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Sunday, January 18, 2009  Signing Off And so it comes time to post this, my last contribution to NRO. I hope readers will follow this Diary to its new home at NewMajority.com.
The site goes live in the early morning hours of Inauguration Day, but we have some preview video already posted - and a really interesting clutch of posts, essays, and video interviews already in hand. I think the site will be worth your time! I'll be liveblogging Barack Obama's inaugural address on the site as well.
In the months ahead, conservatives and Republicans will face the most adverse political environment since the middle 1960s. At the same time, the current economic crisis raises some of the most searching intellectual problems conservatives have faced since their rise as a coherent intellectual movement. How did we get into this mess? How do we get out? And perhaps above all: Why did American incomes stagnate so dismally on our watch, even before the crisis struck?
The work ahead is difficult. As ever, it is difficulty that brings out the best in individuals and in political movements. I look forward eagerly to working through those difficulties together with you, our readers and (I hope) future commenters - and with the brilliant band of colleagues and associates who will be posting at NewMajority.com
Let me end with fond thanks to my colleagues here at NRO and NR. I published my first article at National Review in 1982. This magazine has been an intellectual home for me in all the quarter century since - and Bill Buckley was throughout my life been an inspiration and the most delightful of friends. Rich Lowry and Kathryn Lopez have admirably preserved the Buckley spirit in print and electrons. And even if our intellectual journeys lead me and my cherished one-time colleagues to different destinations - or possibly to similar destinations, but by different routes - I know that NR and NRO will remain valued and indispensable reading for me and every American conservative.
And now ... to work! 01/18 09:45 AM  Saturday, January 17, 2009 Cobber & Me My wife Danielle testifies to the community service record of our Labrador retriever, Cobber, at the Huffington Post.
Off and on over the past eleven years, I've accompanied our 110-pound English Labrador Cobber on visits to the sick, the handicapped, and the disturbed. I've never had to train him for this work (although he has been registered as a "therapy dog" with the magnificent PAWS program). In fact, he trained me.
Our "teamwork" began when our two eldest children, now in their teens, were in pre-K. Cobber, gentle and calm by nature, has always been especially gentle with children. When under siege by toddlers and roughhousers, he exhibits the same kind of stoicism as a Londoner during the Blitz. You can push his nose, tug on his ears, bodycheck him, attempt an air landing on his back, and at most he will emit a heavy sigh before closing his eyes and resuming his nap. Somehow I persuaded the school principal to allow Cobber into the building on my children's birthdays: Cobber would show up pulling a flotilla of helium balloons tied to his collar. In his mouth he'd carry a little sack containing his parcel of "tricks:" a tennis ball, a newspaper, and a brush. The children would take turns tossing the ball to him, brushing his coat, and after, applaud his best trick — fetching the paper.
This was one he taught himself. At one time, in the pre-Internet age, as many as five different newspapers landed on our front walk (or more often, in the bushes) every morning. After observing my husband collect them a few times, he got the idea, and from then on assumed the daily task. You would open the front door, say "Carry paper!" and out he'd charge, running back and forth until they were all picked up (even the heavy weekend supplements, which he had to drag). We soon realized that Cobber could count: If only four had arrived, he'd go back without prompting and start searching the bushes. Occasionally he made up for the loss by fetching our neighbor's paper.
So in the classroom, I'd place the newspaper as far away as possible from Cobber, sometimes on a low shelf. Then on command he'd retrieve it, cheered on by the children.
When my kids got too old for this dog and mommy show, I wondered how we might take it on the road, so to speak: Cobber never seemed happier than when he was visiting a classroom performing his "work." I found out about a program here in D.C. that organized dog visits to sick children in hospitals. Who would be more perfect for this than Cobber?
Labrador lovers will want to read the whole thing. 01/17 02:32 PM
Hamas Heroics Hamas leaders in Gaza sue for truce - Hamas leaders in Qatar vow to fight to the last Gazan. From today's NYT:
Whether Hamas will comply with the terms of parallel talks with Egypt was unclear. At a meeting organized by Qatar, a top exiled Hamas leader rejected Israeli terms for a cease-fire and called for increased resistance.
