June 27, 2005
A Scolding From Miss Rice
by Patrick J. Buchanan
From The Washington Post to The Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is being hailed for her latest public scolding of America's Arab allies.
In what columnist David Ignatius calls the "signature line" of her speech at The American University in Cairo, Rice declared: "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course."
What is it about Rice's speech that makes it so off-putting and irritating?
First, in treating friends, common decency and diplomacy – and the Good Book, as well – teach us that private admonition is preferable to the public declamation, which is often the mark of the hypocrite.
Second, Rice's public scolding fairly reeks of moral arrogance. Unlike my purblind predecessors, Rice is telling us, my president and I are moved by a higher, nobler cause. While we fight for democracy for Arabs and Muslims, my predecessors, going back to World War II, were only interested in "stability." Thus, they all failed.
The claim is absurd. For Rice's predecessors had to conduct foreign policy during a Cold War in which freedom was at stake and under siege from the greatest enemy the West had known since the Islamic armies invaded France in the 8th century.
Thirty years ago, during Watergate, Richard Nixon ordered a huge arms airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, for which Golda Meir was eternally grateful. Then, with Dr. Kissinger, he brokered an armistice and effected a severance of Sadat's Egypt from the Soviet Bloc – to the West. Jimmy Carter took it from there, brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel that still hold.
Does Rice believe that because Nixon, Kissinger, and Carter did not insist that Sadat hold elections they were on some lesser moral plane than her own virtuous self?
President Bush's father, in the Gulf War, put together a coalition of NATO nations and Arab autocracies, including the Syria of Hafez al-Assad – a ruler no less ruthless than Saddam – to expel Iraq from Kuwait in a six-week war that was a military masterpiece. U.S. casualties were a tenth of those in our current war, an end to which is not remotely in sight.
Was that Bush I achievement diminished because Saudi Arabia, which provided bases and troops, and Kuwait, the nation we rescued, were, neither of them, democracies on the New England model?
From Truman to Bush I, from Acheson to Jim Baker, with rare exceptions, U.S. Middle East policy was crafted, as it should have been, to secure the vital interests of the United States. Who is Rice, and what exactly are her accomplishments, to demean what these men achieved: victory in a half-century Cold War with the Soviet Empire?
There is another problem with this schoolmarmish scolding of Arab nations that aided this country in the Cold War, but have failed to live up to Rice's standards.
Has she or President Bush thought through the consequences, should their hectoring succeed in destabilizing and bringing down Saudi Arabia or Egypt? Have they observed how the elections they have been demanding have been going of late?
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Amal militia took every parliamentary seat. In the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas is so strong the Palestinian Authority postponed the July elections. If Hosni Mubarak held free elections in Egypt, his principal rival would be the Muslim Brotherhood. If the Saudi monarchy should hold elections, Osama bin Laden might not win, but my guess is he makes the runoff.
President Bush is riding for a fall. He sold the war in Iraq to the country on the hard security ground that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda, that he may have had a role in 9/11, that he was hell-bent on getting WMD and atom bombs, and that, when he did, he would give them to fanatics to use on Washington, D.C. The lady who stapled together that false and perhaps falsified case for George Bush was Condi Rice.
Now they tell us the war was about democracy in Iraq and the Middle East – i.e., a nobler cause than any such mundane concerns as American national security.
This is baby boomers working up noble-sounding excuses and preparing high-minded defenses in the event they wind up as failures.
When the Great Society programs of LBJ led to riots, inflation, campus upheaval, crime waves, polarization, and a quarter century of almost unbroken Republican rule, liberals exonerated themselves by saying that, even though they had lost the country, they were still blameless, since their motives were so superior to those of their adversaries.
The liberals' defense of the Great Society debacles will be the neocons' defense if we lose the Middle East. But Rice's homilies about how high-minded she was will carry little weight. Americans won't buy it. Just ask Robert McNamara.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
A Defeat Bred in Deceit
by Paul Craig Roberts
"Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When Bush decided, prior to Sept. 11, to attack Iraq, he committed himself to lies and deceit. As his British co-conspirators realized, only victory could save them from the consequences.
On June 27, General George Casey, U.S. commander of the "multinational coalition" in Iraq, told morning TV audiences that the conflict in Iraq "will not be settled on the battlefield." On June 26, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told TV audiences that "coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency." The insurgency, Rumsfeld said, might "go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
These admissions give the lie to Vice President Cheney's claim that the insurgency is in "its last throes."
Would Congress have let Bush invade Iraq if Congress had known that it would not be a three-week war but a 12-year war?
What kind of fantastic lie or gross incompetence caused a 12-year war to be marketed as a three-week war?
How can any people, no matter how deceived and deluded, support a government capable of such miscalculation or deceit?
Would the Washington Post and the New York Times have been such willing conduits of neoconservative propaganda against Iraq if anyone on either paper had enough education to realize the catastrophe that hubris was creating? What if either paper had possessed enough of a reporter's skepticism to ask a question?
General Casey's and Secretary Rumsfeld's remarks make it clear that the Defense Department has given up the prospect of military victory: The situation in Iraq, Gen. Casey said, "will ultimately be settled by negotiation and inclusion in the political process." Rumsfeld says the U.S. troops are being killed and maimed in order to "create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."
After three years of fighting, Rumsfeld still doesn't understand that the Iraqi people are the insurgency. Is Rumsfeld still clinging to the myth that the insurgency is an outside element injected into Iraq?
When will the moronic Bush administration realize that it is creating the environment in which the insurgency is prevailing?
Many readers write to me that Bush and his neocon crazies are Israel's patsies. An equally good case can be made that Bush and his crazy neocons are Osama bin Laden's agents. In a recent speech at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, Secretary of State Condi Rice repudiated America's 60-year-old policy of Middle East stability and declared: "Now, we are taking a different course."
Rice, being completely ignorant of the Middle East, believes that the path to democracy is through instability. But, of course, instability is exactly what bin Laden wants. The instability that the Bush administration is creating will unseat our puppets in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden intends to pick up the pieces.
The Bush administration has squandered America's diplomatic, economic, and military power and is heading for defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East. Bush's invasion of Iraq is fast becoming one of the greatest strategic blunders in history.
by Paul Craig Roberts
"Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When Bush decided, prior to Sept. 11, to attack Iraq, he committed himself to lies and deceit. As his British co-conspirators realized, only victory could save them from the consequences.
On June 27, General George Casey, U.S. commander of the "multinational coalition" in Iraq, told morning TV audiences that the conflict in Iraq "will not be settled on the battlefield." On June 26, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told TV audiences that "coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency." The insurgency, Rumsfeld said, might "go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
These admissions give the lie to Vice President Cheney's claim that the insurgency is in "its last throes."
Would Congress have let Bush invade Iraq if Congress had known that it would not be a three-week war but a 12-year war?
What kind of fantastic lie or gross incompetence caused a 12-year war to be marketed as a three-week war?
How can any people, no matter how deceived and deluded, support a government capable of such miscalculation or deceit?
Would the Washington Post and the New York Times have been such willing conduits of neoconservative propaganda against Iraq if anyone on either paper had enough education to realize the catastrophe that hubris was creating? What if either paper had possessed enough of a reporter's skepticism to ask a question?
General Casey's and Secretary Rumsfeld's remarks make it clear that the Defense Department has given up the prospect of military victory: The situation in Iraq, Gen. Casey said, "will ultimately be settled by negotiation and inclusion in the political process." Rumsfeld says the U.S. troops are being killed and maimed in order to "create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."
After three years of fighting, Rumsfeld still doesn't understand that the Iraqi people are the insurgency. Is Rumsfeld still clinging to the myth that the insurgency is an outside element injected into Iraq?
When will the moronic Bush administration realize that it is creating the environment in which the insurgency is prevailing?
Many readers write to me that Bush and his neocon crazies are Israel's patsies. An equally good case can be made that Bush and his crazy neocons are Osama bin Laden's agents. In a recent speech at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, Secretary of State Condi Rice repudiated America's 60-year-old policy of Middle East stability and declared: "Now, we are taking a different course."
Rice, being completely ignorant of the Middle East, believes that the path to democracy is through instability. But, of course, instability is exactly what bin Laden wants. The instability that the Bush administration is creating will unseat our puppets in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden intends to pick up the pieces.
The Bush administration has squandered America's diplomatic, economic, and military power and is heading for defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East. Bush's invasion of Iraq is fast becoming one of the greatest strategic blunders in history.
July 07, 2005
The war arrives on British soil
By Melanie Phillips
Touching and heartening messages of sympathy and solidarity have been arriving in Britain from across the world after today's horrendous acts of mass murder in London. For me, however, the most poignant are those which call up the heroic image of the British wartime spirit: that stoical, phlegmatic response which is determined to continue as before in the face of unspeakable acts because to do otherwise is to give terror its victory. And yes, there's plenty of that stoicism and quiet heroism around, and it was on display today.
But alas, there is something else, something horrible and warped, also lurking just below the surface. It is the belief that this monstrous event would never have occurred had Tony Blair not taken us to war in Iraq, that that war has created more not less terror and that the British would not have been a target at all had we distanced ourselves from the US. It is a view which has so far only been expressed openly, as far as I am aware, by far left groups such as the SWP. But it is believed far more widely than that, and I expect to see mainstream writers saying as much over the next few days. The great question is which of these rival impulses will define the mood among the British public as a whole. Are Britons still the people of the Blitz, or have they become like Spain after the Madrid bombings?
Our friends in America look at Tony Blair, whom they admire so much for his staunchness in the struggle to defend the west, and they imagine that Britain overall is in that same mould. Well, it is not. It is impossible to overstate the pernicious influence of the viciously anti-American, defeatist, appeasement-minded media and intellectual class, which has quite simply shifted the centre of moral gravity and subjected the country to a remorseless diet of distortions, lies and illogicality.
As a result, Britain has never properly understood or faced up to the nature and scale of the threat it faces, or indeed that it was always a target of attack along with the US. This lack of understanding of the war against the west may well lead the British to blame not al Qaeda but Blair and Bush - the very outcome desired by al Qaeda, and which therefore makes it so much more likely that it will attack countries where the population is perceived to be flaky. Every utterance since 9/11 by an appeasenik, it has to be said, made today's attacks that much more certain.
On the other hand, the British who are so slow to anger are bloody-mindedly warlike when finally roused. How they react to today's obscenity will be a critical turning point in this war. As we grieve for those who have lost their lives or who have sustained terrible injury in today's act of war, we must also hold our breath.
The war arrives on British soil
By Melanie Phillips
Touching and heartening messages of sympathy and solidarity have been arriving in Britain from across the world after today's horrendous acts of mass murder in London. For me, however, the most poignant are those which call up the heroic image of the British wartime spirit: that stoical, phlegmatic response which is determined to continue as before in the face of unspeakable acts because to do otherwise is to give terror its victory. And yes, there's plenty of that stoicism and quiet heroism around, and it was on display today.
But alas, there is something else, something horrible and warped, also lurking just below the surface. It is the belief that this monstrous event would never have occurred had Tony Blair not taken us to war in Iraq, that that war has created more not less terror and that the British would not have been a target at all had we distanced ourselves from the US. It is a view which has so far only been expressed openly, as far as I am aware, by far left groups such as the SWP. But it is believed far more widely than that, and I expect to see mainstream writers saying as much over the next few days. The great question is which of these rival impulses will define the mood among the British public as a whole. Are Britons still the people of the Blitz, or have they become like Spain after the Madrid bombings?
Our friends in America look at Tony Blair, whom they admire so much for his staunchness in the struggle to defend the west, and they imagine that Britain overall is in that same mould. Well, it is not. It is impossible to overstate the pernicious influence of the viciously anti-American, defeatist, appeasement-minded media and intellectual class, which has quite simply shifted the centre of moral gravity and subjected the country to a remorseless diet of distortions, lies and illogicality.
As a result, Britain has never properly understood or faced up to the nature and scale of the threat it faces, or indeed that it was always a target of attack along with the US. This lack of understanding of the war against the west may well lead the British to blame not al Qaeda but Blair and Bush - the very outcome desired by al Qaeda, and which therefore makes it so much more likely that it will attack countries where the population is perceived to be flaky. Every utterance since 9/11 by an appeasenik, it has to be said, made today's attacks that much more certain.
On the other hand, the British who are so slow to anger are bloody-mindedly warlike when finally roused. How they react to today's obscenity will be a critical turning point in this war. As we grieve for those who have lost their lives or who have sustained terrible injury in today's act of war, we must also hold our breath.
From Touchstone blog, July 07, 2005. Interesting stuff in view of the OpEd piece immediately preceding this.
Lack of Intelligent Proof?
Writes George Will (Newsweek, July 4):
The problem with intelligent-design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's curriculum.
The problem with Will here is that it's not likely he is familiar enough with ID to realize that there is nothing "creedal" about it all. There is no faith required. I don't see how he could write this, otherwise.
Anyone familiar with Bill Dembski's book, The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press), will realize the ID argument is about data, math, and science. What constitutes signs of intelligence, such that astronomers searching the heavens for radio signals from outer space can tell whether the signals are from an intelligent source or not? This is a revelant question, used in the movie Contact as a context: the SETI project, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
George Will is probably in good company with other conservatives in exhibiting not much of a grasp of intelligent design theory. In Evolutionary War Ben Adler writes: "How do leading conservative thinkers and pundits feel about evolution and intelligent design? We asked them. Here's what they said." (You have to register --for free-- to read the whole article). One excerpt:
James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal:
Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Yes."
Whether schools should teach intelligent design or similar critiques of evolution in biology classes: "I guess I would say they probably shouldn't be taught in biology classes; they probably should be taught in philosophy classes if there is such a thing. It seems to me, and again I don't speak with any authority on this, that the hypothesis ... that the universe is somehow inherently intelligent is not a scientific hypothesis. Because how do you prove it or disprove it? And really the question is how do you disprove it, because a scientific hypothesis has to be capable of being falsified. So while there may be holes in Darwinian theory, while there's obviously a lot we don't know, and perhaps Darwinian theory could be wrong altogether, I think whether or not the universe is designed is just a question outside the realm of science."
