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A while ago I posted what is probably a stale cliche--that China and India are bound to take over soon.
Robert Kaplan on Slate discusses a CIA report that comes to similar conclusions.
The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players--similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century--will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.
In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"--probably the single most powerful country--but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"--not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others--will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.
There's some talk about Europe becoming more important to much of the Third World than the U.S., partly because the euro is doing well against the dollar right now. This I think is more of a long-term kicker:
...China is displacing the United States all across Asia--in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.
How long-term are we talking? It's still striking that the U.S. is the only country with big aircraft carriers--and it has 12 or so. I like the story about how China asked to tour one of them--probably with the most advanced technology sealed off. The Americans responded that the Chinese could see anything they liked--probably expecting that they would be amazed and intimidated. Indeed, the story goes that the Chinese returned home and said: don't bother even trying to build one of those things. It costs the economy of a good-sized country.
As far as I know, the U.S. is also practically the only country now with a real air force--maybe Israel has one as well.
So there is reason for skepticism.
But then Mark Helprin weighs in--the Republican who did at least some work for Bush senior, and has consistently had doubts about the present Iraq war. (Link from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ).
By taking intelligent advantage of the fertile relation between economic development and military capacity, China will be able to leverage its extraordinary growth into superpower parity with the United States. Without the destruction of Chinese social and political equilibrium, this is only a matter of time. And just as we had no policy for dealing with the rise of Germany, Japan, and (prior to the late 1940s) Russia, we have none here.
But with the exception of South Korea, which chafes under our protection and may eventually break from the fold, our major allies in the Pacific are islands, and conveniently in this regard our strengths are the air, the sea, space, and amphibious warfare. We have not since the Korean War been able to face China on the mainland, but if we vigorously augment what we do best, we and our allies--by deterrence and maneuver rather than war--can hold the chain of islands well into the coming century or longer, after which our objective would be to contest the open ocean. China's objective is to establish a defensive line to the east of the chain, and it is building up its navy accordingly. But we, to prepare for the coming maritime century in the Pacific, are forcing naval strength to its lowest levels since the 1930s.
Hold the chain of islands and contest the open ocean? Those aircraft carriers will come in handy. At any rate, Helprin takes for granted that Bush, the next time there is a student protect in Beijing, is not going to send in troops.
Helprin also predicts problems with old-fashioned, i.e. non-terrorist-induced epidemics.
There have also been comments recently that it is India--with its English language and political traditions--that will grow more than China--and that there is a natural alliance between India and the U.S. See Glenn Reynolds here, and John Derbyshire here.
UPDATE: It's hard to resist a joke. From a real news story--India plans to send an unmanned mission to the moon, we get from Fark: "India plans two moon missions. First will map lunar terrain, second will establish call center." And we can spin it out from there: soon a software consulting shop.... (via Hit and Run)
For some reason, I can't get access to my blog to work on it from my home computer. I'm now at the public library, where everything worked. When I e-mailed the support folks, they said it worked from their end as well.
Frustrating.
Now to see if I can open some e-mail to access material that I meant to post.
Terry Teachout definitely captures something: when some of us were young, it was a big deal to stay up and watch Carson, on a good night he seemed really "on" and funny (or he allowed his guests to be funny), and the band was great. It was an enjoyable slice of Hollywood. Yet once the tube was turned off--to say nothing of years later--what can anyone remember? It gives "ephemeral" a new meaning.
Joseph Epstein wrote in an essay once (I don't remember which) that he thinks everyone is reduced in scale somehow by appearing on a talk show. To dramatize his use of "everyone," he says: even Katherine Hepburn, the way I might say: even Sigourney Weaver.
It used to be a cliche that you wouldn't want to be trapped in an elevator with an actor. Yet more and more, that seems to be exactly what people do want.
One obit has a nice touch about how Carson could ad lib when things went a bit awry--especially during the monologue. Coming out of the curtain, centre stage--he had at least a little theatre training. If the laughter was flat, and then there was a bit more nervous laughter, he might hold up his hand and say: No, I don't want your pity. And that would get a laugh.
I saw a few minutes of This Week yesterday. George Will said Bush's speech was nothing truly new--everything in it could be found in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson would be comfortable with it. Bush was also compared to Truman--he seems to have a "Doctrine" like the "Truman Doctrine," although some of his defenders are denying that.
