Boy, this is disappointing, but I’m glad Virginia Postrel saved me the cost of a ticket to the Maggie Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.” From her indignant review:

It skips a lot of things. In the entire movie, there is only one policy discussion, with U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig about the Falkland Islands, that might be called an argument rather than a slogan. The Iron Lady never explains the coal miners strike or mentions the raging controversy over stationing U.S. nuclear cruise missiles in Britain. It doesn’t include Thatcher’s assessment that Mikhail Gorbachev was “a man I can do business with” or show her delivering her 1984 party congress speech only hours after being bombed out of her Brighton hotel — a potentially riveting scene. It doesn’t include the famous lines “the lady’s not for turning,” “there is no alternative,” or “there is no such thing as society.” It never explains how she won three general elections.

A two-hour film obviously can’t include everything. But this movie’s choices all tend toward a consistent end. They drain the content out of Thatcher’s public role, making it little more than a vehicle for her ambition, while embellishing her private life to portray her husband and daughter as justifiably resentful and her old age as haunted by regret. (Her son, Mark, stays out of this picture.) You would never know that Carol describes her parents’ marriage as “truly a meeting of minds” or that she depicts her mother with great affection as a “superwoman” who crafted elaborate cakes for her children’s birthdays, faithfully attended school parents’ nights and took her kids to enjoy the pageantry of the opening of Parliament.

Virginia says that no male leader would be portrayed the way “The Iron Lady” treats Thatcher:

In the days of the old Hollywood Code, female characters were inevitably punished if they strayed from traditional sexual mores. Today, female characters (and many men as well) must suffer if they violate a different, unwritten code. This new code declares that one’s worth depends on personal relationships, not public actions, and that sacrificing family time for the sake of achievement is nothing but short-sighted selfishness. Hollywood enforces the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen.

What matters, then, is not the nature of Thatcher’s policies, or even the quality of her real-world family relations. It’s that she dared to forge her identity in public, through what she did rather than what people she cared about, and that she did it very well. For that unseemly daring, we must see her suffer.

The problem with Margaret Thatcher, one assumes (from the filmmakers’ point of view) is that she was a successful conservative politician. If she had been a Labour leader, is there any doubt that “The Iron Lady” would take a different line on her? If Virginia’s description is correct, then the film’s view of its central character is startlingly old-fashioned. Again, is it really conceivable that a liberal woman prime minister would be portrayed in this way? To be sure, I’m not saying that Thatcher ought necessarily to be lionized. Perhaps she was a badly flawed figure in private (though Virginia points out the film takes unjust liberties with the truth on this point). But is that really what’s most important about her? Is that really what we need to remember about her? Would the first Churchill biopic be doing justice to its subject by dwelling on the fact that he was a drunk and perhaps disagreeable in private?

Maybe I’ll still see “The Iron Lady,” but leaving aside the personal politics of the thing, I cannot imagine wanting to see a Thatcher biopic that doesn’t put the weight of its dramatics on her public life, which was so dramatic and consequential.

It’s Carnival season, and that means king cakes down here. You don’t see this warning on pastries in other parts of the country:

So, it’s done: the tickets are bought, the hotel is reserved, and my niece Hannah and I are going to Paris in April, on her spring break. Her first time in France. It is Votre Jeune Travailleur’s privilege, and his joy.

I was talking with my folks the other day about points of conflict between my sister Ruthie and me. One of them had to do with our approach to food. Said my dad, “Ruthie wouldn’t have gone to Whole Foods for hell.” That I do some of my shopping at Whole Foods was something she disdained as a sign of poshness. (Did she think I was Simon Marchmont? Probably.) My guess is that it wasn’t Whole Foods that was literally the problem, but what Whole Foods symbolized to her: the larder of privileged people who waste money on expensive food.

This was one of those things it was impossible for us to discuss, for various reasons particular to our relationship (more on which in the forthcoming book). As I told my admirably frugal and practical-minded sister once, she was right: we do spend a greater proportion of our money on food. (For some reason, it didn’t make much of a difference that we bought much of our meat directly from small independent farmers; in the culture war, farmer’s markets are Stuff White People Like — by which I mean they are defined solely by their ridiculous, but very real, Posh Nosh excesses.) Anyway, we do spend more of our money on food, because food matters a lot to us, both aesthetically and from a health perspective. While it is true that we allocate our food budget differently than she did — she bought more processed foods and snack foods than we did; we put the money we might have spent on those things toward buying other foodstuffs — the fact is it’s more expensive to buy fresh fruit and the kinds of things that are common in our house than it is to buy more mainstream American fare. But, as I said, it’s worth it to us, and if that means we have to cut back on some other expense, that’s something we did, and we’ll do. As with so many things about life in our country these days, it’s hard for people to have conversations about certain lifestyle choices without a lot of defensiveness on all sides.

