Martin Peretz is surprised…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by the fact that the guy who took over TNR, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, told Peretz he planned to do one thing with the magazine and has actually done another.

Surprised, Martin? Why?

I can’t read the full Peretz article at the WSJ because it’s behind a pay firewall, but Volokh has some liberal (ha ha) quotes from it [emphasis mine]. Peretz writes:

[The most recent issue of TNR has] established as fact what had only been suggested by the magazine in the early days of its new administration: The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.

That was hardly the fate I expected for the magazine. Yes, Mr. Hughes had run Barack Obama’s highly successful social-media operation during the 2008 presidential campaign, so a certain Democratic affinity was to be expected. But his assurances of open-mindedness in running the magazine inspired confidence. . . .

There is something strange about Chris Hughes’s journalistic vision. He has said in public and to me that he intended for the magazine no longer to be known as a liberal journal, for it not to take up only one side of an issue. Fair enough. An earnest expression of this sentiment is the fact that the magazine has stopped publishing editorials.

But maybe editorials are no longer needed, given the articles themselves. The magazine now seems to live in a space where those “little insurrections of the mind” are unwelcome. It is akin to the atmosphere in many colleges and universities: There are prevailing orthodoxies but they aren’t recognized as such. Mr. Obama himself is the main one. The president is an object of fealty at the New Republic in a way that Woodrow Wilson and even Franklin Roosevelt never were.

Welcome to the reality you’ve apparently been denying for years, Mr. Peretz. You thought you were creating an organ for the sort of fair, thoughtful, open-minded left that questions authority whether it comes from left or right, and that it could endure that way? That proves that you never understood the left at all, although you were part of it.

And you apparently never understood Barack Obama, either, or most of his hired hands, if you trusted them to do what they say they will.

Of course, this may all be some sort of reaction by Peretz to losing his fiefdom and seeing it taken over and steered in a new direction. It may, in other words, be more personal than principled. But although ego may have a bit to do with it, I think his surprise and anger about the larger issue is sincere, as well. Peretz’s sort of liberalism, including his support of Israel, has become increasingly out of date, and he may just be beginning to realize it.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

To all my ever-loving readers:

valentine

Did you receive anything? Did you give those you love anything? Do you consider this day just an excuse for the greeting card, chocolate, and flower industries to coax us in a rather unsubtle way to buy more stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Do people (mostly women, I’d imagine) get too demanding on this day? Is it a burden rather than a pleasure? Or do you love, love, love it?

I have an odd relationship to Valentine’s Day. It just so happens that, completely through chance and unrelated to the event, I’ve had some hard experiences on that day in the past. So I have no particular affection for it for historical reasons. Plus, as those who read here regularly probably know, for the last couple of decades I’ve been unable to eat chocolate without getting a migraine. Waahh! Woe is me!

But there used to be a wonderful Valentine’s Day candy that I’d look forward to all year: smallish sugar-coated red pectin hearts that were bright in color, cherry in flavor, and achingly, meltingly soft although with a slight toothsome resistance at the same time.

In short, they were perfect.

About four years ago the local store where I used to get them stopped stocking them. The owner said they were now unobtainable. I searched online but could find none. At the time, I knew who made them, but I’ve since forgotten. Negligent of me, but perhaps it’s really for the best. Why torment myself with searching for what was and can never be again?

Then again, does anyone know where they might be found?

This…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is somewhat encouraging.

I say “somewhat” because I don’t think it will amount to a hill of beans in the end. I predict that Hagel will be confirmed, or someone almost equally awful.

I say “almost” because it would be hard to find someone equally awful. But where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Somebody had a bright idea

The New Neo Posted on by

The email spammers know what they’re doing. The other day I got a spam email with the subject: “GET PAID TO WATCH PORN!”, thus deftly combining the two most successful spammer devices on the internet in one succinct and fell swoop.

Hey!

Want some money?

And wow, look at that porn!

What about those Roaring 20s?

