthie Leming: A
Southern Girl, a Small Town,
and the Secret of a Good Life,
by Rod Dreher.
CITY DESK:•
THE OBJECT OF BEAUTY
Richard Brookhiser discusses
women and beauty.
by Mark Krikorian
It’s not what the senator promised, but he’s defending it anyway.
29 iPENCIL
by Kevin D. Williamson
SECTIONS
Nobody knows how to make a pencil, or a health-care system.
31 HOW THE FED CAN UNWIND
by Ramesh Ponnuru & David Beckworth
And its critics can relax.
34 FAITH AND FAMILY
by Mary Eberstadt
We should be optimistic about their future.
2
4
37
38
43
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
The Long View . . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . Jason Lee Steorts
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
NATIoNAl RevIeW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIoNAl RevIeW, Inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2013. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to editorial Dept., NATIoNAl RevIeW, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
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letters:QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/1/2013 2:51 PM Page 2
Letters
MAY 20 ISSUE; PRINTED MAY 2
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Washington Editor Robert Costa
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
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Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace
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Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
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Explaining the Gulf
According to Kevin A. Hassett in his April 22 column, a “gulf has emerged”
between the academic achievements of boys and girls—women now earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 60 percent of master’s degrees, for example—and
“new clues” explain the roots of these differences. A graph plots the differences of
time spent on children’s cognitive activities (number of books a child owns, attendance at story hours, and visits to the library).
But of the six comparisons, the greatest difference has to do with library visits
among two-year-olds. About 30 percent of girls
Factors in Child
visited a library in the past month, as compared with
Cognitive Development
24 percent of boys—a six-percentage-point difference, as compared with the roughly 20-point gaps in
degree-earning. How such a small difference can
produce an “achievement gulf” is not clear—and at
any rate, girls mature faster than boys, so such a difference among young children is hardly surprising.
Mr. Hassett is entirely correct about one thing, though—yes, boys are more
wiggly than girls!
Two-year-old boys
Two-year-old girls
Four-year-old boys
Four-year-old girls
70.2
40.5%
65.9
36.5%
33.1%
29.8%
29.5%
44.5
39.9
23.4%
11.5% 12.6%
Number of Books
Child Owns
Attended a
Story Hour
Visited
the Library
Margaret B. Larson
Mt. Airy, Md.
Kevin A. HAssett replies: even though the differences in activities between boys
and girls from the study i described may appear small, the cumulative effect of all
the small differences is startlingly large. the authors of the study show that the difference in parental activities was responsible for up to 50 percent of the differences
in boys’ and girls’ cognitive-test scores when they entered kindergarten. the activities listed are only some of the many ways that parental involvement may affect
academic performance, which may well explain the large estimated impact.
visiting the library, for example, may be a proxy for other differences. the striking
thing is that the “wiggles” in the data are found to have a major impact, leaving less
to be explained by the wiggles in the boys.
Corrections
in “King roger” (May 6), Jay nordlinger reviewed Zev
Chafets’s new book, Roger Ailes: Off Camera. He quoted the
author as saying that Ailes pioneered the use of musical
“intros and outros” in television news. He went on to question this claim. in fact, Chafets quotes a Berkeley professor,
who makes the claim. He does not make it himself.
in addition, a letter in the May 6 issue stated that Berkshire
Hathaway A shares were valued at $155; in fact, they were
valued at $155,000.
PUBLISHER
Jack Fowler
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com.
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
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M AY 20, 2013
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/30/2013 12:56 PM Page 1
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week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/1/2013 2:51 PM Page 4
The Week
n New line of attack on Ted Cruz: He doesn’t act like the other
senators. New slogan for Cruz campaign: See above.
n A Washington Post/ABC poll taken the week before the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library (see Jay
Nordlinger, p. 22) showed that the former president and the current president have identical approval ratings: 47 percent. Barack
Obama has been hailed by his supporters in and out of the media
as the Second Coming. But even Jesus would be a lame duck in
a second term that has so far been a substantive fizzle. For the
departed, on the other hand, time removes the pricks of daily controversy. For Bush, it has allowed Americans to recall his fundamental decency and to appreciate that the Terror War, which
came to him and us on 9/11, will last for more than two administrations and that Bush confronted it manfully. Better days have
come for his reputation. Far more important, as he said at his
library, is the hope that America’s best days lie ahead.
ROMAN GENN
n Back in 2010, Republicans were not able to stop or shape
Obamacare, but they did win one tiny victory: requiring congressmen and some of their aides to enroll in the law’s “exchanges.” Now congressional Democrats are worrying that they
will not be able to attract young, single staffers, who will have to
pay much more for exchange coverage—thanks to Obamacare’s
regulations—than they pay today. So the Democrats are trying to
create an exemption for their offices, either through new legislation or through a favorable regulatory ruling. Speaker John
Boehner immediately nixed the legislative option, saying that the
solution to the country’s Obamacare problems is repeal. Around
the same time, Senator Max Baucus (D., Mont.), who more than
any other individual wrote the bill, complained that its implementation would be a “train wreck.” A few days later he announced that, after six terms, he will not be running for reelection
next year. The people who know this law best are doing what they
can to get off this train in time.
n But Republicans have their own Obamacare headaches. House
Republican leaders sought to shift some Obamacare funds from
the program’s propaganda division to its “high-risk pools” to help
sick people. The move would have highlighted the law’s prioritization of ideology over its putative beneficiaries. Conservatives
have generally supported high-risk pools, although preferring
that they be designed differently than they are in Obamacare. The
problem those pools are meant to address—that some people
who have chronic conditions are effectively locked out of healthinsurance markets—is the result of federal and state policies that
have made it impossible for individuals to buy cheap, renewable
catastrophic policies. A conservative reform of health care would
allow such a market to emerge while essentially (through the risk
pools) giving money to the people for whom it is too late to start
buying insurance. The leaders had to pull the bill, though,
because of opposition from a few conservatives who worried that
4
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
the party was retreating from the goal of a full repeal of
Obamacare. We supported the bill, but it is not an idle worry.
Republicans need to match their anti-Obamacare rhetoric with an
alternative to the program that would let at least as many people
get coverage as that misbegotten law, but without its side effects.
(We are happy to send inquiring Republican congressmen back
issues of NR for more details.) It is only in the context of an overall strategy to replace Obamacare with something better that
Republicans can achieve unity on tactics.
n In Washington, it’s not always easy to tell where the incompetence ends and the cynicism begins. So it was with the FAA
air-traffic-controller furloughs, a stupid and inept response to
sequestration that the Democrats planned to exploit to the fullest.
Even before the flight delays had been felt, Harry Reid was using
them as an illustration of the need to cancel almost all of the
spending cuts. Never mind that the FAA had to find only $600
million in cuts in an agency with a $16 billion budget within a
Transportation Department with a $70 billion budget. Only
15,000 of the FAA’s 47,000 employees are air-traffic controllers.
Yet the agency furloughed them as though they had no special
role in the nation’s transportation and commerce. The FAA
claimed—probably wrongly—that it lacked the flexibility under
sequestration to allocate its cuts differently. A bipartisan revolt
forced the White House to accept a bill explicitly giving the FAA
the authority to shift from other accounts the money necessary to
avoid the furloughs—a small victory for reason.
n Higher levels of public-sector debt and deficits are, generally,
associated with slower economic growth. But just what level
presents a serious problem is a remarkably difficult question.
M AY 20, 2013
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/29/2013 1:36 PM Page 1
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week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/1/2013 2:51 PM Page 6
THE WEEK
n Paul Krugman, writing on his blog on April 28, asserted
that events were refuting the theories of a school of conservative critics of Keynesianism. Against the Keynesian insistence that spending cuts must hurt a depressed economy,
these conservatives had argued (to simplify) that monetary
expansion by the central bank would do a lot to offset any
such effect. Krugman noted that we have had a real-world
test of this theory in the U.S.: The Fed launched a new round
of expansion in late 2012, and around the same time the
budget took a turn toward “austerity” (i.e., modest spending
cuts). The result is a disappointing new figure on economic
growth showing that “austerity seems to be taking its toll.”
Hang on a minute, though: That number is higher than the
2012 growth rate, which means that the lesson (to the extent
there really is one) is the exact opposite of the one Krugman
drew. Twenty minutes later, Krugman wrote another post
explaining that “again and again” he has been proven to be
right in economic debates, and his opponents to be, in many cases, “knaves and
fools.” To doubters, he summed up:
“Look at how the debate has run so
far.” Follow Krugman’s links and
you will see a triumphant mention
of a study showing how, from 2007
to 2008, his predictions were better
than those of Sam Donaldson and
Senator Lindsey Graham. Though
armed with no study, we will
venture a prediction:
Krugman will keep
on winning debates
in the future as
long as he’s
the judge.
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
n As secretary of state, John Kerry hasn’t lost his knack for the
inane. Testifying before Congress, he was asked about Benghazi,
where four of our people were killed last September 11. He finished his answer by saying, “We got a lot more important things
to move on to and get done.” But there are still unanswered questions. And we don’t recall that Democrats were eager to move on
from Abu Ghraib, even though there were important things to
“move on to” then, as well. On another day, Kerry made a casual
comparison of those who died on the Mavi Marmara to those
who died in the Boston terror bombing. The Mavi Marmara was
the Turkish ship carrying thugs who were bent on breaking the
Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. On a third day, Kerry made
a statement about jihadists: “I think the world has had enough of
people who have no belief system, no policy for jobs, no policy
for education.” Unfortunately, the jihadists have a rather welldeveloped belief system. It’s almost enough to make you pine
for Madame Secretary Clinton.
n A handful of conservative outlets—including this one, but
most persistently Breitbart.com—have for years sought to bring
attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford,
which has spiraled into a racially charged, billion-dollar government kickback machine for untold thousands that shows no signs
of letting up. One organ of the indifferent mainstream media has
at last caught up, with the New York Times publishing a deeply
reported piece on Pigford and its descendants that, if anything,
reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought. The
original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to
any black American who had even “attempted to farm” and who
was willing to write on a form that he had been discriminated
against by the USDA. An orgy of fraud followed, led by a small
cadre of lawyers and hucksters who, among other efforts, toured
rural churches in the South encouraging parishioners to get their
checks. Some claimants were as young as four years old; others
had their forms filled out by lawyers just to “keep the line moving.” In some towns, the number of claimants exceeded the number of farms operated—by individuals of any race. Instead of
closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration opened it to
women, Hispanics, and Native Americans, overruling in the
process the objections of career lawyers in the Justice Department. It financed the payouts by dubiously tapping a Justice
Department fund reserved for a different purpose. And it applied,
in most cases, evidentiary standards even looser than the ones
governing the original settlement. Pigford has long screamed for
congressional investigation, and now that the mainstream media
have taken notice, perhaps it will get it.
n Fisker is—or perhaps, by the time you read this, was—another
“green” automotive company, a producer of a plug-in luxury car
called the Karma that it sold to the likes of DiCaprio and Clooney
for just $100,000 or so a pop. Karma, as it turns out, is a bitch,
and Fisker is nearly bankrupt. This would be just another example of the vicissitudes of the free market if it weren’t for the fact
that the American taxpayer is on the hook for a $529 million loan
given to the company by Steven Chu’s gang at the Department of
Energy—the same rocket scientists (in some cases literally) who
brought you Solyndra. So cozy was Fisker with the administration that Vice President Biden stood at the site of a proposed
Fisker plant in Delaware promising that the government’s investment would return untold billions. The loan did bring in a billion
M AY 20, 2013
AP PHOTO/MEL EVANS
Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have
attempted to examine it on a number of occasions, using historical data from wealthy nations over the past two centuries. Their
most famous study, in 2010, found that when a country’s ratio of
national debt to total economic output rises above 90 percent,
its economic growth drops dramatically, or stalls entirely. (U.S.
debt is currently about 70 percent.) This stark result has become
a popular piece of evidence in favor of austerity in Europe and
of fiscal restraint in the United States. But this spring, economists at the University of Massachusetts published a paper
attacking Reinhart and Rogoff’s work, demonstrating one
minor error and what they considered questionable weighting
of the countries involved. In the UMass paper’s assessment,
the relationship between high debt and slow growth remained, but it was much weaker, and there was no cliff at 90
percent or any other level. Regardless, it is likely that the
causality runs in both directions: Slower growth also drives
higher debt. None of this changes the fact that the growth of
entitlements, and the growth in debt it will yield, will crowd
out private investment and restrain growth. That problem,
our real fiscal dilemma, has not been seriously considered—
or addressed.
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/30/2013 11:27 AM Page 1
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week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/1/2013 2:51 PM Page 8
THE WEEK
A Long-Term Problem for the Economy
I
8
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
long-term unemployed made up only 17.3 percent of all
unemployed workers in December 2007; today they
constitute fully 39.3 percent of all unemployed workers
in the labor market. In December 2007, the average
length of unemployment was 16.6 weeks; today, it is
much higher, at 37.7 weeks. There is growing evidence
that employers are extremely reluctant to make a job
offer to persons who have been out of work for more
than six months. A recent study by Rand Ghayad
involved submitting fake résumés in response to job
postings and varying the levels of experience and lengths
of unemployment on them. He found that the chances of
receiving a callback from an employer dropped off significantly for the long-term unemployed; a worker who
had been unemployed for only a short time and had no
relevant experience in the industry to which he was
applying was more likely to receive a callback than a
long-term-unemployed person who did have relevant
experience. Providing 99 weeks of unemployment insurance may not have helped matters, since it encouraged workers to stay out of jobs for longer and they then
became mired in unemployment for the long run. (There
are large geographical differences in unemployment as
well, and workers reluctant to move to find jobs may
have become stuck as their area floundered while others, such as North Dakota, flourished.)
Employers make that choice for rational but unfortunate reasons: Workers whogo through longer periods of
unemployment have a heightened risk of substance
abuse and suicide, a shorter life expectancy, and a
higher likelihood of personal problems, including divorce
and troubled children. The costs of long-term unemployment are high, and the shift of the Beveridge curve
implies that they may stick around for a long time.
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Beveridge Curve:
January 2001–February 2013
4.0
Sept 2009-Feb 2013
Job-Openings Rate (Percent)
N a perfect frictionless economy, there would never be
any unemployment. If a number of workers were expected to lose their jobs tomorrow, firms would anticipate an increase in the supply of workers, everybody’s
wage would drop, and higher demand for the newly available workers would emerge instantly. In the real world, of
course, there are many frictions that make non-zero unemployment possible. Most important are skill mismatches
and geographic mismatches. A surge in the demand for
engineers might not reduce the unemployment rate today if
it takes time to train engineers. An energy boom in North
Dakota can create job listings that remain unfilled until
workers decide to move to North Dakota.
In one of the more important papers in economic
history, Christopher Dow and Louis Dicks-Mireaux
showed that there is a regular relationship between job
openings and unemployment. When there are many
unemployed workers, openings disappear relatively
quickly, and when there are many openings, unemployment tends to be low. Economists later began referring
to this curve as the “Beveridge curve” after William
Beveridge, an economist who studied unemployment in
the first half of the 20th century.
Subsequent research has demonstrated that economies
tend to move up and down a relatively stable Beveridge
curve over the business cycle. In recessions, there tends to
be high unemployment and few openings.
The nearby chart portrays one of the most striking shifts
in U.S. labor-market data on record. Data on U.S. openings
and unemployment from January 2001 to February 2013
are shown, and non-linear estimates of the Beveridge curve
are provided for the periods from January 2001 to August
2009, and from September 2009 to February 2013.
In an economy with low friction, the Beveridge curve
would be very close to the origin. Unemployment would
tend to be low, and openings filled quickly. In an economy
with large matching problems, high unemployment and
high job openings could coexist, and the curve could be
farther from the origin. The chart indicates that the Beveridge curve has shifted out sharply during the Obama
administration.
It has been almost four years since the end of the recent
recession, but the U.S. has yet to return to its previous
levels of unemployment. The shift in the Beveridge curve
suggests that it may never do so. The points labeled A and
B illustrate why. In February 2013, the job-openings rate
(unfilled jobs as a percentage of total jobs) was 2.8, a rate
that would have corresponded with an unemployment rate
of about 5.25 on the Beveridge curve from 2001 through
August 2009. The unemployment rate in February, however, was 7.7—almost two and a half points higher.
What explains the shift in the Beveridge curve? The
biggest factor is likely the massive increase in the number
of workers who have become long-term unemployed. The
3.5
Jan 2001-Aug 2009
3.0
B
A
2.5
2.0
1.5
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Unemployment Rate (Percent)
SOURCE: BLS
M AY 20, 2013
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/29/2013 1:28 PM Page 1
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THE WEEK
in private capital, investors who liked the idea of a firm with
White House connections, and who now stand to be wiped out
because Fisker offered a product it didn’t know how to efficiently mass-produce to a public that didn’t want to buy it. There will
likely be no plant in Delaware, no untold billions in return on the
federal investment, and no Karma in every garage.
n When President Obama addressed a Planned Parenthood national conference in Washington, D.C., he assured his audience
that they had “a president who’s going to be right there with you,
fighting every step of the way.” He has been fighting since he was
an Illinois state legislator, voting against bills that would have
required trying to save the lives of infants who survive attempts
to abort them. Give Planned Parenthood and President Obama
the benefit of consistency: They are a business that provides
abortions; he is a politician who approves their handiwork. May
the days of their sway be numbered.
n Jurors in the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor
accused of one third-degree and four first-degree murders, have
begun deliberations as we go to press. No one disputes the generic description of the 41-year-old woman who died after seeking an abortion at his clinic. The task of describing the four
persons who, according to the prosecution, were killed after
attempts to abort them failed is a different matter. Anglo-Saxon
terms—“child,” “baby,” “newborn”—applied to the aborted
party have a humanizing effect and suggest that the moral worth
of the object of abortion is equal to that of its agents and everyone else. Those who think it isn’t resort to the word “fetus,” the
Latinate, clinical term for “unborn child” and the analogue of
another Latinate, clinical term rightly absent from the legal and
political debate: “gravida,” a pregnant woman. Journalists and
commentators who call the infants fighting for their lives in the
chaos and filth of Gosnell’s clinic “fetuses” clearly signal their
affirmation of abortion rights but inaccurately convey the fact of
the matter: The children at that point were no longer unborn. Of
course, if babies are fetuses, fetuses are babies. The lesson in
logic is unintended.
n The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity has landed,
and of course its roster is fruitier than Natalie Portman’s breakfast. Habitual scourge of Paulism James Kirchick makes the
introductions: Lew Rockwell, believed by many to be the author
of Ron Paul’s oddball racist newsletters, is a prominent member
of the board, as is Michael Scheuer, who insists that American
Jews are a “fifth column” acting in Israeli interests; John Laugh land, a prominent toady to Slobodan Milosevic and Alexander
Lukashenko; Eric Margolis, who has suggested that 9/11 was the
work of either the U.S. military or the Israeli intelligence service;
and a few other questionable characters. The line-up is distasteful, but some features are simply laughable: a pair of Big
Brotherly cartoon binoculars over the words “Neocon Watch”
(“Neocons, who are at all times salivating for war . . .”), to say
nothing of the presence of Dennis Kucinich. From 9/11 truthers
to Lew Rockwell’s sad little theme park in Alabama to crackpottery, the intellectual decline of the Rothbardian tendency within
libertarianism is a sad spectacle. Ludwig von Mises had no children, and also no heirs.
n Mother Jones, a magazine named for the founder of a terrorist
10
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
organization, responded to the Boston attack with an article making the claim that so-called right-wing terrorism has killed more
Americans since 9/11 than has Islamic terrorism. The problem, as
Ben Shapiro notes, is that practically none of the incidents
Mother Jones describes as right-wing terrorism were 1) instances
of terrorism or 2) perpetuated by right-wingers. Most are common crimes committed by people with the sort of lunatic political opinions one hears at the worse class of bars and the better
class of universities: Robert Andrew Poplawski, for example,
was an angry anti-Semite, but he did not murder his mother out
of political principle—they had an argument about letting the dog
out. (He subsequently killed two police officers.) Chris and Wade
Lay were militia nuts who killed a man during a bank robbery;
Jim David Adkisson was angry about losing his welfare benefits.
Strangely enough, the magazine also characterized Andrew Joseph Stack’s 2009 airplane crash into the IRS building in Austin
as right-wing terrorism, even though Mr. Stack identified himself
as a Communist in his suicide note. (We are familiar enough with
the magazine to know that it is possible to be a Communist and
still be to the right of Mother Jones, but this is ridiculous.) Predictably, recent left-wing terrorism—such as the attempt by
members of Occupy Cleveland to blow up the Route 82 bridge—
does not much enter into Mother Jones’s analysis.
n Speaking of which, Floyd Lee Corkins II has pleaded guilty. If
you don’t know the name, it’s because the national media have
not been interested in his story. He’s the one who went to the
Family Research Council in Washington and shot security guard
Leonard Johnson, who nonetheless subdued him. FRC is a conservative organization, concentrating on social issues. Corkins
also planned to attack similar organizations. He told investigators
that he intended to kill as many FRC employees as possible. Then
he was going to smear Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces. He
had bought 15 of the sandwiches for the purpose. He got the idea
that FRC was a “hate group” by going to the website of the
Southern Poverty Law Center. And you can never be too careful
about hate.
n NR has a table every year at the White House Correspondents
Dinner. When Louis XIV expected every nobleman to appear at
Versailles, who would stay at his chateau? But the dinner is an
institution as grotesque as Versailles. Tom Brokaw slammed the
2012 iteration because of the splash made there by Lindsay
Lohan. But celebrity varnish had been layered on for years.
