BOOKS: What makes a dictator, anyway?

Maybe I've been mistaken, and Jeff Gahan really isn't a tinhorn small-pond dictator after all.

As analyst Adam Gopnik plausibly suggests:

What if language is exactly what the ogres have mastered, and bad people tend to have a better command of language than good ones, who are often tongue-tied in the face of the world’s complexities? What if the tragedies of tyranny were, in the first instance, tragedies of eloquence misapplied—of language used for evil ends, but used well? ... (after all) the worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers.

So much for my previous theories, seeing as Gahan won't ever be confused with a reader or a writer. Perhaps "mob boss" works better.

Meanwhile Gopnik reviews Frank Dikötter’s new book, How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century, also discussing The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, a recent book by Daniel Kalder.

THE FIELD GUIDE TO TYRANNY, by Adam Gopnik (New Yorker)

Dictators tend to share the same ugly manner because all seek the same effect: not charm but intimidation.

... Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. (“At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time—the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. In 1985, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist leader, ordered up such television programs as “The Nicolae Ceauşescu Era” and “Science During the Nicolae Ceauşescu Epoch.” By law, his portrait was featured at the beginning of every textbook.

If you have a half-hour to listen (and can access The Economist), this podcast is worth your time.

The Economist Asks: What makes a dictator?

This week we speak to Frank Dikötter, a professor at the university of Hong Kong and author of “How to be a dictator”

THE 20TH CENTURY has become known as the “age of dictatorship”, for the horrors perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other despots from Chile to Cambodia. Anne McElvoy asks Frank Dikötter, a historian and professor at the university of Hong Kong, how these men rose to power and why some survived while others were brought down. They debate the limits of authoritarian power today, including China’s ability to act in Hong Kong. And what makes a true dictator—or is there something a bit dictatorial in everyone?

To conclude, my attention was directed to Dikötter by virtue of reading one of his books earlier this month. It was valuable to do so, although not necessarily a pleasurable experience.

BOOKS: The Tragedy of Liberation, an account of China's revolutionary insanity, by Frank Dikötter.

Chernobyl: "Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe."

It was a minor concern at the time. I'd be visiting Eastern Europe in 1987 and traveling in the general vicinity of Chernobyl. It wasn't being flippant to ask: what's the real fallout from the nuclear disaster?

After all, the USSR was hardly "open" at the time. There was no way of knowing how accurate the official reports might be.

In the end I said to hell with it and followed my wanderlust. Thirty years later the memory came to a brief reference.

It’s strange what you remember, and what you don’t. The train came to a stop in Warsaw well after 9:00 p.m., and we congregated on the plaza in front, waiting for our guide and the bus to the Hotel Nowa Praga.

There was a women dressed in peasant garb, standing behind a rickety wooden table by a shoddy cement wall. She was selling admirably healthy strawberries, and none of us had Polish złoty to spend on her wares.

Barrie didn’t ruminate. Taking stock of the situation, he produced a few dollar bills that she happily accepted as illegal tender in honor of the wonderful Mr. Reagan, depleting her stock to nothing.

Then Barrie grandly announced the reason for her bountiful crop: Undoubtedly these were Chernobyl strawberries, fertilized with the fallout from the nuclear disaster the previous year.

We ate the nuclear strawberries, each and everyone, laughing all the way to the hotel.

Then, and now:

Loth to sacrifice production targets, Soviet planners ordered slaughterhouses to mix radioactive and clean meat to make sausages. The Soviets were not alone in circulating poisoned wares: Greek wheat contaminated by the fallout was eventually blended into consignments of aid shipped to Africa and East Germany. Even now, Ms Brown joins pickers in the forests of northern Ukraine who combine “hot” and clean berries so the crop meets radiation requirements for exports.

The Economist's review of three books about Chernobyl is elegiac and economical, proper words harnessed to sentiments for mulling over a stiff drink. Kudos to the author.

The tragedy of Chernobyl (The Economist)

Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe

... The weather was unseasonably warm on that fateful Saturday, and Pripyat was in a festive mood. Locals planned to attend weddings or to stroll into the idyllic forests they had come to love. An engineer who arrived in 1971 described the surroundings reverently: “Silence and a sense of primeval creation.” Then the safety test scheduled for that morning went tragically wrong. Anatoliy Diatlov, the plant’s deputy chief engineer, called the ensuing meltdown “a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante”. While monitors in Sweden picked up radiation just hours after the explosion, it took the Soviet government three days to release a terse statement: “There has been an accident at the Chernobyl atomic-electricity station.”

The Economist on the WHCD, Michelle Wolf and snowflaking: "In the age of Trump, calls for civility are calls for servility."

As we debated the idiotic White House event,
"Ten journalists among 36 killed in Afghanistan attacks."

At Medium, writer John Zeratsky explains "Why I ignore the daily news and read The Economist instead (and how you can too)."