Sounds like he's been reading George Will.
Posted by James M. Kushiner at 12:22 PM | Permalink
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Lack of Intelligent Proof?:
Comments
The failure of many conservatives to grasp ID is frustrating. It is also something of a hollow victory that some evolutionary psychologists are adopting socially conservative positions from their reading of the science. However, I do wonder whether Mr. Adler will follow up with a poll of liberal pundits and their thoughts on evolution:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_03-2005_07_09.shtml#1120775700
Posted by: Warren Dodson | July 7, 2005 05:04 PM
I guess Mr. Will did not check with the Discovery Institute, either. Unobservability does not preclude testability, as the good people at that ID think tank have said. The transitional life forms that ostensibly occupy the nodes on Darwin's branching tree of life are unobservable, just as the postulated past activity of a Designer is unobservable.
As to falsifiablility of Intelligent Design theory, Michael Behe has written, "To falsify design theory a scientist need only experimentally demonstrate that a bacterial flagellum, or any other comparably complex system, could arise by natural selection."
Posted by: Patrick O'Hannigan | July 7, 2005 05:11 PM
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Isn't evolutionary theory non-falsifiable? I mean exactly what test can be used to show that its not true?
Its just a fact that some "sciences" can't be tested with experimentation.
Ken
Posted by: Ken | July 7, 2005 05:57 PM
Just the other day, libertarian journalist and blogger Colby Cosh, long-time condescending "eye-roller" and sigher at Christianity, triumphally linked to an attack on ID, and gloated as if it proved his point:
http://colbycosh.com/#wmhd
If memory serves, though, didn't Dembski already deal with the sorts of objections Barash raised, and Cosh echoed, in one of his chapters in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology? I don't have it in front of me, but I seem to recall these very sorts of objections to intelligent design - that it doesn't seem, in their opinion, to have been "perfect". But that very argument is an appeal to emotion and sentiment, that, surely, if God existed, he would do things this way or that; therefore, the fact that it didn't happen that way disproves ID. And that is "petitio principii", begging the question - we have to first agree to their premise before we can accept their conclusion; they would have us do so uncritically.
But their arguments completely ignore the main thrust of Dembski's argument, that the complex, specified information that cells, tissues, and organs exhibit, is simply too mathematically improbable to be random and spontaneously self-generated, particularly since it makes no sense for information to increase in complexity on its own, when information theory demonstrates that, at best, it can be preserved, but will tend to, over time, degrade, according to natural processes.
Alas, that won't stop evolutionists from repeating themselves, ad nauseum - and refusing to tackle ID head on, and argue their case without resorting to argumentum ad hominem against creationists (and linking ID with "creation science", which is incorrect; ID is strictly an information theory, not an ideology itself - unlike evolution, which is as much a dogma as creationism is), and petitio principii, and other logical fallacies. Not to mention gloating all the while at how smart they are, and how foolish and irrational Christians are.
Posted by: Will S. | July 7, 2005 08:23 PM
It's difficult, in the midst of a swirling intellectual controversy, to see that if ID is a true depiction of the universe that God created, (as I am convinced it is), all the pooh-poohing we're enduring now cannot prevent its eventual adoption as a guiding principle of science. The evidence of that is the reluctance, bordering on outright fear, that evolutionists are displaying toward confronting its arguments and evidences. (And their harassment of its backers, as Dembski has suffered at Baylor.) Hiding behind assertions of intellectual disrepute and persecution of your opponents can only serve you so long. It is not a long-range strategy for winning a dispute over facts. The truth will out, because the Truth will out.
Posted by: Dcn. Michael D. Harmon | July 8, 2005 07:25 AM
This is amusing. Intelligent Design is a credible hypothesis with substantial evidence to support it. The role of the scientist is to determine whether it is supported by a preponderance of evidence or false, not whether the testing process is the one they prefer to use.
This is precisely why I support the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in a rigorous and scientific manner. If neither is completely provable, then present the best case for each, the troubling facts unexplained by each, and let the student stretch their intellectual skills over this genuine controversy. They might even pay attention. They will certainly grow in their ability to think.
Posted by: Roz | July 8, 2005 08:27 AM
Although Will is wrong to suggest that the deliverances of ID work constitute credal tenets or matters of faith, from my (admittedly inconsequential) perspective, ID "science" has a significant deficiency. At the end of the day, for all its scientific rigor, the conclusions of ID are uninteresting. Detecting the mere presence of intelligent design does not provide any explanatory insight into how an intelligent designer might have gone about bringing into being the state of affairs the exhibits the property of "being designed by an intelligent agent." Unless, of course, the assertion is that the state of affairs in question was brought about by the direct agency (ex nihilo, as it were) of the intelligent designer - in which case ID amounts to a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis.
I'm highly sympathetic to the ID efforts. But I cannot overcome the suspicion that ID "science" is ultimately just an incredibly complex (and powerful!) resurrection of Paley's argument from design - in which case ID belongs in the philosophy department (theology's handmaid), but not in natural sciences.
Posted by: Justin D. Barnard | July 8, 2005 12:39 PM
Lack of Intelligent Proof?
Writes George Will (Newsweek, July 4):
The problem with intelligent-design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's curriculum.
The problem with Will here is that it's not likely he is familiar enough with ID to realize that there is nothing "creedal" about it all. There is no faith required. I don't see how he could write this, otherwise.
Anyone familiar with Bill Dembski's book, The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press), will realize the ID argument is about data, math, and science. What constitutes signs of intelligence, such that astronomers searching the heavens for radio signals from outer space can tell whether the signals are from an intelligent source or not? This is a revelant question, used in the movie Contact as a context: the SETI project, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
George Will is probably in good company with other conservatives in exhibiting not much of a grasp of intelligent design theory. In Evolutionary War Ben Adler writes: "How do leading conservative thinkers and pundits feel about evolution and intelligent design? We asked them. Here's what they said." (You have to register --for free-- to read the whole article). One excerpt:
James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal:
Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Yes."
Whether schools should teach intelligent design or similar critiques of evolution in biology classes: "I guess I would say they probably shouldn't be taught in biology classes; they probably should be taught in philosophy classes if there is such a thing. It seems to me, and again I don't speak with any authority on this, that the hypothesis ... that the universe is somehow inherently intelligent is not a scientific hypothesis. Because how do you prove it or disprove it? And really the question is how do you disprove it, because a scientific hypothesis has to be capable of being falsified. So while there may be holes in Darwinian theory, while there's obviously a lot we don't know, and perhaps Darwinian theory could be wrong altogether, I think whether or not the universe is designed is just a question outside the realm of science."
Sounds like he's been reading George Will.
Posted by James M. Kushiner at 12:22 PM | Permalink
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Lack of Intelligent Proof?:
Comments
The failure of many conservatives to grasp ID is frustrating. It is also something of a hollow victory that some evolutionary psychologists are adopting socially conservative positions from their reading of the science. However, I do wonder whether Mr. Adler will follow up with a poll of liberal pundits and their thoughts on evolution:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_03-2005_07_09.shtml#1120775700
Posted by: Warren Dodson | July 7, 2005 05:04 PM
I guess Mr. Will did not check with the Discovery Institute, either. Unobservability does not preclude testability, as the good people at that ID think tank have said. The transitional life forms that ostensibly occupy the nodes on Darwin's branching tree of life are unobservable, just as the postulated past activity of a Designer is unobservable.
As to falsifiablility of Intelligent Design theory, Michael Behe has written, "To falsify design theory a scientist need only experimentally demonstrate that a bacterial flagellum, or any other comparably complex system, could arise by natural selection."
Posted by: Patrick O'Hannigan | July 7, 2005 05:11 PM
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Isn't evolutionary theory non-falsifiable? I mean exactly what test can be used to show that its not true?
Its just a fact that some "sciences" can't be tested with experimentation.
Ken
Posted by: Ken | July 7, 2005 05:57 PM
Just the other day, libertarian journalist and blogger Colby Cosh, long-time condescending "eye-roller" and sigher at Christianity, triumphally linked to an attack on ID, and gloated as if it proved his point:
http://colbycosh.com/#wmhd
If memory serves, though, didn't Dembski already deal with the sorts of objections Barash raised, and Cosh echoed, in one of his chapters in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology? I don't have it in front of me, but I seem to recall these very sorts of objections to intelligent design - that it doesn't seem, in their opinion, to have been "perfect". But that very argument is an appeal to emotion and sentiment, that, surely, if God existed, he would do things this way or that; therefore, the fact that it didn't happen that way disproves ID. And that is "petitio principii", begging the question - we have to first agree to their premise before we can accept their conclusion; they would have us do so uncritically.
But their arguments completely ignore the main thrust of Dembski's argument, that the complex, specified information that cells, tissues, and organs exhibit, is simply too mathematically improbable to be random and spontaneously self-generated, particularly since it makes no sense for information to increase in complexity on its own, when information theory demonstrates that, at best, it can be preserved, but will tend to, over time, degrade, according to natural processes.
Alas, that won't stop evolutionists from repeating themselves, ad nauseum - and refusing to tackle ID head on, and argue their case without resorting to argumentum ad hominem against creationists (and linking ID with "creation science", which is incorrect; ID is strictly an information theory, not an ideology itself - unlike evolution, which is as much a dogma as creationism is), and petitio principii, and other logical fallacies. Not to mention gloating all the while at how smart they are, and how foolish and irrational Christians are.
Posted by: Will S. | July 7, 2005 08:23 PM
It's difficult, in the midst of a swirling intellectual controversy, to see that if ID is a true depiction of the universe that God created, (as I am convinced it is), all the pooh-poohing we're enduring now cannot prevent its eventual adoption as a guiding principle of science. The evidence of that is the reluctance, bordering on outright fear, that evolutionists are displaying toward confronting its arguments and evidences. (And their harassment of its backers, as Dembski has suffered at Baylor.) Hiding behind assertions of intellectual disrepute and persecution of your opponents can only serve you so long. It is not a long-range strategy for winning a dispute over facts. The truth will out, because the Truth will out.
Posted by: Dcn. Michael D. Harmon | July 8, 2005 07:25 AM
This is amusing. Intelligent Design is a credible hypothesis with substantial evidence to support it. The role of the scientist is to determine whether it is supported by a preponderance of evidence or false, not whether the testing process is the one they prefer to use.
This is precisely why I support the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in a rigorous and scientific manner. If neither is completely provable, then present the best case for each, the troubling facts unexplained by each, and let the student stretch their intellectual skills over this genuine controversy. They might even pay attention. They will certainly grow in their ability to think.
Posted by: Roz | July 8, 2005 08:27 AM
Although Will is wrong to suggest that the deliverances of ID work constitute credal tenets or matters of faith, from my (admittedly inconsequential) perspective, ID "science" has a significant deficiency. At the end of the day, for all its scientific rigor, the conclusions of ID are uninteresting. Detecting the mere presence of intelligent design does not provide any explanatory insight into how an intelligent designer might have gone about bringing into being the state of affairs the exhibits the property of "being designed by an intelligent agent." Unless, of course, the assertion is that the state of affairs in question was brought about by the direct agency (ex nihilo, as it were) of the intelligent designer - in which case ID amounts to a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis.
I'm highly sympathetic to the ID efforts. But I cannot overcome the suspicion that ID "science" is ultimately just an incredibly complex (and powerful!) resurrection of Paley's argument from design - in which case ID belongs in the philosophy department (theology's handmaid), but not in natural sciences.
Posted by: Justin D. Barnard | July 8, 2005 12:39 PM
From The New York Times:
Finding Design in Nature
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
Vienna
EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.
But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.
Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:
"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator."
He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."
Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity."
Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: "Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."
In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.
The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."
Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist."
Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."
Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.
Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.
Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Finding Design in Nature
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
Vienna
EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.
But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.
Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:
"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator."
He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems."
Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity."
Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: "Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance."
In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.
The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."
Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist."
Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."
Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.
Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.
Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Friday, July 08, 2005
The Judges War: An Issue of Power
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Behind the modern conservative movement that first found a champion in Barry Goldwater were several burning concerns.
The first was anti-communism—outrage at FDR’s “Uncle Joe” diplomacy at Yalta, Truman’s “no-win war,” the firing of Gen. MacArthur, softness toward Soviet spying and homegrown treason.
A second issue that rallied the Right was the Warren Court. In the 1930s, conservatives had turned back FDR’s effort to “pack the court,” but after 20 years of Roosevelt-Truman appointees, the court was packed. Ike’s pick, Earl Warren, completed the job.
The Brown decision of 1954, desegregating the schools of 17 states and the District of Columbia, awakened the nation to the court’s new claim to power. Hailed by liberal elites—and finding no resistance from a Democratic Congress or president who spent his afternoons at Burning Tree—Warren’s court went off on a rampage.
It invented new rights for criminals and put new restrictions on cops and prosecutors. It reassigned students to schools by race and ordered busing to bring it about, tearing cities apart. It ordered God, prayer and Bible-reading out of classrooms. It said pornography was constitutionally protected, making Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein First Amendment heroes, rather than felons. It ruled naked dancing a protected form of free expression. It declared abortion a constitutional right and sodomy constitutionally protected behavior.
It outlawed the death penalty, abolished terms limits on members of Congress voted by state referendums, and told high school coaches to stop praying in locker rooms and students to stop saying prayers at graduation. It ordered the Ten Commandments out of schoolhouses and courthouses. It condoned discrimination against white students in violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. And, two weeks ago, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that towns can seize private homes and turn them over to private developers.
In every election since 1964, the court—its liberal bias and usurped powers—has been at issue. Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 was attributable in part to his pledge to “strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces in society” and put a Southerner on the Supreme Court.
