…are of no interest to the press.
Free the president from the bonds of Congress!
Wealthy financier and opinion writer Steven Rattner is a long-time mover and shaker in the Democratic Party, although he never held any political position in a Democratic administration until he became Obama’s auto czar for a while. How important have Rattner (and his wife, a former national financial chair of the DNC) been to the Democratic Party? This important:
…[T]he Rattners were””and are””considered to be among the very top Democratic Party benefactors, often holding lavish candidate fund-raisers at their palatial apartment at 998 Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum, and at their secluded 15,000-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, to which Rattner flies regularly on a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet he pilots himself. Because they have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates around the country and to the party itself, they have been described as the “D.N.C.’s A.T.M.”
This Vanity Fair article is worth reading if you’re interested in more about Rattner, his wealth, his maneuverings, and his personal aspirations (a failed decades-long goal of becoming Treasury Secretary never came to fruition). This guy is about money and power, and he has had both. When he was appointed car czar, it seemed an odd choice (which I wrote about at the time) because he had no experience in the auto industry and knew little about the restructuring process.
So, why am I prattling on about Steven Rattner? He has written an op-ed for the NY Times that says that a “dsyfunctional” Congress should stop tying Obama’s hands. It is worth quoting:
Last week’s news from Washington: A dysfunctional Congress managed to function just long enough to bludgeon President Obama into ceding his prerogative to enter into an executive agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program.
That’s unfortunate. I wish the president had had the votes to hang tough on this important right, in part because of the precedent it sets for future executive agreements and the pall it casts over his fight for the legality of his recent executive orders on immigration, climate change and other matters.
Note the hyperbolic violence of “bludgeon.” Note also the absence of any mention of the bipartisan nature of this terrible, unfair “bludgeoning” of Obama. Note also the acceptance of the notion that Obama has the right to enter into an “executive agreement” with Iran that is really a treaty of the type that traditionally and constitutionally has been the right of Congress, as well as his usurpation of the laws on immigration that are currently being challenged in the legal system.
Rattner doesn’t bother to confront the constitutionality of those things head-on, nor does he even mention the treaty/executive agreement distinction. He acts as though the inability to pass a law is a bad thing, and the ability to pass one is a good thing. Why should we have to wait for a bunch of people to agree on something, when we can get one person to simply order it? It’s so, so, so much simpler.
No great surprise that Rattner, with his history, would be in favor of greater and greater executive power. It’s especially no surprise since he’s been one of the earliest and strongest supporters of Hillary Clinton, and has raised an enormous amount of money for her in the past. If Hillary becomes president, Rattner stands an excellent chance of finally, after all these years, achieving his long-held ambition of becoming Treasury Secretary.
He closes his piece by saying that there should be greater presidential power whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. But does anyone really think he’d be writing this op-ed if George Bush were president? I did a search for something like that in his output while Bush was president, and although it’s possible I missed something, I haven’t been able to find a word about it.
As I said, it’s not surprising that Rattner would be in favor of increased presidential power for Obama and presumably for Hillary. What is more depressing is to read the comments to his Times piece. I quit after growing weary of looking at them, but most of the commenters I saw seem to agree wholeheartedly with him.
I continue to conclude that very very few people seem interested in the Constitution, and very very many seem inclined towards being ruled by dictators.
And our dictators can’t even make the trains run on time.
[NOTE: None of Rattner’s history described in this post appears in the short blurb about him after his Times column, which reads “Steven Rattner is a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.” The reader could be forgiven for being completely unaware of his history and personal investment in the issue of executive power. The Times is certainly aware of it, however.]