Hollywood glitz, plus journalistic and Beltway self-esteem,
makes the dinners about as republican as Versailles too. We here
are the in-crowd; you (outside) are most definitely not. When the
president, the guest of honor, shares the prejudices of his audience—i.e., is like most of them a liberal Democrat—there is a trifecta of snobbery. Modern American democracy was born when
the triumphant plebs trampled the carpets and furniture of the
White House at Andrew Jackson’s inaugural ball. Now the
American political elite behave like the gilded freaks in SaintSimon. Not good for them, not good for the U.S.
n Is the best possible next mayor of New York Anthony Weiner?
If the city had a functioning GOP, Joseph Lhota, former head of
the subway system, might fill the bill. But the odds against a
Republican who is neither the Wrath of God (Rudy Giuliani) nor
a billionaire (Michael Bloomberg) are immense. The Democrats
M AY 20, 2013
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/29/2013 1:33 PM Page 1
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THE WEEK
offer a field of tiny hacks, occupying ethnic or sexual niches: Bill
Thompson (black), John Liu (Asian), Christine Quinn (lesbian),
Bill de Blasio (married to an ex-lesbian). Weiner opposes an inspector general for the police department. He also dislikes Mayor
Bloomberg’s bike lanes, one of the incumbent’s worst whims.
Weiner is a sad case. Because his downtime amusement was
tweeting obscene pictures of himself to women to whom he was
not married, he wrecked his political career. Yet because he can
think of no other, he seems determined to run for mayor. Pity the
New Yorkers who may have to hold their . . . noses and vote for
him.
n The Sacramento Bee published an ugly and uninventive cartoon mocking Texas over the fertilizer-plant disaster that killed
15 people in the small town of West, juxtaposing the explosion
with Rick Perry’s boasting that “business is booming.” The implied argument—that the West catastrophe is a result of Texas’s
lighter regulatory touch—is false. Fertilizer plants in Texas, like
fertilizer plants everywhere in the United States, are heavily regulated: The West facility was subject to oversight by no fewer
than seven agencies. The problem is not the regulations but the
regulators: OSHA had not visited the site since the Reagan administration. DHS is responsible for monitoring facilities with
more than 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate—the stuff Timothy
McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bomb—but was ignorant of
the fact that the plant had more than half a million pounds on
hand. The plant had informed one regulatory agency, but agencies do not communicate. The owners filed a “worst-case scenario” report with the EPA, which did not follow up to see
whether that scenario was in fact the worst case. The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration—there is
such a thing—visited the facility in 2011 and handed down a
$5,200 fine for failure to draft certain safety plans; the 270 tons
of highly explosive material apparently did not seize their attention. Rick Perry, needless to say, does not oversee OSHA, DHS,
or the EPA.
n President Obama has made a memorable contribution to the
annals of worthless diplomatic ultimatums with his infamous
“red line” warning to Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons. It would be “totally unacceptable,” a “game changer,” and
bring “consequences.” He said all of this apparently believing he
could bluff Assad out of using such weapons, and giving nary a
thought to what he would do if Assad defied his threats. Now, the
British, French, and Israelis all believe that Syria has used chemical weapons, and so do U.S. intelligence agencies “with varying
degrees of confidence,” in the words of Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel. The president has responded with Clintonian parsing of
his past words—all but saying that it depends what the meaning
of “red line” is—and with a defense lawyer’s doubt about the evidence against Assad. The entire episode is a lesson in not writing
rhetorical checks you don’t want to cash, especially when the
international credibility of the United States is at stake. It is certainly true that Syria, locked in a hellish civil war between the
regime and an increasingly radicalized opposition, presents limited and unpalatable options for the United States. No one wants
to put boots on the ground. A no-fly zone would invariably commit us to toppling Assad by force of arms and taking ownership
of the post-Assad dispensation. We should pursue a more limited
course. If it is possible to identify and target stocks of chemical
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weapons from the air, without too much risk of contamination to
innocents on the ground, we should do it. We shouldn’t want
these weapons in the hands of Assad, or of a radical Islamist government that could replace him. More broadly, we should give
military aid to the more secular elements of the opposition, to
strengthen them vis-à-vis the dominant radicals and give ourselves some allies on the ground. It would have been much better if the president had done this sooner, but in Syria he put all his
trust in meaningless gestures and words.
n Demonstrating in the street is a well-known sport in France,
and there’s plenty to demonstrate about at the moment. According to polls, no president has ever been so unpopular as François
Hollande, and unemployment has seldom been so high. At the
ministerial level, there’s financial jiggery-pokery. The socialist
Hollande makes known how little he appreciates the conservative
governments of Germany and Britain. Hoping to shore up his
position, he got a bill to legalize same-sex marriage through the
parliament. There were fisticuffs inside the building and mass
demonstrations outside, leading to arrests and tear gas. Gays have
been attacked and beaten in cities throughout the country. A coalition of right-wing opposition parties, the Catholic Church, and a
formidable lady comedian who goes under the spoof name Frigide Barjot, denounces violence but remains determined to take
all legal steps to stop final ratification. The media compare the
demonstrations planned for the coming days to historic revolutions, and even Le Figaro, that cautious newspaper, raised the
specter of 1789. A lot of people evidently want the famous phrase
Gay Paree to keep its old-time meaning.
n In Paris, an Iranian man chased a rabbi and his son, both wearing yarmulkes, through a synagogue, then slashed them with a
box cutter badly enough to require hospitalization. Witnesses
said the man shouted “Allahu akbar!” repeatedly during the
attack. According to the Associated Press, “an official investigation was underway to determine a possible motive.” Hmmm,
we’re stumped too.
n The Vatican may have a scoop on its hands, or so thinks
Antonio Paolucci, the director of its museums. They have been
restoring rooms with frescoes by Pinturicchio. One of these has a
portrait of Rodrigo Borgia, elected as Pope Alexander VI in 1492.
Probably because he was such a source of scandal, these rooms
were shut for centuries, and the frescoes obscured by the city’s
grime. The restorer, Maria Pustka, reveals that hitherto indistinct
figures in the background of one fresco are naked men wearing
only headdresses and dancing, with one on horseback. This is
precisely how Christopher Columbus describes the people he had
encountered in the New World. Columbus was back home by
1494, the date when Pinturicchio finished the painting. Experts
are at work figuring out if the Borgia pope had got a copy of
Columbus’s journal. If this was the source, then here is the first
portrayal of native Americans, so to speak a Renaissance travel
poster.
n Animal-rights vandals are the modern-day equivalent of book
burners, destroying knowledge to intimidate anyone who defies
them. In Italy, protesters invaded a University of Milan laboratory where scientists used mice (plus a few rabbits) to research
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phrenia. To be sure, research animals should be treated humanely, which is why every lab must run a gauntlet of rules and regulations and review boards. But that wasn’t enough for the
extremists, who spoiled research records, switched or defaced
labels on cages, and otherwise nullified several years’ worth of
work. The protesters also set free around 100 of the lab’s experimental subjects (a questionable move, since lab animals have
trouble surviving in the wild) and at last report were negotiating
for custody of the other 700 rodents. Meanwhile the researchers
will just get more mice and start over—not that the protesters
care, as long as they can indulge their Wind in the Willows fantasies.
n Private Bradley Manning was named an honorary grand marshal of the San Francisco gay-pride parade. Soldiers no longer get
booted from the Army over such things, which must be of great
comfort to him—that and the fact that prosecutors have opted not
to seek the death penalty in his trial on charges of stealing classified information and aiding the enemy during the Iraq War. But
after a few days of withering criticism, the organizers of the event
rescinded the invitation: Private Manning apparently is too controversial for the decorous ladies and gentlemen of the San
Francisco gay-pride parade. If ever you have had the pleasure of
witnessing that great American spectacle, you will appreciate that
the group’s announcement that the party responsible for inviting
Private Manning “has been disciplined” could mean any number
of things.
n Four years ago, the Barbadian pop sensation Rihanna was
beaten by her rapper/r&b-singer boyfriend Chris Brown; he admitted to the assault and was sentenced to five years’ probation.
They are back together, and the faniverse buzzes with gossip
about their relationship as Rihanna embarks on a world tour. In
the bad old days, entertainment moguls ran their talent like
chattel. But they kept their troubles (purely for commercial reasons) hush-hush. Maybe that was no bad thing.
n The advance of women’s rights through the ages has been inspiring, and to it we can add the heroic effort of Washington’s legislature to purge the state’s laws of such degradingly sexist terms
as “penmanship” and “journeyman” (which have been replaced
with “handwriting” and “journey-level plumber”). The notion
that a little girl growing up in Puyallup will be deterred from a
rewarding career in ichthyology because a law says “fisherman”
instead of “fisher” is beyond far-fetched. This Olympian effort
took six years plus a long series of bills, each numbering in the
hundreds of pages, and a 40-member staff; Samuel Johnson compiled his dictionary in not much more time with far fewer resources. The shame of it all is that instead of tracking down
outdated words in obscure statutes, the legislature could have
used the time for more important work, such as subsidizing in dustries to stimulate the economy, or setting up Obamacare exchanges . . . well, come to think of it, there’s really no better way
for a legislature to spend its time than copy-editing old laws. In
fact, the next thing they should do is carefully check the entire
legal code for serial commas and the correct use of “which” and
“that.”
n We first took notice of Howard Phillips in the early 1960s,
when he was president of the Harvard Student Council. He would
become a leader of the New Right: the movement associated with
Jack Kemp, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and others. He
founded the Conservative Caucus in 1974, remaining its chairman until 2011. “Conservatives used to believe their job was to
lose as slowly as possible,” he said. “I don’t just want to slow the
train down; I want to put it on another track.” Phillips set himself
against the temporizing qualities in the Republican party, and he
occasionally went too far. He accused President Reagan of being
“a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda”; the Gipper turned out to
know what he was doing. Three times, Phillips ran for president,
on tickets of his devising. He has died at 72. In its obit, the New
York Times said, “Even among stalwart conservatives, Mr.
Phillips was known for being especially devoted to the ideological principles of the right, including limited government, traditional family values, strong national defense and opposition to
abortion.” A high tribute. R.I.P.
TERRORISM
After Boston
HE Tsarnaev brothers’ bombing of the Boston Marathon
raised questions peculiar to itself, and others already
familiar to us in the War on Terror.
In the Nineties, it gratified some liberals to think that the disturbers of our peace were right-wing anarchists and survivalist
nuts. If Timothy McVeigh could be fused with ordinary conservatives, all the better. So the day after the Boston attack, former
Obama aide David Axelrod speculated that it could be linked to
“Tax Day” (April 15). Axelrod represents an old type in American politics, but for this slimy remark, in a better world he would
be shunned.
As in other jihadi crimes—most prominently the Fort Hood
murders of Major Hasan—we saw what our colleague Andy
McCarthy calls “willful blindness.” The Russians warned us
twice about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and the FBI even interviewed
him. Yet he was allowed to fly to Russia, spend six months doing
who knows what, and return unmolested. It is not anti-Muslim to
investigate dodgy Muslims for terrorist activity. Most American
Muslims are not terrorists, but many American terrorists have
been Muslims. Whether this is a perversion of the religion, or an
expression of an authentic strain of it, is not the business of government. Actions most definitely are.
Are we involved in a war, or crime-fighting? Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, the brother who survived, was questioned for 16 hours,
then read his Miranda rights. Unless there was a connection to alQaeda, he couldn’t be held as an enemy combatant, but there
should not have been such a rush to treat him as a common criminal.
Out came the armies of excuses. The brothers felt alienated
in America. Thousands of immigrants feel the same, yet do not
become mass murderers. Dzhokhar was under the spell of
Tamerlan (but the Unabomber’s younger brother didn’t help
him mail bombs—he turned his brother in). It can be hard to
believe in monsters who are young or (in Dzhokhar’s case)
cute, but history provides examples enough.
The older members of the bombers’ family were a study in
contrasts. Their parents, Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev, showed
a combination of shock, stupidity, and evil. The more they
talked, the larger the proportions of the last two grew. Meanwhile the bombers’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, berated his nephews
T
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THE WEEK
as “losers. . . . You put a shame on our entire family” and “on
the entire Chechen ethnicity.” Good for him.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, the former Katherine Russell, suggests a newish phenomenon. The transgressive partner of choice
is no longer the black rebel or the criminal, it would seem, but the
radical Muslim. Only wearing hijabs can express the full measure
of rebellion (or self-hatred, or just dim-wittedness). Expect to see
more such.
Was the police lockdown of Boston excessive? The comic
Bill Maher said we have become a “police state.” On the other
hand, Senator Rand Paul discovered a use for drones (they can
be used when there might be a need to use them, just not when
there is no need). Policing is always open to criticism and
improvement: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found only after the
lockdown was lifted and the Watertown homeowner went outside to see blood on the boat where he was hiding. But hot pursuit is hot pursuit; salus populi suprema lex esto.
The murderers were caught in short order. Yet they took four
lives, injured hundreds, and disrupted a great city. Food for
thought, for our enemies and for us.
IMMIGRATION
This Time It’s Different?
hE Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform bill contains a
number of superficially attractive security mandates: It
would require the federal government to have 100 percent “situational awareness” of the border, to catch 90 percent
of illegal border-crossers in high-traffic areas, to establish a
tracking system to address the problem of those who enter the
country illegally but overstay their visas, etc. So attractive are
those goals that we have supported them in the past, on the
many occasions upon which the government has promised to
achieve them.
Disappointingly, Washington keeps failing to deliver on its
promises. The unspoken premise of the Gang of Eight bill is: This
time it’s different. We are skeptical that this is so. And regardless,
there is a great deal in this package that is deeply objectionable.
It follows the same amnesty-first/enforcement-later model that
has burned us before. The bill’s proponents, such as Senator
Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), lay a great deal of stress on the “triggers”
that must be pulled before it lets illegal immigrants become citizens. Yet the trigger for the amnesty itself—creating “provisional” legal status for the millions who have entered the country
illegally—would be almost entirely meaningless: The De partment of homeland Security would merely have to affirm in
writing that it had plans to do something about border security,
and that money had been appropriated for doing so. That’s it: no
rigorous empirical standard, just the fact of having a plan.
Offering legal status before enforcement—even if citizenship is
delayed—can be expected to draw more illegal immigrants to our
country.
As we noted earlier, these security measures have been legislated before. Congress mandated the creation of a visa-tracking
system, for instance, in 1996. Since then, Congress has on multiple occasions during three presidencies reiterated its demand that
the executive branch comply with the law, and the executive
branch has on each occasion failed to do so. The system the bill
would mandate is even weaker than the system already mandated:
It would apply at airports and seaports, but not to land crossings.
GETTY IMAGES/ALEX WONG
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Perhaps President Obama will suddenly get religion on enforcement. But consider his Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals initiative, which gives some illegal immigrants relief
from deportation after what is supposed to be a rigorous screening process to weed out criminals and national-security threats.
“Criminals” has a rather loose definition—you can have a couple
of convictions and remain golden in the eyes of Obama’s DhS,
so long as you pled any felony charges down to misdemeanors—
the result of which is a 99.5 percent approval rate. There is no
reason to expect this bill’s legalization process to be implemented more rigorously.
We very strongly support mandating the use of E-Verify or a
similar system nationwide in order to ensure that businesses hire
only those workers who are legally eligible to be employed in
the United States. Mandating E-Verify is so obvious and sensible
a move that it should have been made years ago in a stand-alone
piece of legislation, but that bill was rejected. Those who opposed it, including business interests and farm-state Republicans,
will have similar incentives to water down enforcement provisions in any compromise bill that passes Congress and continue to resist them even after they are written into law.
The bill has additional perversities. It not only would offer
legal status to the 11 million or so illegals currently in the
country but also would readmit many of those who have been
deported. The argument for normalizing the status of illegals
already resident in the United States has in the main proceeded
from the fact that they are already resident in the United States.
Offering legal status for those who are not living in the United
States is indefensible.
Further, the bill would open the floodgates for unskilled
laborers. Many of those unskilled laborers would be brought
in under guest-worker programs, which are in and of themselves objectionable. They amount to nothing more than the
creation of a caste of second-class workers for the benefit of
certain business interests.
The Gang of Eight bill is a cobbled-together beast, a truly ugly
creature of politics. If Washington were serious about border
security and controlling illegal immigration, then Congress
would pass a mandatory E-Verify bill, and the executive would
enforce it, finish the job of securing the border, and implement
visa controls. More broadly, our immigration procedures would
be reoriented toward the economic needs of the country rather
than other concerns. Once the government had built up its
credibility on enforcing the immigration laws against new
entrants, then the time might come to talk about granting legal
status to those who are here illegally. Until then, we won’t
believe promises that this time it’s different.
M AY 20, 2013
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American Dawa
The radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers
BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY
multi-culti Boston is
the latest target of jihadist terror. The spree began on April
15, when terrorists remotely
detonated two improvised explosive
devices near the finish line of the Boston
Marathon, killing three spectators: two
young women, Krystle Campbell and
lu lingzi, and eight-year-old Martin
Richard, who was waiting for his dad to
complete the race. Four days later, with a
major American city paralyzed by fear,
the siege ended with a series of wild firefights in the streets, during which the terrorists killed MIT police officer Sean
Collier and critically wounded transitauthority police officer Richard Donahue
(who, thankfully, is expected to make a
full recovery).
The terrorists were a pair of brothers,
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, originally from Chechnya. Their family had
immigrated to the united States beginning in 2002. Dzhokhar, 19 years old at
the time of the bombing, had been naturalized, in perverse irony, last September
11. He was captured hiding in a boat and
faces a capital trial in federal court. His
26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, a greencard holder who bore the name of a legendary 14th-century jihadist warrior, was
killed during the manhunt.
AP PHOTO/THE BOSTON GLOBE, DAVID L. RYAN
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The Tsarnaevs seemed well assimilated, at least until recent years. Thus the
pressing question: How did this happen?
The answer begins with that simple, chilling admonition from Muslim leaders:
Integrate but do not assimilate. For those
Muslims who have begun assimilating,
there is this corollary: Turn away from
Western wickedness and embrace the
cloister of Islamic piety—as construed by
Islamic-supremacist leaders, whose ideology glorifies violent jihad even as it pretends to moderation.
The strategy has been called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is to provide
Muslim immigrants in the West—particularly, energetic young Muslims like the
Tsarnaevs—with cultural, psychological, and even physical insulation from
Western mores, traditions, and institutions. It was the bedrock of Muslim
Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s
framework for ground-up revolution. In
every city and town, the Egyptian academic taught, Muslim leaders must establish a mosque–cum–community center.
These, he explained, would become “the
axis of our movement,” serving as the
“House of Dawa”—that is, of Islam’s
particularly aggressive form of proselytism—and providing “the base for our
rise . . . to educate us, prepare us, and
supply our battalions.”
“Our battalions,” indeed. “Battalions of
Islam” was the honorific applied by Omar
Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian intellectual,
Banna admirer, and convicted terrorist
better known as “the blind sheikh,” to the
jihadists who answered his summons to
savagery in Cairo and New York. That
these battalions will emerge from the
dawa mission stressed by Muslim leaders
is inevitable. It is why atrocities such as
the rampage in Boston are bound to happen.
Robert Spencer, a sharp critic of Islamic supremacism, fittingly describes
dawa as “stealth jihad.” Dawa can include charitable fundraising (part of
which is, under sharia guidelines, quite
intentionally diverted to jihadist groups),
intimidation of detractors, cultivation of
sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of legal systems and
religious liberty, infiltration of political
systems, and the portrayal of any scrutiny
of Islamic doctrine as Islamophobia. The
defining feature of dawa in the West,
though, is resistance to assimilation.
“One cannot expect you to assimilate,”
Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, told a throng of Muslim
immigrants to Germany in 2008. “Assimilation,” he exclaimed, “is a crime against
humanity!” The Brotherhood’s leading
sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
who boldly promises that it is through
dawa that “we will conquer Europe, we
will conquer America,” is perhaps the
most influential champion of the “integrate but never assimilate” principle. The
key to “our quest for an Islamic state,” he
instructs, is to “convince Western leaders
and decision-makers of our right to live
according to our faith.”
Of course, the right to live according to
one’s faith is a fundamental guarantee in
the united States. When Qaradawi and
other Islamic supremacists say “faith,”
however, they are not talking merely
about what we would understand as religious tenets; they are talking about
sharia’s socio-political strictures, its suffocating regulation of human life’s every
detail. What the supremacists demand is
something quite the opposite of an Islamic seat at America’s ecumenical table.
It is the establishment of autonomous
Muslim enclaves within a society to
which they are irrevocably hostile.
The supremacist’s interpretation of
sharia rejects liberty and equality, casting
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women as chattel and non-Muslims as
contemptible. It thus instills in young
Muslims the animating belief that Western culture is not just to be resisted as corruptive but disdained as beneath human
dignity. It is true enough that most adherents to this ideology will not become terrorists; but it is equally certain that some
will—and many have.