Attacks upon court decisions seen as pro-criminal and anti-Christian have been a staple of Republican oratory that has given the GOP seven victories in 10 presidential elections and raised party strength from a third of the House and Senate in 1965, to majorities in both houses in 2005.
Hence the Judges War. Left and Right both know that at stake in the nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor is control of the last citadel of liberal power in America. For not one of the radical reforms imposed by our judicial dictatorship would have been approved by Congress.
If conservatives can recapture the court, social and moral issues can be returned to where they belong: elected legislatures and executives. The Left will lose its power to advance its social agenda and see a rollback of a revolution imposed undemocratically upon America over 50 years.
The Left gets it. Liberals smeared Nixon nominees Haynesworth and Carswell as racists and tried to derail Rehnquist. They gave Reagan’s moderate nominee, O’Connor, a pass, while savaging conservative Robert Bork. They let Bush I’s stealth candidate Souter through, but attempted the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas.
But Republicans often do not get it. Clinton nominees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg sailed through without resistance. Though Ginsberg was a card-carrying ACLU activist, she got every GOP vote but those of Jesse Helms and two others.
Does Bush get it? He needs three seats to capture the court, that of Chief Justice Rehnquist when he retires, that of O’Connor, now open, and that of one other justice, as long as it is not Antonin Scalia or Thomas.
Bush can succeed where every Republican president in 50 years failed: to rein in this radical and renegade court and restore the Constitution to its rightful place as the highest law in the land: to be interpreted by Supreme Court justices, and not perverted to their own ideological and political ends.
To succeed will take perseverance and courage by President Bush. But if he does, he will leave a mark on history. It will be his greatest domestic achievement, for which his country will forever remember him, his friends will praise him and his enemies will be eternally gnashing their teeth. Let’s get it on.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Behind the modern conservative movement that first found a champion in Barry Goldwater were several burning concerns.
The first was anti-communism—outrage at FDR’s “Uncle Joe” diplomacy at Yalta, Truman’s “no-win war,” the firing of Gen. MacArthur, softness toward Soviet spying and homegrown treason.
A second issue that rallied the Right was the Warren Court. In the 1930s, conservatives had turned back FDR’s effort to “pack the court,” but after 20 years of Roosevelt-Truman appointees, the court was packed. Ike’s pick, Earl Warren, completed the job.
The Brown decision of 1954, desegregating the schools of 17 states and the District of Columbia, awakened the nation to the court’s new claim to power. Hailed by liberal elites—and finding no resistance from a Democratic Congress or president who spent his afternoons at Burning Tree—Warren’s court went off on a rampage.
It invented new rights for criminals and put new restrictions on cops and prosecutors. It reassigned students to schools by race and ordered busing to bring it about, tearing cities apart. It ordered God, prayer and Bible-reading out of classrooms. It said pornography was constitutionally protected, making Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein First Amendment heroes, rather than felons. It ruled naked dancing a protected form of free expression. It declared abortion a constitutional right and sodomy constitutionally protected behavior.
It outlawed the death penalty, abolished terms limits on members of Congress voted by state referendums, and told high school coaches to stop praying in locker rooms and students to stop saying prayers at graduation. It ordered the Ten Commandments out of schoolhouses and courthouses. It condoned discrimination against white students in violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. And, two weeks ago, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that towns can seize private homes and turn them over to private developers.
In every election since 1964, the court—its liberal bias and usurped powers—has been at issue. Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 was attributable in part to his pledge to “strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces in society” and put a Southerner on the Supreme Court.
Attacks upon court decisions seen as pro-criminal and anti-Christian have been a staple of Republican oratory that has given the GOP seven victories in 10 presidential elections and raised party strength from a third of the House and Senate in 1965, to majorities in both houses in 2005.
Hence the Judges War. Left and Right both know that at stake in the nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor is control of the last citadel of liberal power in America. For not one of the radical reforms imposed by our judicial dictatorship would have been approved by Congress.
If conservatives can recapture the court, social and moral issues can be returned to where they belong: elected legislatures and executives. The Left will lose its power to advance its social agenda and see a rollback of a revolution imposed undemocratically upon America over 50 years.
The Left gets it. Liberals smeared Nixon nominees Haynesworth and Carswell as racists and tried to derail Rehnquist. They gave Reagan’s moderate nominee, O’Connor, a pass, while savaging conservative Robert Bork. They let Bush I’s stealth candidate Souter through, but attempted the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas.
But Republicans often do not get it. Clinton nominees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg sailed through without resistance. Though Ginsberg was a card-carrying ACLU activist, she got every GOP vote but those of Jesse Helms and two others.
Does Bush get it? He needs three seats to capture the court, that of Chief Justice Rehnquist when he retires, that of O’Connor, now open, and that of one other justice, as long as it is not Antonin Scalia or Thomas.
Bush can succeed where every Republican president in 50 years failed: to rein in this radical and renegade court and restore the Constitution to its rightful place as the highest law in the land: to be interpreted by Supreme Court justices, and not perverted to their own ideological and political ends.
To succeed will take perseverance and courage by President Bush. But if he does, he will leave a mark on history. It will be his greatest domestic achievement, for which his country will forever remember him, his friends will praise him and his enemies will be eternally gnashing their teeth. Let’s get it on.
From www.washingtontimes.com:
Finding Osama bin Laden
By Michael F. Scheuer
CIA Director Porter Goss has been criticized for telling Time that he had an "excellent" idea of Osama bin Laden's location, while inferring (sic) that U.S. respect for Pakistan's sovereignty prevented action to capture or kill him. Now, I tend to believe Mr. Goss's statement was part of a concerted U.S. government effort to press Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to do the always undefined "more" to eliminate bin Laden. Mr. Goss' comments followed harsh criticism of Pakistan's inaction by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and in a volley from the U.S. gadfly ambassadorinKabul,Zalmay Khalilzad, now on his way to Iraq to replicate the disaster he created in Afghanistan.
Though Mr. Goss' words are part of Washington's never-ending quest to find foreigners to do its dirty work, the CIA chief did do a great, even heroic service for Americans by saying the U.S. government had too much respect for Pakistan's sovereignty to kill bin Laden on its territory. Mr. Goss' statement is the most frank to date that the U.S. leaders care more about currying international opinion than protecting American lives. While some say Mr. Goss' statement was a clumsy mistake, I see it as a warning to Americans from a man of integrity who has seen both parties' leaders refuse to act to defend Americans when given the opportunity.
The truth is that under both Bill Clinton and President Bush the U.S. government has valued the good opinion of the world over American lives. Mr. Clinton and his merry band of national security advisers cum economic hucksters — Sandy Berger, Leon Fuerth, Richard Clarke, George Tenet, et al. — always assigned Americans to the gallows if they could preen before international opinion, sell huge amounts of weapons to Arab tyrants or close an oil deal somewhere in the world. No need to take my word, simply give a close read to the September 11 commission report to see the number of chances the Clintonites had to kill or capture bin Laden in 1998-99 that's right, 1998-99 and the absurd reasons they came up with to both keep bin Laden alive and keep Americans on al Qaeda's bull's-eye.
And Mr. Bush and the tough-talking, gun-slinging Republicans? More of the same. The intelligence community gave Mr. Bush's national security team precise locational data on Abu Musab Zarqawi nearly every day for the year preceding the invasion of Iraq. No action followed because Bush officials were sweet-talking the Germans and French into joining us in Iraq. The parents of soldiers and Marines killed by Zarqawi's forces are now mourning because the Bush crew like Mr. Clinton's before it valued European support and good-will over their kids' lives.
For those who argue this is a one-off case, it is well to recall that the Bush team refused to use U.S. military power savagely enough to find and kill bin Laden at Tora Bora in late 2001 — too much force might offend the coalition, after all, and cynically wasted the lives of U.S. Marines by ending the first attack on Fallujah on victory's edge, in favor of trying "political remedies" insisted on by the nervous nellies among — yup, you guessed it — the European members of the Iraq coalition. Republican or Democrat matters not, the bottom line is: Keep the world sweet and worry about American lives later, if it's convenient.
Let us not, therefore, condemn Mr. Goss for what he said to Time. While he exaggerated our knowledge of bin Laden's location, he put down a marker for Americans that the bipartisan elite that conducts foreign policy and national defense cares more about what others think than about protecting their lives. This attitude has been manifest to CIA's counter terrorism officers since 1992, but they had no senior leader willing to voice their concerns, and the September 11 commission buried reams of their damning testimony to protect negligent senior officials who helped make September 11 possible.
So, all praise and honor to Mr. Goss for telling the truth about the willingness of U.S. leaders to sacrifice American lives in favor world opinion, Pakistani sovereignty and arms sales. Mr. Goss words create an opening for the media and through unlikely members of Congress to examine the instances above and find just how cheaply America lives are held by our political elites. Whether or not this overdue study is conducted, Mr. Goss will be remembered as the CIA director who had the patriot's courage to warn Americans that their children's lives, at home and abroad, are regularly sacrificed by the favor-currying leaders of both parties.
Unlike his bosses, Mr. Goss clearly prefers to be remembered as an American citizen, not a Citizen of the World. Well done, Sir.
Michael F. Scheuer, a 22-year veteran with the CIA, created and served as the chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He is also the author of "Imperial Hubris."
Finding Osama bin Laden
By Michael F. Scheuer
CIA Director Porter Goss has been criticized for telling Time that he had an "excellent" idea of Osama bin Laden's location, while inferring (sic) that U.S. respect for Pakistan's sovereignty prevented action to capture or kill him. Now, I tend to believe Mr. Goss's statement was part of a concerted U.S. government effort to press Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to do the always undefined "more" to eliminate bin Laden. Mr. Goss' comments followed harsh criticism of Pakistan's inaction by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and in a volley from the U.S. gadfly ambassadorinKabul,Zalmay Khalilzad, now on his way to Iraq to replicate the disaster he created in Afghanistan.
Though Mr. Goss' words are part of Washington's never-ending quest to find foreigners to do its dirty work, the CIA chief did do a great, even heroic service for Americans by saying the U.S. government had too much respect for Pakistan's sovereignty to kill bin Laden on its territory. Mr. Goss' statement is the most frank to date that the U.S. leaders care more about currying international opinion than protecting American lives. While some say Mr. Goss' statement was a clumsy mistake, I see it as a warning to Americans from a man of integrity who has seen both parties' leaders refuse to act to defend Americans when given the opportunity.
The truth is that under both Bill Clinton and President Bush the U.S. government has valued the good opinion of the world over American lives. Mr. Clinton and his merry band of national security advisers cum economic hucksters — Sandy Berger, Leon Fuerth, Richard Clarke, George Tenet, et al. — always assigned Americans to the gallows if they could preen before international opinion, sell huge amounts of weapons to Arab tyrants or close an oil deal somewhere in the world. No need to take my word, simply give a close read to the September 11 commission report to see the number of chances the Clintonites had to kill or capture bin Laden in 1998-99 that's right, 1998-99 and the absurd reasons they came up with to both keep bin Laden alive and keep Americans on al Qaeda's bull's-eye.
And Mr. Bush and the tough-talking, gun-slinging Republicans? More of the same. The intelligence community gave Mr. Bush's national security team precise locational data on Abu Musab Zarqawi nearly every day for the year preceding the invasion of Iraq. No action followed because Bush officials were sweet-talking the Germans and French into joining us in Iraq. The parents of soldiers and Marines killed by Zarqawi's forces are now mourning because the Bush crew like Mr. Clinton's before it valued European support and good-will over their kids' lives.
For those who argue this is a one-off case, it is well to recall that the Bush team refused to use U.S. military power savagely enough to find and kill bin Laden at Tora Bora in late 2001 — too much force might offend the coalition, after all, and cynically wasted the lives of U.S. Marines by ending the first attack on Fallujah on victory's edge, in favor of trying "political remedies" insisted on by the nervous nellies among — yup, you guessed it — the European members of the Iraq coalition. Republican or Democrat matters not, the bottom line is: Keep the world sweet and worry about American lives later, if it's convenient.
Let us not, therefore, condemn Mr. Goss for what he said to Time. While he exaggerated our knowledge of bin Laden's location, he put down a marker for Americans that the bipartisan elite that conducts foreign policy and national defense cares more about what others think than about protecting their lives. This attitude has been manifest to CIA's counter terrorism officers since 1992, but they had no senior leader willing to voice their concerns, and the September 11 commission buried reams of their damning testimony to protect negligent senior officials who helped make September 11 possible.
So, all praise and honor to Mr. Goss for telling the truth about the willingness of U.S. leaders to sacrifice American lives in favor world opinion, Pakistani sovereignty and arms sales. Mr. Goss words create an opening for the media and through unlikely members of Congress to examine the instances above and find just how cheaply America lives are held by our political elites. Whether or not this overdue study is conducted, Mr. Goss will be remembered as the CIA director who had the patriot's courage to warn Americans that their children's lives, at home and abroad, are regularly sacrificed by the favor-currying leaders of both parties.
Unlike his bosses, Mr. Goss clearly prefers to be remembered as an American citizen, not a Citizen of the World. Well done, Sir.
Michael F. Scheuer, a 22-year veteran with the CIA, created and served as the chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He is also the author of "Imperial Hubris."
Thursday, July 07, 2005
From The Los Angeles Times:
Mercenaries, Not Musicians, for Africa
By Max Boot
Anyone who has visited a shantytown in Africa can applaud the impulse behind Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign. It would be swell if, as we are repeatedly told, "for the price of a Big Mac" we could save 20,000 people a day who die from extreme poverty. But there is little reason to think that aging pop stars have figured out how to achieve a goal that has eluded generations of policymakers.
The solution being promoted by Live 8 is simple: Send beaucoup bucks. The anti-poverty campaigners are grouchy because the wealthy world spends only 0.25% of its gross national income on aid — a mere $76.8 billion last year. They want to nearly triple that, to 0.7% of GNI.
