lloydtown 

The Notebook: Young People learn new skills?

I joined my wife in watching The Notebook, which she had rented. Jim Garner and Gena Rowlands as an elderly couple, struggling to recall their young romance.

OK, I get cynical about chick flicks.

Young Allie (Rachel McAdams) and young Noah (Ryan Gosling) re-discover each other after some years apart. They are still only about 25. She is engaged, so she faces a big dilemma: rich fiance or good old exciting Ryan?

She goes to the huge plantation house he has superbly re-furbished. They spend a couple of nights together. One morning she sleeps in, and finds out he has left her a completely outfitted painting studio as a surprise. Still dressed only in a sheet, she paints up a lovely picture--before lunch. Let's see: the sun was high in the sky when she got up: 9:00? 10:00? That's fast work. I missed the beginning; maybe she took a lot of art classes, but it would be a lot funnier if this was the first time she ever put brush to canvas.

Which gets me thinking: what about all those skills he needed to re-furbish the house? When we first meet him he does basically unskilled labour at a sawmill. Now he is able to do every kind of carpentry and finishing work? OK, I see that there is a connection: wood. His dad lives with him for a while before he dies--presumably his dad had a lot of skills. Otherwise he seems to do everything totally on his own. Maybe he was able to keep repeating the same day, like in Groundhog Day, expect that work he did on the house would stay?

Let's ring some more changes. She spots some rust on his old truck. Goes to the library and reads up on auto body repair. The next day, she rents the tools she needs: cuts, welds, sands, primes, paints. Still has time to make him a nice sandwich for lunch.

Gourmet cooking: they laugh a lot, and mean well, so how hard can it be?

French poetry, again like Groundhog Day: this hick from the South, if he applied himself, could come up with this: "La fille que j'épouserai..."

This is kind of an immense boomer fantasy. The skills that make life rich and full--vaguely like the old aristocrats, combined with self-reliant homesteaders--can't be all that difficult to acquire. Martha Steward plus all those home repair shows.

Weapons? What Weapons?

1. Bush's State of the Union, January 2004:

We are seeking all the facts - already the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day.

U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN.

The United States is taking steps to determine how it received erroneous intelligence that deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was developing and stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday.

"Our friends and allies had the same intelligence that we had when it came to Saddam Hussein," he said. "Now we need to continue to move forward to find out what went wrong and to correct those flaws.."

Bush Women at State

From Rich Lowry at the Corner, linking to The Note:

When the word came out that Karen Hughes was coming back to DC, many people speculated she would be in the White House; but she is joining Condi Rice at the State Department. So is Dina Powell, and Liz Cheney.

Announcement here.

With a bit of exaggeration: the most intelligent women Bush knows, except for his wife, are all working at State. Maybe they are all thinking big things are possible there.

Meanwhile Tim Cavanaugh at Hit and Run speculates that Colin Powell was really a screw-up at State, pure and simple--even that he was the major cause of the "unilateral/insensitive" perception that was usually blamed on Bush.

Hmmm.....

From the Soongs to the Nicolsons

Back to my reading again.

The Soong family ran China, or were the figureheads for the criminal gang that ran China, from the 20s to the 40s. Chiang made it to Generalissimo partly because he had cut his teeth with the Green Gang at a young age, and partly because he married May-Ling Soong (and converted to Christianity). Ching-Ling, widow of Sun Yat Sen, was an important figurehead who was encouraged not to go far, but her sympathies were with the peasants, and eventually with the Communists. Big sister Ai Ling married a rich man, H.H. Kung, and helped him get even richer. The Soong brothers also got rich.

Much of the "Lend Lease" money from the U.S. that was intended to help fight the Japanese almost certainly went into the pockets of these people and their more subterranean allies. Chiang saw the peasants as either sheep to be plucked, or obstacles to be destroyed: he sacked or starved out more than one significant area of China. Did they cause the disappearance and murder of a lot of people, even those they had worked closely with, to maintain their own position? Sterling Seagrave suggests they probably did.