For anyone who’s weary of the frantic daily news cycle, The Economist is a breath of fresh air. It’s a London-based weekly magazine (although they call themselves a newspaper) covering global political, social, economic, and business news. They are moderate, quirky, and unconventional.

Zeratsky's analysis almost perfectly mirrors my own, except that I've been reading The Economist since 1988, and subscribing during all but a handful of these years.

A few years back, The Economist explained itself.

Is The Economist left- or right-wing? Neither. We consider ourselves to be in the "radical centre."

I offer these two preludes as preparation to consume the main course, which is Michelle Wolf, and what we're to make of her monologue at a dinner which shouldn't even take place -- and the fact that while this is the main point, it's being missed in the usual hyped-up furor over showflaking.

The Economist's take is spot on, so here it is, in its entirety, with the important passages highlighted.

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The Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, by J.F. (The Economist)

In the age of Trump, calls for civility are calls for servility

FULL disclosure: I have never been to a White House Correspondents’ Dinner; I will never go to a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The American political press already has a bias toward reverence and access preservation; journalists yukking it up with powerful people whom they are supposed to cover impartially is unseemly. Partly for this reason, The Economist has for several years not sent anyone along. Usually the dinner passes in a flurry of photos and articles about who wore what, which celebrity sat at which publication’s table and a recounting of the hokey jokes told by whichever safe comedian they wangled into hosting. But occasionally something more interesting happens.

Over the past two days Washington has worked itself into a tizzy over Michelle Wolf’s unusually scathing monologue. She mocked everyone: Donald Trump (“the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab”), Kellyanne Conway (“If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree”), Ivanka Trump (“about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons”), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (“She burns facts and then uses the ashes to create a perfect smoky eye”), and the press (“[Mr Trump] helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off him.”).

Matt Schlapp, a conservative lobbyist and the husband of Mercedes Schlapp, a White House communications director, tweeted that he and his wife “walked out early from the wh correspondents dinner. Enough of elites mocking all of us”—though precisely what definition of “elite” includes a stand-up comic but excludes high-ranking White House officials remains unclear. Several people, liberals as well as conservatives, demanded that Ms Wolf apologise for mocking Mrs Sanders’s appearance—though of course Mr Trump has made juvenile derision of people’s looks his stock-in-trade.

Margaret Talev, the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association, tut-tutted that Ms Wolf’s monologue “was not in the spirit of [our] mission,” which was “to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honouring civility [and] great reporting…not to divide people.”

Among those who failed to receive that message, apparently, was Mr Trump, who in a nifty bit of counterprogramming held a rally in Washington, Michigan during the correspondents’ dinner. He skipped the event for the second straight year. Mr Trump accused the media—whom he has previously called “the enemy of the American people”—of making up sources and hating his supporters who attended the rally. One worked-up attendee at the rally screamed at reporters, whom he called “degenerate filth”, to leave the country.

After the speech, Mr Trump’s people pressed their advantage. Mrs Schlapp told a reporter that “journalists should not be the ones to say that the president or his spokesman is lying.”

This raises an obvious question—if not journalists, then whom?—with an equally obvious answer: nobody. Mr Trump’s communication staff would prefer it if nobody pointed out when he and his media team lie.

Ms Talev invited Mrs Sanders to sit at the head table because she “thought it sent an important decision about…government and the press being able to work together.” But of course, that is precisely what should never happen, particularly with an administration as ambivalent about the First Amendment—among other norms and laws—as this one. (The Justice Department recently removed a section entitled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial” from its internal manual for federal prosecutors.)

Calls for press-corps civility are in fact calls for servility, and should be received with contempt. Some might argue that insults do not deserve the same protection as investigative journalism, but that is a distinction without a difference. Anyone who wants to outlaw or apologise for the former will end up too timid to do the latter.

In open societies, self-censorship—in the name of civility, careerism or access preservation—is a much greater threat to the media than outright repression. The only person owed an apology here is Ms Wolf, for being scolded by the very people who invited her to speak, and who purport to defend a “vigorous and free press.”

7 Days of Piketty: Saturday, or "All men are created unequal."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Piketty generally has been praised for the sheer depth of his research, and criticized for failing to offer a solution to the problem of inequality apart from a global tax on wealth, which strikes most observers as unlikely.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with The Economist, circa 2014: "Revisiting an old argument about the impact of capitalism."

All men are created unequal (The Economist)

INEQUALITY is one of the most controversial attributes of capitalism. Early in the industrial revolution stagnant wages and concentrated wealth led David Ricardo and Karl Marx to question capitalism’s sustainability. Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the “Great Compression” that followed the second world war. But a modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, is an authoritative guide to the question. Mr Piketty’s book, which was published in French in 2013 and will be released in English in March 2014, self-consciously builds on the work of 19th-century thinkers; his title is an allusion to Marx’s magnum opus. But he possesses an advantage they lacked: two centuries’ worth of hard data.

