Communist Chic

I remember once causing a ruckus at a Harvard lunchtable by getting up and moving when someone sat down next to me wearing a Chairman Mao t-shirt. If someone feels that’s a fashion statement, I don’t want to associate with them. I’m still amazed that people use the symbols of communist totalitarianism – CCCP t-shirts, Che Guevara ballcaps, and so on – as if they were just cultural bric-a-brac. If someone had worn a swastika to lunch, others would have moved too, no? Jeff Jacoby, it appears, has noticed the same thing. On May Day, the evil of communism needs to be remembered; and its millions of victims mourned and recalled.

$3 Million Oppression

Chicago’s highest-paid TV news personality sues a construction company for allegedly shoddy work on her $3 million mansion. She claims

the company "intended to take advantage" of [her and her husband] because they are black. They accuse the company of seeing a black couple as being "gullible and inexperienced in construction matters," so it could "deceive and take advantage of and defraud" them.

This victim of racism earns $2 million a year.

Reporting on Colbert

Some of you have asked me what I thought of Stephen Colbert’s speech at the WHCA. Sorry. I’m one of those people who leave before the dinner. I took a friend from England for the cocktails part; and then scarpered for a dinner with other friends, winding up on the couch falling asleep watching Chevy Chase’s "European Vacation". The fiance, fresh back from London, wanted to acquaint me with this important cultural artefact. So no review from me. But here’s Noam Scheiber:

My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left–until recently more common on the right–wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value. Jon Stewart often says he hates when his audience cheers; he wants them to laugh. My sense is that, had most of the bloggers complaining about the WHCD been around Saturday night, there would have been lots of cheering but not much more laughing.

I love Colbert; but perhaps he misfired. It happens.

The Art of Conversation

It’s in decline; but people have been saying that for a very long time. What is it? Here’s a rough definition, drawn from describing the way Huck Finn conversed with Jim:

Conversation_1 Both participants listen attentively to each other; neither tries to promote himself by pleasing the other; both are obviously enjoying an intellectual workout; neither spoils the evening’s peaceable air by making a speech or letting disagreement flare into anger; they do not make tedious attempts to be witty. They observe classic conversational etiquette with a self-discipline that would have pleased Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, or any of a dozen other old masters of good talk whom Miller cites as authorities.

This etiquette, Miller says, is essential if conversation is to rise to the level of—well, "good conversation." The etiquette is hard on hotheads, egomaniacs, windbags, clowns, politicians, and zealots. The good conversationalist must never go purple with rage, like people on talk radio; never tell a long-winded story, like Joseph Conrad; and never boast that his views enjoy divine approval, like a former neighbor of mine whose car bumper declared, "God Said It, I Believe It, And That Settles It."

This is taken from Russell Baker’s engaging review of a new book on the subject by Stephen Miller. Conversation is Oakeshott’s metaphor for free association; Michael Totten sees it as the antidote to terror on the Israel-Lebanon border. I’d say it’s a practice integral to liberal democracy. Which is why the more open-minded parts of the blogosphere have an important part to play in reviving it.

King George Watch

Cato unveils a new study of this president’s war on limited government. Money quote:

Far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad … President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Conservatives are beginning to fight back in earnest. Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch, authors of the new study, were once fiercely critical of president Bill Clinton on similar grounds. But Bush has made Clinton look much more like a small-government conservative than Bush has ever been.

Blue-State Britain; Red-State Iran?

A reader offers a provocation:

You print a letter that says Boston, MA is more like a "foreign country", i.e. the UK, than it is like Arizona. Once again, the tired reactionary Rovian slur that red states are real America while blue states are "foreign".

Let’s set this straight. Here’s the letter you should be printing:

"I am a native of Boston, Massachusetts, the epitome of Bunker Hill, Minutemen, Thanksgiving blue state America. I also have traveled extensively in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other fundamentalist theocracies. I have lived in North Carolina for the past year, and it is very intriguing to realize that North Carolina, and indeed the entire Bible Belt, is culturally and even politically much closer to a foreign country – the theocratic Middle East – than it is to other contiguous parts of the same country like Massachusetts."

Remember: the Northeast was and is the cradle of American ideals. It’s the Bob Jones theocrats who are, once again, attempting to create a foreign country on U.S. soil.

Fighting words – more inflammatory than I think justified. I might add to my own observations that Blue State Britain is perhaps closest in sensibility not to Boston but to Seattle, if only for climate and cultural reasons. And to my mind, the most fascinating development of the last two decades has been the conversion of freedom-loving California from a Republican stronghold to a Democratic bastion. Reagan’s home became Clinton’s base. Tells you something about where Reagan conservatism now lingers, I think.