Month: April 2009

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?

It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They’are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.

— John Donne, Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.

A reader writes:

Maybe you mock Malkin et al. a bit too much. Seems to me that for much of last year’s campaign, those on the right mocked and pooh-poohed Obama’s internet strategy and the liberal netroots. Now they’ve discovered that there’s something behind bottom-up organizing and social networking driven by the web. I think that’s all to the good, don’t you? I’m willing to give them time to find a message worthy of their newfound cybertoys and accept that there’s nothing at all surprising about the incoherence and irrationality of their tea parties.

Let them try to gather the masses. Let them find out how easy it is to have things go viral and how hard it is to sustain something without a cogent message or an articulate messenger. The sooner they discover all of this, the sooner we might actually have a Republican party that can take a serious role once again in the governance of this nation.

My frustration is not with the manner of the protest, but simply the difficulty of discovering what it is exactly they are against and, more importantly, what they are for.

A reader writes:

That photo of Larry Summers yesterday gave me a jolt – it is the classical Jew profile from every old European caricature (think Der Sturmer or the protocols of the elders of Zion). So I found it very disturbing, particularly given the classic European antisemitic association of Jews and money and given Summers‘s current position.

I found it even more disturbing when you actually linked to one of those classic caricatures of Jews (the Bosch painting, traditionally showing all those nasty Jews gloating over the Crucifixion) effectively gloating about how Summers looks like them.

I do hope you didn’t exactly understand what you were doing and didn’t realize the implications of the link. Maybe to some people the Bosch image is amusing. To me it brings to mind the traditional Easter pogroms, when good Christians for centuries heard during mass about the suffering of Christ a the hands of the evil Jews and after church went in a fury to kill and maim those horrible people.

I do hope you respond to this, otherwise I will have no choice but to believe that your selection of the photo and the corresponding Easter image were intentional, and not an innocent mistake.

Oy. In my survey of Getty photos for the Face Of The Day, I thought that one of Summers was a gripping and surprising portrait. Then a reader emailed me the Bosch and I too was struck by the similarity. I can see now why you might see things the way you did. But it was in no way intended. I’m sorry if anyone was offended. I’ll try and be more conscious of these things in future.

David Samuels thinks it would be rational for Israel to attack Iran:

An attack on Iran might be risky in dozens of ways, but it would certainly do wonders for restoring Israel's capacity for game-changing military action. The idea that Iran can meaningfully retaliate against Israel through conventional means is more myth than fact. Even without using nuclear weapons, Israel has the capacity to flatten the Iranian economy by bombing a few strategic oil refineries, making a meaningful Iranian counterstroke much less likely than it first appears.

It's a chilling read.

Thomas Barnett doesn't buy all the apocalyptic economic reports:

I made a decision a long time ago not to make my career a bet on bad things happening. I think that approach simply corrodes your strategic thought capacity. Human history is progress, so if you're constantly having to screen out the good to spot the bad, your vision will be unduly narrow. If you bet on progress, you can easily contextualize the bad, because progress is never linear. But if you bet on retreat, you must consistently discount advances as "illusions" and "buying time" and so on, and after a while, you're just this broken clock who's dead-on twice a day.

This Hilzoy post on why women stay in abusive relationships is eye-opening:

There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they're rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you're completely crazy. Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.

What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her. And it's not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place; she questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2.30 pm

E.D. Kain documents Peter Wehner's break with reality. So does Massie:

There are plenty of Obama's policies that might cause some concern and he is, as he has never tried to deny, a new kind of old-fashioned liberal, but the notion that he is ashamed of the United States is a stretch too far and the sooner conservatives divest themselves of this delusion the sooner they may have a chance to regain some measure of respect and be listened to as though they were a serious political movement and not just a bunch of paranoid fools.

I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.

Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.

Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists … only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform? Is that postponed future increase so radical that it demands a protest modeled on one in which people were taxed with no representation at all? Truly bizarre. And when you consider that we have gone through a very long period of relatively low taxation for the very successful, and a very long period in which their wealth has soared, and after an election where a majority of such people voted for Obama, the extremism seems unrelated to anything substantive underneath it.

Option 3: It's a protest against illegal immigration. Ok, so why the tea? Weren't all the original tea-partiers illegal immigrants?

Option 4: It's a protest against government debt. Yay! I will leave aside the somewhat awkward fact that Fox News and Pajamas Media barely covered the massive debt racked up by the Republicans during a period of economic growth. Instead, I'll proffer a simple point: If the tea-partiers are concerned about debt and concerned about taxes, one presumes they favor drastic spending cuts. But what are the tea-partiers proposing to do to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security?

I'd love to see a proposal that they support on any of these entitlement programs, but particularly Medicare which is the culprit for much of the debt burden. Where is it? Or are we really going to hear more diversions about "pork"?

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.