Mickey, along with so many young men of his generation, fought and died face down in the mud, in the jungles of the New Republic, trying to kill unions and other pro-Democratic interest groups in the 1990s. And now, does anyone appreciate the sacrifice? Does Mickey get a parade? Of course not; rather, some young kid like Ezra Klein comes along and spits in his face, and tells him it was all for nothing. ~Robert Farley

So, neoliberalism was a political version of the Vietnam War.  I have to say that this is actually one of the more appropriate analogies coming out of the recent chatter about Brooks’ lament for neoliberalism’s passing.  Following up on the Vietnam connection, watching Kaus run about attacking Ezra Klein and arguing over technical definitions of neoliberalism and making what look to outsiders to be fairly hair-splitting distinctions between DLC New Democrats and Washington Monthly neoliberals is a bit like watching Walter Sochek (John Goodman) from Big Lebowski lecturing the waitress in the diner about the technicalities of the First Amendment and the sacrifice of his buddies in ‘Nam after she has asked him to stop shouting profanities in the middle of a restaurant.  Sochek, like Kaus, might be completely right about these technical distinctions and the sacrifice of his fellow soldiers, but twenty years on no one cares and it doesn’t change how obnoxious the entire display is.

Update: Note to Mickey Kaus: When advocating the viability of a political position, do not use phrases such as “Gorbachev-like” and “perestroika-like” to defend your preferred policies.  Neoliberalism may or may not have had some important successes (of course, “successes” from a neoliberal perspective may be regarded as failures by progressives for the very reasons the neoliberals regard them as achievements), but Gorbachev was a uniform failure  in his express goal of preserving the USSR through reform.  If neoliberalism is to the Democratic Party as Gorbachev is to the Soviet Union, Kaus has just handed neoliberalism’s enemies the perfect analogy with which they demolish neoliberalism forever.

The nation long ago removed such impediments to voting as property requirements, poll taxes and literacy tests. Perhaps we should add one: No one should be allowed to vote until he or she has driven across the country. ~George Will

By the simple fact that essentially all of New York City would hereby be disqualified from voting, I am all for it.  (I am still a little annoyed about my La Guardia experience.)  We flyover country folk would rule, while all the flyers from the coasts would be reduced to their geographically apt marginal political position.  However, this could create some potential problems, since it would mean that almost the entire electorate would be made up of truck drivers, itinerant graduate students, road tripping twentysomethings and hitchhikers.  This might create slightly skewed perspectives in its own way.  Actually, this would be a terrible idea, since it would not promote anything healthy in our politics and would definitely overemphasise the considerable nomadism, mobility and rootlessness in our society that are already terribly destructive of a healthy polity.  The best way for people to reacquaint themselves with regional variety is by turning off the dreadful television and cultivating some regional variety of their own.  Southerners could fight against the spread of the flat Midlander accent that creeps in over the television, while incomprehensible New Yorkers could create appreciation societies to preserve their baroque and strange accents.  New Mexicans could restore cockfighting to its rightful place as our national pastime, and make understanding of the “state question” a prerequisite for entry.  Anyone who did not know what a roadrunner looked like could be banned from ever setting foot on our beloved tierra amarilla.  Those who made Bugs Bunny references could be expelled from Albuquerque’s city limits. 

Incidentally, the very thing that Will seeks to encourage (appreciation of regional diversity in Americans) is going to be effectively destroyed by what the folks at Hotline call “Tsunami Tuesday” on February 5 next year.  Next year’s primaries will be the most nationalised, least region-specific primary season ever.  As such, they will probably end up producing the most blow-dried, cookie-cutter, homogenous candidates as the nominees.  Hey, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton do have a chance after all!

