My friend (and editor-in-chief of the leading newspaper south of Shelburne and north of North Ferrisburg) commented that it was weird to think that I had left my liberal Democrat past to join what she called the “far right.” She was from the center, she said; she thought it was important to find some middle ground in this country or we’d be in big trouble. I prefer “neo-conservative intellectual” to “far right-wing nut job,” but never mind.
The call for a middle way has been made by several candidates for the Presidency, notably Barack Obama on the Democrat side and Mike Huckabee on the Republican. It is increasingly difficult to have a civil political discussion in this country. Mention at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts that you might vote for Rudy, or that you’re skeptical about Al Gore’s global warming alarmism and you might think you had been describing your interest in child pornography.
It is therefore appealing to imagine that compromise, bipartisanship and a centrist point of view will lead to more positive discussion and an end to “legislative logjams.” We need to “put ideological differences behind us” and “get beyond politics as usual.”
Certainly we can agree to avoid to rudeness of MoveOn.org’s ad calling Four Star General David Petreus a traitor (“David Betray-us”). And the corresponding rude behavior on the far right… well, nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I’m sure letter-writers from the left side of the aisle can make suggestions. Respectfully disagreeing with our opponents is better than demonizing them, but is there really a substantive middle ground on the essential issues of the day?
For instance, if one side wants to pull American troops out of Iraq and the other side wants them to stay indefinitely, where is the middle ground? Taking a numerical average between zero and infinity is difficult.
One side believes that tax cuts favor the rich, that we need to raise taxes on the wealthy to give the less fortunate members of society a helping hand; the other believes that tax cuts stimulate the economy and benefit everyone. A compromise that rescinds part of the Bush tax cuts will satisfy neither side.
One side believes that immigrants deserve a shot at a better life; the other side believes that people who enter the country illegally have broken the law and should not be provided taxpayer funded services. Do we compromise by building only half of a border fence?
One side believes that global warming warrants the creation of a global legislative mechanism to control greenhouse gas emissions; the other believes that global warming is neither catastrophic nor man-made and that market forces should guide the creation of new energy sources. There’s no middle ground when a chasm separates the two sides.
One side believes that abortion is murder, the other believes it’s a woman’s right to choose. Any change in the current laws will be seen by abortion advocates as taking away their rights and the most implacable abortion opponents will argue that any abortion is murder.
It is possible of course to reach legislative compromise. The federal budget is always a compromise. Judicial appointments are often a compromise between what the executive will tolerate and the legislature will confirm. Immigration reform might punish illegal immigrants with criminal records but offer hard-working immigrants a “path to citizenship.”
But compromise involves ceding ground. A secondary definition of compromise is, “the acceptance of standards that are lower than is desirable.” It may be necessary to reach a solution, to break up that logjam, to “make things happen.” But compromise is not necessarily a positive thing. Passing a new law just to make things happen is good only if the law is sensible. It’s not like there’s any shortage of laws.
Jonah Goldberg’s new book describes “a “’Third Way’ between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are ‘false choices.’” This view itself, according to Goldberg, is an essentially liberal view; conservatives accept that there are hard choices to make and see the call for consensus as a call to shut down the debate. Too often when people advocate consensus, they expect that the other side will come over to their obviously superior side.
Personally, I enjoy the debate. Obviously I think my conservative positions are superior to the arguments of liberals, but I don’t want to shut liberals up. Monday morning without James Carroll’s moonbat columns in the Boston Globe just wouldn’t be as much fun.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
What would Chairman Mao think?
The following was an internet resource on the website of an education non-profit whose mission is to “introduce global content,” and “change the way students learn.” Their motto is "Educating for Global Understanding."
My problem with the material is not what is taught. It’s nice to have students think about folk paintings from modern China. It’s what is not taught. To begin with, introducing the Cultural Revolution while studying art is likely to give the impression that Chairman Mao was concerned about improving his country’s arts and culture. Sadly, the Cultural Revolution’s main contribution to Chinese art was the destruction of countless priceless works of art because they represented “old ways of thinking.” I have been in Buddhist caves where ancient frescoes with thousands of Buddha faces were methodically scratched out by Red Guard soldiers.
Secondly, the passage gives the impression of wealth during the Cultural Revolution; agriculture is described as “productive”; Hu County is “a fertile art community,” “rich with painters.” Unsaid is the unfortunate fact that the Cultural Revolution and its predecessor, the Great Leap Forward, were times of enormous famine. Tens of millions of farmers were moved arbitrarily to work on industrial projects to force China’s Great Leap Forward into the industrial age, which led to massive starvation and widespread cannibalism--in many cases, parents eating their own children. Statistics are hard to verify, but estimates range as high as 30 million dead.
