lloydtown 

Bush on Steroids?

Of course this seems ridiculous. (See Bruce Reed, The Has-Been: The Cream and the Clear). But it might explain his neurological symptoms:
1. He's less articulate than he was when he ran against Ann Richards.
2. He falls over a lot.
3. 2 or 3 hours of exercise per day is obsessive. He's trying to stay off the booze, but is there something more?

Two Movies

My wife rented The Upside of Anger. A chick flick, of course, but really quite good. I join the ranks of admirers of Joan Allen. She always seems to be listening to some inner voice, yet she gives quite a bit to the people around her. She makes you want to follow and see where she goes. Kevin Costner is surprisingly good.

I rented Bottle Rocket. For some reason both my wife and my son were convinced they wouldn't like it, so I watched it alone. I was inspired by the piece in Slate on Wes Anderson--the kind of thing they do so well. The basic idea is that Anderson was at his best when Owen Wilson was his co-writer. Exhibit A for the problems with Anderson on his own is supposed to be the recent The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou starring Bill Murray.

Bottle Rocket is a nice, indy-type movie. Partly these guys are trying to show that much of the human race isn't brilliant in any way. How do you tell the story of non-brilliant people and their genuine successes? People are struggling with this all the time in modern democracy. One joke about David Adams Richards is that he makes inarticulate people extremely articulate. I guess this is even a big part of Tarentino. Arguing about some aspect of pop culture or etiquette--like whether to tip, or how much. Also like the conversation in Cheers.

I guess I'm often more drawn to the humour of someone who is fairly bright and articulate, albeit damaged, in a world that is crazy as well as inarticulate. Frazier and Lilith on Cheers, even Diane, more than Norm and Cliff. Fawlty Towers, I think Father Ted. This is meaner in a way: how did I get stuck with all these clods? But there is still the underlying theme that we are all damaged in some way, we all deal with the same issues.

More Waugh

A few favourites out of many funny and/or interesting bits:

Waugh was amazed that Brideshead Revisited was as popular in the U.S. as it was. The book was (and is) predictably despised by a lot of sophisticated intellectuals (why is Waugh now in favour of slightly stuffy Catholics? Oh, he is one). There is an ongoing debate about whether the parts of the book really fit together--but for that matter, there were similar questions about A Handful of Dust; a member of the English gentry ends up in the jungle, forced to read Dickens aloud to a madman. How does this fit with the England/London story in the early parts of the novel? Waugh had an answer: everywhere he turns, Tony is surrounded by savages.

On Brideshead, he writes (1946) "I am delighted that you liked Brideshead. I was pleased with it at the time but I have been greatly shaken by its popularity in the U.S.A." (p. 222)
"My book has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can't be...." (p. 223)

This is all background to his book The Loved One--some would say, his best. He went to California to consider an offer for the movie rights to Brideshead. He eventually turned down an offer of $125,000. He wrote his literary agent from California (1947) (p. 247):

I am entirely obsessed by Forest Lawns & plan a long short story about it....It is an entirely unique place--the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else. It is wonderful literary raw material....MGM bore me when I see them but I dont see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians who are the only people worth knowing.

The ideas I had in mind in writing were: 1st and quite predominantly over-excitement with the scene of Forest Lawn. 2nd the Anglo-American impasse--'never the twain shall meet', 3rd there is no such thing as an American. They are all exiles uprooted, transplanted & doomed to sterility. the ancestral gods they have abjured get them in the end.

I was most surprised to learn...that you are only now 50. I always supposed that when you came to Oxford ... you were at least that age. It is a great thing to be old and I am sorry you are not older. Still you have passed the watershed & that is everything. Downhill now all the way into deep pasture & long evening shadows. I am still struggling up the last false crest & salute your vanishing silhouette.

End of Terror in Ireland?

I'd like to see someone do a real review of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and see whether they fit a lot of Bush's statements about "terra."

Total casualties, over several decades, on both sides: perhaps 3,500. Innocent civilians killed? Yes, although the IRA always said they really tried to avoid this. (At least until some of their thugs killed a Catholic guy in a bar simply for "dissing" them somehow).

Was the issue religion, a fanatical strain of religion (not what Bush and Blair would call "true" religion), occupation by military forces, or what? I guess largely occupation, but with lots of doses of religion, fanatical and otherwise.

Was there a real cultural split between the two sides, reinforced by differences in wealth, technology, "success" in the world? Historically, yes. The Protestants of Northern Ireland were modern and rich; the Catholics at least of the South were old-fashioned and poor. (Ireland is now a very rich modern country). Lots of Northerners, Brits and Protestants could be found to describe Irish Catholics in much the way Bushies describe Islamofascists.

Did a more or less political/military movement cross over into mere crime and lawlessness, both organized and not? Yes.

Was there a foreign power that was a source of funding and weapons for terror, and even worse, kept reinforcing the messages that the occupying forces were evil, murder was justified, etc.? Yes: the United States of America. Were parochial schools in the U.S., to some extent, madrassas for terra?