I turn off a light and say, ‘Take that Iran’ and “Take that, Venezuela.’ We should not be sending our money to people who are not going to support our values. ~Hillary Clinton

I can picture HRC getting really excited about this as she walks through her house.  Perhaps she also gets a kick out of denouncing Nigeria by not using her hair dryer, or enjoys mocking the Mexicans when she buys a hybrid.  As has been pointed out by others, ceasing consumption of a fungible commodity for which there is particularly inflexible demand, such as oil, does not significantly affect the price and so cannot “punish” oil-producing countries that have governments that you dislike.  Especially in a heavily cartelised industry, such as oil production and export, price is dictated somewhat more by the producers in collusion with one another and somewhat less by the market.  In theory, OPEC could ramp up prices to $100 per barrel by slowing production or arbitrarily withholding exports, but they have little interest in precipitating global economic meltdown.  Divestment from the companies that do business with such governments is just as ineffective as this boycotting, since selling your shares in the “tainted” companies simply creates a buying opportunity for all those investors who are not so burdened by fairly fake moral dilemmas (this would be most investors).

By the way, how pathetic have “centrist” Democrats become that they feel obliged to join the looney jingo fringe in vilifying Venezuela as a major foe?

Far worse than anything else that might be revealed about Obama’s past, the recent LA Times story reveals Obama was a teacher’s pet:

Obama’s Indonesian teachers all said he was a leader at a young age. Fermina Katarina Sinaga, Obama’s third-grade teacher, didn’t have to quiet her pupils before class because Obama did it for her.

We all knew kids like this in school, and none of us ever liked those kids.  Nobody is worse-suited to positions of responsibility than a fawning sycophant.

As a boy in Indonesia, Barack Obama crisscrossed the religious divide. At the local primary school, he prayed in thanks to a Catholic saint. In the neighborhood mosque, he bowed to Allah.

Having a personal background in both Christianity and Islam might seem useful for an aspiring U.S. president in an age when Islamic nations and radical groups are key national security and foreign policy issues. But a connection with Islam is untrod territory for presidential politics. ~The Los Angeles Times

As noted at The Plank, the Obama campaign hastily denied any Allah-bowing:

Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ. Accounts in the L.A. Times that suggest otherwise are simply not true.

Was the next headline, “Obama Embarrassed By Muslim Ties”?  Somehow I don’t think it was.  Note how nicely the LA Times spun the story and gave it a pro-Obama title.  It wasn’t a story that stressed that he had actually been a Muslim for a short time or grew up as a religiously confused child, both of which could in any case be attributed to his mother’s decisions, but that one that said he had “crisscrossed” a “cultural divide.”  This supposedly shows that he is capable of uniting different religions, different cultures, different anything, because he can be on both sides of the fence at the same time.  He is Mug and Wump and everything in between. 

However, the story did say:

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

This could be easy to spin as a case of bureaucratic formality where the step-father had to put down something for registration and picked his own religion as a matter of convenience.  Whether anyone would believe it or not is another question, but these full-throated denials don’t help Obama’s credibility more generally for people who would otherwise not necessarily care about this.  It is clear that Obama is embarrassed by this detail in his past and so eager to move away from anything that might conjure up an idea of foreignness or the phrase “black Muslim.”  As the first example of a presidential candidate’s Muslim ties being publicly revealed, it is hard to know whether this will become the equal and opposite version of the politician’s public embrace of his recently-discovered Jewish heritage.  However, from what can be found in this story Obama really has nothing to fear from his years as “Barry Soetero,” but he may well badly damage his credibility if he keeps strenuously denying that he was ever a Muslim.  To most people, if you prayed in a mosque, saying that you were never a Muslim is a bit like saying, “I smoked, but I didn’t inhale.” 

Actually, the bigger problem Obama might have with this story is the bit that draws attention to his knock on prayer:

In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.

Taken out of context, this citation makes it sound as if Obama is something of a great cynic about religion and prayer, as if anyone ever claimed that angels would be visibly descending or that anything should “happen” during class prayers.  That hardly fits with the man who likes to talk up the importance of faith and refers to a “righteous wind at our backs.”  Some people might begin to think that Obama’s religion talk is just a lot of self-righteous wind.