Jefferson/the Declaration: Would Jefferson really have said: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands"? I don't know, this seems to be part of "9/11 changed everything." Before 9/11, Bush could be an isolationist Republican: we're powerful enough that we don't really have to worry about anyone else--and God knows, we don't want to. After 9/11, he has no choice but to spread democracy over the whole world in order to prevent future attacks. Or something.
Kevin Drum has some comments on a book which, by the sound of things, may have been influential as Bush's speech was written: The Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P.M. Barnett.
[blockquote]...the primary division in the world today, he says, is between two sets of countries that he calls the Core and the Gap. The Core consists of advanced countries that play by the rules and are committed to globalization (primarily Europe, North America, and Japan) plus countries that are committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some others). The Gap is everyone else: a collection of disconnected, lawless, and dangerous countries such as Colombia, Pakistan, and North Korea, plus most of the Middle East and Africa. [snip] American military action since World War II has been confined almost exclusively to the Gap, which means the task of the United States over the next several decades--and in particular the task of the United States military--is to shrink the Gap and eventually convert the entire world to the values of the Core. Only then will America and the rest of the current Core be safe.[/blockquote]
This is different and more realistic than the Inaugural. It is really only Gap states that are threatening--because they are failed states, unusually or cruelly tyrannical, they harbour terrorists or collaborate with them, they have nukes, etc. Core and near-Core states, even if they're not "free" by American standards, are rational actors, and everyone is fine with giving them lots of time to become more free. Fareed Zakaria says something similar in Newsweek.
As for the Declaration, you don't have to be Michael Moore or John Kerry to notice the phrase "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." I'll link again to some comments by Nathan Tarcov in an essay published in the 80s. (I don't know if Tarcov would still say the same things or not). He says it would be better if presidents didn't have doctrines. The Declaration encourages or authorizes one sovereign or potentially sovereign people to help another people achieve their freedom. But Tarcov stresses that this is really a counsel of prudence. There should be a pretty clear resistance movement, with well-known leaders, in existence. A rebellion should be more or less underway; as Locke says, when war is waged on behalf of the just rights of a people, against a tyrant, it is the tyrant who has literally "re-belled," or returned to war. The "foreigner" should be helping the resistance, not taking over. And there should be some caution as to what counts as "the expression of the people." An election is not necessarily reliable, and a very broadly supported government might not hold elections.
Tarcov goes so far as to say there is "no right" to "vindicate [the] violated rights" of another people "without having conscientiously weighed the costs to all innocent parties, the precedents and consequences, and the power, will, and opportunity to win."
Of course, in today's world an election may be a kind of moral trumps. Otherwise, the Americans might say that in a case like Iraq they were pretty sure there would be a good-sized resistance movement--if not led by Chalabi, who still hasn't disappeared completely, by someone. The Shiite leaders are acting in a very statesmanlike fashion--not supporting violence, even in retaliation for Sunni attacks, and promising that if they win a majority in the election they will support a secular, pro-American leader such as Allawi or Chalabi. The Shiites seem quite experienced by now at working with Kurdish leaders, and they are all reaching out to Sunnis as much as they can.
So it was reasonable to hope and expect that invading would bring about a legitimate expression of the will of the Iraqi people, and voila! so it has come to be.
I still haven't gotten to Wilson, and now I have to catch up with the Truman analogy.
Joe Knippenberg, who was a fellow student of mine in grad school, has written very favourably about Bush's speech here.
Honestly, my first reaction to the idea that Bush's speech had something in common with Lincoln's Second Inaugural was: you've got to be kidding. (Woodrow Wilson is something else; I may have to come back to that).
As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln reminded everyone that slavery was evil, and abolishing it was a noble cause; but in the best-known part of his speech, he strongly urged "malice toward none." It was reconstruction and reconciliation that were most important--as in South Africa recently. To prepare for this thought, Lincoln argued that fault wasn't only to be found on the side of the South; neither the North nor the South could fully grasp, or carry out, God's plan. There was fault on both sides, so forgiveness is logical as well as necessary.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.
Here's Harold Meyerson.
