The American Conservative

The Imaginative Conservative has been running an insightful series on books that showcase what it means to be human, with an emphasis on texts that show what we should stand for. (See John Willson’s recommendations, for example.) To avoid duplicating what others have already said, I’ve submitted a list with some offbeat choices, some of which show humanity in its darker aspect, but all of which say something provocative, I hope, about the human thing.

Here’s the list, but visit the Imaginative Conservative to read my reasoning:

Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

Carle Zimmerman, Family and Civilization

John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays

Florence King, With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look At Misanthropy

Hamas rules Gaza. Hezbollah rules Lebanon. The Turks have turned hostile. The Palestinian Authority has given up on Barack Obama and is demanding a state from the Security Council and U.N. General Assembly. Israel’s partner in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, is gone. The Israeli embassy in Cairo has been sacked. Mobs in Amman have sought to do the same.

Patrick J. Buchanan says things are looking bleak for Israel, as she grows more isolated and less accepted in the post-Arab Spring world of 2011.

Sandy Tolan says that regardless of diplomatic trouble, Israel is winning the battle-on-the-ground for physical control of the West Bank. Whether or not the UN grants any kind of state recognition to the Palestinian Authority, winning a symbolic battle, they’re losing the physical one. The isolation Buchanan mentions may only further be exacerbated by such a precarious situation.

The latest GOP debate in Florida has ruffled a few feathers among various camps. The same Romney vs. Perry narrative subsisted last night, with Romney and Perry still receiving the lion’s share of speaking time.

If speaking allotment is to reflect polling trends, Google and Fox clearly failed in this endeavor. Read More…

There are a disturbing number of journalists out there who cannot count to two. I captured a screen shot of a story — originally from the Daily Caller, but syndicated on Yahoo — with the following title: Poll: Romney leads New Hampshire, Huntsman in third, Perry in fourth. Though the headline has since changed to acknowledge Paul’s existence, it indicates that some elements of American media are still all-too-comfortable omitting the candidate from public consideration.

The headlines above refer to a poll that was conducted by Suffolk University/7NEWS. Read More…

In June 1967, with ex-Vice President Richard Nixon, this writer toured an Israeli military hospital full of wounded Egyptian soldiers.

An Israeli officer told us that in the hospital was an Egyptian officer he had captured in the 1956 Sinai campaign, and that he had asked the Egyptian: “We have fought three times now, and three times you have been defeated. Why do you keep fighting us?”

The Egyptian replied, “You may have defeated us three times, and you may defeat us 11 times. But the 12th time we win.”

From that Six-Day War, wise Israelis took away two lessons.

First, they had to remain alert and strong enough to defeat all their neighbors at once. Second, the more important struggle was that they must win the acceptance of the Arab peoples to survive in an Arab sea. Read More…

Earlier this week, Mexican President Felipe Calderon told the Americas Society and Council of the Americas that if the United States cannot limit drug consumption–which it can’t–Mexico may abandon the drug war. From a Reuters report in the New York Times:

“We are living in the same building. And our neighbour is the largest consumer of drugs in the world. And everybody wants to sell him drugs through our doors and our windows,” [Calderon] said.

“We must do everything to reduce demand for drugs,” Calderon added. “But if the consumption of drugs cannot be limited, then decision-makers must seek more solutions — including market alternatives — in order to reduce the astronomical earnings of criminal organizations.”

He did not go into more detail, but the remarks appeared to be a softening of Calderon’s attitude towards state regulation of the market for drugs, which could curb the power of the cartels by taking away their profits.

Calderon is probably just threatening U.S. political leadership here because they live in constant fear of Mexico going wobbly on them, and he knows it. However, what Calderon said is far larger than him. He may not personally want to end the War on Drugs, but if the violence in Mexico continues unabated, the populace will demand some kind of radical change, and legalization of some kind seems to be the leading candidate right now.

I am interested to see how the federal government would react to such a scenario. Certainly, they wouldn’t allow Mexico to pursue its own policies without Yankee interference. I predict that they’d declare the whole country a criminal enterprise and seize it as part of the largest forfeiture case known to man. I’m sure there are some Texas oil billionaires who wouldn’t mind getting their hands on Mexico’s oil fields.

Of course, the U.S. would then be stuck waging Mexico’s drug war, and I doubt we’d meet with any more success than they have. But that’s never kept us from trying.

Ron Unz has devised a tough reading-comprehension test for ideologues on both sides of the immigration debate. Already the shallow end of the restrictionist talent pool has failed: a number of commenters evidently didn’t get to the end of the article — not enough Ritalin? Too much Ritalin? — but that hasn’t stopped them from mashing their keyboards to express their feelings. Will the open-borders types fare as badly?

Among other things, Unz points out why America’s immigration policy has been completely one-sided, however heated arguments over it have been: Republican business interests and the ideologies of libertarians and liberals alike all converge to support de facto open borders. If you actually want to restrict immigration, as opposed to merely expressing your feelings about immigration, this is knot that has to be untied. Read on, and you may find that Unz even indicates how that might be done. Hint: it doesn’t involve a spontaneous uprising of Middle Americans panicked by a lot of neighbors with vowels or z’s at the end of their names.

