Worse Than the French

“What the French election revealed is that in France, as in
the United States, there are a lot of angry people. ...

What are the angry people angry about? Not economics;
peace and prosperity did not reconcile them to Bill Clinton
or to Mr. Jospin. Instead, it seems to be about traditional
values. Our angry right rails against godless liberals;
France's targets immigrants. In both cases, what really
seems to bother them is the loss of certainty; they want to
return to a simpler time, one without that disturbing modern
mix of people and ideas.

...

Now for the important difference. Mr. Le Pen is a political
outsider; his showing in Sunday's election puts him into the
second-round runoff, but he won't actually become France's
president. So his hard-right ideas won't be put into practice
anytime soon. In the United States, by contrast, the hard
right has essentially been co-opted by the Republican
Party—or maybe it's the other way around. In this country
people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr.
Le Pen's are in a position to put those views into practice.

Consider, for example, the case of Representative Tom
DeLay. Last week Mr. DeLay told a group that he was on
a mission from God to promote a ‘biblical worldview,’ and
that he had pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in
part because Mr. Clinton held ‘the wrong worldview.’ Well,
there are strange politicians everywhere. But Mr. DeLay
is the House majority whip—and, in the view of most
observers, the real power behind Speaker Dennis Hastert.

And then there's John Ashcroft.

What France's election revealed is that we and the French
have more in common than either country would like to
admit. There as here, there turns out to be a lot of
irrational anger lurking just below the surface of politics
as usual. The difference is that here the angry people are
already running the country.”
                    — Paul Krugman, New York Times, 4/23/02




See the people, dull and dim, pull
Voting levers for the simple,
Like some dreadful, pussy pimple
     On the body politic.
Angry at the loss of certain,
With the rightists they are flirtin’
When they step inside the curtain:
     It’s enough to make you sick.

Skeptical about the Euro?
Dubious of EU bureau-
Crats who seem to make a thorough
     Hash of everything they do?
Tired of hearing Muslims boast of
How they’d like to make French toast of
All and sundry of their host, of
     Whom they have a jaundiced view?

No, there can’t be reasons for it;
Lightly stir and gently pour it
Into vessels used before: it
     Sure beats thinking twice a week.
Bad as was the French election,
U.S.A.’s on worse direction,
Prompting thoughtful, sage reflection:
     Tom DeLay and Ashcroft: Eek!

Now Courage Call, and Dark Concerns Dispel

“We can all remember when the Mideast was not a crisis
but rather an unanswered question: How will they find
peace? It was a place that in our lifetimes had not achieved
amity and accord but was not always at war, at least not
always in full, hot war.

But now everyone—literally everyone you read, hear, speak
to—has the sense that events are accelerating toward
some unknown outcome. And no one—no one—believes the
outcome will be good. We are out of optimists and optimism.
The scenarios floated are dire. ‘Watch Lebanon,’ says the
ahead-of-the-pack Charles Krauthammer. Hezbollah in
southern Lebanon has 8,000 Katyusha rockets; they have
already threatened to hit Haifa. If they do, Israel will
answer, and not only in Lebanon but possibly in Syria,
where the Hezbollah receives support. Syria would likely
strike back with chemical weapons. Israel would answer
unconventionally. And Armageddon is launched.

Tuesday night I bumped into a celebrated foreign-policy
genius at a birthday party for a friend. He told me he
thought that President Bush is doing well, has not yet
made any serious mistakes. I said I agreed, and that I
thought any effort that buys us time is good. By ‘us’ I meant
the world. He surprised me with his vehemence. ‘There is
no “land for peace,” ’ he said. ‘There is only land for time.’

‘This is not solvable,’ he added. And he had spent his life
trying to solve international problems.

...

It is easier to fight than to pray. In fact it's much easier to
fight than to pray. It's one of the reasons we do more of
the former than the latter.

...

Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you
for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if
things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any
case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what
we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best
answer but the only one.”
                — Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 4/12/02




Now courage call, and dark concerns dispel:
The closed racecourse of fear is better quelled
Than let to run. The shadow has been there
A time; we slept in comfort, unaware.
When now we wake, it casts a fearsome form
That seems a portent of some dreadful storm.
Fear not: the light does it, not us, offend:
It is our waking that will make its end.