Matthew Yglesias has posted lots of interesting comments on Tapped. I especially like this one, referring to comments by Condi Rice that agree with the Bush speech:
Freedom is good; the United States is free; we want a balance of power that favors freedom, so we must create a balance of power that favors the United States. That's quite the sleight of hand, and I'd even deem it clever, except the actual policies undertaken in its name don't seem to have actually improved our position in the balance of power or done much to spread the blessings of liberty.
This reminds me of the ancient Spartans: they would always say quite blandly that they would never do anything unjust; even more ambitiously, they could be counted on to defend justice, even far from home. The latter was certainly not true, the former was dubious. Rather than admit to any problems, which might undermine their morale, they simply fell back on asserting that anything they did was just, and anything they failed to do was not required by justice. A slight dusting of your fingers, and you're done.
Yglesias says Bush has said very similar things before, and his phrases have never led to a change in U.S. policy, or even been connected to facts on the ground in any meaningful way. So much for comparisons to Lincoln, Kennedy, and for that matter (I suspect) Wilson.
At least two commenters on Bush's speech have linked it to Frances Fukuyama's argument, most famously captured in his book The End of History and the Last Man, that liberal, capitalist democracy is close to conquering the entire world. Oh yes, there would be that little problem of Islam to clear up .... (See Chris Suellentrop here, Roger Kimball here, Matthew Yglesias here; a gung-ho editorial in the Arizona Republic here).
The argument at least has a relationship to Hegel: tendencies that had earlier seemed contradictory, end up being synthesized into something different from, arguably better and more rational than, the older component parts. (Maybe its senility, but this suddenly reminds me of Dune, too). Every new synthesis--every major stage (never really constant or motionless) of civilization, somehow expresses human reason and attainment better than earlier ones; and we are now approaching the final one. Even Hegel wasn't convinced this was altogether a good thing; he said "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk"--the complete wisdom he had attained, because he lived at the time when it was becoming real in the world, could be seen as the end, rather than the beginning, of something great. In his Philosophy of Right he describes a modern constitutional, liberal democratic government (in some ways more European than American), which is stable and effective, but primarily protects individual rights. One might think we would be best off if this regime just keeps chugging along; but Hegel says we need a good war every so often.
Nietzsche radicalizes the downside of this argument: it is social democratic man, who wants no real struggle or challenge in life, who is taking over. Social programs to ease every transition or difficult decision in life; a pill to improve one's mood; a suicide pill when it all gets to be too much; tepid and limited relationships between these largely affectless yet self-absorbed individuals. Nietzsche refers to the culmination (apotheosis?) of this human development as "the last man"--picking up on Hegel's thought that "history has ended," but emphasizing dramatically how terrible that is for any real human accomplishment. Nietzsche looks forward to a war bigger than we have ever seen, in which all sides take huge risks: "a good war justifies any cause."
Bush defenders might say: it is blue state voters and Western Europe who want all those social programs; we want to cut back considerably on any guarantee of a comfortable retirement for workers, to say nothing of the chronically unemployed. We believe in standing on your own two feet, and allowing for the considerable influence of dumb luck (which in a way is the voice of God).
The best defence of Bush might be: he's not really a theocrat or mullahcrat at all; his speech isn't really a call for a democratic jihad. Like Reagan, he only believes a certain proportion of what he says, and he hides even from himself what that proportion is, or even that it needs to be calculated. Sistani in Iraq says he wants all law to be based on Islamic law, but he doesn't want the rule of the mullahs as in Iran. Maybe he and Bush aren't so far apart--and maybe this "red state" thinking is quite different from the last man. It certainly seems true that some degree of "red state" mixture of modernity--technology--democracy--old fashioned tradition/religion is much more prevalent in the world at large than Western European/blue state cool unenthusiastic secular rationalism. To paraphrase Anne Roche: how wonderful for the children to be shown an empty cradle at Christmas, so it can be carefully explained to them exactly why it is empty.
But somehow, looking at Bush, it seems to be all about feeling good. A little talk about God and "character" just makes the political gruel a little bit thicker--just thick enough to defeat liberal Democrats, who do seem to be floundering these days as to what they really stand for.
UPDATE: In fairness, the passages about character:
In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.
From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?
Partly this is Bush's way of saying: my sexual morality is impeccable, unlike Clinton's. And of course: I'm brave in fighting terrorists and tyrants, unlike Kerry. Somewhere in the middle: I identify with social conservatives, including pro-lifers.
