The Dish

Heather Timmons puts in context Saturday’s knife attack, which the Chinese are attributing to “Xinjiang separatists”:

Tensions in resource-rich western China have been escalating for years, as Han Chinese emigrate to the [Xinjiang] region, in many cases taking the best jobs while locals, especially those who don’t speak Mandarin, face widespread poverty and growing unemployment. The Chinese government has clashed with Xinjiang citizens many times in recent months, resulting in dozens of deaths, and six weeks ago authorities detained the group’s best-known moderate voice, economics professor Ilham Tohti. He was recently charged with “inciting separatism,” a charge his lawyer and wife deny.

But international terrorism experts and influential Chinese commentators believe China’s policies in the Western region are just one factor contributing to rising terrorist activity like this weekend’s attack. China’s economic rise, and particularly its growing reach in the Middle East and North Africa, areas contested by extremist Islamic jihadi organizations, could also be fueling terrorism inside the country itself.

Evan Osnos has more on why “militant Uighurs are motivated largely by resentment of their relationship to Han Chinese”:

Xinjiang’s Uighur population has dropped from ninety-five per cent, in the early twentieth century, to forty per cent, in 2008, thanks to an explicit migration policy intended to bind the country more tightly. On the ground, the development policy has created vast new infrastructure and economic activity, but, crucially, it has also accentuated the socioeconomic gaps between Hans and Uighurs. In Xinjiang today, Hans hold more than thirty five per cent of the region’s the high-income jobs, while Uighurs hold thirteen per cent. The ratio is widening by the year, fuelled by, and creating, even more resentment and suspicion. The events of 3/1 will make that worse.

Nisid Hajari argues that the “Chinese might want to think twice before they start adopting the U.S.’s politically charged, post-Sept. 11 enthusiasm for labeling terrorists and terror attacks”:

The Chinese regime has tagged Uighur separatists as “terrorists” at least since Sept. 11, 2001, when Beijing sought to link long-running tensions in Xinjiang to the newly sexy “war on terror.” The discovery of several Uighur men in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion bolstered China’s claims. Some of the fighters were indeed looking for insurgent training; others may have been traveling through the country on their way to the Middle East.

But of the 22 Uighurs who landed up in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. officials eventually determined none had any real links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban leadership. Indeed, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, concrete ties between Uighur extremists and the global jihadist movement are hard to corroborate.

Many Chinese are furious, however, that the US government and Western media outlets have declined to use the t-word:

A post by the official account of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing fueled the outrage. It did not, as many Chinese had hoped, characterize the attack as terrorism, but instead called it a “senseless act of violence.” Almost all of the more than 50,000 comments left on the post accused the U.S. Embassy of a double standard when it comes to violence in China. “If the Kunming attack were a ‘horrific, senseless act of violence,'” the most up-voted comment reads, “then the 9/11 attack in New York City would be a ‘regrettable traffic accident.'” (The United Nations Security Council released a statement late Sunday condemning “in the strongest terms the terrorist attack.”)

Some of the fallout from the embassy’s statement stems from an unfortunate translation. “Senseless violence,” a common diplomatic phrase the Obama administration has also used to describe the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, which killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, read as “meaningless violence” in Chinese.

Julie Makinen points out that the attack took place far from the Uighur heartland of Xinjiang province:

Analysts said the location and nature of Saturday’s attack — a “soft target” in the balmy, tourist-friendly capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China — indicates further bloodshed well beyond Xinjiang’s borders is likely. “It shows that Uighurs are, like Chechens in Russia, expressing their discontent throughout the country, not just where they are based,” said Dru Gladney, a professor at Pomona College and author of “Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic.”

“It’s a sad day for China and a sad day for Uighurs,” he added. “Many Han think all Uighurs are violent, and this could lead to a real backlash.”

Generic morning-after pills will finally be available over-the-counter. Nora Caplan-Bricker explains why the cheaper generic version will come with an age warning, while the brand-name version, Plan B One-Step, does not:

The logic behind the distinction wasn’t scientific: It was commercial. FDA protocol grants three years of exclusivity every time a drugmaker conducts new clinical studies that result in a major change to the product—it’s an incentive for companies to bankroll costly research to improve their wares. In this case, since [Teva Pharmaceuticals, maker of Plan B] was behind the studies that made the case for allowing girls under 17 to buy the morning-after pill without a prescription, the FDA was looking for a way to protect Teva’s share of the market.