The Economist on Richard III.

Before my job at the long defunct UMI Data Courier back in '88, I didn't know what The Economist was. It still isn't entirely clear, given that the Brits call it a newspaper, and to Americans, it looks like a magazine. Maybe I saw a few issues in college while amassing information for my term paper on Eurocommunism. At any rate, once I began abstracting  The Economist, I was hooked. Apart from a few fallow periods when money was tight, I've been a subscriber to the print edition since 1989.

What continues to impress these many years later is the uniform style; numerous contributing writers with distinctive voices, but written and edited into a "house voice." Prior to my immersion into the Internetz, The Economist was my weekly recap of the planet: Current affairs, politics, economics, science, books, and the very first article I read upon arrival, the obituary at the very end.

This week's essay about the deceased exemplifies the publication's sense of both style and humor: Richard III (Richard Plantagenet), dead since 1485, but whose bones recently were rediscovered and positively identified, having spent the past five centuries in a shallow grave beneath the stones of an abbey, itself long since transformed into a parking lot. The obituary fuses history, literature and science into a clever but respectful summary of a life relinquished in the distant past.

I appreciate good writing, and this is good writing.

NO VIPER, toad or hedgehog; no unformed bear-whelp, or lump of foul deformity. Instead, the man dug up from the car park of Leicester Social Services in September had, for the most part, an ordinary shape. His height was a little above average for the time when he had lived. His limbs were regular and delicate—almost feminine, the scientists said. Pace Shakespeare, there was no withered arm. There was, however, a severely sideways-twisted spine, the result of scoliosis that had probably emerged in adolescence. It would have put one shoulder higher than the other, making him stand shorter than he was. He might have needed extra cushions in his chairs, and extra tugs when putting on those robes of green velvet and crimson cloth of gold so lovingly detailed in his orders to the Wardrobe. But then a king would get that sort of help anyway.

Really, is Hell for real?

The cover story for The Economist's year-end double issue is Hell (see illustration above).

Hell: Into everlasting fire

For hundreds of years, Hell has been the most fearful place in the human imagination. It is also the most absurd

TO MANY in the West, Hell is just a medieval relic. It went out with ducking stools and witchcraft ... Hell hardly hurts any more. In everyday parlance (“What the hell are you doing?”), it is merely a bark, not a place ... The devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and wailing souls, have been cleared away, rather as a mad aunt might be shut up in the attic.

But hold on. For many people in the world, Hell still exists; not just as a concept, but as a place on the map. “Hell is Real,” declare the billboards across the American South: as real as the next town. To make it an abstraction is comforting and tidy, but doesn’t work. Religion thrives on fear, as well as hope: without fear, bad behaviour has no sanction and clerical authority wins scant respect.

Having surveyed the conceptual history of this unprovable notion, the newspaper offers a lighthearted tourist brochure.

Hell: A very rough guide

Hell is steadily losing adherents. The Infernal Tourist Board (chief field-researchers Dante Alighieri and John Milton) has therefore produced a promotional flyer

... Time stands still here, as the ocean boils and the great abyss yawns before you. Feel the hot sand under your feet, watch the chimeras and gorgons frolic, take a trip on a demon’s back, smell the brimstone on the breeze! You know how you always hope holidays will never end? This one never will.

Eleven progressives we lost in 2012.

And an eleventh, as noted in The Economist: Oscar Niemeyer.

The rich and famous gave him work, so he refused to be embarrassed by his palace-and-casino-building. But he was prouder of the 300 schools he designed in Brazil, all different, to surprise and inspire the poor with beauty.

The Nation's ten remembrances share a unifying theme of progressivism.

Remembering Ten We Lost in 2012, by Peter Rothberg (The Nation)

Lived History is designed to honor, remember and pay tribute to the dearly departed who have made significant contributions to bettering our world. Each week we feature a remembrance of a member of the progressive community, either prominent or obscure, whose remarkable accomplishments demand recognition. In the process, we hope to highlight and recover some of the more important but often un-noted periods of our history that demonstrate the progressive tradition in American life. Here are a few of the notable individuals we lost in 2012.

The Economist for Barack Obama, again.

It isn't the ringing endorsement of 2008, but The Economist comes down on the side of the incumbent, and in the process of doing so this traditionally pro-business newspaper issues a damning (in typical understatement) indictment of the Romney non-plan:

"For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive."

NA Confidential on November 3, 2008: The Economist for Barack Obama: "This cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear."

Here is the link to the 2012 Obama endorsement, with a few selected passages.

Our American endorsement: Which one? America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill

... A man who once personified hope and centrism set a new low by unleashing attacks on Mitt Romney even before the first Republican primary. Yet elections are about choosing somebody to run a country. And this choice turns on two questions: how good a president has Mr Obama been, especially on the main issues of the economy and foreign policy? And can America really trust the ever-changing Mitt Romney to do a better job? On that basis, the Democrat narrowly deserves to be re-elected ...

