ACTUALLY, "JAZZ JUDAISM" SOUNDS KINDA COOL...: Got a good challenging email from Ben A., which I think will allow me to clear up some misunderstandings and give a much better sense of what "rock'n'roll conservatism" is and isn't about. As always, Ben is in bold and I'm in plain text:

"Rock and Roll Conservatism" is a catchy phrase, and I support the desire to tell Allan Bloom to suck eggs. But, at the risk of being hyperbolic, I think it makes about as much sense as "jazz Judaism."

I suppose I am reacting to a pet concern. Too many people read their politics off their larger cultural identification: the things they like to do, the movies they watch, and yes, the music they listen too. Well, this is a mistake. Verdi doesn't have a position on the gun control, and even if David Bowie does, we shouldn't much care what it is. But sadly, people do care: about Rage Against the Machine, about the whole silly story of rock music as Symbol of Social Rebellion.

I realize you don't mean to rediscover rock and roll as a conservative voice: that's the same mistake in reverse. Rather, you seem just to be signalling that you're not a culture snob. But if so, I would think it's irrelevant to your politics. Indeed, of your listed principles, surely an appreciation for popular culture is the most trivial and negotiable, right?

Let me talk about what I'm not doing first; then I'll get to what I am doing:

1) Actually, I dig Allan Bloom a lot; I just disagree with his account of rock music, which is sloppy.

2) More importantly, I totally agree that people shouldn't "read their politics off their larger cultural identification"; I think that's one of the criticisms Jonah Goldberg leveled at Rod Dreher's whole "crunchy conservative" deal. I actually don't listen to rock all that often these days; I'm more into random shards of punk, country, New Wave, and various film scores. You can be a rock'n'roll conservative even if the only music you ever listen to is Hank Williams Sr. and "The Ring of the Nibelung," or Public Enemy and Palestrina, or what have you. "Rock'n'roll" is being used half as allusion, half as metaphor. If it is confusing, we'll have to drop the term and find something better.

3) So, OK then, what is "rock'n'roll" supposed to allude to? What are we supposed to be thinking of here? First, the dynamic quality of rock--the way it constantly reinvents itself, the way it is willing to borrow and meld and confuse genre boundaries, the way it's willing to capture good ideas, powerful hooks and rhythms, or iconic storylines wherever it finds them. Second, rock connotes a certain rough and ready quality.

4) And most importantly, rock alludes to some of the ways that the five of us came to become what we call, for lack of a better word, men and women of the right. Engaging pop culture isn't in any way peripheral to our project--it's actually a central and extremely useful method, because it relies on a) the strengths inherent in contemporary culture--it builds on what's already present; and b) surprise. Rockers, scriptwriters for movies and TV, comedians, and all kinds of other pop-culture types are, whether intentionally or not, presenting us with songs and stories that reflect the world in either true or false ways (or, of course, a mixture of truth and falsehood). Conservatives tend to deal with pop-culture stuff in one of two ways: Condemn/ignore it, or attempt to use it to prove their hipness ("I'm not a culture snob! I'm COOL!"). Both of these approaches are really lame. Condemning/ignoring, of course, totally fails to meet people where they are and to show the implications of the roles, characters, and stances they already embrace. But an uncritical, self-congratulatory approach to pop culture ("Look, this is me, enjoying a Tori Amos album!") is condescending--because it treats pop culture as unworthy of tough examination--and unhelpful.

Instead, RNRC will very often use the method of drawing out the underlying, unspoken implications of movies or books or songs that people already love--here are a few examples: "Malcolm in the Middle," a bunch of rock songs, "Vertigo," DMX. The basic idea is to show people the implications of what they already know and love. I was surprised--and intrigued--when I started investigating the underlying philosophical stances of the kids' books or TV shows or music I liked. With the companionship of friends, I was able to draw the conclusions that ultimately led me to shift from left to right politically. (And other, more important changes.)

5) The important thing to keep in mind is that RNRC is not only a list of principles; nor is it only a stance, a way of being in the world, an ethos. It's both. (And "ethos" here doesn't mean "lifestyle"! Like I said above, this is not about whether you like Pink Floyd or--shudder--Cristina Aguilera, etc.) The tension contained within the odd name is intended to draw that out--"conservatism," which we generally think of as a list of principles, lived in a "rock'n'roll" way.

TELL TED BARLOW WHAT TO READ! Plus check out the other good stuff on his blog.

PERSON WHO SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE 2002 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Harry Wu, in honor of this anniversary.

I'd also be cool with giving the prize to Cardinal Ratzinger. His name has brought laughter to millions.

THE NOBEL COMMITTEE SHOULD HAVE GIVEN JIMMY CARTER to Philip Roth, as a consolation prize. Roth could have eaten him or something.

"What a crazy day! The first time I've seen you in three years and we're buried alive!"
--Woman to ex-boyfriend, "Cave-In!"

LEON KASS COMMENTED, "NOW THAT'S JUST WRONG, AND YOU KNOW IT."

"The town is infested with man-eating cockroaches. Repeat: man-eating cockroaches!"
--George Peppard to Jan-Michael Vincent, "Damnation Alley"

INTERESTING CONTRAST between this nifty Kathy Shaidle article on Jewish comic-book superheroes and this Telford Work piece on the anti-heroic "Veggie Tales."

DISPUTATIONS is doing an awesome monthlong series on the rosary. Go! Read! Pray!

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Shlemiel, shlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.
We're gonna do it!

Give us any chance, we'll take it.
Give us any rule, we'll break it.
We're gonna watch our blogs come true....

The Agitator: Good wrapup of the New Jersey follies; and an inspiring story. And yes, this will keep me busy for a long, long time. (How can people prefer egg to butter???)

Regions of Mind: Pat Buchanan, American Platypus.

Uggabugga: Saudi graphic. Via Ted Barlow.

Telford Work: His review of the Veggie Tales movie. Very intriguing.

Matthew Yglesias: Is hosting a quick but interesting discussion of why people do bad things, in his comments box.

National Review Online: "Migrant sex work."

NORM!!!! Via Shamed.

POSTSCRIPT. So last night I was thinking about the last post from yesterday. Two things about it in particular. The first was that I forgot to mention one other good result of my early unhappiness, which is the sense of lack and necessity that drove me to philosophy. Unhappiness can make people really self-protective and risk-averse, thus averse to rigorous philosophical seeking. And I think I did that too, especially when I was in high school and on my big relativist kick. (Relativism, of course, means never having to say you're sorry.) But the more lasting effect of unhappiness for me was a sense of drivenness, a goad--something the Rat has called "being pursued by Furies." That sense of drivenness and need makes it harder to stop philosophical questing when things start seeming dangerous or unpleasant.

The second thing was that I wondered, "Why did I post that?" It seemed pretty unusual for me. I think there were three main reasons:

1) I had figured some stuff out. And at this point, I'm so used to having the blog that when I figure things out, I tend to either post them here or incorporate them into my fiction writing.

2) I'd been blogging about politics for days and days and I was starting to bore even myself. Wanted something different in the mix.

3) Arthur Silber of Light of Reason asked me to comment on this post, and on Richard Dawkins generally. You can read my somewhat over-strenuous and irked comments at his site; but I wanted to give some idea of why Dawkins's worldview strikes me as totally insufficient. And I think the post below limns some of my reasons for thinking that.

This last point is easy to misunderstand. The immediate response is, "So... you bought into this whole religion because of some bad experiences you had?" I tried to show, in the initial post, that my experience was part, but only part, of the evidence I use to try to figure out what the world is. And the point of that post was to show the connections between my own experiences and various philosophical or religious stances and questions.

MARCHING TO THE BEAT OF A DEAD HORSE. Via The Rat.

"The level of the mysterious radiation continues to increase steadily. So long as this situation remains, government spokesmen warn that dead bodies will continue to be transformed into flesh-eating ghouls."
--TV newsman, "Night of the Living Dead"

AND I WAS YOUNG: Recently I had a bad weekend. A really, really lousy, stressed-out, low, hateful weekend. And at some point I realized something: You know, I used to feel like this all the time! Thinking over it, actually, I used to feel worse than that, all the time. Like between the ages of, say, five or six, and 20. After 20 or so, I've had frequent bad patches, grim little self-hate-fiestas, but they've been interludes between longer calm, basically happy stretches. This correlates very roughly with my entrance into the Church, which is interesting; I don't know what to say except "interesting," because entering the Church has certainly provoked new anxieties and fairly painful self-assessments. But there it is.