Consider this sentence again: "Images depicting peoples' every day lives in the fields, performing productive agricultural and labor routines became a natural focus under the regime of Chairman Mao." A natural focus? The author seems oblivious about the purpose of state-sponsored art in a totalitarian country: that it paints a completely unrealistic vision to cover up the horrors of terror and famine. This would be an interesting start of a discussion, to ask students if they believe the happy scenes depicted reflect life in Communist China.
In addition to famine, the Cultural Revolution was a time of brutal repression, with an additional 2-7 million murdered by execution or overwork in labor camps.
The total murdered by Mao comes to somewhere between 44-72 million people, with 20 million in labor camps over his 26 year reign.
Given these ghoulish statistics, it is perverse in the extreme to ask third graders questions like, “Are there any aspects of these Peasant Paintings that could be read as images that promote or represent Cultural Revolution ideals? Would Mao Zedong like them?”
Which ideals would those be? Cannibalism, famine and mass internment?
Would Mao Zedong approve of the paintings? Should we defer to the aesthetic judgment of a man who murdered 50 million people?
Imagine asking if the paintings promoted Nazi ideals, and whether Adolf Hitler (himself a painter) would like them, without any accompanying criticism of the Nazi regime.
This is what is called “global understanding”?
This form of painting, which in the West would be categorized as folk or naive painting, became popular during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976). Images depicting peoples' every day lives in the fields, performing productive agricultural and labor routines became a natural focus under the regime of Chairman Mao. Artists in places like Hu County in Shaanxi Province (near Xi'an), where these painting were made, were discovered and became popular.
Hu County is rich with painters working in this style. Think about skills and practices being passed down through generations of families living in a fertile art community.
While this art form gained broad acceptance in the late 1960s and 1970s, these paintings were done in the late 1990's. Are there any aspects of these Peasant Paintings that could be read as images that promote or represent Cultural Revolution ideals? How do these paintings differ in style from "traditional" Chinese painting? How are they similar? Would Mao Zedong like them? If so, what would he like about them?
My problem with the material is not what is taught. It’s nice to have students think about folk paintings from modern China. It’s what is not taught. To begin with, introducing the Cultural Revolution while studying art is likely to give the impression that Chairman Mao was concerned about improving his country’s arts and culture. Sadly, the Cultural Revolution’s main contribution to Chinese art was the destruction of countless priceless works of art because they represented “old ways of thinking.” I have been in Buddhist caves where ancient frescoes with thousands of Buddha faces were methodically scratched out by Red Guard soldiers.
Secondly, the passage gives the impression of wealth during the Cultural Revolution; agriculture is described as “productive”; Hu County is “a fertile art community,” “rich with painters.” Unsaid is the unfortunate fact that the Cultural Revolution and its predecessor, the Great Leap Forward, were times of enormous famine. Tens of millions of farmers were moved arbitrarily to work on industrial projects to force China’s Great Leap Forward into the industrial age, which led to massive starvation and widespread cannibalism--in many cases, parents eating their own children. Statistics are hard to verify, but estimates range as high as 30 million dead.
Consider this sentence again: "Images depicting peoples' every day lives in the fields, performing productive agricultural and labor routines became a natural focus under the regime of Chairman Mao." A natural focus? The author seems oblivious about the purpose of state-sponsored art in a totalitarian country: that it paints a completely unrealistic vision to cover up the horrors of terror and famine. This would be an interesting start of a discussion, to ask students if they believe the happy scenes depicted reflect life in Communist China.
In addition to famine, the Cultural Revolution was a time of brutal repression, with an additional 2-7 million murdered by execution or overwork in labor camps.
The total murdered by Mao comes to somewhere between 44-72 million people, with 20 million in labor camps over his 26 year reign.
Given these ghoulish statistics, it is perverse in the extreme to ask third graders questions like, “Are there any aspects of these Peasant Paintings that could be read as images that promote or represent Cultural Revolution ideals? Would Mao Zedong like them?”
Which ideals would those be? Cannibalism, famine and mass internment?
Would Mao Zedong approve of the paintings? Should we defer to the aesthetic judgment of a man who murdered 50 million people?
Imagine asking if the paintings promoted Nazi ideals, and whether Adolf Hitler (himself a painter) would like them, without any accompanying criticism of the Nazi regime.
This is what is called “global understanding”?
Monday, January 07, 2008
Winner of the idiotic sentence of the week, pro division
It’s only Monday, but this one from professional idiot James Carroll will be hard to surpass:
It has it all: racism, pacifism, class warfare, anti-Americanism. Plus bonus points for these idiotic points:
--War = mass killing. Take that, D-Day veterans. (At least he's not trying to claim that he supports the troops.)
--Freedom is an “abstract value.” Explain this to the inmates of Treblinka.
--The American Revolution only benefited the merchant class.