Ehrenstein is just not cynical enough about white motivations. First, I don’t know any whites under 55 who personally feel guilty for the status of blacks. ~Steve Sailer

On a conscious, individual level, Sailer is right.  No white person 55 or under does actually feel personally guilty for the status of blacks, because as far as all of these people are concerned it would be basically impossible for them to have anything about which they should feel personally guilty.  However, as part of the shared cultural assumptions that have been drilled into the heads of two generations of white American kids from the day they were old enough to understand the word slavery, a sense of corporate and historic white guilt for the status of blacks–in which contemporary whites are made to feel somehow complicit–is as pervasive as it is exaggerated.  Added to that was the generally offensive multiculti indoctrination, which falsely presupposed that the white kids were all thoroughly familiar with and committed to European and Christian civilisation and therefore had to be taught about all of the crimes and errors of that civilisation while simultaneously being told about, for instance, the glories and tolerance of the Islamic “Golden Age” (most of which was the product of fairly uncreative imitation and use of Greek texts translated by the conquered Christian populations of the Near East), the (non-existent) peaceful and environmentally-friendly Native Americans or the (non-existent) peaceful and harmonious world of the K!ung Bushmen that was, of course, only ruined because of their integration into a Western society.  Not only have these generations grown up without even the most meager grounding in the Biblical and classical traditions of their fathers (hence widespread Biblical illiteracy that is just now beginning to be seen as a problem by people other than cultural conservatives), but they have grown up believing that it is ethically necessary to resent and dislike their ancestors or the heroes of their ancestors because of their flaws and failures. 

They have been taught that it is imperative to be ashamed of their heritage and to actively deny that they even have anything that might be called a positive racial identity (ethnic white, mainly southern and eastern European, Americans are allowed to continue their own traditions, provided these are limited to amusing diversions of music, dance and food).  These generations do not approach Obama’s candidacy primarily with the sense that correct opinions about Obama matter for in-group status fights among whites (though they may also be worried about this), but they view approval and well-wishing of Obama as a moral imperative and as a kind of purgation of the sins they have supposedly inherited from their fathers.  Many of them actually feel guilty at some level, even though they themselves have never done anything, because they have been taught for their entire lives that they should feel guilty simply because they are white and are therefore beneficiaries of past exploitation or oppression.  The only positive affirmation of being white is an affirmation aimed at identifying whites as historic villains and inculcating in white people today the desire to repudiate that villainy by yielding to whatever policies or reparations are demanded as the way to make up for the past. 

The media, the political class and the masters of the educational system have all worked to advance this message, and this message sinks in.  Add to that the desires to avoid social and professional ostracism that follows from taking potentially controversial or unacceptable views on matters of race (such as the wild idea that something called race actually exists in any meaningful sense), and you have a significant psychological burden of guilt that most white people educated since maybe 1980 have been told that they are supposed to carry around with them.  Those of us who never bought this crap when they were telling it to us in school, or who rejected it later, look at all of this and cringe at how pathetic it is that people are so dominated by this brainwashing.  If there were not a pervasive sense of corporate guilt in which most white people have learned to share, the enforcement of social stigmas against those who say or believe “inappropriate” things would not be possible.  People know what to say and what not to say because they have been indoctrinated since they were children that making true observations about racial differences between people, except perhaps in jokes, is simply not done.  Correct opinions on race have only become a mechanism of white in-group status maintenance because inculcating white guilt was first a mechanism of elite social engineering.  The first may be in some sense as “cynical” as the last always was.  It has nothing to do with equality or justice, and everything to do with mobilising people against each other for the sake of acquiring power and prestige.  Nonetheless, the former would not have been possible if the latter had not happened first, and the fact that it was a cynical manipulation of the psychology of people doesn’t mean that this manipulation does not have extensive and long-lasting effects.

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him. ~David Ehrenstein

As I read the article, Steve Sailer basically said some of the same things about Obama’s appeal (call it the Poitier Factor, if you like) and then set about trying to show who the “real” Obama was (or at least the person he portrays himself as being in his first book) with a typical Saileresque flair for the provocative.  Mr. Sailer has noticed Ehrenstein’s article and comments on it here.   

