SEAN PENN AND TRICKY DICK

One film, two takes.

THE OLD (NORSE)MAN AND THE SEA: Yet more on the burning question of fish-eating among Greenlanders, from the indefatigable Matthew Yglesias.

TSUNAMIS AND THEODICY: How do people who believe in a loving God deal with this week’s disaster? Various intelligent folks wrestle with the issue.

THE APU APPROACH TO FOREIGN POLICY: Another take on democracies at war.

— Ross

THE OASIS OF TOLERANCE

I just finished Ian Buruma’s “Letter from Amsterdam.” Buruma covers roughly the same ground as Christopher Caldwell in “Holland Daze.” Whereas Caldwell focuses on the intellectual landscape, Buruma, Dutch by birth, brings first-hand narrative reporting to bear, along with a closer look at Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s twenty-six-year-old assailant. The best part involves Buruma’s visit to a social-studies class. The students’ wide-ranging discussion reads as admirably free of cant.

One of the black students made fun of the Muslims’ preoccupation with “identity” and said, “Moroccan, Egyptian, Algerian-who the fuck cares. They’re all thieves.” The others laughed, even some of the Muslims.

Fortunately, no cataclysmic rumble ensued-a hopeful sign in itself. Buruma’s article closes with a paean to Dutch liberalism:

After the war, and especially since the nineteen-sixties, the Dutch prided themselves on having built an oasis of tolerance, a kind of Berkeley writ large, where people were free to do their own thing. Liberated, at last, from the strictures of religion and social conformity, the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, frolicked in the expectation that the wider world would not disturb their perfect democracy in the polders. Now the turbulent world has come to Holland at last, crashing into an idyll that astonished the citizens of less favored nations. It’s a shame that this had to happen, but naxefveté is the wrong state of mind for defending one of the oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy it.

Here one is struck by the elisions, and the stark contrast with Caldwell’s take. Describing the same “oasis of tolerance,” Caldwell notes “that most Dutch people don’t like it,” and that large majorities describe their country as “too tolerant.” The “oasis” derived from the retreat of church authority, and an elite consensus to the effect that libertarian orthodoxy would take its place. The extent to which Dutch democracy has been “perfect,” in Buruma’s description, has been precisely the extent to which it has not been democratic.

And so Buruma’s implicit call for a hardheaded liberalism, shorn of its naxefveté and committed to defending “Berkeley” against the barbarians, is necessarily an appeal to elites. The burghers, after all, never embraced “Berkeley.” Just as the youth revolt in Holland was seen as a “rebellion against church authority,” the ongoing populist revolt represents a rebellion against the “perfect democracy.”

I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THE PAIN: A few weeks ago, Buruma wrote on Iraq, arguing against “perfect democracy,” i.e., rigorously secular democracy, and for at least the possibility of “Islamic democracy.” Drawing on the writing of Reuel Gerecht and Noah Feldman, Buruma makes a persuasive case. So persuasive a case, in fact, that he might consider applying it to Holland:

It is always tricky for an agnostic in religious affairs to argue for the importance of organized religion, but I would argue not that more people should be religious or that democracy cannot survive without God, but that the voices of religious people should be heard. The most important condition for a functional democracy is that people take part. If religious affiliations provide the necessary consensus to play by common rules, then they should be recognized. A Sharia-based Shiite theocracy, even if it were supported by a majority, would not be a democracy. Only if the rights and interests of the various ethnic and religious groups are negotiated and compromises reached could you speak of a functioning democracy.

That negotiation and compromise were preempted by elite consensus in Holland now seems clear. Democracy failed. To say that it’s only now under threat, now that the exclusion and alienation of an immigrant class has reached a crisis point, is to ignore the deeper tensions.

Which is one reason why the liberal disdain of populist conservatism is misplaced. That secular liberals will seek to defeat populist conservatives in argument is a given. But marginalizing concerns over “moral values,” the approach fatefully taken in Holland and elsewhere in Europe, has had ugly consequences all its own. Be careful what you wish for.

This all leads back to Iraq, and Buruma’s sharp and to my mind short-sighted opposition to regime change, but I’m too wordy as it is. And Tylenol PM has me confused. I will say that I’ve had a terrible flu, and that “Street’s Disciple” is excellent.
— Reihan

POLITICAL FRAMES

Steve has a New York Sun column today on George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor whose notions about rhetorical “framing” are apparently attracting a lot of attention from Democratic politicians. Lakoff’s general point is that people think, and vote, in ways that have little to do with right reason properly applied, and much more to do with the sub-rational frames — Republicans as the responsible “daddy party,” for instance, and Dems as the simpatico but soft-minded “mommy party” — through which they view American politics.