Now, according to a letter to the makers of generics from Kathleen Uhl, acting director of the Office of Generic Drugs, the FDA has decided that “the exclusivity is too broad,” so it’s letting the generics out from behind the counter. But it’s requiring generic drug makers to include the special label, in order—as Uhl’s letter puts it—to “carve out” some exclusivity for Teva.

Irin Carmon zooms out:

Until getting rid of most of its age restrictions on the drug, the U.S. was one of the few countries to have age restrictions at all.

Confusingly, the FDA’s most recent letter says the generics will be repackaged to say they are “for use by women ages 17 and up.” It appears that provision won’t actually be in force, since now no one is required to show proof of age, and that the new label is, according to the letter, intended to “appropriately carve out Teva’s exclusivity” per an earlier agreement. But the wording could still sow confusion in pharmacy aisles.

The drug has repeatedly been shown to be safe for women and girls of all ages, but the specter of adolescents having sex has haunted American politicians. In 2005, the top FDA official for women’s health, Susan F. Wood, quit in protest of the Bush-era politicization of the agency, particularly around emergency contraception.

Back in August, Tara Culp-Ressler reported that existing regulations had already caused mass confusion about the drug:

Aside from medical misconceptions about the contraceptive, moving Plan B out from behind the counter has not been without its own complications. Outside investigations have found that not all pharmacies may be stocking their shelves with Plan B yet. Some are still choosing to keep emergency contraception under lock and key because they’re worried that people might try to shoplift the expensive product — Plan B One-Step, which is manufactured by Teva Pharmaceuticals, generally costs between $40 and $50. That means that people who want to purchase the morning after pill may still have to ask a pharmacist about it, something that can make some customers feel too uncomfortable or give pharmacists an opportunity to turn them down.

Another point of confusion is the fact that the FDA currently has a “sweetheart arrangement” with Teva Pharmaceuticals when it comes to over-the-counter emergency contraception. Until 2016, Teva’s Plan B One-Step is the only type of emergency contraception that young women or men under the age of 17 are allowed to purchase. Other generic versions — which tend to be cheaper — still require older customers to show an ID to prove that they’re old enough to buy it. The cost barrier may prevent some of the people who need emergency contraception from being able to purchase it, whether or not it appears on their local pharmacy shelves.

Unless, that is, you happened to be one of the elderly church ladies he visited, orphans he put through college, or friends for whose medical care he paid. All of these anecdotes and more are uncovered in Edward Mendelson’s new essay on Auden’s “secret life” of generosity and charity, a life that he kept hidden from the world because “he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it.” Here’s one telling story about the lengths to which the poet would go to cover the tracks of his kindness:

At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract.

He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.

Mendelson claims that Auden was “presenting himself as less than he was” because of how he had come to understand evil:

By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.

On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.

One of many forms this argument takes is a dispute over the meaning of the great totalitarian evils of the twentieth century: whether they reveal something about all of humanity or only about the uniquely evil leaders, cultures, and nations that committed them. For Auden, those evils made manifest the kinds of evil that were potential in everyone.

Dreher relates the essay to a conversation he recently had with a friend about a “grandfatherly gent who was kind to all” but who, as his friend later discovered, “had a terrible, villainous past of which he never, to her knowledge, repented”:

It seems to me that when you are face to face with the reality of human beings, it becomes hard to judge with icy clarity. The genial grandfather who was a terrorist in his youth: his character is both things. His gentleness and kindness in old age does not obviate his ferocious villainy in his youth, but nor does that villainy obviate the sweetness in his late character. One has to hold both things in one’s judgment simultaneously, and that is hard, and even painful. So we come down on one side or the other to dispel the anxiety. Doing so also relieves in ourselves the anxiety that comes from examining our own character, in humility. Sure, we think, we have our faults, but at least we’re not like Them.

Auden seems to have been afraid of this moral complacency and capacity for deception within himself. About ourselves, so should we be. What is so unnerving about the genial grandfather who was once a terrorist is his palpable humanity. If he can be both things, and be unaware of the contradiction, then what, absent humility, is to prevent us from the same fate?

David Zahl adds:

Lest these remarkable stories be dismissed as mere hagiography, Mendelson (author of the indispensable Later Auden) doesn’t lionize the great poet, instead tracing the ‘good works’ back to their root–which is not a sense of earning or credit (clearly) but of genuine humility brought on by piercing self-knowledge. That is to say, the further Auden plumbed his own fallibility and weakness (and few have plumbed more deeply), the more moved he appears to have been to acts of radical generosity and service.

