More fool than king.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Seeds Of Tyranny
A long essay by Don Surber on the continuing siren call of Stalinism.
Repeal And Replace Barack Obama?
I make the case, over at Ricochet.
Rocketman
A nice high, lonesome cover of the old song.
Space Casualties
…are a necessary tragedy.
My column on this week’s anniversaries, in historical perspective. Actually, it’s a 500-work summary of the book.
[Update a few minutes later]
Right on cue, some idiot comes up in comments with the usual, “End human spaceflight. If you want science, send a robot.”
Of course, the word “science” didn’t appear in the piece.
More Pete Seeger Thoughts
You can’t separate the man from the music:
Someone should assign Miller, Fusilli, and Bruce Springsteen to read in its entirety Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Perhaps, then, they would come to understand the cause that Pete Seeger’s championing of unions, civil rights, and environmentalism was really intended to serve.
The idea of using music and the arts more generally to subvert allegiance to this country and to make Americans thoroughly ashamed of a history that is for the most part admirable, the idea of using music and the arts more generally to undermine the principles that make this country prosperous and free, and the idea of using music and the arts to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a thuggish, populist, kleptocratic dictatorship here — that is Peter Seeger’s legacy, and it is, alas, enduring.
And David Goldman thinks that the music was his greatest sin:
Seeger’s (and Guthrie’s) notion of folk music had less to do with actual American sources than with a Communist-inspired Yankee version of Proletkult. The highly personalized style of a Robert Johnson and other Delta bluesmen didn’t belong in the organizing handbook of the “folk” exponents who grew up in the Communist Party’s failed efforts to control the trade union movement of the 1940s. The music of the American people grew out of their churches. Their instrument was the piano, not the guitar, and their style was harmonized singing of religious texts rather than the nasal wailing that Guthrie made famous. Seeger, the son of an academic musicologist and a classical violinist, was no mountain primitive, but a slick commercializer of “folk” themes with a nasty political agenda. His capacity to apologize for the brutalities of Communist regimes — including their repression of their own “folksingers” — remained undiminished with age, as David Graham reported in the Atlantic.
I’m willing to forgive Seeger his Stalinism. Some of my most-admired artists were Stalinists, for example, Bertolt Brecht, whose rendition of his own “Song of the Unattainability of Human Striving” from The Threepenny Opera is the funniest performance of the funniest song of the 20th century. I can’t forgive him his musical fraud: the mind-deadening, saccharine, sentimental appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste in his signature songs — “I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” and so forth. Bob Dylan (of whom I’m not much of a fan) rescued himself from the bathos by poisoning the well of sentimentality with irony. His inheritance is less Dylan than the odious Peter, Paul and Mary.
I liked Peter, Paul and Mary as a kid, but the point is taken.
Politicians Steer The Economy
On Tuesday, the president of these United States called for an end to the “rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government,” so that he might move forward with his economic agenda uninhibited by “stale political arguments.” It was an interesting moment. The president’s childlike faith in his own ability to direct resources according to his own vision is almost touching in its way, though when the actual costs are accounted for it is terrifying. The president’s understanding of how the economy works is about as sophisticated as was my understanding of anatomy and nutrition at the age of four: Lean this way and we’ll strengthen the middle class, lean that way and we’ll nourish the working poor. He doesn’t even understand the debate that he wants to preempt: It is not only a question of the size of government but a question of what government does.
He only knows what he knows.
The questions we habitually ask —“Is the government spending too much? Is it spending enough?” — are without meaning in and of themselves. It matters what the government is spending on. Spending X percent of GDP to defeat Hitler is one thing, spending it to subsidize Solyndra is another. Government must always be recalibrated in light of current conditions: war or peace, boom or bust, expansion or decay. The debate about the size and scope of government can be “stale” only if you fail to understand that its relevance is constant and eternal.
It will never end, because there will always be those who want to expand it far beyond its abilities to exercise power over others.
MSNBC And The Bigotry Of The Left
“They’re totalitarians, not hypocrites.”
[Update a while later]
Matt Welch has more thoughts:
There is nothing tolerant about assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic tribalism. MSNBC, on whose shows I have happily participated, engages daily in the othering business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age.
I think you have to have your sense of irony excised at an early age to be a leftist.
The Death Of The Humanities
Thoughts on the depths to which they’ve plunged, by classics professor Victor Davis Hanson:
…classical liberal education—despite the fashionable critique that it had never been disinterested—for a century was largely apolitical. Odysseus was critiqued as everyman, not an American CEO, a proto-Christian saint, or the caricature of white patriarchal privilege. Instead Homer made students of all races and classes and both genders think twice about the contradictions of the human experience: which is the greatest danger to civilization, the Lala land of the comfortable Lotus Eaters, or the brutal pre-polis savagery of the tribal Cyclopes? Telemachus was incidentally white, rich, and male, but essentially a youthful everyman coming of age, with all the angst and insecurities that will either overwhelm the inexperienced and lead to perpetual adolescence, or must be conquered on the path to adulthood. Odysseus towers among his lesser conniving and squabbling crewmen—but why then does his curiosity and audacity ensure that all his crewmen who hitch their star to the great man end up dead?
In the zero-sum game of the college curricula, what was crowded out over the last half-century was often the very sort of instruction that had once made employers take a risk in hiring a liberal arts major. Humanities students were more likely to craft good prose. They were trained to be inductive rather than deductive in their reasoning, possessed an appreciation of language and art, and knew the referents of the past well enough to put contemporary events into some sort of larger abstract context. In short, they were often considered ideal prospects as future captains of business, law, medicine, or engineering.
Not now. The world beyond the campus has learned that college students know how and why to take a political position but not how to defend it through logic and example. If employers are turned off by a lack of real knowledge, they are even more so when it is accompanied by zealousness. Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal combination.
Ignorance and arrogance is a deadly combo, as demonstrated by the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Early Voting
The case against it.
It’s really an appalling development.