May 15, 2008 10:52 AM
Democrats and race
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Instapundit points to Ann Althouse who, investigating The New York Times on the West Virginia primary, comes to this melancholy conclusion.
“White. White. White. Race. Race. Race. Oh, you Democrats. You’ve really made a nice place for yourselves.”
That about sums it up. Who was it who pointed out that in the 19th century the Democrats were [...]
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May 14, 2008 05:30 AM
Obama and the other intellectuals
by Michael Weiss
One is unlikely to find a criticism of Barack Obama jotted in the pages of Jewcy magazine, my old digital shtetl up until a few months ago. But at the risk of interrupting the lovefest for a flawed national politician, allow me to add to what has already been said about Obama's interview on the Jewish Question with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. From a terse Q&A, Jewcy's Politics Editor Daniel Koffler has found a "deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience [sic] than any previous presidential aspirant" has hitherto embodied -- a statement that would be too silly to countenance were it not for the presumptuousness behind it. Koffler of Tea Neck, NJ might know something about the American Jewish experience, but how much? And what of the Israeli?
I've long thought that Obama needed rescuing from some of his more lock-step supporters, particularly those who credited him with moral maturity for not renouncing Jeremiah Wright in Philadelphia, then subtracted none of the credit after he did just that weeks later in North Carolina (and after nothing new was disclosed about the nasty pastor except the audacity of his booking schedule). This is a willingness, if not an eagerness, to be easily pleased and to have one's bias confirmed almost effortlessly.
But let's see now, Obama can namedrop Leon Uris and Philip Roth to a humorous American-Israeli journalist and suddenly he's an honorary member of Team Chosen! I can't wait until he compliments the continental breakfast at the King David Hotel and becomes the man to grab fate by the foreskin in Judea and Samaria...
I was rather struck by Obama's laughable assertion that a Jewish camp counselor gave him his short course in Altneuland utopia, and that the work of Roth and Uris filled in the rest of the blanks on Diaspora and Zionism. However, left out of Koffler's post is the fact that Goldberg cited both of those writers in his thoughtful Atlantic cover piece on the future of Israel, which Obama was good enough to admit he had read prior to sitting down for the interview. And even if he had come up with these allusions unbidden, what would that prove besides an ability to seize upon any proffered conversational trope for the sake of impressing his audience? Obama may well be the candidate to beat on ensuring Israel's security and keeping up antipathy toward Hamas, but the foregoing demonstrates his charisma and nothing more.
Though in saying so, I'm reminded of how dangerous that charisma can be when intellectuals who ought to know better find themselves in thrall to it.
John F. Kennedy's cultural tastes plumped in an easy-bake oven built for him by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and he famously collected artists and novelists and mandarins in order to strengthen his candlepower vicariously. Nothing like having a genuine brain in the White House with a real guest list. (One ingathering of Nobel winners gave posterity the not-bad line that the executive mansion hadn't seen such an assembly of intellects since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.) For the most part, though, the valets du pouvoir required little convincing to come running to the Round Table, which is why the whispers about "Camelot" took so long to expire after its knight errant did. The two honorable exceptions to this ignoble rule were the two finest literary critics then working in America: Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin.
Thus a 1962 dinner at the White House featured Kennedy inquiring of Wilson what his new book on the Civil War was about. Wilson referred him to the Introduction. Strike two came when the president then asked about another volume Wilson had authored on the Iroquois. Faced with an author's unlikely resistance to gibber on about his own work, particularly to someone who clearly hadn't read it, Kennedy added: "I suppose I'll have to buy it?" "I'm afraid so" came the cold reply from the owlish man of letters in what I would term the finest instance of Wilsonian idealism. (Wilson also joked, upon hearing Kennedy refer to Robert Frost as America's Virgil, that this made the meretricious president a modern Octavius. A real "knee-slapper.")
Similarly, in an effort to buck Kazin's forthcoming critical piece on him and his claque of dittoing eggheads, Kennedy and Schlesinger, who knew the number two critic, invited him over for state niceties. Offer accepted. But upon reading the only mildly toned-down result of their intervention -- Kazin's brilliant political essay, "Kennedy and the Other Intellectuals," which chided the cognoscenti's herd-like worship of a seeming bright young thing who nevertheless unintelligently invaded Cuba and brought the country to the brink of nuclear holocaust -- Jack joked to Schlesinger: "We wined him and dined him and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him, and later I told Jackie what a good time she missed, and then he went off and wrote that piece!" Some aren't so easily charmed by superficial learning or the throwaway reference, yet the temptation in intellectuals to abase themselves before executive power is strong and persistent.
The Goldberg interview might indeed have taken a more interesting turn had Obama furnished us with a few clues as to what, exactly, in Roth he found edifying about the Jewish American experience. Self-hatred? The transcendent nature of the handjob? Prostate cancer? (I'd seriously considering supporting him if he dilated at length on any of these promising topics.) As for Uris, how many discriminating yes-we-canners just threw in the towel in Hyde Park upon hearing the author of Exodus mentioned as a literary mentor? Elitist, heal thyself.
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May 14, 2008 11:00 AM
Robert Rauschenberg: Dadaist for the Masses
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
The artist Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday, age 82, at his home in Florida. The Hosannas were loud and predictable. Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, spoke for the terminally infatuated when he praised Rauschenberg as an artist who “time and again reshaped art in the 20th century,” whose work “gave [...]
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May 13, 2008 04:09 PM
The most intelligent ticket in town
by James Panero
This evening marks the season finale of year two for the monthly Intelligence Squared debate series. Imported from England, IQ2US brings Oxford-style debate on a host of controversial issues to Manhattan's Upper East Side--an area of the country often sadly deprived of open discussion and disagreement. Last year The New York Times ran a profile of the man behind IQ2US, Robert Rosenkranz. The series is regularly sold out, and this evening's debate, on the harvesting of human organs, is now standby only.
