Month: January 2011

The Other Side Of Big Government

Peter Beinart asks tea-partiers to re-read the constitution:

In modern times, conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have tried to reconcile their efforts to rein in federal power with their support for a large military and an interventionist foreign policy. But both times, the latter has seriously trumped the former. Under both Reagan and Bush, aggressive, militaristic foreign policy produced more presidential power and larger deficits. Tea Partiers say their movement is a response to the way government power, and government debt, grew under both Bush and Obama. But if they looked seriously at the reasons for that growth under Bush, they would see that much of what they’re upset about is the military and homeland security spending justified by his expansive “war on terror.” Anyone genuinely worried about debt can’t ignore the fact that defense constitutes a majority of federal discretionary spending. And anyone devoted to a strict interpretation of the Constitution can’t ignore the fact that America is still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Pakistan, Yemen and lots of other places, without formal congressional declarations of war, although that is what the Constitution requires.

“Israel’s Relentlessly Growing Illiberalism”

Even Marty has noticed it. Matt Steinglass penned the phrase above. This restates the surface problem:

The political determination to create Jewish settlements necessitates segregation of Jewish and Palestinian populations; the segregation renders it impossible for Jews even to see the Palestinians they live next to, and vice versa; and that invisibility breeds oppression, fear, mutual hatred and violence.

The deeper one is the same core issue we are still grappling with: religious fundamentalism vs political liberalism in modernity. Fundamentalism is inhaling the fumes of collapsed traditional faiths that have yet to find the intellectual and spiritual courage to recover themselves. That's why, in my view, the deepest struggle of our time is religious, not political. No one is immune – and if Western democracies like Israel or the US think they are, their complacency is their biggest vulnerability.

Don’t Trouble To Thank Him

Hitchens updates a classic:

It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to. It's quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.

Starbucks' London Fog or Earl Grey Tea Latte unsweetened is the best approximation of my mother's cup of cha that I have been able to find. Except she would proceed to add three teaspoons of sugar and one artificial sweetener.

Comparative Literature – And Snooki

An amusing clatch of contrasting quotes, from classics and from Nicole Pollizzi's new oeuvre. Dish fave:

Fitzgerald:

"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."

Polizzi:

"He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face."

The Mind Of The Tory Anarchist

E.D. Kain conducts an engrossing, bracingly honest interview with Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative. It's deeply encouraging to read such sane and smart arguments on the right, even if discussions about the distinction between Nozick and Rothbard might be a bit much for some (not me). This leapt out:

Liberalism is not the end of history, and it’s not the final picture of justice.  Under the guise of democracy and markets, and human rights, various kinds of powers and interests are able to run quite unchecked. This was what Tories who opposed the fiscal revolution realized — they opposed the financialization of power as much as they opposed, for self-interested reasons, the transfer of power from landed and established interests to commercial ones.

And that's why the Tory tradition has no problem tackling an overly-powerful financial sector, because Toryism is about breaking up all overly-concentrated power, private and public. McCarthy's frankness about the Whiggishness of American traditionalism is also a lovely tonic after the turgid nationalist idolatry of Lowry:

American traditionalists try to make up for the absence of fixed institutions by emphasizing the supposedly conservative qualities of the Puritans or the continuities between British traditions and America. But the Puritans themselves possessed some profoundly un-conservative characteristics — they really did want to start a new and pure settlement from which they could eventually recreate the world in a holier image.  Even if that were a good idea, it has nothing to do with conserving.  Vaunted Anglo-American traditions, meanwhile, are largely Whig myths.  There’s a conservative side to Whiggery, but the American revolution was a radical Whig event — it created a republic.

American traditionalists are often caught between denying the religious and republican radicalism of the country’s origins — and when they do that, their claims about tradition ring false in their countrymen’s ears — and repudiating the country itself for having un-conservative origins.  The best traditionalist makes the most of the traditions he has, even if their origins embarrass him. No one gets to pick his parents, after all.

A Journey, Not An Escape, Ctd

A reader writes:

My inaugural psilocybin trip happened with a cast of fellow actors under the guidance of one of the last surviving Merry Pranksters.  Tom Wolfe described the particulars better than I ever could, so I’ll skip them here to comment on the larger discussion of Journey v. Escape.

Psilocybin3dAfter I came down from my Oregon sky odyssey, I felt a brief urge to return – to escape back – into the third-eye pleasure-dome.  But a new feeling from the same trip quicklycountered that reflex. Put simply, the trip left me with a new sense of reverence for the trip itself.  No, not in an evangelical you-must-try-this sense, but reverence in the sense that this experience was to be remembered, treasured and only repeated with certain people, landscapes, music, skies or stages in life.  In other words, I wouldn’t want to spend every waking minute on psilocybin because I value what I brought back from the trip too much.  The potency of the trip commanded a strange new spiritual respect, not bottomless desire.  Sure, I’d love to go back “on the bus” some day, but I’m not organizing my life around that goal.  The experience was too beautiful to make it an earthly goal.

This kind of reverence is categorically different from the fixations of addiction, where the drug-taker only reveres the drug.  I suspect it’s why few people talk of shrooms with the same vocabulary as heroin, cocaine or cigarettes.  Dependence, tolerance, toxicity – these have nothing whatever to do with it.  As with marijuana, our drug policy places shrooms at level of criminality that is inversely proportionate to the personal and public health risk it poses.

(Illustration: A Molecular spacefill of Psilocybin.)