And so I was thinking, after the bad weekend had passed, about the particular kind of unhappy childhood I had and what I gained from it. I think it actually cleared away some of the obstacles that might have prevented me from finding truth, rather than creating obstacles as many other kinds of unhappiness might. Here are four benefits of this particular kind of unhappiness:

1) My unhappiness came from a deep sense of personal inadequacy, due to specific failings on my part. (And so this unhappiness did not come from, say, betrayals or failures by my family, who have always been just awesome.) The language of sin, when I got over my allergy to it and started actually listening to what Christians said about sin, struck me as exactly right in describing my experience: I did things, and had intense, passionate desires to do things, knowing that they were wrong. Not "knowing that other people told me they were wrong"--the sense of wrongness was, as far as I can tell, at least mostly independent from other people's judgments. It was an internal sense that something inside had warped and was inclining toward evil. So I never had to be persuaded that I needed saving. I never bought the Pelagian line that if you just work hard enough you can earn your salvation. I was never even tempted by belief systems that claimed that people were inherently good. The description of man as not good, not bad, but Fallen seemed to me much more like what I knew: People know that there is some standard of good that they have fallen away from, but they can't, by their own efforts, ever attain that righteousness. Something has gone wrong.

2) I have little attraction to or patience for nostalgia. I think this is basically a benefit, though there are probably drawbacks that I'm ignoring. Philosophically, this helped me see that Augustine's discussion of happiness (brief and probably tangled synopsis, filtered through C.S. Lewis: How do we distinguish random pleasures from true joy? We must have some standard in mind, and, because of the subjective nature of joy, the intermingling of joy with fear and similarly painful emotions, and the "sui generis" nature of most joyful experiences, our standard can't just be "what my culture tells me is joyful." We must have some memory of actual, experienced, full joy against which we can compare the flashes we receive in this life. Augustine speculates that this remembered happiness is Adam's--we share in his happiness as we shared in his Fall) is not just about missing your happy childhood. (Augustine himself is not exactly filled with longing for the carefree, innocent days of his childhood.) And politically, I think this general non-nostalgic-ness inoculated me from the longing for an imagined past that so many "social conservatives" suffer from.

3) I haven't had a certain kind of hideous, stomach-lurching moments of disillusionment, when our bargains with the world ("You're basically an alright world, so if I just behave myself, nothing bad will happen, right? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, World...") fail. I never held the underlying "benevolent universe premise" that those bargains rest on. (For this I can also thank my mother, who works for prisoners' rights; once you've heard a few horror stories from the American prison system, you at least no longer believe that humans "can't be that horrible...") I don't want to be too cocky here--I haven't had this moment of disillusionment, but that doesn't mean I never will have it. I am sure I still have some illusions that will be painfully ripped away before the end of days.

4) I think that I try to keep those who suffer or are alienated from society front and center in my politics partly because of my own experience of deep-rooted alienation. That's not a claim of moral superiority--there are major drawbacks to that alienation as well, and there are all kinds of other and perhaps better paths to a commitment to the suffering and alienated. But this post is about the uses of adversity. And for me, personally, I think the "first tenet" of rock'n'roll conservatism is so central is in part because of my experiences.

THE CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND.

VOUCHERS: Rob Dakin writes, "Do you know who vouchers will end up benefitting? Not rural people such as my neighbors here in the foothills of Appalachia, who have no alternative schools to send their kids to, voucher or no voucher. No. The majority of the people who would benefit from a voucher system would be folks on the edge of the upper middle class, living in relatively affluent areas where private schools with high standards have already been established, and who, once they receive the voucher, would be able to afford to send their kid to that private school that was formerly just beyong the scope of their budget. This seems to me to be obvious. Whether the funding source is federal, state, or private, the same situation would exist. The people in most need will not be the ones who get the benefit.

"Inner-city parents, as opposed to rural ones, differ, in that cities can be expected to have both private schools and parochial schools available as alternatives to the public school system. The problem still remains, however, that if every public school child suddenly has the means to pay for tuition funded schooling, where will the necessary seats and faculty and private classrooms to accommodate all those children come from? And how will it be funded? How will it be made equitable? The basic idea of a voucher system is very attractive, but the nuts and bolts of implementing a fair and universally accessible voucher system quickly become more problematic than simply upgrading the public schools, in my opinion as a parent with school-aged children."

OK. There are a lot of things going on here. I'm going to address a bunch of them very fast, but I will probably miss some of the underlying assumptions or points that I would dispute, and I won't be going into much detail since at the moment I'm kind of vouchered out. But:

1) Presumably Dakin doesn't think that all public school programs should run the same way, across the country, a cookie-cutter series of programs. So why should he assume that voucher proponents want to institute the exact same program everywhere? Different areas will have different needs. I think that as the success of inner-city vouchers becomes more evident, more and more places will want to try vouchers, and so the conditions that currently make vouchers a bad idea in some areas (not enough private schools, etc.) will gradually erode. I don't want to force that process--I don't advocate a voucher wildfire sweeping through every county in the USA right this instant. I want to let that process happen at a relatively slow pace. I want vouchers to come fast to the places where there is an enormous need for alternatives to public school and where there is sufficient supply of those alternatives (= cities, generally). Suburban areas typically have the latter condition but not always the former. Rural areas may lack both conditions. So I don't think that the same methods or pacing would apply to every area.

2) Vouchers won't cover the whole cost of a private-school education. Well, Dakin does note that vouchers might cover (typically relatively cheap) parochial education. I'd also add that vouchers are not the only source of tuition money for poor families. A voucher makes other trade-offs possible. It's the same as federal grant money for college tuition: Without a grant, someone may not even be able to consider attending a ritzy private university. With a grant, that same person may well be able to combine grant + financial aid + scholarship program + working two jobs over the summer--the grant puts her over the top so she can afford a better school. Similarly, even if a voucher does not fully cover tuition, it can make scrimping and hunting for scholarships more worthwhile. Sort of like matching grants, where I raise $50 and my employer matches with an additional $50. I'm not sure why I really need to point this out, since the people clamoring for vouchers are clamoring because they know the additional money makes a difference. Dakin also doesn't take into account the possibility of means-tested voucher programs, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

3) If every public school kid can pay for private school, where will the new private school desks, teachers, etc. come from? Well, first off, I find it interesting that this question assumes that a large number of families really want to pull their kids out of public school! That aside, this claim rests on a picture of a static amount of possible private schooling. Public schooling, in this view, is suddenly yanked away with the onset of vouchers, leaving private schools to deal with an impossible flood of new applicants. What actually happens, where vouchers have been tried, is a lot more dynamic: Some students switch to private schools. Some private schools add spots. Lots of kids remain in private school. The amount of private schooling available slowly increases, as schools build on the new possibilities opened by vouchers.

4) How will it be made equitable? It won't, if "equitable" means everyone has the same shot at an excellent education. That isn't happening now, won't happen with vouchers, and can't happen without huge changes to the education system which are almost certainly impossible and would definitely have major negative side-effects. I do think vouchers help make excellent or adequate educations more available to people who otherwise would not be able to attain them. So I guess I'd need to know what's meant by "equitable" before I can really comment.

5) Upgrading the public schools: I expect that whether this is easier than implementing vouchers very much depends on where you live and what your state and local regulations are like; see point #1.

6) I'd like to point out, also, that while there are difficulties inherent in any voucher program, there are also enormous difficulties inherent in a non-voucher system. To take only one example (though one that's extremely important), without vouchers it is much easier for a rich family to find a school that reflects their values than for a poor family. Again, I don't expect perfection here--many families won't be able to find any school that perfectly reflects their values, and rich families, in general, will still have all kinds of advantages. But right now, poor families, unless they can get a hefty chunk of financial aid, are stuck with schools whose ability to teach ethics and character is constrained by the First Amendment and held hostage by local political disputes. Cf. the enormous fights over "abstinence-based education" as vs. condoms-in-classrooms. I've written about some of these issues here and here.

"CAD" IS TOO NICE: So the software firm e*ECAD placed this charming billboard in Silicon Valley. Despite a torrent of angry emails, e*ECAD has yet to apologize or take the ad down. Here's a relevent email address: support@eecad.com

I am sure you will show them the support they deserve. Here's a list of their business partners, some of whom are apparently very unhappy with the ad.

Best lines from angry emails: "Being someone's girlfriend does not make me an object. Brides are not objects either. Nor (amazing as it might seem to you) are prostitutes."

"Are your daughters, sisters, wives, mothers worthy of the hourly, term, or perpetual payment plan?"

"Ethical conduct IS important, and it does affect your bottom line. Next time, think twice."

"In every encounter, God asks: 'Adam, where are you? Where do you stand? How is it with you?' To answer this question, a person must be willing, lucid, transparent. Once someone has left behind the habitual prayers of childhood and has entered into the personal encounter, there is no way back. He must live in the light of God and expose and entrust himself to the light ever more unconditionally."
--Adrienne von Speyr

"Every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision--to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God. ...Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own and all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstance of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion, or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. ...For the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis."
--Aldous Huxley

"If we remember that every encounter with God and every deep encounter with man is a judgment, a crisis, we would seek God both more whole-heartedly and more cautiously. We would not be bitter if this encounter did not immediately take place. We would approach God with a trembling heart. In this way we would avoid many disappointments, many useless efforts, because God would not give himself to us if we could not bear the encounter. He prepares us for it, and sometimes by a long wait....