What concerns him most is that these people knew how to manipulate American public opinion, and keep the dollars flowing. May-Ling spoke English with an accent from the U.S. south (a bit like her father before her). She was heard to say there was nothing Chinese about her except her face. Yet for many magazine-reading Americans, the Soongs were the real China, nobly opposing both the bad old Communists and the Japanese.

This is a gloomy book. Even if the U.S. in some sense chose the wrong pony, what was the alternative? The idea seems to be, once again, that some of the Communists might have been quite moderate, and even held an election or two, if only the U.S. hadn't been so mean to them.

And didn't Chiang or his heirs eventually build something decent in Taiwan?

Meanwhile I've started Harold Nicolson's diary--abridged in one volume, with some stuff that didn't appear in the larger work.

Nicolson had a career as a diplomat, then as a literary person, then kind of in politics--he was probably seen as a dilettante in all these fields. He saw every Brit who was famous in the 30s socially.

His son says in an introduction that his father, unlike more famous and maybe greater diarists, lacked meanness. But there are some shots. Churchill comments on what it's like to tour the U.S.: "The difficulty of drink and food. One never got real food, only chicken." (Later Nicolson and his wife go on a speaking tour, and are served only water to drink--they are told this would be true even without Prohibition. Nicolson likes the health benefit, proving what a hippie he was compared to Churchill).

A large party gathers at Chequers, the PM's country place. PM Ramsay MacDonald is called away to London, and then rushes back. Already exhausted, he struggles to introduce the Prime Minister of Canada (R.B. Bennett), and then says "my brain is going." Those damn colonials; who the hell can remember them, anyway?

On the other hand, Nigel Nicolson, the son and editor, or a junior person who made up the index, mixes up two wives of Sir Oswald Mosley, the famous fascist. Lady Cynthia or Cimmie appears in the early pages, dies by p. 57, and yet is somehow back on p. 208. No, this is wife no. 2, Diana, one of the famous Mitfords.

Bush: Not Quite Fighting for Human Rights Everywhere

A kind of surprising piece I found through Drudge: Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett interviewed by the People's Daily Online (China).

But if you look at the different parts of the world, it would be very difficult for the Bush administration to argue that they do not apply same standards to different parts of the world. Clearly US is a great ally of Pakistan and Saudi Arbia, which are not democracies. US has a very complex relations with China, which is not a democracy either by American standard. The issues that were once on the top of that relationship, like human rights, were no longer on the top any more. If you still remember last time when US President talked about human rights in China as a major issue between the two countries, that has been a long time ago. So I think it is true there are different standards applied to different places. In that case You could call that hypocrisy or whatever labels you thought fit most appropriately. But it is clear that the US government's ideas of political development around the world is not applied equally in all places. I am just observing that as I look out how political development in different countries operates around the world.

jews, catholics, and biotechnology

This piece by William Saletan strikes me as really excellent journalism: some of the debate behind the deliberations of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Jews emphasize questions, with few answers (like Socrates and Leo Strauss); Catholics offer more answers (like Aquinas). Jews are more likely to accept abortion--at least until viability or so. Catholics are more likely to overcome the "yuck" factor on the new biotechnology advances, and actually recommend some of them if the lines are clear. Jews are more likely to be cautious and uncertain.

One Jew says Catholics have "a ridiculous faith in reason." I guess this means: a faith that the old tension between reason and revelation has been resolved.

Politics and Love of Truth

David Greenberg criticizes The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (a book I haven't read) in Slate.

He admits that even many prominent conservatives have criticized and even disavowed the book, but he still want s to say the success of the book says something about conservatism today:

For a while now, conservative elites have made common cause, sometimes cynically, with populist anti-intellectuals. Once upon a time, the original neoconservatives—the academics and intellectuals around the journal the Public Interest—rested their critiques of liberalism on penetrating social science scholarship and attacked the left for preferring bleeding-heart sentiment to polemical rigor. But now the Public Interest is defunct, and in the Bush years, conservatism has embraced not only the familiar ridicule of the eggheads but a rejection of the very legitimacy of independent, nonpartisan expert authority. The wisdom of legal professionals, such as those in the American Bar Association, is now denied, and, since George Bush took office, no longer used by the White House in evaluating candidates for federal judgeships. Mainstream journalism, such as that in the major newspapers and network news shows, is deemed liberal, slanted, and unreliable. The faith-based belief in creationism, enjoying renewed support of late, is accorded equal (or greater) weight as the scientific theory of evolution.