Hasn't William F. Buckley engaged in his share of anti-British propaganda? Mel Gibson? Without even getting into the Irish Catholics of the U.S. in general. Wasn't this support for terra?

I turned around to look at Woodstock and ....

Ann Althouse, just after the British police shot a man to death, apparently for not stopping:

Is it not true that yesterday's sad mistake has already solved the problem it represents? In fact, a further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him.

Recruitment

The U.S. Army is proposing raising the recruitment age to 42. Still plenty of time for Jonah Goldberg, age 36, to sign up. Boot camp might kill him, or flatten him for a while, but now he will have time for several attempts.

Glenn Reynolds is still too old at 45. Perhaps he could lie about his age? (UPDATE: As many doughboys have done in several wars?) (From his reports, it seems that he's in good shape, and thus much more likely to survive boot camp than Goldberg).

Young Republicans in general apparently don't want to sign up. They seem to have intuited, as the White House is now confirming, that there isn't a Global War on Terror (GWOT) underway after all; instead there is a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE). Soon it may be a Big Effort Against Isolated Bad Guys (BEAIBG), and then Just Plain Hard Work (JPHW).

UPDATE: the article I link to above says: "Congress also is being asked to raise the maximum recruiting age to 42 for all services - just four months after raising it from 35 to 39 for National Guard and Reserve recruits, but not for active duty troops."

It may seem unfair to single out Goldberg, but he has entertained some of the debate on the question of whether he should enlist:

[blockquote]I mentioned in passing that "a few" of the reasons I never signed up before the war were my age, my financial situation, my brand new baby daughter and my physical condition.... [snip] I never said these were the "only" reasons I didn't sign up. Merely that these were among them.... [snip] I've received lots of email from folks who sincerely believe - for one reason or another - that I was saying my family or my financial situation was more important than those of the soldiers, marines and airmen in Iraq who also have families and, often, even greater financial challenges. So let me just say here that this was never my intention nor my meaning. If I gave that impression, I'm sorry. While obviously my family is everything to me, I have never thought in those terms.[/blockquote]

But then by way of a follow-up, perhaps getting closer to the real or deepest reason for not signing up, Goldberg says: "...the fact that I am too old to enlist seems to bounce off of most of these people (to serve at my age I would need to have already served before or be in the reserve)." This now seems, er, no longer operative.

Goldberg is relatively honest, but Hobbes was more honest. He said government has the right to recruit troops to fight, but the real reason anyone submits to government is to protect one's own life. The paradox can be resolved by finding people who actually want to fight, and paying them to do so. But then Hobbes didn't kid himself that he was a great patriot. He boasted that when civil war broke out, he was "the first of all that fled." He had no sympathy for those who had suffered exile as a punishment. As long as you get your three squares, and some freedom to move around, he insisted, exile is no punishment.

Finding volunteer soldiers is just like recruiting for the police and fire departments, as important as those are? This is the Chris Hitchens "let's have another drink" argument, and it works--as long as we are living in relatively, even remarkably, peaceful times, and not, say, in a GWOT.

UPDATE: Since I am reading the letters of Evelyn Waugh: Waugh managed to enlist in the Army at the beginning of World War II, at the age of 36--although his application, even using influential contacts, was rejected several times. He was certainly no athlete. At first he thought his duty would be both exciting and glorious; he more or less expected to be killed. Then the days and weeks of monotony set in, punctuated mostly by false alarms of actual battle. The other men were never very congenial to him. He kept running into Randolph Churchill, and got thoroughly sick of him. The last straw: when British troops finally started real fighting, no one really wanted an aging amateur officer such as Waugh.

As he became disillusioned, and appalled at the need to cooperate with the Bolshies, he applied himself more and more to his writing, and actually wrote Brideshead Revisited more or less while in the service. This became his focus, so he kept trying to get a combination of leave and soft service that would allow him to finish the novel. All the Army could think of for him by this time was that he could be ADC to a general; he tried several. One comment to his wife on March 9, 1944: "So the new general is very much less assuming than Tomas & fully appreciates, or appears to appreciate, the importance of a gentleman leading his own life." So maybe that's it: it's not Hobbes at all, but the necessity of a gentleman leading his own life, even with a war on.

What's Funny About the Dutch?

My friend Peter asked me about this, about the time that Austin Powers Goldmember was in the theatres. It seems to go without saying in that movie that Goldmember is pathetic and ridiculous, just because he's Dutch.

Here's Mike Myers in an interview:

Goldmember's a Dutch guy who is a bad guy. He's from the '70s. He runs a club called Studio 69. He's a type of Dutch guy that you see at the beach that wears a terry cloth banana hammock, and has a lotion bag filled with various lotions and a cell phone and wet naps.

The phrases "Dutch act," meaning "suicide," and "Dutch uncle," meaning someone who is not your uncle but gives you advice as if he were, are both linguistic relics of a low point in relations between England and The Netherlands. Back in the 17th century, when both countries were building their global empires, their intense rivalry found an outlet in a wide range of popular sayings invented by each country to insult the other. Since we are primarily an English-speaking culture, the few volleys in this linguistic war that have survived are, naturally, those disparaging the Dutch, but even those are rarely heard today. Some, such as "Dutch uncle," were probably originally meant to be more insulting than we consider them today.