"Let us be careful not to seek mystical experience when we should be seeking repentance and conversion. That is the beginning of our cry to God. 'Lord, make me what I should be, change me whatever the cost.' And when we have said these dangerous words, we should be prepared for God to hear them. And these words of God are dangerous because God's love is remorseless. God wants our salvation with the determination due to its importance. And God, as the Shepherd of Hermas says, 'does not leave us till he has broken our heart and bones.'"
--Anthony Bloom

I somehow ended up on the mailing list for the Plough Reader. There's some fluffiness, but much more food for thought there; the above is only a small sample.

"These words of mine made [Baccio] Bandinello burst with fury; he turned on me, and cried: 'And you, what have you got to say against my work?' 'I will tell you if you have the patience to hear me out.' 'Go along then,' he replied. The Duke and his attendants prepared themselves to listen. I began and opened my oration thus: 'You must know that it pains me to point out the faults of your statue [of Hercules and Cacus]; I shall not, however, utter my own sentiments, but shall recapitulate what our most virtuous school of Florence says about it.' The brutal fellow kept making disagreeable remarks and gesticulating with his hands and feet, until he enraged me so that I began again, and spoke far more rudely than I should otherwise have done, if he had behaved with decency. 'Well, then, this virtuous school says that if one were to shave the hair of your Hercules, there would not be skull enough left to hold his brain; it says that it is impossible to distinguish whether his features are those of a man of or something between a lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like the two pommels of an ass's pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The loins seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; nobody can tell how his two legs are attached to that vile trunk; it is impossible to say on which leg he stands, or which he uses to exert his strength; nor does he seem to be resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talents just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass of flesh between them, so that if they were to be separated, not only one of them, but both together, would be left without a calf at the point where they are touching. They say, too, that Hercules has one of his feet underground, while the other seems to be resting on hot coals.'"
--The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, tr. John Addington Symonds

"This is KTTV Studios in Hollywood to Mount Wilson. We are being attacked by the Slime People. They have us walled in the city. If you have any information about this wall, please contact us immediately."
"If anybody's listening, this is no joke. I'm a Marine. I was fighting the Slime People and was knocked out. I guess they thought I was dead and left me there. The Slime People made a fog, and the fog turned to a wall. If anyone knows how to get through this thing, then I'm sure that there's a few other people just like us, that still have hope."
--TV announcer and Marine, "The Slime People"

EXCELLENT MEMOIR-ESSAY on Martin Luther King, Jr., from the most recent First Things. Here are two excerpts, but you should definitely read the whole thing: "In my movement days, I would, when feeling mischievous, observe that I was not and never had been a socialist. This would predictably meet with startled incredulity, and the discussion would inevitably turn to what is meant by socialism. I would usually end up by saying something like this: “If by socialism, you mean reforms in the political economy that help the poor to be more fully included in the opportunities and responsibilities of society, then I admit to being a socialist.” This almost always met with great relief, my faux pas was forgiven, and I was restored to ideological communion. If the above formula is accepted as the definition of socialism, I’m very much a socialist today."

"I recall rallies when, in the course of his preaching, King would hold forth on the theological and moral foundations of the movement. The klieg lights and cameras shut down, only to be turned on again when he returned to specifically political or programmatic themes. 'Watch the lights,' he commented. 'They’re not interested in the most important parts.' But as for the judgment that King finally achieved very little, Mr. Frady might recall his own statement that the chief consequence of King’s legacy was securing the vote for all blacks. No little achievement, that."

SMOTHERED BY MARSHMALLOWS: Ted Barlow is playing host to a discussion of who trashes the opposition in more disgusting terms--the left or the right? The discussion highlights all the problems I have with this kind of debate: 1) Confirmation bias--if you're a lefty you notice when someone on the right says something nasty, and gloss over it when someone on the left says something similar; and vice versa for us righties. 2) "Those idiot weasel lying slime-sucking Republicans are always calling us names!" 3) Should you actually adhere to a belief because you hate the most visible representatives of the alternative beliefs? I know that credibility matters a lot; I know that we (rightly) give people more credence when we generally agree with their worldview; I know that I'd be very, very skeptical of any political position that was advocated primarily by people who seemed loathsome or cruel, even if that position initially seemed to make lots of sense. But one of the reasons this debate feels both futile and bassackwards, I think, is that we should try to form our political stances in such a way that we could take a stand even if the most public adherents of that stand are lying jerks. Otherwise we're a) ignoring the non-lying-jerk people, who seem like the ones who should get more of our attention!, and b) abdicating our responsibility to judge the issues--the message, not just the messenger.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to say was just that the form of left-wing invective that I find most irritating doesn't, at first, appear to be invective at all. It's the "smothered by marshmallows" approach: "I'm a liberal because I care!" "I'm a liberal because I think about the poor!" The Yale College Democrats at one point posted recruiting signs with their name and the slogan, "We're the good guys." Frankly, I would rather they'd just posted, "Republicans are fetid hateweasels!"--it would be less smarmy. Now, Republicans have totally bought into this image--many Republicans genuinely seem to believe that they're the hard-hearted but hard-headed party. This is depressing in the extreme. So I guess my plea to "both sides" (and yes, I'm well aware that there are really innumerable possible constellations of political beliefs, so I apologize for the pigeonholing in this post) is: Don't say stuff that implies your opposition hates poor people or doesn't care or doesn't think about them. And if you're on the Right, don't think you've got an excuse--you do still have to work for justice and mercy for those in need. That isn't soft-headed--it's honorable.

A HOMETOWN AND A DATELINE: So people are fussin' again over DC vs. NYC. I used to get really defensive about this stuff; I hope, and think, that I've chilled out on it. Here are some scattered thoughts on this perpetual argument (which seems popular only in the media and music worlds, but whatever, journalists are people too, I think).

1) Obviously, New York City is objectively better. I mean, duh. Anything DC has, New York has more of it (except trees, deer, and sky...). But when we're asking what's the best place in the world, it strikes me that an objective measure is exactly the wrong one. This subject above all other subjects should be subjective. It is "dulce et decorum" to love one's hometown. Demanding objectivity about someone's home is like demanding objectivity about his family--it'll only annoy him.

2) I don't think Jonah Goldberg is right that "New Yorkers spend no time worrying about their rivalry with DC while Washingtonians obsess about it." I've seen the "who's bad?!" argument started up at least as often by New Yorkers as by DC-lovers. I've seen at least as many self-lacerating "DC sucks, why do I live here, New Yorkers are a master race!" articles as pro-DC, "#2, We try harder!" ones. And, of course, the mentalities are different--it's scrappy, wrongheaded but kind of admirable, to argue that the obvious underdog is actually the better city; it just comes across as bullying when the New York Times or wherever tries to make everyone here agree that DC is lame.

3) Is DC a "factory town"? Not really. There are (at least) two cities here, in uneasy conjunction: Washington-the-dateline and D.C.-the-hometown. People move here from elsewhere to work on Capitol Hill, hang out only with other political transplants, get bored with talking politics 24/7, and conclude that D.C. is boring--even as they express astonishment when they meet someone who actually grew up here. You'd think that the second part of their reaction to the city (astonishment that there are D.C. natives) would be a clue that there's a whole swathe of Washington life that they haven't found yet. I have no problem a'tall with people leaving because the hothouse atmosphere of the politicos becomes stifling and boring. I have no problem with people saying, "Sure, there might be other aspects to DC, but why should I bother finding them? I want to go somewhere else." That's natural, and shows an admirable ability to recognize the degree to which "inside the Beltway" circles can become confining and stultifying. But I do think when making broad "DC vs. the world" comparisons, even political journalists should keep in mind that they are not the sole demographic of this city.

4) The skyline. The New York skyline is a thing of beauty, for sure--ten thousand glittering windows, each one hiding a life, a story. But if you like some sky with your skyline, D.C. offers gorgeous panoramic views, bright blue sunny expanses, varied rooftops rather than endless skyscraper-canyons, and whole clouds. Really, they're pretty! Now that I think about it, of course, New York City offers these things too--in Brooklyn, for example. Or is that not what we mean when we compare "DC" to "NYC"? I suspect we're really trying to compare a narrow slice of one city with a narrow slice of the other.

5) If you try to judge DC based on whether it beats New York, you will miss out on a lot of great things this city can offer. You'll never get around to going to the Shakespeare Theater, because New York obviously has better theater. You'll never entrench yourself in a neighborhood bar for an evening, because everyone knows people just talk politics at D.C. bars. If you want New York, move there; New York does a much better New York impression than D.C. does! If you want something else, try this little city.

Here's a list of stuff I love about D.C.

"THE DAY AFTER SADDAM": Very interesting Washington Post article profiling five Iraqis who are hoping to rebuild their country once Saddam Hussein is gone.

ROCK'N'ROLL CONSERVATISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH: Telford Work responds to my post on "rock'n'roll conservatism" (not to be confused with "South Park Republicanism," sigh). Here's what I sent him:

OK, well, first, thanks very much for the thoughtful reply--and I'm glad to see we agree on so much!

