Daniel Mendelsohn on the subject, excellent as usual. (As a counterpoint, here’s an unusually revealing interview with Oliver Stone on the film’s, um, less-than-stellar reception.)
AMISH FAMILY VALUES: The long-awaited Legal Affairs story on incest in Amish country is here.
GETTING WARMER: Michael Crichton’s latest sounds fairly dumb, in its premise if not its argument — but since he’s gone to all the trouble of packing his book with charts, graphs, and a twenty-page appendix, you’d think that Elizabeth Kolbert and the New Yorker might go to the trouble of actually, you know, engaging with his arguments.
FISH FOOD: This Malcolm Gladwell review of Jared Diamond’s latest book is fascinating. I always thought (not least from reading The Greenlanders, which is a lot better than Jane Smiley’s political commentary, I promise) that the Little Ice Age did the Greenland Vikings in. But apparently, it was the Viking taboo against eating fish that drove them to starvation.
Unfortunately, Gladwell never explains the origin of this taboo (an odd one in a seafaring people, wouldn’t you say?). Maybe Diamond does, somewhere in the book — but Gladwell only quotes his digs at Christianity, which have an all-too-typical faculty-lounge flavor:
To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.
Oh, those silly Christians and their world-to-come concerns . . .
In any case, as a mackerel-snapper myself, I can assure Messrs. Diamond and Gladwell that there’s no Christian prohibition on seafood-eating. (Would that there were.) So, why no fish for the Norse?
This is going to keep me up all night . . .
— Ross
It’s hard to top Dave Barry, especially when he throws in items like this one:
OCTOBER: … the Boston Red Sox, ending an 86-year drought, defeat the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series, defying exit polls that had overwhelmingly picked the Green Bay Packers. The Red Sox get into the Series thanks to the fact that the New York Yankees — who were leading the American League championships three games to none, and have all-stars at every position, not to mention a payroll larger than the gross national product of Sweden — chose that particular time to execute the most spectacular choke in all of sports history, an unbelievable Gag-o-Rama, a noxious nosedive, a pathetic gut-check failure of such epic dimensions that every thinking human outside of the New York Metropolitan area experienced a near-orgasmic level of happiness. But there is no need to rub it in.
Nope, none at all. The worst choke in all of human history really speaks for itself. (Via JoyofSox, the only blog that offers both Red Sox coverage and far-out left wing conspiracy theories in one convenient package.)
THE YEAR IN REVIEW (IN TV): Look, I watched Entourage. I even kinda liked Entourage. But Alessandra Stanley, do you really, really think that Entourage was the best television show of the year? I mean, for serious?
THE YEAR IN REVIEW (IN MOVIES): I don’t mean this as a commentary on the artistic quality of any of the movies in question (though I liked Sideways less then most people), and I’m on the record as saying conservatives need to have less of a chip on their shoulder about Hollywood, and no, I don’t expect art to be the handmaiden of conservative social mores or anything . . . but, well, check out Stephen Holden’s top ten movies of the year.
Let’s see: You’ve got a movie about a cross-dressing victim of a pedophile priest (is there any other kind?); a film about a female drug mule whose title and ad campaign trade cynically in Catholic language and imagery; the tale of “a selfless abortionist” (is there any other kind?); the “sober, sympathetic” account of Alfred Kinsey’s struggle to bring sexual enlightenment to the masses; and the “fearless, taboo-breaking” story of a grandmother who has an affair with her daughter’s fiancee.
Admirable films all, no doubt. But I have just one question — what, Mr. Holden, no Motorcycle Diaries? (Wasn’t political enough for him, I bet.)
ALTHOUGH: Honesty compels me to mention that I rather liked The Motorcycle Diaries.
FINALLY: Kate Bosworth is a peach. And I won’t hear a word against her.
— Ross
“Democracy triumphed,” opines Deutsche Welle. “The political change the West hoped for and the Ukrainians demanded has happened.”