I think there’s a lot to be said for Lakoff’s general argument. (At the very least, it gets closer to the heart of voter behavior than overly optimistic notions about “deliberative democracy”.) But as for Lakoff’s specific applications of his thesis . . . well, I’ll let Steve take it away:

With this deep psychological motivation lurking behind American political debates, it’s no surprise that Mr. Lakoff perceives hidden agendas everywhere. Conservatives “are not really pro-life,” he writes. Rather, because abortion allows teenagers to be promiscuous and women to delay childbearing to pursue a career, it threatens their model of social control: “Pregnant teenagers have violated the commandments of the strict father. Career women challenge the power and authority of the strict father,” explains Mr. Lakoff. “Both should be punished by bearing the child.”

Similarly, Republicans support school testing not to identify substandard schools and improve them, but for more nefarious reasons.”Once the testing frame applies not just to students but also to schools,” writes Mr. Lakoff, “then schools can, metaphorically, fail – and be punished for failing by having their allowance cut,” leading ultimately to “elimination for many public schools.” The goal, it turns out, is to replace the entire public school system with private institutions.

The list of GOP deceptions is seemingly endless. Republicans don’t support tort reform because they care about the cost of frivolous lawsuits; they want to bankrupt a Democratic Party that relies on contributions from trial lawyers and leave corporations free to pollute the environment. The war in Iraq, as one might expect, is really about “the self-interest of American corporations.” . . . On issue after issue, “what conservatives are really trying to achieve is not in the proposal,” Mr. Lakoff explains. The “real purposes are hidden.”

Let’s allow that there’s a kernel of truth here — namely, that any political movement tends to emphasize small-scale aims that are palatable to most voters, in the hopes of moving the country toward larger-scale aims that can’t yet claim much popular support. For instance, many Republicans would like to drastically overhaul Social Security, but the GOP is proposing incremental reforms at present, because the public generally likes Social Security as it is. Similarly, many Democrats would like to have a European-style social safety net, but in the absence of public support, they spend most of their time either defending the status quo, or proposing incremental welfare-state expansions (e.g. John Kerry’s health care plan).

THE PARANOID STYLE: But why, instead of focusing on how the Democrats can find the right frames to move the country toward Swedish-style statism (or whatever preferred end he has in mind), does Lakoff leaps immediately to the assumption that rhetorical frames must, by definition, conceal bizarre hidden agendas — agendas that bear almost no relation to the frames themselves? Steve rightly cites the famous Richard Hofstadter essay on the “paranoid style” in politics . . . but why is this style so appealing to otherwise intelligent people? Why the eagerness to believe the absolute worst about your political opponents (pro-lifers don’t care about babies, they care about subjugating women; Wolfowitz, Feith, et. al. aren’t misguided idealists but power-mad lackeys for oil companies, and so on)?

Hofstadter’s essay suggests — rightly, I think — that the leap into paranoia has to do with a desire for rationality and order. “The higher paranoid scholarship,” he writes, “is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.” This isn’t just a matter of dividing the world into a neat moral black-and-white, though that has something to do with it. It’s also a matter of explaining away the messiness of reality. If the Bush Administration really believed there were WMDs and wanted to democratize Iraq, the paranoid mind thinks to itself, then 1) why didn’t we find any weapons, and 2) why are we doing such a lousy job of democratization? It could be that the world is a messy, human-error-riddled place — but saying that we really went in for the sake of Halliburton and the oil companies makes the chain of causality so much simpler. (The same is true of conspiracy-theorizing on the right, I should add, where Bill Clinton’s success could never just be explained by the willingness of the American people to excuse sleaziness and mendacity during economic good times . . . no, there had to be murder behind it.)

In other words, the paranoia of writers like Lakoff is itself a “framed” way of viewing the world. Which, I suppose, only makes his thesis that much stronger.

— Ross

SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

A few days back, I dinged Michael Ledeen for talking up Iranian and Syrian “democratic revolution” as a solution to our difficulties in Iraq. I wanted to know how, precisely, he thought we should go about promoting such revolutions — and in this Corner post, he offers a partial answer:

For those of us who have long preached the power of democratic revolution, [the new Ukrainian election] is a happy day, and I hope that our leaders draw the appropriate lessons:

–The mild support we gave to the democratic forces in the Ukraine proved far more powerful than most of the experts expected. The revolutionaries required a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement. They did the rest. The same can and should be done elsewhere in the world (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea . . .)

–Our democratic values are shared by the overwhelming majority of the people in the world, and are rejected, sometimes violently, by tyrants and their followers. We need to stick to our principles, which means that we cannot blindly and compulsively support all the policies of individual anti-democratic leaders just because they help us. That kind of support always gets us in trouble (as in the Middle East, where we are justly criticized for our many decades of support for corrupt tyrants). Sometimes we will have to make some compromises, but when we do, we must still support democratic forces–openly, unapologetically . . .

–You can’t always see the revolutionary forces inside oppressive countries, but, given a chance, they will emerge more often than not. We are the most successful revolutionary society in history, we have to stand with our people, everywhere . . .