As for your criticisms/questions (not sure to what extent you were criticizing as opposed to wondering whether criticism was in order): Yeah, I left out the fundamental beliefs that underly, in my view, the principles/practical applications I listed. (BTW, "principles" referred to what you might call second-level principles--ethics not metaphysics--and even the "principles" list was almost entirely focused on the next steps after ethics--applying pre-existing ethical principles to contemporary
situations. "Principles" in that context wasn't supposed to imply, say, "The five of us structure our entire lives around these fundamental beliefs," but rather, "Here are some tests we use in figuring out which policies are likely to do more good than harm and vice versa." I guess that wasn't clear, so I can certainly clear that up.)

I left out specifically Christian references for three main reasons:

1) This set of political beliefs arose as an undesigned, unaimed-for convergence of beliefs between me and my friends, as described. We were actually trying to do something totally different (had to do with politicking in an undergrad organization we're all in) when we ended up becoming friends and convincing one another of many ethical and practical claims, but, so far, few religious claims. (We're working on it!) To import religious claims that my friends couldn't sign on to would be, in my view, to
be false to what actually happened as well as unnecessary.

2) I really did not want to get into a big public kerfuffle with my friends about the fact that I don't think their religious or anti-religious beliefs support their ethics. Why should I use the context of that post to do that? We talk about it privately, and I've made it clear quite often on my site that I do believe my ethical stances only make sense given the underlying fact of Christ.

3) I didn't think it was necessary to make RNRC a project only Christians could undertake. Analogy: I've prayed the rosary outside abortion sites, with a big honkin' picture of Our Lady of Guadelupe; I've also participated in pro-life activities that weren't associated with Christianity in any way. In fact, the group I co-founded in college, the Yale Pro-Life League, had an exec. board that was at least half atheist. To my mind, this is an accomplishment, not a reason to worry that I'm compromising the faith. Getting non-Christians to agree is a feature, not a bug, no?

So, no, I don't think RNRC is the product of "American ideology" or "liberal modernism" as vs. Christianity. I'm not sure whether you're just saying that Christians should never discuss politics without pointing out the ways in which those political beliefs derive from our faith (I disagree), or if you're making a specific claim that the stuff included in "RNRC" seems more American-ideological than other possible political stances that both Christians and non-Christians could agree on.

If the former, how is that different from saying, "You can't do anything until you can agree on everything"? If the latter, this sounds more promising as a criticism--where do you most sense encroaching liberal modernism? In what's said, what's unsaid?

Thanks again--do let me know if you have more stuff to say about this--I check in on you every other day or so and am always edified/challenged.

Come on, shake your blogwatch, make it do the conga
I know you can't control yourself any longer...

Ted Barlow: Good post on Israel and the lessons of history. At least, that was the part I cared about.

Charles Murtaugh: Sin. And Iraqi inspections: been there, done that.

Telford Work: Excellent post on "liberation theology" and the dangers of focusing on the oppressor. Plus a good solid FAQ on how to read the Bible, a.k.a. How come you don't read the Bible right? Plus something I'll get to in a moment.

"South Park Republicans": I want money! And sex! And did I mention money? ...It should be obvious that I have some sympathy for a fun-loving, free-marketeering attempt to revamp the GOP. And, as it happens, most of the "South Park" episodes I've seen have been hilarious. (The movie was just OK, though The Mole was fantastic; I've heard that some of the episodes I haven't seen are stupid, and not in a good way.) Like the author of this piece, I love the "Underpants Gnomes" episode. But let's take a couple quotes from this essay, shall we, because this guy's version of "South Park Republicanism" strikes me as shallow and dull.

1) "Southpark Republicans are true Republicans, though they do not look or act like Pat Robertson. They believe in liberty, not conformity. They can enjoy watching The Sopranos even if they are New Jersey Italians. They can appreciate the tight abs of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt without worrying about the nation's decaying moral fiber."
Ohhhkay. So hanging one's identity on pop-cultural icons from HBO and MTV is a way of demonstrating a) liberty, or b) conformity? In re Britney, which is more "conformist"--a) "She's so hot! Cut taxes!"; b) "Y'know, that whole 'Look at my boobs! I'm a virgin! Look at my butt! I'm a schoolgirl!' shtik is played, gross, and irritating"?

2) "Many of these individuals can tell you why Ayn Rand should displace some other authors in high school literature classes."
[insert Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake noise.] Sorry, cheap shot, ten-point penalty.

3) "JFK was a supply-side tax cutter. His alleged private exploits would place him squarely within the Southpark wing of the Republican Party."
Tax-cutting scumbags--the new GOP! Welfare reform and adultery--it's the Republican way! Hey, wait, I think we tried that a couple years back.... Anyway, it's OK, they're only women.

4) "Hint: Southpark Republicans are more likely to get Cosmo than the Weekly Standard."
Fifty Ways to Drive Your Man Wild With Pleasure! #1: Cut taxes! #2: Get a boob job so he won't run off with a Mafia-linked younger woman. #3: Cut taxes! #4: Get over it, he's not gonna marry you. #5: Cut taxes!

OK, end rant, but c'mon, people, as a "Southpark Republican" might say, we can do bettah.

And this moving article that I found via Amy Welborn--17-year-old boy, molested by a priest, has made helping other victims his mission.

"Where sin begets sin. Nobody cares who does what to whom. Stripped of all inhibitions, everybody swings. No matter what your kick is, you name it, they've got it. They couldn't wait to get into the hotbed of pleasure. Charged-up, sex-crazed women, driven by bizarre desires. Choice women, from the fleshpots of the world, each with their own specialty... and you can have them all. Where violence begets violence. Where for just one night of twisted pleasures, men turn into beasts."
--Announcer during a trailer for "Where Sin Lives"

MATERNAL LIFE INTERNATIONAL: Just awesome. Please go, read, explore. Give. I found 'em in the Register!

"After her marriage, her health seemed to rise and fall with the tide of her emotions."
"Ah, a sad case. A case not infrequent in this supersonic age we live in."
--Two doctors discussing the problems of the fifty-foot-tall woman, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman"

AWESOME conversion narrative--lots of generous and tough-minded thoughts on giving one's whole life to Christ, Episcopalianism, prayer, and, ultimately, why this one guy ended up in Eastern Orthodoxy. He quotes an old journal entry in which he makes the wrong kind of distinction between truths known by the mind and truths known through relationship--he views them as opposed, I don't. I think that's the only real point of disagreement I found...! Good stuff.

FEMINISM AND FEDERALISM: Thought some of my readers might be interested in this: The Federalist Society, its Federalism & Separation of Powers and Civil Rights Groups, and the Independent Women’s Forum present "Feminism & Federalism: Should American Women Embrace or Distrust Federalist Principles?"

Is the current Supreme Court’s federalist jurisprudence harmful or helpful to women? A distinguished panel will discuss some of the many questions raised by recent events, including the Senate’s rejection of Priscilla Owen for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals:

*Is federalism a feminist issue?

*Should American women support or oppose judicial nominees who subscribe to the theory of federalism?

*Does adherence to federalist principles tell us anything about a judicial nominee’s likely rulings in civil rights cases?

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2002 3:30 – 5:00 PM

Reception to follow. Refreshments will be served.

Location: Georgetown University Law Center 600 New Jersey Ave.,N.W., Room 201 (Please enter from 2nd Street)

Accessibility: Take Metro to Judiciary Square or Union Station, Valet parking available at The Washington Court Hotel (Across the street from the Law Center), Public parking available at Union Station

Moderator: Jennifer C. Braceras, Esq., Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum

Panelists: Professor Vicki Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center

Professor Gail Heriot, University of San Diego School of Law

Professor Marci Hamilton, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Isabelle Katz Pinzler, Esq., National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund

RSVP TO (202) 822-8138

Online Registration is available here.

MYSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY: Christopher Jones notes that he discussed Eastern Orthodoxy's mysticism here.

THE "GET A FREE BOOK JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE A BLOGGER" CONTEST has a winner!

RNRC PS: And Paul Donnelly writes about something I know nothing about; I print his letter here so you all can see and judge, but until I know more about the general subject I'm reluctant to shoot my mouth off about it. ("Never stopped you before!" --Hey, quiet in the peanut gallery.) It's long enough that I'm going to put it all in plain text, rather than the usual "readers in bold, me in plain" schema. So, everything that follows in this post is from Donnelly.

[H]ere is a simple test: what's known as the "2nd preference" in our waaay too complex immigration law. (I've pitched you on this before, which is why it is a test of your principles.) If you MEAN what you say (particularly 1, 2, 3 and 8), you will take this up. IMNSHO, this is the most anti-marriage, anti-family issue in American politics. But you'll find that a subsidy for Microsoft counts for more than marriage, which is why I raise it to you (somewhat belligerently, for which I apologise) as what you might see as a matter of principle.

Otherwise, well...

Basically, the Rule (with many exceptions) for immigration policy is that each immigrant is invited. An American has to ask for them -- whether a citizen petitioning for a spouse, child, parent of sibling; or a legal permanent resident petitioning for a spouse or child; or an employer for an employee. There are other categories (lottery winners), and refugees and asylees, but the Rule is: individual Americans invite individual immigrants.