... Indeed, the extremism of his party is Mr Romney’s greatest handicap. The Democrats have their implacable fringe too: look at the teachers’ unions. But the Republicans have become a party of Torquemadas, forcing representatives to sign pledges never to raise taxes, to dump the chairman of the Federal Reserve and to embrace an ever more Southern-fried approach to social policy. Under President Romney, new conservative Supreme Court justices would try to overturn Roe v Wade, returning abortion policy to the states. The rights of immigrants (who have hardly had a good deal under Mr Obama) and gays (who have) would also come under threat. This newspaper yearns for the more tolerant conservatism of Ronald Reagan, where “small government” meant keeping the state out of people’s bedrooms as well as out of their businesses. Mr Romney shows no sign of wanting to revive it ...

... Many of The Economist’s readers, especially those who run businesses in America, may well conclude that nothing could be worse than another four years of Mr Obama. We beg to differ. For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive. And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.

"This dichotomy (inequality) is bound to have social and political consequences."

A book review from The Economist, reprinted in its entirety.

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Economics: An ordinary Joe (from the print edition of The Economist)

The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future. By Joseph Stiglitz. 

THE American dream is that any child can make it from the bottom to the top. That may still be true in politics; the son of a Kenyan immigrant, raised partly by his grandparents, is now president of the United States. But it is much less true, in economic terms, than most Americans think. Social mobility is less easy in America than in other countries. For example, three-quarters of Danes born in the lowest-earning 20% of the population escape their plight in adulthood. Seven out of ten poor children in supposedly class-ridden Britain achieve the same feat. But fewer than six in ten Americans do so.

Similarly, with rags-to-riches stories. It is far less common for Americans from the bottom 20% in childhood to move into the top 20% in adulthood than it is in Denmark or in Britain. On the whole, America’s wealthy prosper while the average citizen struggles; the richest 1% of Americans gained 93% of the additional income created in 2010. The pay workers get has failed to move in line with productivity in the past 30 years. But Americans have yet to realise the extent of this tectonic shift. In a survey conducted in 2011 the average respondent thought that the richest fifth of the population had 60% of the wealth, not 85% as is the case. The respondents’ ideal income distribution would be for the top quintile to have just 30% of the wealth.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics and a regular critic of liberal capitalism, addresses this issue in his new book, which he wrote in response to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Indeed, he argues that their slogan, “We are the 99%”, echoes an article entitled, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”, that he wrote in Vanity Fair in May 2011.

To Mr Stiglitz, this inequality is the result of public policy being captured by an elite who have feathered their own nests at the expense of the rest. They have used their power to distort political debate, pushing through tax cuts to favour the rich and adjusting monetary policy to favour the banks. Many of the new rich are not entrepreneurs but “rent-seekers”, he says, who use monopoly power to boost profits.

Mr Stiglitz’s views are representative of clever, leftish America and Mr Stiglitz is (mostly) skilled at making his argument. Imagine, he says, what it would be like if the world had free movement of labour, but not of capital. “Countries would compete to attract workers. They would promise good schools and a good environment, as well as low taxes on workers. This could be financed by high taxes on capital.” The result would be a much more equal society.

Mr Stiglitz’s argument would benefit, however, from a better sense of history and geography. He points to the period between 1950 and 1980 as one where inequality was much reduced. But that was a highly unusual time. For much of recorded history there has been a huge gap between a wealthy landowning class and the rest; the Rockefellers and Carnegies were much richer (in real terms) than any modern plutocrat. Mr Stiglitz also views the housing boom and bust as another result of misguided American policy, but Spain and Ireland had property bubbles too—and they are much more equal societies.

When it comes to solutions to the inequality problem, Mr Stiglitz wants a top income tax rate of “well in excess of” 50%, targeted fiscal stimulus and greater bank regulation. Here, perhaps, he might have been more open about the trade-offs. Controls on bank leverage, caps on interest rates and greater protection for bankrupts are all likely to reduce bank lending at a time when there already is a credit squeeze. He admits that the 2009 fiscal stimulus was “not as well designed as it could have been”, but blithely hopes that the convoluted American budget-setting process will result in much better stimulus packages in future.

Whether or not he has the right answers, Mr Stiglitz is surely right to focus on the issue. Across the developed world, the average worker is suffering a squeeze in living standards while bankers and chief executives are still doing very nicely. This dichotomy is bound to have social and political consequences.

Lots to learn in The Economist's holiday double issue.

(Photo credit The Economist/University of Oregon)

The annual "Special Holiday Double Issue" of The Economist is much anticipated in our household. In it, the usual weekly news coverage remains intact, but it is augmented with fine feature-length essays, which provide seemingly inexhaustible end-of-year reading.