The debates are recorded for NPR and broadcast on the Sundays following each event. DVDs are also made available for each debate, and last month's debate is now for sale. The resolution was "Islam is Dominated by Radicals." If you are looking for speaking points on the radicalization of Islam, I highly recommend it.
One of the interesting features of IQ2 is the ability of the audience to vote by remote control on the resolution, once before and again at the end of each debate. The breakdown of last month's debate, when announced, drew gasps from the audience. Before the debate, 46 percent of the audience agreed with the resolution that Islam is dominated by radicals, 32 percent disagreed, and 22 percent were undecided. After the debate, 73 percent agreed, 23 percent did not agree, and 4 percent were undecided. This was, unofficially, the greatest shift in any IQ2 poll, and it speaks to the persuasiveness of the argument that Islam is, indeed, dominated by radicals. A very interesting debate on a very important topic. You can purchase the DVD of the event here, and learn more about IQ2US here.
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May 13, 2008 12:13 PM
Myanmar and telescopic philanthropy
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Here’s a shocking admission: I haven’t given a moment’s thought to the carnage in Myanmar (or “Burma,” as I continue to call that far-off place). Should I berate myself for this cold-heartedness? After all, everywhere you turn you find people loudly declaring their solidarity with the unfortunate victims of the cyclone there. The death toll [...]
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May 12, 2008 02:30 PM
Beyond 1968 (or, 2 1/2 cheers for the 1950s)
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
In an essay in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio offered a useful corrective to the obsession with 1968 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that fateful year. It really was fateful, but Donadio is right to point out that much that we associate with “the Sixties” really had its origin [...]
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May 11, 2008 01:47 PM
More lunacy from theTimes, or why an Islamic supremacist is not like Bill Cosby
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Earlier today, I reported on The New York Times’s cheerful story about “mad pride,” the effort by various lunatics (I use the term in the way Mr. Blotton used “humbug,” in its Pickwickian sense) to reverse the unfair stigmatizing insanity by embracing their madness, so to speak. Just as certain homosexuals now proudly employ the [...]
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May 10, 2008 12:54 PM
Some disadvantages of sainthood
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on Obama’s “new messianic rules of engagement,” posted a brief observation on “the advantages of Sainthood.”
he talks about supposedly illiberal Pennsylvanians as a racial group or quips “typical white person”, associates with the racist Wright, and counts on a solid base that votes 90 percent along racial lines, [...]
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May 09, 2008 11:16 AM
Hillary channels Glenn Close
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
From Madatoms (via Instapundit). A story whose title says it all: “Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party.”
It’s 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees “Hillary” on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing [...]
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May 08, 2008 06:51 PM
Mac like me
by Stefan Beck
Heather Mac Donald’s new essay “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?” is finally available online at City Journal, and is a must-read. Another must-read: this instructive peek at the psychology of a cops-are-racist true believer, courtesy of good ol’ Mother Jones.
If you believe that the criminal justice system is racially biased, you need to know Heather Mac Donald.
She’ll mess with your mind and make you either up your politico-cultural game or admit you were wrong. . . .
And how will she “mess with your mind,” exactly?
Just about every one of her pieces is a statistical and analytical tour-de-force, while we liberals tend too often to mouth liberal pieties like inside jokes. Just yesterday, I was listening to Angela Davis . . . on my car radio. I agreed with nearly everything she said, but they were dissatisfying lefty bromides, one and all. Racist criminal justice system. Slavery was bad. War in Iraq. The crowd whooped and hollered, but where was the beef, the analysis, the facts? Forgive me Angela, patron saint of the streets, but Mac Donald would have had you for lunch. . . .
[Mac Donald is] among America’s harshest critic of blacks. Harshest and most devastating; unlike most of the right-wing blovio-sphere, home girl does her homework. . . . I read her religiously—even have a Google alert set up in her honor—much the same way one looks for dismembered limbs and blood stains at an accident scene while knowing one shouldn’t. One will only get upset if successful and MacDonald upsets me every time because with every piece, she sets out to prove that the only problems blacks face are of their own making.
She doesn’t mess around. Her City Journal latest is a devastating response to the liberal shibboleth that the criminal justice system is racist and designed to criminalize and incarcerate blacks en masse.
The author, Debra Dickerson, goes on to praise Mac Donald for her “thoroughly documented” claims (what a novelty!) and for “the attention she pays to internal dissent from the conventional wisdom within the black community itself, a voice which liberals tend to muffle so as to continue the war against the criminal justice system.” You could be forgiven for thinking this was a piece in favor of Heather Mac Donald. It’s really a call to ignore or trivialize evidence that contradicts your prejudices:
However much crime blacks commit, Mac Donald refuses to consider for even a moment that racism itself is the (yeah, I’ll go there) root cause of black crime. Either blacks commit more crimes because they’re inherently violent and criminal or there’s another reason—a bedrock racism that segregates, undereducates, and marginalizes them in every way come to mind. Is it so hard to imagine that a hated group responds with disfunction [sic]? For Mac Donald—yes, it is.
Yet this question has nothing to do with Mac Donald’s thesis, which is simply that “the continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school—and out of trouble.” Nevertheless, Dickerson doesn’t think twice about a smear: If Mac Donald illuminates “the complexities of life in the inner city,” she does so “for all the wrong reasons.” The title of this post is “Know Your Enemy”—the enemy, one supposes, being the unpleasant truth.
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