The United States, in particular, is castigated for its stingy development budget — only 0.16% of GNI. This obscures the fact that, in absolute terms, the U.S. government spends far more on foreign aid ($19 billion last year) than any other nation. And that's only a small part of our total contribution. Thanks in part to our lower tax rates, Americans give far more to charity than do Europeans. If you include private-sector donations, the Hudson Institute finds, U.S. foreign aid totals $81 billion, or 0.68% of GNI — close to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. And that's not counting the billions the U.S. spends to subsidize global security or the billions more it sends abroad as investment capital.
By any measure, the U.S. is extraordinarily generous, and President Bush is making us more generous still. He has already tripled development aid to Africa and plans to double it again. But for the anti-poverty campaigners it's not enough. It never is. Their animating idea is the same one that was behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Massive transfers of wealth can eradicate poverty. It didn't work in the U.S., and it has even less chance of working abroad.
In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans' income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.
Economists who have studied aid projects have found numerous reasons for the failures. In many instances, money was siphoned off by corrupt officials. Even when funds did reach the intended beneficiaries, the money often distorted local markets for goods and labor, creating inflation that drove local businesses out of business.
Only one major research paper in recent years has found any positive correlation between foreign aid and economic growth, and that only in countries "with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies," which excludes much of Africa. Most experts think even that conclusion is too optimistic.
The International Monetary Fund recently issued two reports that find "little evidence of a robust positive impact of aid on growth." Jeffrey Sachs, economist-in-residence at Rock 'n' Roll U., airily waves away such objections. Yes, aid hasn't worked in the past, he concedes, but he's come up with some boffo (or is that Bono?) ideas that really, truly will break a half-century of futility. Maybe he's identified the key barriers to growth; maybe Africa really does need more leguminous trees. Or maybe not. But his impassioned assurances offer scant cause to throw good money after bad.
Oddly enough, Sachs ignores the most obvious obstacle to Africa's escape from the "poverty trap," what his pal Bob Geldof has accurately described as "corruption and thuggery." (This was also Sachs' blind spot when he tried to reform the Russian economy in the 1990s.) Yet not even Sir Bob has offered any plausible ideas for addressing these deep-rooted woes.
Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it's linked to specific "good governance" benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.
Any real solution to Africa's problems must focus on the root causes of poverty — mainly misgovernment. Instead of pouring billions more down the same old rat holes, maybe the Live 8 crew should promote a more innovative approach: Use the G-8's jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.
Mercenaries, Not Musicians, for Africa
By Max Boot
Anyone who has visited a shantytown in Africa can applaud the impulse behind Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign. It would be swell if, as we are repeatedly told, "for the price of a Big Mac" we could save 20,000 people a day who die from extreme poverty. But there is little reason to think that aging pop stars have figured out how to achieve a goal that has eluded generations of policymakers.
The solution being promoted by Live 8 is simple: Send beaucoup bucks. The anti-poverty campaigners are grouchy because the wealthy world spends only 0.25% of its gross national income on aid — a mere $76.8 billion last year. They want to nearly triple that, to 0.7% of GNI.
The United States, in particular, is castigated for its stingy development budget — only 0.16% of GNI. This obscures the fact that, in absolute terms, the U.S. government spends far more on foreign aid ($19 billion last year) than any other nation. And that's only a small part of our total contribution. Thanks in part to our lower tax rates, Americans give far more to charity than do Europeans. If you include private-sector donations, the Hudson Institute finds, U.S. foreign aid totals $81 billion, or 0.68% of GNI — close to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. And that's not counting the billions the U.S. spends to subsidize global security or the billions more it sends abroad as investment capital.
By any measure, the U.S. is extraordinarily generous, and President Bush is making us more generous still. He has already tripled development aid to Africa and plans to double it again. But for the anti-poverty campaigners it's not enough. It never is. Their animating idea is the same one that was behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Massive transfers of wealth can eradicate poverty. It didn't work in the U.S., and it has even less chance of working abroad.
In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans' income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.
Economists who have studied aid projects have found numerous reasons for the failures. In many instances, money was siphoned off by corrupt officials. Even when funds did reach the intended beneficiaries, the money often distorted local markets for goods and labor, creating inflation that drove local businesses out of business.
Only one major research paper in recent years has found any positive correlation between foreign aid and economic growth, and that only in countries "with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies," which excludes much of Africa. Most experts think even that conclusion is too optimistic.
The International Monetary Fund recently issued two reports that find "little evidence of a robust positive impact of aid on growth." Jeffrey Sachs, economist-in-residence at Rock 'n' Roll U., airily waves away such objections. Yes, aid hasn't worked in the past, he concedes, but he's come up with some boffo (or is that Bono?) ideas that really, truly will break a half-century of futility. Maybe he's identified the key barriers to growth; maybe Africa really does need more leguminous trees. Or maybe not. But his impassioned assurances offer scant cause to throw good money after bad.
Oddly enough, Sachs ignores the most obvious obstacle to Africa's escape from the "poverty trap," what his pal Bob Geldof has accurately described as "corruption and thuggery." (This was also Sachs' blind spot when he tried to reform the Russian economy in the 1990s.) Yet not even Sir Bob has offered any plausible ideas for addressing these deep-rooted woes.
Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it's linked to specific "good governance" benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.
Any real solution to Africa's problems must focus on the root causes of poverty — mainly misgovernment. Instead of pouring billions more down the same old rat holes, maybe the Live 8 crew should promote a more innovative approach: Use the G-8's jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.
Reagan's Biggest Mistake Finally Retires
By Ann Coulter
The fundamental goal of the next Supreme Court justice should be to create a record that would not inspire Sen. Chuck Schumer to say, as he did of Justice O'Connor last week: "We hope the president chooses someone thoughtful, mainstream, pragmatic – someone just like Sandra Day O'Connor." That's our litmus test: We will accept only judicial nominees violently opposed by Chuck Schumer.
Showing what a tough job it is to be president, when Bush announced O'Connor's resignation, he called her "a discerning and conscientious judge and a public servant of complete integrity." I assume he was reading from the script originally drafted for Justice Rehnquist's anticipated resignation, but still, he said it.
Cleverly, Bush also made a big point of noting that Reagan appointed O'Connor, reminding people that whatever mistakes Bush may have made, at least he didn't appoint O'Connor.
It's hard to say which of O'Connor's decisions was the worst. It's like asking people to name their favorite Beatle or favorite (unaborted) child.
Of course, it was often hard to say what her decision was, period. In lieu of clear rules, or what we used to call "law," O'Connor preferred conjuring up five-part balancing tests that settled nothing. That woman could never make up her mind!
In a quarter-century on the highest court in the land, O'Connor will have left no discernible mark on the law, other than littering the U.S. Reports with a lot of long-winded versions of the legal proposition: "It depends."
Some say her worst opinion was Grutter v. Bollinger, which introduced a constitutional rule with a "DO NOT USE AFTER XXXX DATE." After delivering a four-part test for when universities are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race (a culturally biased test if ever there was one), O'Connor incomprehensibly added: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
So now constitutional rules come with expiration dates, bringing to mind the image of O'Connor proffering one of her written opinions to Justice Scalia and asking, "Does this smell bad to you?" Strangely enough, she failed to specify which month and day in the year 2028 that affirmative action would no longer be justifiable under the Constitution.
Others say her worst decisions came in the area of religion. In determining the constitutionality of religious displays on public property and government aid to religion, Justice O'Connor evidently decided she preferred her own words, "entanglement" and "endorsement," to the Constitution's word "establishment."
No one could ever understand O'Connor's special two-prong entanglement/endorsement test – including Justice O'Connor. Over the years, she struggled to resuscitate her own test by continually adding more tines to the prongs.
Among the tines to the "endorsement" prong is the "outsider" test, requiring that the government not make a nonbeliever feel like an "outsider." But wait! There are spikes on those tines!
O'Connor discovered a spike off the Feelings tine of the Endorsement prong, which requires the court's evaluation of the feelings of the nonbeliever to be based on a "reasonable observer" who embodies "a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment."
It's often said that O'Connor's problem is that she is not a judge, but a legislator. On the basis of her bright idea to replace 10 blindingly clear words in the Constitution ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") with a 40-page manual of flow charts and two-pronged, four-tined, six-spiked tests, she wouldn't have made much of legislator, either. O'Connor's real calling was as a schoolyard bully, maliciously making up rules willy-nilly as she went along.
Processing the religion cases through the meat grinder of her own multipart tests, O'Connor found it was unconstitutional for a Reform rabbi to give a nonsectarian prayer at a high school graduation. It was also unconstitutional for a courthouse in Kentucky to display a framed Ten Commandments along with other historical documents.
In the latter case, McCreary v. ACLU, O'Connor haughtily added this bit of advice to religious believers: Visionaries "held their faith 'with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.'"
Religion may be able to get along without the government, but apparently sodomy and abortion cannot. Those, O'Connor found, were special rights protected by the Constitution.
O'Connor took sadistic glee in refusing to overturn Roe v. Wade in the face of the unending strife it has caused the nation. (And it hasn't been easy on 30 million aborted babies either.)
She co-authored the opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey which upheld Roe v. Wade, gloating: "[T]o overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason ... would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question." Yes, the court has really crowned itself in glory with those abortion decisions.
At least she would not overrule a precedent for something as trivial as a human life. Overruling a precedent would require a really, really compelling value like our right to sodomize one another.
Thus, in the recent sodomy case Lawrence v. Texas, which overruled an earlier case that had found no constitutional right to sodomy (risibly titled Bowers v. Hardwick), O'Connor specifically cited criticism of Bowers as a reason to overrule it. "[C]riticism of Bowers has been substantial and continuing," O'Connor explained in her concurrence. When "a case's foundations have sustained serious erosion, criticism from other sources is of greater significance."
Mercifully, O'Connor was concurring only in Lawrence, so there is no multipronged test for sodomy under the Constitution.
For all the blather about O'Connor's moderation and pragmatism and motherly instincts, Mommie Dearest signed on to the most monstrous opinion in the history of the court, Stenberg v. Carhart, which proclaimed a heretofore unnoticed constitutional right to puncture the skull of a half-delivered baby and suction its brains out – just as the framers so clearly intended.
In her 2003 memoir, Miss Pragmatic-Consensus wrote, "Humility is the most difficult virtue," which perhaps explains why she never attempted it.
Every human being on the globe has heard the lachrymose tale of O'Connor being offered the job of secretary after her graduation from Stanford Law School. Bushmen in Africa weep at the unfairness of it all – though not as bitterly as O'Connor does.
O'Connor spent the last quarter-century paying America back. With no offense intended to the nonbelievers who are "reasonable observers" embodying "a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment," thank God the punishment is finally over.
By Ann Coulter
The fundamental goal of the next Supreme Court justice should be to create a record that would not inspire Sen. Chuck Schumer to say, as he did of Justice O'Connor last week: "We hope the president chooses someone thoughtful, mainstream, pragmatic – someone just like Sandra Day O'Connor." That's our litmus test: We will accept only judicial nominees violently opposed by Chuck Schumer.
Showing what a tough job it is to be president, when Bush announced O'Connor's resignation, he called her "a discerning and conscientious judge and a public servant of complete integrity." I assume he was reading from the script originally drafted for Justice Rehnquist's anticipated resignation, but still, he said it.
Cleverly, Bush also made a big point of noting that Reagan appointed O'Connor, reminding people that whatever mistakes Bush may have made, at least he didn't appoint O'Connor.
It's hard to say which of O'Connor's decisions was the worst. It's like asking people to name their favorite Beatle or favorite (unaborted) child.
Of course, it was often hard to say what her decision was, period. In lieu of clear rules, or what we used to call "law," O'Connor preferred conjuring up five-part balancing tests that settled nothing. That woman could never make up her mind!
In a quarter-century on the highest court in the land, O'Connor will have left no discernible mark on the law, other than littering the U.S. Reports with a lot of long-winded versions of the legal proposition: "It depends."
Some say her worst opinion was Grutter v. Bollinger, which introduced a constitutional rule with a "DO NOT USE AFTER XXXX DATE." After delivering a four-part test for when universities are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race (a culturally biased test if ever there was one), O'Connor incomprehensibly added: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
So now constitutional rules come with expiration dates, bringing to mind the image of O'Connor proffering one of her written opinions to Justice Scalia and asking, "Does this smell bad to you?" Strangely enough, she failed to specify which month and day in the year 2028 that affirmative action would no longer be justifiable under the Constitution.
Others say her worst decisions came in the area of religion. In determining the constitutionality of religious displays on public property and government aid to religion, Justice O'Connor evidently decided she preferred her own words, "entanglement" and "endorsement," to the Constitution's word "establishment."
No one could ever understand O'Connor's special two-prong entanglement/endorsement test – including Justice O'Connor. Over the years, she struggled to resuscitate her own test by continually adding more tines to the prongs.
Among the tines to the "endorsement" prong is the "outsider" test, requiring that the government not make a nonbeliever feel like an "outsider." But wait! There are spikes on those tines!
O'Connor discovered a spike off the Feelings tine of the Endorsement prong, which requires the court's evaluation of the feelings of the nonbeliever to be based on a "reasonable observer" who embodies "a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment."
It's often said that O'Connor's problem is that she is not a judge, but a legislator. On the basis of her bright idea to replace 10 blindingly clear words in the Constitution ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") with a 40-page manual of flow charts and two-pronged, four-tined, six-spiked tests, she wouldn't have made much of legislator, either. O'Connor's real calling was as a schoolyard bully, maliciously making up rules willy-nilly as she went along.
Processing the religion cases through the meat grinder of her own multipart tests, O'Connor found it was unconstitutional for a Reform rabbi to give a nonsectarian prayer at a high school graduation. It was also unconstitutional for a courthouse in Kentucky to display a framed Ten Commandments along with other historical documents.