Not much point in adding updates to that last, long post:
Ann Althouse:
[blockquote]Following the theory of the Declaration, [Bush] sees God as creating liberty, but his vision for the future, presented idealistically in the speech, is that the human love of freedom is what will prevail, as he promises to come to the aid of people all around the world. I'm sure Bush skeptics will see that promise as disastrously ambitious, but it is a beautiful promise, and those who hate Bush so much were once the people who themselves spoke of beautiful ideals. [/blockquote]
Especially since it comes so close to one of her reminders of her love of 60s (rock) music, this is close to saying: the only people who will give you real hippie talk any more are the Republicans. Literally, it used to be the left who said: the future is coming soon; everyone will be free; there may be a last few wars, but we will engage in them grudgingly, and only to achieve universal freedom; freedom can't possibly be a bad thing. Archie Bunker would watch on TV and say, more or less inarticulately: that's pie in the sky--and not very tasty pie. Now the Republicans are living a Billy Jack movie, and throwing a party.
By some segue, this in turn reminds me of Sandra O'Connor's famous defence of the abortion liberty (Planned Parenthood of SE Pennsylvania v. Casey; quoted in Lawrence v. Texas by Anthony Kennedy):
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
As Austin Powers would say: Yeah, baby.
UPDATE:
"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." A sense--arguably paranoid--that no American will be safe until the whole world is a democracy.
"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Cue some of that terrible Bacharach and David music (their worst collaboration) from Lost Horizon.
Update: here's a link to the music in question. I'm thinking especially of "It's a Small World" and "Living Together, Growing Together." Lyrics here.
Until I went looking, I assumed for years that "It's a Small World" also came from that musical; but apparently, it was created within the Disney empire. Now I'm hunting for "Sing, Sing a Song." ("Keep it Simple....") . Ah, a Joe Raposo song from Sesame Street.
I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. I didn't really think much about what the themes would be, or how the speech would go. I can't really stand to watch him speak anymore--it's too likely to turn out like a documentary on people who need speech therapy, but gamely keep on going with a goofy grin on their faces.
This speech was truly eloquent, and he was apparently the master of his material. Whatever the contribution of his speech writers, this was what he wanted to say. Basically: freedom, more or less on the American model, will come to the entire world sooner rather than later. The United States itself is likely to be a catalyst--sometimes using force, sometimes not--pushing this tremendous force for good along. Bush is already the benefactor of humanity, and has a good chance to be so even more before he is through. "... we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." He or his immediate successors will deserve as much credit as if he single-handedly brought both World War II and the Cold War to an end, with a glorious victory for the side of right.
There is incredible confidence here--not only that he is in the right morally or "ideologically," but that he will succeed--with just enough difficulty to say a challenge has been overcome, but not so much that there is any real risk of failure. The morality is difficult to argue with in the modern world. We can stipulate, as the lawyers say, that there have been decent regimes that were not democracies. At earlier stages of technology, some kind of aristocracy, tending to mere oligarchy, might have been necessary in order for any human beings to achieve leisure, and thus the kind of accomplishments that make history--and perhaps offer wisdom. Leo Strauss went to some trouble to show that Socratic political philosophers, famous among other things for their denunciations of tyranny, may have quietly offered defenses of rational tyranny. Thucydides quietly suggests that imperialism and war come because of human nature, and bring moments of supreme skill and accomplishment--maybe grandeur, or glory. But if a society is so fortunate as to stay calm while a tyrant tends them like a gardener tending his private property, this may be in some sense "the best regime." Harsh words to our ears.
In the modern world, we have seen the accomplishments of technology stun everyone; and, when combined with liberal democracy, provide a kind of liberation of the common man that could hardly be conceived of before except in visions of an afterlife. Anyone who questions Bush's vision that democracy (more or less American-style) is good, and the more of it there is, the better, is easily seen as a Hitler lover or something.
What about the practicalities? Remarkably, Bush doesn't seem to think he has to worry about them. Yes, he has moved beyond a lot of specific statements justifying war on this or that country--weapons, ties to Al Qaeda, support for a loosely organized terrorist movement, or whatever. Of all this he is saying: I'll make mistakes, or I'll trust people who make mistakes, but it won't matter because I mean well. But it's more than that. "Mistakes" in foreign policy used to mean disaster. There were rival countries of roughly equal size, or smaller ones that were very eager to rise. Politics was a zero-sum game; what you gained, you took from someone; what you gave up, someone would take and threaten to harm you with it.