Though Brotherhood leaders and
Islamist intellectuals in the West purport
to renounce violence except in selfdefense, they concurrently beatify violence and preach that Islam is always
under attack. The Hamas terrorist organization, one should never forget, is the
Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch; raising
global alarms about supposed tidal waves
of anti-Muslim bias and aggression is the
supremacist’s stock in trade. The young
Muslim who hears terrorism occasionally
condemned also hears it constantly rationalized, excused, and endorsed—by revered role models.
For Banna, there was no contradiction
in this. Combat, including terrorism, was
something young Muslims had to train
and be prepared for. The revolution, he
taught, could not ultimately succeed without it. But though violence had its place,
that place was not necessarily central.
Like strategic deception, it was one option
on a very extensive dawa menu, resorted
to only when its benefit to the movement
outweighed its drawbacks.
Decades later, it has become the fashion to abide, even to admire, Muslim leaders who temper their effusive praise for
jihadist violence in the Middle East with
vague denunciations of attacks in the
West. This explains Sheikh Qaradawi.
With a huge international television following courtesy of his weekly sharia
program on Al Jazeera, Qaradawi is probably the most influential Islamic scholar
alive today. Consequently, despite his
infamous fatwas endorsing suicide bombings against Israel, terror war against
American troops in Iraq, and the death
penalty for homosexuals, he is a darling
of Western chancelleries and academics,
who present him as a leading “moderate”
intellectual.
He is a ubiquitous figure, sitting on a
scholarly congress here, an advisory
board there. They include the original
board of trustees at the Islamic Society of
Boston Cultural Center. The ISBCC’s
founder was Abdurahman Alamoudi, the
bipartisan Beltway’s favorite Muslim
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
moderate—until he was convicted, in
2004, of complicity in a plot to help Libya
recruit jihadists to kill the Saudi crown
prince. The investigation had revealed
that he was a major al-Qaeda financier,
as well as a champion of Hamas and
Hezbollah.
Naturally, none of that derailed the
ISBCC enterprise, which includes a
mosque in Cambridge, only a few blocks
from the Tsarnaev family home. In the last
three years, both brothers attended the
mosque, as well as other mosques in
the area. Tamerlan, the older and more
fervent, was more of a fixture than
Dzhokhar.
Prior to this recent phase, the brothers
seemed like unexceptional young American males, decent students who were
active in sports—Tamerlan became a
champion boxer who dreamed of Olympic fame, Dzhokhar a top wrestler. The
call of supremacist ideology was never far
away, though, most immediately in the
influence of their mother. As the years
went by in Cambridge, Zubeidat Tsarnaev
increasingly withdrew into Islamic piety.
Tamerlan followed her, gradually distancing himself from American acquaintances, expressing disdain for American
life, and lacing his conversation with allusions to Allah’s will.
This is symptomatic of the process of
becoming “radicalized,” to borrow the
popular, politically correct term that
sanitizes Islam of its scriptures’ suprema cist dictates. Tamerlan’s wife, an
American Christian named Katherine
Russell, abruptly converted to Islam,
donning the veil and similarly isolating
herself from American acquaintances
in favor of spending time with other
Muslim women. Tamerlan took to studying Sheikh Feiz Mohammed, an Australian, a former boxer like himself, and a
notorious sharia hardliner who spews
bile against non-Muslims and endorses
jihadist violence. Tamerlan even began
maintaining YouTube playlists glorifying
jihad, including a list he called “Terrorists” and one featuring a song entitled “I
Will Dedicate My Life to Jihad.”
By 2011, Tamerlan’s radicalism had
come to the attention of Russian intelligence. Based on intercepted conversations between the young man and his
mother, the spy service concluded he was
poised to travel to Dagestan, a republic
that has long endured a brutal Islamic
insurgency. The Russians brought him to
the attention of both the FBI and the CIA.
But while the latter entered his name in an
anti-terror database (the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment), the former,
after interviewing Tamerlan, reasoned
that being a follower of radical Islam did
not necessarily make one a terrorist
threat. In the face of a lethal, ideologically driven threat, our government’s
policy is to turn a blind eye to ideology.
Only criminal activity, it insists, may properly be investigated—even if that means
the investigation happens only after the
activity has killed innocent people.
Tamerlan did indeed embark on a sixmonth journey to Dagestan in 2012, evidently making contact with—and perhaps
receiving training from—jihadists. When
he returned to the U.S., only two days
after a July firefight in which several
Muslim militants were killed, he was
clearly seething. But the insouciant in vestigators were not in a position to know
this, having already closed the case after
finding “no derogatory information.”
When post-bombing video pointed to
Tamerlan as a suspect, they had to ask the
public’s help in identifying him.
Dzhokhar was clearly enthralled by
Tamerlan’s exploits, but his turn to Islam
was not as pronounced—such that, as
his grades cratered at the University of
Massachusetts at Dartmouth, friends
attributed his lethargy to his hardpartying ways. But the signs of withdrawal into a Muslim identity were
there. Invited to describe his “outlook”
on the Facebook page he maintained,
Dzhokhar succinctly responded, “Is lam.” The Washington Post reports that
he played soccer with members of the
Muslim Students Association and, for a
time, attended a Muslim prayer group.
Just two weeks before the bombing, he
told a friend that he no longer cared
about his classes because Islam and God
were the only true things in life.
At the moment, it is unknown whether
the brothers Tsarnaev had technical help
from any international terrorist organization. It is known, however, that they
drank deeply the ideology that creates terrorism by insulating its adherents and
dehumanizing non-believers. Far from
regarding Islamic supremacism with
dread and suspicion, our government
appeases supremacist agitators. We avert
our gaze as the House of Dawa supplies
the battalions of Islam. As America re treats, the war comes home again.
M AY 20, 2013
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Acculturation
Without
Assimilation
We reject American
identity at our peril
B Y S TA N L E Y K U R T Z
Boston Marathon terror
attack has pushed the problem
of assimilation to the forefront
of the debate over immigration
reform. The younger bomber, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, took his oath of citizenship on
September 11, 2012, of all dates. Although his older brother and the mastermind of the plot, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had
been investigated by the FBI in 2011, his
citizenship application was still pending
T
he
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public
Policy Center.
at the time of the bombing. These terrorists wanted to be Americans, yet they
nursed a murderous hatred for the United
States. Clearly the quest for citizenship is
no guarantee of assimilation. Sad to say,
the Tsarnaevs are but extreme examples
of a far wider breakdown in America’s
system of assimilation. We ought not to
be mulling amnesty for millions of illegal
immigrants before putting that system
back in order.
One of the architects of this country’s
ethos of assimilation, Teddy Roosevelt,
delivered an 1894 address called “True
Americanism,” which seems almost to
have been written with the Tsarnaevs in
mind: “We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every
man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on
becoming a good United States citizen
like the rest of us; but we have a right, and
it is our duty, to demand that he shall
indeed become so and shall not confuse
the issues with which we are struggling by
introducing among us Old World quarrels
and prejudices.” It’s a message today’s
immigrants are no longer hearing.
From the late 1960s on, a multiculturalism hostile to everything Teddy
Roosevelt stood for has entrenched itself in our schools, our universities,
large corporations, and the mainstream
press. Pockets of traditional assimilationist thinking remain, yet the trend
is clearly in the opposite direction. Federal and state governments reinforce the
new multiculturalism by funding bilingual education, multilingual voting,
diversity training, and the like.
The famous melting-pot metaphor
notwithstanding, America has never
required a total sacrifice of culture or
creed from its immigrants. Instead we’ve
called on prospective citizens to attach
their personal heritage to American principles and identity. In a 1997 essay, the
Manhattan Institute’s Peter Salins identifies three core components of what he
calls “assimilation, American style”:
acceptance of english as the national
language, willingness to live by the
Protestant work ethic (self-reliance, hard
work, moral integrity), and pride in
American identity and belief in our
democratic principles. Knowing J. Lo
19
from Jay-Z isn’t enough, in other words.
That’s mere “acculturation.” Genuine
assimilation—true Americanism, in
Roosevelt’s words—is something more.
Many studies purporting to show that
our assimilation system is flourishing do
not adopt Roosevelt’s standard—that
immigrants should embrace Americanism—as their own. A 2010 research
report for the Center for American
Progress by Dowell Myers and John
Pitkin and a 2013 study for the Manhattan Institute by Jacob Vigdor, for
example, use the rate at which immigrants become citizens as an index of
civic assimilation. Yet citizenship itself in
no way guarantees assimilation, as the
Tsarnaevs show.
A newly published Hudson Institute
study by John Fonte and Althea Nagai
provides a more reliable assessment. In
“America’s Patriotic Assimilation System Is Broken,” Fonte and Nagai found
wide differences between native-born
and naturalized citizens on a series of
questions measuring patriotic attachment
to the United States. For example, nativeborn citizens are, by large margins, more
likely than immigrant citizens to believe
that schools should focus on American
citizenship rather than on ethnic pride, or
that the U.S. Constitution ought to be a
higher legal authority for
Americans
than international law. Republicans who
believe that amnesty for illegal immigrants will be a political boon for the
GOP, whether because they view
Hispanics as “natural conservatives” or
because they hope to win them over in
20
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
time, may be taking for granted a pattern
of assimilation that no longer exists.
America’s vaunted ability to forge a
cohesive society out of many immigrant
strands is now in doubt. The implications
of this breakdown range well beyond terrorism, but the connection between terrorism and the weakening of assimilation
cannot be dismissed as a side issue.
Salins, in his 1997 essay, presciently
singled out several Arab-born perpetrators of the failed 1993 World Trade
Center bombing as pure examples of
“acculturation without assimilation.”
These men were quite familiar with
American society. The sister of one of the
ringleaders said of her brother, “We
always considered him a son of America.
He was always saying, ‘I want to live in
America forever.’” As observers on both
left and right have pointed out since the
Marathon bombings, post-9/11 terror
attacks in Europe were likewise carried
out by plotters conversant with the culture of their targets.
Many of those terrorists were children of poorly assimilated immigrants
from Muslim countries. These secondgeneration European Muslims had an
easy familiarity with the ways of their
birthplace, yet they never felt quite at
home in the adopted countries of their
still unassimilated parents. Caught between two worlds, fully belonging to
neither, these young men turned to radical Islam for certainty and identity when
they felt the hard knocks of adulthood.
The same thing happened to
the Tsarnaevs. The collapse of cultural selfconfidence in the West
has left us with too little spiritual food to
offer the children of
Muslim immigrants,
leaving some to turn
to militant Islam in a
search for lost roots.
This suggests that
opening our doors to
new citizens without
first paring back the excesses of multiculturalism and confidently reasserting traditional American
principles of assimilation is asking for
trouble.
Unlike immigration from regions
wracked by violent ethnic and religious
conflict, such as the Tsarnaevs’ homeland, Hispanic immigration raises no
specter of terrorism. Yet the abandonment of Roosevelt-style assimilation
has caused problems for the immigrants
themselves. In 2000, Brookings Institution scholar Peter Skerry described a
process by which the children of such
immigrants undergo a sort of reverse
assimilation. According to Skerry,
many Mexican Americans who largely
assimilate into majority-Anglo environments in their K–12 years, scarcely
even thinking of themselves as members of a minority group, dramatically
change when they reach college. The
politicized multiculturalism that dominates America’s universities substantially deassimilates many of them,
leading them to attribute virtually all of
their discontent to race-based grievances. That process may not make for
terrorism, but it won’t foster civil comity
either, much less a raft of Republican
recruits.
The reversal of assimilation at the university is by no means a worst-case
scenario. Too often, says Skerry, highschool-aged Latinos born in the United
States are “prone to adopt an adversarial
stance toward school and a cynical
anti-achievement ethic.” Even leftleaning assimilation researchers such
as Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco,
who want more multiculturalism, not
less, describe the tough urban schools
that many immigrants attend as riven by
racial and ethnic tensions. The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald
recently called the fast-growing split
between America’s English-speaking and
Spanish-speaking cultures “E pluribus
duo.”
Fixing our broken system of assimilation won’t be easy, because the problem is deeply rooted. Fonte and Nagai
propose doing away with the apparatus
of state and federal supports for multiculturalism and bilingualism. That step
would surely have positive consequences beyond the programs directly
affected by the change, and Re pub lican leaders should advocate it. They
also ought to insist on guarantees of
border security that far exceed those on
offer in the Senate’s “Gang of Eight”
immigration proposal before considering a path to citizenship. Should
Democrats demur, it will show they
were never truly serious about comprehensive immigration reform to begin
with.
M AY 20, 2013
DARREN GYGI
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base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/30/2013 7:05 PM Page 1
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George W.
Bush Day
Some notes on a dedication ceremony
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
Dallas, Texas
streaming onto the
grounds of Southern Methodist
University, at 7:30 in the morning. They’re dressed in their
Sunday best, too—even though it’s
Thursday. They, we, have come for the
dedication ceremony of the George W.
Bush Presidential Center. That will begin
at 10, but we were told to be here very
early, to go through the security rigmarole. At the ceremony, five U.S. presidents
will appear: the incumbent and the four
living former ones.
People have traveled to Dallas from all
over the world—but mainly they’ve traveled from somewhere in Texas, I think.
Observing them, I get the impression
they’ve been supporting the Bush family
for a long time. Is this kind of a last hurrah? Well, Jeb—who became a Floridian,
true—may run for president. And his son
George P. is running for land commissioner here in Texas.
George W. is suddenly back in the
national media—because of this ceremony, to be sure, but also because of the
terror attack in Boston a week and a half
ago: It reminded people of 9/11, and of the
president’s resoluteness in the face of it.
This week, journalists have been writing
reassessments of Bush. One of them was
by Ron Fournier, the veteran Washington
reporter, and it was titled “Go Ahead,
Admit It: George W. Bush Is a Good
Man.” To some of us, that’s like saying,
“Go ahead, admit it: Two plus two equals
four.”
Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in
the House, provoked a few gasps last
summer when she described Bush as
“really a lovely man.”
In a blogpost this week, the Daily
Telegraph’s Will Heaven reminded us of
some of the old venom. He cited the
British historian Nigel Hamilton, who in a
recent book claims that Bush is “ill-read
to the point of near-illiteracy.” What’s the
point of literacy if you have to read lies
like that?
T
22
HEY’RE
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
The GWB Center at SMU is a combination of library, museum, and publicpolicy institute. It holds some 40,000
artifacts. These include a container of
chads (a symbol of Election 2000); the
bullhorn used by Bush at Ground Zero;
and the pistol taken from Saddam Hussein
when he was dragged from his “spider
hole.”
Serving as architect for the center was
Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of the Yale
School of Architecture. When Stern’s
design was unveiled in 2009, Philip
Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote
of the difficulties of designing a building
for W. Architects are defined by “intellectual sophistication” and “aesthetic refinement,” he said, and Bush is “seemingly
hostile” to those things. At least he said
“seemingly.” Earlier this month, by the
way, Kennicott won the Pulitzer Prize
for Criticism.
This day in Dallas, there is not only a
Bush celebration but a Bush denunciation, too—a series of counter-events
called “The People’s Response.” Some of
the People featured in the Response are
Code Pink, Phil Donahue, and Lawrence
Wilkerson. This last figure was chief of
staff to Colin Powell. In citing Bush’s
mistakes, critics tend to say, “Iraq! Torture! Katrina!” A few of us are tempted to
say, “Powell!”
For celebrators and denouncers, the
weather is heavenly in this city: about 70
degrees, without a trace of humidity. Here
at SMU, the atmosphere is one of a happy,
elegant party. There are celebrities in the
crowd, including athletes: Troy Aikman,
for example, and Dikembe Mutombo.
The former was a quarterback for the
Dallas Cowboys; the latter was a center
for the Houston Rockets.
Waiting for 10 o’clock, we are entertained by singing groups, and by a slide show. The Bush presidency is depicted
in a glowing, heroic light, to the accompaniment of Coplandesque music. We
see the president with his fellow statesmen, but also with dissidents and former political prisoners. One of them is
Kang Chol-Hwan, a survivor of the North
Korean gulag. “If our opinion-shapers
were of a different nature,” I think, for
the thousandth time, “Bush would be
known as a human-rights president.”
At last, the ceremony begins, starting
with a parade of special guests, led by
W.’s vice president, Dick Cheney. He is
wearing a cowboy hat and looks thin and
determined. Then come children of
deceased presidents—led by the Johnson
girls, both of whom look chic and splendid. Then come the first ladies, all of them
from Rosalynn Carter onward, except for
Nancy Reagan, who is apparently unable
to make such a trip. Michelle Obama
looks embarrassed to be here, a little contemptuous—nose-holding.
And I don’t know about you, but I sort
of forget that Hillary Clinton was first
lady. She has been other things since.
Out troop the husbands, the presidents:
Obama, Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41 (in
a wheelchair), Carter. Bush 43, of course,
gets a bigger cheer—a much bigger
cheer—than Obama. I think, “Is this the
only place where that would happen?” I
have another thought: “Say Romney had
won last November. Would the Obamas
have shown up for this?” They would have
had to, right? It would have been a miserable, almost impossible duty, though.
Condoleezza Rice comes to the podium,
to acknowledge distinguished guests in
the audience. Among them are Tony Blair,
John Howard, and José María Aznar—in
other words, the Bush-friendliest foreign
leaders. When Rice acknowledges Silvio
Berlusconi, there are a few titters. For
once, Bill Clinton may not be the randiest
statesman in the house. In reading the
long list of names, Rice performs feats
of pronunciation. She throws a “th” into
“Aznar.” And she tries to pronounce
“Bahrain” Arabicly—which is a little
awkward.
In due course, we have the Pledge of
Allegiance. When all rise, Mutombo turns
to the people behind him and says, with a
bright wonderful smile, “Can you see?”
(He is 7 foot 2.)
The first president to speak is Carter,
wearing shades. He gives a good, crisp,
vigorous speech. He credits Bush with
settling the war between North Sudan and
South Sudan (known formally as the
Second Sudanese Civil War). I remember
something Congressman Frank Wolf, the
Virginia Republican, once told me: He
would have nominated Bush for the
Nobel Peace Prize, but Khartoum was
committing genocide in Darfur, and it
would have looked odd to make a Sudanrelated nomination.
In further remarks, Carter praises Bush
for his help to Africa in general. And he
ends with an exceptionally warm encomium: “Mr. President, let me say that I’m
filled with admiration for you and deep
M AY 20, 2013
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THE BUSH CENTER
April 25, 2013, at SMU
gratitude for you,” because of “the great
contributions you’ve made to the most
needy people on earth.”
I have another memory: One of the best
speeches President Reagan ever gave was
on October 1, 1986—Carter’s 62nd birthday. They were dedicating the Carter
Library in Atlanta. Carter responded, “As
I listened to you talk, I understood more
clearly than I ever did in my life why you
won in 1980 and I lost.”
On the stage at SMU, Bush 41 is next to
speak. He does so from his wheelchair.
He has no notes. “It’s a great pleasure to
be here,” he says, “to honor our son”—
then he switches to “our oldest son,” for
there are three others, two of whom aren’t
really famous. He continues, “This is very
special for Barbara and me.” Is Bush the
last person in America to use “I” and
“me” correctly?
His remarks last a grand total of 25 seconds. Afterward, W. shakes his hand and
says, “Good job.” His father cracks, “Too
long?” which breaks up his son.
As for Clinton, he’s on pretty good
behavior. I could pick at him, but I should
give him a rest. He notes what some people have said: He’s so close to the Bush
family, he has become “the black-sheep
son.” And that gives me a memory of W.
himself—who in 1991, during his father’s
presidency, identified himself to Queen
Elizabeth as the black sheep of the family.
Exactly ten years later, he was president
himself.
Like Carter, Clinton heaps praise on
Bush for his activism in Africa. This is
obviously something Democrats can concert on. And he enlists Bush in the cause
of the present immigration reform in
Congress, whether Bush wants to be
enlisted or not.
President Obama does the same thing,
and he, too, repeats the praise concerning
Africa. Overall, he is good and gracious.
He refers to 43 as “George,” and does so
with apparently genuine friendliness. “To
know the man is to like the man,” says
Obama, “because he’s comfortable in his
own skin. . . . He takes his job seriously,
but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He is a good man.”
Giving the final speech, Bush is completely himself: folksy, formal, cocky,
humble, idealistic, hard-boiled—that
whole, strange package. He pays tribute
to Cheney, saying, “I’m proud to call
you ‘friend.’” It sounds to me the slightest bit strained. I think of the dispute
between the president and the vice president over the pardon, or non-pardon, of
Scooter Libby, the Cheney aide.
In the last couple of weeks, Bush has
become a grandfather for the first time,
and he talks of the “joy” of it. The child is
a girl named Mila. I don’t think I’ve heard
that name since Brian Mulroney was
prime minister of Canada, and the country’s first lady was Mila. She was “Yugo slav,” as we used to say.
Naturally, Bush talks about freedom,
his perpetual subject. The idea of freedom “sustains dissidents bound by
chains” and “believers huddled in under ground churches.” Freedom this, free-
dom that. It occurs to me that Bush is
talking more about freedom in this one
speech than Obama has done in all the
speeches he has given as president. But
that can’t be true (quite).
Bush also answers a criticism of the
Left, I believe. In recent years, they’ve
been painting conservatives as dog-eatdog Darwinians, radical individualists,
caring for nothing but the Self. Bush
says, “Independence from the state does
not mean isolation from each other. A
free society thrives when neighbors help
neighbors, and the strong protect the
weak, and public policies promote private
compassion.”