Anyway, I bring all this up in light of this post  comparing the calories consumed by Europeans to Americans, correlated with the amount of money we spend on food. Europeans take in about the same number of calories as we do, but spend 50 to 100 percent more on food than we do. And they have less than half the obesity rate that we do. Cliff Kuang:

Granted, Americans don’t walk as much as Europeans do. But the obvious thing you have to conclude is that we simply eat cheaper food that’s worse for us. Again, that’s no surprise given the amount of fast food and processed food that Americans eat. The real question is why we eat like that. I’d place the blame squarely on the 1950s, and our wholesale embrace of mechanized food after World War II. In those days, fast food, canned vegetables, and cheap chicken became a sign of America’s progressiveness: Cheap food, in the days after World War II, were a marker of the roaring economic progress we were making. Cheap food, in other words, was a source of national pride before it became a national habit. Europe, by contrast, had no such industrial miracle. Instead, they simply held onto the food traditions that they always had–of home cooking, for example.

To flip it forward a bit, I would argue that Europeans are willing to pay more for better food because what they eat is so wrapped up with national pride and cultural identity.

I’d say Cliff Kuang is onto something. I’ve rarely encountered in this country the kind and degree of cultural pride in local food and food traditions that’s common in Europe. The idea that you would willingly pay more for food with a localist pedigree is still fairly alien to American culture. Mind you, I’m talking in the abstract, not the particular. It’s offensive to criticize someone struggling to put food on the table for not being open to paying more for tomatoes at the local farmer’s market. I get that. My point is more general. Europeans aren’t all rich, but even working-class Europeans are willing to spend a greater proportion of their money on food. I think there must be a middle ground here, but it’s hard even to talk about these questions because there’s so much cultural anxiety bound up in this topic. Which is just bizarre, if you think about it, but that’s reality.

By the way, if you haven’t seen it, Mary Eberstadt’s wonderful 2009 essay about moralizing about food and sex is a must-read. Excerpt:

One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this: Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself. No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been subject in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus the potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called “home-wrecking” — have been ameliorated in every recorded society by legal, social, and religious conventions, primarily stigma and punishment. Similarly, all societies have developed rules and rituals governing food in part to avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls over scarce necessities. And while food rules may not always have been as stringent as sex rules, they have nevertheless been stringent as needed. Such is the meaning, for example, of being hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering rations on a ship.

These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?

This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.

Mary’s piece primarily comes at the question from the point of view of elites who believe one should have no real restrictions on sexual appetite, but who fetishize the consumption of food. Read just a bit more of this insightful piece:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can.

In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

Betty, on the other hand, would be baffled by the idea of dragooning such moral abstractions into the service of food. This is partly because, as a child of her time, she was impressed — as Jennifer is not — about what happens when food is scarce (Betty’s parents told her often about their memories of the Great Depression; and many of the older men of her time had vivid memories of deprivation in wartime). Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

This clear difference in opinion leads to an intriguing juxtaposition. Just as Betty and Jennifer have radically different approaches to food, so do they to matters of sex. For Betty, the ground rules of her time — which she both participates in and substantially agrees with — are clear: Just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is subject to social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and out of established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly adheres to a traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Thus, for example, Mr. Jones next door “ran off” with another woman, leaving his wife and children behind; Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and wasn’t allowed back in school; Uncle Bill is rumored to have contracted gonorrhea; and so on. None of these breaches of the going sexual ethic is considered by Betty to be a good thing, let alone a celebrated thing. They are not even considered to be neutral things. In fact, they are all considered by her to be wrong.

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

In short, as Jennifer does with food, Betty in the matter of sex fulfills the requirements for Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

In my family, my sister was Betty, and I … well, I’m both Betty and Jennifer, because I believe that both the consumption of food and the practice of sex have moral meaning, and must be governed by norms. I spoil everybody’s day!

(Via Andrew Sullivan).