“Israel will not be able to destroy our resistance, and the United States will not be able to dictate us their rules,” the leader, Khaled Meshal, said in defiant remarks broadcast worldwide. “Arab countries should help Hamas to fight against the death of civilian Palestinians.”
But the Gaza branch of Hamas, squabbling with exiles out of the line of Israeli fire, seems to have agreed to much of Egypt’s cease-fire proposal.
01/17 09:13 AM Comeback? Grover Norquist and I discuss/debate the future of the Republican party on Riz Khan's program on English-language Al Jazeera.
Click here for part 1, here for part 2, about 10 minutes each. 01/17 08:48 AM Talk to Hamas? I say no, for reasons explained in this National Post column:
Advocates of engagement with Hamas use the word "talk" to mean two very different things — in fact, two exactly opposite things.
For sure, Western intelligence services should be conducting informal talks with individual members of Hamas. We can learn things by listening to them (always remembering of course that they may be feeding disinformation intended to deceive —and that they are probing us at the same time as we probe them).
Likewise, it's good strategy to try to detach less radical individuals from radical insurgencies. That strategy is now pacifying Iraq. It is being tested in Afghanistan. Conceivably it could work in Gaza too. If that's what is proposed, it's worth a try.
But of course that is not what is being proposed. What is being proposed is to talk to Hamas's leadership — not disaffected Hamas membership. What is being proposed is not intelligence-gathering, but diplomatic negotiations.
Such negotiations would create a series of extremely dangerous incentives for the region and the Palestinian people.
01/17 08:13 AM A Tale of Two Stimuluses
One country is planning to try to blast its way out of the recession with vast new permanent spending commitments. Another will rely primarily on tax cuts aimed at the middle class. Surprise - or anyway, it's a huge surprise for a Canadian of my generation - one is the United States and the other is Canada. From Stephen Harper's Thursday interview with the National Post:
[M]ake no mistake, that as a Conservative government, we think it is very important that the middle class be part of a stimulus program. Yes, it is very important to help the vulnerable, struggling sectors and help people who are losing their jobs, but you can’t sustain economic activity without having stimulus for the middle class as well. That’s very important. Since the middle class is paying most of the freight, the middle class has to share in the stimulus program and we will be making sure that is the case.
Q: That sounds very much like a tax cut.
Harper: I’m not laying out any specific — we’re looking at a range of specific spending and tax measures of all kinds. I’m not committing to you any particular measure, but the principles are clear. We have to help the vulnerable and those affected most severely by the downturn. But you can’t do that and leave the middle class to fend for itself. A program like that would not be successful.
And:
If we stick to the plan we are going to bring forward, which will be large short-term deficits, we’ll come out of this in a good situation. First of all, let’s be clear, everyone around the world is going to be running deficits. Those deficits everywhere are going to be large and in most countries will be much larger than Canada’s because they started in a far worse financial situation than Canada. Canada’s going to come out of this with a marginally higher debt-to-GDP ratio — only very marginally — and relative to other countries, we’re going to be in a relatively even better financial position than we were before, because their positions are going to deteriorate markedly and ours are not. We have the financial situation that allows us to borrow money in the short term and spend that money, as long as most of that is time-limited spending. That’s what we’re going to be proposing — programs of one to two years duration for the most part. The key will be for us to resist calls that will be inevitable to extend some of those things indefinitely.