According to Hugh Rawson, who explores the topic at length in his wonderful book "Wicked Words" (Crown Publishers), many of the English anti-Dutch terms became popular in the U.S. because of confusion with the word "Deutsch," or German, and were often applied to German immigrants. For the connoisseurs of insults among us, Mr. Rawson lists more than two pages of anti-Dutch slurs once popular. Along with "Dutch treat," which means no "treat" at all because each person pays his or her own way, other phrases once current included "Dutch courage" (liquor), "Dutch defense" (a retreat), "Dutch headache" (a hangover), "Do a Dutch" (commit suicide), "Dutch concert" (a drunken uproar), and "Dutch nightingale" (a frog), which seems an especially low blow.

Creationists

I agree with Ron Bailey: it is a shame that decent people, who want to bring their children up with salutary moral teachings, consider it necessary to deny much of modern science in order to do so.

This is also part of a larger split among our elites. Harvey Mansfield wrote some years ago of the split between the intellectuals, especially centered around the humanities, and the money-makers or business people. More and more they have become distinct groups, instead of friends and relations with a common education, who end up with a greater or less interest in one activity or another. They see each other as threats, and since we live in a democracy, they appeal to the demos or the common people: "Those other people are an elite who are hostile to your interests." To some extent the business people say: "the intellectuals want to raise your taxes for wasteful and/or immoral programs," and the intellectuals say "the business people want to leave you at the mercy of the worst employer, landlord and retailer you can find." The business people in the U.S. have made an alliance with social conservatives, and they talk about values, going beyond tax cuts. Right now it doesn't seem to be so much abortion or gay marriage, big as they are, but "leadership." Intellectuals have fallen into an unfortunate habit of sounding like the village atheist: all that stuff is bunk!

Then you have the military (officers now skewing Republican), the clergy (evangelicals to the right, blacks including evangelicals, and others, to the left). Part of the complaint of the creationists is that mainstream churches accepted modern science as part of the same process by which they gave up proselytizing for any of the statements in Scripture. Creationists think that in order to restore the latter practice, it is necessary to deny science. So the clergy who are most successful at gaining adherents will be totally divorced from the secular university, the sciences as well as the humanities?

More on Outlaw Mormons

I heard something about this on CBC Radio today, as I drove to an event:

Among those who may have been reallocated are some of Winston Blackmore's family. Blackmore is the former bishop of Bountiful. Jeffs demoted him last summer before wresting control of the government-supported Bountiful elementary-secondary school from Blackmore and his followers with the help of a B.C. Supreme Court order.

Jeffs is doing all of this, says Shurtleff, under the threat that people will burn in hell if they don't comply and under Jeffs' threat that he will bring back "blood atonement." Blood atonement is the sanctioned murder of "sinners" by slitting their throats and disembowelling them.

Some Utah legislators have warned that FLDS under Jeffs is no different from Afghanistan under the Taliban.

What to do about Terror

More and more, pundits and bloggers are lining up on the questions of what caused the bombings in the UK, and what to do about them.

Lefties, and isolationist Pat Buchanan (in today's Toronto Star: registration), ahve discovered the work of Robert Pape. "Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think...." The secular Marxist Tamil Tigers may have originated the suicide bombing using a vest, and the Palestinians who took it up had little to do with Islamic fundamentalism. The most consistent theme with groups using this tactic is to cause a democracy to withdraw its forces from a specific territory. That doesn't mean it is always easy or right to withdraw; some Palestinians obviously want the Israelis to "withdraw" from all of Israel. But to a remarkable extent, where withdrawal has occurred, suicide bombings have ceased or almost ceased: for example, U.S. and French troops withdrawing from Lebanon, and Israel pulling back to a six-mile buffer zone.

Glenn Reynolds, not surprisingly, takes the pro-war position: it is Western societies that have lost their will to fight and win that invite attack. The correct response is always the same: show our determination and toughness, and fight again. This approach could be expected to show a certain lack of concern as to which countries, exactly, it is right to attack; Bush has shown exactly that lack of concern or awareness, and Reynolds still seems to have no problem with that.

There is obviously a left-wing version of Savanorala's line, as cited by Machiavelli: the war that comes to us is a punishment for our sins. But there is also a right-wing version, which allows people to think they are tough and ruthless like Machiavelli: it is our softness and lack of preparedness that have invited attack.

To the extent that we know what Bin Laden knows or thinks about anything, he seems to have become very concerned about U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, allegedly desecrating the sites that are holiest to Moslems. By comparison he has never said much about the Palestinians, or "Islamic fundamentalism" in general. The Bushies in the White House seem to have quietly acknowledged all this--I believe they have been dismantling U.S. bases in Saudi, in favour of new ones in Qatar, Bharain, and now Iraq. Yet they allow their supporters to keep saying "we've got to be tough! no backing down!" while justifying the war in , er, Iraq.

It may or not have been true right after 9/11 that we had all become Israelis. Today the resemblance between us and Israelis seems stronger.