Since Obama of the “curative black benevolence” type is indeed a fantasy and a stock stereotype from the world of film, it stands to reason that the actual Obama would be different, complex and human and not the gooey purveyor of hope made out of cotton candy and syrup that media reports make him out to be.  For attempting to find out who Obama is, or who he has claimed to be in the past, Sailer has received some of the usual tut-tutting, while I assume Mr. Ehrenstein, who is black, will not hear a contrary or discouraging word.  Someone might do well to write an article about that phenomenon. 

Isn’t it the case that quite a few pundits and journalists have bought into the Obama-as-healer view of the man because they have mistaken what Matt Yglesias might call “politico-media reality” for the actual merits and characteristics of Obama as a candidate? 

On this point, Yglesias writes about the right’s national security fetish being played out through adoration for Giuliani the tough goombah:

I think this brilliantly sums up what’s so wildly off-base about conservative thinking.  Absolutely nothing in Giuliani’s history suggests that he is any more skilled than a randomly chosen individual at plotting a military response to an armed attack on the United States of America.  I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics an “image of toughness” matters more than actual experience or sound policy ideas. What’s crazy about today’s rightwingers, however, is that they’ve chosen not only to accept this slice of politico-media reality but actively embrace it. 

Likewise, I might say about Obamamania: “I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics Obama’s image of racial reconciliation and good feelings matters more than Obama’s actual policy views or past attitudes and associations with radical black nationalism.  What’s crazy about a lot of white pundits and journalists is that they’ve chosen not only to accept this slice of media-driven reality, but treat it as if it were the absolute truth.”

The alternative to Sailer’s reading of Dreams From My Father would seem to be to say that Obama told not simply a slightly fictionalised account of his own life, but that he was just making up things all over the place to pander to readers who wanted to find in him the angst-ridden, aggrieved black man they were expecting to find.  Obama might just be that smooth and good at selling himself as anything his given audience wants him to be (see below), but to conclude this you would also have to conclude that most of Obama’s autobiographical account is a lie.  This might overthrow Sailer’s article but it would also make Obama into the left’s equivalent of Mitt Romney, which would not be all together good for Obama’s political hopes.

I think Sailer’s “head or heart” bit at the end of his article was one of the weaker parts of the piece, because it treats Obama’s enthusiastic expressions of solidarity with Kenyans as genuine statements of allegiance.  This is like the mistake evangelicals made when they took Mr. Bush’s invocation of the name of the Lord as proof that he was “one of them,” since the man has rarely done anything politically that would indicate such powerful and deep solidarity.  Whatever else Obama is, he is still a smooth-talking pol who frequently identifies with his audience in idiom and manner (as Sailer himself noted in the same article).  A closer reading of the rest of Sailer’s article would show that this final, provocative concluding note isn’t really all that plausible, not because Sailer’s general interpretation of Obama is really all that mistaken, but because Obama always pretends that the people around him are his “brothers and sisters” even when he has nothing in common with them.  This is why he can generate such fawning press coverage and such exuberant reactions from crowds.  Similar to of Clinton’s campaigning style with individuals (“he made me feel like the only person in the world”), Obama’s style is to make whichever group he’s talking to feel as if they are the fulcrum of political and social transformation on a world-historical scale and he makes them momentarily believe this garbage long enough to win a favourable impression.  As a politician, what he cares about is leaving that favourable impression, which tends to make policy disagreements or other objections to the candidate fade into the back of voters’ minds. 

Politicians of this sort have natural talent at winning people over, and they know that the fastest way to win people over is to convince them that you are, in some sense, one of them (and someone who will therefore “fight” or “work” for them once in power, which is a silly thing to assume).  In Obama’s case, doing this involves at once ignoring his heritage and revaluing it, so that he can convince voters of any race that he is basically on their side while also emphasising his own heritage enough to make it seem as if he represents some epochal shift in race relations and racial attitudes in this country.  Precisely because such a shift is not and has not been taking place to such a great degree, the image of Obama as someone transcending race both provides space for his natural political talent to flourish with every audience and serves as the reason for all of the excessive, absurd adoration lavished on the man.  He can become the “Magic Negro” because everyone knows that there’s no such thing (it is a stereotype and a fantasy), and he can appear to “transcend” race because everyone knows that nobody has and nobody actually can.  That is, these two ideas that have been pounded into the minds of modern Americans for the last forty years are seen as desirable and laudable in inverse proportion to their actual existence in the world.  Some might call this magic.  I would call it the product of propaganda and cultural indoctrination.