The contrast between Obama's Chicago way wrapped in the rhetoric of hope and change - and Harper's steady governance - reminds me of that scene in the remake of the Untouchables where the Capone gangsters try to smuggle whisky across the border and run into a cavalry charge of Canadian Mounted Police. It summons up a wave of Steyn-style pride in the old Dominion. 01/17 08:10 AM Montalban Remembered Reader Dan Fendel writes:
I suppose you know, but maybe not. Montalban told the story about making those commercials that when he originally read the script in rehearsal he pronounced the name of the car, "Cordoba" the way it is properly said in Spanish—i.e. "COR-dobah" with accent on the FIRST syllable. The producers/sponsors stopped him and asked him to say "CorDOOOOH-bah" instead. He told them it was incorrect and other Spanish-speakers would laugh at him. They explained that they'd focus-grouped the name and that they found the average American would both mispronounce it that way AND remember the name better if it was said "CorDOHbah" with accent on the second syllable, so that's the way he did the commercial...and got endless grief from other Latinos about it ever since.
01/17 07:47 AM Friday, January 16, 2009 What to Wear to the Ball? My wife Danielle's take on inaugural dress codes.
Are you a...are you a..."
The man was so drunk he could barely get the words out. He shut his eyes and with fierce effort managed to splutter:
"Are you a wife or a prostitute?"
Ah, the glamor of inaugural balls! The intimate mingling amongst the thousands who have come from out of town for the sole purpose of getting ripped. The bon mots (see above). The divine dancing (I don't care if you're left or right: Have you ever seen two hundred policy wonks hopping to "Celebration"?!). The magical glimpse of the new First Couple ("Can you see them?" "No, there's this fat guy in front of me." "Wait—is that the top of her head? What's she wearing?" "I. CAN'T. SEE." "Ow, why the stampede?!" "I think the couple just left.")
Back to the drunken man. This was Bush/Quayle '88. Yes, I was there.
01/16 08:47 PM Tender Moments at Hamas HQ From a jaw-droppingly fascinating NYT story yesterday:
In a different part of town, another young fighter and his wife were getting ready to go see her brother, 20, who had been wounded in southwest Gaza City two nights ago while bringing food to fighters. The fighter, 27, in dark jeans and Timberland-style boots, swaggered with words about Islam and duty to his people. Hamas is doctrinally opposed to Israel’s right to exist.
“It’s either victory while alive, or martyrdom,” he said. “Both ways are victory.”
His wife, in a white head scarf, agreed.
“Two days ago, he was very tired and he didn’t want to leave the house,” she said. “I told him you have to leave, you have a responsibility.”
But the sight of her brother unconscious in the hospital bed seemed to jolt the couple into an alternate reality, one where they were vulnerable and afraid. The man’s eyes glistened with tears as he asked the doctor question after question.
Back outside, the woman regained her composure.
“I prefer you as a martyr,” she said to her husband.
“What if I am injured?” he asked.
She repeated her preference for death.
Could somebody tell these people that there are ways to resolve a bad relationship that do not involve blowing up buses full of schoolchildren? 01/16 09:48 AM Thursday, January 15, 2009 BHTV on Gaza The Bloggingheads diavlog mentioned below is now up and viewable, here._ 01/15 12:16 PM Davids Bookshelf 116 & 117 So many people have opinions on the Gaza war. So few understand it. To help with understanding, here are two of the most important books published about the Hamas terrorist organization that until now controlled Gaza: Matthew Levitt's Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad and Jonathan Schanzer's Hamas v. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine.
Levitt, who worked on terrorism financing issues at the Department of the Treasury, has written a book based on open source documents but inescapably influenced by his immersion in more highly classified information. He carefully analyzes the inner workings of Hamas and its external fundraising operations. Levitt exposes the unreality of the distinction often drawn in media coverage between Hamas' "military" and its "social welfare" operations. For Americans, Levitt offers this sobering thought:
While Hamas' ideology is at least as anti-American as Hezbollah's, Hamas unlike Hezbollah has refrained from attacks on US targets. It is sometimes suggested that Hamas for this reason should not be considered a direct danger to American security. Levitt points out, however, that Hamas' main motive for abstention is financial: Hamas raises much of its money inside the United States, through a variety of front groups. Hamas will wish to avoid a direct clash with the United States only so long as this condition holds. For that reason, the US too will emerge a big winner if the Gaza war cripples Hamas' ability to launch large-scale terrorist operations.