Winding up, he says, “I dedicate this
library with an unshakable faith in the
future of our country.” I think of what
Martin Luther King said at the Nobel
ceremony in Oslo: “I accept this award
today with an abiding faith in America
and an audacious faith in the future of
mankind.” Bush says, “Whatever challenges come before us, I will always
believe our nation’s best days lie ahead.”
Does he really mean it, or is he expressing more like a wish? Either way, his
face is wet with tears.
And the crowd goes nuts. People
thrust three fingers in the air, in a “W”
sign—I don’t think I’ve seen that since
the 2000 campaign. Later in the day,
someone tells me, “In a way, that was
the last speech of the Bush presidency.”
It was a good one, by a good man, yes.
I appreciate him anew, though I’ve never
actually stopped.
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Donald
Kagan’s Last
Lecture
An important career ends memorably
BY ELIANA JOHNSON
New Haven, Conn.
KAGAn’s survey course,
Introduction to Ancient Greek
History, has for the past four
decades been an intellectual
touchstone for Yale undergraduates. His
final lecture of the semester, during which
he recounts Demosthenes’ heroic struggle to defend Athens against Philip of
Macedon, is famous for rousing students
to their feet as he exits the stage.
The 80-year-old Kagan is retiring this
year, and today he delivers a different
kind of final lecture: his last as a member
of the Yale faculty. He left the Cornell
faculty for Yale in 1969; he was by then
already a conservative, having been
pushed right watching the fecklessness
of Cornell’s administrators as black student protesters turned a university building into an armed camp.
In the 44 years since his arrival in new
Haven, Kagan has served the university
in virtually every position imaginable—
D
24
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
as head of the classics department, dean
of Yale College, master of the residential
college Timothy Dwight, and Sterling
Professor of Classics and History. He is
perhaps the only scholar of antiquity to
have served as a university’s director of
athletics. He also happens to be one of
the most consequential historians of the
20th century; his four-volume history of
the Peloponnesian War has drawn comparisons to the masterworks of Tacitus,
Gibbon, and Thucydides himself.
Today, students, alumni, and some of
his fellow faculty members pack into
an oak-paneled hall to hear his re marks. Some cram awkwardly into small
wooden desks intended for younger and
more flexible bodies. Kagan, the most
visible conservative on the Yale campus,
is predictably iconoclastic. (“There are
places in this university where a motion
to wish me a happy birthday would get a
close vote,” he has said.) His subject is
not ancient Greece but contemporary
America—in particular, the meaning of
a liberal education, which has in recent
years become a nebulous and controversial topic.
Kagan is greeted at the podium with
the type of lingering applause that conveys the warmth and emotion of the audience, but his message is not particularly
sentimental. The trendy, specialized, and
scattershot courses that now constitute a
liberal-arts education, he says, reinforce
“a cultural void, an ignorance of the
past,” and “a sense of rootlessness and
aimlessness” among students, who float
through their undergraduate years secure
in the belief that “the whole world was
born yesterday.”
According to Kagan, the nation’s elite
universities are doing little to correct the
problem. A liberal education now means
that students pick up “enough of the subjects thought interesting in their circle
and . . . make friends who may be advantageous to them in their lives.”
This poses a challenge for the Ameri can experiment, Kagan tells his audience, because a democracy must educate
its citizens. He points to the champions
of the liberal arts, from Cicero to Castiglione to Benjamin Franklin, who considered a liberal education an essential
element of individual freedom.
Kagan calls for institutions of higher
learning to create a common core of studies consisting of the literature, philosophy, and history of Western civilization.
The students of today and tomorrow, he
says, deserve the same opportunity as
those of previous generations; they too
must be “freed from the tyranny that
comes from being born at a particular
time in a particular place.”
This is what Kagan has been doing in
his classroom for the past five decades.
The foremost living scholar of the Peloponnesian War, he has imparted to students both his intellectual seriousness
and his sense of history’s great drama.
He is known to pluck kids from the audience of his lecture and arrange them on
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3col:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/30/2013 10:15 PM Page 26
stage in the rectangular formation of the
ancient Greek hoplite phalanx.
Kagan was born in lithuania in 1932,
but his mother brought the family to a
working-class Jewish neighborhood in
Brownsville, Brooklyn, when he was two
years old. It was surrounded by rough
Italian and black communities. “In our
neighborhood, you’d see butcher shops
that would have Hebrew writing on the
windows, and when you went up the hill,
everything was in Italian,” Kagan tells
me over lunch. “Sometimes, if you
crossed over, you really felt like you were
in a foreign country.”
Though he came of age in a community of european refugee Jews as Hitler
reigned in Germany, he says it was great
teachers who shaped his interest in history. There was Mr. Silverman, a highschool teacher of modern european
history who shared Kagan’s flair for
drama and asked his students big questions. “He had a wonderful trick of
speech that really captured me,” Kagan
recounts. “He used to say, ‘So, at that
point, Bismarck could have done A or he
could have done B. He did neither.’”
“He was the first one I ever saw who
resembled in any way what I later came
to think of as a historian, in the sense
that he used to pose questions and then
undertake to answer them, and to make
us understand what the issues were,”
Kagan continues. “I still think that’s
what it is to be a historian: You pose a
question that emerges from what you
know, and if you’re smart enough, you
pose the right question, and then you
are very careful to consider the alternatives.”
This is an old-fashioned approach to
history, and it led Kagan to rebut, in his
four-volume study, the popular idea that
human beings merely behave in accordance with the larger societal forces that
work upon them, and that events such as
the Peloponnesian War are in this sense
inevitable. Thucydides embraced a similarly fatalistic view of history; he be lieved Athens had simply become too
powerful for Sparta to abide, regardless
of the policies adopted by either side.
Kagan puts the decision-making of individual leaders at the center of the action.
“Human beings appear not to be just like
artifacts or elements of science,” he
argues, but rather to have will, choice,
and the capacity to act. “There is no
escape, if you want to understand human
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behavior, from looking into the hearts
and minds of human beings engaged in
things.”
Kagan’s version of ancient events has
come to be widely accepted, and this triumph has helped to loosen the grip of
social-science reductionism on the historical profession. He has done something similar on the Yale campus, acting
as a consistent counterweight to the
forces of political correctness.
After arriving at Yale in 1969, “I
almost immediately began making trouble,” Kagan recounts, a note of defiance
in his voice. When the Nixon administration compelled the university to formulate an affirmative-action plan for
faculty hiring, Yale president Kingman
Brewster issued orders to the chairmen
of the university’s academic departments to sort applications by gender
and race. “I found that objectionable,
and I wrote a letter to the president in
which I said to him, ‘You’re a liar and
I’m not, but I believe this order is illegal,
immoral, and unconstitutional, and I
will not carry it out.’”
A meeting with Brewster followed.
Kagan recalls, “I gave him a little lecture in which I said, ‘You have to know
this is bad, and you are the man best situated to fight this.’ I basically said to
him, ‘If you had the guts, you could do a
great thing here.’” Brewster, who sensed
Kagan was not truly looking for a public
fight, exempted him from the distasteful
business of sorting and asked him to
pass faculty applications along to the
dean’s office, where it would be done on
his behalf. Kagan agreed.
In retrospect, he says, “I was wrong. I
should have made it a public fight. It just
didn’t occur to me that I could just set
myself up and make it a public war.”
The lesson was not lost on him, and he
would go on to cause Brewster and others considerable grief. In the spring of
1974, Yale’s chapter of Young Americans
for Freedom invited the Nobel Prize–
winning physicist William Shockley to
debate his noxious views on race and
intelligence with NATIoNAl RevIeW publisher William Rusher. Brewster had
urged the organization not to invite
Shockley to campus, a move to which
Kagan strenuously objected. “The life’s
breath of a proper university is to resist
censorship,” he insists. When the debate
was about to begin, with the auditorium
full, student protesters shouted down
both speakers and booed them off the
stage. In Kagan’s view, Brewster had
been a party to the intimidation, and he
denounced the president in a speech
before the Yale Political Union.
His agitation led the Yale College faculty to demand that Brewster appoint a
faculty commission to study the state of
free expression on campus and to make
recommendations for its preservation.
Brewster appointed the eminent historian
C. vann Woodward to lead the endeavor,
and Woodward’s report—which concludes, “even when some members of
the university fail to meet their social and
ethical responsibilities, the he paramount
obligation of the university is to protect
their right to free expression”—remains
the university’s policy to this day. The
Yale Daily News has noted that the
Woodward report brought about among
students and faculty “a renewed concern
for and commitment to free expression.”
“Scratch Don and you’ll find a combination of Winston Churchill and John
Wayne,” Kagan’s colleague and fellow
historian Paul Kennedy has said. “You
hear about faculty who are intimidated
about going against the grain and all
that stuff,” Kagan says. “What the hell
are they intimidated by, what the hell
are they afraid of? You don’t ever have
anybody getting up and saying anything that is going to make anybody
else sore. It never cost me a thing. I
think there’s something about professors, something in their lives,” he
muses. “I guess they didn’t grow up in
Brownsville.”
Kagan has for years concluded the
final lecture of his introductory course
with a tribute to those who have defended liberty in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. “Men like Churchill and
Demosthenes know that those who love
liberty must fight for it, even against odds,
even when there is little support, even
when victory seems impossible,” Kagan
has told students through the years. “In
spite of the outcome, it seems to me that
the stand of Athens and its Greek allies at
Chaeronea may have been, in words that
Churchill used in another context, ‘their
finest hour.’”
These words are a fitting tribute to
Kagan himself as he concludes a career
for which he, too, will be remembered as
someone who fought for liberty, with
little support, when—and where—victory seemed impossible.
M AY 20, 2013
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The Rubio Amnesty
It’s not what the senator promised, but he’s defending it anyway
hen Mitt Romney lost last november, the Republican establishment decided that his moderately
hawkish stance on immigration had been a major
cause of his defeat. never mind that his share of
the hispanic vote was within the margin of error of McCain’s
2008 share. never mind the significant drop in white turnout.
There is little elite constituency for a hawkish approach to
immigration, and much elite support for lax enforcement and
increased legal immigration (Romney actually supported the
latter).
So the Republican establishment turns its hopeful eyes, once
again, to so-called comprehensive immigration reform. The
same senators who pushed such a bill in 2007, prominently
including Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham and
Democrat Chuck Schumer, are at it again. They have devised
a plan that would ease the path to legality for illegal immigrants while making some gestures toward enforcement. But a
new element this time around is Marco Rubio.
A tea-party favorite (and a favorite of this magazine) who
wrested the senatorial nomination from GOP-establishment
pick (now Democrat) Charlie Crist, he’s young, telegenic, and
the son of Cuban immigrants. Rubio became part of the “Gang
of eight,” four Democrats and four Republicans negotiating a
W
Mr. Krikorian is the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
deal that sought to placate a dizzying array of interests, all
seeking de facto unlimited immigration but each with a different set of specific concerns. The result of all this is S.744,
a sprawling, 844-page measure legalizes most of the illegal
population (plus many who were deported and are currently
living abroad), promises tougher enforcement in the future,
and hugely increases all forms of legal immigration, low- and
high-skilled, temporary and permanent.
In advance of the release of the bill’s text, Rubio fearlessly
and tirelessly made the case for it to conservatives. he was
greeted by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and others as a friend
and was afforded a respectful hearing as he made repeated
assurances about the coming bill. It would guarantee tough
enforcement, so we wouldn’t be having this same debate a
decade from now about yet another wave of illegal settlers.
The legalized population wouldn’t get green cards until certain
strict “triggers” were met. There would be no special path to
citizenship for them. They would have to pay their back taxes
and a fine. They would not receive taxpayer-funded benefits.
They’d be required to learn english.
Then we got to see the actual text of the legislation. Rubio’s
promised provisions are absent. Regarding back taxes, for
instance, the bill requires only that applicants “satisfy any
applicable federal tax liability” that has previously been
“assessed” by the IRS. But a tax is “assessed” only after a tax
27
AP PHOTO/JACQUELYN MARTIN
BY MARK KRIKORIAN
2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/30/2013 11:22 PM Page 28
return has been submitted or after the IRS has conducted an
audit. Since neither of those things happens with illegal immigrants working off the books, there aren’t any back taxes to be
paid.
The fine for legalization is small—just $500 up front and $500
paid in installments, in return for lifetime legal access to the U.S.
labor market. And while $500 can be a lot for an illegal immigrant, in a certain sense it isn’t a fine, since the money would go
into a slush fund for DHS to dole out to groups such as La Raza,
which are in turn to provide services for the very amnesty beneficiaries who paid the fines. (Conservative writer John Fonte has
called this the Alinsky Fund.) Even such a modest penalty is
absent for crooked employers. They get amnesty for free—
amnesty from prosecution for knowing employment of illegal
aliens, non-payment of wages, non-payment of payroll taxes,
and facilitation of identity theft.
As for learning English, the language requirement applies
only to already-amnestied immigrants seeking the upgrade to
full green card, and even then, requires only enrollment in a
class, not demonstration of actual proficiency (which is what is
required for citizenship).
Moreover, the bill provides for a huge increase in legal immigration—and not just increased numbers but increased complexity, in a system already excessively complex. It has special
provisions for guest workers, farm laborers, and foreign technology workers, doctors, and nurses, as well as retirees, entrepreneurs, and foreign students graduating with technical
degrees. The Schumer-Rubio bill simply seeks to placate every
interest group at the table by handing out more visas. Numbers
USA has estimated the number of green cards that would be
issued during the first decade of the bill’s operation at 33 million. About one-third of those would be illegal aliens receiving
amnesty, so new immigration would go from about 1 million
per year to 2 million.
But it’s in the enforcement provisions that the gap between
Rubio’s promises and the actual bill is most consequential.
A
DVoCATES of amnesty tout the best polls money can
buy, claiming public backing for their goal. Yet setting aside the tendentious nature of most of the
polling, even by ostensibly objective media organizations,
there is considerable support for some kind of amnesty, if
often half-hearted and mainly as a way to clear the decks and
start fresh. But it’s predicated on ensuring that this will be the
last such amnesty—that immigration security will be improved, so that another 11 million won’t sneak across the border or overstay visas.
This was the promise of the 1986 amnesty law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act. In a grand bargain of amnesty for
enforcement, the amnesty came first, with 2.7 million people
legalized within a few years. But the enforcement petered out
as the political incentive to support it disappeared with the
completion of the amnesty. It had gotten so bad by 2004 that
only three employers in the entire country were fined that year
for knowingly hiring illegal aliens.
Despite Rubio’s promise to have an enforcement system
“that ensures we’re never here again with the situation that we
face today,” the Schumer-Rubio bill sets up a replay of the
1986 scenario. Rubio stresses that none of the currently illegal
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immigrants will be able to get a green card until the enforcement benchmarks are met. But he seldom notes that virtually
all illegal aliens would get a kind of green card lite within
months of the bill’s signing. This “Registered Provisional
Immigrant” status would provide work authorization, a legitimate Social Security account, a driver’s license, and travel
papers—in other words, the amnesty is effectively granted up
front. The only “trigger” for the government to begin the
green-card-lite program is the submission to Congress by the
Department of Homeland Security of a border-security plan
and a fencing plan—of which DHS already has a full shelf.
But once all the illegal aliens are amnestied, working legally,
and able to travel back home to display their new status, we’re
told, the real work of enforcement will begin. The bill contains
three enforcement objectives that must be met over the decade
following its passage before the now-legal amnesty beneficiaries may upgrade from green card lite to a regular green card,
which would allow them eventually to apply for citizenship:
mandatory use of E-Verify, implementation of an exit-tracking
system to identify visa overstayers, and securing the Mexican
border. All are important goals—so important that it’s not clear
why their completion has been held hostage to amnesty.
E-Verify is the free online system that allows an employer to
check the legal status and identity of a new hire by verifying
his name, Social Security number, and date of birth. It is currently voluntary but widely used, and making it a required part
of the hiring process is an important part of turning off the
magnet of jobs that attracts illegals. The Schumer-Rubio bill
would indeed make the system mandatory (though, due to
sloppy drafting, it seems to abolish E-Verify and require the
development of an entirely new system). But it would be five
years before all employers had to use it, and it could not be
used to check on the existing work force, only new hires. This
last part is a large loophole; one would think that deporting
workers who didn’t qualify for amnesty would be an important
aspect of enforcement. But the goal of this and other measures
in the bill appears to be to shield non-qualifying illegal aliens
so they can stay illegally and wait for the next amnesty.
As for the exit-tracking system, it is important that we
establish one, because perhaps 40 percent of the illegal population are visa overstayers, and if we don’t track who departs,
we can’t know who has illegally remained. But the system
provided for in the legislation would have to be in place only
in airports and seaports, even though most foreign visitors
cross land borders. What’s more, Congress already mandated
an entry- and exit-tracking system at all border points—in
1996. It has reiterated that mandate five times since then. It
takes chutzpah to offer as enforcement a seventh such mandate and a simultaneous provision of ten more years for its fulfillment.
Finally, securing the Mexican border. The benchmark given
in the bill is called “effective control” and means surveillance
of 100 percent of the border and apprehension of 90 percent of
attempted infiltrators. This is absurdity many times over. You
have to know the total number of attempted crossings to know
that you got 90 percent of them, and as even DHS Secretary
Janet Napolitano has pointed out, there is no way for the
Border Patrol to know how many people it misses. This standard also applies only to “high risk” sectors, which turns out to
mean just three of the nine sectors along the Mexican border.
M AY 20, 2013
2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/30/2013 11:22 PM Page 29
If “effective control” of the selected portions of the border
is not achieved within five years, rubio has said, “it goes to a
border commission made up of people that live and have to
deal with the border and they will take care of that problem.”
More nonsense. The bill’s “Southern border Security Commission” would be made up of six Washington-appointed
members (two by the president and four by congressional
leaders), plus one from each southern border state (appointed
by the governor), and it could do nothing but issue recommendations.
Moreover, the bill states that if, after ten years, “litigation or
a force majeure” has prevented any of the conditions serving
as enforcement triggers (e-verify, exit controls, and border
security) from being met, the legalized immigrants will be
upgraded to green cards anyway. A rubio spokesman called
concern over this “hysterical,” but the ACLU has already made
clear that it opposes the e-verify mandate, and litigation over
the 1986 amnesty ended just a few years ago.
In the words of Frank Sharry, a liberal supporter of the bill,
“The triggers are based on developing plans and spending
money, not on reaching that effectiveness, which is really quite
clever.”
And once the amnesty is safely out of the way, does anyone
think Speaker Pelosi and President Clinton II (or President
bush III) won’t seek the watering down even of these triggers
in order to get people their green cards faster?
W
ITH its obamacare-style expanse and complexity,
the bill contains much more than what is sketched
above. democrats packed it with as many loopholes
and immigration-lawyer schemes as they thought they could
get away with. rubio’s staff, like most GoP Senate staff, are
relative amateurs on immigration, while Schumer’s people are
pros. This is how Ted Kennedy dominated immigration policy
for so long. (The House GoP committee staff on immigration,
on the other hand, are professionals with long experience.)
opposition to the bill should be the obvious position for conservatives who care about immigration enforcement and don’t
want to open the spigots even wider to low-skilled immigration. Whatever the discrepancies between rubio’s assurances and the reality of the bill, though, he has now lashed
himself to it. His convoluted justifications for various provisions suggest that he’s decided to do what he must to sell it.
He’s made the laughable argument that the bill doesn’t give
anything new to illegal immigrants because they can already
return home and apply to come here legally. (This sounds a
lot like what Mitt romney called “self-deportation.”) He’s
claimed that amnesty must precede enforcement because the
enforcement measures would throw millions of illegals out of
work, creating a humanitarian crisis. In fact, the three security
triggers, if enacted on their own, would have only a gradual
impact on the existing illegal population.
In the months leading up to the introduction of S.744, conservatives looked hopefully to rubio as their representative
on the Gang of eight, someone who would make sure its plan
didn’t turn out to be a call for de facto open borders. early on,
rubio may well have seen that as his role. but he is now much
less the conservative ambassador to the Gang of eight than the
Gang’s ambassador to conservatives.
iPencil
Nobody knows how to make a pencil,
or a health-care system
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
verybody knows the first words spoken on a telephone call—Alexander Graham bell’s simple demand “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
April marked the 40th anniversary of the first cellphone call, which was quite different in tone. Two research
teams had been competing to bring the first real consumer cell
phone to market, and the first mobile call was placed by
Motorola engineer Marty Cooper to his chief rival, Joel engel
of bell Labs. “Joel, this is Marty,” he said. “I’m calling you
from a cell phone.” In other words: “you lose, suckers.”
It took nearly a century to get from Alexander Graham
bell’s conversation to Marty Cooper’s, even though the basic
technologies of mobile phones—telephony and radio—date
from the 19th century. Conversely, it took only 66 years for
mankind to go from the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk
to Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the moon. Technology does not
move in predictable ways.
but it does move.
We treat technological progress as though it were a natural
process, and we speak of Moore’s law—computers’ processing
power doubles every two years—as though it were one of the
laws of thermodynamics. but it is not an inevitable, natural
process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.
When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still
from the oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a
Motorola dynaTac 8000X. The students always—always—
laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and
weighs a couple of pounds. but the revelatory fact that takes
a while to sink in is this: you had to be a millionaire to have
one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost
about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play
Angry birds on it. When the first dynaTac showed up in a
movie—it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall
Street—it was located in the front seat of a rolls-royce,
which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. by
comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle.