Ramadi appears about to fall…
…and the Obama administration says it doesn’t matter much:
…Ramadi’s looming collapse has long been predictable. After all, it’s not exactly a secret that ISIS wants to control the arterial roads that connect central Syria with central Iraq (if you want to see the strategic importance of those highways, just look on Google maps). Neither is it a secret that ISIS wants to dominate the Euphrates river from northern Syria into central Iraq. Or that it wants to dismember the governance structures in Anbar province. Its strategy is vested in the domination of territory and the appropriation of Sunni populations under its banner…
The simple fact is that if Ramadi collapses, the Islamic State will symbolically and physically crown itself the ruler of Anbar. Propaganda being central to its strategic narrative ”” that which it uses to gain resources and recruits ”” the seizure of Ramadi would be an extraordinary victory. It would also be an extraordinary defeat for the struggling Iraqi government…
It is for these reasons that the administration’s downplaying of Ramadi’s significance is so galling. While General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has long been advising President Obama for more comprehensive action against the Islamic State, he’s wrong to suggest that Ramadi isn’t that important. It most certainly is. We should have been supporting (as I explained here) the Anbar tribes with military support and political empowerment for months now. But there’s also an American moral issue at stake here. A better future for Ramadi ”” that which it had before the Islamic State’s rise ”” was built with American sweat and blood. It was in Anbar that Marines fought so valiantly and so successfully to win the Sunni tribes to their side, and together crush al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But Tom Rogan, author of the above, is speaking to an administration that is deaf to his plea. It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they (a) don’t much care; (b) are completely unwilling to commit to any action that would have a good chance of changing things, since it would be neither politically expedient nor in line with their philosophy; and (c) know that, except for the right, most Americans have accepted the narrative that it’s all Bush and the Republicans’ fault, so Obama and the Democrats won’t be left holding the bag.
The left’s plan to make Iraq into another Vietnam has succeeded. One big difference, though, is that although the fall of Vietnam to the Communists caused widespread suffering and bloodshed in that region of the world, and undermined our worldwide reputation for being able to follow through and win a lasting victory and lasting peace, the winners in Vietnam were not planning to come to America soon and commit mass murder here. ISIS is.
Wednesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day
Wednesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Netanyahu gave a speech in honor of the occasion:
Israel reserves the right to defend itself against a nuclear Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday night as he compared its regime with that of the Nazis in his address at the annual state Holocaust commemoration at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
“Even if we are forced to stand alone against Iran, we will not fear. In every circumstance we will preserve our right and our ability to defend ourselves,” Netanyahu said…
The fanatic regime in Iran is suppressing its own people, and its aggressive actions through the region have “drowned in blood” innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the Golan border, he said.
“The Nazis sought to crush civilization and have a master race rule the Earth while destroying the Jewish people. In that same way, Iran seeks to dominate the region and to spread outward from there, with the declared intention of destroying the Jewish state,” he said.
Iran has a two-pronged plan of action, he said. The first is to develop its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capacity. The second is to use terrorism to take over large portions of the Middle East and to impose a Khomeini-style revolution, he said.
“This is clear to the naked eye,” he said. “This is all taking place in broad daylight in front of the cameras. And even so, there is still a great blindness,” he said…
“The determination that stemmed from the bloody lessons of 70 years ago have vanished and have been replaced today by the darkness and fog of reality,” he said.
“The civilized world has sunk into a coma” and is “lying on a bed of illusions,” he concluded.
I wish I could disagree with him. I find that I can’t.
Netanyahu added that he sees preventing another Holocaust as his responsibility. It does seem to be mostly on his shoulders, since the rest of the Western world appears to have abandoned Israel.
The details were different, but western Europe had abandoned Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938:
Czechoslovakia was informed by Britain and France that it could either resist Nazi Germany alone or submit to the prescribed annexations. The Czechoslovak government, realizing the hopelessness of fighting the Nazis alone, reluctantly capitulated (30 September) and agreed to abide by the agreement. The settlement gave Germany the Sudetenland starting 10 October, and de facto control over the rest of Czechoslovakia as long as Hitler promised to go no further. On 30 September after some rest, Chamberlain went to Hitler and asked him to sign a peace treaty between the United Kingdom and Germany. After Hitler’s interpreter translated it for him, he happily agreed.
On 30 September, upon his return to Britain, Chamberlain delivered his infamous “peace for our time” speech to crowds in London.