For my part, it seems to me that treating a country as an arbitrary job market is a bad idea, just as applying an economic mindset to every aspect of one’s family would be a bad idea. (A libertarian friend of mine once pointed out that within the family, the Marxist rule of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need actually does pertain, and rightly so.) A country is not a family, but neither is it a market. That there are vast disparities of wages and wealth between nations proves the point: if the only thing people wanted to get out of nations or citizenship was economic efficiency, we wouldn’t have the borders we have — or perhaps any borders at all. To say that governments are responsible for these divisions is true but not true enough: if Switzerland or Japan had no central government — the Swiss barely have one as it is — the peoples of those places would still insist on remaining distinct from the global mass and maintaining cultural-political frontiers.

The human-rights and fairness claims of the liberal ideologues are spurious too, and the Swiss are hardly motivated by hatred in preserving their place and customs. But in any event, liberal arguments for mass immigration are not the primary driver of immigration policy in this country: Rick Perry and his supporters among the class that demands cheap labor account for much more of the problem than university-based diversity-mongers or other rogues in the gallery of political correctness. In seeing this, too, Unz is a better restrictionist than his restrictionist critics.

The Cornell University economist Robert Frank’s latest New York Times editorial is well worth reading, not least for his argument in favor of a progressive consumption tax. (I’m not a fan of any kind of tax, but I think a progressive consumption tax would be far preferable to our current progressive income tax.)

That said, this section is way off base:

When the ability to achieve important goals depends on relative consumption, all bets on the efficacy of Smith’s invisible hand are off. …

The median size of a new single-family house in 2007 was over 2,300 square feet, more than 50 percent larger than its counterpart from 1970. That creates a problem for concerned parents, because good schools are usually found in affluent neighborhoods. To send your children to one, you must outbid others for a house in a good school district. Yet when all families increase their bidding for such houses, they succeed only in driving up their prices. No matter how much parents pay, only half of all children can attend schools in the top half.

Frank is of course correct that in any educational system only half of the students can attend above-average schools, but a Smithian market would not lead to this distortion in the price of housing. Government bundles education and housing, effectively requiring families to buy two of their biggest expenses together. By definition, the wealthy can better afford any good or service than other people, but bundling the goods restricts middle and lower class people’s ability to pay for either. Laying that government mandated failure at the feet of the market is utterly bizarre.

When I was still teaching, I caught a student plagiarizing a paper. It wasn’t just a matter of improper attribution, either–she had copied and pasted whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, apparently unaware that I knew how to use Google. The next day, her mother called the school and discussed the problem with me. “My children don’t cheat,” she said. This was an article of faith, not a subject for debate. Other kids certainly cheated, but not her children, so regardless of the contrary evidence I could produce, she would not believe it.

Tonight, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, and many people, myself included, believe there is reasonable doubt about Davis’ guilt. Davis was convicted purely on the basis of eyewitness testimony, which even the courts are starting to admit is unreliable. (Speaking as someone who has been the victim of violent crime, I know firsthand that the memory goes straight to hell in a fight or flight situation.) Furthermore, several of those witnesses have recanted.

Nevertheless, Davis was convicted, and his appeals went through the proper channels, so according to those, such as Rick Perry, who sleep soundly in the confidence that the government has never executed an innocent man, he must be guilty. You see, our government doesn’t kill innocent people. Other countries may do that sort of thing, but our justice system is above all that, so there’s no need to examine the massive piles of evidence that show it regularly makes mistakes.

Because if we have to question whether our government kills innocent people, we have to question its moral basis. Or lack thereof.

Rick Santorum is crinkling his eyebrows at Rick Perry today, with Santorum letting Perry have it in a discussion with Politico. TAC blogger Daniel Larison examines the unfolding dynamic between the two candidates on foreign policy.

Controversy around the push for Palestinian statehood continues, as President Mahmoud Abbas makes a bid to the U.N. for official recognition. Though an issue far more complex than basic campaign rhetoric will allow, Mitt Romney released a statement condemning President Obama’s handling of Israeli-Palestinian relations, calling the current situation an “unmitigated diplomatic disaster.” He went on to propose that the U.S. withhold foreign assistance if the Palestinian Authority “succeeds in gaining any type of UN recognition.” Romney’s Texan lookalike, Rick Perry, made similar remarks in New York on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, President Obama is urging Abbas to cease his efforts of appeal to the UN Security council, instead saying that statehood recognition should be achieved through peace talks. Five permanent members of the council wield veto power, including the United States, who will block the appeal. The ramifications of such a move, or sudden the-cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority will surely not cultivate a better relationship with the Arab world, and perhaps that is where the potential for an “unmitigated diplomatic disaster” really lies.