But not everybody gets in right away. The spouses and kids and parents of citizens do. Everybody else has to wait (the visas are distributed through ALGEBRA, of all things) -- this is NOT because the INS is inefficient (although it is), but because Congress promises more than it delivers. The MINIMUM wait for the spouses and kids of legal permanent residents is now 5-7 years. (For the siblings of U.S. citizens, it's 10-20+.)

I told you, I wrote to Cardinal Law about this a few years ago: bupkas. The Conference of Bishops, last I checked, has said literally NOTHING about the moral distinction between siblings and spouses. By way of example, I love my five brothers and four sisters -- but I live with my wife and son.

Rather than make that simple moral distinction, the Bishops (along with a coalition of self-proclaimed "pro-immigration" groups) have focused instead on MAINTAINING their coalition, which defines "pro-immigration" by preserving all existing categories -- and thus, the existing management of the system by backlogs.

Which has a simple result: husbands and wives, parents and small children, are outlawed or exiled. Last anybody checked, we were talking about a MILLION people. When folks obey their marriage vows and obligations as parents, and move to live in the SAME COUNTRY as their husbands, wives and kids, they are breaking U.S. law. Immigration lawyers in particular are fond of this (see below) precisely because it gives them more business. Immigration advocates rarely think about in detail, because they are in the business of representing the poor and downtrodden -- the more there ARE, the better their business.

And -- folks like you? The RNRC? Let's see.

ILW.Com
(an electronic newsletter for immigration attorneys)
The H-1B Is A Barrier To The IT Industry's Recovery
Even Milton Friedman Says "there is no doubt" H-1B Is A Subsidy

Computerworld
July 22, 2002
H-1B Is Just Another Gov't. Subsidy

Baltimore Sun
Baltimore’s Salvation Lies in Immigration
(w/Bruce Morrison)
June 19th, 2002

ILW.com
April 20, 2001
Time to Bury the Ratchet and Replace it with Real Reform

American Prospect
April 5, 2001
The End of Ellis Island
[This notes the failed approach which the Bishops most recently tried as "vague to the point of dishonesty"]

The New Republic
Temporary Help

One more, no longer online for free:

WASHINGTON POST

Tuesday, July 28, 1998 ; Page A15

IMMIGRATION: FAMILIES FIRST

PAUL DONNELLY
Reading Robert Suro's otherwise thoughtful article about the effect of immigration ["The Next Wave," Outlook, July 19] on our national distraction over race, I was struck by his distortion of the late Barbara Jordan's views of immigration. Suro explains the Jordan Commission recommendations on prioritizing legal admissions: "[Jordan] proposed drastic cuts in the number of low-skilled legal immigrants allowed into the country in order to remedy the plight of poor Americans who might otherwise find work in urban labor markets. Implicit in the proposal put forth by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which Jordan then headed, was the notion that employers, overwhelmingly white, preferred to hire low-skilled immigrants, overwhelmingly Latino, over the native poor, especially blacks."

In fact, most legal immigration is based on family ties, not on skills; and the core issues of immigration reform concern priorities, not numbers. With legal admissions approaching 1 million a year, the commission did propose to eliminate 10,000 unskilled employment-based visas. Continuing to import workers because of their lack of skill is certainly not Congress's smartest move going into welfare-to-work; but American families ask for four to five times as many immigrants as employers do. And so they should.In characterizing an "implicit notion" about immigrants' skills and employers' racism, Suro skipped over what the commission explicitly recommended: uniting husbands and wives, moms, dads, and little kids -- adding 150,000 nuclear family-based visas a year until nearly a million legal immigrants now waiting in line are here legally. These folks are overwhelmingly Mexican American (and a substantial number are also unskilled), and now face being exiled for four to 10 years or even permanently outlawed under current law.

What Jordan actually said: "We believe there are three priorities: reunification of nuclear families, admission of highly skilled workers needed to increase the competitiveness of U.S. business, and refugee admissions ....The number of immigrants should flow from these priorities."

"For family-based immigration, the priority has to be the nuclear family. First, the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. Second, the parents of U.S. citizens. Third, the spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents."

What was so unclear about these priorities that Suro and others consistently misconstrue them? Immigrants are people, not simply economic units. Ultimately, the immigration debate boils down to just three unavoidable questions: Why do we want immigrants, anyway? How many do we want? And -- most important -- are we willing to treat them like Americans when they get here?

Ask a congressman why we want immigrants, and you are likely to get a soaring but equivocal speech about Ellis Island, his grandparents and the melting pot. Yet the law provides a practical, not an ideal answer. Americans primarily want immigrants to unite families and fill jobs.

Ask how many we want, though, and you discover the dirty little secret of immigration policy: Congress promises far more immigration than it delivers. Nearly 1 million husbands, wives and minor children of legal permanent residents wait as much as a decade for legal admission -- while the siblings of U.S. citizens face a wait measured literally in generations, (which means they enter toward the end of their most productive years).

This isn't rocket science. There are only two ways to resolve the inexcusable, un-American separation of immigrant families: add visas or prioritize admissions. That is what the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform dealt with. Why? Because the answer is a lot more important than mere economics.

Are there American families, other than immigrants, where U.S. law forces husbands and wives apart and makes parents choose between jobs and their kids? Between obeying their marriage vows and U.S. law? The Jordan Commission warned Congress and the nation that we are replacing our historical approach toward immigrants -- that they become us -- with a policy that is pro-immigration but anti-immigrant; that flirts with a guest worker model and blurs the difference between illegal aliens and legal
immigrants while drawing a dangerously bright line between legal resident and U.S. citizen.

Suro is right on, of course, in pointing out that we need a new way to talk about race and ethnicity, to reflect what will unite us in the 21st century. But ignoring the centrality of immigrants' nuclear families -- moms, dads and little kids -- and focusing instead on economic skills and prejudice in the workplace is not the way to build it.

The writer was communications director of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

ROCK'N'ROLL CONSERVATISM MAILBAG: Rob Dakin: I would define myself as an unattached believer in the truth of the gospel message, with strong Gnostic tendencies. I think that the material world is a fallen one, possibly "created" by some kind of demiurge, rather than the Ultimate One; that Jesus had little, if any regard, for things material; and that He came to show men how to overcome that death which is attachment to matter. That said, here I go, parachuting directly into the muck of the world:

1) Rock'n'Roll Conservatism: I am old enough to have been around for the entire history of rock music as popular entertainment. When I was a young boy, the most subversive music on AM radio was probably Hank Williams. Perry Como was huge. I remember very distinctly when Elvis first came upon the scene. In the art class at my grade school some of the girls used their crayons to draw brides, some drew horses, but the brightest ones began drawing Elvis. You can love rock'n'roll and be "conservative" at the same time, I suppose. But, to me, that is only to say that no person ever achieves total consistency. I believe that genuine rock'n'roll is subversive of conservative values in its essence. It is a distillation of adolescent angst arising from the rebellion against authority and resultant separation anxiety that is an unavoidable part of growing up, combined with the relentless horniness that gives rise to it all. Music that is anything other than that may SOUND like rock'n'roll, but it's pure Parkay--not butter. I am sure you are well aware the that the very term "rock'n'roll" is a transparently descriptive blues euphemism for the sex act. In short, the horror with which the conservative communities of the mid-1950s greeting the advent of rock'n'roll was consistent with the values of that community and justified according to those values. It was also prophetic: rock'n'roll was the sound track of the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and the accompanying excesses of the 1960s.

2) School Vouchers: This is a bad idea, as just about anybody who, like me, has school-age children and does not live near a big urban center will tell you immediately. Moreover, I believe that the voucher movement is not given impetus by legitimate grassroots organization. Vouchers are being pushed by corporate interests, backed by Republican politicians: very much top-down. If you gave me a voucher for ten times the kind of amounts that I've heard proposed, I would not be able to use it to send my girls to any school other than the one they now attend, unless I put them in a boarding school somewhere--a thing I would never do. There are no private schools here. The public schools in the southeastern Ohio counties surrounding mine are almost all in deplorable condition, and there are no alternatives. If there were some mechanism by which alternative schools could be first funded, built (the physical plants of the schools around here are mostly not salvageable), equipped, and staffed (by whom? there is already a teacher shortage; the teachers who working are all unionized, etc.), and this done everywhere, simultaneously, so that nobody is deprived of the opportunity. If, if, if--then I'm with you.

Well, insofar as I don't think there are any proposals on the table for a national voucher system, you needn't worry. Places that have the resources (= private schools) to support voucher systems should implement them. Other places can see what has worked and what hasn't, and decide whether vouchers fit their needs and capabilities. I suspect that the success of vouchers where they are tried will inspire lots of places that had previously thought such a system impossible. As for where this movement comes from, all I can say is that some of the strongest voucher supporters are, unsurprisingly, totally ordinary parents who want their kids to have a better education. Did inner-city parents originate the voucher idea? No--Milton Friedman did. Do many, many inner-city parents support his idea now? Yup.