It was only a matter of time before this kind of thinking spread to history. Politics has always colored the ways that people interpret the past, but The Politically Incorrect Guide politicizes history in a new way, reducing all scholarly inquiry to a mere stance in the culture wars. "Everything (well, almost everything) you know about American history is wrong," states the book's back cover, "because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact." Conservatives who believe in open intellectual pursuit understandably blanch at the popularity of a book like this. The problem, however, isn't a lone piece of agitprop but a cynical alliance that conservative intellectuals forged with those who hold their ideals of scholarship in contempt. It's not surprising that the anti-intellectual currents they've aligned themselves with are proving too powerful for them to control.

Spreading Democracy (again)

In the rationales for invading Iraq, the U.S. tended to emphasize WMDs first, links to al Qaeda second, and liberating non-Americans third. The main reason for liberating non-Americans, as Bush has said, is that no American can be safe at home until all non-Americans are free, or something like that. What used to be a fantastic, utopian project, divorced from self-interest and common sense, is now the most practical way to prevent another 9/11.

At some point many Bushies must have realized there were few WMDs, if any. Probably no one with any credibility ever thought Saddam had nukes, or would have them soon, or was working directly with al Qaeda in any way. So the official pretexts were more than half smoke. Why were the Bushies so comfortable with them? Of course, the pretexts polled well--many Americans were comfortable with them. Beyond that, though, all these pretexts kept emphasizing to Americans: it is our safety that counts; we are not wooly-minded humanitarians. The implication always was: if we can win the war on terror without liberating Iraqis, or even by making their lives considerably worse, of course we will do it. (When I heard Bill Kristol in Toronto, he said something like: maybe Iraq isn't going so well; there are other countries). Many of the neo-cons, at least, don't believe that progress is possible if many countries are sacrificed--they really believe greater safety for Americans at home, and indeed for everyone, comes with spreading democracy.

I have to give Christopher Hitchens credit for his support for Wolfowitz on this. Hitchens still clearly has some loyalty to the Palestinians, and to almost any Communists. He hasn't shed his old campus politics, even as he has become a kind of Bushie.

But in this interview he is clear about what he likes in Wolfowitz, and it shows he was willing to see things "shaken up," in the hope that democracy would emerge, almost everywhere.

Wolfowitz and Kissinger disliked each other and disagreed very strongly with each other for a long time. I think the origin of the disagreement and the origin of Wolfowitz's political career is that he argued it was important to dump the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Base or no base, let it go and take the chances that this would have a ripple effect in the rest of Asia, which was just what Kissinger didn't want. As a result, there were outbreaks of democratic insurgency, starting with the Aquino election, in South Korea, in Taiwan, eventuating in Tiananmen Square, in fact, in 1989, which of course, Kissinger also opposed and took the side of the Chinese Stalinists. On the Middle East, the victory of the neo-conservatives is very paradoxical, because contra Bush, Eagleburger, Bush Sr., Scowcroft -- I've just mentioned, by the way, the two leading members of Kissinger Associates -- and others, Colin Powell. The argument of the neo-conservatives, or at least of the Wolfowitz wing, was, "We can't go on like this, running the Middle East as a kind of political slum of client states. We have to take the chance that destabilization would be worth it in the long run." That's what, that's still why the extreme right in the country, people like Buchanan and others, oppose it. Precisely for that reason. They and the pro-Saudi conservatives. To the extent I'm a neo-conservative, it would be because they're the only ones willing to take the radical risk of regime change.

While such stalwarts as Pat Buchanan and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were allied with the angels, Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, The National Review's John O'Sullivan and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal enlisted in Bill Clinton's cluster-bomb crusade and clamored for a ground war.

Whatever else he may be, Milosevic is no threat to the West. However objectionable his methods, in trying to thwart the establishment of another Islamic republic in Europe, he was doing us a favor.

When the Cold War ended, some conservatives forgot how to think strategically. Firepower should be saved for real threats (China, for instance), not wasted on conflicts that don't concern us.

