Remember 1983? I do. That’s when Secretary of the Interior James Watt said, “”I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” He had to resign shortly after. I wrote a letter to the Battle Creek Enquirer saying he should have been fired because his policies were repudiated, not because he said that.
Now President Barak Obama does a modern version of a fireside chat and makes a joke about the Special Olympics. Which standard should we hold him to?
Philanthropy consultant Thomas Tierney argues for bigger, longer grants to fewer organizations. “How many social problems can be solved with $50,000? Over 18 months? Not many.” (This is in The Weekly Standard: “Rich Rewards” by Martin Morse Wooster. Good article.)
But I’d like to know how many social problems can be solved with $50 million or even $50 trillion over whatever timespan you want. No more than with $50,000, I’d wager.
What business do philanthropic organizations have in trying to solve social problems anyway. Why can’t they just try to help people who need help? There are all sorts of good things they can do — helping build institutions by which people can help themselves, funding technological improvements, and who knows what else. But solving social problems? I think that one is beyond their competence, just as much as it’s beyond government’s competence.
First we had the Defenestration of Prague; now we have the Hypovehiculation of Barak. From James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today“:
In an item yesterday, we observed that the White House had done the right thing in “defenestrating” Charles Freeman, the unhinged former ambassador who had been President Obama’s nominee for chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Since Freeman was thrown under the bus rather than out the window, we should have said the White House did the right thing in hypovehiculating him. We regret the error.
It’s about time somebody invented it. It’s going to be an important new word for our political vocabulary. It has been needed for some time — starting at least as far back as when we first heard about Barak’s grandmother.
Sam Schulman compares Obama to Hamlet in the March 9 issue of The Weekly Standard.
To the untutored eye, the Obama administration can seem merely lazy. Economic stimulus? Let Nancy do it. Give a heavyweight like Bob Gates a job that would affront the dignity of a Guildenstern–make him plead with the Europeans to help us in Afghanistan, but force him to admit that his boss hasn’t made up his mind about whether to protect NATO members against the new Iranian/North Korean missiles. Close Guantánamo one of these days soon, decide even later what to do with its population. But it’s not laziness; it’s the way that a Hamlet thinks the world works. To a Hamlet, a leader like himself “who can inspire the American people to rally behind a common purpose” issues a decree. And that’s all that needs to be done.
For Hamlet and Obama, leadership is something that one can imagine or speechify oneself into. Hamlet feels that the only thing that stops him from being as effective a king as Fortinbras–or the Player-king–is that he lacks their sincerity and self-delusion. Obama thinks that being FDR is a matter of making FDR-like speeches–so FDR-like that Richard Cohen had a vision of an amber cigarette-holder while Obama spoke! He needn’t bother to study how FDR connived, threatened, charmed, lied, and manipulated to get his way.
But is this really the key to understanding Obama? It might be, but who knows? I’ve called him an empty suit, but really, I don’t know if that’s the key, either. We’re all trying to figure him out.
Obama is not the first president to be in way over his head. Several others have been, too. And some of those soon learned to swim.
IBut in this case it’s new territory not just for him, but for all of us. We’ve never before elected a president who was so lacking in both administrative and legislative experience. So we’ll all have to keep coming up with our theories to explain him and his actions. Eventually, it may become clear just which one has the most explanatory power.
I need more books like “Wednesdays with Diether.” Maybe the Kalamazoo Gazette will publish another such collection of Diether Haenicke’s columns.
On Monday when I heard of Dr. Haenicke’s passing, I read a few random articles in my copy. But then I discovered it’s a good book for reading while running on our new elliptical machine. The book is small enough and the font large enough that I can read it even when my glasses start to get foggy. In fact, I can read it without glasses. That’s more than I can say for a bilingual Russian book I sometimes use for the purpose. Some combinations of Cyrillic characters get difficult for me to decipher toward the end of a run.
Actually, I’d rather watch a Big Ten basketball game while running, which is what I’ll do tonight. But other times I like to read.