Michael Yaeger, RNRC founding law student: Two [...] specific comments. First, the title "rock n' roll conservatism." It's obviously cool in that it gets at the point that we like pop culture, but to non-sympathetic (i.e., lefty) folk it would probably provoke dumb jokes along the "military intelligence" line. Oy. On the other hand, it's a cool name and I certainly can't think of anything better. Names such as "Modern Conservatives" (like modern orthodox), etc., are lame. Nothing else seems to get at how we don't have a perfect moment in mind, that we're not standing athwart history yelling "stop!" ; we're saying that we can do better than we ever have, but only by using the wisdom of the past.

Second, I completely agree with your statement on the law--i.e., that, when possible, judges should not "make" law. There's no better way to say it short of a three volume set on jurisprudence. I do wonder, though, if all those talk show commentators realize how complicated the whole thing is, and how hard it is not to make law. I guess this is a non-point for the Rock n' Roll Manifesto. But in any event, sometimes the right doesn't give the left enough credit on this stuff. We really had to change the Constitution to deal with economic and demographic changes--not as much as we did, but still. Paper money, the SEC, the FDA, the Federal Reserve, and other parts of the administrative state seem to do more good than harm. And there are some benefits to not amending the Constitution too often, much less passing whole new Constitutions. Do the French, with their five official republics, have the same reverence for the law that is so common in America, land of at least three unofficial republics since 1789?

FEMINIST BOOKS MAILBAG: Here's my post, "Ten-Cent Tour of Women's Studies."

John W. Brewer: What, you never read Mary Daly? She was by far the most flamboyant/ridiculous/self-parodic feminist Deep Thinker I read when I was in high school. (I see also no Simone de Beauvoir, but she may have been so hopelessly pre-Second-Wave as to be irrelevant by the time you were reading this stuff.)

I've never tried de Beauvoir, but as for Daly--if you ever figure out what the heck she's talking about, feel free to let me know. And people think Joyce is hard to read!

An anonyreader: This was my (straight-female, young-and-confused-but-angry) favorite feminist passage in my years of angry young womanhood:

"Our preference for mechanical and pharmacological agents of birth-control is irrational. Our position with regard to the function of sex is absurdly confused. The other systems which have occasionally been referred to (in this book) have had a certain internal consistency, outlandish though some of them may seem. There is no logic in a
conceptual system which holds that orgasm is always and everwhere good for you, that vaginal orgasm is impossible, that no moral opproobrium attaches to expenditure of semen wherever it occurs, that considerable opprobrium attaches to the bearing of unwanted children, and at the same time insists that 'normal' heterosexual intercourse should always culminate in ejaculation within the vagina. These are the suppositions which underlie our eagerness to extend the use of modern contraceptives
into every society on earth, regardless of its own set of cultural and moral priorities....

"Another name for this kind of mental chaos is evil."

(Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, p. 128-9)

And Jendi Reiter: You might enjoy "Cognition & Eros" by Robin May Schott --- British philosophy professor (I think), basically critiques the ascetic tendency in Western classical and Christian philosophy, saying that the devaluation of the body has meant the devaluation of women and a fear of admitting that one is dependent and mortal. Marred slightly by Marxist jargon, but a great book nonetheless.

If you're a horror fan, I recommend the 1950s French film "Eyes Without a Face." Creepy, beautiful example of the mad-scientist genre, whose impact comes from suspense and tragedy rather than gore. Also Doug Clegg's book "Neverland."

MAILBAG: Rock; Hitch + Vatican; Miguel Estrada; "High Noon"; religion in New York; mysticism and Christianity; working mothers; and Scalia. Soon I will post separate mailbags on feminist books and rock'n'roll conservatism. As always, I am in plain text (though I don't think I have any replies in this one) and my readers are in bold.

Rock: An anonymous reader writes: [T]he blues is not about despair. It's about melancholy and resignation. The latter is the opposite of despair, in a way. Despair wrecks (objects, others, and finally the self); resignation accepts. If it didn't, surely black Americans would have died of grief long before they found their freedom?

Do you know the John Lee Hooker song called "The Fog"?

...Can't resist pointing out that my SERIOUS musical friends all tell me that the complex rhythms of American popular music are actually too simple and repetitive for them. But I can never quite agree with this; think they're missing some subtlety. I once found a critic's comment (perhaps banal to those more knowledgeable than I am) saying that the European musical tradition aimed to make the voice as pure and accurate as a musical instrument; the American tradition (under its African influence) aimed to make instruments as supple and expressive as the human voice.

One point you may never have noticed: Canadian popular music differs from that of the US in that it never had a significant African influence until the 1950s (with the exception of jazz). Our dominant tradition in popular music is Celtic. What we have is what American music would be, minus the influence of African rhythms and vocal styles.

Hitchens testifying at the Vatican against Mother Theresa's canonization: Dave Lull writes: He wrote about it (not on the web): Vanity Fair, Oct 2001 i494 p166(4) "The Devil and Mother Teresa." (role of devil's advocate during the canonization of Mother Teresa), Christopher Hitchens.

Abstract: Issues concerning the investigation of Mother Teresa by the Catholic church before she could be granted sainthood by Pope John Paul II after her death in 1997.

Estrada. The Talking Dog writes: Good call on my fellow Brooklynite Senator Chuck Schumer; he is being an intellectually dishonest doberman-- though I tend to think you overestimate the voters of my beloved Empire State by saying that if he out and out said "I'm going to trash ALL of George W. Bush's nominees until he sends me one I like," it would cost him votes. I think it would HELP him here in the State that elected you know who as its junior senator!

My problem with Estrada is more basic and personal: this guy was supposedly in my college class (dear old Columbia '83 [...]). Anyway-- despite the fact that I supposedly spent three years in the same college with the guy-- and I saw his picture here: I am absolutely unable to place him. I don't think he REALLY went to Columbia College at ALL (which is f***ed up-- because let me tell you,
being in Columbia's last all-male class is not something you'd ordinarily make up!)

Besides-- if this guy was really as rabid-ass a conservative as he claims to be (vetting judicial clerk nominees on politics, for God's sake!) [I thought the whole point was that he claimed he didn't do that.--ed.], then I would have known him for sure (as I was one of perhaps 8 members of Columbia '83 who were not to the left of, oh, Mark Rudd; I have moved left over time, on my theory that if you're not a liberal at 21, you have no heart, and if you ARE a liberal at 39 you have no money). Unless, of course, Estrada is a situational conservative-- in which case he surely can't be trusted with life tenure on the D.C. Circuit either!!!

So-- regardless of Chuck Schumer's disingenuous "double bind" bullshit question (the correct answer would have been "I'm sorry senator, could you repeat the question," followed by, "No, I still didn't get all of it--could you break it down for me? Harvard Law wasn't as good when I went there as when YOU went there." This would have brought down the house (and cemented his nomination)), there are serious issues about Estrada's credibility (i.e., just where DID you go to college-- and if you went to Columbia, why doesn't Farber know who you are?)

But having a sense of humor vs. NOT having a sense of humor is why I am here (an associate at an 8 lawyer firm in Manhattan, albeit with a cool blog [...]) and Miguel is a kick-ass partner at Gibson Dunn in Washington, and is up for the DC Circuit (well, the last part is because he is probably one of, oh, 3 or 4 guys with Spanish surnames and kick-ass legal credentials who seem to be THAT conservative). But I can resent him anyway.

High Noon. Rodney Welch writes: I didn't read the City Paper review of "High Noon," but I assume when they refer to the "liberal cliches" they're referring to the fact that it was made in the McCarthy Era, when liberals (most of them Democratic, I'd guess) were the only ones standing up to Tail Gunner Joe. Will Kane is somewhat in the mold of how Hollywood viewed liberalism, as more or less being equated with peaceful, live and let live decency. (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is another example.) It's interesting to compare the movie with "On the Waterfront" -- they were made just two years apart, both had a theme of loner versus an evil that had cowed the rest of society, both were influenced by Cold War politics, and yet the directors were at diametrically opposite political perspectives. Fred Zinneman's bogeyman was McCarthy; Elia Kazan's was Stalin.

Jonah vs. Clinton + Enron: Ed Graham: I think Jonah had tongue firmly in cheek -- he was taking a shot at all those who were happy to ascribe every excess of the 80s to the "Reagan era of greed."

Similarly, Rand Simberg: You wrote, quoting Jonah Goldberg, "...That's what the era of Clinton-greed brought us..."

And then castigated him for blaming the greed on Clinton.

I think you missed his point. The comment was tongue in cheek--a dig at the fact that Bill and Hillary got into office by (among other lies) calling the Reagan eighties the "decade of greed." I suspect that if you asked Jonah, he would tell you that neither president actually caused their respective "decades of greed," but that demogoguery is cheap.

