Nixon nostalgia is au courant

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a sign of the weariness of our times that Elizabeth Drew reports in the Washington Post on the exceedingly odd fact that many who are sick of Bush seem to be longing for the days of Richard Nixon, whose Presidency is now enveloped in the warm glow of nostalgia about his relatively liberal domestic programs. Drew tries to nip this dangerous feeling in the bud, asking that newfound Nixonphiles place Nixon in the context of the times in which he governed and realize that he hardly had a choice, since he had to deal with one of the most powerfully liberal Congresses of all time.

Since I’m in New York City right now (and the Tony’s are tomorrow night), I’ll mention that some of this Nixonomania is currently reflected on Broadway in the play Frost Nixon (that title could use some work), based on Nixon’s post-Watergate interviews with British television personality David Frost in 1977. The interviews’ claim to fame is that Frost managed to elicit an apology from Nixon about Watergate and, according to this review, playwright Peter Morgan indicates that this was Frost’s real goal in soliciting the series of Nixon interviews.

Ah, apologies from public figures! The Sanity Squad talks about the phenomenon here; I personally think such apologies are vastly overrated; any interest I might have in whether Nixon ever apologized or not is purely psychological rather than political. The play—and the misplaced nostalgia—don’t surprise me, however; the past is often enveloped in its misty glow, and movies and plays are now a huge venue for the “learning” of history.

My memory of Nixon is that he was hated every bit as much as George Bush is now, perhaps even a bit more. Nixon-hatred predated Watergate, as well, just as Bush-hatred predated the war in Iraq. The latter two events merely gave the hatred a greater focus, but the original hatred had to do with a combination of personality and policy, with the former leading the way (remember, that’s “hatred” as distinguished from mere “strong disagreement”).

If you’re interested in a more historically correct (and “nuanced?”) reflection on the play and the genesis of the Nixon apology, as well as Nixon’s character, see this account from Robert Zelnick, a journalism professor and editor of the original Frost/Nixon interviews. In fact, although the play portrays Nixon as trapped by Frost into the dramatic apology, Nixon’s staff had entered the interview arena with the goal of just such an apology, and facilitated and coached Nixon in that direction.

It makes for better drama, I suppose, to bend the truth somewhat to make the camps more oppositional. But the truth was dramatic enough, and somewhat Shakespearean: the fall of the mighty, and the emotions of a man who had lost what he most desired—the good graces of history—through his own paranoia and hubris.

Of course, life is short and history is long. History is probably not through with Richard Nixon. As Zelnick points out, even in the ex-President’s own lifetime, Nixon’s rehabilitation had already begun.

Hot town, summer in the city…

The New Neo Posted on by

…back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.

Well, not really. But maybe a little sweaty, and slick with suntan lotion. I’m in Brooklyn, New York, for the weekend, visiting my family—including my elderly mother—and it’s predicted to reach the mid-90’s here today. So I did my exercising, a fast three-mile walk to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and back, early-ish in order to beat the worst of the heat. I succeeded, as it turns out, thanks to a couple of phenomena for which a walker in the heat can be especially grateful.

The first is shade. The entire way was lined with enough trees that I was never in the full sun for more than a few seconds at a time. Those few seconds made me realize anew that on a hot day shade can make all the difference between comfort and suffering.

The second is breeze. Still air is oppressive in the heat, but evaporation does indeed produce cooling, as my fifth grade science teacher avowed. Today the slight but constant movement of the air was just enough to take the edge off.

I also am pleased to report that the law-abiding dog-owning citizens of Brooklyn have made the sidewalks a pleasure to traverse these days. No more need to look down every step of the way to avoid the dog excrement that used to be so plentiful. Now one can look up and notice that here in NY it’s several weeks ahead of New England in terms of the flora. Roses are in their riot of bloom, and the hydrangeas are starting to take on blue tints. There’s an almost Mediterranean feel to the place, and the youngish girls are sporting those sundresses I saw in all the store windows about a month ago while I shivered and felt as though there would never be a chance to wear such things.

Blue meanies have Klein seeing Red

The New Neo Posted on by

Bloggers have been mean to Time’s Joe Klein. Awfully, awfully mean; read all about it in his alliteratively titled “Beware the Bloggers’ Bile.”

Beware, indeed. The blogosphere is noted for the ooze of its free-flowing slime. Although I try to keep a higher and more magnanimous tone in this blog, I can feel Klein’s pain. In fact, back when I was just starting to blog and had about three readers a day (and two of them were me), the very first mention of “neo-neocon” I saw on Technorati and Google were from other bloggers who were writing about me in rather nasty terms, offended by some minutiae or other about my posts.

One learns to shake it off. No doubt Klein—no stranger to the perils of celebrity—will, as well.

Klein seems to be especially surprised that he’s been the target of rage from the bluish Left of the blogosphere, since he’s a liberal and all:

…the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn’t move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed””especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable.

Agreed—-I couldn’t have said it better myself, and I might have said it a lot worse. And of course the Right, ruby-red (see, I can do some alliteration too) section of the blogosphere is far from immune; I’ve seen it happen there as well when a blogger doesn’t toe the party line sharply enough.