Hitler wasn’t happy with the Munich Agreement, though. Some people are never satisfied. He wanted to be a military hero, and ultimately he made it his business to be one. However, he had come to a conclusion about Chamberlain and the rest of Europe:
Hitler was furious. He felt as though he had been forced into acting like a bourgeois politician by his diplomats and generals. He exclaimed furiously soon after the meeting with Chamberlain: “Gentlemen, this has been my first international conference and I can assure you that it will be my last”. Hitler now regarded Chamberlain with utter contempt. A British diplomat in Berlin was informed by reliable sources that Hitler viewed Chamberlain as “an impertinent busybody who spoke the ridiculous jargon of an outmoded democracy.
The Russians also took note of Munich, and learned their own lessons from it:
Joseph Stalin was also upset by the results of the Munich conference. The Soviets, who had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia, felt betrayed by France, who also had a mutual military assistance treaty with Czechoslovakia. The British and French, however, mostly used the Soviets as a threat to dangle over the Germans. Stalin concluded that the West had actively colluded with Hitler to hand over a Central European country to the Nazis, causing concern that they might do the same to the Soviet Union in the future, allowing the partition of the USSR between the western powers and the fascist Axis. This belief led the Soviet Union to reorient its foreign policy towards a rapprochement with Germany, which eventually led to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.
Some agreement. Some “peace.”
For a different Holocaust remembrance, read this.
And by the way, if you ever get a chance to see this extraordinarily excellent film, please do. There’s a trailer for the film at the link; it gives you a small idea of how good the film is, but it gives away some important plot elements. The film also makes it clear that the Poles suffered a great deal during the war, too, and that many of them were heroic and acted with great nobility of spirit.
It is not as universally known that Hitler planned to kill all the Poles after the Jews, and then most of the Slavs, too. The Jews were just the canaries in the mine, but he did succeed in making Europe pretty much Judenfrei. A significant number of the Jews of Europe today (in particular, France) are more recent refugees from Arab countries. Note the irony.
Rubio and the youth vote
John Hinderaker at Powerline notes that Rubio isn’t just young, he’s culturally youthful:
Not only is Rubio a knowledgeable sports fan, he actually listens to rap, hip-hop and similar abominations. Normally I wouldn’t think this sort of thing would impress young voters, but this TMZ video might suggest otherwise.
Watching the TMZ video at Powerline, I’d say it’s got a heavy dose of mockery, too. It’s understood that Rubio can’t be all that cool (or whatever the word is nowadays) if he’s a Republican.
Hinderaker also notes this:
I understand that TMZ, or another such outlet, also likes the fact that Rubio married a Miami Dolphins cheerleader. Qualifications for the presidency ”” they aren’t what they used to be.
Indeed, they are not. Or rather, the qualifications are still the same, but what the American public is attracted by and will vote for isn’t the same.
Of course, this isn’t quite new; think JFK versus Nixon. But the phenomenon accelerated with the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008, and his re-election. Both campaigns pitted the young hip Obama against opponents who were about as unyoung and unhip as presidential nominees get, and Obama exploited those differences to the max. The GOP never understood his savvy ability to market himself to the young in venues the young like to watch.
Rubio might be able to exploit his own contrast with Hillary Clinton, with Clinton cast in the role of old and square, as well as white to Rubio’s Hispanic (although of course the Democrats will cast him as a “white” Hispanic, which means the “Hispanic” part doesn’t count).
Rubio also has a baby face, and looks young even for his age. In earlier years that probably would have counted against him in a presidential race, but these days it’s most likely an asset.
This sort of thing is the reason conservatives detest Jeb Bush
Actually, it’s just one of the many reasons. But it’s a pretty big one, IMHO:
Jeb Bush says that the Senate should confirm the nomination of Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general. A number of Senate Republicans oppose her nomination.
“I think presidents have the right to pick their team,” Bush said, according to reports of his stop at the “Politics and Pie” forum in Concord, New Hampshire, on Thursday night.
The former Florida governor made sure to get in a few digs at current Attorney General Eric Holder, saying that Republicans should consider that the longer it takes to confirm Lynch, the longer Holder stays.