I give Ledeen points for optimism, but I’d be more convinced that “a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement” will bring down the mullahs in Iran if there were a single example of a successful democratic revolution anywhere in the Arab world that Ledeen could cite. I’d be more convinced of the aptness of the Ukrainian parallel if there was any similarity at all between a struggling parliamentary democracy like Ukraine and a five-decades old tyranny like North Korea. And I’d be more convinced of the reality of “revolutionary forces” that we “can’t always see” because they’re inside “oppressive countries” if I hadn’t spent months listening to, and at times believing, the same argument about WMDs. (Sometimes we can’t see them because they aren’t there, it turns out.)

OUR PEOPLE?: Finally, and not to get too old-fashioned-realist here, but . . . the Iranians are not “our people.” Neither are the Syrians, the Saudis, the Chinese, or the North Koreans. And they do not become “our people” just by believing in democracy, or even by establishing democratic self-government. An Iranian democracy would be a good thing in countless ways — but it would also probably be just as hell-bent as the current regime on acquiring nuclear weapons, flexing its muscles in Iraq, and perhaps even sponsoring anti-Israeli terrorism. As such, it would be our strategic rival, not our brother nation, even were its constitution copied word-for-word from ours.

We would do well to remember this, should Michael Ledeen’s “democratic revolution” ever come to Tehran.

— Ross

ALEXANDER, THE MOVIE

Daniel Mendelsohn on the subject, excellent as usual. (As a counterpoint, here’s an unusually revealing interview with Oliver Stone on the film’s, um, less-than-stellar reception.)

AMISH FAMILY VALUES: The long-awaited Legal Affairs story on incest in Amish country is here.

GETTING WARMER: Michael Crichton’s latest sounds fairly dumb, in its premise if not its argument — but since he’s gone to all the trouble of packing his book with charts, graphs, and a twenty-page appendix, you’d think that Elizabeth Kolbert and the New Yorker might go to the trouble of actually, you know, engaging with his arguments.

Or not.

FISH FOOD: This Malcolm Gladwell review of Jared Diamond’s latest book is fascinating. I always thought (not least from reading The Greenlanders, which is a lot better than Jane Smiley’s political commentary, I promise) that the Little Ice Age did the Greenland Vikings in. But apparently, it was the Viking taboo against eating fish that drove them to starvation.

Unfortunately, Gladwell never explains the origin of this taboo (an odd one in a seafaring people, wouldn’t you say?). Maybe Diamond does, somewhere in the book — but Gladwell only quotes his digs at Christianity, which have an all-too-typical faculty-lounge flavor:

To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.

Oh, those silly Christians and their world-to-come concerns . . .

In any case, as a mackerel-snapper myself, I can assure Messrs. Diamond and Gladwell that there’s no Christian prohibition on seafood-eating. (Would that there were.) So, why no fish for the Norse?

This is going to keep me up all night . . .

— Ross

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

It’s hard to top Dave Barry, especially when he throws in items like this one:

OCTOBER: … the Boston Red Sox, ending an 86-year drought, defeat the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series, defying exit polls that had overwhelmingly picked the Green Bay Packers. The Red Sox get into the Series thanks to the fact that the New York Yankees — who were leading the American League championships three games to none, and have all-stars at every position, not to mention a payroll larger than the gross national product of Sweden — chose that particular time to execute the most spectacular choke in all of sports history, an unbelievable Gag-o-Rama, a noxious nosedive, a pathetic gut-check failure of such epic dimensions that every thinking human outside of the New York Metropolitan area experienced a near-orgasmic level of happiness. But there is no need to rub it in.

Nope, none at all. The worst choke in all of human history really speaks for itself. (Via JoyofSox, the only blog that offers both Red Sox coverage and far-out left wing conspiracy theories in one convenient package.)

THE YEAR IN REVIEW (IN TV): Look, I watched Entourage. I even kinda liked Entourage. But Alessandra Stanley, do you really, really think that Entourage was the best television show of the year? I mean, for serious?

THE YEAR IN REVIEW (IN MOVIES): I don’t mean this as a commentary on the artistic quality of any of the movies in question (though I liked Sideways less then most people), and I’m on the record as saying conservatives need to have less of a chip on their shoulder about Hollywood, and no, I don’t expect art to be the handmaiden of conservative social mores or anything . . . but, well, check out Stephen Holden’s top ten movies of the year.

Let’s see: You’ve got a movie about a cross-dressing victim of a pedophile priest (is there any other kind?); a film about a female drug mule whose title and ad campaign trade cynically in Catholic language and imagery; the tale of “a selfless abortionist” (is there any other kind?); the “sober, sympathetic” account of Alfred Kinsey’s struggle to bring sexual enlightenment to the masses; and the “fearless, taboo-breaking” story of a grandmother who has an affair with her daughter’s fiancee.

Admirable films all, no doubt. But I have just one question — what, Mr. Holden, no Motorcycle Diaries? (Wasn’t political enough for him, I bet.)

ALTHOUGH: Honesty compels me to mention that I rather liked The Motorcycle Diaries.

FINALLY: Kate Bosworth is a peach. And I won’t hear a word against her.

— Ross