The current holiday issue seems particularly memorable, with articles about religion in America, the "servant problem" in Brazil, Cairo's venerable Cafe Riche, the failure of China to excel at soccer, hiking in England, Albrecht Durer's medieval art (and self-) marketing plan, Belgian ale ... and two pieces that have made especially deep impressions on me:

Social media in the 16th Century -- How Luther went viral; Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation, in which the crude and rude illustration above is explained.

Musical history -- Seven seconds of fire; How a short burst of drumming changed the face of music ...

Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band’s re-entry.

Elsewhere, Prospero provides aural accompaniment to explain the seven seconds.

Accompanying each of these two links is a listing titled "In this section," in which there are links to all the special essays in this year's special issue. They're worth reading.

Why bicyclists almost never bitch about traffic calming.

The tedium of listening to motorists complain when they can't drive faster than they should might lessen if the same motorists periodically were held responsible for the persons and cyclists they hit.

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Bike safety: Calm down; With a very few exceptions, America is no place for cyclists (from the print edition of The Economist)

DYING while cycling is three to five times more likely in America than in Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands. To understand why, consider the death of Michael Wang. He was pedalling home from work in Seattle on a sunny weekday afternoon in late July when, witnesses say, a brown SUV made a left turn, crunched into Wang and sped away.

The road where the 44-year-old father of two was hit is the busiest cycling corridor in Seattle, and it has clearly marked bicycle lanes. But the lanes are protected from motor vehicles by a line of white paint—a largely metaphorical barrier that many drivers ignore and police do not vigorously enforce. A few feet from the cycling lane traffic moves at speeds of between 30 miles per hour, the speed limit for arterials in Seattle, and 40 miles per hour, the speed at which many cars actually travel. This kind of speed kills. A pedestrian hit by a car moving at 30mph has a 45% chance of dying; at 40mph, the chance of death is 85%, according to Britain’s Department of Transport.

Had Mr Wang been commuting on a busy bike route in Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Berlin, his unprotected exposure to instruments of death—namely, any vehicle moving at 20mph or more—would be nearly nil. These cities have knitted together networks for everyday travel by bike. To start with, motor vehicles allowed near cyclists are subject to “traffic calming”. They must slow down to about 19mph, a speed that, in case of collision, kills less than 5%. Police strictly enforce these speed limits with hefty fines. Repeat offenders lose their licences.

Calmer traffic is just the beginning. In much of northern Europe, cyclists commute on lanes that are protected from cars by concrete buffers, rows of trees or parked cars. At busy crossroads, bicycle-activated traffic lights let cyclists cross first. Traffic laws discriminate in favour of people on bikes. A few American cities have taken European-style steps to make streets safer for cycling, most notably Portland, Oregon, which has used most of the above ideas. The result: more bikes and fewer deaths. Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.

Another potential ROCKlamation project?

Every time I listen to the well-intentioned and hopelessly oblivious activists of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana ROCK), many of whom seem to have consciously refrained from any objective study of history that does not begin with the words “Holy Bible,” I immediately think of articles like this one. It is an obituary that appeared in a recent issue of The Economist.

Is the institutionalized “exploitation of blacks” part of the hallowed American history that ROCK seeks so avidly (and for the most part thoughtlessly) to reclaim? How many Christian pulpits supported the institution of slavery?

Take your time, soldiers. It isn’t like really I expect a coherent answer to be forthcoming, although you’d think that an organization fronted by a highly trained lawyer making almost 100 Gs per annum just might be able to articulate the occasional historical analogy that doesn't have to do with with puritanical sex preoccupations.

I'm so naive.

John Hope Franklin (April 2, 2009; from The Economist print edition)

John Hope Franklin, historian of race in America, died on March 25th, aged 94

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, “right by where the Smithsonian is”. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America’s banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had “never got over”.

The Economist: "Clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime."

While others cling to their religion and guns, leaving observers unsure as to which poses the bigger threat to personal health and well-being, I persist in reading the British newspaper that accurately called the recent presidential election, which resulted in Barack Obama’s victory, and made it possible for Tribune guest local columnists to pretend they’re being satirical.

Criminology: Can the can, from the Nov. 20 print edition of The Economist.

The idea that graffiti-spraying and other forms of low-level delinquency promote further bad behaviour has now been tested experimentally.

A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal.

The experiments are described in detail, leading to this conclusion:

“The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.”

Think about this the next time you drive through one of New Albany's myriad slumlord protection districts, and consider another year's passage without meaningful reform amid the absence of money that might be devoted to police and fire protection, as well as pro-active efforts to enforce ordinances and keep the city's neighborhoods clean.

The Economist: "Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future."

Sunday mornings are a fine time to catch up on the previous week's reading, such as this insightful column that will not be read aloud on FOX.