In the latter case, McCreary v. ACLU, O'Connor haughtily added this bit of advice to religious believers: Visionaries "held their faith 'with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.'"
Religion may be able to get along without the government, but apparently sodomy and abortion cannot. Those, O'Connor found, were special rights protected by the Constitution.
O'Connor took sadistic glee in refusing to overturn Roe v. Wade in the face of the unending strife it has caused the nation. (And it hasn't been easy on 30 million aborted babies either.)
She co-authored the opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey which upheld Roe v. Wade, gloating: "[T]o overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason ... would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question." Yes, the court has really crowned itself in glory with those abortion decisions.
At least she would not overrule a precedent for something as trivial as a human life. Overruling a precedent would require a really, really compelling value like our right to sodomize one another.
Thus, in the recent sodomy case Lawrence v. Texas, which overruled an earlier case that had found no constitutional right to sodomy (risibly titled Bowers v. Hardwick), O'Connor specifically cited criticism of Bowers as a reason to overrule it. "[C]riticism of Bowers has been substantial and continuing," O'Connor explained in her concurrence. When "a case's foundations have sustained serious erosion, criticism from other sources is of greater significance."
Mercifully, O'Connor was concurring only in Lawrence, so there is no multipronged test for sodomy under the Constitution.
For all the blather about O'Connor's moderation and pragmatism and motherly instincts, Mommie Dearest signed on to the most monstrous opinion in the history of the court, Stenberg v. Carhart, which proclaimed a heretofore unnoticed constitutional right to puncture the skull of a half-delivered baby and suction its brains out – just as the framers so clearly intended.
In her 2003 memoir, Miss Pragmatic-Consensus wrote, "Humility is the most difficult virtue," which perhaps explains why she never attempted it.
Every human being on the globe has heard the lachrymose tale of O'Connor being offered the job of secretary after her graduation from Stanford Law School. Bushmen in Africa weep at the unfairness of it all – though not as bitterly as O'Connor does.
O'Connor spent the last quarter-century paying America back. With no offense intended to the nonbelievers who are "reasonable observers" embodying "a community ideal of social judgment, as well as rational judgment," thank God the punishment is finally over.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
What rocks is capitalism... yeah, yeah, yeah
By Mark Steyn
'To sneer at such events," cautioned The Sunday Telegraph apropos Live8, "demeans the generosity which they embody".
Oh, dear. If you can't sneer at rock stars in the Telegraph, where can you? None the less, if not exactly a full-blown sneer, I did feel a faint early Sir Cliff-like curl of the lip coming on during the opening moments of Saturday's festivities, when Sir Paul McCartney stepped onstage.
Not because Sir Paul was any better or worse than Sir Elton or Sir Bob or any other member of the aristorockracy, but because it reminded me of why I'm sceptical about the "generosity" which these events "embody".
Seven years ago, you'll recall, Sir Paul's wife died of cancer. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state.
That way she could set up a "qualified domestic marital trust" that would... Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the immortal words of Lennon and/or McCartney. Big deal, you say. We're into world peace and saving the planet and feeding Africa. What difference does it make which jurisdiction some squaresville suit files the boring paperwork in?
Okay, I'll cut to the chase. By filing for probate in New York rather than the United Kingdom, Linda McCartney avoided the 40 per cent death duties levied by Her Majesty's Government. That way, her family gets all 100 per cent - and 100 per cent of Linda McCartney's estate isn't to be sneezed at.
For purposes of comparison, Bob Geldof's original Live Aid concert in 1985 raised £50 million. Lady McCartney's estate was estimated at around £150 million. In other words, had she paid her 40 per cent death duties, the British Treasury would have raised more money than Sir Bob did with Bananarama and all the gang at Wembley Stadium that day.
Given that she'd enjoyed all the blessings of life in these islands since 1968, Gordon Brown might have felt justified in reprising Sir Bob's heartfelt catchphrase at Wembley: "Give us yer fokkin' money!" But she didn't. She kept it for herself. And good for her. I only wish I could afford her lawyers.
I don't presume to know what was in her mind, but perhaps she figured that for the causes she cared about - vegetarianism, animal rights, the usual stuff - her money would do more good if it stayed in private hands rather than getting tossed down the great sucking maw of the Treasury where an extra 60 million quid makes barely a ripple.
And, while one might query whether Sir Paul (with his own fortune of £500 million) or young Stella really need an extra 15 million or so apiece, in the end Linda McCartney made a wise decision in concluding that her estate would do more good kept out of Mr Brown's hands, or even re-routed to Africa, where it might just about have defrayed the costs of the deflowering ceremony for the King of Swaziland's latest wife.
And that's why the Live8 bonanza was so misguided. Two decades ago, Sir Bob was at least demanding we give him our own fokkin' money. This time round, all he was asking was that we join him into bullying the G8 blokes to give us their taxpayers' fokkin' money.
Or as Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd put it: "I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World. It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations."
No, it's not. It's no more crazy than Linda McCartney giving such a paltry percentage of her estate - ie, 0 per cent - to Gordon Brown. And, while Britain may be a Bananarama republic, it's not yet the full-blown thing.
Africa is a hard place to help. I had a letter from a reader the other day who works with a small Canadian charity in West Africa. They bought a 14-year-old SUV for 1,500 Canadian dollars to ferry food and supplies to the school they run in a rural village. Customs officials are demanding a payment of $8,000 before they'll release it.
There are thousands of incidents like that all over Africa every day of the week. Yet, throughout the weekend's events, Dave Gilmour and Co were too busy Rocking Against Bush to spare a few moments to Boogie Against Bureaucracy or Caterwaul Against Corruption or Ululate Against Usurpation. Instead, Madonna urged the people to "start a revolution". Like Africa hasn't had enough of those these past 40 years?
Let's take it as read that Sir Bob and Sir Bono are exceptionally well informed and articulate on Africa's problems. Why then didn't they get the rest of the guys round for a meeting beforehand with graphs and pie charts and bullet points in bright magic markers, so that Sir Dave and Dame Madonna would understand that Africa's problem is not a lack of "aid". The tragedy of Live8 is that its message was as cobwebbed as its repertoire.
Don't get me wrong. I love old rockers - not for the songs, which are awful, but for their business affairs, which so totally rock. In 1997, David Bowie became the first pop star to hold a bond offering himself. How about that? Fifty-five million dollars' worth of Bowie "class A royalty-backed notes" were snapped up in minutes after Moody's in New York gave them their coveted triple-A rating.
Once upon a time, rock stars weren't rated by Moody, they were moody - they self-destructed, they choked to death in their own vomit, they hoped to die before they got old. Instead, judging from Sir Pete Townshend on Saturday, they got older than anyone's ever been. Today, Paul McCartney is a businessman: he owns the publishing rights to Annie and Guys & Dolls. These faux revolutionaries are capitalists red in tooth and claw.
The system that enriched them could enrich Africa. But capitalism's the one cause the poseurs never speak up for. The rockers demand we give our fokkin' money to African dictators to manage, while they give their fokkin' money to Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts to manage. Which of those models makes more sense?
By Mark Steyn
'To sneer at such events," cautioned The Sunday Telegraph apropos Live8, "demeans the generosity which they embody".
Oh, dear. If you can't sneer at rock stars in the Telegraph, where can you? None the less, if not exactly a full-blown sneer, I did feel a faint early Sir Cliff-like curl of the lip coming on during the opening moments of Saturday's festivities, when Sir Paul McCartney stepped onstage.
Not because Sir Paul was any better or worse than Sir Elton or Sir Bob or any other member of the aristorockracy, but because it reminded me of why I'm sceptical about the "generosity" which these events "embody".
Seven years ago, you'll recall, Sir Paul's wife died of cancer. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state.
That way she could set up a "qualified domestic marital trust" that would... Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the immortal words of Lennon and/or McCartney. Big deal, you say. We're into world peace and saving the planet and feeding Africa. What difference does it make which jurisdiction some squaresville suit files the boring paperwork in?
Okay, I'll cut to the chase. By filing for probate in New York rather than the United Kingdom, Linda McCartney avoided the 40 per cent death duties levied by Her Majesty's Government. That way, her family gets all 100 per cent - and 100 per cent of Linda McCartney's estate isn't to be sneezed at.
For purposes of comparison, Bob Geldof's original Live Aid concert in 1985 raised £50 million. Lady McCartney's estate was estimated at around £150 million. In other words, had she paid her 40 per cent death duties, the British Treasury would have raised more money than Sir Bob did with Bananarama and all the gang at Wembley Stadium that day.
Given that she'd enjoyed all the blessings of life in these islands since 1968, Gordon Brown might have felt justified in reprising Sir Bob's heartfelt catchphrase at Wembley: "Give us yer fokkin' money!" But she didn't. She kept it for herself. And good for her. I only wish I could afford her lawyers.
I don't presume to know what was in her mind, but perhaps she figured that for the causes she cared about - vegetarianism, animal rights, the usual stuff - her money would do more good if it stayed in private hands rather than getting tossed down the great sucking maw of the Treasury where an extra 60 million quid makes barely a ripple.
And, while one might query whether Sir Paul (with his own fortune of £500 million) or young Stella really need an extra 15 million or so apiece, in the end Linda McCartney made a wise decision in concluding that her estate would do more good kept out of Mr Brown's hands, or even re-routed to Africa, where it might just about have defrayed the costs of the deflowering ceremony for the King of Swaziland's latest wife.
And that's why the Live8 bonanza was so misguided. Two decades ago, Sir Bob was at least demanding we give him our own fokkin' money. This time round, all he was asking was that we join him into bullying the G8 blokes to give us their taxpayers' fokkin' money.
Or as Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd put it: "I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World. It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations."
No, it's not. It's no more crazy than Linda McCartney giving such a paltry percentage of her estate - ie, 0 per cent - to Gordon Brown. And, while Britain may be a Bananarama republic, it's not yet the full-blown thing.
Africa is a hard place to help. I had a letter from a reader the other day who works with a small Canadian charity in West Africa. They bought a 14-year-old SUV for 1,500 Canadian dollars to ferry food and supplies to the school they run in a rural village. Customs officials are demanding a payment of $8,000 before they'll release it.
There are thousands of incidents like that all over Africa every day of the week. Yet, throughout the weekend's events, Dave Gilmour and Co were too busy Rocking Against Bush to spare a few moments to Boogie Against Bureaucracy or Caterwaul Against Corruption or Ululate Against Usurpation. Instead, Madonna urged the people to "start a revolution". Like Africa hasn't had enough of those these past 40 years?
Let's take it as read that Sir Bob and Sir Bono are exceptionally well informed and articulate on Africa's problems. Why then didn't they get the rest of the guys round for a meeting beforehand with graphs and pie charts and bullet points in bright magic markers, so that Sir Dave and Dame Madonna would understand that Africa's problem is not a lack of "aid". The tragedy of Live8 is that its message was as cobwebbed as its repertoire.
Don't get me wrong. I love old rockers - not for the songs, which are awful, but for their business affairs, which so totally rock. In 1997, David Bowie became the first pop star to hold a bond offering himself. How about that? Fifty-five million dollars' worth of Bowie "class A royalty-backed notes" were snapped up in minutes after Moody's in New York gave them their coveted triple-A rating.
Once upon a time, rock stars weren't rated by Moody, they were moody - they self-destructed, they choked to death in their own vomit, they hoped to die before they got old. Instead, judging from Sir Pete Townshend on Saturday, they got older than anyone's ever been. Today, Paul McCartney is a businessman: he owns the publishing rights to Annie and Guys & Dolls. These faux revolutionaries are capitalists red in tooth and claw.
The system that enriched them could enrich Africa. But capitalism's the one cause the poseurs never speak up for. The rockers demand we give our fokkin' money to African dictators to manage, while they give their fokkin' money to Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts to manage. Which of those models makes more sense?
Monday, July 04, 2005
From The New York Times Book Review, an overview of recent Springsteen titles.
The Boss Bibliography
By A. O. SCOTT
BOOKS about, inspired by or making reference to Bruce Springsteen are hardly a new, or especially rare, phenomenon. ''Born to Run,'' the first volume of Dave Marsh's quasi-authorized biography, appeared in 1979, and is now available along with its sequel, ''Glory Days,'' in a single volume called ''Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts.'' Springsteen's lyrics, which frequently, if modestly, display their own literary pedigree, resonate in the prose of writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Stephen King (who prefaced his epic novel ''The Stand'' with a quotation from Springsteen's song ''Jungleland'') and T. C. Boyle, who took the title for his story collection ''Greasy Lake'' from imagery in a cut from Springsteen's first album. The basic Boss studies syllabus includes Daniel Cavicchi's ''Tramps Like Us,'' a sociological study of his fan base; Rolling Stone's omnibus ''Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files''; and ''It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive,'' Eric Alterman's knowledgeable and rousing elaboration of ''The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.''
In 1999, when he reunited the E Street Band for a long, triumphal tour, it seemed Springsteen's main enterprise would be the consolidation of his reputation as the greatest — and perhaps also the last — rocker to emerge from the ferment of the baby boom. His recent releases, apart from ''The Ghost of Tom Joad,'' had been mainly archival, and the reunion shows were devoted largely to breathing new life into old favorites and to a joyful, generous rock 'n' roll revivalism. But then came Sept. 11, which called forth ''The Rising,'' his (and maybe anyone's) most convincing rock record since the Reagan era, and the 2004 election campaign, which occasioned Springsteen's first public endorsement (on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper) of a presidential candidate. Those events, and the release this spring of ''Devils & Dust,'' have sent the Bruceologists back to their desks, and the result is a spate of revisitings, reinterpretations, reissues and recyclings, from rock critics, psychiatrists, historians and fiction writers.
