The Obama Green Revolution

Earlier this month Obama revealed his energy program to Wesleyan graduates:

At a time when our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising, we need you to help lead a green revolution. We still have time to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we get serious about investing in renewable sources of energy, and if we get a generation of volunteers to work on renewable energy projects, and teach folks about conservation, and help clean up polluted areas.

The four-point Obama green revolution:

1. “Getting serious about investing in renewable sources of energy”: renewable energy is a great thing, but Obama doesn’t specify where the money for all this investing will come from. My guess is that he means that government officials will take money from you and redistribute it to industries that they, with expertise gained from majoring in political science, deem worthy of support, with helpful advice from renewable energy experts, a.k.a., lobbyists for the renewable energy industry. These lobbyists are not to be confused with oil industry lobbyists, because they are only interested in serving the planet. Unlike the American Petroleum Institute, they have no interest in attracting government funding to their clients’ projects.

2. “A generation of volunteers [working] on renewable energy projects.’ Volunteers? Tom Friedman talks about a hundred thousand Manhattan Projects. Obama wants them staffed with volunteers? It must be part of the “path of service”he recommends to Wesleyan graduates. It’s what Michelle Obama calls “the helping industry,” as opposed to the “money-making industry.” So either get down to the local food pantry and stock some shelves, or drop by the community renewable energy pantry and pitch in on the nuclear fusion car project. Yes, we can!

3. “Teach folks about conservation” because “folks” are kind of dumb and they need some teaching. Once you 21-year-old Wesleyan kids explain to us folks how we are buying the wrong light bulbs and driving the wrong cars, viva la revolution!

4. “Help clean up polluted areas.” Everybody hates pollution, so this is a good closing point. Except for Republicans who like pollution because it means they make bigger profits by avoiding clean-up costs. But is Obama talking about getting a bunch of eighth graders to pick up trash in an abandoned lot in Southside Chicago? Shampooing seagulls after the Exxon Valdez oil spill? Okay, pollution cleanup ought to be part of any good green revolution, but how does this help us “avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change”? Perhaps since carbon dioxide has been defined as pollution, Obama wants the Wesleyan green revolutionaries to stop driving, cooking, heating their houses and breathing?

By the way, a study released in January 2008 by NASA offers a glimpse at the “catastrophic consequences of climate change.” Under the headline, Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up”we learn that ice melt has increased by 75% in the last ten years! This “sharp jump” is "enough ice to raise global sea level by .01 inches a year in 1996, to .02 inches a year in 2006"! It may not sound like much, but in that means that in 2106, the sea will be TWO INCHES higher! Vote Obama before it’s too late!

Anti-intellectualism

A liberal friend recently characterized a statement by Victor Davis Hanson as "anti-intellectual." Hanson was discussing "the dreams of intellectuals and elites who strive for economic efficiency or entertain dreams of a one-continent or one-world peaceful state." To me this speaks to Thomas Sowell's characterization of liberals as believing in the "vision of the anointed"--the idea that an educated elite understands how to govern and should thus be given power to decide the fates of the uneducated common man. This leads to a liberal fascism--the belief that government should decide for us how to run our lives. In one sense then, VDH is an anti-intellectual; against an intellectual elite who claim power because they think they are smarter than everyone else. But the common use of anti-intellectual is a pejorative, meaning scornful not of certain intellectuals but of intellectual matters in general. To describe Victor Davis Hanson--a brilliant and intellectually curious scholar--as anti-intellectual is laughable.

Aid Workers Kid Sex Shocker

An AP headline: "Report: Sex Abuse of Children by Aid Workers Widespread in War Zones."

If instead of aid workers it was the U.S. military, the New York Times would run this story on the front page through election day. Isn't molesting the children you're supposed to be helping worse than putting dog collars on the enemy combatants at Abu Ghraib? (Not that the latter is excusable.)

One of the founding giants of poststructuralist literary theory

Jonathan Gottschall recognizes that postmodern literary criticism is ailing, but I have doubts about his recommended course of treatment (Boston Globe, Ideas, 5/11/08). Making literary criticism “scientific” may yield some interesting studies. Mr. Gottschall however seems unaware of the most elemental wrong turn that critics took a few decades ago—that of “privileging” the critic over works of literature. The article’s subheading, for instance, claims that “Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition.” No, I would argue, not literary criticism, but literature helps us understand the human condition.

Gottschall mentions Roland Barthes’s notion of “the death of the author,” which attributes creative power to the reader of the text over that of its author. (The word “reader,”is disingenuous since the best reader in the mind of the critic is the critic himself.) Gottschall uses scientific methods to disprove Barthes’s thesis, but the exercise is unsatisfying to the vast majority of readers to whom it never made sense in the first place. Resolving internecine postmodern squabbles will not bring back the interest of the reading public.

Although Gottschall finds fault with Barthes, he still refers to him as “one of the founding giants of poststructuralist literary theory.” Elsewhere he refers to the “charismatic leaders” and “the great minds of literary studies.” My undergraduate professors, like the wonderful Peter Bien at Dartmouth, never saw themselves as “giants” of theory; their job was to communicate a love of great literature to their students. As long as the cult of the critic continues, literary criticism will continue, in Gottschall’s words, to “wander in continuous circles.”