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Lexington: Ship of fools
(Nov. 13th, 2008 ... from The Economist print edition)

Political parties die from the head down

JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

Time for reflection
How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).

But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.

The Economist for Barack Obama: "This cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear."

In its current edition, The Economist endorses Barack Obama. It should be noted that there exists no record of this 165-year-old publication issuing such an endorsement for a socialist or a terrorist. According to Wikipedia:

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd and edited in London. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843. While The Economist calls itself a "newspaper", each issue appears on glossy paper, like a newsmagazine. In 2007, it reported an average circulation of just over 1.3 million copies per issue, about half of which are sold in North America.

The Economist claims it "is not a chronicle of economics." Rather, it aims "to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." It practices advocacy journalism in taking an editorial stance based on free trade and globalisation. It targets educated readers and boasts an audience containing many influential executives and policy-makers.

The senior editor sez: Don't forget to look at The Economist's "Global Electoral College."

----

The presidential election: It's time
(Oct 30th 2008 ... from The Economist print edition)

America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Thinking about 2009 and 2017
The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

Speaking of Major Move(ment)s ...

With the city council pursuing budget cuts and money tight all around, surely it won't be long until New Albany's sewer system returns to its rightful daily place on the front page. Meanwhile, a new book that is destined to become the ideal Christmas gift for members of New Albany's "Potty Police" is reviewed in this week's issue of The Economist.

Adventures in human waste: Lifting the lid, from the Oct. 9, 2008 edition of The Economist.

DEATH, once referred to in euphemisms, if at all, has been reborn as prime-time television drama. Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention—adolescent jokes aside—that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late.

But as Rose George explains in this fascinating and eloquent book, there is a great deal that needs to be said about excretion that is not remotely funny. Two-fifths of the world’s population has nowhere to defecate except open ground ...

Rural "values"?

Ten days and an unprecedented financial “bailout” have elapsed since the publication of The Economist article excerpted below, and the question it poses may already have been answered. The “Palin effect” has proven to be little more than a vacuous feistiness barely concealing a startling (and as for John McCain, entirely cynical) absence of gravitas.

But he has very little choice, does he?

McCain remains inextricably linked with the disastrously failed presidency of W, a fact that even a foaming-at-the-mouth Neo-Con like Charles Krauthammer recognizes, and the geriatric must campaign on the basis of ceaseless gimmickry, desperately seeking to divert attention from his damning proximity to Shrub’s all-around catastrophe.

McCain still will receive plenty of votes from the bedrock core of the nation, or some forgettable silliness like that. It is this phenomenon that The Economist considers.

Rural voters: Bucolic ballots … Could the economy trump the Palin effect?, from The Economist print edition of Sep 25th 2008.

A new poll for the Centre for Rural Strategies, a think-tank in Whitesburg, shows John McCain leading Mr Obama by ten percentage points among rural voters in swing states. The poll, conducted in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, found that 51% of rural voters said they would vote for Mr McCain, while 41% preferred Mr Obama.

Only a fifth of Americans live in rural areas. And Mr McCain’s advantage among rural voters is slimmer than George Bush’s 13-point lead over John Kerry in a similar poll in 2004. But it is still a useful vote bank in a very close election. And the reasons rural voters give for preferring the Republican ticket are revealing.

Asked who would deal better with problems facing rural areas or the economy more generally, rural voters are about evenly divided. But when asked who shares their values, they prefer Mr McCain by a 14-point margin. And they love his running-mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. Fully 65% of rural voters in swing states think she “represents the values of rural communities”.

Echoing the advice of the ancient Greek philosophers whose wisdom purportedly girds our non-Christian intellectual experience in the Western world, this rural poll result begs a few “define your principles” questions.

Exactly what are these rural “values”?

If they do in fact exist, are they pertinent to our contemporary experience?

Do these rural “values” still embrace the lingering shadow of racism, which might yet trump both the economy and Sarah Palin in the minds of far too many voters?

If so, shouldn’t any such “value” be summarily disavowed?

Speaking for myself, I don’t accept the frequently bandied proposition that “rural values” somehow preface the presumed glory of the American experience, and I suggest that a healthy skepticism be applied to any such claims. The pervasiveness of religious zealotry in the back forty would be enough to arch one or more eyebrows, but too often, the countryside’s prevailing worldview is far less savory than the imagery of a few millennial crackpots behind a pulpit.

But that’s just one man’s hungover opinion.

The Economist on Sarah Palin: "The most inexperienced candidate for a mainstream party in modern history."

With your indulgence, the following is a column reprinted from The Economist.

The woman from nowhere: John McCain’s choice of running-mate raises serious questions about his judgment

(Column by Lexington; Illustration by KAL)

The most audacious move of the race so far is also, potentially, the most self-destructive. John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate has set the political atmosphere alight with both enthusiasm and dismay.

