Absolut Nationalism

Vodka
By Patrick
Julio Gonzalez Altamirano discusses the controversial new Absolut ad (above) showing the west as part of Mexico:

A vodka company created a nationalist advertisement for the Mexican marketplace. The internets allowed an American audience to gaze upon said advertisement. And voila! An opportunity for anxiety, anger and shock to pour out on the different sides of all the issues our neighbor to the South conjures up: the growth of the Latino population, illegal immigration concerns, imperialism, the presence of the Spanish language in public square and so on.

I certainly dread the idiotic conflations that seem to be dominating the side boycotting the vodka company. Conflations such as confusing Latin America with Mexico. Or arguing that American Latinos are essentially an un-meltable mass of recent arrivals somehow magically coordinating to take back the Southwest for the Mexican government (I guess I didn’t get that memo.) And ultimately, I am just not persuaded that a liquor-selling multinational thinks enhanced profitability will result from actually fomenting a war or domestic revolt in the world’s largest economy.[…]

There is something utterly disingenuous about a Swedish vodka brand playing on Mexican nationalism with an ad that features English copy…there is definitely something unappealing about a corporation exploiting the real resentments present in developing country as a way of establishing brand appeal.

More Yoo

By Patrick
Former OLC employee Tim Wu:

[Yoo] did the opposite of probably the most important thing that the OLC is supposed to do: tell the government what it can’t legally do. He, instead, twisted the law to give his client, the White House, the answer they wanted.

The lawyer is always at risk of becoming his client’s lapdog. Legal boot-licking may be a constant temptation in legal practice, and it is something that happens too often, but it’s obvious to any lawyer that it is wrong. And the higher the stakes, the worse the sin. Yoo, when tested, failed completely.

Reporting Yoo’s Memos

By Patrick
Greenwald looks at media coverage of Yoo in relation to other stories:

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" – 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" — 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" — 16
"Obama and bowling" — 1,043
"Obama and Wright" — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" – 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" — 1,079

On Dictionaries

By Patrick
Ernest Weekley’s 1924 article on the role of the lexicographer provides context for this post. An excerpt:

We now know that the duty of the lexicographer is to record and not to criticize, that refined speech and elegant speech are the delusions of a mistaken optimism, and that the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the Elementary Education Act. Johnson’s Dictionary went far to accomplish, in the eighteenth century, what the Italian and French Academies had unsuccessfully attempted in the seventeenth. It is, of course, as hopeless for the lexicographer to try to stem the flowing tide of new words and expressions as it was for Mrs. Partington to keep out the Atlantic with a mop, but Johnson’s authority was so unparalleled that Boswell’s description of him as ‘the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country’ had, for some time at any rate, an element of truth.

The War On Comics

By Patrick
Jeet Heer on Frederic Wetham’s campaign against comic books:

For Wertham, even the most beloved comic-book heroes were suspect: Superman reminded him of Nazi Germany’s SS (a cadre of self-styled supermen), the adventures of Batman and Robin had homoerotic overtones, and Wonder Woman threatened to turn healthy young girls into lesbians. At the time Wertham made his attack on comics, the medium was at the height of its popularity, selling between 80 million and 100 million copies every week in scores of genres, ranging from funny animals and superheroes (for kids) to romance and horror (for teenagers and young adults).

As David Hajdu reminds us in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Wertham’s ideas had remarkably wide currency in postwar America. Countless religious and patriotic organizations organized book burnings to set comics aflame, and leading politicians held congressional hearings where William Gaines, the owner of EC Comics, publisher of the gory Tales From the Crypt and the satiric Mad comic book (later retooled as a magazine), was grilled as if he were a mobster.

As a result of this moral panic, the once-thriving comic-book industry went into a severe decline. In the two years after Wertham’s book came out, more than a dozen publishers and hundreds of cartoonists left the field. Those publishers that remained were severely restricted by a self-imposed code that prevented comics from publishing anything but the most anodyne kiddies’ fare. Only with the rise of graphic novels in the last few years have comics recovered from the stigma of the Wertham years. For Hajdu, the comic-book crackdown was a "purge," a precursor to later panics over rock music and video games.

The Illusion Of Security

By Patrick

From Jeremy Waldron’s review of Worst-Case Scenarios by Cass Sunstein:

The One Per Cent Doctrine: it’s a striking methodology and a liberating one, and many people think it’s the only way to respond to the threat of low-probability, high-impact events. With it, the endless evidence-gathering and analysis that characterises traditional intelligence policy gives way to clarity. Nothing any longer needs to be conditional. We no longer say, ‘If X has happened, then we need to do Y,’ with all our effort being devoted to finding out whether X has in fact happened or (in an uncertain world) what its probability is. Instead we say, ‘If there is the smallest significant chance that X has happened, then we have no choice but to do Y.’ If X may lead to a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (like a nuclear attack on an American city), then we need to swing into action immediately and do Y. No further questions.

This reminds me of the following segment of George F. Kennan’s 1954 The Illusion of Security (here is a pdf):

There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self-defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien–the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said . A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp  out everything that could conceivably  constitute  a reflection  of improper  foreign influence  in our  national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.

This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible–an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief-making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand the what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions.

When Coalitions Dissolve

By Patrick
Welch on libertarianism’s rocky relationship with the GOP:

The remaining libertarians in Reagan’s shrinking big tent aren’t just being ignored or marginalized; they’re being blamed for the Reagan coalition’s crackup. While John McCain was heading toward the nomination in January, The Weekly Standard published an online piece by the political scientists Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey slamming McCain’s critics as “strict free-market” ideologues whose rigidity jeopardized the conservative movement. “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life,” the Storeys wrote. “Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.”[…]

I wonder how responsible it is to add libertarian votes to a shrinking coalition whose dominant rhetoric and political standard-bearer stand in increasingly explicit opposition to the party’s libertarian strand. McCain, whose National Greatness conservatism is openly hostile to individualism, has recently hit some encouraging free market notes. Nonetheless, a Republican defeat this November might just leave fiscal conservatives more orphaned than people yet realize.