Great lands are not brought down by such as these:
The lost and damned, whose god they seek to please
With godless hate; this swarm of all that fails;
This lie-fed multitude; this tribe that wails
About their plight, while dreaming of a day
When cheap and easy greatness comes their way;
This ignorant and falsely guided crew,
Who would be great, but know not what to do.

Our land has geniuses you do not know:
Its ways grow bumper crops as apples grow
In autumns crisp. Trust the land of your birth,
The land where freedom’s power blooms, in mirth
And in righteous wrath. It will do no harm
To pray, but put your faith as well in arms
Of power greater than despots’ ambition:
Free people, by the millions, with a mission.

The Marvelous Lie-Detecting Machine

“In the wake of the FBI's embarrassment at having one
of its own caught spying for the Russians, ... FBI Director
Robert Mueller announced that the FBI will dramatically
increase the use of lie detectors, beginning with more
than 1,000 of its employees. Such a move would be a
substantial mistake. ... [N]o scientific evidence exists
demonstrating that polygraph screening tests, whether
administered during the application process or as part of
a routine security reinvestigation, have any validity.
Studies undertaken for the Department of Defense's
Polygraph Institute, which trains FBI polygraphers, reveal
that screening tests fail time after time. In fact, the
polygraph determines whether a person is lying with
accuracy only slightly greater than chance. Moreover,
studies have repeatedly shown that the polygraph is more
likely to find innocent people guilty than vice versa.”
               — Mark S. Zaid, Washington Post, 4/16/02




Wouldn’t it be marvelous if there were a machine
By which the moral nature of a person could be seen?
          To see pens making squiggles,
          And markings dancing wriggles,
          And needles doing jiggles,
          And pixels drawing wiggles,
And by such means a person’s state of virtue quickly glean?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that machine could tell
The lying from the truthful ones, and do it very well?
          By readings pulmonary,
          Constrictions capillary,
          Dilations pupillary,
          Recordings coronary,
Could shine a brilliant light that made the fog of lies dispel?

Wouldn’t it be curious if such machine could be?
If everyone betrayed the same when under third-degree?
          If every fabrication,
          Fallacious formulation,
          Deceitful declaration,
          Evasive explanation,
Would cause the same response inside of him and her and
   me?

Wouldn’t it be requisite, for us to think it works,
To treat the deeper twists within as unimportant quirks?
          A conscience untormenting,
          Reality resenting,
          Taxonomies inventing,
          Excuses all fermenting:
Ignore the sly deceivers that in hidden chambers lurk?

Woe Is Mo

“At the opening of ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ last month,
a successful New York guy I know took me aside for a
lecture that was anything but sweet. He said he had wanted
to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages,
but nixed the idea because my job made me too intimidating.
Men, he told me, prefer women who seem malleable and
overawed. He said I would never find a mate, because if
there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her
critical faculties. ...

[Sylvia Ann] Hewlett, the author of ‘Creating a Life:
Professional Women and the Quest for Children,’ observes,
yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. ‘Nowadays,’
she says, ‘the rule of thumb seems to be that the more
successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a
husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true.’ ...

So the moral of the story is, the more women accomplish,
the more they have to sacrifice? The problem here is not
only that women are procrastinating too long; it is that men
veer away from ‘challenging’ women because they have an
atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship. ...

If men would only give up their silly desire for world
dominance, the world would be a much finer place. Look at
the Taliban. Look at the Vatican. Now, look at the bonobo.
Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in the equatorial rain
forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy
existence. And why? Because in bonobo society, the
females are dominant. Just light dominance, so that it is
more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes. ...

There's no battle of the sexes in bonoboland.”
               — Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 4/10/02





     No man will have her:
She’s far too challenging to know.
     Fifty’s not nifty
With no hubby, no kids in tow.
     It’s all so unfair:
Men should be more like bonobo.

     Those smart pygmy chimps
Know how to run a proper show:
     The gal chimps on top,
The happy fellas down below.
     Life would be just fine
If men were more like bonobo.

     She-chimp rule is light:
It’s a dominance more like co-;
     Equality, really.
How happy if men would forgo
     Their Taliban urges
And be more like the bonobo.

     And how sharp, that Mo,
Critical faculties aglow:
     Only simpletons
Think we tend to reap what we sow;
     Boldly she dares dream
Of men transformed to bonobo.