Mr McCain has based his campaign on the idea that this is a dangerous world—and that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to deal with it. He has also acknowledged that his advanced age—he celebrated his 72nd birthday on August 29th—makes his choice of vice-president unusually important. Now he has chosen as his running mate, on the basis of the most cursory vetting, a first-term governor of Alaska.

The reaction from inside the conservative cocoon was at first ecstatic. Conservatives argued that Mrs Palin embodies the “real America”—a moose-hunting hockey mum, married to an oil-worker, who has risen from the local parent-teacher association to governing the geographically largest state in the Union. They praise her as a McCain-style reformer who has taken on her state’s Republican establishment and has a staunch pro-life record (her fifth child has Down’s syndrome). Who better to harpoon the baby-murdering elitists who run the Democratic Party?

Mrs Palin was greeted like the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan by the delegates, furious at her mauling at the hands of the “liberal media”. And she delivered a tub-thumping speech, underlining her record as a reforming governor and advocate of more oil-drilling, and warning her enemies not to underestimate her (“the difference between a hockey mum and a pitbull—lipstick”). But once the cheering and the chanting had died down, serious questions remained.

The political calculations behind Mr McCain’s choice hardly look robust. Mrs Palin is not quite the pork-busting reformer that her supporters claim. She may have become famous as the governor who finally killed the infamous “bridge to nowhere”—the $220m bridge to the sparsely inhabited island of Gravina, Alaska. But she was in favour of the bridge before she was against it (and told local residents that they weren’t “nowhere to her”). As mayor of Wasilla, a metropolis of 9,000 people, she initiated annual trips to Washington, DC, to ask for more earmarks from the state’s congressional delegation, and employed Washington lobbyists to press for more funds for her town.

Nor is Mrs Palin well placed to win over the moderate and independent voters who hold the keys to the White House. Mr McCain’s main political problem is not energising his base; he enjoys more support among Republicans than Mr Obama does among Democrats. His problem is reaching out to swing voters at a time when the number of self-identified Republicans is up to ten points lower than the number of self-identified Democrats. Mr McCain needs to attract roughly 55% of independents and 15% of Democrats to win the election. But it is hard to see how a woman who supports the teaching of creationism rather than contraception, and who is soon to become a 44-year-old grandmother, helps him with soccer moms in the Philadelphia suburbs. A Rasmussen poll found that the Palin pick made 31% of undecided voters less likely to plump for Mr McCain and only 6% more likely.

The moose in the room, of course, is her lack of experience. When Geraldine Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale’s running-mate, she had served in the House for three terms. Even the hapless Dan Quayle, George Bush senior’s sidekick, had served in the House and Senate for 12 years. Mrs Palin, who has been the governor of a state with a population of 670,000 for less than two years, is the most inexperienced candidate for a mainstream party in modern history.

Inexperienced and Bush-level incurious. She has no record of interest in foreign policy, let alone expertise. She once told an Alaskan magazine: “I’ve been so focused on state government; I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.” She obtained an American passport only last summer to visit Alaskan troops in Germany and Kuwait. This not only blunts Mr McCain’s most powerful criticism of Mr Obama. It also raises serious questions about the way he makes decisions.

Vetted for 15 minutes
Mr McCain had met Mrs Palin only once, for a 15-minute chat at the National Governors’ Association meeting, before summoning her to his ranch for her final interview. The New York Times claims that his team arrived in Alaska only on August 28th, a day before the announcement. As a result, his advisers seem to have been gobsmacked by the Palin show that is now playing on the national stage. She has links to the wacky Alaska Independence Party, which wants to secede from the Union. She is on record disagreeing with Mr McCain on global warming, among other issues. The contrast with Mr Obama’s choice of the highly experienced and much-vetted Joe Biden is striking.

Mr McCain’s appointment also raises more general worries about the Republican Party’s fitness for government. Up until the middle of last week Mr McCain was still considering two other candidates whom he has known for decades: Joe Lieberman, a veteran senator, independent Democrat and Iraq war hawk, and Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania (a swing state with 21 Electoral College votes) and the first secretary of homeland security. Mr McCain reluctantly rejected both men because their pro-choice views are anathema to the Christian right.

The Palin appointment is yet more proof of the way that abortion still distorts American politics. This is as true on the left as on the right. But the Republicans seem to have gone furthest in subordinating considerations of competence and merit to pro-life purity. One of the biggest problems with the Bush administration is that it appointed so many incompetents because they were sound on Roe v Wade. Mrs Palin’s elevation suggests that, far from breaking with Mr Bush, Mr McCain is repeating his mistakes.

Au revoir, Monsieur Ponticelli, et votre génération.

France’s last remaining infantry veteran of World War I died earlier this year. Lazare Ponticelli, who was born in Italy and moved to France before he war began, lived to be 110. Millions of men his age died very young, and it took Europe fifty years and another horrific conflagration to recover from the first. Ponticelli saw it all, from disintegrating royal houses to integrating European states. That’s a lot of changes for one man's life.