The Washington Post argues that the president’s desire to mend relations with Europe conflicts with his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the Bush administration has insisted on reform within the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans want to put more pressure on Israel. The Post paints this as a wide gulf, but the piece fails to mention Tony Blair’s trip to Israel last week, where he too argued that reforms were necessary for “the Palestinian side to become a proper partner for peace with Israel”:
Viability cannot just be about territory. The viability has to be that of a state that is democratic, that is not giving any succor or help to terrorism and that uses the help that it is given from the outside in a proper and transparent way.
Saul Singer, in the Jerusalem Post, writes that this “means that taking democracy seriously is no longer just the quaint province of George W. Bush and Natan Sharansky, but has spread…to Europe. It also means that the conference that Blair is proposing for next month in London might, for a change, advance peace.” The London conference aims to help Palestinians build democratic institutions. At the same time, some 600 Palestinian politicians and intellectuals, in a public statement called “What We Want from the Elected President,” are calling for a “firm commitment to democratic deals” and “the implementation of good governance, mainly the rule of law, transparency and accountability.”
The Post repeats the idea that Bush “keeps giving Israel a pass” and “has devoted little attention to the issue.” But Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn argues, “Under Bush, Sharon has adopted a policy that is the reverse of what he believes in, and has accepted severe limitations on his own freedom of action.”:
Bush and his people have gone beyond declarations and have tried to have an impact on the reality of the Middle East. They have forced the Likud government to support a Palestinian state. They have forced Sharon both to promise to freeze settlements and evacuate outposts, and to agree to close American inspection of construction in the territories. They have forced him to return to the Palestinian Authority tax money that Israel owed the Palestinians, and they have made it clear to the Palestinians that, if they want a state, the price tag is internal reform and a change of regime.
All of which might be described as a synthesis of American and European approaches to the peace process.
— Steven
The earthquake, some first-hand accounts, who’s helping, and how you can help.
— Steven
There used to be a general understanding that in wars with dictatorships, democracies were at a disadvantage — because they were slow to mobilize, vulnerable to dissent from the home front, wary of casualties, and so forth. Lately, though, a new conventional wisdom has emerged, epitomized by a recent Gregg Easterbrook column, in which he writes:
When I ponder the twentieth century, one of the things that strikes me is that democracies turned out to be much better at fielding armies than dictatorships. In World War II, freedom beat dictatorship by a decisive margin in combat, even though dictatorship began the conflict with a significant advantage. Think about the situation in the summer of 1940, when England was the sole nation left actively resisting tyranny in all of Europe, while the United States was barely better than demilitarized; at that point, dictatorship outgunned democracy by a big margin, and was dangerously close to winning. But from the summer of 1942 on — El Alamein for the British and Midway for the United States — every battle between freedom and tyranny ended in victory for freedom.
My thoughts on Easterbrook’s argument are here (suffice it so say, he glosses over the not-insignificant, and probably even dispositive, contributions made by the Soviet tyranny to the war effort). But Easterbrook is hardly alone — Victor Davis Hanson, among others, has spent much of his career making a similar argument, and the whole “Greatest-Generation” hoopla, from Spielberg and Hanks to the DC memorial, was thick with the notion of democracy wiping the floor with totalitarianism on the field of battle.
NOW, A CORRECTIVE: It’s instructive, therefore, to consider just how tough it was for the Western Allies to defeat Nazi Germany, even in 1944 when everything seemed to be going the Allies’ way. Max Hasting’s new book out the 1944-45 slog, called Armageddon, is reviewed in this Sunday’s Times, and this passage struck me as worth highlighting:
. . . the generals’ failure to knock Germany out of the war in late 1944 reflected the kind of armies they led as much as their own deficiencies as leaders. The British and American armies were composed of citizen soldiers, who were usually prepared to do their duty but were also eager to survive. ”These were,” Hastings writes, ”citizens of democracies, imbued since birth with all the inhibitions and decencies of their societies.” Such peacetime virtues are not easily transformed into military effectiveness. James Gavin, whose airborne division was among the finest units in any army, filled his diary with harsh comments about the average soldier’s military quality. ”If our infantry would fight,” he wrote in January 1945, ”this war would be over by now. . . . Everybody wants to live to a ripe old age.” When Winston Churchill complained to Montgomery about the British Army’s lack of initiative, Montgomery replied by recalling the carnage on the Western Front during World War I: ”It was you, Prime Minister, who told me that we must not suffer casualties on the scale of the Somme.”