Bush just doesn't seem to believe any of that applies any more. No one can threaten the U.S. Even with Iraq going a lot worse than they hoped or predicted, what's the worst that's going to happen? An election is going to take place--basically the first ever in Iraq. Maybe the results will be challenged, maybe the major factions will slide into civil war. The U.S. remains free to withdraw its troops and try again somewhere else--maybe by using force, maybe not. Who's going to stop them?
He promises Americans that with the exception of military volunteers (and, er, those reserves being extended) they won't have to actually sacrifice in order to fight and win a major war--an historic first, which takes a bit of the shine off the resulting glory. [Correction: "A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice."]
I try to put myself into the shoes of Bush supporters. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, they felt fear and anger. There's a temptation to say they were overcome by these emotions, and kept demanding that everyone feel exactly the same way at exactly the same time. Now: "We're spreading democracy, like it or not. No sane person can question the morality; and no one's in any position to make us pay a serious price. Massacres in Mosul are terrible--but almost infinitely better than any comparable violence in Des Moines--whether or not the insurgents in Iraq have anything to do with any attack on any Americans."
I'm glad to see the comparison of this speech to JFK's Inaugural--still, perhaps, the most recent inaugural that will be taught in school over many years. (See Fred Kaplan, who actually links to the Kennedy speech). JFK practically promised both an escalation of the Vietnam War, on the one hand, and the peace corps and other kinds of practical foreign aid on the other; both toughness against enemies, and true concern for the well-being of all humanity. What prevented him from a Bush-like reverie, I guess, was the Cold War--the presence of a rival with comparable power to annihilate--and the need for real allies on almost every front. There was gritty realism in Kennedy's reference to a "long twilight struggle"--and also in his hint that "we shall always hope to find [new states] strongly supporting their own freedom--and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside." In the light of the most fantastic passage in the speech: "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty"--this has a bellicose meaning. If more or less an entire people in a "new state" foolishly supports, er, communists, and the U.S. can't really tell friend from foe, then Kennedy might find himself attacking that entire people. Liberation would have to wait.
The fantastic hopes are all that is left in Bush's speech--all the prudence, calculation, weighing of forces, balancing of a threat of war with a sincere interest in diplomacy have been distilled out. Kennedy referred in different ways to different parts of the world--strongly re-asserting something like the Monroe Doctrine for the Americas. To Bush the whole world is already pretty much one homogeneous mass. For Kennedy history has got us where we are, and it has to be understood in order to move forward intelligently--for at best, we will have little light to guide us. Bush sees everything clearly, "don't need no history," and makes no reference to any book whatsoever. [Correction: "the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran."] Kennedy came close to promising history-making glory with little sacrifice; Reagan came closer to promising no sacrifice at all; Bush reaches some kind of culmination of this tendency.
It is tempting for intellectuals, constantly frustrated by Bush's usual inability to communicate, and his administration's general refusal to do so, to make this personal. Many people can't help being ill-informed but decent hicks, proud of their stubbornness in the face of a challenge they can see in black and white terms. Bush has actually aspired for much of his life, somewhat despite the opportunities given him by his parents, to be someone like that. And now is his moment. He is predicting history; and he may be right, democracy might win all the marbles, quite soon. Of course he's not going to oppose every tyrant; some of them are still quite useful. Of course he's not going to support every democratic movement. But he doesn't have to. The U.S. will continue to do a lot of good; the trend, going beyond U.S. efforts, will continue, and American leaders can take credit for being perfectly well-intentioned almost no matter how badly a war goes in one (puny, hard to remember) country.
Brian Doherty gives Colin Powell a nasty send-off. The man who was expected to be an adult, and to maintain a sober view of foreign policy and war, providing a corrective to the neo-cons, lost every battle to the neo-cons, never resigned over a principle, and in fact became famous for offering some of the most extreme defences of the false pretexts for war. Doherty concludes that Powell is a mere careerist. But again: isn't something bigger going on? The Powell doctrine says: only make war when you are sure of winning. The neo-cons say: make war more or less continuously, maintain enough forces to fight on several fronts at once, there's nothing wrong with maintaining something like the military presence, at least, of the old British Empire. But if Bush is right about the future, the two doctrines converge. The need for caution is overridden by the massive fact that the U.S. simply is going to win.