My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones
in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your
schools get more expensive and less effective? (or, if you live
in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive
and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status
symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly ringwald’s
reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t
just happen.
E
Mr. Williamson is NATIONAL REVIEW’s roving correspondent. This article is
adapted from his new book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.
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In his classic short story “I, Pencil,” economist Leonard
Read considers the incomprehensible complexity involved in
the production of a simple No. 2 pencil: the expertise in
design, forestry, mining, metallurgy, engineering, transportation, support services, logistics, architecture, chemistry,
machining, and other fields of knowledge necessary to create
a product so common, so humble, and so cheap as to have
become both ubiquitous and disposable. Read’s conclusion,
which is one of those fascinating truths so obvious that
nobody appreciates them, is that nobody knows how to make
a pencil. Nobody is in charge of the operation, and nobody
understands it end to end. From the assembly-line worker to
the president of the pencil company, thousands or millions of
people have tiny, discrete pieces of knowledge about the
process, but no coordinating authority organizes
their efforts.
That is the paradox of social
knowledge: Of course we know
how to make a pencil, even though
none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very
little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing
their creation. A mobile phone is a
much more complicated thing than a
No. 2 pencil, but both are the products
of spontaneous order—of systems that
are, in the words of the Scottish
Enlightenment philosopher Adam
Ferguson, the “products of human
action, but not of human design.”
C
though it is, the iPhone
is also a remarkably egalitarian
device: The president of the
United States uses one, as does the young
Bengali immigrant who sold me my coffee
this morning. But you can bet that her children do not attend schools as good as those
that instruct the Obama daughters. The reason for that is politics: not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not bad politics, but politics per se.
The problem of politics is the problem of knowledge. The
superiority of market processes to political processes is not in
origin moral but technical. The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized—and, as
Read intuited and as modern scholars of complexity studies
confirm, there is no way to centralize it. Ludwig von Mises
applied that insight specifically to the defects of planned
economies—the famous “socialist calculation problem”—but
it applies in varying degrees to all organizations and all
bureaucracies, whether political, educational, religious, or
corporate. Markets work for the same reason that the Internet
works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations. More
precisely, they are composed of countless (literally countless,
blinking into and out of existence like subatomic particles)
pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions. Some, such as the
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iPhone and the No. 2 pencil, are wildly successful; others, such
as New Coke or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, are not.
Products come and go, executives come and go, firms come
and go. The metaphor of biological evolution is an apt one,
though we sometimes draw the wrong conclusion from that—
Social Darwinism and all that nonsense.
Conservatives like to say “Markets work,” as though that
were an explanation of anything. What we really are saying is:
“Failure works.” Corporations are mortal. Failure is not only
an important part of the market process, it is the most important part of the market process.
U.S. Steel was at the height of its power a behemoth, the
largest American business, the first corporation in the world to
have a market value in excess of $1 billion.
It was formed out of the union of J. P.
Morgan’s business interests and Andrew
Carnegie’s steel empire. When Carnegie
took payment for the interests he sold to
Morgan—the equivalent of $6 billion in
contemporary dollars—he received it in
the form of 50-year gold bonds, documents that took up so much room that
the bank in which they were deposited
had to build a special vault to house
them. U.S. Steel seemed to be a permanent thing, but it is today a shadow of
itself, reduced to a mere division of
another firm, surviving mainly in
name, and that name reduced to
grandiosity: U.S. Steel Corporation
indeed, as though it were the U.S.
Mint or the U.S. Army. It produces
barely more steel today than it did in
Morgan’s time, and it is well below
Staples and Rite Aid on the Fortune
500. The decline of U.S. Steel was
bad for the company’s shareholders
and its employees, but it was good
for people who use steel—meaning everybody else in the world. U.S. Steel
was itself the product of an improved business model that had
displaced older, less efficient competitors. Without the pressure
and opportunity created by the possibility of failure, the U.S.
steel industry—and the entire U.S. economy—would be (at
best) stuck in the early 19th century. It seems paradoxical, but
failure is what makes us rich. (And we are, even in these troubled times, fabulously rich.) We’d all be a lot worse off if corporations such as U.S. Steel lived forever (which is one more
reason not to engage in bailouts).
Politics creates the immortal corporation. Amtrak and the U.S.
Postal Service are two institutions that would have failed long
ago if not for government support—subsidies for Amtrak, the
government-chartered monopoly on letter delivery for the postal
service. The cost of their corporate immortality is not only the
waste associated with maintaining them, but also the fact that
their existence prevents the emergence of superior alternatives.
No sane person would invest 12.5 percent of his income in Social
Security in 2013, but we are compelled to do so, and so the bankrupt enterprise continues as though it were not tens of trillions of
dollars underwater. A political establishment is a near-deathless
M AY 20, 2013
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thing: even after the bitter campaign of 2012, voters returned
essentially the same cast of characters to Washington, virtually
ensuring the continuation of the policies with which some 90
percent of voters pronounced themselves dissatisfied. No death,
no evolution. Outside of politics, human action is characterized
by evolution and by learning. And what are we learning? How to
take care of one another, which is the point of what we sometimes
call capitalism. (Don’t tell Ayn Rand.)
How the Fed
Can Unwind
And its critics can relax
I
T is remarkable that we speak and think about commerce
as though competitiveness were its most important feature. There is, as noted, a certain Darwinian aspect to
economic competition—and of course we humans do compete over scarce resources. But what is remarkable about
human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless
cooperativeness. Competition is one of the ways in which we
learn how best to cooperate with one another and thereby deal
with the problem of complexity—it is a means to the end of
social cooperation. Cooperation exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but human beings cooperate on a species-wide,
planetary level, which is a relatively new development in our
evolution, the consequences of which we have not yet fully
appreciated. If you consider the relationship of the organism
to its constituent organs, the relationship of the organ to its
cells, or the relationship of the single cell to its organelles, it
would not be an overstatement to say that the division of labor
is the essence of life itself: Birds do it, bees do it, but human
beings do it better. The size and complexity of our brains
evolved in parallel with the size and complexity of our social
groups, which are just as much a product of evolutionary
processes as our bodies are.
Thus, we do not have the U.s. steel Corporation, a tightly
integrated and hierarchical operation overseen by a CeO with
an omniscient command of his operation. We have lots of U.s.
steel corporations, and a worldwide steel industry, and many
worldwide industries making products that are substitutes for
steel, from aluminum to carbon fiber to nanotubes. But we do
have the U.s. Postal service, the social security Administration, and the government-school monopoly in your home
town. These agencies underperform consistently when compared with such benchmarks of innovation as the software
industry or the biotech industry. They fail because they
attempt to substitute a single brain, or a relatively small panel
of brains organized into a bureaucracy, for the collective cognitive firepower of millions or billions of people. Put simply,
they attempt to manage systems that are too complex for
them to understand. Complexity is humbling, but politics is
immune to humility.
Which is something to keep in mind the next time somebody promises to “solve” our health-care challenges or unemployment. Washington is packed to the gills with people who
believe that they have the ability to design an intelligent
national health-care system, but there is not one who does—
no Democrat, no Republican, no independent. The information burden is just too vast. Washington is not only full of
people who do not know what they are talking about, it is full
of people who do not know that they do not know what they
are talking about. That is no model for social change. Your
pencil and your phone are.
RAMESH PONNURU &
DAVID BECKWORTH
s the Federal Reserve has continued to buy bonds to
aid the economic recovery, critics of its actions, and
even some supporters, have grown increasingly concerned about what comes after all of this “quantitative
easing”: How will the Fed “unwind” its balance sheet—that is, sell
off the bonds it has purchased—without harming the economy?
The short answer: Don’t worry about it. The Fed can reverse
its actions without wreaking economic damage, especially if it
does it at the same time as it announces that it intends to keep
nominal income growing at a stable rate.
Nobody disputes that the Fed will at some point need to reduce
its asset holdings. They have grown so large in the first place
because the financial crisis accompanied (and, in our view, to a
very large extent resulted from) a sharp increase in the public’s
demand for money balances: for the safety, that is, of cash and its
near-equivalents. The Federal Reserve increased the supply of
money in response to this increase in demand. It did so by purchasing Treasury and agency securities from the public, thus
adding to the money held in bank accounts. The increase in supply, however, was insufficient to keep up with the increase in
demand, especially in 2008 and 2009, which is why the crisis was
so severe.
The demand for money balances and safe assets is still very
elevated, albeit down from its crisis peak. If the economy enters
a robust recovery, that demand should fall, as it usually does
when there are attractive alternatives to just holding on to money.
At some point, for example, banks will want to start investing
more aggressively the $1.7 trillion in excess reserves—dollars
they hold beyond what they are legally required to hold—that
they have accumulated since the crisis began. A strong recovery
would raise the demand for credit and provide just such an investment opportunity for banks in the form of higher-yielding loans.
This increased lending would increase the money supply and, left
unchecked, would cause a rapid rise in inflation. Recall the old
explanation of what causes inflation: too much money chasing
too few goods.
A
F
eD officials say they plan to use two different methods to
prevent such a destabilizing surge in the money supply.
First, the Fed will stop reinvesting principal payments it
Mr. Ponnuru is a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW. Mr. Beckworth, a
former international economist at the Treasury Department, is an assistant professor
of economics at Western Kentucky University and the editor of Boom and Bust
Banking:•The Causes and Cures of the Great Recession.
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A
we’ve argued in these pages before, the key to distinguishing between loose and tight monetary policy is
what’s happening to nominal income: that is, to the size
of the economy measured in dollar terms, with no adjustment
for inflation. If the growth of nominal income is accelerating,
then monetary policy is loosening; and if growth decelerates,
it’s tightening. The right policy aims for steady growth, which
happens when the supply of money rises and falls with demand.
By this measure, Fed policy was loose in the years before the
crash, leading to interest rates below the natural level and rising
household debt. But Fed policy has since then been very tight—
first disastrously tight in 2008–09, then only damagingly tight.
One reason to keep nominal-income growth steady is that most
debts, such as mortgages, are contracted in nominal terms. An
unexpected slowdown in its growth, as we have experienced over
the last five years, makes the burden of repaying those debts
heavier. The fact that households are nonetheless continuing to
deleverage, rather than to add to their net borrowings, suggests
that this is not a bubble economy.
The claim that the Fed cannot be trusted to unwind its balance
sheet—that it will let inflation go out of control—ignores its
actual record over the last five years. Inflation has consistently
come in below the Fed’s target and unemployment above it: The
S
M AY 20, 2013
ROMAN GENN
receives from its maturing Treasury and agency securities. The
dollars the Fed takes in, that is, will no longer circulate. Since
the Fed won’t be buying more securities at this point, its balance sheet will shrink. The Fed learned the hard way how effective this approach can be: By not reinvesting the proceeds when
its agency securities matured between mid 2010 and late 2011,
it passively drained about $662 billion from the economy. It
decided to reinvest the payments so as not to tighten monetary
policy inadvertently. In the future, it will deliberately tighten
money by again ceasing to reinvest.
The second method the Fed will deploy to shrink its balance
sheet is to sell off its agency securities. According to the minutes
from the June 2011 Fed meeting, the Fed would most likely do
this over three to five years.
Along with taking these two measures, the Fed would have
to adjust its “forward guidance” on interest rates—that is, raise
its projections of where it expects interest rates to go—and
gradually raise its target federal-funds rate. A recent Fed study
found that, under reasonable scenarios, this unwinding process
would take about five years and would cause no disruptions to
economic activity.
One source of worry about this process is the fear that it will
be expensive for the Treasury. As interest rates go up, some of
the Fed’s securities will decline in value and will have to be sold
at a loss. Also, the Fed has been paying banks interest on excess
reserves, and higher interest rates will increase the size of these
payments. The Fed has been sending money to the Treasury, but
these developments would reduce that flow. In a worst-case
scenario, the Fed could experience an operating loss and require
a taxpayer bailout.
The worriers are overlooking some important facts. First:
While the Fed will send fewer funds to the Treasury during the
winding down of its balance sheet, it will have sent, over the
period including both the expansion and the unwinding, higher
payments to the Treasury than normal. Prior to the crisis, the Fed
was earning about $25 billion a year on average. Since then, it has
earned as much as $90 billion, and it is expected to earn $40 bil-
lion on average over the 2009–25 period. We should not distort
monetary policy to keep payments close to an abnormal peak.
Second, an operating loss need not mean a bailout. Imagine,
for example, that the Fed were to take a large capital loss on its
holdings and could not sell enough securities to rein in a rapidly
expanding money supply. It could still tighten money by raising
the interest rate paid on excess reserves, and fund the higher
payments by tapping into its future earnings. It could do this
by creating more dollars to pay the banks and then offsetting
this transaction in the future by sending less of its earnings to the
Treasury.
Third, these concerns miss the forest for the trees. These potential balance-sheet problems will emerge only if there is a robust
economic recovery. We would be fortunate to have these problems! Moreover, a robust recovery would mean much more tax
revenue for the Treasury. Even the best year of Fed earnings pales
in comparison with the annual trillion-dollar deficits the weak
economy has brought. Surely, no one would argue that we should
keep the economy weak so that the Fed can generate extra revenue for the federal government.
The impact on the Treasury isn’t the only widespread concern
about the Fed’s future undoing of quantitative easing. One popular line of argument holds that the economy has been “artificially” boosted by the Fed, which has been inflating a bubble as
it inflated one in the pre-crisis years. Based on this premise,
some people argue that the Fed now faces a no-win choice
between popping the bubble and inflating it further. So either the
Fed will not unwind its balance sheet, and we will get galloping
inflation, or it will and the economy will crash.
These concerns, too, are overblown. The claim that the Fed
has been inflating a bubble, for example, is based on the idea that
its monetary policy has kept interest rates below their natural
levels. That’s not true. Low interest rates are almost entirely the
result of a weak economy, not the Fed’s inadequate attempts to
loosen money.
The End Is Near + coupon:milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/30/2013 5:58 PM Page 1
­The­end­Is­near
AND IT’S GOING TO BE AWESOME!
Get Kevin Williamson’s acclaimed new book that describes how
going broke will leave America richer, happier, and more secure!
t last, a conservative treatise that isn’t too bilious to
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‘A
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Williamson’s new book making the bold argument that the United States government is disintegrating—and that it is a good thing!
In what is sure to be one of the most important books of 2013 (which you can
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acclaimed Roving Correspondent and ‘Exchequer’ blog author, offers a radical reenvisioning of government, a powerful analysis of why it doesn’t work, and an
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what government is, a powerful analysis of why it doesn’t work, and an exploration
of the innovative solutions spontaneously emerging thanks to the fortunate failure
of politics.
Every year, consumer goods and services get better, cheaper, and more widely
available while critical necessities delivered by government grow more expensive,
even as their quality declines. The reason for this paradox is simple: politics. Not
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decision-making practices.
In The End Is Near, Williamson, considered by many the conservative movement’s most talented writer,
describes the crisis of the modern welfare state in the era of globalization and argues that the crucial political failures of our
time—education, health care, social security, and monetary policy—are due not to ideology but the nature of politics itself.
Meanwhile, those who can’t or won’t turn to the state for goods and services—from homeschoolers to Wall Street to organized
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The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome compellingly analyzes the government’s numerous failures and reports on the
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agencies rivaling the CIA; and learn about the
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Fed has erred, that is, on the side of tightness. The last five years
have seen a lower average inflation rate than any five-year stretch
since the mid 1960s. Yet all of the political pressure on the Fed
from Congress has been directed at getting it to tighten more.
Finally, we have a tool that we lacked the last time we experienced high inflation: a market-based indicator that will warn us
that it is on the way. The Treasury now issues bonds indexed for
inflation as well as unindexed ones, and the spread shows market
expectations of inflation over the duration of the bond. if that
spread rises a lot, the Fed will face even more pressure to tighten
than it would otherwise.
There would be less reason to worry about any of this if the Fed
had adopted an explicit nominal-income target, or adopted one
now. Under such a target, the Fed would commit to adjusting
monetary policy so that nominal income grew at, say, 5 percent a
year (roughly the rate at which it expanded in the decades of the
“great Moderation” before the crisis). if the economy grew by
3.5 percent in real terms, for example, inflation would run at 1.5
percent. The Fed would also commit to correcting for past mistakes: if it let nominal income grow by 6 percent in one year, it
would subsequently keep its growth below 5 percent in order to
keep the long-run path as close to the predicted one as possible.
The Fed would not have had to amass as many assets as it now
has if it had followed this policy. if markets had expected the Fed
to keep nominal income on a steady path, the demand for the
safety of money would not have risen as much as it did, so there
would have been less need to increase the supply. As Australia
shows, a “looser” monetary policy can lead paradoxically to a
smaller money supply. it has kept nominal-income growth relatively steady, and its monetary base is smaller compared with its
economy than is that of the U.S. (or of most other countries that
let nominal income crash). it has also avoided the last two recessions that hit the rest of the developed world.
Even after the initial decline in nominal income, the adoption
of a credible commitment to nominal-income targeting could
have kept the Fed from having to buy so many assets by reducing the demand for money balances. (it is partly because of this
sort of effect that studies find that expectations of future nominal
income are a strong determinant of current nominal income.) And
nominal-income targeting could moderate any future moneydemand shocks in the event that, for example, Europe collapses.
A credible nominal-income target would also aid the Fed’s
unwinding by moderating the decline in the demand for money
balances during a recovery. if markets don’t think the Fed will
allow nominal income to grow 10 percent a year for the next
decade, a bubble psychology is less likely to set in.
And it should be easier for the Fed to commit to a credible
nominal-income target than to an inflation target because the
former would not require the perverse actions that the latter
would. if the target is 5 percent, a nominal-income-targeting
central bank will, in a year when the economy grows by only 1
percent in real terms, let inflation rise to 4 percent. when the
real economy grows by 4 percent, it will let inflation sink to 1
percent. An inflation-targeting bank would have to adopt tighter
money during the bust and looser money during the boom. So
it will either have to make the business cycle more extreme or
fudge its target.
The worriers are wrong. The Fed can and should unwind its
balance sheet without hurting the economy—especially if, at long
last, it adopts the right monetary policy at the same time.
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Faith and
Family
We should be optimistic
about their future
BY MARY EBERSTADT
heavy losses in the same-sex-marriage
fight, traditionalists are anxious. “Conservatives
have been routed, both in court and increasingly in
the court of public opinion,” writes Rod Dreher in
an elegiac piece on “sex after Christianity.” one can appreciate fully the efforts of those brave men and women who
have not given up the battle and still suspect that Dreher and
others who argue similarly are right. if they are, then religious believers not only in America but across the western
world are entering darker and more difficult times.
For one thing, surely the rewriting of laws and customs
along radical new lines consistent with radical new dispensations has only just begun. How many Christian students,
teachers, professors, counselors, priests, nuns, ministers,
doctors, pharmacists, businessmen, and politicians of the
future will run afoul of rules against ever-expanding definitions of “hate group” and “hate speech”? How many will be
ostracized, or worse, in their schools and workplaces, as
some already have been, for “extremism”? How many will
see their children penalized for religious beliefs that seemed
unremarkable in America until the day before yesterday?
will the United States now go the way of great Britain,
where a couple was recently forbidden to adopt a child
because they were practicing Christians and therefore on
the wrong side of current right thinking? will we follow
Canada, where, as Mark Steyn reports, Catholic schools are
required to include gay-straight alliances subversive of
Catholic moral teaching? Father Raymond de Souza of the
Archdiocese of Kingston, ontario, recently commented that
many young priests he knows think “the prospect of one of
us spending some time in jail for teaching the faith is not a
distant or unlikely proposition, it is a plausible reality to be
prepared for.” will men and women of the cloth in the
United States someday say the same?
if that were the whole picture, despair would abound. But
it isn’t. For 2,000 years, Christianity has weathered severe
storms, surviving discrimination and outright persecution.
Are we really and only now facing the Church’s terminal
decline? Does the sexual revolution, alone among all cultural
influences inimical to the Church throughout history, render
F
ollowing
Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This essay
is adapted from her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New
Theory of Secularization.
M AY 20, 2013
2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/30/2013 11:22 PM Page 35
the cross and all it stands for obsolete?
A contrarian case can be made that things aren’t as grim as
they seem—or, conversely, that they aren’t nearly as invigorating as they seem to their adversaries. The case for cautious
optimism shares many facts with the case for pessimism. In
fact, the case for optimism is more or less the case for pessimism turned on its head and examined from a different
angle.
For over a hundred years, sociology has broadcast the
death of God—prematurely, it turns out, because sociologists
have ignored the part played in religious belief by that great
institution with which religion’s fate appears inextricably
entwined: the family.
History shows that, in case after case, one pillar is only as
strong as the other. Religion, and specifically Christianity,
from London to Athens, from Barcelona to Paris and back, it
has grown ever clearer that the welfare states of the West are
overextended and ultimately unsustainable. Nor is this just
a matter of euros and cents. The eventual civilizational implosion of the welfare state, one can argue, will be a gamechanger for family decline.
Easier divorce and more widespread illegitimacy, along
with related developments, have been taken more or less in
stride for decades now, in the belief that the state can do
what was once done by competent families: care for the
young, tend to the sick and old, provide for the home. Family
decline has so far been premised on Western affluence.