Schanzer's book relies entirely on the outside record, and focuses on the two-decades long struggle between Hamas and Fatah for supremacy within the Palestinian national movement. Palestinian Arabs have badly suffered from the murderous factionalism of their politics, extending all the way back to the 1930s. During the 1936 Arab uprising, Palestinian Arab factions inflicted far more casualties upon each other than upon the British or the Jews. The feuds spawned by these grudge killings influence Palestinian politics to this day.
The emergence of Hamas in the 1980s unleashed another round of hatreds within the Palestinian Arab world, and Schanzer details them minutely.
Some American readers may wonder if they really need to go quite so deeply into the details of Palestinian politics. Answer: This kind of detailed knowledge is the only way to inoculate oneself against all-prevailing myths.
The greatest obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arab population originate from within the Palestinian side. Hope that an outside intermediary can negotiate or impose some kind of deal - that there are some set of concessions from Israel and aid from outside that will suffice to bring peace - has been repeatedly disappointed by experience. Yet the hope itself lingers on, invulnerable to all disproof, no matter how painful, no matter how repeated, no matter how predictable.
True, some regional experts have laid this hope outside. I conducted a Bloggingheads exchange yesterday with Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation. (To be posted shortly.) One of Amjad's themes is the incapacity of the Palestinian side to govern or police itself. (He would add "under conditions of occupation," but that is an expression of sympathy whereas his conclusion is an assessment with political implications.) He argues that American policy has to be built around this great Palestinian incapacity. That seems accurate as description - and as a map of the true obstacles to a resolution of this unresolved and perhaps unresolveable conflict. Such assessments suggest that even autonomous Palestinian areas will have to be put for many years or decades under some kind of international trusteeship. Whether Palestinian leaders can summon in themselves the wisdom - and inspire in their followers the moderation - to make a success of such a project is very uncertain. After reading Levitt and Schanzer, the question will seem to you even more uncertain still. 01/15 10:22 AM In Honor of Ricardo Montalban This will mean nothing to those who missed 1975- but it will be unforgettable to anybody who was there. Who had ever before heard of "Coreeentheean leather"? 01/15 06:46 AM Wednesday, January 14, 2009 The Duty of Opposition My column in The Week.
Republicans can plainly see that in the name of “fiscal stimulus” Barack Obama is planning to do a lot of things that will in no way help alleviate the downturn.
Some of these plans may have some merit on their own, and where they do, Republicans can do themselves and the country a favor by seeing if it’s possible to work cooperatively. With action on health likely inevitable, it’s better that Republicans participate in the work to ensure a result that’s market-sensitive. Action on climate change and the environment is essential, so Republicans should promote nuclear power, the cheapest alternative to dirty coal, and should resist further subsidies to costly fantasies like wind and solar.
But Republicans also should never forget that Obama is a Chicago pol. His plans will be larded with special favors and ripe for abuse. We already know where the worst will be. Chicago style, Obama will cram them into the one department to which he has named a Republican as cabinet secretary (the better to share the blame). Look for the Department of Transportation to be chock full of bridges to nowhere, roads to everywhere and hands out all around.
In a similar vein, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the government’s $700-billion bailout engine, is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, dispensing billions in tax dollars on nobody knows what. Likewise, impending cap-and-trade plans to create carbon dioxide pollution permits will create billions in new money—which is essentially what emissions permits are—and distribute them to favored industries.
So clearly, there will be a role in Obama’s Washington for an opposition party that protects taxpayers and exposes corruption.
01/14 09:42 PM Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Pardon Libby! Quinn Hillyer makes the case.
The jury, therefore, wrongly treated as a test of two men’s respective truthfulness what was merely a test of their memory, about a factoid that was no longer important to the overall case. The jury was wrong because, with mens rea removed, Libby’s testimony was not perjury, even if it had been in error.
