Columnist.
It would be wrong to say this president had no policy toward the revolution in Egypt. On the contrary, he's had many. One for every day. Every hour. He still does. Just as he now does for Libya. X X X Germany's otherwise quite competent and quite popular defense minister has been forced to resign. It seems his university revoked his doctoral degree after it was discovered that "he had violated academic standards in his thesis by failing to sufficiently credit some of his sources," which is a polite way of describing what a plagiarist does. He had to go.
When it comes to fighting the War on Terror, even though this administration doesn't call it that any more, you may have to shake yourself to remember that George W. Bush is no longer in the White House. Since his policies in that ongoing global conflict are being adopted, one after the other, by his successor. In the latest example, the current occupant of the Oval Office has announced that the military prison at Guantanamo Bay won't be shut down after all, at least not any time soon, despite his repeated vows to do just that.
One of the most abused words in today's political rhetoric has to be "lie." It's used to cover everything from an innocent misstatement to a broken promise to a misleading phrase. By now the strict definition of lie -- a conscious, deliberate falsehood -- is almost forgotten, the word is so over-used. Certainly in politics. For it's no longer enough for partisans to say an opponent is wrong or misleading or exaggerating or even being disingenuous. He's got to be lying.
It was the always observant Mary McCarthy who observed that antisemitism is the one form of intellectuality that appealed to stupid people. But she may have overlooked its appeal to ambitious politicians, too. They're always on the lookout for some mania they can use for their own purposes. Whether to seize power at the beginning of their rise or to hold onto it at the end. Or anytime in between. Think of the way Southern demagogues back in the bad old days knew that, whenever they needed a way to stir folks up, they could always rely on the Race Issue.
Leave it to a prof at the University of Arkansas -- specifically, an economist in its Department of Education Reform -- to go to the heart (and guts) of what all the fuss is about in Wisconsin. His name is Bob Costrell, and he's put his finger and calculator on the essence of that state's problem. In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal last week, the professor detailed the sweet deals that Wisconsin's public-employee unions have negotiated for themselves over the free-spending years.
There are few better ways to go back in time and ever deeper into the South, which are much the same thing, than to drive through the Delta down to New Orleens Land of Dreems. Mile by mile, the dreamscape unfolds like an old map, falling into familiar place after place. As the road narrows to two lanes, the residue of the past begins to float by. You pass abandoned cotton gins, long empty houses by the side of the road, their roofs slowly, majestically caving in, as if they had all the time in the world to disappear. They already seem archaeological, like forgotten monuments. The testify, like a stove-in old man at a camp meeting, to both the malice of time and the persistence of memory. Something, something powerful, lives on here. The evidence of it is all around.
That most Southern of phrases, "a sense of place," came up at a gathering the other evening. It elicited only a quizzical expression from one of the guests, who seemed to think it referred to her neighborhood. Of course she had a sense of place. Why, she'd lived there for eight years. And before that? A succession of places, all of which she left vague. I was at a loss. I so often am. About so many things. Among them, how do you explain a sense of place to someone so unburdened (and unblessed) by one?
It isn't T.E. Lawrence's revolt in the desert, leading a hodgepodge of Arab tribes across the desert in the Arab revolt against the Turks in the World War, Act I. That was the stuff of which legend was made. And myth. This time the Arabs are rebelling against their own hodgepodge of kings, dictators, autocrats, demagogues and all of the above. The crumbling old pillars of the region, long rotten from within, are falling one by one. Or at least trembling.
I tried to stay interested in Bill O'Reilly's interview with Barack Obama some weeks ago. Honest I did. Duty called but, when I answered, it turned into what seemed a life sentence. On and on these two went, pausing at every familiar stop, but not for very long. Like the local to Glencoe. Interviewer and interviewee quibbled the whole way, like an unhappy couple you really didn't want to overhear, and the more they spoke, the less they said. A familiar pattern was established from the first and maintained to the end: feint, jab and move on. To sum up the sequence: Gotcha, No You Don't, Next Question....
One of the uncounted, indeed oft intangible, ways in which the United States of America is an exceptional country is that here citizenship is not a matter of race, creed, color or national descent. Nor of blood-and-iron or whatever barriers other nations may erect to protect their Kultur or further their mission civilisatrice. Ours is a different, more open and embracing bond, to wit: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." --Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
It's not enough that the professoriate has decided it can improve on Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," which is not only a great American novel but a popular nominee for The Great American Novel. This latest act of literary vandalism was committed out of regard for the tender sensibilities of a politically correct age, which can be brutal when it comes to suppressing language, that is, ideas. Especially any that come dangerously close to truly representing the past.