From the Circe Institute blog, this micro-close-up photo of sand grains:

I don’t normally do this sort of thing on this blog, but I feel compelled to bring to your attention a new job that a friend and longtime reader of my blogging has just taken. From the press release:

The Human Rights Initiative of North Texas (HRI) today announced that William O Holston, Jr., has been selected to serve as its new Executive Director. In his new role, Mr. Holston will oversee the nonprofit agency which provides legal representation and social services free of charge to clients who have fled persecution and arrived in North Texas, often times with few or no resources.

Holston is a Dallas attorney who has a special passion for helping vulnerable people seeking refuge in the United States. Since 1987, Mr. Holston has provided pro bono legal representation for political and religious asylum applicants from 18 countries in Immigration Court. He has volunteered his services for HRI for the past 10 years. In 2005, Mr. Holston was awarded the Angel of Freedom Award by HRI, because of his commitment to provide pro bono services to clients.

I’ve known Bill for a few years, since my time in Dallas, and hoisted a few beers with him. I’ve heard Bill tell stories of human suffering — things his refugee clients have suffered back in their home countries — that make your skin crawl, your heart break, and your blood boil, all at the same time. Bill helps these poor souls who in Dallas, often for free, because that’s the kind of man he is. And because that’s the kind of Christian he is.

Bill also likes to walk in the great outdoors — Bill and Rawlins Gilliland used to get on me for being such an avid indoorsman — and has been writing about his walks, though the writing has to cease now, with his new position. Literature’s loss is humanity’s gain, I suppose. Congratulations, Bill, on your wonderful work, and on your new position.

New Gallup poll finds that more Americans (40 percent) identify themselves as conservatives than liberal or moderate. I suppose that’s good news, but I’m skeptical. What do people mean by “conservative” anyway? If I were asked this question in a poll, I don’t know how I would answer. The straightforward answer is, of course, yes, I’m a conservative. But if “conservative” is shorthand for “I support the Republican Party and its policies,” then I’m at best inconsistently conservative. Would that make me a moderate? Maybe, according to this measurement — but I can, and would, make a case from philosophically conservative principles for taking stances on certain issues that, by conventional measure, would be labeled moderate or liberal.

The problem with this is that you risk turning into one of those people who ends up saying, “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me.” Around about 1970, a certain generation of robust liberals of the 1950s and early 1960s vintage realized that what constituted liberalism had changed so much that they were now on the political right. Hence neoconservatism. It would have been strange for them to keep insisting that they were the “true liberals.” Standards change.

At the same time, it’s lazy to assume that what constitutes conservatism (or liberalism) is whatever the positions of that side’s loudest partisans say it is. Our media culture rewards articulate spokesmen who take more or less extreme positions, though (important caveat!) within the mainstream. Every political school or tradition needs to re-examine its first principles, and to reconsider its own policies and positions in light of both those principles and changing conditions.

That’s stating a banality, of course, but it’s frustrating how quasi-theological so many of us on the Right are about what constitutes true conservatism. Kirk said conservatism is “the negation of ideology,” by which he meant … well, here:

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.

There’s more to this, of course; follow the link for more. I wonder about Kirk’s statement that it’s “almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such,” in light of the Gallup poll. If 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative, my question is the same as I started this post with: What counts as a conservative, anyway?

I ramble. It’s Friday afternoon. Over to you…

John Cassidy, on the “Romney & Me” video:

The Republicans have got this position where they’re the party of the very rich, obviously, but they’re also the party of the white, working-class guy now…. I think that’s really what’s got the Republican establishment frightened, because this is an attack right on the heart of the Republican coalition between the rich, economically driven voters and the poor—or relatively poor—voters who are driven by social values. And that’s why Gingrich has done Obama such a big favor

Ryan Lizza:

If you look fairly at his record at Bain, the Olympics, and the governorship of Massachusetts, I think you have to conclude that he has the requisite leadership and decision-making skills to be President.

But what became clear this week is that Romney made a major mistake in the way he chose to describe his professional experiences. Instead of simply emphasizing that he was a turnaround expert, someone whose managerial skills and business competence would help fix everything, Romney insisted that his great achievement in life has been creating jobs—specifically, 100,000 jobs while at Bain. As The Wall Street Journal and others have now made clear, “creating jobs” was never a metric that Bain used to define success, and, frankly, is not a metric that any company uses to define success. Independent fact-checkers have declared Romney’s 100,000 figure somewhere between phony and unverifiable. It is now one of the most important claims of this campaign for journalists to substantiate. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Romney’s success depends on whether that job-creation statement withstands scrutiny.