Even Peggy Noonan is surprised (saddened?) at the lack of "nuance". (The Kerry word!). She respects Bush for wanting to change the status quo, recognizing that the world is not constant (not wanting to simply kick the can a few feet, etc.; he either wants to do something historic or transformative, or nothing at all); but "some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government. This world is not heaven."
Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.
[snip]
...promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."
This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.
One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.
If the Bushies actually believe what they say, they may be functioning like people who are high, drunk, or crazy. Maybe they don't believe it, and they are actually very practical realists who sense the advantages of showing off their power; only the overwhelmingly powerful would speak this way.
I've gone on too long, but: we may still look forward to the last man, living in a homogeneous spiritless world, with dread; but being the second-last man, making the final changes to history, can still be pretty exciting.
On Monday evening I went looking for a video of M.L. King Jr. delivering the "I Have a Dream" speech. For a while I thought I was going to have to download QuickTime, but then I found it in Windows format. I watched it (17 minutes) told my son about it, and he watched it.
When I was teaching in the U.S. in the late 80s, I searched high and low for a VHS video of that speech. Someone at the college finally offered me a complete set of "Eyes on the Prize" on VHS, the idea being: fast forward to the speech you want. Sometimes the technology today still amazes me.
Of course our son, almost 15, uses a wider variety of tools and functions than my wife and I do. The other day he saw "Fern Gully" on TV, something he hadn't seen for years. He looked it up, realized there were some big stars doing voices in it, etc., and started looking to see if he could find the music from the movie. I think he found some.
He loves his MP3 player. He often comes to the computer to download some tunes, and change the mix on his player. Unfortunately, the last couple of days, when he has finished, it is hard for me to get on the Internet. He tells me he completely removes the downloader when he is finished with it--deletes all related components, even from the Deleted file. This is good; I'm proud of him. Music downloaders are notorious for including spyware. So what goes wrong? When I try to open our usual home page, it shows up, and the bar at the bottom says "1 item remaining," and then freezes.
Well, I read Dune in a mad rush--just like in high school. I think I was up until 2 or 2:30 a.m. Sunday, and late again Sunday night. I finished on the bus on the way in to work this morning.
For me the book is totally gripping for the first half or so, then the silliness starts to become too evident. The giant worms are a part of it. Like with Star Wars (I guess--I don't know much about it) we have a high-tech society of the future which in some ways is forced back in to low-tech ways. No one dares use "atomics," lasers will cause an explosion when they are used against high-tech shields, so it's back to sword fights and knife fights. So far, so good.
The Fremen of the desert planet are almost totally cut off from this advanced civilization. They speak an ancient "hunting" language--their ancestors migrated from elsewhere, or were moved to the planet to harvest the spice. With help from a "planetologist" who technically worked for the Emperor, they have begun to grow plants and ecosystems--in a remote part of the planet, far from the cities. In principle, everything is visible from the air in this world--so they bribe the "Guild"--which has a monopoly on interplanetary travel and satellites--not to look.
One thing that has always excited me is the vague idea of all great civilizations and texts, including religious texts, coming together. (I think C.S. Lewis would say such hopes are the ultimate sin of pride). The desert people are clearly the Arabs--ignored by the West for a long time, their ancient history forgotten, now emerging with a new power because of a resource everyone wants. The Atriedes have the same family name as the main royal family of the Greeks at Troy--Menelaus, whose marital difficulties start the war, and Agamemnon, who is some kind of chief of the Greeks. Harkonnen and the Emperor sound German. No Brits? No Romans? Bene Geserit are a combination of nuns and Vestal Virgins--was Frank Herbert a Catholic having a little joke? Are the Mentats who think logically (no one is allowed to rely on thinking machines) a stand-in for the Jews? I don't know.
And then, when I go searching the web, I find out that Frank Herbert was a hack writer, with a tremendous capacity to absorb a lot of reading in such a way that he could churn out original-sounding narrative, and a bit of a nut. Sigh.
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