Libby enjoyed a reputation as a straight shooter through an entire career in various branches of government. He does not deserve to forever be branded a felon, unable to practice law or to vote. To not pardon him would be a travesty, and a permanent blot on Bush’s reputation for political courage.
01/13 11:23 PM Should Fannie & Freddie Buy Up the Mortgage Market? Sunday I invited comments on this idea, circulated by Bradford DeLong.
My favorite idea right now is that of nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completely and unleashing them to buy up every single mortgage in the country at market rates. Their ability to borrow at the Treasury rate means that they should be able to make money by doing this. When they own mortgages they can renegotiate and refinance them all with the public interest in mind. And as they squeeze banks out of the mortgage business the fact that banks are looking for yield should push other financial asset prices up—and make it possible for those businesses that should be expanding to get financing right now on terms that make expansion profitable.
Some reader responses:
Too clever by half. Only need to buy up risky mortgages to clean out the system. Need a clear, easily explained plan — a government offer to buy all subprime and ALT-A mortgages for 50 cents on the dollar. That's high enough to benefit all but insolvent banks, yet low enough to give the taxpayer a chance of making a buck.
Longer term — Canadian system, mandatory mortgage insurance whenever down payment is below 20%, and no mortgage interest deduction. Also margin requirement (loan to value limits) for mortgage backed securities, just like Fed has on corporate securities. Mystery why no one notices this major structural problem.
**
As an economist I have to say that [the idea] has some merit.
1. The infusion of cash into the banks while removing the primary source of risk in their portfolio would almost certainly drive up investment and likely break the lending logjam we are currently witnessing.
2. It is theoretically possible for Fannie and Freddie to make money at this endeavor given the availability of funds at treasury rates.
As is always the case in reality, though, there are one or two "unintended consequence" that could stem from such a policy:
1. The cash infusion would likely cause very high inflation rates, at least in the short term. This may not be inherently horrible, but it would likely cause a policy backlash with no way of knowing how it would play out.
2. This makes the Federal government the lienholder on the vast majority of property in the US. This is a situation ripe for "political entrepreneurship" (otherwise known as rent seeking). The question of Eminent Domain becomes almost moot because all the government has to do is foreclose on whatever homes they want to raze as a gift to whatever developer happens to contribute the most to their campaign warchest.
3. Fan and Fred become the SOLE source of mortgage lending. This means that a "one size fits all" approach will likely develop out of Fan and Fred. This is because they cannot afford to staff the numbers of people necessary to offer the number of options currently available through the market. Of course this is because the market operates for profit, where Fan and Fred would operate for the "public interest."
4. The "public interest" is a moving target and will be subject to political interpretation and manipulation. People who make the claim that policy makers will act in the "people's interest" forget that there are interpretations other than their own. On the other hand, the market is not subject to the kind of random manipulation at the whim of whomever is in office. This doesn't mean it can't be manipulated by lawmakers, but it is a much slower and less effective process. Imagine a political environment where if you have been turned down for a loan a politician then promises to "reform" Fan and Fred so as to make it impossible for them to turn down loans. In case you missed it, this was what started our current meltdown. So instead of having private institutions failing, Fan and Fred would fail (again), and this time they would represent 100% of the mortgage market.
...
Let's hope no one is paying attention to such ideas.
**
I'm not an economist but I am someone who has been around Wall Street and the CMO business for 20 years. The statement that banks are looking for yield shows that Bradford has a poor knowledge of the mortgage business. Banks don't make the interest off your mortgage and haven't for years. They are simply processors of the loan. They package those loans up and sell them to Fannie and Freddie. So they really don't care what the rate is. They'll get their processing fee and upfront fees for generating the mortgage but that is it.
Fannie and Freddie can't squeeze banks out of the mortgage business because they depend on each other to make it work. Plus can someone tell what the market rate is for a house when nobody is buying ? Don't forget it was mainly because Fannie and Freddie bought up bad loans and held on to them instead of securitizing them into bonds that we had to bail them out. In the end if nobody wants your CMO's you end up holding the bad loans and bad loans don't get better because of who holds them.