After some aggravation thanks to Friday’s snowstorm, I made it back last night only about five hours later than I should have been here.  The delay from my cancelled flight wasn’t that terrible (especially compared to the epic incompetence of JetBlue a few weeks ago), so I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but let me just say that I’m not a big fan of La Guardia.  The airport, that is.  Judging from the absurd-looking statue of old Fiorello that they have put up in the Marine Air terminal, I would say that the people who run the airport don’t much like the former mayor.  Neither am I pleased with the horrid Northeastern habit that people have of automatically putting milk in your coffee.  I didn’t even ask for a ‘regular’ coffee, which I understand is Northeasternese for, “Please ruin this perfectly good coffee with some milk.”  No, apparently it’s simply taken as a given that coffee should never be good and there is no need to consult the person ordering the coffee.    Even leaving aside the question of Lent, such coffee will go from an unpleasant ordeal to being simply undrinkable in a matter of minutes.  This is one of those amusing regional customs, rather like the default of putting sugar in tea in the South, that I find a little tiresome after a while.  (Southerners, being generally more hospitable, do understand that they should ask whether you would also like to have your tea ruined.)  I don’t begrudge people their regional customs, but I do reserve the right to point out that they are ruining their coffee and tea.  I should say that Brookline was very nice, and I’d be glad to go back there anytime.  Boston, however, left a different, sour taste in my mouth.  

The conference itself was a great time.  As I had briefly mentioned in one of the comments, it was on the campus of Hellenic College and Holy Cross Theological School.  It is an unusual experience for me, as I imagine it is for most people, to be able to go to a campus chapel and find an Orthodox church.  The daily Orthros (albeit in a very shortened form) and Vespers were very good ways to start and end a couple of the days.  The weather was not entirely cooperative with us, leading to the later problems of traveling home, but the atmosphere of the conference, which was one made up entirely by graduate students, was very cordial and pleasant.  There was one contentious session on Hesychasm, which didn’t surprisingly create an argument between Orthodox and non-Orthodox participants (since Palamite theology is usually seen in all Orthodox-Catholic exchanges as a fundamental disagreement).  Ironically, it was a paper arguing that St. Gregory of Thessalonika had turned what could have been a “dialogue” into a “polemic,” which was unfortunately the effect of the paper on that topic.  Instead of sparking confessional dispute, it set off a strong intra-Orthodox quarrel between one Orthodox speaker (who, curiously enough, had also gone to my alma mater) and the other Orthodox students.  The poor Protestant seminarians and other non-Orthodox in the room seemed to be mostly at a loss as to why this paper had generated such intense feelings.  Gatherings of Orthodox academics should come with a warning label: “Danger: Converts and Greeks may create a combustible and unstable situation.”  However, this particular debate wasn’t one of converts vs. cradle Orthodox or Americans vs. Greeks, but really was a debate between the one speaker, who was taking a very hard line against Palamas over a single response that he had made to Barlaam the Calabrian, and everyone else fairly sputtering and gasping in disbelief.  Several of the people in the audience did make what I considered quite solid replies to the paper’s argument, but the session had definitely gone from being a venue for exchange and inquiry and had become a more fundamental and visceral argument over the place of monks in the Church. 

My own session generally went very well, and I think the session in which I was giving a response was fairly productive.  All of the papers I heard were interesting, though the one mentioned above would undoubtedly have done better with some less provocative language about St. Gregory, and it made for a good opportunity to meet some of the rising early Christian studies, patristics and Byzantine scholars.  What was remarkable was how many had either previously gone, were currently going or were considering going to Chicago.  Officially, we had four speakers participating in the conference, which put us behind the folks at Notre Dame, but our “unofficial” representation including former students and other attendees put us closer to nine out of a group of roughly forty-five.  Somehow or other Chicago attracts or produces quite a few people interested to one degree or another in church history.  I have no idea whether this is actually above average or not, but it certainly seems unusual for a place normally associated with its economists, lawyers and businessmen. 