But then Klein goes on to say an extraordinary thing. In an attempt to explain why this is happening on the Left, whom does he blame? Why, the Right, naturalment! Most specifically, Rush Limbaugh, who is now apparently responsible, according to Klein, not only for Limbaugh’s own utterances, but for expressions of anger from those on the Left.

Talk about making excuses and not taking responsibility! Klein writes that his attackers on the Left:

…are merely aping the odious, disdainful””and politically successful””tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered.

Seems to me Joe, that this sort of thing predates Rush; the Left has always been doctrinaire enough to eat its own for breakfast if they dissent too vigorously.

And even if you accept Klein’s basic premise that the Left is merely following the Right—well, as my mother would say, two wrongs don’t make a right (or a Right doesn’t make a Left, or something like that).

And then again, if a nasty tone were all that it took to be successful on radio, why is left-wing talk radio doing relatively poorly? Certainly it’s not for want of enough bile.

Borges was right: the perils of Funes

The New Neo Posted on by

The laconic, elegant, deeply intellectual, and labyrinthine Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite authors, and “Funes, the Memorius” from his collection Ficciones is one of his best stories.

Borges had a swell of popularity in the 60s. I have no idea whether college students read him now as often as they did then, but I think they should. In “Funes,” Borges posits the existence of a young man who, as the result of a head injury, suddenly and spectacularly remembers everything.

But perhaps “remembers” isn’t quite the right word. He actually perceives everything with equal clarity and importance, and then remembers it. The problem is that Funes lacks a filter, and without one he can hardly live; he’s immobilized by his own receptivity to the confusion of the blooming, buzzing world (read the story to see how it all turns out).

And now the New York Times reports on research that backs up what Borges intuitively sensed:

…forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important.

So it appears that in order to remember we must forget, and that this “pruning” sharpens focus. The problem, of course, is that we aren’t necessarily all that efficient in choosing when to hit the “delete” button and when to “save” (if in fact it’s a conscious choice at all). But, as the article points out, the knowledge that judicious forgetting can be helpful might be somewhat of a comfort to us as we age and have more trouble remembering things such as phone numbers and even names.

That is, if we can remember the article.

Caught on tape: surveillance cameras and solving murders

The New Neo Posted on by

An arrest has been made in the Kelsey Smith case, another almost unspeakably tragic murder in which an attractive young woman was abducted in a mall parking area and the incident was recorded by surveillance cameras.

The facts of the case make it clear that those cameras were vital in fingering the alleged perpetrator. Not only was Ms. Smith’s abduction apparently taped, but the suspect’s arrival at the store and his vehicle were likewise identified by the cameras. It is highly possible that, but for those cameras, this case would have forever gone unsolved.

Surveillance cameras have been proliferating for quite some time now. Many strict libertarians aren’t so sure they like them or that they’ll always be used properly, and it’s not totally clear whether they have the deterrent effect proponents claim, although it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that they would. But there’s little doubt that they have had an impact on solving crimes.

It’s frustrating to know that the beginnings of a crime as heinous as this one can be recorded without anyone being able to see it at the time and, more importantly, to stop it. Passively watching, ex post facto, as an innocent and beloved teenager gets abducted in a Target parking lot by what turns out to be her murderer isn’t what police prefer to do.

But there’s no way that all cameras could be monitored in real time, just as anyone who really thought about the notorious telescreens in Orwell’s 1984 would have to conclude that, unless half the population were engaged in continually monitoring the other half (and then who would watch the watchers?) it just couldn’t be effectively done—except for its deterrent value, which might be enough.

To counter this problem, some surveillance cameras today are becoming “smarter,” detecting atypical movement patterns and calling attention to them by alerting a human operator (of course, for that to work, there must be at least one human operator around).

The machines are smart, but people—including perpetrators—are smart as well. Humans have found ways to thwart the cameras, but designers of the devices find ways to counter the humans, something like the race between bacteria and advances in antibiotics.

It’s cold comfort in a case such as Kelsey Smith’s that the cameras recording the horror that led to her death were mute bystanders only able to document it. But by doing so they may have led to the arrest of her murderer, and the prevention of another such act.

The Twilight Zone: the episode of the phantom doorbells

The New Neo Posted on by

This morning my doorbell rang at 6:15 AM.

And rang. And rang and rang and rang.

I don’t usually have visitors at that hour of the day, announced or un. I live in a quiet residential neighborhood and it’s rare that my doorbell rings at all, unless it’s an expected guest. Six-fifteen AM is not an hour when I’m usually awake, and if even the phone rings at that time I consider it Bad News.

When I collected myself enough to understand that yes, indeed, my doorbell was in fact actually ringing, and rather insistently at that, I had to decide whether or not to answer it. My front door has one of those peepholes that allow you to view the visitor, but when I looked out there was no one there. So I decided to forget about it.

Ten minutes later it happened again. This time I glanced out an upstairs window to see whether I could ascertain who was standing there at this highly unusual hour. My view was partially obstructed, so I didn’t know for sure, but I wasn’t able to see anyone. I looked through the door peephole again, and saw nothing but the house across the street. So perhaps my visitor was a young child, a dwarf, or a specter that had somehow (as in the movie “Ghost”) managed to bridge the gap between the spirit and material worlds to make a physical impression on the latter.