01/13 11:20 PM Watch the Gaza War Are you watching the IDF's YouTube channel? You should.
Click here for an English-language exposition of a captured Hamas map that shows the placement of Hamas IEDs in a densely populated Gaza neighborhood with no regard for the safety of the population.
Click here for video in which the Israeli forces discover that Hamas has filled a school with boobytrapped explosive.
Here is video of what happens when Israeli aircraft strike a Gaza mosque: It blows up in a giant fireball, attesting to a huge stockpile of weapons inside.
This video documents the extreme lengths to which Israeli forces go to avoid harming civilians when possible.
Or subscribe for yourself! 01/13 11:03 PM Sunday, January 11, 2009 Comments Wanted This idea of Bradford DeLong's struck me as pretty interesting. Any economists out there - any comments or criticisms to offer?
My favorite idea right now is that of nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completely and unleashing them to buy up every single mortgage in the country at market rates. Their ability to borrow at the Treasury rate means that they should be able to make money by doing this. When they own mortgages they can renegotiate and refinance them all with the public interest in mind. And as they squeeze banks out of the mortgage business the fact that banks are looking for yield should push other financial asset prices up—and make it possible for those businesses that should be expanding to get financing right now on terms that make expansion profitable.
01/11 10:55 PM "The Children's Brigade" A very moving song and video about the Gaza war by an old chum, Sandy Cash, "The Children's Brigade," now at YouTube. Sandy is an American singer now moved to Israel. We attended summer camp together, er, a while ago... Do click. 01/11 10:07 PM David's Bookshelf 116 The Old Curiosity Shop is neither the most famous nor by any definition the greatest of Charles Dickens' novels. But it does however contain one of Dickens' very most famous scenes - a scene famous only slightly more in itself than for the famously bitchy quip it elicited from Oscar Wilde: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
Wilde has a point, or maybe half a point. Nell's death is heavily foreshadowed through the book, then mercilessly extended over a long scene for purposes that seem as much commercial as artistic. Dickens wrote The Old Curiosity Shop early in his career. He was not yet 30 when the final installments appeared in the magazine he owned, Mr. Humphrey's Clock. The book is his third full-length novel (counting The Pickwick Papers as an anthology of stories rather than a novel), and it followed immediately upon the very worst novel of his career, Nicholas Nickleby. The Old Curiosity Shop is a much better book than Nickleby, but it shares in milder degree many of Nickleby's faults: The plot is baggy, packed with unnecessary sub-plots to eke out the length. Little Nell is more of a real person than Nicholas or his sister Kate, but she is more a symbol of youth, goodness, and purity than an actual human being with motives and feelings.
Wilde lived on the other side of a great literary divide: the divide in which readers had begun to demand novels that functioned more as coherent works of art than as episodic entertainment. The author who revises and revises in quest of the "mot juste," who slices away every excess word and scene, who never makes explicit what can be conveyed implicitly - that ideal had not yet migrated from poetry to prose in the 1840s. Like Wilde, we live on the other side of that literary evolution. The bagginess and emotional manipulativeness of the early Dickens can irk and vex us almost as much as they did him.
Almost as much. For if Wilde shared with 21st century readers a preference for the subtle and the spare, he labored under a burden that we 100 years later have quite escaped: the overwhelming inescapability of Dickens' stories, characters, and cultural attitudes.
A young British writer starting his career anytime in the half century from 1875 to 1925 must have felt as if he or she were living inside Charles Buss's "Dickens' Dream," entrapped within the imaginary world Dickens created for the mid-Victorians and bequeathed in all its sentimental power to the very different generations immediately following.
Evelyn Waugh delivered probably the most memorable satire and protest against Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Waugh's protagonist, Tony Last ("Last" - get it?), grows up in and inherits a country house described by a fictitious contemporary tourist guide as follows:
Between the villages of Hetton and Compton Last lies the extensive park of Hetton Abbey. This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest.
