Month: August 2013

by Matt Sitman

Last week, the prominent political theorist, Christian ethicist, and public intellectual passed away at the age of 72. Elshtain was perhaps best known for making the ethical case for American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11, outlined in her book Just War Against Terror. The NYT obituary describes her impact this way:

In the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Dr. Elshtain was among a handful of scholars and religious leaders, including Franklin Graham and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, invited to meet with President George W. Bush to discuss the response he was considering. Dr. Elshtain had expertise in one particular area of interest to the president, her husband recalled: she had written extensively on the fourth-century Christian bishop later known as St. Augustine and his doctrine of the Just War. That doctrine held that while Christians could not justify killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of others. The notion became central to the Bush administration’s justification of the war in Iraq as in large part a humanitarian project to free the Iraqi people from a tyrant.

Despite her arguments on behalf of war, many remembrances are emphasizing the difficulty in applying labels to her thinking. Carl Scott summarizes her this way:

[S]he was something of a difference feminist, something of an Augustinian, something of a Jane Addams-ite battler for social justice, something of a communitarian, and something of a foreign-policy neo-conservative.

Her most lasting legacy might be that, unlike many academic political theorists, she sought to engage religious thought in her work, long before it was trendy:

“Her joint appointment in political science and the divinity school at [the University of] Chicago was truly unusual,” said Erik Owens, a professor at Boston College who worked with Elshtain when she was his dissertation adviser. “Religion was not taken seriously enough as a proper subject of study by political scientists through most of her career, and political science was equally suspect in most divinity schools. She helped to bring these two disciplinary guilds into conversation with one another. This may be one of her greatest legacies as a professional academic.”

Biographically, her concern for ordinary people, and the weak and disabled among us, came from her own experiences – especially with illness, as Robbie George, who served with her on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, points out:

She was a daughter of the west—born and bred in Colorado. She did not enter the world with a silver spoon in her mouth, nor was she given a gilt-edged education. She was among the last cohort of Americans to be struck by polio. She limped throughout her life, but never complained of her affliction or let it slow her down.

Marc Livecche, a former student of Elshtain’s, recalls her refusal “to change anything she thought or to attempt to change anything you thought simply in order to reach an agreeable reconciliation”:

Believing instead that falsehood is the opposite of dialogue, and that real disagreement is a hard won victory accessible only through an honest meeting of minds, she gave it to you straight and demonstrated the refreshing value of frankness-with-charity and invective-against-twaddle. This led to her belief that what the world most needed from Christians was, in Camus’ terms, “Christians who remain Christians.” For Elshtain this meant that Christians have to speak out loudly and clearly, in witness to their normative grounding, against evil in the world, never leaving the world in doubt that we stand against those bloodstained regimes that put the innocent to torture. She bore none of the utopian sentimentalism that believed we could end evil in history but neither did she give in to cynicism by refusing to believe we might end some evils and diminish others.

In addition to her work on just war theory noted above, Elshtain wrote on women and public life, St. Augustine and politics, the moral dimension of democratic life, and more. One of her last major projects was her 2005-2006 Gifford Lectures, which resulted in her book Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. From its final pages:

One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby. This historic recognition should not occasion resentment or dour heaviness; rather, it should instill gratitude. As this book drew to a close, I realized that it was no culminating magnum opus — few books are — but, rather, a contribution to the shared memory of our time and place. And that is enough.

For more, especially if interested in her work in political theory, read Russell Arben Fox’s richly detailed thoughts on Elshtain here. For a critical take on her writings, on torture in particular, see Corey Robin here.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Marcotte’s Dutch example of more progressive attitudes toward teen sex is not unique to the Netherlands. When I was living abroad, a German friend explained to me that when she and every other girl she knew growing up turned 16, their mothers would take them to get birth control pills. It was entirely permissible for her to have a boyfriend spend the night and have sex with him in her parents’ home. In fact, she said, her parents would probably be concerned if she had a boy over and they DIDN’T hear them doing it. It’s worth noting that this young woman was not the daughter of freethinking hippies, but rather straight, conservative Bavarian Catholics; her dad is a cop and her mother is a theologian (yes, really). She always said she couldn’t understand why American parents were so afraid of their teenage children having sex. As a matter of simple logic, it just didn’t make any sense to her, given how many of them end up pregnant, with STIs, or in unhealthy relationships as a result of having no guidance on the subject.

Ferrett Steinmet focuses on the father-daughter dynamic:

There’s a piece of twaddle going around the internet called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:

“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.” All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”

Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.

Another reader:

Slightly off topic: A gay couple I know has an elementary school-age son and daughter who have lots of friends and who adore their parents. The couple is also popular with neighbors and fellow school parents.  The daughter has girlfriends on sleepovers as often as the other girls – meaning all the time. But an awkward and sad problem: The fathers of the boy’s friends, as much as they get along with the two gay fathers, refuse to allow their boys on a sleepover at the gay men’s home. So the boy gets no sleepover parties like his sister and friends get.

Throatlump.

by Patrick Appel

Gregory Djerejian is disappointed with Obama’s foreign policy:

[T]he President does have one thing going in his favor. The opposition party would have mounted an even more disastrous foreign policy, I suspect, proactively blundering about saber-rattling with the usual recycled neo-con nostrums, bogging us down in even more theaters than at present. Obama at least has spared us these indignities, ‘leading from behind’ adventures like Libya (and its ugly hangovers) apart. But it is not a particularly proud legacy to say ‘at least I was better than the other guy would have been’. This is not the stuff of a great Presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy.