The New Neo Posted on by

James Lileks offers his take on the 1920s. As usual with Lileks, it’s both interesting and fun.

It’s always kind of strange to imagine what is was like to live in a decade we’ve heard about but weren’t around for. I was very much around in the 60s, but my take on it would be very different than that of a lot of other people who lived through it too—the ones who thought it was both a hoot and a transformative time in which we young people were reinventing a far more wonderful world that would be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius yada yada yada. For me, it was not fun and games: boyfriend in Vietnam, multiple assassinations and riots. As for that wonderful world, most of the supposed revolutionary leaders I witnessed (and I did so in person, because I was intermittently around some of the centers of the action) seemed like self-aggrandizing, bombastic, nitwit nihilists. I saw no reason to suppose that any world they were going to have a part in creating would be an improvement on the one we already had.

The 20s meant nothing to me except flapper clothing, the Charleston, and the Crash. But my mother—who had been six years old at the decade’s beginning, and a high school graduate of sixteen at its end—told me something about those years that had stuck in her memory. It subsequently stuck in mine.

“The adults told us we were the luckiest generation in history, that we should thank our lucky stars because we’d never know war,” said this member of the Greatest Generation, who was to see the Great Depression and World War II in short order.

What had motivated her elders to tell my mother and her classmates that? Why, the Kellogg-Briand Pact had been signed in 1928, when she was fourteen:

The Kellogg”“Briand Pact (officially the Pact of Paris) was a 1928 international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them”. Parties failing to abide by this promise “should be denied the benefits furnished by this treaty”. It was signed by Germany, France and the United States on August 27, 1928, and by most other nations soon after. Sponsored by France and the U.S., the Pact renounced the use of war and called for the peaceful settlement of disputes.

It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone here that the pact didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to:

As a practical matter, the Kellogg”“Briand Pact did not live up to its aim of ending war, and in this sense it made no immediate contribution to international peace and proved to be ineffective in the years to come. Moreover, the pact erased the legal distinction between war and peace since the signatories, having renounced the use of war began to wage wars without declaring them as evidenced by the U.S. intervention in Central America, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, and the German and Soviet Union invasions of Poland.

US Secretary of State Kellogg was awarded the 1929 Nobel Peace Prize for his great accomplishment.

And co-creator Aristide Briand seems to have been an even more influential figure. He had already received his Nobel Peace Prize in 1926, for the Locarno Treaties, which ultimately met a similar fate as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Briand was a socialist and one-time Prime Minister of France, and might also be called the father of the European Union, because he proposed a prototype.

Today, it’s the water

The New Neo Posted on by

The buzz today is all about Marco Rubio’s water bottle.

Well, in a way, why not? There’s nothing new to say about Obama except that of course, as could have been predicted and as was predicted, he was more leftist, more aggressive, and simultaneously more ominous and more boring (which should be an oxymoron but is decidedly not). People are hungry (you might say: thirsty) for something real, human, and simple to sink their teeth into, and Rubio’s gesture grabbed them.

Gestures have a tendency to do that, and they can even be revealing—sometimes more revealing than the scripted words. Remember Bush 1’s watch and Al Gore’s sighs? Rubio’s water seems somehow more innocuous—at least as best I can tell from the sample of jokes I see around the web). And it certainly is a change from Romney’s bland smoothness.

Are gesture’s trivial compared to speeches? I contend that speeches have become trivial. Even though I don’t prefer to process information through the auditory route and don’t like speeches in general (and I’m equal-opportunity on that score: I didn’t listen to Obama or Rubio or Paul), I can recognize the fall-off in the quality of speeches between the era from Kennedy to Reagan and recent years, not to mention fall-off from the early days of the republic.

Also in no surprise whatsoever, a CNN poll found that 53% of watchers very much liked Obama’s speech and 24% somewhat liked it, and that those who viewed it were much more likely to be Democrats than the population as a whole. The rest, no doubt, are having difficulty stomaching both Obama and his speeches, and chose to spare themselves.