David Klinghoffer on religion in NYC: John W. Brewer: I agree with your points re DC and furthermore with the overall proposition that his take is idiosyncratic to the point of being bizarre. By considering Manhattan "secular" he seems to mean no more and no less than "I didn't know or run into very many white evangelical Protestants when I lived there. I run into more of them in Seattle." Once you discount Catholics, Jews, and non-whites (groups which are not inherently 100% secular, at a minimum), you have very few people left to work with in New York. The percentage of the NYC population which is "white Protestant" (with "Protestant" understood purely as a statement about ethnicity/ancestry rather than current faith or practice [...]) is, I think, something like 6-8%, and I doubt the Manhattan percentage is dramatically higher than the citywide average. The comparable figure is something in excess of 50% nationwide. Not only is the nonwhite (perhaps technically "non-Anglo," given the Census Bureau reminder that Hispanics can be "of any race") population much larger in N.Y. in percentage terms, but something north of 75% of the white population is Jewish, Roman Catholic (at least "culturally") or "other" (Greek, Armenian, etc.). By contrast, I would expect that 75%+ of the Seattle-area white population is "culturally" Protestant. I would tend to doubt that the percentage of actual believers/ regular churchgoers among the Seattle-area cultural-white-Protestant population is higher than the equivalent percentage in Manhattan (at least as adjusted for age & marital status), but there's simply a dramatically smaller population, by an order of magnitude, to draw from.

Now, it is true that the population of actual churchgoers among the c-w-P population in Manhattan is notably more mainline and less evangelical/fundamentalist/Pentecostal than with the country as a whole, and perhaps Seattle. For better or worse, mainliners are less likely than fundies to be outwardly demonstrative in the way Klinghoffer identifies. [...] However, it's not that nonmainline Protestants don't exist in NYC, they just tend to be black or, increasingly, Hispanic.

It may be significant in all sorts of ways that the religious/ethnic mix of NYC is dramatically at variance with that of the country as a whole (the religious/ethnic mix of New Amsterdam was different from the rest of the East Coast way back when), but that's not "secularism." Anyone who lived anywhere in the world other than Brooklyn (including in Israel) would be struck by how many observant orthodox Jews actually live in Manhattan. It's not not just the ones who commute in from the outer boroughs, but the ones I see from my window every Saturday as they walk to and from the synogogue at 94th & Lexington. The fact that Klinghoffer apparently doesn't count these people as affecting the secular tone of the place is just weird, and says something about him and his own relationship with Judaism rather than something about Manhattan. (So Manhattan also has more secular Jews than anywhere else. We have more of everything. Someone else can address whether practicing Roman
Catholics are simply a low-class outer borough phenomenon with no relevance to Manhattan.)

Oh, and not only do I read the Bible on the subway (admittedly a practice disproportionately practiced by black women), I have been known to say the office from the Book of Common Prayer (in a low but audible voice, complete with appropriate head-bobbing, crossing myself and the like) while riding the subway at rush hour. People look on impassively, without eye contact. They've seen weirder. This is New York.

And Avram Grumer: I noticed that Klinghoffer kept talking about "Manhattan," as if one island with about a fifth of New York City's population were the whole city. I wonder if he knows that Brooklyn's nickname is "The City of Homes and Churches."

Mysticism and Christianity: Lynn Gazis-Sax: FWIW, I tend to think of the meaning of the word mysticism in terms closer to your definition than Brink's (though I suspect there is probably no shortage of people who use the word in terms closer to Brink's definition). Just a few things that struck me:

[Quoting Eve:] "I wonder if there is some lack of awareness of mystical elements in Catholicism (which I displayed in my earlier posts on this subject...) because many of the practices and language de-emphasized by misguided 'spirit of Vatican II' types were more obviously mystical: traditional devotions like the rosary, an understanding of the Mass and transubstantiation, talk of submission in Christ, talk of God's otherness. But a lot of that stuff is being revived, thank God!"

I've always thought that, if I ever were a Catholic, I'd be a "spirit of Vatican II" Catholic. I like the National Catholic Reporter, some of the things that bother me most about the Catholic Church (e.g. lack of ordination of women and its views on birth control) seem to be things that lots of "spirit of Vatican II" Catholics also disagree with, etc. But I'd have to say that the mystical aspects of Catholicism are, from my point of view, part of what's positive in the Church; I'd hate for the "spirit of Vatican II" to mean sloughing all that off.

[Quoting Eve again:] "Well, I'd say Gnosticism is all around us, cf. Harold Bloom's intriguing studies of 'the American religion,' but hey."

Very much all around us among liberal Quakers. I don't mean that in a derogatory way (taking something I don't like about the liberal side of Quakerism and calling it Gnostic as a way of expressing what I dislike about it). I mean it in the sense that, among the more liberal Quakers (as opposed to the more evangelical ones), there are people who would, for example, read Elaine Pagels, and feel that her relatively positive take on Gnosticism expresses the kind of faith that they value. (I'm ambivalent -- I
find Elaine Pagels interesting, but, despite any flaws in the choices the Church took, I still see value in an incarnational view of Christianity, which Gnosticism lacks.)

Working mothers: Jendi Reiter: Your exchange with Lisa Powell on working mothers is more nuanced than most, but what's usually ignored in this debate is that it's a delicate balance between too much and too little parental attention. It's unhealthy for a relationship when one person sacrifices her outside interests or commitments to focus wholly on the other person. This is true whether it's a marriage or a parent-child relationship. The right balance will be different for each family. Especially when the child grows older, it can be a major burden for him to feel that he is his mother's sole "mission in life." As a general rule, our families should take priority over our jobs, but it's a big leap to say that therefore mothers shouldn't have jobs at all unless financial need compels them.

And Scalia: A different anonymous reader writes: I think that Scalia's rule-based notions of jurisprudence do have more than the paltry, grudging moral content that you ascribe to them. That case would depend on the kinds of "natural law" arguments posited by, among others, John Finnis, who argued that neutral, rule-based systems of justice faciliate reciprocity and cooperation, and hence contribute to the formation of a "flourishing" community capable of effective coordinated planning (on an individual basis). Finnis reasoned that such planning is moral in an important sense because, as I'm sure the poor bastards who have lived in Afghanistan for the last 20 years can also testisfy, it is an essential prerequisite for the fullest realization of friendship, community, pursuit of knowledge and the like.

This is a "baseline" morality to be sure, but nothing to sniff at--and, in our far-flung heterogeneous society, may yeild far more of a net moral outcome than a possibly arbitrary system in which federal judges legislate their own version of morality (these are lawyers we are talking about(!)) under the guise constitutional or statutory legal interpretation.

TO QUOTE SAM THE EAGLE, "It is at times like this that I am proud to be an American."

Via the Rat.

"I shall keep you, Bortai. I shall keep you unresponding to my passion. Your hatred will kindle into love."
"Before that day dawns, Mongol, the vultures will feast on your heart!"
--John Wayne (as Genghis Khan) and Susan Hayward, "The Conqueror"

POETRY WEDNESDAY: Four different translations of the same poem, by Hwang Chin-i. Here's where I got 'em. The first three are more freestyle, the last one more literal.

I cut in two
A long November night, and
Place half under the coverlet,
Sweet-scented as a spring breeze.
and when he comed, I shall take it out,
Unroll it inch by inch, to stretch the night.
--Peter Lee

I cut in two a long November night
And place one half under the quilt,
Sweet as the spring breeze.
Whe he comes I shall take it out
And unroll it inch by inch
To stretch out the night.
--Peter Hyun

I will break in two the long strong back of this long midwinter night,
Rollit up and put it away under the springtime coverlet.
And the night that my loved one comes back again I will unroll it to lengthen the time.
--Richard Rutt

I wish I could cut out the waist of this deep mid-winter night
And curl it softly, softly under the spring quilt,
And then slowly, slowly spread it on the night my love comes back.

THE HEART OF ROCK'N'ROLL IS STILL BEATIN': So a reader sent me this essay: "Body and soul: The musical miseducation of the youth," by Martha Bayles. It's a critique of Allan Bloom's takedown of rock music (click here and here for previous, much longer Eve rants on this topic); Bayles chastises Bloom, but also sympathizes with him, and agrees with substantial portions of his criticism.

I found the essay to be a mixed bag. Bayles makes lots of excellent points, many specifically directed at Bloom's attempt at a Platonic approach to contemporary music. She notes that Bloom attempts to smuggle in romanticist music even as he denounces romanticist philosophy, for example. She picks up on the way he tends to lump all "the old European music" together, blessing it all, while similarly lumping all the new American music together in order to damn it. She identifies three "distortions" (I wonder if she intended that as a rock reference?) that lead Bloom to false and overhasty conclusions: a belief, Marxist in origin, that anything popular with contemporary "masscult" audiences must be bad; a denunciation of rock rhythms and an ignorance of the complexity of those rhythms; and an inability to see, or even to consider, that in the 20th century the Western musical "center of gravity" shifted from Germany to black America.

But then Bayles goes and lumps lots of disparate things together just like Bloom did! When she's defending music she herself loves, she is attuned to nuance; she points out that Bloom's take on Louis Armstrong's hit recording of "Mack the Knife" ignores not only Armstrong's singing style but also the many hit instrumental versions of the song. She writes, accurately, "In the same chapter, Bloom waxes indignant at the German condescension that views America as 'a nonculture,' a collection of castoffs from real culture.' Such indignation is ironic coming from someone who has just reduced Louis Armstrong to a hollow conduit through which the elixir of German philosophy flowed into an empty American vessel."