The strangest thing I saw on the entire trip was on the Boston T on the Blue Line.  As I was riding in from the airport, I looked across the way to see a big, prominently displayed advertisement for “Guaranteed Swahili.”  Is there a great need for Swahili speakers in the greater Boston area?  It wouldn’t exactly surprise me, given that there is plenty of immigration from Africa in several of the major Eastern cities (as I understand it, Washington is the largest concentration of Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia), but I am a bit more used to seeing ads for learning Spanish where I’m from.  I suppose some gradual cultural takeovers seem a bit less bizarre than others.

An interesting discovery was a new academic press, Gorgias Press, that had put some of its books out at the conference.  I was looking at their book collection last night after returning, and they have an impressive number of publications or reprints of many things related to Syrian and Persian Christianity and early Christianity generally.  The reprints are often quite expensive, but in the case of the book I found at the conference, The Maronites in History, it would have been worth the full, non-conference price.  The book on the Maronites is a recent reprint of a 1986 work that apparently went out of print (how could that have happened when the book talks extensively about monotheletism?).  In it, the author, Matti Mousa, lays out quite clearly and, I think, mostly accurately the history of the Maronites as a distinct religious community.  I assume that many Maronites do not like this book, because it is a pretty relentless debunking of the extremely shaky myths Maronite apologists have woven around their origins as a religious group.  Mousa’s control of the Byzantine material is a little shaky, and therefore his dating sometimes just follows that of the Syriac sources, but it would appear that he knows the Arabic and Syriac sources very well.  From all of this he reconstructs the duration of monotheletism in the Maronite church, which was actually much, much longer than I had ever thought.  Most accounts seem to assume that monotheletism ended soon after the Maronites submitted to Rome in the 1180s, but Mousa claims, based on ongoing Italian missionary work to Lebanon, that Maronite service books and doctrines remained formally and materially monotheletic into the late sixteenth century, if not longer.  This is an even longer duration than Fr. Louth allowed for in his fine book on the Damascene, but unfortunately the footnote for this particular point is actually missing from the bottom of the page (even OUP makes mistakes, I suppose).  If that is accurate, it is even more important for the historian of monotheletism (who, at this point, seems to me, given that there are so very few competitors for the title) to get into the study of the Maronites, who represented the continuation of monotheletism for more than ten times as long a time as monotheletism existed in Byzantium.  It is fascinating to think that monotheletism endured well into the early modern period in at least one small corner of the world.  Perhaps if there were more attention paid to this continuation a greater interest in understanding monotheletism would develop.

Why was Obama so insistent upon rejecting the white race? ~Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer’s massive article on what Dreams From My Father tells us about “Obama’s Identity Crisis” is online at TAC‘s site.  You will either be very impressed (as I, amateur Obama-watcher, was) or you will be scandalised and possibly horrified, but you should read the whole thing and chew over the ideas in it. 

He’s the first Republican in the Congress to call for Gonzales to be dismissed. Sununu is also one of the few truly principled conservatives on the Hill. A coincidence? I think not. ~Andrew Sullivan

I won’t bother with defending Sununu against the insult of being praised by Andrew Sullivan, but I will just note that a Republican from an ever-bluer state up for re-election next year needs to demonstrate independence from the administration early and often.  This is an easy way for Sununu to show that he is not a reflexive administration loyalist, since no one can really blame him for wanting to kick out an incompetent AG.  If I were convinced that this controversy is the reason why Gonzales should go (rather than all the other dreadful things he has done), I might not get too excited that Sununu is prominently associating himself with the anti-Gonzales effort.  This is the bold, courageous Senator who literally sprinted away from journalists to avoid telling anyone what his views on the “surge” were.  I suppose that does make his call for Gonzales’ resignation that much more surprising, but a vulnerable Senator criticising members of the administration is hardly proof of rock-solid conservative backlash.