The elliptical machine is a Nordic Track Autostrider 990. I’m mostly pleased with it so far. It would be better if I could attach some sort of articulating arm to hold a book, or a laptop computer to play movies. But I can rest a small book on a little ledge, and still see part of the display over the top. But most books I’d like to read are too big, or have printing that’s too small.
The Haenicke book is especially good in that when the display says “Slow down” I can see the word “Slow” above the book. But “Speed up” and “Speed OK” both look the same. All I can see is the word “Speed”. I definitely don’t want to miss a directive to slow down. If I miss an occcasional speed-up instruction, that’s not so bad.
Actually, I don’t have a lot of trouble with my cadence, probably because I’m used to a relatively high cadence when riding my bicycle. But I think I’ve slowed it down a bit in the last couple of years, so I hate to miss an actual command to do so.
Unfortunately Diether Haenicke’s book is an easy read, good only for two more sessions at the most. It’s a shame in many ways that we won’t be hearing more from him.
Here’s a comment I posted in response to the article by Harvey Wallbanger in The Atlantic titled “Football is a Dangerous Business“:
Here’s my favorite proposal to improve the situation: eliminate free substitution and go back to having the players play both ways. If they had to play both ways, there would not be so many of the freakishly large players on the field who create the lethal forces that endanger others’ lives. An added benefit is that it would tilt the game more in favor of the best, most versatile athletes.
Besides, super-specialization is a hallmark of the modern industrial society, along with super-commoditization and super-organization. Sports are supposed to be a way to bring back a taste of the more primitive life we left behind when we all became cogs in the giant industrial machine.
According to Ron Suskind, in January 2003 when George W. Bush was informed that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, his response was, “Fuck it. We’re going in.”
Whether or not that’s true, Barak Obama has already had his “Fuck it, we’re going in” moment. When Rep. Eric Cantor objected to a part of the president’s stimulus proposal, Obama’s response was, “I won. I will trump you on that.” (URL)
And to think that some of us were hoping that Obama could at least be more articulate than Bush.
Barak Obama’s White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Even the toughest rules require reasonable exceptions.”
Oliver North’s secretary, Fawn Hall: “There are times when you have to go above the law.”
I didn’t know Mexico ever had a president like Porfirio Díaz. I learned about him while reading “Bound in Twine : The history and ecology of the Henequen-Wheat complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950” by Sterling Evans (2007). On page 42 he links Diaz with 19th century positivism, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and private property. I presume there is more to learn about him from this book, but I get a rather different picture of him from Wikipedia. In any case, this is something I need to learn more about, especially as it relates to the communal land holdings of the native peoples.
Well, I barely know what to say other than to expose my ignorance of this bit of history, which I’m doing here as seems to be the proper thing to do in this age of blogs.
And that got me to thinking that blogs are a modern version of the “blab schools” like those that Abraham Lincoln attended. In those schools all students would recite their lessons out loud simultaneously, which made for a cacophonous educational experience. Now modern technology has increased the ability for all of us to blab at once about what we’re learning, even if it’s not very well digested knowledge.
Not that I’m complaining. My own elementary education was in one- and two-room schools. First and second grades were spent in a one-room school, complete with pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room, overlooking the Missouri River in central North Dakota. I have always appreciated that I was able to listen to the 7th and 8th grade boys at their lessons. It was certainly more interesting than our Dick and Jane. And here were these big kids who we thought would just as soon kill us little kids if they were even to recognize our existence, and they were discussing poetry and literature. It was the usual fare in American public schools of the time — things like Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and Edward Everett Hale’s “Man Without a Country.” But those big, tough kids were so earnest in their discussions. I don’t remember what they said, but I still remember the tone of their discussions, which didn’t at all match what I saw out on the playground. It was disconcerting, but also made me want to get to the point where I could learn the things they were learning.
Maybe I’m feeling a little bit of that now.
In my last post I wondered whether Nat Hentoff and Richard John Neuhaus had ever met. So I went to google it, and learned that Hentoff was laid off at the Village Voice at the end of 2008. Here is a NY Times article about it. Hentoff is not the only person who was let go, but it certainly does look like the left is expelling the last vestiges of liberalism from its midst.