If you’re interested in content, here’s a piece by Ed Morrissey that goes into what Rubio actually said. But if you’re interested in the water (and who isn’t at least a little teeny bit interested in the water?), a picture is worth 344 words (the grand total in this post, at least according to my word count program):

[NOTE: The title of this post comes from this ad campaign.]

The problem with starting an alternative media on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been saying for quite some time that one thing that’s needed is to start an alternative media source on the right. Fox is not enough.

But there’s an inherent problem with that, and it’s not just the fact that it can be hard to find experienced newspeople who aren’t liberals. The much more basic problem with an alternative conservative media is that the media on the right has been so demonized—and any alternative media would be equally demonized—that Democrats and even many of those in the middle have been taught that it’s unreliable and will not watch it, and/or they automatically discount what it says.

Fox News, for example, is “Faux News,” and most people I know laugh when it’s suggested they watch it, as though it were a Pravda of the right. The funny thing is that they are unaware that the MSM they do watch is closer to the old Soviet Pravda at this point (although a voluntary one); they are unaware of their own susceptibility to propaganda and how greatly influenced they are by it. So any new media source on the right will be “Fauxized,” much as any new exciting conservative politician is Palinized (see what happened to Ryan, and what’s starting to happen to Rubio). It’s a full court propaganda press, in which the MSM determines for the most part what the valid sources are, and the right is by definition unreliable.

Periodicals on the right such as National Review, Weekly Standard, and Commentary are either not heard of by non-political-junkies in the middle or liberals (leftists, who tend to be quite involved, often know quite a bit about them, if only to counter them)—or, if heard of, rarely read. For example, I’m not aware of having any liberal friends who read them; I tend to get blank stares of non-recognition if I even mention them.

If you read my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” pieces, you may note that discovering these other sources of information and opinion was one of the sparks for my change experience. In 2000 I happened to stop delivery of all periodicals and began to get my media information primarily online. After 9/11 I became more interested in the news and read more than I had before in general, and I was so naive (and somewhat isolated at the time, having been recently separated from my husband and living in a new town) that I didn’t even know I was reading sources on the right when I read pieces from the big three, as well as newspapers I now know are somewhat to the right. But at the time, I just knew I was reading a lot of really interesting stuff that made a lot of sense, more sense than my old sources (NY Times, Boston Globe, New Yorker) were making at the same time (I had continued reading them, too, so I was able to compare). It was only much later that I learned, to my shock, that those new periodicals I was reading were on the right. I had previously known about the National Review, but not the others.

Believe me, when I found out, I was flabbergasted and really thrown. But the “damage,” as it were, had been done, and there was no turning back.

But my story is an unusual one. Unfortunately, it appears more and more that sources on the right, although popular, are a case of preaching to the choir, talking to the already-convinced. I’m not at all sure how that could be countered.

Happy 20th anniversary…

The New Neo Posted on by

…“Groundhog Day”.

Which is why I get to mention the movie again.

Perhaps I’ll take this opportunity to recommend this audio, which features some great reminiscences about the movie from actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who played insurance salesman Ned Ryerson (“Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy!) in the film.

Shlaes on Coolidge

The New Neo Posted on by

Amity Shlaes, author of the highly-praised (by conservatives, anyway) The Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression, has just put out a biography of Calvin Coolidge called—simply and appropriately enough, since he was known as a man who didn’t waste words—Coolidge.

PJ’s Ed Driscoll interviews her about the new book here. Well worth reading or listening. Here’s a sample quote from Shlaes:

So Forgotten Man was about the misremembering of the 1930s. Coolidge is about the misremembering of the 1920s.

Lots of misremembering going on, isn’t there? And remember, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

And sometimes those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it along with them.

Yes, Virginia, they finally found a Republican to run in Massachusetts to replace Kerry

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, two, so there can be—gasp!—a contested Republican primary. Now he needs to hustle to get signatures so he can actually qualify:

Gabriel E. Gomez, a former Navy SEAL and private equity investor, took out nomination papers Monday to run as a Republican in the special election to replace Senator John F. Kerry, according to the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin.