Now, what’s wrong with Bush’s statement? Nothing much—that is, if it were the olden (pre-Bork) days. The Bork nomination in 1987 is often considered the beginning of the current hyper-partisan attitude towards nominations, be they Supreme Court or otherwise:
Within 45 minutes of Bork’s nomination to the Court, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork in a nationally televised speech, declaring,
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
A brief was prepared for Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Biden Report. Bork later said in his best-selling book The Tempting of America* that the report “so thoroughly misrepresented a plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility”. TV ads narrated by Gregory Peck attacked Bork as an extremist, and Kennedy’s speech successfully fueled widespread public skepticism of Bork’s nomination. The rapid response of Kennedy’s “Robert Bork’s America” speech stunned the Reagan White House; though conservatives considered Kennedy’s accusations slanderous, the attacks went unanswered for two and a half months.
Note the players, including Joe Biden. Note, also, how flatfooted the Reagan administration was. They had an excuse, though; the no-holds-barred virulence of the attack was relatively new—not to American politics, which had had periods (even in its earliest days) in which that sort of thing was relatively commonplace, at least for political opponents. But it was new in the mid-Twentieth century, which had been marked by a more civil tone.
Jeb Bush appears to be living in that world—which would be nice, if the left, liberals, and the Democratic Party were still living in it, too. They are not—and the left never was.
It may just be that the biggest difference between the moderate Republicans who conservatives do not support and those they do is this: whether or not a candidate understands that the left is playing hardball. Bush isn’t bringing a knife to a gunfight; it’s worse than that. He’s bringing a peashooter to a gunfight.
[* NOTE: Bork’s book sounds like a good read.]
In Georgia, dance is a combat sport
Here’s a great rehearsal video of some Georgian (the Russian Georgia, not the US one) dancers [hat tip: commenter “g6loq”]. Usually they wear costumes that make it more difficult to see their bodies. It creates a nice illusion but hides their feats (not their feet) to a certain extent. You can see the full effort that creates the pyrotechnics here
And ordinarily when they’re doing this stuff, at least some of them are holding—and throwing—knives. Real ones, as far as I can tell.
One of ballet choreographer George Balanchine’s (also a Georgian, by the way) famous sayings was “ballet is woman.” He was expressing his own thoughts as a heterosexual man, as well as a genius choreographer. I beg to differ; there’s a big big place for men in ballet, and not just as porters. But yes, there is something about ballet that particularly highlights the grace and line of the woman. Ballet is not egalitarian, either; the differences in the male and female bodies and what they do best in terms of movement and expression is profound, and ballet exploits them rather than hiding them.
If ballet is woman, though, Georgian dance is even more man. The video makes that crystal clear, I think. Dancing is not an effeminate pursuit; in most cultures, au contraire. It’s one of the ways men show their bravery, daring, strength, virility, power, you name it. And these Georgian guys? They’ve got “it” to the nth degree, and they flaunt it.
Tom Cotton on nuclear war and Iran; Goldberg on Iraq
This is a good interview with Tom Cotton on the Iran “deal.” In it, he suggests better alternatives, and speculates on the possible consequences of the deal as it’s currently being described by the administration. I suggest you read the whole thing.
The intervewer is Jeffrey Goldberg. I submit the following question of Goldberg’s as a demonstration of one (or several) of the many things wrong with the press today:
But we also talked about America’s role in the world and President Obama’s understanding of America’s role in the world, and we autopsied the Iraq War as well. Cotton did not take away from the Iraq War a lesson I learned, and that many Republicans also learned, which is that America is not expert at fighting long wars on complicated Middle East battlefields.
It’s not that Goldberg’s statement is incorrect on the face of it—of course we are “not expert at fighting long wars on complicated Middle East battlefields.” But what he ignores is that no one is, and that it’s not even possible to be. We’re merely the most expert people in the entire Western world—and maybe in the entire world—at “fighting long wars on complicated Middle East battlefields.”
What, pray tell, is Goldberg’s own expert opinion on what would constitute “expert” at something so admittedly complex? Would it be going seamlessly from strength to strength with no errors and almost no casualties? In other words, would it have to be a “cakewalk” to qualify (and please read my previous post on the complexity of war decision-making, as well as “cakewalks“)? How about World War II, whose very early years featured a series disasters for the Allies? Good thing Goldberg wasn’t around back then.