--Lincoln’s sham Emancipation Proclamation was a cover for his mass murdering blood lust.
The breadth of idiocy packed into one sentence could only come from a pro.
The American belief in the righteousness of mass killing for the sake of abstract values like "freedom" springs not from the Revolution, where the killing was relatively slight and the freedom limited to a merchant class, but from the Civil War, where a spirit of total killing was justified by a professed commitment to racial equality that simply did not exist.
It has it all: racism, pacifism, class warfare, anti-Americanism. Plus bonus points for these idiotic points:
--War = mass killing. Take that, D-Day veterans. (At least he's not trying to claim that he supports the troops.)
--Freedom is an “abstract value.” Explain this to the inmates of Treblinka.
--The American Revolution only benefited the merchant class.
--Lincoln’s sham Emancipation Proclamation was a cover for his mass murdering blood lust.
The breadth of idiocy packed into one sentence could only come from a pro.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Angkor Wat proves that Al Gore is right
On my way back from a carbon burning orgy weekend--seven hours of driving to carbon powered ski lifts, wearing petroleum-based clothing and swimming in a heated outdoor pool--I tuned into a National Geographic radio program on Angkor Wat. After some praise of the brilliance of the temple engineers, the Australian archeologist turned the discussion to, naturally, global warming. It appears that the decline of the Khmer kingdom in the 13th century was likely tied to the clear-cutting of the forests around the temples to build rice paddies, which led to a climate change--which, as we know, destroys empires. The parallels with the today's climate change are disturbing: these Khmer temple builders had put all their faith in a technology that led to their downfall, much like the modern western world's dependence on carbon-based technologies.
So the SUV of the 12th century Cambodia was the rice paddy. It all makes sense.
So the SUV of the 12th century Cambodia was the rice paddy. It all makes sense.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Talking about the weather, 2
Mark Twain once said, "Everyone's talking about the weather but nobody's doing anything about it."
It's funny because the idea of doing something about the weather used to be absurd. But that was before Al Gore started saying things like, “climate crisis…demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the world’s thermostat.”
It's funny because the idea of doing something about the weather used to be absurd. But that was before Al Gore started saying things like, “climate crisis…demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the world’s thermostat.”
Talking about the weather
Talking about the weather used to be the safest of safe conversation openers—a subject so dull and non-controversial because everyone shared the same experience and could hardly be expected to have a different interpretation (with the exception of the grouch who when asked to reply to, “Nice day,” answers, “What’s so nice about it?”)
One side effect of global warming hysteria is the politicization of talking about the weather. The most common word I hear these days is, “crazy.”
On a cold winter day:
“It’s so cold today.”
“It’s crazy.”
Or, on a seasonably warm day:
“Nice day.”
“I know, it’s crazy.”
In New England we used to say that if you don’t like the weather, wait a couple hours. Unusual weather was usual. If pushed, global warming alarmists will concede that weather isn’t the same as climate. One warm day doesn’t prove that the globe is warming. But in practice every weather condition is pressed into service to support the theory of wildly erratic weather.
Crazy.
One side effect of global warming hysteria is the politicization of talking about the weather. The most common word I hear these days is, “crazy.”
On a cold winter day:
“It’s so cold today.”
“It’s crazy.”
Or, on a seasonably warm day:
“Nice day.”
“I know, it’s crazy.”
In New England we used to say that if you don’t like the weather, wait a couple hours. Unusual weather was usual. If pushed, global warming alarmists will concede that weather isn’t the same as climate. One warm day doesn’t prove that the globe is warming. But in practice every weather condition is pressed into service to support the theory of wildly erratic weather.
Crazy.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Good Times, Bad Times
A story on the front page of the Globe today reports: “Greenhouse gas emissions from Northeast power plants were about 10 percent lower than predicted during the last two years…But the decrease may have some unanticipated consequences for efforts to combat global warming.”
Imagine the headlines if emissions had risen 10 percent.
In The God that Failed Arthur Koestler describes how his Communist Party leaders taught him to think dialectically, a useful strategy that allowed him to ignore obvious facts by placing them in the context of revolutionary class struggle. Once you have convinced yourself that you are on the right side of history, no mere fact can intrude. More emissions are bad for global warming. Less emissions are bad for global warming. Warmer weather is proof of global warming. Colder weather is proof of…climate change.
Imagine the headlines if emissions had risen 10 percent.
In The God that Failed Arthur Koestler describes how his Communist Party leaders taught him to think dialectically, a useful strategy that allowed him to ignore obvious facts by placing them in the context of revolutionary class struggle. Once you have convinced yourself that you are on the right side of history, no mere fact can intrude. More emissions are bad for global warming. Less emissions are bad for global warming. Warmer weather is proof of global warming. Colder weather is proof of…climate change.
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