Once upon a different time the communists and their fellow travelers had a simple slogan and strategy: No enemies to the left! It sounds better in French -- pas d'ennemis à gauche -- not just because so many things do, but because the concept originated with the French, and explains why their intellectual life can be both so rich and so mistaken. Sometimes fatally. Why? Because those who are willing to sacrifice enduring principle or even elemental decency for a transient political alliance may find themselves the first put up against the wall.
Civility and the need for it is much in the news these days, often enough in a political context, and even more often when pundits and pols are accusing each other of lacking it. Civility, like so many other virtues, tends to be more preached than practiced. And to judge by much contemporary commentary, it is a practice most needed by others. Even so, such lectures may have a wholesome effect. Note the president's State of the Union yawner some weeks ago. This year he didn't pause to ream out the various members of the Supreme Court of the United States in attendance. Last year they were arrayed (and arraigned) before him like prisoners in the dock waiting to be lectured severely. Which they were.
Today may be Lincoln's Birthday by the calendar. But officially there is no more Lincoln's Birthday. Or Washington's. The old holidays have been telescoped, flattened, mixed and matched, their identities melted into a generic Presidents' Day that honors ... well, no one is quite sure. Washington and Lincoln? All the presidents combined? Bargain sales? It is all a blur. Not that Mr. Lincoln was ever easy to pigeonhole. To quote one of his contemporary biographers, David Donald, "I'm not sure anybody's ever gotten Lincoln down." But historians keep trying. So do a lot of pseudohistorians. Today we want our Wisdom of the Ages bite-sized, user-friendly, convenient, easy to open, unwrap and reseal. Mass-produced, cellophane-wrapped, french fries with that, and no thought required.
It's happened before. The politically correct among us take a perfectly good word and prate on about it till they bore everyone in sight. They may even turn it inside out so that it becomes the opposite of what it once meant. Then they wonder why the word they've finally driven into the ground has lost all its power. See what happened to diversity, which was once a good, simple enough concept. But that was before the word-killers got their hands on it. First they turned it into a shibboleth, then an obsession, then a way of creating not diversity at all but a quota system embedded in law, faculty appointments, fashion and everything else. Instead of a diversity of opinion, they wound up preaching uniformity. Until eyes now glaze over at the very mention of the word.
Their faces are a mirror of hope, pride, exhilaration ... in short, youth! Direct from Liberation Square in Cairo, they crowd our television screens here in the West, perfectly articulate in a language not their native tongue. They make demands (the Egyptian dictator must go and go now!), assure us of their friendship ("We're not anti-America, we just object to some of your government's policies"), and sound cheerful if insistent, their spirits lifted by being part of the huge throng that has gathered to welcome in a bright new day for their country.
Like all modern revolutions since the fashion was introduced in Paris, events in Egypt proceed a la francaise: in a series of successive shocks from right to left till the pendulum swings as far as it can, trembles for an uncertain moment (the Reign of Terror), and then swings back toward autocracy.
It happens after every shocking act of violence against a public official. Or just a bitterly disputed election. Americans are told we must tone down our rhetoric. It's too wild, too provocative, and just plain dangerous.
Something new is being heard along the Nile: the sound of freedom. It always comes as a surprise to Egypt's rulers. For they have grown up seeing the great river flood, then recede. That rhythm has been the very life of Egypt over the ages, and not even when the river turns to blood can old Pharaoh believe anything will really change. He may resolve to change, at least publicly, but it is always too late. The years of indolence and apathy have taken their toll. Now the warning voices he regularly dismissed are turning out to have been prophetic.
When it comes to bureaucracies, corporate or public, it's not just jobs that can be delegated but any sense of responsibility. This isn't just a familiar pattern, it's standard operating procedure by now. When the head of the outfit is confronted by a scandal that can no longer be ignored, and the public has grown more outraged than usual, protocol demands that the top exec submit ... somebody else's resignation. It could almost be Washington's motto: The buck stops somewhere else. Now it's happened at NPR. Which is one of the many public-private hodgepodges that gets all kinds of funding from all kinds of sources -- and so is hard to pin down when things go embarrassingly wrong. There are more of those around than ever -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Government Motors, AIG, American health care in general ... you name it. Their structure tends to resemble that of a medieval chimera, only without the charm.