Goldberg also ignores the fact that by the time Barack Obama became president, the war in Iraq was under pretty good control, as even Obama admitted at the time. A small force left in that country would have most likely preserved those very hard-fought gains, but Obama (not the US military, whose opinion he ignored) nevertheless made the decision to leave Iraq entirely and throw the country to the wolves.
The article is well worth reading anyway.
How Lois Lerner evaded charges
It was really rather simple:
The Obama Administration’s latest gift to the former IRS tax-exempt chief came recently when U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ron Machen informed the House of Representatives that he would not file charges on its formal contempt citation against Ms. Lerner. This absolution, which shields Ms. Lerner from a grand jury probe, came on Mr. Machen’s final day on the job…
The House on May 7, 2014 held her in contempt of Congress and sent the citation to Mr. Machen.
The law clearly explains that the U.S. Attorney’s only “duty” “shall be” to “bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” Mr. Machen instead sat on the contempt citation for 11 months, and on March 31 sent Speaker John Boehner a letter explaining he’d unilaterally decided not to investigate Ms. Lerner…
…the job of making these legal calls belonged to a grand jury””not Mr. Machen.
Good soldiers in the Obama administration don’t get indicted, thanks to other good soldiers.
And no doubt they get rewarded, too. As a commenter to the article wrote:
How convenient! Had Machen not resigned his position, as a presidential appointee he could have been impeached by the same House of Representatives. that was no doubt part of the calculus.
I can’t wait to see what his payoff is going to be.
Timing is everything.
That’s true not only for Machen, but for Obama. Run down the clock, and hope the American people forget. To care, they’d not only have to remember Lois Lerner and what she did, they’d have to learn what Machen did and what it signifies. And then for that to matter at all, they’d have to connect it to not just Holder but to Obama and his possible Democrat successor, and turn against them.
Otherwise, as a very well-known public official once said, what difference does it make?
Done!
I took my tax returns, sealed in their pretty manila envelopes, to the post office early today. Got those puppies in there at 4:51 PM, with plenty of time to spare.
And now I’m singing and dancing [hat tip: Powerline]:
What shlemiels these mortals be
Yiddish is well-known for having a large number of words to describe various complex shadings of fool. The European Jewish culture that gave us Yiddish displayed an exquisite (and humorous) sensitivity to and perception about the failures and foibles of humankind, including our propensity to delude ourselves.
So here are some forty Yiddish words for fool—and I don’t think that’s all that exist, either. One wouldn’t think there were so many distinct types, but there are. For example, who hasn’t known examples of these two (although I’d never heard either Yiddish word before)?:
Nar: He left his law practice to become a clown.
Nayfish: A doormat. When he’s robbed, he apologizes for being short on cash.
As for Obama, try this one on for size:
Ongeblussen: A self-involved blowhard. If his last name is Moses, he thinks the Bible gave him a mention.
There’s also an entire strain of traditional Jewish humor that involves tales of the Jews of Chelm, who are portrayed as foolish:
The jokes were almost always centred on silly solutions to problems. Some of these solutions display “foolish wisdom” (reaching the correct answer by the wrong train of reasoning), while others are simply wrong.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a paraphrase of a line of Puck’s from one of my favorite plays, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The original goes like this:
…Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!]
On poets, celebrities, and politics
During a 1976 interview, author and poet James Dickey said this about poets and celebrities pronouncing on politics:
INTERVIEWER
Some of your detractors have mentioned the fact that they felt that you should use your influence, your place in the world, for the “betterment of man.”
DICKEY
If I knew what it was, I might do that. But I don’t know. There’s this tendency in American life to assume that because someone is good or maybe just notorious or publicized in one realm that he’s a universal authority on everything. So, Frank Sinatra or John Wayne can tell you how to vote. What competence do they have in politics? Or that a poet can tell you about ecology or something of that sort. A poet is only a professional sensibility. His opinion in politics is no better than anyone else’s ninety-nine percent of the time. But they’re always being interviewed and always being asked their political opinion: what should we do with the military, what should we do with the economy, with government spending, et cetera. Poets don’t know anything about that. If they did, they wouldn’t be poets. This is not to say that they are precluded from knowing anything about it at all; it is to say, however, that just because they are poets their opinions should not be paid any more attention to than anybody else’s. It does not give them any privilege or any insight or any clairvoyance as to the political and economic and military future of America.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t feel, then, that since a poet has a highly developed sensitivity about our universe and about our place in the world and our society, he should make public pronouncements about the direction our society is taking?