The Economist magazine excels in the art of the elegiac obituary, with one appearing in each weekly issue. These remembrances are by no means limited to the rich and famous, and they are written in classical sense of the genre, comprising mini-essays on life and important lessons that range beyond the mere chronology of the deceased. Ponticelli’s obituary in The Economist is available on-line alongside death notices for Ian Smith, Charlton Heston and Benazir Bhutto, but also Marie Smith (the last remaining speaker of the Eyak language) and Ollie Johnson, Walt Disney’s key animator.

Back in the early 1960’s, there was a black and white documentary series about World War I shown on network television. It may have been a summer replacement series. The episodes were a half-hour in length, and were narrated by the actor Robert Ryan. Years later these were rerun on cable, and studiously videotaped by my history buff friend Barrie, who currently teaches at Scribner.

The grainy, ghostly black and white film clips told the story of the conflict from start to finish, but the episode we always returned to watch again and again was "Tipperary and All that Jazz," which was quite innovative for the time. In effect, it was a music video of World War I, with archival film footage as the backdrop to song snippets, all popular ditties of the day. Some were recorded, but most performed live in parlors or at public gatherings -- remember, radio didn’t exist until after the war had concluded.

One of the songs was “There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” much later used as a poignant ending for an episode of M*A*S*H – the television series that told the story of war’s tragic futility in a different time and a different place than the Somme and Argonne … through the imagined experiences of Col. Sherman Potter, a fictional character, and without Lazare Ponticelli and his real-life comrades staring back into the moving picture’s lens.

So very many of them died before their time, and now only a handful remain, and the long trail keeps a-winding.

There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

Nights are growing very lonely,
Days are very long;
I'm a-growing weary only
List'ning for your song.
Old remembrances are thronging
Thro' my memory.
Till it seems the world is full of dreams
Just to call you back to me.

Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams:
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.

All night long I hear you calling,
Calling sweet and low;
Seem to hear your footsteps falling,
Ev'ry where I go.
Tho' the road between us stretches
Many a weary mile.
I forget that you're not with me yet,
When I think I see you smile.

Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams:
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.

“Creative types don't want bourgeois homogeneity.”

The current edition of The Economist includes a thought-provoking essay on the rivalry between London and Paris, and surveys the reasons why London seems to be “winning” the race. An extended excerpt is provided.

The rivals: Two great cities are about to hold mayoral elections. Which has the brighter future?

Perhaps most important, the city (London) has adopted a guiding creed that belongs neither to the political left nor the right: openness to change. “London has flourished not because it has sorted out its transport, or its city management, but because it opened its borders,” argues Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics. These days, there is nothing particularly British about London, bar its tolerance of chaos. It has embraced globalisation to become an international city, while Paris has remained unapologetically French.

Nearly 700,000 extra foreign-born people have made London their home since 1997, bringing the capital's total foreign-born population to over 30%. Not counting illegals, Paris has fewer foreigners (about 14%) and, crucially, it is the more educated ones, whether from India or Poland, who head for London. (In total, Britain has attracted more skilled and professional immigrants: 35% of them have a college education, according to a recent OECD study, against just 18% in France.) The energetic renovation of newly fashionable districts such as Hoxton and Shoreditch is not only spurred by sky-high property prices elsewhere; it also owes something to the friction and renewal of London's messy, cosmopolitan mix.

“Creative types don't want bourgeois homogeneity,” says Mr. Travers. “They want edginess, and space to grow.”

In the fashion typical of my favored news magazine, all sides of the coin are duly considered, and I’m not in lock-step agreement with every aspect of the story.

Also, it is worth conceding that analogies are treacherous, especially when considering two major world cities on the one hand and places like New Albany on the other.

Yet …

The last sentence in the preceding excerpt aptly summarizes the New Albany conundrum for me. Bourgeois homogeneity does not lend itself to creativity, which is what we need more than anything else, and in large measure this creativity must be pried from the cold, dead hand of bourgeois homogeneity, which has proven to be entirely unwilling or unable to offer solutions to problems beyond expressing eternal contempt for creativity and the necessary things that stem from it.

For me, there is nothing more indicative of bourgeois homogeneity than the recurring insistence that the sole value of a human being lies in his or her willingness to pay taxes.

Unfortunately, the past year’s public discourse in New Albany and in Indiana has been predicated on precisely this misreading of the social contract. New Albany’s bloc of Luddites will continue to babble phrases misappropriated from the likes of Ayn Rand, and I – quite possibly alone, which is fine by me – will continue to respond that the task of the local politician is to serve all the people, not just those whose participation in a civil society is defined solely by incessant threats to drown government in a bathtub if their narrow interests are not properly addressed.