Two new story collections -- Tennessee Jones's DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (Soft Skull Press, paper, $12) and MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.95), an anthology edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard J. Brewer -- serve mainly as reminders of Springsteen's own superior skill as a storyteller. Jones's slim volume contains 10 linked stories suggested by the lean, grim vignettes of Springsteen's ''Nebraska'' album, while ''Meeting Across the River'' comprises 20 variations on a noirish monologue that may be the least memorable cut on ''Born to Run.'' ''It's what's not in the lyric,'' Martin J. Smith writes in a foreword, ''rather than what is, that makes the song so intriguing,'' thus inadvertently establishing the superfluousness of the undertaking. What the various contributors, many of them crime novelists, put in amounts mainly to the tough-guy clichés that already hang too thickly over the song.
Jones, adding a dimension of sexual anxiety to the tales of hard luck and aimlessness in ''Nebraska,'' does a bit better. His versions of ''Highway Patrolman'' and ''My Father's House,'' in particular, go farther into the darkness on the edge of town than Springsteen himself has ventured. But you can't help wondering if Jones's imagination has been hobbled by the songs he's chosen to lean on. Since, for instance, he can hardly match the courtroom monologue that concludes ''Johnny 99'' (''Now judge, judge, I had debts no honest man can pay''), Jones pushes it offstage, into the hearsay testimony of another character: ''I don't remember exactly what he said,'' she confesses. ''I wish I had it recorded so I could just play it back for you.'' At that point, you may prefer to cue up the CD.
Which, of course, you are likely to do anyway. Springsteen's command of his chosen themes, and the power and sophistication he brings to them, makes criticism largely a matter of saying amen. Books about Elvis Presley tend to traffic in either rootsy antiquarianism or slick mythologizing. Bob Dylan inspires exegetes and soothsayers. Springsteen encourages hagiography. Every fan knows it's hard to be a saint in the city, and every reader of the Bible (one of Springsteen's preferred storehouses of phrase and image) has heard that it's not easy to be a prophet in your own country. Maybe, in Springsteen's case, it only looks easy; God -- or anyone who has been to a Springsteen concert -- knows the man works hard. By now, though, 30 years after the release of ''Born to Run'' landed him simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time, the mantle of prophet and oracle -- perhaps even of saint -- seems to rest as naturally on Springsteen's muscular shoulders as the strap to his blond Fender Esquire or Clarence Clemons's hand.
Virtually all the books under consideration here are documents of faith, written by folks who will always find some reason to believe (as well as any excuse to quote some lyrics -- my apologies). But for this very reason it may be worthwhile to take note of the views of heretics and dissidents, in particular those who do not so much criticize the quality of Springsteen's music as question the authenticity of his oracular, populist persona.
John Lennon sang that a working-class hero was something to be. In England, maybe, but in this country, where money and mobility tend to dissolve and to mystify social divisions, a working-class hero may be a contradiction in terms. And so Springsteen, the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary, occasionally encounters suspicion when, from his current position as an unimaginably rich and successful rock star, he speaks up for, and in the voices of, the marginal and the downtrodden. His preacherly demeanor solicits accusations of bad faith, while his forays into political activism (including his mini-tour in support of John Kerry near the end of last year's presidential campaign) can be caricatured as the well-meaning sentiments of yet another wealthy show-business liberal. Springsteen's sincerity can also rankle those who prefer their pop culture affectless and ironical, or who are more attuned to the clever manipulation of sampled bric-a-brac than to the struggle for mastery over historical influences.
In a recent article in Slate, Stephen Metcalf made the provocatively revisionist claim that the real Bruce was neither the singer of quiet, Guthriesque ballads nor the purveyor of grand, operatic anthems, but rather the scruffy, mischievous New Jersey boardwalk habitué -- ''a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore'' -- who composed the verbose, playful, musically adventuresome shaggy-dog tales of his first two albums, ''Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.'' and ''The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.'' In Metcalf's account, it was the rock critic Jon Landau, author of the most famous line of rock-critic prophecy (''I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen'') and after that Springsteen's producer and mentor, who transformed the charming beach bum into a self-conscious man of the people and, consequently, into a darling of the intellectuals. For Metcalf, at the same time that Landau ''intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him,'' minting a familiar, durable persona that turns out to be ''Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity,'' and the basis of what is ''in essence, a white minstrel act.''
Strong words. But authenticity is a peculiar criterion to apply to a rock musician, since American popular music since the 1950's has provided fertile ground for self-invention, contradiction and cross-pollination. The personas of the great popular musicians of the rock era -- from Elvis to Prince, from Bob Dylan to Madonna -- are hardly organic products of native soil. There are no pure products of America. Which is not to endorse Metcalf's cynical view of Springsteen's imaginative project of the past three decades, but rather to suggest that the idea of authenticity needs to be applied somewhat differently. Not to Springsteen's persona -- which I would argue even the most passionate and literal-minded fan understands to be, to some degree, an artifact, an act -- but rather to the experience of witnessing and participating in a Springsteen performance, and also to the musical, lyrical and conceptual integrity of the songs themselves.
To my mind, no one has written better about the texture and rhythm of a Springsteen show than Jimmy Guterman. His new book, RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM: Listening to Bruce Springsteen (Da Capo, paper, $15.95), is a collection of loose, energetic essays that, as they meander and overlap, add up to a passionate, highly subjective portrait of the artist in relation to his public. Guterman, whose other books include ''The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time,'' makes some interesting and occasionally counterintuitive judgments about Springsteen's records, but his greatest knack is for using particular shows and tours to set up wide-ranging excursions into musical history. His perspective -- the one on which rock criticism was founded in the late 1960's -- is that of the smart guy in the audience, plucking ideas and emotions out of the stream of familiar songs and wondering what, beyond the price of the ticket, it all amounts to.
Guterman's understanding of the bond between Springsteen and his audience, a phenomenon empirically observed at who knows how many stadium, arena and club shows -- a comprehensive list of such events appears in the back of THE TIES THAT BIND: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (Visible Ink, paper, $24.95), Gary Graff's spirited and comprehensive encyclopedia of Bossiana -- is both nuanced and incisive, as is his description of the songwriting ethic that guarantees that bond. Since ''Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' Springsteen, according to Guterman, has told ''accurate, unflinching stories of the people who weren't as lucky as he was. As he looked out at the vast stadium crowds, he must have known those were the people filling the stadiums. They still needed to see a reflection of themselves onstage; Springsteen still needed to deliver that.''
Of course, this has proven to be a complicated undertaking. For one thing, the scope of Springsteen's reference -- the kind of characters who show up in many of the songs on ''The Ghost of Tom Joad'' and his new album, ''Devils & Dust'' -- has broadened far beyond his core audience. And that audience itself may have narrowed as rock has left behind the last traces of youthful rebellion to become the soundtrack of wistful middle age. Still, no one who has stood in a stadium during the second verse of ''Promised Land'' or the opening of ''Hungry Heart'' can deny that the sense of identification between the singer, his subjects and his fans is powerful and deep. At those moments, Springsteen stops singing and listens as a hundred thousand people sing back his first-person lyrics.
This ritual transaction underlies Robert Coles's BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S AMERICA: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (Random House, paper, $13.95). (It's one of the only entries in the Boss bibliography, by the way, that does not take its title from a Springsteen lyric.) The subtitle may overreach. This people is as likely to be listening to Toby Keith or 50 Cent as to the bard Coles places in the line of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Even so, Coles's book, in spite of a certain wish-fulfilling, populist sentimentality, turns listening into an ingeniously literal-minded exercise in anecdotal sociology. Using the documentary method he has been refining since the early 1960's, Coles sits down with a cross section of Americans, not all of them especially interested in Bruce Springsteen, and listens to them talking about what they hear in particular songs. His style of transcription can be grating -- it is sometimes hard to believe that ordinary Americans talk in the ostentatiously folksy vernacular Coles puts between quotation marks -- but ''Bruce Springsteen's America'' nonetheless attempts something rare and valuable in the study of popular culture. It tries to record the complicated reactions people have to the music they hear, and the contradictory, free-associative ways we connect that music to our own lives. The book's best section presents a law enforcement officer contending with tracks like ''Johnny 99'' and ''Highway Patrolman'' that cut against his ideas about work, morality and crime. His response to ''American Skin (41 Shots),'' Springsteen's song about the shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999, is a précis of the contradictions that the song tries to explore, but that even Springsteen's generous, capacious personality has had a hard time containing.
He does, nonetheless, contain multitudes, and at this stage in his career there is no shortage of writers eager to place him in the broadest context of American cultural history. BORN IN THE U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Wesleyan University, paper, $22.95), Jim Cullen's 1997 study, newly updated to include Springsteen's response to 9/11, marshals impressive scholarship to assimilate the Boss into the main currents of American thought -- or at least into the canon of the American studies curriculum. (Cullen, currently on the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, has a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown.) Some of his readings are more persuasive than others. Much as I love the idea of Springsteen as torchbearer of a small-r republican tradition stretching back through Roosevelt and Lincoln into the Enlightenment, Cullen's argument has the effect of installing him in a stable full of academic hobbyhorses rather than in a vital constellation of ideas. The chapter on Springsteen's place within a tradition of American Roman Catholic writers and artists is more interesting, since it provides a cultural context for the dialectic of sin and grace, alienation and despair that has given structure to Springsteen's music since ''Born to Run.''
A more unusual kind of contextualization informs 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK: A History of the Promised Land (Bloomsbury, $24.95), Daniel Wolff's wonderfully evocative history of the New Jersey resort town where Springsteen, after graduating from Freehold High School and briefly attending Ocean County Community College, served his rock 'n' roll apprenticeship. Among other things, Wolff's book footnotes some of the place names and geographical features in Springsteen's lyrics. (The narrator of ''Something in the Night,'' who's ''riding down Kingsley, figuring I'll get a drink'' is cruising one of the city's main thoroughfares, a block inland from the water, named for a 19th-century Methodist minister.) The chapters dealing with Springsteen himself also show how Asbury Park's music scene -- divided by race, class and taste -- influenced the intricate sound of his early records.
But really, Springsteen is less the subject of ''4th of July, Asbury Park'' than a kind of hovering spirit in the night, and perhaps also a marketing conceit. Wolff characterizes the book, which stretches back to the town's founding after the Civil War by an enterprising Methodist named James Bradley, as a ''rock 'n' roll history,'' a grand, sad story of racism and real estate, political hardball and seaside pleasure-seeking. It hardly explains Springsteen -- none of these books really do -- but it does remind us, in fascinating detail, where he comes from.
A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.
The Boss Bibliography
By A. O. SCOTT
BOOKS about, inspired by or making reference to Bruce Springsteen are hardly a new, or especially rare, phenomenon. ''Born to Run,'' the first volume of Dave Marsh's quasi-authorized biography, appeared in 1979, and is now available along with its sequel, ''Glory Days,'' in a single volume called ''Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts.'' Springsteen's lyrics, which frequently, if modestly, display their own literary pedigree, resonate in the prose of writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Stephen King (who prefaced his epic novel ''The Stand'' with a quotation from Springsteen's song ''Jungleland'') and T. C. Boyle, who took the title for his story collection ''Greasy Lake'' from imagery in a cut from Springsteen's first album. The basic Boss studies syllabus includes Daniel Cavicchi's ''Tramps Like Us,'' a sociological study of his fan base; Rolling Stone's omnibus ''Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files''; and ''It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive,'' Eric Alterman's knowledgeable and rousing elaboration of ''The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.''
In 1999, when he reunited the E Street Band for a long, triumphal tour, it seemed Springsteen's main enterprise would be the consolidation of his reputation as the greatest — and perhaps also the last — rocker to emerge from the ferment of the baby boom. His recent releases, apart from ''The Ghost of Tom Joad,'' had been mainly archival, and the reunion shows were devoted largely to breathing new life into old favorites and to a joyful, generous rock 'n' roll revivalism. But then came Sept. 11, which called forth ''The Rising,'' his (and maybe anyone's) most convincing rock record since the Reagan era, and the 2004 election campaign, which occasioned Springsteen's first public endorsement (on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper) of a presidential candidate. Those events, and the release this spring of ''Devils & Dust,'' have sent the Bruceologists back to their desks, and the result is a spate of revisitings, reinterpretations, reissues and recyclings, from rock critics, psychiatrists, historians and fiction writers.
Two new story collections -- Tennessee Jones's DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (Soft Skull Press, paper, $12) and MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.95), an anthology edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard J. Brewer -- serve mainly as reminders of Springsteen's own superior skill as a storyteller. Jones's slim volume contains 10 linked stories suggested by the lean, grim vignettes of Springsteen's ''Nebraska'' album, while ''Meeting Across the River'' comprises 20 variations on a noirish monologue that may be the least memorable cut on ''Born to Run.'' ''It's what's not in the lyric,'' Martin J. Smith writes in a foreword, ''rather than what is, that makes the song so intriguing,'' thus inadvertently establishing the superfluousness of the undertaking. What the various contributors, many of them crime novelists, put in amounts mainly to the tough-guy clichés that already hang too thickly over the song.
Jones, adding a dimension of sexual anxiety to the tales of hard luck and aimlessness in ''Nebraska,'' does a bit better. His versions of ''Highway Patrolman'' and ''My Father's House,'' in particular, go farther into the darkness on the edge of town than Springsteen himself has ventured. But you can't help wondering if Jones's imagination has been hobbled by the songs he's chosen to lean on. Since, for instance, he can hardly match the courtroom monologue that concludes ''Johnny 99'' (''Now judge, judge, I had debts no honest man can pay''), Jones pushes it offstage, into the hearsay testimony of another character: ''I don't remember exactly what he said,'' she confesses. ''I wish I had it recorded so I could just play it back for you.'' At that point, you may prefer to cue up the CD.