DICKEY
I think in that way lies madness. No; all he’s got is his own sensibility and his own opinions as a private citizen. But he has no privilege. Insight, yes. Maybe a poet could come along who could solve all our problems, but I haven’t seen him yet. The history of poets pronouncing on public issues is notoriously dismal.
It was the poet Shelley who famously called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These days any comparison to “legislators” might be considered an insult, but Shelley certainly didn’t mean it that way:
For Shelley, “poets … are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society…” Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is “arbitrarily produced by the imagination” and reveals “the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension” of a higher beauty and truth. Shelley’s conclusive remark that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” suggests his awareness of “the profound ambiguity inherent in linguistic means, which he considers at once as an instrument of intellectual freedom and a vehicle for political and social subjugation”
Shelley not only seemed to think poets have enormous influence in the world (poets were far more famous, and poetry generally more highly regarded, in his day than it is now). He also was himself a very politically active guy. And it should come as no surprise which political side he was on:
[Shelley’s father insisted] that [Shelley] renounce…his beliefs, which included atheism, vegetarianism, free love, and political radicalism; Shelley refused. The resulting estrangement from his father was completed when Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the 16-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. Shelley now sought a vocation: he went to Ireland for a few months to campaign for political reform; his poem “Queen Mab” appeared in 1813. The following year he met his hero William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, and fell in love with his daughter Mary, a radical and an idealist like himself. The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary later wrote Frankenstein and The Last Man, two novels that remain popular and influential today. Taking along Mary’s step-sister Jane Clairmont (daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin), Mary and Percy eloped to Switzerland in July 1814.
Like quite a few leftist radicals, Shelley didn’t have to soil his hands like the common man. He had an inheritance:
An inheritance from his grandfather of £1000 per annum in 1815 alleviated Shelley’s financial difficulties, which were often caused by his generosity to others.
Shelley resembled certain other leftist radicals in the complexity of his domestic life, in which he threw off the yoke of tradition and lived pretty much the way he wished. His behavior may seem familiar today, but imagine how shocking it was in the early part of the nineteenth century:
…[Shelley’s] domestic situation became very complex: Harriet, who had already given him a daughter, Ianthe, bore a son, Charles, on Nov. 30, 1814, after Shelley had been living with Mary for several months. A few months later (Feb. 22, 1815) Mary bore a daughter, who lived only a few days, and in January 1816 their son William was born. In 1816, Percy, Mary, and Jane Clairmont (who had reinvented herself as Claire and become Lord Byron’s mistress) returned to Geneva, where they met Byron and his friend (and doctor) John Polidori…After they returned to England, Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay committed suicide in October, and less than a month later, Harriet (apparently pregnant by another man) drowned herself. Shelley married Mary in December but lost custody of his children by Harriet to her family.
During his life, Shelley was by no means as popular as his buddy Byron, who was a rock star. But despite this, a number of scholars believe that Shelley’s political views were very, very influential indeed:
Paul Foot, in his Red Shelley, has documented the pivotal role Shelley’s works ”“ especially Queen Mab ”” have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although Shelley’s works were banned from respectable Victorian households, his political writings were pirated by men such as Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail for printing “seditious and blasphemous libel” (i.e. material proscribed by the government), and these cheap pirate editions reached hundreds of activists and workers throughout the nineteenth century.
In other countries such as India, Shelley’s works both in the original and in translation have influenced poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. A pirated copy of Prometheus Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized in that year by customs at Bombay.
So it’s possible that Shelley wasn’t just a megalomaniac, and that he did influence the course of political history. These days, poets seem to influence comparatively little—except for who will get published in poetry journals read moslty by their fellow poets in academia and aspirants to the club. Now it’s rock stars and movie stars who serve the function of shaping politics through the widespread influence of their point of view, which is almost always to the left.
I’m with Dickey on this.