(Video: Trailer for Wystan, a 2012 documentary about Auden)

Fareed begins his review of The Kennan Diaries with that observation from my last book, The Conservative Soul, which he believes helps explain why America, “as an experiment in modernity, hasn’t had many genuine conservatives in its history.” George F. Kennan, he seems to think, was one of them, with all the ambiguities that entails. Consider this beautiful lament from Kennan’s diaries that Fareed highlights:

“I cannot help but regret that I did not live 50 or 100 years sooner,” he wrote in one of his entries. “Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, . . . too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them.”

It’s a vivid expression of a deep, instinctual conservatism, especially when you consider that it was written in December 1927.

If you think of conservatism in this way, you can see why it has found so few followers in the restless, creedal and optimistic uplands of America. But that may make it all the more necessary in this country. In my view, American conservatism desperately needs a deeper sense of the limits of American power, of the delusions behind rampant materialism, of the wisdom in silence and nature and tradition. A little more skepticism about change might help as well. But as always with cultural pessimists, Kennan’s suspicions of modernity could slip toward the strange and reactionary, as all conservatism can:

Kennan’s conservatism was poetic, comprehensive and utterly impractical. In 1979, he outlined the kind of politics he would favor. “In addition to being a political isolationist, I am a believer in autarky. Not only do I believe that the healthy national society would rigidly eschew the importation of foreign labor . . . but I consider that it should restrict to a minimum its economic and financial involvements with other peoples.”

To some readers, this may sound like North Korea, but Kennan’s celebration of the character, coherence and moral superiority of small communities has a rich pedigree in European thought. It also informs what can only be described as Kennan’s racism. Writing on a flight to Los Angeles in 1978, Kennan thinks about how few white faces he will see when he lands and laments the decline of people “of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged.” Instead, he predicts, Americans are destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass, . . . one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity and drabness.”

Douglas F. Brinkley is on the same page as Fareed. He finds the diaries contain “enough gloomy prognostications to give the book of Revelation a run for its money”:

As a philosopher, Kennan is a gold-plated Cassandra. Moreover, on a number of occasions, he espouses views that are homophobic and pro-eugenics.

“Nothing good can come out of modern civilization, in the broad sense,” he writes of his dissatisfaction with life in a 1932 entry. “We have only a group of more or less inferior races, incapable of coping adequately with the environment which technical progress has created. . . . This situation is essentially a biological one. No amount of education and discipline can effectively improve conditions as long as we allow the unfit to breed copiously and preserve their young.” …

Disdainful of automobiles and the Californication of America, full of loathing for strip malls and traffic jams, he reveals his preference for sailing above all else. “I turn my back, figuratively, on the land and keep my eyes fixed on the horizon of the sea — the abused, raped sea, deprived of its dignity and its mystery by the ubiquitous oil rigs, the monstrous thundering automobile ferries, the airplanes over head, the pipelines underneath.”

Kennan would have loathed this Oscar-night commercial, as Copyranter did:

But Christian Caryl argues that it was those very sentiments relayed by Brinkley that made Kennan a brilliant analyst and strategist – they “can’t be seen in isolation from the rest of the package”:

Kennan’s great virtue as an analyst was his ability to see things from the outside. No one was better at tracing out the logical implications of a particular policy in all their elaborate permutations (even if, in so doing, he often ended up overlooking the grubbier but no less important aspects of everyday politics). And this was not despite but because of his own proudly cultivated sense of alienation, his persistent suspicion that he’d been born into the wrong era, or that, above all, he was really a Russian at heart.

He continues with an example:

His black, razor-sharp diagnosis of Stalinism—at a time when pro-Soviet wartime propaganda in the United States presented a diametrically opposed picture of the regime—is of a piece with this innate skepticism and independence of thought. He viewed the mendacious pro-Soviet ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, who hailed the show trials and Stalin, with undisguised contempt and revulsion. As his diaries demonstrate, not everything that he concluded was fruitful or wise or perspicacious—and I have to confess that some of the things I learned about the man from this book did diminish his image in my eyes. But I would still insist that it was precisely Kennan’s ability to ask big questions, and his gift for transforming his insights into powerful prose, that made him so unique. … What I do know is that we condemn him, and those like him, at our own risk. A dose of grumpiness in the right place can work wonders.

Indeed it can.