Of course, there has been and is much work to accomplish at home, and while not the topic here, whether jobs, infrastructure, Wall Street reform, and more; we should not conclude the Administration necessarily covered itself in glory there either, beyond the easy myths that ‘but for’ pork-infested stimulus, QE-infinity and serial bailouts Great Depression II beckoned (this is not to take away from the gravity of the economic situation we faced in late ’08 and early ’09, nor some of the Administration’s crisis management at the time, or indeed, the prior Administration’s). But while I understand a great power can only remain so from a base of strongly rooted strength at home, and Obama’s apparent focus on domestic politics therefore is not ill-advised, it is another thing to look alternatively peeved, bored, listless and simply largely adrift on foreign policy. Leaders, whether Sisi or Putin, have noticed. We simply must do better, and please, this does not mean better, or more, speeches. It means strategic execution of statecraft in a turbulent, unsettled age of great geopolitical transition, one of the Presidency’s most solemn responsibilities, or at least one might hope, a solemn aspiration. And its manifest absence represents a season of disappointments the international community can ill afford at this juncture.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I actually think the premise of Amy Schumer’s joke is pretty funny, but it might be funnier if the guy arrives at work Monday and gets called on the carpet for not finishing his work. Of course he didn’t expect to be there, but it turns out this is hardly a new issue of his; he apparently never finishes anything he starts. “You need to develop some stick-to-itiveness, son! You need to follow through to the end!”

Another presumes that Comedy Central killed the joke because it was too skittish about the subject:

There’s no place left for black comedy, I guess, in our timid times. Both MASH and Harold and Maude mined suicide to terrific comedic effect, the latter making suicide both the driver and climax of the movie. Within a year or so of those two movies, Ruth Gordon (Maude) also starred in the hilarious and pitch-black Where’s Poppa? We are poorer for our earnestness.

Below are several more cultural references and links from readers:

Another sterling example of suicide played for laughs is the sequence in Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray, in a fruitless attempt to escape his endlessly repeating day in Punxsutawney, tries over and over to kill himself. In this particular context, suicide is funny indeed. It’s only one of the many elements that makes Groundhog Day a classic film comedy and one of very few movies that succeeds in using suicide in a humorous way (and yet with a poignant touch).

Another:

I’m probably not the first to email the “Bruce’s Cry For Help” skit from Kids In The Hall, but in case you haven’t seen it, it’s a chuckle (2:00 is the one laugh-out-loud moment for me):

Another:

Oh my gosh, you can’t consider suicide humor with Joan Rivers, who began making jokes about her husband Edgar almost immediately after he took his own life. She has continued to so, and it was a theme of her roast.  Not too long ago, she made Terry Gross almost speechless with her comic references to it.

Update from a reader:

How can any discussion of joking about suicide not include “The End?” Burt Reynolds was at the height of his powers, and bearded:

by Brendan James

Dylan Matthews fact-checks the show’s portrayal of the meth game:

One of the most convincing critiques of the show I’ve read came from The New Inquiry’s Malcolm Harris, who argued that the show’s obsession with highly pure method — supposedly Walt’s calling card, and the thing that got Gus interested in buying his wares — doesn’t square with the real world, in which meth is almost always “stepped on,” or diluted. There isn’t a market for pure meth, not because it’s not better, but because of who’s buying meth. “It’s a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand,” Harris writes. “As Stringer Bell told D’Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, ‘When it’s good, they buy. When it’s bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make.’”

Even if that logic holds, there may still be reasons for Walt to make his meth as pure as possible. “When Walt measures the purity in the lab, he’s figuring out how much of the expensive and tightly controlled precursor chemicals became saleable product and how much went to waste,” Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times has argued. “The purer Walt’s product, the more [distributors] can dilute it.” But that doesn’t explain why Walt’s meth on the street, when found by his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank and analyzed by the agency’s experts, is so much purer than other meth out there. Walt’s product would only make it to the street like that if there really was demand for purer meth.

Update from a reader:

Wasn’t this addressed in last night’s episode, albeit indirectly?

Local scrub dealer Declan is fine with substandard product, as he’s much closer to the end-user, both geographically and in terms of where he falls on the supply chain.  International meth empire mastermind Lydia, on the other hand, needs a purer product.  If you’re moving tons of meth halfway across the globe, you’re going to want the purest product you can have, as it allows for easier transport and lower risk.  I figured that Lydia’s issues with Declan’s substandard product stemmed directly from the fact that the product was meant to be cut upon arrival in Europe, not because Czech junkies are any more discerning than those of Albuquerque.

Previous fact-checking of the show here.

by Jessie Roberts

The Novelist is a video game with an unconventional objective:

[T]he player is tasked with guiding an author named Dan Kaplan and deciding how he will spend his days. There are no bullets or rocket launchers here: the core conflict revolves around Dan’s ability—or inability—to balance his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his son.

You, the player, don’t directly control Dan; instead you are a ghost who inhabits his house. You can watch, observe, and manipulate at your discretion. One day, you might direct Dan to sit and work on his novel, boosting his career at the cost of neglecting his wife and son. Another day you might have help out his wife at an art show, or take his kid to the beach. Every time you go down one branch, the other two could suffer.

The idea, designer Kent Hudson says, is to make us all think about how we approach our own major life decisions. “There’s no winning or losing,” Hudson told me during a lengthy phone chat a few weeks ago. “You play through and get a story that my hope—and this sounds so pretentious—but my hope is that as you’re presented with the same fundamental question in nine different ways over the course of the game, that you start to learn about your own values.”

(Hat tip: Page-Turner)