In the 1970s, sociologist David Popenoe predicted that
one consequence of diminished Western affluence might be
exactly the revival of the institution of the family. After all,
Is a revival of the natural family possible—and,
with it, a revival of Christianity? The answer is and
will continue to be yes.
waxes and wanes according to the strength of marriage and
family formation. Across the Western world, the first ten to
15 years after World War II saw a religion boom in conjunction with the Baby Boom. The decades since the 1960s, conversely, have seen rising out-of-wedlock childbearing and
falling birthrates in conjunction with a religion bust. Family
and faith are historically bound together in ways that intrinsically historicist sociology has wholly ignored. So one way
of considering the future of Christianity is to ask another
question: Is a revival of the natural family possible—and,
with it, a revival of Christianity? The answer is and will continue to be yes.
B
EGIN by meditating on an insight from the late Pitirim
Sorokin, founder of Harvard’s sociology department
and one of the seminal social thinkers of the mid
20th century. Sorokin wrote at a time when sociology was
practiced not through finely granulated statistical analysis
but rather with the broadest possible brush and the widest
historical canvas imaginable.
In Man and Society in Calamity (1942), Sorokin dedicated
his powers to a project broadly applicable to the present
moment—in his case, to disentangling the ways in which
historical catastrophes of various kinds, principally wars,
famines, and pestilence, set countervailing social forces into
motion. Reviewing wide swaths of human history, Sorokin
spied a general rule: “The principal steps in the progress of
mankind toward a spiritual religion and a noble code of
ethics have been taken primarily under the impact of great
catastrophes.” Calamity, as he saw it, is not only a possible
inducement to religious revival but may even be its sine qua
non.
Is the Western world today home to a calamity of sufficient dimensions to prove Sorokin’s rule once more? Since
2008, when the global financial crisis first burst into the consciousness of the mass of Western voters, followed by riots
he observed, families perform a function crucial to all societies, doing for free what would otherwise cost money to
accomplish. “The importance of this family care-giving
function,” he writes, “becomes clear when we consider what
might happen if modern societies ever again fall into a serious economic depression.”
Could the post-welfare Western state end up imparting
economic value to marriage, childbearing, and family ties,
as the pre-industrial agricultural state did for many centuries? One needn’t imagine a full-scale crisis to see how the
pressures of a shrinking and ageing Western population
might make the family look like a grossly undervalued
stock. As Stanley Kurtz observed presciently in “Demo graphics and the Culture War,” an article in Policy Review
three years before the financial collapse of 2008:
It wouldn’t take a full-scale economic meltdown, or even a relative disparity in births between fundamentalists and secularists,
to change modernity’s course. Chronic low-level economic
stress in a rapidly aging world may be enough. There is good
reason to worry about the fate of elderly boomers with fragile
families, limited savings, and relatively few children to care for
them. A younger generation of workers will soon feel the burden
of paying for the care of this massive older generation. . . .
Modernity itself may come in for criticism even as a new appreciation for the benefits of marriage and parenting might emerge.
Tantalizing evidence from the crash of 2008 shows just the
sort of unintended consequences of economic adversity
mentioned by Kurtz. Consider divorce. An economic crisis
turns divorce, always expensive, into a luxury item.
According to figures from the American Academy of
Matrimonial Lawyers, the divorce rate in the U.S. dropped
24 percent in 2008 and 57 percent in 2009, following the
housing collapse. The rates then began creeping back up in
2010, as the economy improved. Like other observers, the
president of the AAML was certain that the drop was in
response to harder times.
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2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/30/2013 11:22 PM Page 36
Another inadvertent consequence of the economic crisis
has been the return of many adult children to the homes of
their parents. Though undertaken for financial reasons,
might not the movement of the “boomerang generation”
back to the nest also have the effect of reinforcing family
bonds? Hard times, in short, have a way of driving people
back to what’s most elemental.
This leads to another reason for cautious optimism about
the future of family and faith: People learn. Marriage rates
and childbearing among relatively affluent, educated American women, for example, are on the uptick (even as marriage
continues to implode further down the socioeconomic
ladder). Two can live more cheaply than one, as Robert J.
Samuelson reflected in a recent column on the relationship
between personal wealth and family structure, and it’s rea-
ning of infanticide and abortion, and its overall attentiveness
to the family contributed to a demographic advantage for
believers. All those conditions still obtain.
Consider one more fact in support of traditionalists. In
Family and Civilization (1947), Carle Zimmerman, another
Harvard sociologist, demonstrated that throughout history
the family has followed a pattern: It grows stronger after a
period of decay has incurred mounting social costs. Zimmerman argued that family strength is cyclical and that the problems resulting from periods of weak and atomized families
lead to counter-cycles of strong family formation.
Finally, there remains on the side of contrarianism what
might be called Christianity’s secret weapon. Throughout
history, men and women have been drawn to the Church precisely because of the traditional moral code that so many
Family strength is cyclical and the problems resulting
from periods of weak and atomized families lead to
counter-cycles of strong family formation.
sonable to think that more people will come to realize as
much. One reason better-off women are a little more inclined
toward children and traditional family may be that they have
learned from the past, particularly from the tolls associated
with alternative structures. If more people learn the same
lesson, the natural family—and, with it, the churches—
might enjoy a recovery.
Current, historically low rates of natural-family formation
and their attendant problems are not longstanding. Single
motherhood, for example, cheered by feminists in the name
of “liberation” less than a generation ago, is now widely
seen for what it really is: an inhumanly difficult task for
almost any woman, let alone poorer women, who are more
likely to be unmarried. Likewise, “Career first” is now a
slogan that many educated younger women reject, including
many feminists. Maybe future generations will be more
kindly disposed to the idea that more is merrier than were
their forebears in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s possible to imagine a turnaround of family-formation rates
across the West both because the economics of subsidizing
familial decline will have become untenable and because the
social cost of alternatives to traditional families will have
become more obvious to many people than it is today.
T
HeRe’S another reason not to write the obituary for
Christianity and the traditional family quite yet:
demography. As Phillip Longman and eric Kauf mann have independently documented, and as Jonathan Last
energetically explores in his riveting book What to Expect
When No One’s Expecting, believers have babies, and nonbelievers don’t. And among believers, the most religious
have the most babies. Over time, as those who look at the
numbers agree, this simple fact will tilt Western populations
toward religious belief. Sociologist Rodney Stark argues
that Christianity grew from a small sect to a world religion
precisely because the Church’s prizing of marriage, its ban36
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
people today love to hate. The pagans, the early Christians
were instructed, could have it all: their idols, their infanticide, their contraception, their abortions, their sexual libertinism; the Christians couldn’t. And on the list went. From
the beginning, these “no”s were fundamental teachings of
Christianity (and in many cases, also of Judaism), but they
were not only prohibitions. They were also teachings that
drew many people in, fallen but serious human beings who
recognized the teachings as somehow true. And such re mains the case, as the legions of Western converts down to
this very day go to show, sometimes in some pretty sophisticated places.
As a caution against the notion that anything ever is
inevitable, let us consider the last boomlet of faith across the
West, during the years immediately following World War II.
So pervasive was religious practice in the United States then
that Will Herberg, the foremost sociologist of religion in
America during the mid 20th century, could observe in his
classic book Protestant, Catholic, Jew that the village atheist
or freethinker was a disappearing figure, that agnosticism
was in decline, and that “the pervasiveness of religious
identification may safely be put down as a significant feature
of the America that has emerged in the past quarter of a century.”
Those words were written only decades ago. Religion
ebbs and flows in the world in ways not dreamed of by sociologists. Belief does not simply enter and leave the earth as
a unidirectional force, like a comet. Christianity in particular engages with that other spiral, the one of family, in a deli cate, profound dynamic of mutual dependence.
None of which is to say that Western believers today can
count on seeing brighter days for either institution in their
lifetimes. In the short run, to reverse John Maynard Keynes,
we’re all dead. As for the long run, though, several signs
point the way not just to hope but to likely revival. Therein
lies a limited but real case for optimism about the twinned
futures of family and faith.
M AY 20, 2013
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Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Let Us Rage Together
HE Sanctioned F-Bomb finally appeared in the
wake of the Boston bombings. Speaking at a televised baseball game, Red Sox player Big Papi
said, “This is our [bleepin’] city.” The FCC not
only declined to scold, but approved: The chairman tweeted
that Papi “spoke from the heart,” which makes everything
okay. You could say the same thing of Mother Tsarnaev’s
lunatic screechings, but never mind.
Contrast with a poor TV anchorperson in North Dakota
who mumbled the F-bomb while looking at his script,
unaware that his mic was on. He also said something was
gay, which gets you banned from the profession for two
lifetimes. If he had, however, said “gay” and sworn in disgust over a terrorist attack on an LBGT advocacy center by
tea partiers, he would probably be looking at Matt Lauer’s
job right now. Authenticity, man!
That’s what proper sanctioned cussing is: authentic.
Quality cable shows like Mad Men use profanity like a
drop of Tabasco, and it has tang; it’s real. Network TV
will be next. Because it’s real. No one seems to realize
that if Papi had called the bombers “herkenheiming fishbinding ocelot tossers,” we would have gotten the point
and remembered him all the better. But no. Our Bleepin’
Town. Readjust your Thornton Wilder theater programs
accordingly.
Ah, you say: If occasional cussing’s okay in the context
of art, why not in public life? Don’t bring up standards,
Grandpa. Standards kept the Smothers Brothers from joking
about the Vietnam War; ergo, all standards must go. Well,
not all; if something is hurtful or hateful to select tender
demographics, standards are terribly important, and part of
encouraging a Positive Space where nowhere is heard a discouraging word. But outside of that, eff ’em.
For example: Previous standard for a college student:
study hard, get good grades, be graduated to the sound of
sonorous Elgar, then beaver away in a good job. New standard: topless pope protests. KDKA-TV reported:
T
Students at Carnegie Mellon say it’s freedom of expression,
but the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh calls it inappropriate
and disrespectful. At an annual art school parade, a female
student dressed up as the pope, and was naked from the waist
down while she passed out condoms.
Even more, witnesses say the woman had shaved her pubic
hair in the shape of a cross.
As songwriter Neil Innes once said, “I’ve suffered for my
art, now it’s your turn.”
CMU issued a statement about the artistically reordered
nether-hair, saying: “We are continuing our review of the
incident. If our community standards or laws were violated,
we will take appropriate action.”
How? If they left it up to the student to come up with an
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
“artistic” form of suspension, she’d probably work a cross
into it. As for the “community standards,” the Carnegie
Mellon student code of conduct says that students “must
show a commitment to honesty without compromise, as
well as truth without equivocation and a willingness to
place the good of the community above the good of the
self.”
So, no, she didn’t violate community standards, since
they no doubt praise a raspberry blown to the gynophobic
patriarchy. It was honest and authentic in its rage. It struck
a blow. Pope Francis probably read the news story with a
trembling hand, convinced this sort of honesty can only call
into question two millennia of established religion. Good
thing she didn’t go topless too or everyone would begin to
doubt the Old Testament as well.
They’re doing topless priest-mocking over in Belgium.
There’s a feminist group called FEMEN, known for showing
up topless with feminist slogans scrawled on their bosoms—
talk about the medium being the message. They crashed a
press conference and threw holy water on a priest while
screaming abuse, possibly because the Church doesn’t admit
the possibility that Jesus was a cross-dresser. Put the
trans in transubstantiation, man. The priest would have
been excused if he’d stood up and shouted “HARLOTS
BE GONE!” and shot lightning out of his fingertips—
church attendance would have soared—but he simply
bowed his head and prayed for them.
The photographs of the tableau may not convince an
atheist that God is real, but they certainly make you believe
in the previously mythical harpies.
Who are we to judge, though? Until he’s run a mile braless in their scratchy T-shirts, who among us can judge
the wrath of the FEMEN or the disenfranchised Carnegie
Mellon student? Anger is a guarantee of authenticity; if
something is truly felt, it must be truly true. The art of one’s
utterance takes a backseat to the quantity of honesty.
But it’s real, and that’s what matters today. Studies of the
last Obama campaign showed that e-mails with casual subject lines—“Hey” or “Are you in?” or entreaties to make
sure Barack knew you “had his back”—appealed well to
younger voters. They sounded so inarticulate and slackercasual they had to be real. Perhaps the GOP could vault over
the slacker-chat tone and go right for the new age of
Authentic Sanctioned Eff: swearing at every turn, sending
out Mitch McConnell stripped to the waist to yell at Hillary
Clinton for Benghazi answers, shaving a dollar sign into his
pubic hair to “explore the relationship between politics and
money.” They would fail to attract new voters and drive
away their base, but they would make these things so uncool
that politicians would say “Gosh” and “ma’am,” protesters
would hone arguments instead of cheap shocks, and the culture would look to artists who create beauty instead of
empty acts of theatrical narcissism. They’d lose the 2014
election, but if that’s the trade-off? Worth it.
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The Long View
Ali Ba’Nasri: I agree.
Qu’Turush: And then she should be
set on fire.
Ali Ba’Nasri: I agree.
Transcript from the Al
Jazeera political talk show
The Al-Irshad Group
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Al-Irshad: Issue One! Boston Bonanza Brou-Ha-Ha! In the aftermath
of the Boston Marathon jihad demonstration by our brothers-in-arms the
Tsarnaevs, questions have emerged
about their reliance on the largesse of
the Great Satan! Question: Is receiving WIC and/or other assistance, including Section 8 housing, from the
American taxpayer a crime against
Islam? Most Exalted Imam and syndicated columnist Qu’Turush?
Qu’Turush: No, no, no. Look. We’ve
been through this and through this.
What the Tsarnaev family did was
apply for funds that were available to
all who qualified. There’s really no
scandal here. We need to stop stigmatizing folks who just need a helping
hand. That’s what these social services
are there for. That’s what we pay our
taxes for.
Salil Faqtb: We? What is this “we,”
you filthy son of a whore-mongering
pig? You are like the shopkeeper who
sells coffee to the Jew!
Qu’Turush: Allow me to finish!
Allow me to finish, you devil! Die!
Die! Die!
Salil Faqtb: The warrior who lives off
of the enemy is like the handful of
dates that harbor the stone!
Al-Irshad: Political consultant Salil
Faqtb, let me break in here—
Qu’Turush: Please, brother. I’m trying to get a word in edgewise, here. All
I’m saying is—
Al-Irshad: And what about the
American wife?
Qu’Turush: She should continue to
receive whatever the system allows.
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Al-Irshad: So we have agreement at
last, between syndicated columnist
Qu’Turush and Baath strategist Ali
Ba’Nasri! Exit question: Tsarnaev
sayonara! As the fervor dims from the
events in Boston, we ask ourselves,
where are the next youngsters coming
from who are willing to engage in
jihad? With the Twitter and the Facebook and the Spotify, many of our
young men find themselves bespoiled
and feminized. Is there hope for our
young, I ask you political consultant
Salil Faqtb!
Salil Faqtb: Brother, there is only
doom and hellfire for our young. They
travel to the West and construct incendiary devices made entirely of cooking
utensils, like females. Like common
brazen whores and prostitutes!
Qu’Turush: I don’t think you’re seeing the pressure-cooker bombs in context—
Salil Faqtb: Do not speak to me of
context, you blaspheming hypocrite
homosexual agnostic Jew-loving libertine dog.
Qu’Turush: The root causes of that
pressure cooker—
Salil Faqtb: Prepare to die!
Qu’Turush: Get off me! Get off me!
Al-Irshad: Gentlemen! Gentlemen!
Please!
Ali Ba’Nasri: Can I break in here? I
think the real question isn’t where is
the next generation of jihadists coming
from, but why are the Americans doing
such a better job teaching it than we
are? My nephew is studying physics at
Harvard, and let me tell you, when it
comes to understanding just how evil
and twisted the American system is,
he’s way, way ahead of anything we’ve
got over here. I mean, just the other day
he was explaining to me how obvious
it was that what happened in Boston
was an inside job.
Al-Irshad: But it wasn’t. It was us.
BY ROB LONG
Ali Ba’Nasri: Oh, right. I keep forgetting that.
Salil Faqtb: Of course you do! Your
nephew is studying physics! In the
West! There is no such thing as
physics! Your nephew should be tied
into a sack and dropped from a minaret!
Ali Ba’Nasri: Well, maybe. But that
would be physics, right?
Salil Faqtb: I will taste your blood
before this show is over! Die, you perverted monster with diseased genitals!
Qu’Turush: You see, this is the problem. We need to reach out to the middle. We’re only talking to the very
small minority of folks who think
nuclear weapons are the be-all and
end-all. What about pipe bombers?
What about the boys in Boston? They
were making some inroads in a very
blue state.
Salil Faqtb: They were JINOs!
Jihadists in name only! Brothers! Am I
the only one who sees it? They used a
cooking utensil! They may as well
have been wearing dresses!
Al-Irshad: Last question. On a scale
of one to ten, one being impossible and
ten being metaphysical certitude—
Salil Faqtb: Both are impossible for
man. Both are the repository of the
Divine. Please allow me to disembowel you immediately.
Al-Irshad: What is the likelihood that
our movement is becoming rapidly
decentralized? Qu’Turush?
Qu’Turush: I’d say a six. Luckily for
us, American universities and local
governments remain a wonderfully
hospitable place to nurture jihad. But
that could change.
Al-Irshad: Ali Ba’Nasri?
Ali Ba’Nasri: Ten. Have you seen
what’s happening on Kickstarter? Exciting stuff for jihad, let me tell you.
There’s an app for that.
Al-Irshad: Salil Faqtb?
Salil Faqtb: Please remain motionless
while I pour gasoline upon you.
Al-Irshad: You’re all incorrect! The
answer is three! Bye bye!
M AY 20, 2013
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Books, Arts & Manners
A Grief
Observed
DAVID FRENCH
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl,
a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life,
by Rod Dreher (Grand Central,
288 pp., $25.99)
COURTESY OF ROD DREHER
W
hat I felt when I picked up
Rod Dreher’s new book
was, simply, dread. From
the dust jacket, I knew it
dealt with his sister’s untimely death
from cancer. If it was written well, it
would rip apart my old wounds—wounds
inflicted by seeing too much premature
death in too short a time. If it wasn’t, I
had another kind of dread—that of
voyeuristically reading about someone
else’s pain against the backdrop of an
excessively idealized small southern
town.
there is a genre of conservative writing
and thought that takes rural america and
elevates it, drains it of the brokenness that
plagues the rest of our nation, and turns
it into an unrecognizable Disneyland of
simple folks just doin’ good. But I know
better. I grew up in a small southern town,
and—like Dreher—have returned to the
South after years of northeastern wanderings, moving from New York to upstate
New York and then to Philadelphia be fore settling in my family’s longtime
home town of Columbia, tenn. (perhaps
Mr. French is a senior counsel at the American Center
for Law and Justice and a co-author (along with his
wife, Nancy) of Home and Away: A Story of
Family in a Time of War.
better known as the “Mule Capital of the
World”). I love my town, and the people
in it, but they are people, and people are
fallen.
Dreher’s book begins with the story
of his childhood in Louisiana. his little
sister, Ruthie, loved him, but was different from the start. Rod was bookish,
intellectual, and questioning. Ruthie
loved the outdoors, the rural life, and
the town where they lived. Rod left as
soon as he had the chance, at age 16, to
go to boarding school. Ruthie stayed for
the rest of her life.
the writing is both intimate and distant. Dreher’s subject is people he knows
better than anyone else, but he steps back
from them stylistically and intellectually.
the book reads a bit like an authorized,
insider biography of a celebrity or political leader, respectful as it identifies and
evaluates formative events—but it is
also painfully honest.
Rod left home, but he also kept looking back, often desperate to reconcile
with a father who seemed to scorn his
choices. he also looked back to his sister, who made a life as a teacher and
seemed to open her heart and life to
everyone but her brother. his family
felt that Rod was rejecting them; Rod
felt rejected and misunderstood by his
family.
Ruthie, after all, saw Rod’s lifestyle as
mystifying and strange. She was a publicschool teacher; Rod and his wife homeschooled. She lived in one place and had
one job; he couldn’t stay in a city for
long and hopped from job to job. In one
painful vignette, she even refused to eat a
French meal Rod and his wife had prepared, believing it was a symbolic rejection of their simpler southern way.
then Ruthie was diagnosed with cancer.
In the hallmark version of this story,
the cancer would claim Ruthie’s life, but
it would also bring a family together in
a spasm of forgiveness and healthy perspective. Death would come, but so would
closure, and healing. But Dreher doesn’t
shrink from the sometimes terrible realities. Yes, there is healing and forgiveness, but there is also stubbornness and
denial. Some wounds aren’t healed, and
are even ripped open further amidst the
unimaginable stress of a terminal-cancer
diagnosis.
It turns out that a person with cancer is
still a person, and a family rallying to
support a stricken sister, wife, mother,
and daughter is still a family. Ultimately,
this is what makes Dreher’s book so
powerful. as Ruthie nears the end of her
life, the prose is compassionate but remorseless. You know what’s coming,
Rod Dreher and Ruthie Leming
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
you see the family make mistakes, and
you know there’s no remedy. When a
daughter decides to distance herself from
her mother in the final weeks of her
mother’s life, you know it won’t end
well.
As Ruthie dies, and as Rod sees not
just the outpouring of love from friends
and neighbors but also the outpouring of
grief (a grief that you’ll feel yourself; I
read those pages on a flight from Boston
to Nashville and had to close the book
while I composed myself), he decides to
come home.