Robert Wright makes an obvious but necessary point:

If you had asked me a few days ago, before news broke that American soldiers have urinated on Taliban corpses, whether American soldiers have ever urinated on Taliban corpses, I would have said: Probably.

You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface–and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.

It is appalling what happened, but not surprising. Did you ever read Paul Fussell’s great memoir of his combat service in World War II, “Doing Battle”? Here is a passage in which Fussell admits his revulsion at what war does to one’s humanity:

At dawn, I awoke, and what I now saw all all around me were numerous objects I’d miraculously not tripped over in the dark. These were dozens of dead German boys in greenish gray uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces and hands like marble, still clutching their rilfes and machine pistols in their seventeen-year-old hands. One body was only a foot or so away from me, and I found myself fascinated by the stubble of his beard, which would have earned him a rebuke on a parade groudn but not here, not anymore. Michelangelo could have made something beautiful out of thse forms, in the tradition of the Dying Gaul, and I was astonished to find that in a way I couldn’t understand, at first they struck me as awful but beautiful. But after a moment, no feeling but horror. My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.

… The captain called for me, and as I ran down a forest path, I met a sight even more devastating. The dead I’d seen were boys. Now I saw dead children, rigged out as soldiers. On the path lay two youngsters not older than fourteen. Each had taken a bullet in the head. The brains of one extruded from a one-inch hole in his forehead, pushing aside his woolen visor cap so like a schoolboy’s. The brains of the other were coming out of his nostrils.

At this sight, I couldn’t do what I wanted, go off by myself and cry. I had to pretend to be, if not actually gratified, at least undisturbed by this spectacle of our side victorious. …It wasn’t long before I could articulate for myself the message the war was sending the infantry soldier: “You are expendable. … You are just another body to be used. Since all can’t be damaged or destroyed as they are fed into the machinery, some may survive, but that’s not my fault. Most must be chewed up, and you’ll probably be one of them. This is regrettable, but nothing can be done about it.”

It should be noted that Fussell doesn’t believe that he bears moral fault in the conventional way for the killing of these German soldiers. They wore the uniform of the enemy, and the enemy was an evil regime — indeed, one of the most evil that ever existed. Nevertheless, this is what war is, and what it does to one, even when one does one’s duty.

An Orthodox friend says that the Orthodox church requires soldiers who have killed in combat, even in a just war, to go to confession before being readmitted to communion. I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense to me. Even if one had no real choice but to kill — and only a radical pacifist would be able to say that killing is always and everywhere wrong — the idea is that to take a human life is to dirty one’s own soul. War is at best — at best — a necessary evil. But even necessary evils are evil.

I can see a case for murdering the Iranian nuclear scientist. If you are a citizen of Tel Aviv, you may regard this man’s work as equivalent to the work of a German scientist working on new, improved gas chamber engineering, circa 1934. I’m not saying that this is a case I endorse, but I am saying it’s not irrational. Nevertheless, it’s disturbing to read a report of Rick Santorum’s remark:

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly,” Santorum said at a campaign event in October.

He should have been less candid. But it’s not like this sentiment comes from nowhere. On many occasions, Iranian president Ahmadinejad has spoken of his intention to wipe Israel off the map. If Iran were to develop nuclear weapons capabilities, the Iranians could keep that promise. If you’re an Israeli, how do you regard a scientist working to give that power to Ahmadinejad? Ahmadinejad could not possibly have signaled more clearly what his intentions are.

To be sure, I’m against war with Iran, and the main reason I would never vote for Santorum is that he relishes the thought of war with Iran. However, I am by no means certain that it was wrong for the Israelis to have killed this scientist, given that they are in a state of de facto war with Iran, and that the Iranian leadership has publicly and repeatedly vowed to exterminate the Israelis. My point here is that even if the killing of the Iranian scientist is justified as self-defense, it is nothing to be called “wonderful.” A grim, tragic necessity? Perhaps. But “wonderful”? We must not allow ourselves to bless these things, much less glory in them, as Santorum has done.

A friend told me not long ago about someone she knows, back from the Iraq war, deeply changed by the killing he had to do. As far as that soldier knows, all his killing was legal, and he did it justly. But it was still killing, and it haunts him profoundly. He will never be the same. Paul Fussell killed Nazi soldiers, for crying out loud, and the act of killing, and facing the results of killing, even in that just war, broke something in him.

I don’t want my sons to be the kind of men who piss on the corpses of human beings, even of vermin like the Taliban. War could do it to them. It could do it to any of us.