The demographics of America are changing at a rapid pace. Before the middle of this century, whites will be a minority. Ron Unz examines the future political and cultural landscape, as well as a path for the GOP in an increasingly racially diverse America.

We’ll have to rename the bird a Freedom Fowl or something similar.

The United Nations’ annual opening of the General Assembly each September affords heads of state and heads of government the opportunity to meet both formally and informally.  The upcoming meeting between President Barack Obama and Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promises to be particularly contentious.  How exactly it plays out will inevitably demonstrate the astonishing power of Israel and its Lobby in Washington.  Obama is expected to rebuke Erdogan over the issue of Palestinian statehood, which Turkey and most of the world support. Ankara has also stated its willingness to use its own warships to protect Turkish vessels in international waters that are seeking to sail to Gaza.  They have good reason to do so.  In June 2010, the Israelis boarded the unarmed Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara in international waters and killed nine Turks, one of whom was also an American citizen, most of whom were shot execution style.  Israel could have defused the crisis by apologizing but refused to do so.

Turkey has been a NATO ally since 1949, hosting numerous American bases and the key intelligence listening post at Sinop, which had unique ability to monitor Soviet ballistic missile launches.   Turkish soldiers in the Korean War were regarded as some of the finest engaged in that conflict.  And they have fought and died to save American lives.   The 5,000 men of the 1st Turkish Brigade were attached to 2nd then to the 25th US Infantry Divisions.  In 1950, after the Chinese breakthrough, they fought a series of bloody rearguard actions covering the retreat of the American troops in which they suffered more than 3,500 casualties.

But American congressmen and pundits, particularly those who are particularly enamored of Israel, seem to have forgotten their history, if they ever knew it.  In the September 16^th Washington Post Morton Abramowitz, a former US Ambassador to Turkey, opined the following: Erdogan “now directly challenges our major alliance in the Middle East, and how far he will go is unclear…By threatening to militarily contest Israel’s blockade of Gaza…the Turkish government has laid down a serious challenge to American policy…Obama’s meeting with Erdogan on Tuesday is crucial. He can take a few important steps. He should immediately deploy 6th Fleet ships from Norfolk to the Eastern Mediterranean to signal that the United States will not tolerate even inadvertent naval clashes. He needs to make clear to Erdogan that the United States will not side with Turkey against Israel and that Turkey’s current strategy risks undermining regional stability.”

And there’s more.  Seven United States Senators have send a letter to President Obama stating that “Turkey is shifting to a policy of confrontation, if not hostility, towards our allies in Israel and we urge you to mount a diplomatic offensive to reverse this course.  We ask you to outline Turkey’s eroding support in Congress…and how its current ill-advised policy towards the State of Israel will also negatively reflect on U.S. Turkish relations and Turkey’s role in the future of NATO.”  The Senators are Mark Kirk, Charles Schumer, Mark Warner, Scott Brown, Joe Manchin, Joe Lieberman, and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Abramowitz fatuously describes Israel’s blockade of Gaza as “American policy.”  Both he and the Senators reveal their own ignorance apart from anything else. Turkey is portrayed as undermining regional stability, not Israel.  Israel is described as our “major alliance” in the Near East, not Turkey or Egypt or Saudi Arabia, all of which are far more strategically valuable. And then there is the casual fact-free dismissal of Ankara’s importance. Turkey is an ally. Israel is not.  Turkey has served United States strategic interests.  Israel has not.  Turkey has hosted American bases and committed its soldiers to support their American counterparts in combat.  Israel has not.  Israel has done little more vis-à-vis the United States than take in excess of a hundred  billion dollars in taxpayer provided largesse, use Washington as a veto machine to protect its own interests, and betray all of that by spying and stealing defense secrets which were later traded to the Russians and sold to the Chinese.  Oh yes, and Israel also was instrumental in Washington’s headlong rush to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq and is seeking more of the same against Iran.

Abramowitz wants to use the US Navy to protect Israel against the consequences of its own actions and is willing to attack an alliance member which is insisting on freedom of the seas and some accountability for the killing of its own citizens.  Americans were once proud of the US Navy when it acted in that fashion, but apparently no longer, at least not in the White House nor among some retired ambassadors.  The Senators are threatening to use all means possible to punish Turkey not because it has done damage to the United States but because of its strained relationship with a third country, Israel.  The Senators even threaten reducing Turkey’s role in NATO.  Excuse me, but NATO is an alliance with equal partners, isn’t it, not an American fiefdom?

So why all the defensiveness about Israel when Israel is a liability and Turkey a valuable asset strategically?  Well, there’s an election coming up, which means that President Obama will do everything he can to appease Israel and its Lobby without any regard for the United States national interest or for old allies like Turkey.  He will ignore world opinion by vetoing Palestinian statehood at the UN and he will make clear to the Turks and to everyone else who is listening that Israel always comes first, the single immutable factor in American foreign policy.  Israel will always come first.  And there will be plenty of congressmen and Morton Abramowitzes that will stand up and say that Obama is right to do so.