These are the most difficult passages
of the book. Ruthie’s loss tore a gaping
hole in the lives of her family but also in
an entire community. Such voids aren’t
left by people who live just in a “little
way,” but only by those who live in a
noble, honorable, and loving way.
As an imperfect family and an im perfect community cling to each other,
Dreher comes to a convicting conclusion:
During the decade leading up to Ruthie’s
death, I had spent my professional life
writing newspaper columns, blog posts,
and even a book, lamenting the loss of
community in American life. I had a reputation as a pop theoretician of cultural
decline, but in truth I was long on words,
short on deeds. . . . My friends and I
talked a lot about the fragmentation of
the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass
media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization
of religion and the leviathan state and
every other thing under the sun that
undermines our sense of home and permanence.
The one thing that none of us did was
what Ruthie did: Stay.
And so, he moves back to his tiny
Louisiana home town.
But this is no fairy tale, and there is
no “happily ever after.” Back home, the
challenges keep mounting, as he discovers Ruthie disliked his lifestyle even
more than he knew. Each page contains
yet another surprising and disturbing
revelation. Though all is not well back
at home, he feels called to “accept the
limitations of a place, in humility.”
And this is where the book’s deeper
social significance lies. It seems that we
now live in the era of “lean in”: As the
underclass fragments, and families collapse, the elite strains to achieve—leaning into careers, rejecting limitations,
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
and often scorning those who don’t jump
into the global marketplace with both
feet. Live your dream, they say, as hard
as you can, as fast as you can, as long as
you can. But Dreher’s book is about
something completely different: not leaning in, but leaning on, creating and sustaining communities where imperfect
people lean on one another as they struggle together through sickness, through
grief, and even through conflict. We lean
on and are leaned upon, ready to jettison
ambition in order to serve and to sustain.
The book inspires, moves, and convicts. Dreher introduces readers to his
patron saint, Benedict of Nursia. Benedict took a vow of “stability,” asking his
monks to settle down, to embrace “the
discipline of place and community.”
But this vow often conflicts with the
goal of ambition, and the desire to exercise influence.
Dreher is too smart and wise to draw
rigid boxes, to declare that we should all
stay in small communities near home.
But he does remind us that amidst the
avalanche of contemporary hand-wringing
about values, ideas, and communities,
someone has to actually live those values. Someone has to walk the talk. And
Ruthie walked.
When you lose someone close to
you, there is often a desperate desire to
tell that person’s story—not just to preserve memories but also to honor her
and to sustain the meaning of her life.
In this book, Dreher has done much
more than honor his sister or preserve
her memory. He’s shown us a way—perhaps the best way—to build our culture
and to strengthen our families.
Simply put: Be there—for your family,
your friends, and your community. Live
not to achieve, but to serve. There is, of
course, no single way to “lean on” rather
than “lean in,” but the very decision to do
so should transform the focus and object
of our lives. But lean on (and be leaned
upon) with eyes wide open, not with
expectations of creating utopia but in stead with the realization that unless millions of us choose the “little way,” there
will be no good way left.
Man is still fallen, small towns struggle much as big towns, and—absent selfsacrifice—we’d struggle even more. It’s
not policy that redeems a culture, but
character and commitment, lived in
towns large and small, in the way of
Ruthie and her loving brother, Rod.
The Tribes
Of PostAmerica
JOHN O’SULLIVAN
Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe
(Little, Brown, 720 pp., $30)
T
oM WoLfE long ago declared a
preference for the great, teeming, socially panoramic novels
of the 19th century—in which
a plot of ambition and scandal brings
together a rich variety of characters from
the overclass, the underclass, and the
classes in between—over the novel of
internal reflection and exquisite sensibility where what little happens is of
great significance for a particular examined life. This preference for Dickens
over Virginia Woolf, so to speak, or for
Trollope over Henry James, is a very
scandalous one, because it is probably
shared by most readers. That more or
less ensures that it will be viewed with
suspicion, if not distaste, by most critics.
Mr. Wolfe, moreover, has compounded
this offense of taste by actually writing
(by my estimation) at least three great
social novels: The Bonfire of the Vanities,
A Man in Full, and now Back to Blood.
The main character in all of these novels
is, of course, America itself, whose energy and disarray provide all the other characters with their dreams and nightmares.
Like any other character, however, Tom
Wolfe’s America is subject to change and
decay, even perhaps to dissolution. And
in Back to Blood that ominous possibility
is beginning to seem possible.
That in turn creates exaggerated difficulties for Wolfe’s other characters. He
has sometimes (and plausibly) argued
that status anxiety is the motive force of
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most social lives. People are moved to
act in order to establish their social status, to improve it, or to defend it. Most
of the time their actions are ordinary
enough—studying at night school, say,
or “marrying up”—but sometimes the
prospect of social ruin or social triumph
drives them to extreme actions, murder
for instance, or martyrdom. Whatever
the nature of someone’s social anxiety,
he will face unusually tangled and baffling difficulties in a society whose
splintering standards and broken guideposts no longer give him clear directions on how to behave.
But that is the dilemma facing only
some of the players in Back to Blood;
others are liberated by the collapse of
older standards. For Wolfe’s vision of
the America emerging from the chaos
of modernity is eerily similar to the
Rome of Antiquity before Constantine.
Where that antiquity was pre-Christian,
this New Antiquity is post-Christian.
Its original brand of Protestant Christianity no longer influences the politics,
institutions, and laws of the nation it
once shaped. The WASP elites, for whom
Protestantism was long a mark of
respectability and soundness, no longer
even pretend to believe. It is a genuine
religious faith for only a tiny number of
people. Its secular expressions, “Ameri can exceptionalism” and “the American Creed,” are in only slightly better
shape. The former provoked President
Obama into an embarrassed meandering
as he sought to reconcile his cosmopolitan disdain for it with its popularity
among the rubes; the latter has been
redefined into its opposite, an umbrella
term covering a multitude of tribes and
their different customs, namely multiculturalism.
This transformation from the Great
Republic to the New Antiquity has
happened in large measure in order to
accommodate the growing number of
immigrant groups forcing their way
into the metropolis. It is a colder and
crueler world: Inside the cultural ghettos, the new tribes of post-America
retain much of their old affections and
loyalties; outside them, they treat others
with wariness and distrust. And they
are slow to develop a common attachment to their new “home.”
Wolfe touched upon this New
Antiquity shaped by immigration in A
Man in Full, where he had Conrad
Hensley make his way across America
on an underground railroad for the
undocumented (provided with their
documents, naturally) and discover
Stoicism as a means of coping. But here
he deepens the comparison with
ancient times by giving another meaning to multiculturalism as well as its
ethnic one. As mainline WASP Christianity shrivels, other cults flourish in its
place: the ethnicity cult, of course; the
arts cult for the very rich; the sex cult
for the young; the celebrity cult for
professionals; the psychology cult for
billionaire clients; a religion cult (nontraditional religion, of course) for the
perplexed; and the cult of wealth for
everyone. Only the Gods of the Copybook Headings are missing from this
teeming agora through which Wolfe’s
characters pursue their fantasies and
flee from their anxieties. It is a world of
fear, superstition, and constant insecurity as people try to adapt to the new,
always shifting social reality.
Nestor Camacho is a Cuban-American
cop whose status anxiety derives from
the fact that he is the lone Cuban in the
maritime department of the Miami
police. Nestor is brave and good, as we
quickly realize, and he also proves to
be the wise counselor that his name
suggests. Initially, however, it is he
who needs counseling. His troubles
arise when, from a sense of duty but
also to win the approval of his fellow
cops, Nestor performs an astounding
physical feat in the course of rescuing a
would-be Cuban immigrant from death.
This rescue, however, also prevents the
refugee from setting foot on land and
thus from winning asylum. To the cops
he is now a credit to his profession; to
the Cuban community he is a traitor to
his race. Even his own family shuns
him. At this low point in his fortunes,
but coincidentally, Nestor’s girlfriend,
Magdalena, leaves him to become the
mistress of a would-be-famous psychiatrist, Norman Lewis, who specializes
in treating sex-addiction cases among
the very rich.
Magdalena is fundamentally a decent
girl, but she is foolishly in thrall to
celebrity and to Norman’s near-fame,
and Norman, though a priest in the psychiatry cult, is a secret worshiper in the
cult of sex. His real faith emerges when
he takes Magdalena to what starts as a
regatta for young WASP kids but ends
up as a large open-air orgy by the sea.
Disgusted by the evident fact that
Norman wants her to take part in these
festivities, she decides to transfer her
affections elsewhere. Soon, a glamorous Russian billionaire and art collector, Sergei Korolyov, wanders into
view at a cocktail party, and asks her
for her telephone number.
We already know a great deal about
Sergei from the other characters. Edward T. Topping IV, the understandably
insecure WASP editor of the Miami
Herald and a minor deacon in the cult
of art, regards him with nervous awe as
a public and private benefactor. Topping
had smiled complicitly from the head
table on behalf of his newspaper when
Korolyov donated billions of dollars’
worth of hitherto unknown paintings by
masters of modern art to a new museum
bearing the billionaire’s name. It was
the high point of his editorship so far.
But Topping’s ace investigative reporter, John Smith, also a WASP, is less
starry-eyed about the Russian. Smith is
Tom Wolfe
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
a devotee in the temple of truth (a real,
if inadequate, deity) and takes his religion seriously. He knows Korolyov
to be a Russian mafioso with terrible
crimes to his credit. He also suspects
him of having the promised art treasures
forged by an émigré Russian painter as
part of an elaborate fraud that Smith
can’t quite make out. In order to solve
the puzzle, Smith seeks out Nestor—
now famous owing to his acrobatic
exploit on the patrol boat—to find the
painter/forger and expose the mafioso.
Nestor, meanwhile, is on a roll. Taking
part in a police raid on a drug den, he
overpowers a huge and brutal crack
dealer under the admiring eyes of
Ghislaine Lantier, a beautiful Haitian
girl of good family who is present in
the crack house looking after neglected
children on behalf of a fashionable
charity, South Beach Outreach. Im pressed by Nestor’s bravery, and his
kindness to her, Ghislaine seeks his
help to prevent her foolish but harmless young brother from being con victed of a serious crime. He succeeds
in that, reinforcing Ghislaine’s admiration, and also in tracking down, with
John Smith, the Russian painter and
his forgeries.
That leads to a front-page story on
Korolyov, which, unfortunately for Magdalena, appears in the early morning of
the night on which she has slept with
him. Korolyov dismisses her fairly
brusquely (as if, she reflects, taking out
the garbage), pauses briefly to arrange
to have the painter murdered, and then
takes off in his private plane back to
Mother Russia. His scheme to use the
prestige of his museum donations as the
basis for selling other fake masterpieces
to dealers for billions is now in ruins.
Magdalena, who has seen her status
soaring heavenwards, now looks at herself in a new, harsh, and glaring light,
literally so in the oligarch’s bathroom,
and also metaphorically, as someone ex posed as a cheap whore. She now thinks
fondly of Nestor and their happy times
together. But Nestor is basking in the
admiration of his fellow cops again,
along with John Smith, and also in
Ghislaine’s smiles. Who will Nestor end
up with . . . but I will leave you in suspense on that.
Wolfe’s characters, driven by status,
are for the most part seeking to rise in a
slippery world and getting into difficul42
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
ties as a result. There are exceptions,
interesting ones: Ghislaine is anxious
not for herself but only for her young
brother, who is so desperately prey to
status anxiety that he is almost drawn to
crime and self-destruction by the desire
to be accepted in the ethnic-gang subworld of Miami kids. She is admirable
in her uncomplicated goodness, also
perhaps a little unrealistic. Korolyov, an
intelligent criminal, thinks status comes
out of the barrel of a gun. Other people’s
status is something to be manipulated,
as he successfully manipulates Topping,
in order to advance his criminal interests. He is, alas, a very realistic picture
of evil. John Smith is a WASP who has
found in journalism a respectable way of
upholding WASP ideals in this treacherous New Antiquity. Like his colonial
namesake, he survives amid other tribes
by wit and coolness.
Topping suffers most from status
fears. He is like an officer in a long, losing war—the WASP in gradual retreat
before the new post-American tribes.
Inevitably, he cuts a somewhat pathetic
figure. But he has learned a thing or two
in the campaigns, and Wolfe allows him
a final flourish of deceptive leadership
as he boldly oversees the Korolyov exposé he has been quietly obstructing.
Magdalena is, as her name suggests, a
good girl gone bad who will now make
good again. She will no longer be deceived by sex, celebrity, or power. Like
her namesakes, she is the sadder but
wiser girl.
And Nestor—well, Nestor was never
pursuing a higher status, he was defending a decent status he had chosen on
other (decent) grounds. Nestor has an
internal moral compass and, given that,
he will navigate his way through the
ethnic suspicions of Miami and its various worlds. And Nestor, like Smith, is
brave—which in Wolfe is always the
key to someone’s worth.
As always, Wolfe is a very entertaining read. The book has great set pieces—
the seaside orgy, the strip club, the drug
raid, the editorial debate over whether to
run the exposé of Korolyov. It tells sad
but rumbustious truths about modern
America; in describing Miami, it explains the Boston bombers.
Only one mystery remains: One sour
critic said that Wolfe was writing less
about Miami than about himself. What on
earth must he think Wolfe is like?
No Aquatic
Tarts?
C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the
Dark Ages, by Guy Halsall
(Oxford, 384 pp., $34.95)
‘W
Hy is it,” I once asked
a friend at Oxford,
“that I have to write
2,000 words per essay and you only have to write 800?
After all, we do the same subject.” She
bristled slightly at the suggestion. “No,
we don’t, Charles. you study modern
history and I study medieval history and
nobody knows anything about medieval
history—bugger all, in fact. There’s not
much to write.”
We really do know “bugger all” about
the early medieval period, and what we
think we know changes all the time.
Written primary sources are thin on the
ground and most of the archaeological
evidence is still buried under it. Nonetheless, although it is placed slap-bang
in the middle of a historical wilderness,
one story is burned into our collective
memory: King Arthur’s. Dark Ages be
damned, we have a legend and we’re
sticking with it.
Guy Halsall, a professor at the University of york, has set out to address this
paradox. In Worlds of Arthur, he examines not just the Arthurian myth but the
entire period during which Roman
Britain “fell” and an Anglo-Saxon “invasion” allegedly took its place. His work
sits at the confluence of mystery and
history, raising the awkward, compelling
question of how much value we put on
objective truth. “The study of King
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Arthur has been insular for too long,”
Halsall complains, and it has been
hijacked by profit-seeking “amateur
enthusiasts” who, in thrall to Winston
Churchill’s vain hope that “it is all true,
or it ought to be; and more and better
besides,” pretend to hordes of willfully
gullible readers that they have unlocked
the “secret” at last.
“Medieval writers and their audiences expected different things from
‘history,’” Halsall allows early on, because “medieval people did not have a
category of ‘factual history’ separate
from what today might be thought of as
‘historical fiction,’ ‘alternative history,’
through the evidence. He notes that the
Historia Brittonum, the first datable
source to mention Arthur, was written
300 years after he supposedly existed,
creating a vacuum into which existing
legends were readily sucked. In the
ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
Halsall concedes, there “could be snippets of sixth-century fact”—but “it is
impossible now to disentangle them
from the narrative and structure of its
authors’ propaganda and from the huge
dose of myth, legend, and pun with
which they injected it.” likewise, there
is no reason to take the Welsh Annals
“very seriously,” nor Welsh heroic
Halsall doesn’t even accept the terminology of the question. In what is by
far and away the book’s best section,
“New Worlds,” we are treated to a
scintillating reevaluation of the period.
Halsall’s contention is that the Roman
period was not as Roman as is popularly imagined, nor was the barbaric
period as barbaric. Roman hegemony
had all but collapsed by 435, Halsall
contends, meaning that a fifth-century
Arthur was unlikely to be fighting to
preserve it. Moreover, the threat from
outside was not as discrete as it is
made out to be: The “barbarians” had
adequate exposure to Roman influence
Halsall confesses to being a “romantic, Arthurian
agnostic”: He wishes “that Arthur had existed” but is aware
that there is “no evidence” that he did.
or even ‘fantasy.’” Moral truths, he
adds, were often more important to
writers of the epoch than accuracy,
because their works were contrived primarily to assuage contemporary concerns. Nevertheless, this does not excuse
modern historians from the author’s
contempt. As much as anything, his
book is a polemic in favor of academic
discipline. Halsall confesses to being a
“romantic, Arthurian agnostic”: He
wishes “that Arthur had existed” but is
aware that there is “no evidence” that he
did. “Poetry creates the myth,” held
Jean-Paul Sartre, but “the prose writer
draws its portrait.” Worlds of Arthur is
very definitely written in prose.
At this point, the fable’s keener devotees might ask, “All right, killjoy, but
which Arthur are you talking about?” A
fair question. To be sure, the Arthur of
Merlin, Guinevere, and so much Camelot flim-flam is widely conceded to be
fanciful folly. (To paraphrase Monty
Python, “strange women lying in ponds
distributing swords” is no basis for
serious history.) But what of the supposedly historical Arthur, with whom
every schoolchild is familiar? What of
the man who played the heroic role in
fighting for civilization against the
onslaught of barbarism?
Halsall has little more time for this
iteration than he does for the fairy tale.
Knocking it down as he goes, a touch
irritably at times, he takes us patiently
poetry, which may have been full of
attractive stories for a people that felt
threatened but which has little to recommend it in the way of veracity. By
the time Halsall is done, he has constructed a convincing case that the written sources make “depressing reading”
for those who are set on believing in any
Arthur who would be worth believing
in. Books that claim that the written
record aids their cause, the author insists, should “be rejected immediately
and out of hand. Such attempts represent fiction, no more and no less.”
What about archaeology, a typical
refuge of the more creative Arthurian
optimists? Is there anything in the
record to indicate that a man named
Arthur was a champion of Roman civilization against Saxon barbarism?
KOAN PRACTICE
On one hand, what
Is it not?
But on one hand it
Isn’t everything.
The beer I do not drink
With the friend I have never met
In the café that doesn’t exist.
—JASON LEE STEORTS
and generally desired to settle within
the Roman Empire, not to destroy it.
And the Saxons? They, and the oftignored Angles and Jutes, didn’t so
much “invade” as they formed Romanblessed war bands that garrisoned
areas of importance while the military
went off to fight civil wars of larger
imperial import. The truth is, to borrow
a favored academic word, “complex.”
And complexity is no friend of lore.
At one point, the author lets his frustration with his adversaries translate
into open belligerence, writing: “The
locations of all of these battles are
unknown and unknowable. This is of
supreme importance if reading modern
pseudo-histories so I’ll say it again: THE
loCATIoNS of All THESE BATTlES ARE
uNKNoWN ANd uNKNoWABlE.”
Such combativeness is unsurprising,
coming as it does from a man who made
the British press when he lambasted his
truant students for missing the “chance
to hear (probably) the most significant
historian of early medieval Europe
under the age of 60 anywhere in the
world give 16 lectures on his current
research.” But at points, I confess, I had
some sympathy with those students.
Halsall is clearly a brilliant man, but
when he is not fulminating against people he doesn’t like, he can be terribly
dry. I suppose he can’t help it here; this
book is dry because a book like this
must be dry. Shakespeare, too, corrupted
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
our national knowledge of history with
the considerable poetic license that he
took, and any book that endeavored to
set the record straight would inevitably
suffer from an inability to be even half
as entertaining as that it sought to correct. Like Shakespeare’s versions of
events, the Arthur myths survive be cause they make great stories, and great
stories endure.
Pathologies endure, too. The modern
resurgence of the Arthurian legend
came at the height of the Victorian era,
at an odd crossroads during which the
success of the Industrial Revolution
was felt to be costing England its Ruritanian idyll and at which the success of
the Empire was causing more selfconscious elites to worry aloud about
going the way of the Romans. When the
British Parliament burned to the ground
in 1834, the queen’s robing room in the
House of Lords was decorated with
Arthurian themes, instilling the new
with the virtues of the old. Likewise, in
the New World, Americans at the
height of their post-war boom rechristened the youthful Kennedy administration as “Camelot.” The details may
have changed, but neither the urge to
return to the romance of nature nor
Western anguish at the prospect of decline has disappeared. We remain in
search of ideals toward which we might
strive. Fiction remains preferable to
fact.
At the end of the classic 1962 western
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a
newspaperman learns a dark, potentially ruinous secret about an American
hero, written evidence of which he proceeds to crumple up and throw in a fire.
“You’re not going to use the story?”
asks the hero. “No, sir,” the newspaperman replies. “This is the West, sir.
When the legend becomes fact, print
the legend.” In Worlds of Arthur, Guy
Halsall is almost certainly correct: The
legend becomes fact if you look at it
properly. Nonetheless, this is still the
West and Halsall has managed to write
perhaps the only book on Arthur this
year that will not be profitable. Such are
the trials of academics and truth tellers.
The rest of the Arthurian aficionados,
meanwhile, will shake themselves off
from the scolding, thank the professor
for his opinion, and continue to do what
they have always done: Print the legend
and be damned.