Which, of course, you are likely to do anyway. Springsteen's command of his chosen themes, and the power and sophistication he brings to them, makes criticism largely a matter of saying amen. Books about Elvis Presley tend to traffic in either rootsy antiquarianism or slick mythologizing. Bob Dylan inspires exegetes and soothsayers. Springsteen encourages hagiography. Every fan knows it's hard to be a saint in the city, and every reader of the Bible (one of Springsteen's preferred storehouses of phrase and image) has heard that it's not easy to be a prophet in your own country. Maybe, in Springsteen's case, it only looks easy; God -- or anyone who has been to a Springsteen concert -- knows the man works hard. By now, though, 30 years after the release of ''Born to Run'' landed him simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time, the mantle of prophet and oracle -- perhaps even of saint -- seems to rest as naturally on Springsteen's muscular shoulders as the strap to his blond Fender Esquire or Clarence Clemons's hand.
Virtually all the books under consideration here are documents of faith, written by folks who will always find some reason to believe (as well as any excuse to quote some lyrics -- my apologies). But for this very reason it may be worthwhile to take note of the views of heretics and dissidents, in particular those who do not so much criticize the quality of Springsteen's music as question the authenticity of his oracular, populist persona.
John Lennon sang that a working-class hero was something to be. In England, maybe, but in this country, where money and mobility tend to dissolve and to mystify social divisions, a working-class hero may be a contradiction in terms. And so Springsteen, the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary, occasionally encounters suspicion when, from his current position as an unimaginably rich and successful rock star, he speaks up for, and in the voices of, the marginal and the downtrodden. His preacherly demeanor solicits accusations of bad faith, while his forays into political activism (including his mini-tour in support of John Kerry near the end of last year's presidential campaign) can be caricatured as the well-meaning sentiments of yet another wealthy show-business liberal. Springsteen's sincerity can also rankle those who prefer their pop culture affectless and ironical, or who are more attuned to the clever manipulation of sampled bric-a-brac than to the struggle for mastery over historical influences.
In a recent article in Slate, Stephen Metcalf made the provocatively revisionist claim that the real Bruce was neither the singer of quiet, Guthriesque ballads nor the purveyor of grand, operatic anthems, but rather the scruffy, mischievous New Jersey boardwalk habitué -- ''a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore'' -- who composed the verbose, playful, musically adventuresome shaggy-dog tales of his first two albums, ''Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.'' and ''The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.'' In Metcalf's account, it was the rock critic Jon Landau, author of the most famous line of rock-critic prophecy (''I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen'') and after that Springsteen's producer and mentor, who transformed the charming beach bum into a self-conscious man of the people and, consequently, into a darling of the intellectuals. For Metcalf, at the same time that Landau ''intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him,'' minting a familiar, durable persona that turns out to be ''Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity,'' and the basis of what is ''in essence, a white minstrel act.''
Strong words. But authenticity is a peculiar criterion to apply to a rock musician, since American popular music since the 1950's has provided fertile ground for self-invention, contradiction and cross-pollination. The personas of the great popular musicians of the rock era -- from Elvis to Prince, from Bob Dylan to Madonna -- are hardly organic products of native soil. There are no pure products of America. Which is not to endorse Metcalf's cynical view of Springsteen's imaginative project of the past three decades, but rather to suggest that the idea of authenticity needs to be applied somewhat differently. Not to Springsteen's persona -- which I would argue even the most passionate and literal-minded fan understands to be, to some degree, an artifact, an act -- but rather to the experience of witnessing and participating in a Springsteen performance, and also to the musical, lyrical and conceptual integrity of the songs themselves.
To my mind, no one has written better about the texture and rhythm of a Springsteen show than Jimmy Guterman. His new book, RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM: Listening to Bruce Springsteen (Da Capo, paper, $15.95), is a collection of loose, energetic essays that, as they meander and overlap, add up to a passionate, highly subjective portrait of the artist in relation to his public. Guterman, whose other books include ''The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time,'' makes some interesting and occasionally counterintuitive judgments about Springsteen's records, but his greatest knack is for using particular shows and tours to set up wide-ranging excursions into musical history. His perspective -- the one on which rock criticism was founded in the late 1960's -- is that of the smart guy in the audience, plucking ideas and emotions out of the stream of familiar songs and wondering what, beyond the price of the ticket, it all amounts to.
Guterman's understanding of the bond between Springsteen and his audience, a phenomenon empirically observed at who knows how many stadium, arena and club shows -- a comprehensive list of such events appears in the back of THE TIES THAT BIND: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (Visible Ink, paper, $24.95), Gary Graff's spirited and comprehensive encyclopedia of Bossiana -- is both nuanced and incisive, as is his description of the songwriting ethic that guarantees that bond. Since ''Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' Springsteen, according to Guterman, has told ''accurate, unflinching stories of the people who weren't as lucky as he was. As he looked out at the vast stadium crowds, he must have known those were the people filling the stadiums. They still needed to see a reflection of themselves onstage; Springsteen still needed to deliver that.''
Of course, this has proven to be a complicated undertaking. For one thing, the scope of Springsteen's reference -- the kind of characters who show up in many of the songs on ''The Ghost of Tom Joad'' and his new album, ''Devils & Dust'' -- has broadened far beyond his core audience. And that audience itself may have narrowed as rock has left behind the last traces of youthful rebellion to become the soundtrack of wistful middle age. Still, no one who has stood in a stadium during the second verse of ''Promised Land'' or the opening of ''Hungry Heart'' can deny that the sense of identification between the singer, his subjects and his fans is powerful and deep. At those moments, Springsteen stops singing and listens as a hundred thousand people sing back his first-person lyrics.
This ritual transaction underlies Robert Coles's BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S AMERICA: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (Random House, paper, $13.95). (It's one of the only entries in the Boss bibliography, by the way, that does not take its title from a Springsteen lyric.) The subtitle may overreach. This people is as likely to be listening to Toby Keith or 50 Cent as to the bard Coles places in the line of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Even so, Coles's book, in spite of a certain wish-fulfilling, populist sentimentality, turns listening into an ingeniously literal-minded exercise in anecdotal sociology. Using the documentary method he has been refining since the early 1960's, Coles sits down with a cross section of Americans, not all of them especially interested in Bruce Springsteen, and listens to them talking about what they hear in particular songs. His style of transcription can be grating -- it is sometimes hard to believe that ordinary Americans talk in the ostentatiously folksy vernacular Coles puts between quotation marks -- but ''Bruce Springsteen's America'' nonetheless attempts something rare and valuable in the study of popular culture. It tries to record the complicated reactions people have to the music they hear, and the contradictory, free-associative ways we connect that music to our own lives. The book's best section presents a law enforcement officer contending with tracks like ''Johnny 99'' and ''Highway Patrolman'' that cut against his ideas about work, morality and crime. His response to ''American Skin (41 Shots),'' Springsteen's song about the shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999, is a précis of the contradictions that the song tries to explore, but that even Springsteen's generous, capacious personality has had a hard time containing.
He does, nonetheless, contain multitudes, and at this stage in his career there is no shortage of writers eager to place him in the broadest context of American cultural history. BORN IN THE U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Wesleyan University, paper, $22.95), Jim Cullen's 1997 study, newly updated to include Springsteen's response to 9/11, marshals impressive scholarship to assimilate the Boss into the main currents of American thought -- or at least into the canon of the American studies curriculum. (Cullen, currently on the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, has a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown.) Some of his readings are more persuasive than others. Much as I love the idea of Springsteen as torchbearer of a small-r republican tradition stretching back through Roosevelt and Lincoln into the Enlightenment, Cullen's argument has the effect of installing him in a stable full of academic hobbyhorses rather than in a vital constellation of ideas. The chapter on Springsteen's place within a tradition of American Roman Catholic writers and artists is more interesting, since it provides a cultural context for the dialectic of sin and grace, alienation and despair that has given structure to Springsteen's music since ''Born to Run.''
A more unusual kind of contextualization informs 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK: A History of the Promised Land (Bloomsbury, $24.95), Daniel Wolff's wonderfully evocative history of the New Jersey resort town where Springsteen, after graduating from Freehold High School and briefly attending Ocean County Community College, served his rock 'n' roll apprenticeship. Among other things, Wolff's book footnotes some of the place names and geographical features in Springsteen's lyrics. (The narrator of ''Something in the Night,'' who's ''riding down Kingsley, figuring I'll get a drink'' is cruising one of the city's main thoroughfares, a block inland from the water, named for a 19th-century Methodist minister.) The chapters dealing with Springsteen himself also show how Asbury Park's music scene -- divided by race, class and taste -- influenced the intricate sound of his early records.
But really, Springsteen is less the subject of ''4th of July, Asbury Park'' than a kind of hovering spirit in the night, and perhaps also a marketing conceit. Wolff characterizes the book, which stretches back to the town's founding after the Civil War by an enterprising Methodist named James Bradley, as a ''rock 'n' roll history,'' a grand, sad story of racism and real estate, political hardball and seaside pleasure-seeking. It hardly explains Springsteen -- none of these books really do -- but it does remind us, in fascinating detail, where he comes from.
A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
From washingtonpost.com:
Luther Vandross, Putting The Class in Classic Soul
By Richard Harrington
He couldn't be all that he could be until he was 30, yet Luther Vandross managed to become the premier romantic balladeer of his time, as much the voice of his generation as Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Al Green had been of theirs.
Yet as tempting as it is to listen to Vandross's lush, soulful tenor and place him in a pantheon of classic soul men that stretches back to Ray Charles, his richest, most lasting influences were on women, particularly the great old-school divas such as Dionne Warwick, Cissy Houston and Aretha Franklin. That's one reason Vandross's singing rang so true -- particularly with women, who recognized the vulnerability and insecurity at the heart of his songs.
Men, Vandross once told me, were locked into stereotyped roles. "The female singer who wants to be gruff and convincing, she will tend to go ahead and do that quicker than a male singer will soften up and become sensitive. That's society, that's rearing, that's the package. I refuse to buy into that."
In a time when R&B increasingly became sexually explicit and vulgar, Vandross, who died on Friday at age 54, continued to hold out for romance. His old-soul agenda was revealed in song titles such as "Power of Love/Love Power," "Love Won't Let Me Wait," "Stop to Love," "There's Nothing Better Than Love" and "Any Love." They were not about the bump-and-grind of sex but the convolutions of the heart -- the rush of new love, the anguish of lost love (so beautifully expressed in "A House Is Not a Home"), the thrill of meeting someone special, and the fear of being rejected. These were songs about wanting and needing, about emotional connection, not notch-making. For many, Vandross was the multipurpose confessor/adviser/soul mate.
"My first responsibility is to be honest in what I'm singing," Vandross said in one of a half-dozen interviews we did over the course of 20 years. "My favorite thing is when somebody's emotional state, more than their romantic state, is helped by one of my songs.
"I sing about love, but I also sing about introspection and emotional status and the emotional journey that people go through during the course of a day and how it can affect you -- all the decisions that you make for your life. It's not 'meet me in the shower' and 'let's rub oil on each other.' You'll never hear me sing about those things."
Then he added: "That's my choice, Luther's perspective. It does not mean that anyone who does that is less worthy or less competent."
Vandross, who passed away without ever having fully recovered from a major stroke two years ago, never judged others. He simply knew what was right for him, and it turned out to be right to the tune of 25 million records sold and a loyal constituency that always understood exactly where he was coming from because they'd been there themselves.
Certainly Vandross wasn't a sex symbol. He fought serious weight-related problems for much of his life. In fact, weight almost silenced Vandross's remarkable voice before anyone had a chance to hear it. As a sensitive 300-pound teenager coming of age in New York's Alfred E. Smith housing project, Vandross was unwilling to call attention to himself, so he didn't sing -- at home, at school, at church. But he was consumed by music, finding solace and inspiration in the girl groups of the '50s and '60s and the great divas.
When Vandross did join his school choir, his size led to him being denied opportunities that his talent would have warranted. As a teenager, he already knew all about voices, how they could work together, how they could be best showcased, "but they didn't want me to front the group," Vandross recalled, admitting: "I carried that with me for a long time."
Eventually, he gravitated to studio work, where anonymity made physical appearance irrelevant, and quickly became a top session vocalist and vocal arranger. But where Vandross first showed platinum potential was applying an instantly recognizable yet completely unidentified tenor to commercials. He invited us to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken (and Gino's and Burger King) and to quench our thirst with Coke (or Pepsi or 7-Up). When the U.S. Army broke out its "Be All That You Can Be" campaign, Vandross subbed for Uncle Sam so well that the Navy enlisted him, too. Vandross would often trot out these old jingles during his concerts, unembarrassed and always amused when audiences recognized those first "hits."
Vandross's initial forays into the charts came under the anonymity of disco, singing leads on Change's "The Glow of Love" and Bionic Boogie's "Hot Butterfly." Because there was no demand for live performances, who'd know?
(Years later, Vandross's substantial fluctuations in size always seemed to be much more important to the media than to his fans. It never affected his singing, and they loved him through thick and thin. "Sincerity is not measured in pounds," he noted.)
Eventually -- with a little help from Washington's Roberta Flack and only after insisting on being allowed to produce himself -- Vandross signed with Epic. When his 1981 debut album, "Never Too Much," sold 2 million copies, it simply proved that it was never too late to champion the emotional openness of '60s soul, even dressed up in contemporary production.
Luther Vandross didn't sing just about love, of course. He could serve up a delicious dance track or a bittersweet tribute like his last recording, "Dance With My Father," but what he'll be remembered for are those rich, romantic ruminations on the power of love. In our last conversation four years ago, I suggested that such ballads tend to last longer than most pop music, and Vandross enthusiastically agreed.
"Absolutely! That's because ballads remind you of how you felt emotionally at that period of time when you heard a particular song, and that counts for a lot in people's lives."
Luther Vandross made it easy to remember, and in doing so, made it impossible to forget him.
Luther Vandross, Putting The Class in Classic Soul
By Richard Harrington
He couldn't be all that he could be until he was 30, yet Luther Vandross managed to become the premier romantic balladeer of his time, as much the voice of his generation as Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Al Green had been of theirs.