But Bayles's own stance is too narrow, because it's based on a defense of jazz over and against other 20th-century musical forms. Bayles mentions the blues, but they more or less drop out of her narrative; jazz clearly has pride of place. She locates the greatness of jazz and suitably jazzlike rock in its "rhythmic counterpoint, or swing." I find this too confining. An assessment of great music should allow for a wider variety of moods and expressions--lament, meander, laughter, rage, gallows humor, resignation, and much more. Not all of those moods and expressions require, or work well with, counterpoint/swing. Toward the end of the essay she writes, "Most jazz, including the highly developed strains that appeared after 1930, is less emotional than" the 18th- and 19th-century European music beloved by Bloom. She adds that "Afro-American music" exhibits the classicist virtues of "wit, elegance, playfulness, lucidity, detachment."

In the margins at this point I have written, "When did the blues disappear from this essay?"

Even if you just stick to jazz, can this description really cover the sultry, knowing humor of songs like "My Daddy Rocks Me" ("I looked at the clock and the clock struck ten/I said 'Glory, amen...'/He kept rockin'/With one steady roll...")? Where does "Strange Fruit" fit in here--where's its detachment and playfulness?

Bayles charges contemporary rock with being preoccupied with murder and suicide, as rock was not until the late 1960s. Before then, she claims, rock "was not a musical and cultural revolution." She doesn't tell us much about why contemporary critics of "Elvis the Pelvis"--who certainly did believe he represented a musical and cultural revolution--were wrong, so it's hard to evaluate her stance here. But I note that murder and suicide aren't exactly unusual themes in popular music, from "Sheath and Knife" to "Stagolee." Her account of punk as "performance art, not music" is most accurate as regards the Sex Pistols; it doesn't have much to say about the horde of groups and styles covered under the "punk" umbrella. (Part of the problem with the essay is that it treats genre boundaries as much more real than they are. Even if I grant that different genres have different specialties--say, rock is better at anger, blues is better at despair, synth-pop is better at ironic distance--few actual groups or genres stick within one genre.) The artistic or cultural value of an alienated howl is limited, for sure. But I do think it's possible for actual music, actual art, to be mostly composed of alienated howl. It helps if the musician has accurately identified at least some of the sources of his alienation; I think the Pistols did that, which is part of what makes them so compelling. A final, parenthetical weirdness of her take on punk: She blames it partly on the Velvet Underground, and then later praises jazz because "in the Eastern bloc, jazz became quite literally the Voice of America." So... what was the Velvet Revolution again?

That said, I wholeheartedly concur with this statement, toward the end of the essay: "At bottom, my gripe with Bloom is that he pays no real attention to the musical battles being fought in the souls of youth. He finds his students lacking 'strong prejudices' against which to test serious learning. Yet he dismisses their passion for music as a moral and cultural dead end," rather than viewing that passion as precisely the kind of love through which he could draw students to "serious learning."

Two possibly-significant postscripts: Bayles writes that she agrees with Bloom "that music should not be used to whip human beings into a mindless frenzy." She doesn't discuss whether she thinks there are forms of ecstasy that are not mindless--supra- rather than sub-rational.

And I wonder whether Bloom wasn't subjecting music to stringent criteria he would not apply to Shakespeare, Giacometti, or other artists whose works often inspire longings, passions, or alienations that Bloom would find unsavory. Bloom also didn't tell us if he liked any 20th-century art. What was in between Othello and Ayn Rand, for him?

PROGRESS, RETURN, OR RENEWAL?: More on rock'n'roll conservatism. Leo Strauss has a famous essay, "Progress or Return?", contrasting the metaphor of progress (which tends to imply historical determinism, disdain for the past, and denial of an inherent and ineradicable corruption in human nature) and the metaphor of return. He was playing on the Jewish understanding of return, teshuvah, which has connotations of repentance. A return to the source.

But in contemporary political discourse, "return" has been downgraded to nostalgia. Conservatism, mostly due to its unfortunate name, has been accused of being little more than a desire to return to some imagined past--the 1950s of "Ozzie and Harriet" is the usual suspect. And many varieties of conservatism play into that stereotype, making a fetish of medieval guilds, 1950s diners, or Victorian sexual mores (eep). There are worthwhile ways of drawing on the past for inspiration and examples--I think The Tragedy of American Compassion effectively mines the Victorian era for a sense of the possibilities, needs, and challenges of private charity. But it's easy to slide from that kind of inquisitive, imaginative investigation of the past to an idealization of the past and a demonization of the present. So one aspect of rock'n'roll conservatism is that it's focused on the future, not the past. It's not about a return to some past era--real or imagined.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal specifically use that name, rather than talking about a "restoration" or some such, precisely because they emphasize that they are a new thing that is nonetheless tied to a pre-existing tradition. They are a response, from within the Franciscan tradition, to new circumstances; they're open to new ideas; they have an attractive vigor that can't be gotten from groups that view the 1950s as a lost Eden and the present day as a "Slouching Toward Gomorrah"-style wasteland. Their very name connotes hope, and engagement with the culture around them. And those are key elements of RNRC.

WHAT I LEARNED LAST NIGHT: Last night I saw "Privates on Parade" at the Studio Theater. It's a musical about SADUSEA (Song And Dance Unit, South East Asia), a British military-entertainment unit that tromps and/or flounces through Malaysia leaving a trail of heartache, smuggled weaponry, and women's underthings. Here is what I learned from this play--the good stuff first:

1) Floyd King is still fantastic. He's like a force of nature.

2) The other actors were uniformly (ha ha) very good. The Washington Post review linked above is right about Sunita Param.

3) Costumes, sets: Also good. The Studio is a real class act.

But then there was the play itself. What I learned from the play:

1) You actually can't make a play about racism, Malaysian history, war as theater, intra-gay debates about assimilation vs. flamboyance, liberal male wuss-outs, Christianity, longing, abortion, the British postwar malaise (oy, I'm very glad they didn't try some malaise/Malays pun, it would totally be in line with the show's humor), domestic violence, Communism, and masturbation. I mean, Tony Kushner could probably do it, but he's a horse of a different feather. The play included scads of potentially biting, moving, complex, and/or hilarious moments, but all received too little time and attention. Scenes were abandoned the moment they threatened to develop into something poignant or funny. If you've seen it, I think the clearest example of this unwillingness to do anything with the issues and emotions the play raises was the "Black Velvet" almost-a-scene. Where did that scene go? Nowhere.

2) In 2002, in the District of Columbia, in an artsy independent theater, there is nothing challenging about mocking imperialist Christians, British racists, or anti-Communism.

3) It's possible to write a musical that is partly about Communists which leaves the impression that: a) The East German government had something to do with "the working classes," and was possibly even on the side of said classes; b) Cuba's Batista was replaced by Vaclav Havel; and c) Clement Atlee was more threatening than Mao. I really would rather not even mention this, since it sounds so predictably right-wing, and since the Commie stuff is only thrown in for local color as far as I can tell--Cold War scene-setting, a flash of Red--but it did get in the way of my enjoyment of the musical. I mean, I must have missed that time when British peasant families traded babies with the neighbors so that no family would have to eat its own children to survive. I'm not sure I'm being fair here, since I can't think what I wanted the show to do--I mean, mass death isn't all that funny--but this aspect of the evening really did feel "off."

4) Gay people are funnier in real life. Like, a lot funnier.

5) So are British people.

6) So are gay British people in the military.

7) If your characters are forced to carry too much symbolic weight, eventually anything you do with them will appear stereotyped. "Privates on Parade" made fun of the amount of symbolic baggage its characters held--there's a very funny bit of dialogue that goes something like, "I'm not just representing a woman being raped--I'm also an Atlantic ship convoy!"--but ultimately several of the characters are the sum total of their Dramatis Personae descriptions: The Eurasian Girl, The Heroine's Gay Best Friend Who's The Only Man Who Ever Treated Her Right, The Uptight God-Bothering Empire-Builder Who Prefers Bloodlust To The Other Kind. By the end, pretty much anything the author could have done with these characters would have struck me as fairly crass. If the girl gets the boy, it plays as the native girl needing a white knight to save her; if she gets only the tender care of the Gay Best Friend, well, hello, how cliched is that little "the noble victims of this world stick together!" script?; and if she ends up with no one a'tall, she's just another tragic mulatta. It is possible to avoid this cliche Catch-22 by writing better characters in the first place.

8) Satire should cost the audience something. (See #2.)

"Abjure this woman and her idolatries. Tear down the obscene abomination she has erected!"
--An elder to Yul Brynner, "Solomon and Sheba"

QUICK HITS. Non-violent steps to "regime change" in Iraq. Plus much cogent, pointed criticism in the comments boxes. In case you somehow missed this on InstaPundit.

The Old Oligarch on why Father Tucker's church rocks.

Excellent Stuart Buck column (also from InstaPundit...) on why we shouldn't care who's the smartest Supreme. (Personally, I favor Diana Ross--d'oh, wrong Supremes.)

WHEN IDIOTS BAKE.

When New Mexicans bake.

Both links via The Rat.

"An intelligent carrot--the mind boggles."
--Douglas Spencer, "The Thing"