Month: April 2012

When Roads Were Used For Walking

Before cars took over, drivers who accidentally killed pedestrians were vilified:

"We’re talking less about laws than we are about norms," says Norton. He cites a 1923 editorial from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – a solidly mainstream institution, as he points out. The paper opined that even in the case of a child darting out into traffic, a driver who disclaimed responsibility was committing "the perjury of a murderer."

Erik Loomis thinks lobbying by the auto companies changed this:

By the 1950s, law placed the burden of suffering on the pedestrian, to the point of light or nonexistent prosecutions for drunk driving, etc., that MADD lobbied so hard against in the 1970s and 80s.

“Say that there’s no God but Bashar, you animal”

That's the brutal context for the video below because it is literally one of the most disturbing things I have seen in my entire life (it's an Israeli translation of part of the dialogue). Please do not – DO NOT – watch it if you have any reservations. It appears to be Syrian forces burying an opponent alive, as this piece in the Israeli press suggests. But there's a weird edit jump around the 0.47 mark that might indicate some falsification. Any help from readers in deciphering this would be helpful. It appeared on YouTube yesterday:

Pray for the victim. I don't know what else to do.

The Mormon Card

Douthat expects it to be played:

The Obama White House may not make Mormonism an issue directly, but that doesn’t mean that the incumbent won’t benefit from the coverage that Romney’s religion will inevitably receive. And it’s possible that Romney would stand to gain if he spoke more directly and in more detail about a worldview that’s clearly at the heart of his identity, and that provides one of the most authentic and deeply-felt influences on his often inauthentic-seeming personality. In one form or another, there will be plenty of attempts to define Romney’s religion for him, and he might be better off doing his own defining first.

But he can't, because even talking about it will send chills up Christianists' spines. And yet questions will emerge: why were his in-laws barred from his Temple wedding service? Why was his dad born Parley_P_Prattin Mexico? Could it be he was there because that's where many of the older hard-core polygamists sought refuge after being hounded by the US government?

Romney's grandparents were monogamous, but polygamy is a big feature of the family tree before that: one of Romney's great-grandfathers had five wives, and one of his great-great grandfathers – the "Apostle Paul of Mormonism" – had twelve wives (he was murdered by the former husband of one of them), thirty children, and 266 grandchildren.

Romney really is LDS monarchy, his family going back deep into the heart of the religion's history. I don't see how he manages to avoid talking about this, about whether Mormonism is, as Ross has called it, a "heresy", whether his view of God is as a human, whether humans can become gods, etc. The reason I think he has to find a way to address it is that it is such a profound influence on him that, unless people see a little of how his faith helped form his character and judgment, they will not be able to relate to him at all. For these reasons, I think the taboo on talking about the LDS could hurt more just as much as airing it all could. It's close to lose-lose unless he can manage a speech as great as Obama's on Wright.

I should add and underline that I don't regard any of this as faintly relevant to his capacity to be president. I think it is an amazing and very American thing for this race to be between a black man and a Mormon, given this country's history. It's an astounding achievement in both racial and religious progress. But then I'm not the one insisting that people's religious faith be placed firmly in the public square on the same level as secular argument – and that candidates be judged by that. That's the party Romney leads.

(Photo: Parley Pratt, major Mormon figure and great-great grandfather of Mitt Romney.)

The Larkin Reading

Enjoy the audio from Tuesday night's reading here (my reading of "The Whitsun Weddings" is here) as well as an entirely appropriate introduction:

As with so much else—England, foreign countries, children, grownup people, a great deal of literature, and a great deal of life—Philip Larkin didn’t care for poetry readings.

Listening to poetry read aloud, complained Larkin, one never knows how far away the ending is; all sense of stanzaic form disappears; and this is to say nothing of all the tiny misunderstandings that chip away at our ability to concentrate, the “theirs” being taken for “there’s.” I don’t much like poetry readings either, and I would add to Larkin’s list of grievances the fact that most people aren’t very good at reading poetry aloud. The greatest offense is usually simply that of reading the poem as though it were a poem, in a boomingly uniform incantation that obscures nuance and texture. Fortunately, there were few such performances on display on Tuesday night at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall…

Here We Go Again

The latest revel in ressentiment from Rove's PAC:

  

It reminds me of the Steve Schmidt "celebrity" ad from the 2008 campaign. It has some punch, but I don't think Obama's vulnerability is due to his star power in contrast with the post-recession economy. I guess it was worth trying to link them. But Waldman sees an all-too-familiar pattern:

[O]nce again, we have to wage a campaign of the cool kids versus the squares. This all started in the 1960s, when people like Rove and Romney watched their contemporaries smoking grass, listening to music with electric guitars, and dancing wildly about with adventurous girls in sheer peasant blouses, and thought to themselves, "Gosh darn it, I hate those guys!" It may take a little different form today, but have no doubt, Republicans going after Obama for being "cool" is the same conflict, just updated to 2012.

Romney is squarer than Obama is cool. That has its problems as well. My view, for what it's worth, is that the more personal and vicious the mockery of Obama in this campaign, the better Obama will do. People in the middle like him. They may have issues with his presidency, but they like him. It's political malpractice to forget that.

Why Are Democrats So Useless At Persuasion?

Conor Williams wonders why the left makes its case in technocratic, rather than moral, terms:

[The right] win public debates because they work exceptionally hard at setting the ethical parameters of discussion within the confines of their moral vision. This means that leftists usually start from a rhetorical deficit….from Ezra Klein to Matthew Yglesias to Mike Konczal and beyond, nearly all of the most prominent [online] leftists are concerned with the technical details of public policy. Mainstream media pundits are no different: Paul Krugman occasionally ventures into justifying a left-wing vision for the future, but he is usually content to demonstrate the empirical debility of various conservative canards. E.J. Dionne’s communitarianism stands out as a lonely example of left-wing commentary with a vision.

And this is even more the case with Democratic politicians. I can't think of any major Democrat who persuasively makes the case for liberalism, even at a time when, in my view, liberalism has an edge in addressing the consequences of conservative over-reach. Nancy Pelosi has never persuaded anybody not already persuaded. Try putting "vision" and Harry Reid into one paragraph without collapsing into laughter. Even the bright, witty, brave ones, like Barney Frank, threw off more one-liners than inspiring, coherent speeches. Obama stands pretty much alone. You'd think others might notice the advantage this gave him, but they don't.