By contrast, Armaggedon points out, the Soviets were prodigal with the lives of their soldiers — and ended up in a much-better postwar position because of it. (Paul Fussell’s recent The Boy’s Crusade offers a similarly demythologized view of the European front in the 1944-45 period, with the added advantage that Fussell was one of the American boys in question.)
Note that I’m not questioning America’s military superiority today, or the role that democracy plays in facilitating the kind of capitalism that breeds a superior military-industrial-technological complex. But I’m deeply skeptical of the notion that there’s something in the democratic “citizen-soldier” that makes him ideally conditioned to take on the mindless lemmings of a dictator-commanded army. Just as a for instance — if democratic India fought fascist China today, who do you think would win? (Or did we already run that experiment?)
— Ross
It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching David Brooks attempt to singlehandedly bring idea-driven discourse to the (ahem) not-terribly-idea-driven opinion pages of the New York Times. I’m not always sure that the 700-word column is the best venue for this project, and his “Hookie” nominees (named for Sidney Hook, of course) for best political essay exemplify the difficulties the format presents, since it will require at least another column for him to summarize the top candidates and their arguments. Still, it’s a valiant effort, and a reminder, after a year in which he’s taken his share of slings and arrows, of how much better the Times‘ page is with Brooks than it was without him. (Hands up, everyone who misses Gail Collins’ column. Anyone? Hello?)
My only quibble with his pick of essays so far would be the choice of William Stuntz’s brief for why academics and evangelical Christians would make good political bedfellows. Reihan liked it, but it seemed to me at best a nice but deeply misguided piece that reflected the author’s own wishful thinking (he’s an evangelical and a Harvard Law professor) more than any actual political reality. Here’s a typical passage:
Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and about understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those church buildings that dot the countryside is education — people reading hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.
The fact that universities were founded as schools of theology is telling, yes — telling of how far universities have risen or fallen (depending on your point of view) from the days when they did have a lot in common with religious communities. Claiming that elite colleges’ Christian past somehow links them to today’s evangelicals is at best appealing sophistry, and it’s typical of Stuntz’s argument, which relies on superficial similarities — people reading texts and caring about ideas — that could apply equally well to any pair of mismatched intellectual groups, from Pakistani madrassas to Communist cells to suburban book clubs. The important question is not whether people read books and contemplate ideas — it’s what conclusions they come to, and what ideas they promote. And looked at in this light, the gulf between Christian conservatives and liberal academics is as wide as any in our culture, and widening apace.
For a more serious engagement with some of the issues Stuntz raises, check out this exchange, between Stanley Fish and Richard John Neuhaus. It’s nearly a decade old but (perhaps unsurprisingly) still timely.
— Ross
“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe: the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” More talk of God and freedom from presidents who aren’t George W. Bush, this time in the Boston Globe.
–Steven
CBS News worries that “blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks.” Unlike journalists, the argument goes, bloggers are apt to engage in campaign politicking (this, remember, from CBS). Jonathan Last, in a different context, suggests that some kinds of opinion journalism already present the same quandries about journalism as political advocacy. James Lileks thinks blogs will replace opinion journalism altogether:
The Internet is going to make gigs like this obsolete, once enough people realize that some guy in his basement is capable of turning out commentary as insightful as a tenured eminence who was handed a column 30 years ago and has spent the last 10 coasting on a scoop from the Reagan years.
Lynne Cheney reads them.
— Steven
The Dish 