Yet as tempting as it is to listen to Vandross's lush, soulful tenor and place him in a pantheon of classic soul men that stretches back to Ray Charles, his richest, most lasting influences were on women, particularly the great old-school divas such as Dionne Warwick, Cissy Houston and Aretha Franklin. That's one reason Vandross's singing rang so true -- particularly with women, who recognized the vulnerability and insecurity at the heart of his songs.
Men, Vandross once told me, were locked into stereotyped roles. "The female singer who wants to be gruff and convincing, she will tend to go ahead and do that quicker than a male singer will soften up and become sensitive. That's society, that's rearing, that's the package. I refuse to buy into that."
In a time when R&B increasingly became sexually explicit and vulgar, Vandross, who died on Friday at age 54, continued to hold out for romance. His old-soul agenda was revealed in song titles such as "Power of Love/Love Power," "Love Won't Let Me Wait," "Stop to Love," "There's Nothing Better Than Love" and "Any Love." They were not about the bump-and-grind of sex but the convolutions of the heart -- the rush of new love, the anguish of lost love (so beautifully expressed in "A House Is Not a Home"), the thrill of meeting someone special, and the fear of being rejected. These were songs about wanting and needing, about emotional connection, not notch-making. For many, Vandross was the multipurpose confessor/adviser/soul mate.
"My first responsibility is to be honest in what I'm singing," Vandross said in one of a half-dozen interviews we did over the course of 20 years. "My favorite thing is when somebody's emotional state, more than their romantic state, is helped by one of my songs.
"I sing about love, but I also sing about introspection and emotional status and the emotional journey that people go through during the course of a day and how it can affect you -- all the decisions that you make for your life. It's not 'meet me in the shower' and 'let's rub oil on each other.' You'll never hear me sing about those things."
Then he added: "That's my choice, Luther's perspective. It does not mean that anyone who does that is less worthy or less competent."
Vandross, who passed away without ever having fully recovered from a major stroke two years ago, never judged others. He simply knew what was right for him, and it turned out to be right to the tune of 25 million records sold and a loyal constituency that always understood exactly where he was coming from because they'd been there themselves.
Certainly Vandross wasn't a sex symbol. He fought serious weight-related problems for much of his life. In fact, weight almost silenced Vandross's remarkable voice before anyone had a chance to hear it. As a sensitive 300-pound teenager coming of age in New York's Alfred E. Smith housing project, Vandross was unwilling to call attention to himself, so he didn't sing -- at home, at school, at church. But he was consumed by music, finding solace and inspiration in the girl groups of the '50s and '60s and the great divas.
When Vandross did join his school choir, his size led to him being denied opportunities that his talent would have warranted. As a teenager, he already knew all about voices, how they could work together, how they could be best showcased, "but they didn't want me to front the group," Vandross recalled, admitting: "I carried that with me for a long time."
Eventually, he gravitated to studio work, where anonymity made physical appearance irrelevant, and quickly became a top session vocalist and vocal arranger. But where Vandross first showed platinum potential was applying an instantly recognizable yet completely unidentified tenor to commercials. He invited us to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken (and Gino's and Burger King) and to quench our thirst with Coke (or Pepsi or 7-Up). When the U.S. Army broke out its "Be All That You Can Be" campaign, Vandross subbed for Uncle Sam so well that the Navy enlisted him, too. Vandross would often trot out these old jingles during his concerts, unembarrassed and always amused when audiences recognized those first "hits."
Vandross's initial forays into the charts came under the anonymity of disco, singing leads on Change's "The Glow of Love" and Bionic Boogie's "Hot Butterfly." Because there was no demand for live performances, who'd know?
(Years later, Vandross's substantial fluctuations in size always seemed to be much more important to the media than to his fans. It never affected his singing, and they loved him through thick and thin. "Sincerity is not measured in pounds," he noted.)
Eventually -- with a little help from Washington's Roberta Flack and only after insisting on being allowed to produce himself -- Vandross signed with Epic. When his 1981 debut album, "Never Too Much," sold 2 million copies, it simply proved that it was never too late to champion the emotional openness of '60s soul, even dressed up in contemporary production.
Luther Vandross didn't sing just about love, of course. He could serve up a delicious dance track or a bittersweet tribute like his last recording, "Dance With My Father," but what he'll be remembered for are those rich, romantic ruminations on the power of love. In our last conversation four years ago, I suggested that such ballads tend to last longer than most pop music, and Vandross enthusiastically agreed.
"Absolutely! That's because ballads remind you of how you felt emotionally at that period of time when you heard a particular song, and that counts for a lot in people's lives."
Luther Vandross made it easy to remember, and in doing so, made it impossible to forget him.
Another great column by Mark Steyn:
Public 'interest' shouldn't mean money
By Mark Steyn
Do you know Nancy Pelosi? Her job is leading the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. They should have asked for references. Here's her reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision on "eminent domain":
"It is a decision of the Supreme Court," said the minority leader. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."
That's not the way Abraham Lincoln saw it:
"If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers."
I'm with Abe. On this Independence Day weekend, the people might wish to give some thought as to how they might reclaim their independence from the God-like Supremes. Rule by the judicial interpretation of principles is problematic enough for some of us. But rule by the judicial interpretation of lack of principles takes us to dizzying new heights. Last week, in two rulings, the Supreme Court decided that (a) displays of the Ten Commandments are constitutional and (b) displays of the Ten Commandments are unconstitutional.
Don't worry: All nine judges aren't that wacky, just the deciding vote in both 5-4 decisions. That belonged to Stephen Breyer, who nixed the Ten Commandments in Kentucky but gave 'em two thumbs up in Texas. His grounds for doing so were that the Texas Commandments had been there 40 years and were thus part of ''a broader moral and historical message reflective of a cultural heritage,'' whereas the Kentucky Commandments were newer and "a more contemporary state effort to focus attention upon a religious text is certainly likely to prove divisive.''
Really? Not as "certainly likely" to prove divisive as grandfathering the display of some Commandments but not others, so that the only way to be sure yours is constitutional is to sue over it. For one thing, Justice Breyer didn't identify the year in which he believes the Commandments ceased to be constitutional. Nineteen-sixty-eight? Nineteen-seventy-three? Maybe a sliding scale? If you put up the Commandments before 1965, you can have all Ten; between 1966 and 1979, you can have six firm Commandments plus a couple of strong recommendations; from 1980 to 1991, it's two Commandments and half a dozen lifestyle tips?
To be sure, the Supreme Court took other factors than the year of manufacture into consideration -- whether the display was inside or out, whether it was surrounded by a full supporting cast of religious artifacts or secular knick-knacks, etc. But it's hard to discern any principles here, at least when compared to their one-size-fits-all abortion absolutism. To the best of my knowledge, Justice Breyer has never claimed you can have a first-trimester abortion in the parking lot but for the full partial-birth you have to be indoors.
A couple of days beforehand, the majesty of the law turned its attention to "eminent domain" -- the fancy term for what happens when the government seizes the property of the private citizen. It pays you, of course, but that's not much comfort if you've built your dream home on your favorite spot of land. Most laymen understand the "public interest" dimension as, oh, they're putting in the new Interstate and they don't want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court's decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the "public interest" boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.
I can't say that's my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of "public interest" with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways.
Nonetheless, across the fruited domain, governments reacted to the court decision by sending the bulldozers round to idle expectantly on John Doe's front lawn: In New Jersey, Newark officials moved forward with plans to raze 14 downtown acres and build an upscale condo development; in Missouri, the City of Arnold intends to demolish 30 homes, 14 businesses and the local VFW to make way for a Lowe's Home Improvement store and a strip mall developed by THF Realty.
Get the picture? New Hampshire businessman Logan Darrow Clements did. He wants to build a new hotel in the town of Weare and he's found just the right piece of land: the home of Supreme Court judge David Souter. In compliance with Justice Souter's view of the public interest, Clements' project will generate far more revenue for Weare than Souter's pad ever could. The Lost Liberty Hotel will include the Just Desserts Bar and a museum dedicated to the loss of freedom in America.
I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Weare, N.H., I couldn't help thinking that what this town urgently needs is a good hotel. If it will help the Board of Selectmen in their decision, I personally pledge to take the most expensive suite in the new joint for the first month it's in service. I'll be sluicing plenty of big columnar bucks around town, racking up big N.H. Meals Tax payments at Weare's finest restaurants and, along with my fellow guests, doing far more for the local economy than one ascetic, largely absentee bachelor like Justice Souter could ever do. Indeed, under Souter's definition, it would be hard to think of a property doing less for the public interest than his own house. So let's get on with putting his principles into action, and with luck his beloved but economically moribund abode will be rubble by the end of the year.
North of Weare, by the way, many Granite State municipalities face problems with land that generates even less revenue than David Souter's. In small North Country towns like Warren, for example, half the land belongs to the White Mountain National Forest, and thus is off the tax rolls. Can the Select Board of Warren force the federal government to make way for a logging camp? Or even for a rusting doublewide for David Souter once he's booted out of Weare?
How's that banned-in-Kentucky Commandment go? "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his ass." However, if thy neighbor is an ass and thou hast financing for a luxury hotel, covet away.
Lincoln was right about a robed state: A handful of whimsical commissars settling the rights of 300 million citizens is not republican government. This Independence Day, America needs a "new birth of freedom."
Public 'interest' shouldn't mean money
By Mark Steyn
Do you know Nancy Pelosi? Her job is leading the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. They should have asked for references. Here's her reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision on "eminent domain":
"It is a decision of the Supreme Court," said the minority leader. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."
That's not the way Abraham Lincoln saw it:
"If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers."
I'm with Abe. On this Independence Day weekend, the people might wish to give some thought as to how they might reclaim their independence from the God-like Supremes. Rule by the judicial interpretation of principles is problematic enough for some of us. But rule by the judicial interpretation of lack of principles takes us to dizzying new heights. Last week, in two rulings, the Supreme Court decided that (a) displays of the Ten Commandments are constitutional and (b) displays of the Ten Commandments are unconstitutional.
Don't worry: All nine judges aren't that wacky, just the deciding vote in both 5-4 decisions. That belonged to Stephen Breyer, who nixed the Ten Commandments in Kentucky but gave 'em two thumbs up in Texas. His grounds for doing so were that the Texas Commandments had been there 40 years and were thus part of ''a broader moral and historical message reflective of a cultural heritage,'' whereas the Kentucky Commandments were newer and "a more contemporary state effort to focus attention upon a religious text is certainly likely to prove divisive.''
Really? Not as "certainly likely" to prove divisive as grandfathering the display of some Commandments but not others, so that the only way to be sure yours is constitutional is to sue over it. For one thing, Justice Breyer didn't identify the year in which he believes the Commandments ceased to be constitutional. Nineteen-sixty-eight? Nineteen-seventy-three? Maybe a sliding scale? If you put up the Commandments before 1965, you can have all Ten; between 1966 and 1979, you can have six firm Commandments plus a couple of strong recommendations; from 1980 to 1991, it's two Commandments and half a dozen lifestyle tips?
To be sure, the Supreme Court took other factors than the year of manufacture into consideration -- whether the display was inside or out, whether it was surrounded by a full supporting cast of religious artifacts or secular knick-knacks, etc. But it's hard to discern any principles here, at least when compared to their one-size-fits-all abortion absolutism. To the best of my knowledge, Justice Breyer has never claimed you can have a first-trimester abortion in the parking lot but for the full partial-birth you have to be indoors.
A couple of days beforehand, the majesty of the law turned its attention to "eminent domain" -- the fancy term for what happens when the government seizes the property of the private citizen. It pays you, of course, but that's not much comfort if you've built your dream home on your favorite spot of land. Most laymen understand the "public interest" dimension as, oh, they're putting in the new Interstate and they don't want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court's decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the "public interest" boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.
I can't say that's my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of "public interest" with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways.
Nonetheless, across the fruited domain, governments reacted to the court decision by sending the bulldozers round to idle expectantly on John Doe's front lawn: In New Jersey, Newark officials moved forward with plans to raze 14 downtown acres and build an upscale condo development; in Missouri, the City of Arnold intends to demolish 30 homes, 14 businesses and the local VFW to make way for a Lowe's Home Improvement store and a strip mall developed by THF Realty.
Get the picture? New Hampshire businessman Logan Darrow Clements did. He wants to build a new hotel in the town of Weare and he's found just the right piece of land: the home of Supreme Court judge David Souter. In compliance with Justice Souter's view of the public interest, Clements' project will generate far more revenue for Weare than Souter's pad ever could. The Lost Liberty Hotel will include the Just Desserts Bar and a museum dedicated to the loss of freedom in America.
I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Weare, N.H., I couldn't help thinking that what this town urgently needs is a good hotel. If it will help the Board of Selectmen in their decision, I personally pledge to take the most expensive suite in the new joint for the first month it's in service. I'll be sluicing plenty of big columnar bucks around town, racking up big N.H. Meals Tax payments at Weare's finest restaurants and, along with my fellow guests, doing far more for the local economy than one ascetic, largely absentee bachelor like Justice Souter could ever do. Indeed, under Souter's definition, it would be hard to think of a property doing less for the public interest than his own house. So let's get on with putting his principles into action, and with luck his beloved but economically moribund abode will be rubble by the end of the year.
North of Weare, by the way, many Granite State municipalities face problems with land that generates even less revenue than David Souter's. In small North Country towns like Warren, for example, half the land belongs to the White Mountain National Forest, and thus is off the tax rolls. Can the Select Board of Warren force the federal government to make way for a logging camp? Or even for a rusting doublewide for David Souter once he's booted out of Weare?
How's that banned-in-Kentucky Commandment go? "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his ass." However, if thy neighbor is an ass and thou hast financing for a luxury hotel, covet away.
Lincoln was right about a robed state: A handful of whimsical commissars settling the rights of 300 million citizens is not republican government. This Independence Day, America needs a "new birth of freedom."
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