Last loves the house and the 19th century sensibility it embodies, and for this offense Waugh invents one of his most memorably sadistic punishments: Last travels to the Amazon jungle, where he is captured by an illiterate tribal chief, manacled, and compelled to spend the rest of his life reading aloud the complete works of Dickens - a hilarious and terrifying manifestation of horror Victorianus.
The best analogy to how people like Wilde and Waugh felt about Dickens and his time is the way feminists and protesters who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s felt about "the fifties." Just as that phrase conjured up for them a wasteland of sexual repression and mindless conformity and suffocating complacency and uglifying suburbia - without much regard to the actual events or personalities of the period - so Dickens and the Victorians epitomized for the first modernists everything they set themselves against.
In one other important way, Wilde and Waugh and we live across a great chasm from Dickens. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, the mortality rate for young children in the British Isles began a prolonged and profound decline. In the early 1840s, almost 300 of every 1000 children born in the British Isles would die before the age of four. By the 1890s, when Wilde flourished, that rate had tumbled by nearly half, to about 150. By the 1930s, when Waugh wrote A Handful of Dust, the rate had halved again, to about 75 per 1000.
This change represented a triumph of public health, rather than medicine proper: cleaner water, purer food, more washing, and so on. But what it meant was that the death of the young receded from British consciousness. The death of Little Nell is supposed to have been inspired by the death of Charles Dickens' beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, at age 17 in Dickens' then home in Doughty Street. (Still standing by the way.) At that time, the death of the young was a harrowing but familiar experience. Of Dickens' own 10 children, one died before the age of 1, and another died aged 22. Dickens could expect many of his readers likewise to be touched by similar losses - and to share his intense need to absorb and understand their loss.
Wilde's readers and Waugh's even more would be much less likely to feel this need. For them, child mortality was rapidly becoming rare, and especially rare among the more affluent social classes to which most of their readers belonged. The death of a very young person from disease simultaneously became more unusual - and also more shocking and horrifying. An experience that had been painful but common became unusual and almost unbearable. To describe such an event as Dickens did seemed to those who came after him exploitive almost obscene - as if he were luxuriating in pain, delighting in suffering.
At this much greater distance, the anti-Dickensianism passions of the 1890s or 1930s seems almost as quaint as Dickens himself, actually quainter. For all the medical advances of the 20th century, death remains omnipresent and always will. We've all had losses, and we all struggle not only with the immediate grief but with the longer-term sadnesses and paradoxes of survivorship. Say what you will about Dickens - but have those feelings ever been described better than they were in this one passage from Chapter 17? Nell has entered a quite country graveyard and is studying the humble headstones of the poor people buried there:
She was looking at a humble stone which told of a young man who had died at twenty-three years old, fifty-five years ago, when she heard a faltering step approaching, and looking round saw a feeble woman bent with the weight of years, who tottered to the foot of that same grave and asked her to read the writing on the stone. The old woman thanked her when she had done, saying that she had had the words by heart for many a long, long year, but could not see them now.
'Were you his mother?' said the child.
'I was his wife, my dear.'
She the wife of a young man of three-and-twenty! Ah, true! It was fifty-five years ago.
'You wonder to hear me say that,' remarked the old woman, shaking her head. 'You're not the first. Older folk than you have wondered at the same thing before now. Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn't change us more than life, my dear.'
'Do you come here often?' asked the child.
'I sit here very often in the summer time,' she answered, 'I used to come here once to cry and mourn, but that was a weary while ago, bless God!'
'I pluck the daisies as they grow, and take them home,' said the old woman after a short silence. 'I like no flowers so well as these, and haven't for five-and-fifty years. It's a long time, and I'm getting very old.'
Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and moaned and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how when she first came to that place, a young creature strong in love and grief, she had hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to be. But that time passed by, and although she continued to be sad when she came there, still she could bear to come, and so went on until it was pain no longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she had learned to like. And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth, growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty as compared with her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke about him as her husband too, and thinking of herself in connexion with him, as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.