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Big Brother
At Your
Table
JULIE GUNLOCK
The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the
Politics of Your Plate, by Jayson Lusk
(Crown Forum, 240 pp., $24)
T
HERE has been an explosive
growth in government power in
recent years, from the healthcare system to the financialservices sector. Compared with such
breathtaking assaults on liberty as
Obamacare, New York mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s ban on large sodas might
seem to be an issue that conservatives
can shrug off. But Jayson Lusk’s new
book explains that government’s growing intrusion into Americans’ eating
habits should not be ignored. Politicians
now think it’s perfectly appropriate to
try to limit the amount of soda people
consume; to tinker with food manufacturers’ recipes by restricting the use of
certain ingredients (including sugar,
salt, and trans fats); to ban toys in
Happy Meals and restrict what restaurants offer their customers.
Lusk is more than qualified to tackle
these issues. In fact, his curriculum vitae
almost makes him look like a double
agent: He could easily be mistaken for the
food nannies about whom he writes. An
agricultural-economics professor at Oklahoma State, Lusk has written about food
and agriculture policy for more than 100
peer-reviewed publications and has
served on the editorial councils of seven
Julie Gunlock is a senior fellow at the Independent
Women’s Forum and directs its Culture of Alarmism
Project.
top academic journals. If this impressive
academic career doesn’t give him that
whiff of liberalism, there is also this: He
wrote the book while taking a sabbatical
in Paris.
But that Lusk is hardly a food nanny
becomes clear on the very first page,
when he says the food police are “totalitarians” who “seek control over your
refrigerator, by governmental regulation
when they can or by moralizing and guilt
when they can’t.” He explains that the
catastrophic predictions often made by
the food nannies are nothing more than
the “hysterics of an emerging elite” and
admits he’s being polite by using the term
“food police” instead of the more accurate
terms “food fascists” and “food socialists.” His tone is unapologetic when he
says that today’s food police are less like
Andy Griffith than like the Gestapo.
Lusk begins by identifying members
of the food police, who “play on fears
and prejudices while claiming the high
mantle of science and impartial journalism.” No longer just a few über-healthy
academics and public-health activists,
the modern food police now include
among their ranks talk-show hosts,
politicians, and celebrity chefs. Lusk
says “it is impossible to turn on the TV,
pick up a book about food, or stroll
through the grocery store without hearing a sermon on how to eat.”
The regulators have even enlisted
A-list Hollywood actresses to spread the
message. Joining Lusk’s book on bookstore shelves this spring is a cookbook
by Gwyneth Paltrow—but this cookbook is not just another collection of
favorite family recipes. Paltrow promotes an “elimination diet” that entails
removing a long list of items from the
family grocery list, including, but not
limited to: coffee, alcohol, eggs, sugar,
shellfish, soy, dairy, wheat, meat, and
processed food. What qualifications
does Paltrow possess that make her an
expert on human dietary health? The
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
states that to become a registered dietitian, one must pass an examination after
completing an accredited bachelor’s- or
master’s-degree program. According to
Paltrow’s Wikipedia entry, the actress
“briefly” studied anthropology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara,
before dropping out to act, but never
completed any studies in nutrition or
dietetics. This hasn’t stopped her from
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moralizing on what foods Americans
should be eating.
Lusk explains that more and more people are buying into this sort of pseudoexpertise on food issues. Once, while
giving a presentation on writing, he discovered that his audience was far more
interested in discussing food policy:
I engaged in a lively discussion with
about seventy-five graduate students and
professors of English. I wasn’t surprised
that they had questions about food and
agriculture, and I was happy to answer
them. What surprised me was the absolute moral certitude permeating the air.
Many in the room had no doubt they
were being poisoned and fattened up by
an out-of-control food system. What
facts did these folks have to bolster their
case? Nothing more than what was presented in [the 2008 documentary] Food,
Inc., along with a few innuendos picked
up in the Sunday paper. I would never
have dared question them on the finer
points of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky.
Yet they were certain that my explanations for why food is produced the way it
is were wrong.
Great self-confidence, combined with a
highly ideologized view of food issues, is
a syndrome afflicting much of the foodpolice establishment. Lusk doesn’t deny
that there are problems with food production and manufacturing in America. He
shares the food police’s “unease with the
present state of farm policy,” saying that it
is an “anachronistic throwback” that survives on “the political power of the farm
lobby” and results in such bizarre policies
as paying farmers not to farm and foodassistance programs that drive up the
price of food. But he disagrees with the
intrusive regulatory solutions proposed
by the food police:
Where I part with [food activist Michael]
Pollan and his fellow foodies is in their
conclusions that “like so many government programs—what subsidies need is
not the ax, but reform that moves them
forward.” What makes the food police
think the government will get it right this
time? They like to talk about market failures but are apparently blind to the abundance of government failures. If the
process is so corruptible by corporate
interests and mega farms, as they claim it
is, then Uncle Sam is incapable of working in our food interests, and all the
preaching of hope and change is nothing
more than smoke and mirrors.
Lusk also disagrees with the food regu-
lators’ view that the general public are
low-information eaters who lack the
smarts to differentiate between a slice of
greasy pizza and a vitamin- and nutrientrich leafy green salad. According to Lusk,
it is these low expectations that make the
regulators so devoted to “nudge theory,”
which holds that since fallible human
beings are incapable of acting in their own
best interests, government must step in to
make their lives better. Lusk says that
even though nudge theory is “pseudoscientific,” it has “permeated the highest
centralize the feeding of children by
government agencies. Hillary Clinton
famously floated this idea over a decade
ago in her pleasant-sounding yet ultimately creepy big-government love
story It Takes a Village. Most recently,
MSNBC political commentator Melissa
Harris-Perry cheerfully corrected parents on the silly notion that “your kid is
yours and totally your responsibility,”
suggesting instead that Americans view
their offspring with the “collective
notion of these are our children.”
levels of regulatory decision making” at
various government agencies and “is the
engine behind the new food paternalism.”
Food paternalism dovetails perfectly
with the regulators’ view of the freemarket system and individual freedom
in general: They believe in the need for
“Uncle Sam’s helping hand.” Lusk
writes that the food police’s “readiness
to empower government to control food
businesses; to centrally direct agricultural output through heavy taxes, subsidies, and public-agency purchasing
requirements; and to override consumers’ free choice with everything from a
gentle nudge to outright ingredient bans
is slowly leading us down the road to
serfdom.”
Government intervention is the only
solution identified by the majority of
modern thinkers on food policy. First
lady Michelle Obama’s strategy to
solve the childhood-obesity problem
was not to encourage parents to take a
greater role in their children’s nutritional development, but to increase the
number of children enrolled in federal
school-feeding programs; to, in effect,
Instead of making us better off, Lusk
warns, giving the government more
power over food decisions would “usher
in a more stagnant, less dynamic world,
and . . . breed a generation of children
unwilling or unable to imagine how to
improve their diets through mathematics,
chemistry, biology, and engineering.”
Lusk doesn’t want his children to live in
a society preoccupied with the romanticized ideas of the past, but in one that’s
innovative in how it creates and distributes food—“feeding the world’s hungry
with higher-yielding, more nutritious
crops, and developing space-age technologies that make tasty food at the push
of a button.”
Lusk makes a strong case that the food
police are a major obstacle to the kind of
innovation we need. Their intransigence
on many of the benefits of food modernization—from genetically modified food
to industrial farming and synthetic fertilizers, and even modern conveniences
such as large-scale grocery stores and
today’s shipping methods—is the kind of
thinking that will, as Lusk warns, ultimately doom us to poverty.
45
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Film
The
Place Off
The A-List
R O S S D O U T H AT
FOCUS FEATURES
W
hat are we to make of
Ryan Gosling? In certain
ways, he’s one of the premier actors of his generation—the thinking woman’s sex symbol,
the heartthrob who actually cares about
his craft, with the mix of cool, intelligence, and vulnerability that we associate with a-list leading men. Yet he’s
made disappointingly few movies that
are actually successful as movies, rather
than as showcases for his magnetism and
dramatic chops.
It’s not for want of trying: Gosling has
appeared in a lot of interesting small films
and a lot of respectable bigger ones, and
he’s single-handedly made flawed experiments more watchable and elevated
trashy melodramas above their station.
But none of his movies has united critics
and audiences in the way that true stardom usually requires. So while it feels
like he could end up in the same league
as Nicholson, Pacino, and Newman, his
filmography doesn’t merit those comparisons. he’s been headlining movies for
more than a decade, but he’s still waiting
for a Chinatown or Cuckoo’s Nest, a Godfather or Serpico, a Butch Cassidy or Cool
Hand Luke.
For a little while, his latest film seems
like it might be that breakthrough. The
Place Beyond the Pines has promising
ingredients. the director is Derek Cianfrance, who helmed Gosling’s best
small movie to date, the art-house
downer Blue Valentine. the cast is stellar—Gosling shares top billing with
Bradley Cooper, another actor obviously
hungry for an adult form of stardom; he
shares great scenes and chemistry with
the australian character actor Ben Mendelsohn; and they’re joined by Rose
Byrne, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta in
supporting roles. and Pines has big
ambitions: It’s at once intimate and
sprawling, weaving multiple lives and
generations into a story of crimes and
46
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
punishments, fathers and sons, all set
against the deep greens and rusting redbrowns of Schenectady, N.Y.
the first act belongs to Gosling’s character, Luke. We see him first as a tattooed
body headed into a carnival tent for his
motorcycle act—a wild spin around the
interior of a globe-shaped metal “Cave of
Death.” then we see him reconnect with
a local woman (Mendes) with whom he
had a fling the last time he passed through
Schenectady—and with whom, he discovers, he had a child as well. this intelligence persuades him to stay put when
the carnival moves on, and the place he
finds to crash belongs to an auto mechanic
(Mendelsohn) who happens to be a retired
bank robber. their easy friendship,
Luke’s motorcycle skills, and his desire to
provide for his kid all point in the same
direction: Soon enough he’s speeding into
arcs of both Gosling and Cooper are the
set-up for a dénouement involving their
teenage sons, their families’ buried
secrets, and the long shadow of the past.
this last leap, unfortunately, is a disaster for the film. the boys are miscast: the
lanky, pasty Dane Dehaan is believable
as Gosling’s son but not as Mendes’s,
while the pouty, puffy Emory Cohen
looks and talks more like a refugee from
a Long Island variation on Jersey Shore
than the son of Cooper and Byrne’s
WaSPy upstate couple. Dehaan at least
can act; Cohen evinces no such talent.
their story is supposed to vindicate the
movie’s sprawl and shifting points of
view; instead, it makes everything that’s
happened since Gosling ceded the spotlight feel like a waste of time. Indeed,
with the possible exception of There Will
Be Blood, I can’t think of another recent
Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and Anthony Pizza in The Place Beyond the Pines
banks instead of tents, and speeding back
out with bags of ill-gotten cash.
the robberies go well until they don’t,
at which point the movie shifts perspectives, introducing Cooper’s character, a
straight-arrow Schenectady cop named
avery with a wife (Byrne), a son, and a
powerful politician father whose shadow
he’s trying to escape. here the bankrobbery plot gives way to a policecorruption plot, in which Cooper’s avery
learns about Realpolitik the hard way,
even as his relationship with his family
frays. and then finally the story leaps
forward 15 years, and we realize that the
movie with such a stark drop-off in quality from the first hour to the last.
the ambition animating The Place
Beyond the Pines is still impressive,
and Cianfrance’s film is memorable
and immersive despite ultimately feeling like a misfire. But for anyone following its star’s not-quite-fulfilled
career, and hoping that he finds the
vehicles his talent deserves, that “not
quite, not quite” feeling is all too familiar. Once again, alas, Ryan Gosling has
made an interesting-but-flawed movie
that’s worth seeing mostly because it
has Ryan Gosling in it.
M AY 20, 2013
books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/30/2013 4:07 PM Page 47
City Desk
The Object
Of Beauty
RICHARD BROOKHISER
I
wrote for the weekly on pink
paper for 20 years, and I still
look at it from time to time. It
was the city’s perfect high-low
venue, running the gamut from auteurtheory film criticism to dirt diving (did
it mock the dirt, or just grub it up? the
satirist’s problem, from Martial on).
the last issue I saw featured a russian
lad who is about to go mega. His
project in the land of the free is to
attend dance parties and take pictures
of young women who take off some or
most of their clothing for him. He also
shakes up champagne bottles and
spritzes the foam into their yowza-ing
mouths, a service he calls the champagne facial. He then posts these pictures on his website. “I kind of had to
build a character to stand out from
everyone else taking photos” at parties, he told the pink paper. the character he built: “dark and making fun of
sluts. . . . If you post a photo of a chick,
no one cares,” but if you post it with
an insult, “then you start a conversation.”
It sounds like the punchline of a
Yakov Smirnoff joke—what a country!—but the young russian is making
a career of it. thanks to the buzz his
site generates, he gets paid to shoot
parties; soon he hopes to do coffeetable books and tV.
what caught my eye in the story was
a comment by the reporter that the
young russian “is hardly the first
entrepreneur to convince a woman to
take her clothes off.” the predecessor
the reporter cited went mega in the late
Nineties—a technological era ago—
when he shot videos of young women
who took off some or all of their clothing at Mardi Gras or spring break, and
marketed them via infomercials. You
all know the name of his franchise.
But so swift is time’s arrow that the
reporter did not cite an even earlier
predecessor, who went mega in the
Seventies, two technological eras ago.
He stalked the streets of the city in a
silver-lamé jumpsuit, carrying a video
camera over his shoulder—this was
when video cameras were the size and
weight of pig carcasses. He would ask
young women to take off some or all of
their clothing, and even to have sex
with him, then pull together both his
acceptances and his rejections and
show them on public-access tV. I
know about him because the great
Keith Mano once followed him around,
schlepping the video camera. In a lifetime of trying, Keith had found someone as indefatigable and in-your-face
as he was (Keith was a much better
writer, of course).
But the predecessors stream back
even farther than that. Priscilla Buckley
told me that she was once playing golf
with her mother when a man asked to
play through. Mrs. Buckley was notably
cold to him, Priscilla asked why. “He is
Harry thaw,” Mrs. Buckley said curtly.
Harry thaw—the socialite who beat a
murder rap by pleading insanity, now
free on the links. the crime for which he
had been unpunished: shooting the
architect Stanford white in the restaurant atop the old Madison Square Garden. His motive: white had seduced
Mrs. thaw when she was a model and
chorine, taking off some or all of her
clothing, so that white and his artist
friends could paint her, photograph her,
or otherwise enjoy her company, many,
many technological eras ago.
eras change, the dance never. the
young women may be chorine/models
or dim-bulb pedestrians or drunken
revelers or dancing publicity hounds,
but they all possess the human form
divine—more exactly, the female human form divine, which is divinest.
Sorry, Donatello’s David, sorry, gay
men: You’re outvoted, you lose. women
are what the world goes round, and we
have been going round them since the
Venus of willendorf. Genesis says there
is a father God back behind the generative process, but as far as we can see we
all come from women and we just can’t
turn away.
the young women who attract so
much attention never change: they are
all stupid. they have at best only the
crudest notions of their own power,
and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a
young woman’s body makes as much
sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.
the artists never change. they may
be great architects or creepy auteurs or
sleazy promoters or sleazy auteurpromoters. But they are bound hand
and foot, sinew and synapse, to their
subject, the female human form divine.
Feminists and other moralists may say
they are exploiters and users. they
wield the paintbrush, box camera, video
camera, digital camera; they occupy
the power position, gazing the male
gaze, which is omnipotent. why then
do they all gaze at the same thing,
instead of, say, Arcturus? whose position is truly powerful? only the stupefying ignorance of young women
prevents them from comprehending
the stupefying emptiness of the men
who cluster round them.
empty, not untalented. the real abilities of artists are widely misunderstood. they are often credited with
intelligence and, since the romantic
era, originality, but these are not their
attributes. Most artists have no intelligence (and whether they have it or not
is irrelevant) and none have originality. their great merit is getting the job
done. they work hard and they hit
their marks. when some geezer, looking at art he dislikes, says, My threeyear-old could do that, he is exactly
wrong. Neither his three-year-old nor
his 30-year-old could do that. Art is
done by artists.
they need the guidance of patrons
and tradition, though, or their art, however competent, will be meretricious:
impulsive, lowest-common-denominator.
ride them with a whip and artists will
give you Mary Magdalene or the three
Graces. Let them go and you’ll get
sluts in clubs.
I knew the pink paper would not disappoint.
47
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Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Jihad Abhors a Vacuum
we in the omniscient pundit class
were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all
Chechen experts.
Strictly between us, I can count what I know
about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I
was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish
Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely selfdetonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb.
His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the
London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at
Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed
cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview. All
things considered, I’m glad the poor fellow pre-activated in
his hotel room rather than delivering his package in the
midst of my photo shoot. His name was Lors Doukaiev, and
he had traveled from his home in Liège, Belgium, in order
to protest the Mohammed cartoons by exploding a bomb on
September 11. Got that? A citizen of Belgium is blowing up
a newspaper in Denmark on the anniversary of a terrorist
attack on America.
So whatever was bugging him didn’t have a lot to do
with Chechnya. In Boston, before he was run over by his
brother and found himself committing the jihadist faux
pas of greeting his 72 virgins with tire tracks from head to
toe, young Tamerlan Tsarnaev had apparently put on his
Amazon wish-list the book The Lone Wolf and the Bear:
Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. Yet
while the Chechen-nationalist struggle has certainly
become more Islamic in the last two decades, it’s a bit of
a mystery what it has to do with Jutland newspapers and
Massachusetts marathons. Lors Doukaiev and Tamerlan
Tsarnaev were young men in their mid twenties who had
lived in the West for much of their lives. Both were boxers. Aside from the fact that Lors was one-legged and
Tamerlan wasn’t, the quotes their friends and neighbors
offered in the wake of their sudden notoriety are more or
less interchangeable: “He was perfectly integrated. He
was jovial and very open.” That was Fabian Detaille,
young Doukaiev’s trainer at the Cocktail Boxing Club in
Droixhe, speaking to Belgian radio, but it could just as
easily have been one of Tamerlan’s boxing buddies on
NPR in Boston.
The Washington Post covered much of the Tsarnaev narrative under the headline “A Faded Portrait of an Immigrant’s American Dream.” The story is about what you’d
expect from the headline but the “faded portrait” is fascinating—a photograph of the family before they came to
America: young Mr. and Mrs. Tsarnaev with baby
Tamerlan, and Uncle Muhamad with a Tom Selleck moustache and Soviet military uniform. If you only know Ma
Tsarnaeva from her post-Boston press conferences as a
head-scarfed harpie glorying in her sons’ martyrdom and
P
OST-9/11,
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).
48
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
boasting that she’ll be shrieking “Allahu akbar!” when the
Great Satan takes her out too, the “faded portrait” is well
worth your time: Back then, just before the U.S.S.R. fell
apart, the jihadist crone looked like a mildly pastier version
of an Eighties rock chick—a passable Dagestan doppelgänger for Joan Jett, with spiky black hair and kohl-ringed
eyes. She loves rock ’n’ roll, so put another ruble in the jukebox, baby!
Then she came to America and, after a decade in
Cambridge, Mass., returned to her native land as a jihadist
cliché—pro-sharia, pro-terrorist, pro-martyrdom, proslaughter. She arrived here as Joan Jett, and went back all
black heart.
The Tsarnaevs were a mixed marriage. Pop was
Chechen, Mom was Dagestani, from the Z-list stan on
Chechnya’s borders. But there’s really no such thing as a
“Dagestani.” Dagestan is a wild mountain-man version of
Cambridge, celebrating diversity until it hurts. Its population includes Azerbaijanis, whom you’ve heard of,
because they’re from the stan that thinks it’s a jan. The rest
of the guys are—stan well back—Avars, Dargins, Kumyks,
Laks, Rutuls, Aghuls, Nogais, Tsakhurs, and Tabasarans.
Oh, and Lezgians, a mountain tribe of fearsome female
warriors high on fermented yak’s milk. I’m making that last
bit up, but for a moment you weren’t sure, were you?
Dagestan has everything except Dagestanis. They’re all in
Ingushetia, maybe.
For the last decade, I’ve been lectured by the nuanceyboys on how one can’t generalize about Islam, and especially about Islam in the West: There are as many
fascinating differences between Mirpuri Pakistanis in
Yorkshire and Algerian Berbers in Clichy-sous-Bois as
there are between Nogais and Lezgians in Dagestan. No
doubt. But, whatever their particular inheritance, many
young Muslims in the West come to embrace a pan-Islamic
identity. The Tsarnaev boys, for example, fell under the
influence of an “Australian sheikh.” That’s to say, a sheikh
born in Sydney. While back in the Caucasus in 2012,
Tamerlan is rumored to have met William Plotnikov, a
Toronto jihadist whose Siberian parents are such assimilated Canadians they winter as Florida snowbirds. When
they came back, they found a note from William saying
he’d gone to France for Ramadan. And thence east, to his
rendezvous with the virgins.
Like the photographs of Mrs. Tsarnaeva then and now,
these are stories of dis-assimilation, of secularized
Easterners who in the vacuum of Western multiculturalism
search for identity and find a one-stop shop in Islamic
imperialism.
Either that, or it’s the local gym. Like Lors and Tamerlan,
the Aussie sheikh and the Canuck terrorist were boxers. For
African-Americans, boxing used to be the way out of the
ghetto. For Western Muslims, boxing is apparently the way
out of Cambridge, Mass.—and straight into jihad.
M AY 20, 2013
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