The Reticulator

I like this. Our country is built on unresolvable contradictions, and the WSJ Best of the Web passes up an opportunity to be snarky about it to call attention to one of them.

You’re Fine, but Not That Fine
From Honolulu, the Associated Press reports on a little political kerfuffle that illustrates a paradox about America:

Sen. Daniel Inouye has apologized for suggesting that Sen. Barack Obama’s private high school in Hawaii was elitist.

Inouye said before his state’s Feb. 19 Democratic caucuses that voters know Obama was born in Hawaii and graduated from one of its high schools, “but he went to Punahou, and that was not a school for the impoverished.” . . .

The Democratic senator is backing Obama’s presidential rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Inouye apologized in a letter to the president of the Punahou School, according to Jennifer Sabas, his chief of staff. . . .

“It was just a misstatement,” Sabas said. “It was never the intent to disparage Punahou in any way. It is without a doubt one of the finest schools in our nation.”

If it is “one of the finest schools in our nation,” that’s pretty elite, isn’t it? But Inouye is apologizing for calling the school “elitist.” There is at least a tension here–and yet it is a tension that captures something great about America: We aspire to value the best, but not to devalue that which falls short, to recognize the elite without becoming elitist. It’s a logical contradiction, yet in a funny way it seems to work.

A letter writer says the following in Wednesday’s Kalamazoo Gazette (without presenting either argument or evidence):

I believe that evangelical Christian voters made George Bush our president. I am terrified that unless sthose of us who have not been brainwashed by a church [blah, blah]

“I believe,” she says. It doesn’t quite have the ring of “Credo in unum Deum,” but I suppose it is a belief system.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth lately about Ronald Reagan’s speech in Neshoba County, complete with Paul Krugman using McCarthyistic smear tactics slightly modified from the 1950s. I have nothing to contribute to the debate, but it reminded me that my wife and I did visit Neshoba County ourselves last year. It was our first trip to the south outside of a drive to Atlanta in 1993.

I had planned to bicycle there, and still wish I had had time to do so. I was more-or-less following the trail that Tecumseh took on his recruiting mission to the Creeks in 1811. I started my ride from Vincennes in late March 2006, crossed the Ohio River on the ferry at Cave-in-Rock, and then rode on the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky and Tennessee. I spent part of one day on the Natchez Trace trail, which took me into Alabama.

I had planned to follow the Natzhez Trace to Tupelo, MS, then take back roads to some of the sites where Tecumseh tried to recruit Choctaw people to his cause (without success). But I had been battling headwinds for several days, the Natchez Trace was boring, and I was running out of time. My main destination was Tuckabatchee, near Montgomery, Alabama, where I wanted to spend several days. So we put the bicycle on top of the car, drove the Trace to Tupelo where we hunted down a good book of maps of rural Mississippi, and drove to some of the sites instead.

By the time we got to Neshoba County, it was getting late — too late to visit any of the Choctaw sites there. We got a quick meal in Philadelphia, and then drove to Selma, Alabama. The next day I resumed riding. In part I followed the trail of the Civil Rights marchers to Montgomery, but my main interest was some War of 1812 sites along the Alabama River. My wife spent some of her time in Selma, visiting sites of the Civil Rights marches.

But before that, on our way from Tupelo to Neshoba County, we did stop at a Tecumseh site near Crawford. Here are a couple of photos from Crawford.

I don’t know what this building was, but it got my attention. The site of the Tecumseh meeting was a few miles out of town along the road shown here.

I didn’t take a single photo in Neshoba County. But I did take this one just on the northeast border, of the Nanih-Wayia mound. A few young people of Choctaw descent were there, too, in a park on the near side of the road, learning about their heritage.

I wouldn’t mind going back there someday for more riding. The rural roads looked bicycle friendly, and I would have taken more and better photos if I had been on my bicycle.

George Will, in his 22-October Newsweek article, made a good analysis of the cost-benefit of doing something about global warming. His article is as usual, educational. He compares the global warming zealots with Bush on Iraq:

Zealots say fighting global warming is a moral imperative, so cost-benefit analyses are immoral. Like our Manichaean president, they have a simple fixation: Are you with us or not?

I hadn’t thought of that one, although I do often mention how the nationalized health care zealots act from same hubris as George W Bush on Iraq.

But I have a nit to pick with Mr. Will. It’s in this section where he explains how if we really want to save lives, there is something we can do: Institute a 5 mph speed limit. (He doesn’t mention that a 5 mph speed limit would also reduce transportation fuel consumption.)

Recent loopiness about warming has ranged from the idiotic (an academic study that “associated” warming with increased Italian suicide rates) to the comic (London demonstrators chanting, “What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!”). Well, you want dramatic effects now? We can eliminate what the World Health Organization says will be, by 2020, second only to heart disease as the world’s leading cause of death.

The cause is traffic accidents. The surefire cure is speed limits of 5mph. In 2008 alone, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World, which will be hardest hit by increasing traffic carnage. But a world moving at 5mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure—e.g., clean water—medicine, research, etc.

The costs of such global slowing would be the medievalization of the world, so the world accepts the costs of velocity.

Now I can’t say I favor the idea of a 5 mph limit. That speed is getting dangerously close to the minimum I need just to stay upright on my bicycle. But I do favor some policies that would slow down the world’s personal transportation system, e.g. a substantial tax on fossil fuels (to be offset, of course, by countervailing tax cuts elsewhere). And Will is right, even if he exaggerates, about what that would cost us. So I would not favor something quite like what Will is mocking.

But that’s not the nit. The nit is that word “medievalization.” I don’t think these changes, whether in the extreme form held up to ridicule by Mr. Will or in more modest forms, would necessarily have to result in medievalization. He has picked the wrong word.

The medieval system was governed by a federated system of personal relationships rather than market relationships. It was a world of institutionalized personal loyalty and obligation rather than fee-paid-for-services-rendered.

A world with a slowed-down transportation system might be a more federated world, in both commerce and politics. It might be less Walmartized. People would shop more at local mom and pop stores rather than at distant shopping centers. People would work and entertain themselves closer than home, and local institutions might become more important at the expense of far-off celebrityland (Hollywood, Washington D.C.). So there would be changes — not all of which we would be able to predict. (Though I predict that central planners who think they can predict everything might have their influence diminished.)

But those changes would not need to be accompanied by a change to a system of lord-vassal relationships and fixed societal roles. Medievalization? It could just as easily result in LESS medievalization and MORE free market.