01/11 10:45 AM Saturday, January 10, 2009 Democrats and Israel 2 David Corn objects to my article this week on Israel and the Democrats.
My article began with this observation:
A Rasmussen poll conducted in the last week of 2008 found that while 62 percent of Republicans backed Israel’s action in Gaza, only 31 percent of Democrats did. Almost three-quarters of Republicans blamed Hamas for starting this war; only a minority of Democrats agreed. Republicans are 20 points more friendly toward Israel than Democrats.
I proceeded to offer 4 explanations, each grounded in polling data, about the likely reasons for this gap.
1) Democrats are more likely to oppose the use of force by any nation under any circumstances:
A 2005 MIT poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats would support the use of American troops even to destroy a terrorist training camp. (Compared to 95 percent of Republicans.)
2) Democrats are more likely to favor negotiations under almost any circumstances:
55 percent of Democrats believe that Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the Hamas rocket barrage.
3) Generally, high-information voters lean toward Israel in the Middle East, while low-information voters are less favorable. And low-information voters tilt strongly toward the Democrats. (This is a very well attested fact about US politics, see for example Carpini & Keeter What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters, p. 175. readable through Google Books here.)
4) Finally, I mentioned a fourth factor:
Democratic attitudes are poisoned by the influence of an anti-Zionist hard left, a vociferous faction whose ideology can bleed into outright anti-Semitism.
It was this point that triggered Corn's outrage.
[A]ccording to Frum, "Democratic attitudes are poisoned by the influences of an anti-Zionist hard left, a vociferous faction whose ideology can bleed into outright anti-Semitism."
Yes, the anti-Semitism card. This is the main thrust of his article.
No doubt, there are people who don't fancy Israel's attacks on Gaza due to their own anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. But Frum is engaged in the time-honored tradition of rigging the debate (j'accuse!) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Corn's piece prompted a sharp and precise response by Jamie Kirchick, on the Commentary blog:
Perhaps if Frum had said that anti-Semitism was the only, or major, reason “why Democrats recoil from Gaza,” it would be fair to say he was playing “the anti-Semitism card.” Yet exploration of this factor is not “the main thrust” of Frum’s argument; it’s the last of four. And rather than engage with these other points, Corn does what so many people antipathetic to Israel do, he falsely accuses his interlocutor of carelessly throwing around charges of anti-Semitism.
To which I would add one more point. What's most surprising about Corn's piece is that he reproaches me for mentioning anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism - even as he acknowledges that I am right that these prejudices do play a role in shaping this debate. Let's go to the tape. Corn again:
No doubt, there are people who don't fancy Israel's attacks on Gaza due to their own anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism.
"No doubt there are people?" We can do better than that - we can count them, as Rasmussen did and as my article said right at the very top. About 8% of Democrats (and only 1% of Republicans) describe Israel as an "enemy" of the United States. Obviously that's a minority even within the Democratic party. But it's not an infinitesimal minority. About 1 Democrat in 12 helds vehemently anti-Israel views.
That's not a "card." That's an empirical observation. Maybe Rasmussen's poll is wrong. But it is certainly consistent with polling on US attitudes toward Israel generally.
I thought my article in The Week was very clear, but let me be clearer here: I am not contending that the leadership of the Democratic party heeds its anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic one-twelfth. I am not contending that anti-Zionism is the most important influence on rank-and-file Democrats. (I did after all place it fourth on my list of reasons, not first.)
What I did say was that these attitudes have a measureable influence on the attitudes of Democrats as a group. If this latest poll is correct, 8 times as many Democrats as Republicans express intense hostility toward Israel. That's not an accusation. It's arithmetic.
David Corn may feel that such facts should not be mentioned in polite society. Perhaps he shares PJ O'Rourke's view: "Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism." 01/10 09:55 AM |
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