There is, strange to say, an anti-nationalist element on the right, epitomized by The Wall Street Journal, that views nation-states as obsolete and envisions a world without borders governed by free trade and market principles.

Whenever a group like the Serbs threatens this emerging order by putting love of country and attachment to the land above the globalist vision, it becomes necessary to bomb them to an appreciation of international harmony.

Getting in the Mood

I know this is a bit sophomoric, but I can't resist.

For other animals, missing social cues can cause problems. For many years, zookeepers had trouble breeding the white rhinoceros. Though they were often exhibited in male-female pairs, the animals rarely reproduced. In the wild, the white rhino lives in small herds; it turns out that a male needs to interact with a number of females in order to be properly aroused. Much of the difficulty breeding white rhinos disappeared as zoos began to keep them in larger groups.

A number of other factors can contribute to problems with captive breeding. Keepers might clean up waste too quickly and remove an important odor that signals fertility.

The social tensions particular to zoo life can distract males from reproducing—a male guenon in a dysfunctional family group, for example, can become so preoccupied with aggressive behavior that he ignores the females. Aggression might even be directed out of the animal's enclosure and toward animals of a different species in a nearby cage.

Spreading Democracy

Shorter Ann Althouse: if Bush's critics were truly pro-democracy, they wouldn't complain so much about the use of WMDs as a pretext for war; they'd be glad Saddam was overthrown, and the liberation of the Iraqis was at least an important motive for Bush.

If we go back before 9/11 for comparison, I think we can see that there was no significant political movement in the U.S. that wanted to intervene in any foreign country, except possibly the neo-cons. Not even the neo-cons wanted to do so primarily for humanitarian reasons; many of them were scornful of Clinton's efforts in ex-Yugoslavia because they seemed to have no motive except a humanitarian one.

UPDATE: Correction:

[blockquote]Unlike many Republicans, neoconservatives supported using force to protect the Kosovar population of Yugoslavia and criticized President Clinton for not acting fast enough and ruling out the use of ground troops. However, there was one issue that galvanized neoconservatives more than any other: Iraq. Throughout the nineties, neoconservatives consistently advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a democratic Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz played a key role in this: he coauthored a Weekly Standard article in 1997 entitled “Overthrow Him [Saddam Hussein]” and in 1998 he signed a letter to President Clinton from PNAC that urged the President to turn his attention “to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.”[/blockquote]

Conservatives, including Bush, wanted to take care of things at home--and a lot of people around the world could remain unliberated in the process.

Liberals have pretended to be open to all cultures, and it sometimes seems they are indifferent in a way between their own country and way of life and a bitter enemy. I think they actually want the world to become exactly like them as quickly as possible--but they believe more or less peaceful progress is the best way to achieve this. Old-fashioned war isn't their cup of tea, they don't identify with the military, and in fact they fear that a war will bring the wrong kind of people to the forefront, at least temporarily.

Bushies are now all for war, and it seems true they genuinely want to liberate the whole world. Who can object? But they are careful to say their fundamental motive is self-interest: America can't be safe until the whole world is a democracy, or something like that. Everything truly foreign, in principle, is a threat to the American way of life, and therefore should be stopped if possible. This doesn't mean they are committed to any kind of total war; the fall of Communism among other events has convinced them this is not necessary.

In fact the two sides are not so different. They want the world to live and think like them: right now. The left is willing to wait, flattering themselves that they are subsuming and therefore sharing the wisdom of Confucius, the Buddha, and Mahatma Ghandi, while they actually want everything non-Western, especially when it comes to the treatment of women, to disappear. They actually think of foreign aid as a kind of campaign in this war.

Conservatives have been roused from their isolation and indifference. Some things that are definitely foreign are definitely a threat; other foreign things might be. So it is desirable to spread Western-style democracy and capitalism; force will not hurt, and might help.

Maybe blue-staters are hoping for a blue state version of unversal freedom, and red-staters are hoping for a red-state version. But it's hard to see that one side consists of heroes of freedom, who really care whether billions of people are free; whereas the other side is morally indifferent or worse. The red staters may be a bit more honest--or closer to being honest.