The New Sophists

“Members of the Norwegian committee that awards the
annual Nobel Peace Prize have launched an unprecedented
verbal assault on Israeli Foreign Minister and Nobel peace
laureate Shimon Peres. ... In an interview with a Norwegian
newspaper, committee members said they regretted that
Mr Peres' prize could not be recalled because, as a member
of the Israeli cabinet, he had not acted to prevent Israel's
re-occupation of Palestinian territory. One member said Mr
Peres had not lived up to the ideals he expressed when he
accepted the prize. ‘What is happening today in Palestine is
grotesque and unbelievable,’ said Hanna Kvanmo. ... Oslo
Bishop Gunnar Stalsett, a committee member for the past
eight years, describes as ‘absurd’ what he sees as the
involvement of a Nobel laureate in human rights abuses.
Other committee members argue that the Israeli
government's actions in general and Mr Peres' involvement
in particular are threatening to bring the prize into
disrepute.”
                                          — BBC News, 4/5/02




The Sophist Thrasymachus said: Might makes right,
In Plato’s Republic’s first book;
That justice belongs to the strong in a fight;
No rebuke need the mighty brook.

Then Socrates told of his doubts (at great length)
That justice inheres in the strong,
As he showed (one would think) that weakness and strength
Aren’t related to right and wrong.

In these vastly enlightened times, there are those
Who agree with the Sophist Greek,
With a minor inversion: the side he chose—
They think justice belongs to the weak.

The wretched and poor can't do wrong—don't you see?—
The successful can do no right;
The downcast are blameless, new Sophists agree:
All is justified by their plight.

Set off nail bombs in pizzerias? That’s fine:
The losers can never do wrong.
Blow up a Passover Seder? It’s benign:
How else can the weak fight the strong?

The problem with Hitler was power, it seems:
Impoverished Hitlers are fine;
We ought to indulge them in their noisy dreams
Of a Judenrein Palestine.

And when Israelis decline to play their role
In this happy, bloody dream,
And fight as they must, with survival the goal?
“It’s grotesque,” invert-Sophists scream.

They tell us it’s justice and peace they proffer,
That it’s peace and justice they crave.
To Israelis, the only justice they offer
Is the wasteland peace of the grave.

Like a Four-Car Pileup from Which
the Sensitive Avert Their Eyes

“Virginia, I am thinking of writing, uncharitably, about
Blogistan in general, although I have followed your work
for some time and would pick a nit, much less a quarrel,
with you only against my better judgment. But really—
what is the signal-to-noise ratio here? You, Kaus, keep
the coherence level high day by day, but ... after that,
le blog-uge.”
          — Alex Beam to Virginia Postrel, 3/31/02



“James, weren't you once a talented humor writer? Why
are you churning out this web dreck? I can't tell if these
bleats about Rod Serling or the Palestinians are diluting
your humor work, because I can't claim to know it well
enough, but I certainly have my suspicions.”
          — Alex Beam to James Lileks, 3/31/02



“The Web loggers' main shortcoming is their compunction
[sic] to ‘say’ something several times a day, consequences
be damned. ... Another cloying attribute of bloggers is
their intense admiration for other bloggers. Many of their
Web sites link to one another's, which serves to build
collective audience. But clicking beyond the above-
mentioned writers, or the likes of Virginia Postrel and
Mickey Kaus (both too smart to write every day), lands
you in the remote wilds of Lower Blogovia very quickly.
Over the weekend, for instance, Postrel posted a link to
Norwegian revolutionary (!) Bjorn Staerk's bizarre
recommitment to left-wing raving: ‘This new blog is
dedicated to the coming revolution, and the age of peace
and equality it heralds.’ (More Staerk: ‘Noam Chomsky
is a brave man, and how he escapes imprisonment in
that horrible police state he lives in is beyond me.’)”
          — Alex Beam, Boston Globe, 4/2/02



“Conspicuous flaming idiocy .... [I]ts hilarious misreading
of Bjorn’s April Fools page was delicious. A masterpiece
of the genre.”
          — James Lileks, 4/3/02




He’s the ‘62 Mets of the features page,
The de Havilland Comet of the modern age.
As solid as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,
As sure as the Exxon Valdez, or Tom Ridge.
He’s the fourth Stooge, Charlie Brown without the nice,
The Titanic steaming madly toward the ice,
The Ottoman Empire of the copy desk,
With head so marbleized it’s quite statuesque.
Of prose pros in Beantown, he’s the shoddiest,
Of all Hub nimrods, he’s the nimroddiest.
He’s the ornament of the All-Schlump team:
Hail King Alex, news crap-out supreme!