The move paves the way for Gomez to formally kick off his campaign, and sets up a contested Republican primary, pitting Gomez against State Representative Daniel B. Winslow, a former aide to Governor Mitt Romney…

Gomez, who is unknown but quietly gathering support from top Republicans, will now have until Feb. 27 to collect 10,000 certified signatures from voters to qualify for the April 30 primary.

In Massachusetts, Republicans don’t have a deep bench. In fact, it’s more like a rickety chair. That’s not surprising; it takes a special kind of person to take on a cause that seems lost.

Scott Brown proved it was at least theoretically possible to win, although his election featured exceptionally unusual circumstances: Obamacare anger, special election, telegenic Republican, particularly unpleasant and off-putting Democrat.

The whole thing puts me in mind of this song from the musical “Fiorello,” which I saw and enjoyed on Broadway as a kid. It’s got a lot of clever songs about politics in it, so I’ve never quite figured out why it’s so rarely revived and produced these days. My guess is that people would enjoy it.

Here’s the song “The Bum Won,” which features the New York City Republican Party operatives (yes, they did and still do exist, I suppose) reacting to LaGuardia’s unexpected win in the 1933 mayoral election as a reform Republican (although he could never have been called a conservative):

If you liked that, here’s another old favorite from the show. It’s called “Little Tin Box,” and, as you’ll see, it’s still topical because it’s about a perennial favorite, corruption. Enjoy!:

Not your father’s Captain Ahab

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you know that there’s a campaign by shark attack survivors to save sharks?

I can understand this in the abstract, if sharks are indeed an important part of the ocean ecosystem, although it still seems rather odd, perhaps a strange form of Stockholm Syndrome. I found the article because I was reading a friend’s magazine called “More” and saw this piece about a woman named Michelle Glenn who had survived a horrific shark attack, and who apparently is part of this movement.

I was stunned by the fact that, unlike the people who were attacked while doing recreational ocean swimming, Glenn had gone on an expedition to purposely swim with sharks and photograph them [emphasis mine]:

Michelle “Micki” Glenn wasn’t just scuba diving for fun. She and the 20 other tourists aboard Sea Dancer, a 120-foot dive boat, were on a mission: to photograph sharks off uninhabited French Cay in Turks and Caicos. They were all relaxing after the first dive of the day when someone suggested they snorkel for a while…

Drifting below the surface, Glenn was not surprised to see a seven-foot female shark just beneath her fins. [Her husband] Mike, who’d put on scuba gear, had swum deeper, taking photographs in the cathedral light that fell through the bright blue water and faded to dark purple and then black as it dropped away to the benthic deep. Five days into the trip, Glenn had become accustomed to having sharks nearby. It was one of those unconscious adaptations that we make all the time, but this was not a good one. Glenn’s emotional system had relabeled sharks””formerly something to fear””as fascinating creatures. “I love animals,” she tells me. A lifelong equestrian, Glenn says she saw the sharks as “powerful, graceful””it was like watching horses.”

Horses? As far as I know, horses don’t consider people food—although I suppose a kick in the head or other vulnerable organ from a horse can kill a person. Long ago, I had to dissect a shark in bio lab, and let me just tell you I was impressed by how unhorselike—and strangely “primitive”—it was.

From the rest of the story as presented in the article, Glenn seems like an exemplary person in many ways, and she’s certainly brave. But where does one draw the line between brave and foolhardy? I imagine that most people who do this “swimming with the sharks” bit are not attacked by a shark the way she was, but still—it just seems like a profoundly stupid thing to do.

Of course, one could say that of any risky and extreme activity. Climbing Mt. Everest, for example, probably has a higher fatality rate than swimming with sharks. And as long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, it’s her decision (and her husband’s, who obviously approves). Were there children? Other family? Was the experience worth the risk? It certainly wouldn’t be to me.

But then, I don’t ride horses, either.