Loafers on the Ground

James Carroll’s “The New Immorality of Iraq War” [sic] exhibits an ugly disdain for the U.S. military that is common on the John Kerry Left. He cannot imagine our soldiers rebuilding schools and medical clinics; to his kind they can only be heartless robots whose sole approach to any problem is violence. Thus he sputters with disbelief that President Bush would leave our troops in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown: “bringing order to a post-Saddam Iraq…was not a project for which the US war machine was remotely suited…The initiative should have passed from the Pentagon to a State Department-led program of stabilization and reconstruction, but instead a crudely violent military occupation was begun.”

Mr. Carroll concedes that we need boots on the ground—or rather Italian loafers on the ground. He doesn’t specify however exactly which unarmed social workers the State Department should have sent into Fallujah in 2003 without military support. Given Mr. Carroll’s globalist leanings, I’m surprised he didn’t nominate the United Nations for the job. Oh, wait, I forgot, the UN abandoned its corrupt Oil for Food program after a single car bomb made things too dangerous for diplomacy.

Celebrate University?

published in the Cambridge Chronicle 5/8/08

Criticizing multiculturalism is tricky business, so I better make it clear from the outset that I celebrate diversity as much as the next guy—especially if the next guy is from my 02138 zip code. I love Cambridge for its diversity--in my community of friends, on the street and in classrooms; in the 63 languages spoken (by the parents, one hopes) at Rindge and Latin; in restaurants operated by immigrants from Afghanistan, Turkey, Tierra del Fuego and Wyoming. When you grow accustomed to cultural diversity, it seems normal; as our Office of Tourism advertises, “Multi-Culture is a way of life.” Amen to that.

Restaurant choices may be a superficial form of diversity, but I believe it is profoundly important to raise our children in a multicultural society, that this is the surest way to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where we judge not by skin color but by the content of character.

And yet at the same time the word “multiculturalism” elicits a knee-jerk negative response in me. I roll my eyes at the multiculturalist motto, “Celebrate Diversity.” I don’t think I am being inconsistent; rather it is multiculturalism that has many faces that hide behind the benign veil of respect and tolerance. I would like to comment on three versions of the multiculturalist credo.

Stage 1. “We should respect other cultures.”

Although I celebrate diversity, turning it into a bumper sticker transforms a celebration into an accusation. It assumes that people exist who don’t celebrate diversity—i.e., racists who need to be converted. The slogan announces its owner’s innocence by pointing to the guilt of America’s racist society. As Shelby Steele might say, it assuages white guilt.

Stage 2. “We should respect other cultures because all other cultures are equally valid.”

Here we enter the slippery slope of moral and cultural relativism. When faced with barbaric practices like honor killing, female genital mutilation and tossing widows on the funeral pyre, the multiculturalist can only respond, who are we to judge? My fourth-grader brought home a school hand-out on Cherokee creation myths, which explained helpfully: “Victims were beaten and burned, sometimes for several days, before they died… This practice seems horrifying today, but it made sense in terms of Cherokee beliefs.” Who are we to judge?

Stage 3.“We should respect other cultures because all other cultures are equally valid, except for the dominant white American culture, which is evil and empty.”

At its most malignant, multiculturalism becomes the opposite of tolerance and respect for all cultures; you end up with Jeremiah Wright. The inaptly named Tim Wise wrote about “the emptiness whites so often feel when confronted by multiculturalism and the connectedness of people of color to their various heritages.” (He is referring to that empty Dead White Male culture of Shakespeare, the U.S. Constitution, Bach, James Joyce, and Thomas Edison.) Multicultural education therefore is compelled to “privilege” the history of anything non-Western, while it reduces American history to a narrative of slavery, imperialism and ecological destruction.

In sum, multiculturalism is like a Diet Kool-Aid and Johnnie Walker cocktail. The scotch might be worth celebrating--in moderation--but the adulteration by toxic liquid has rendered the mixture unpalatable.

The more fundamental question is whether even the good parts of multiculturalism have become redundant. If diversity doctors continue to hand out multicultural antibiotics after the patient is healed, the effects become destructive. Rather than leading us toward a post-racial society, it places a spotlight on race, encouraging us to judge by skin color.
It seems that our children are already leading the way to a post-racial society. Many Cambridge schoolchildren listen to the earnest efforts of diversity day organizers with the bemusement of my generation watching Reefer Madness. These attempts to expiate our racial sins are primarily for the adults in the room, living with the memory—or their parents’ stories--of segregated water coolers.

Unfortunately multiculturalism has become an industry—with career opportunities. To my knowledge no bureaucracy has ever voluntarily put itself out of business. Sadly, I expect that multiculturalism will continue to be a growth industry even as its reason for existing continues to decline.

Hamburgers kill polar bears

Derrick Jackson thinks that eating meat is endangering our planet. ("One less burger, one safer planet" 4/15/08)

With fatal food riots in poor nations, and with China rapidly approaching Western levels of consumption, we in the obese United States must redefine what constitutes, to borrow from McDonald's, a "happy meal." Scientists are concluding that along with more fuel-efficient cars and curbing industrial pollution, the simple act of eating less meat could help slow global warming.

"For the world's higher-income populations, greenhouse-gas emissions from meat eating warrant the same scrutiny as do those from driving and flying," according to the authors of a study last fall in the Lancet.

So eating meat, driving and flying "warrant scrutiny"? Be afraid. Be very afraid.