There’s a deck off my bedroom, and so I went outside to view the early morning street. It was spectacularly lovely; sunny and a bit cool, filled with garden fragrances. In front of my house was a teenaged boy with a heavy backpack, bowed head and loping walk, trudging off to a day of school. Could it have been he, playing some sort of strange prank?

A runner in shorts sped by, full of energy surprising for this time of day. My neighbor, a hyper-fit triathlete and mother of three who looks about eighteen herself, was warming up for her run (or it might have been her bike ride, who knows?). I called out to her from my deck and explained what had been happening. She went into her house to ask her family if they’d seen any suspicious activity, but immediately came out again to say that her doorbell had just started to ring.

And then mine rang again, almost in unison. We laughed, and I told her I sensed a tremor in the force field, and then started humming the “Twilight Zone” theme.

Those of you who’ve only seen the show in reruns can’t begin to understand how wonderful it was, how very mind-blowing (even though that phrase hadn’t yet been invented) to its mostly young fans, including me. From the very first episode it tapped into what Rod Serling called—in his clipped, incisive, quietly riveting voice—“a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”

Wondrous, indeed; mysterious, and ever-so-slightly—and deliciously—terrifying. The black-and-white cinematography only added to the effect, which was considerable. The show’s formula was to build suspense and then add a twist, one the viewers knew was coming but the details of which (in those more naive days) could almost never be guessed.

Many of the episodes were so memorable that those of us who are of a certain age can refer to them in shorthand and instantly know what we’re talking about. “The Hitchhiker” made quite a few women of that generation think twice about traveling alone cross-country in a car. “The Eye of the Beholder” was an early commentary on plastic surgery and conventional ideas about good looks, with the requisite surprise ending, of course. “The Invaders” managed to work a startling reversal on the classic space-alien-invasion story without using a single word for its entire length. Time travel was a favorite, as was psychology (I can still hear the tinny, gurgling voice of the slot machine seductively warbling “Franklin, Franklin…” to the gambling-obsessed protagonist in “The Fever“).

Maybe nowadays I’d be able to guess the endings; I don’t know, and I’ll never know, because I remember most of the episodes to this day (yes, indeed, the mind is cluttered with irrelevancies and trivia and all that). At the time, however, they were a stunning revelation to that child and then young teenager I was when I first watched them and felt that delicious thrill.

Iraq: will words help?

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up admirably:

Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t.

The responsible Left hears the question and answers that it is not critical. The irresponsible Left doesn’t care, because it feels the West itself is a blight on the world and wouldn’t mind that it be defeated and replaced by—well, by some sort of Utopian and impossible dream or other, or perhaps just said Leftists in charge.

Some on the Right also feel the answer is that it is not. I, like Hanson, feel that it is indeed critical—but not necessarily critical in the sense that failure there would be irreparable. I think we are stronger than that, although of course I could be wrong. My opinion is that failure there would increase the cost immensely both for us and for the enemy, and that these new payments could be so bloody that it would make the Iraq War look like a quaint tea party.

The same, of course, was true at Munich. The death of many millions could have been avoided if only—if only. Instead, humble and flawed human beings (of which I am one, as is every prognosticator on the other side and every commenter here) can only do the best they can to look at the situation and try to plot the best course of action for the future, knowing we can never predict it properly.

Hanson, a writer and thinker I admire tremendously, says quite a few other things in his National Review piece that I think are to the point. One involves the intelligence of the enemy and their ability to use our own technological advances against us:

We create sophisticated communications at great cost and investment; the parasitical terrorists simply bore into them and use them at no cost and sometimes with greater effect than do their inventors.

Indeed. And he is also eloquently spot on in describing the terrorists’ knowledge of the general Western mindset and impatience, as well as the sad-but-true fact that it is far easier (always) to destroy than to create, and takes far fewer people.

I disagree, however, with his remedy. Hanson is more optimistic than I about the power of improved communication on our end, and for everyone’s sake I hope he is more correct than I as well. He writes that [my emphasis]:

…unless explained, most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport. The war to remove Saddam was won and is over; the subsequent and very different war in Iraq that followed is for nothing less than the future of the Middle East ”” and now involves everything from global terrorism and nuclear proliferation to the world’s oil supply and the future of Islam in the modern world. We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche….we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake ”” in a strategic and humanitarian sense ”” and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it…The more brutal honesty, the less euphemism and generalities, the more Americans will accept the challenge.

Funny thing, but I’ve heard those explanations coming from this administration. Perhaps because they were delivered by Bush’s un-eloquent voice, or his much-hated persona, they could not be heard. Perhaps the press coverage wasn’t good enough, or sympathetic enough. Or perhaps too many people weren’t ready to hear the message, especially if the execution of the task wasn’t perfect, swift, and easy.

Perhaps Hanson is right, though. If so, I hope the next administration, be it Republican or Democrat, will be able to convey the message in a way that the American people can finally hear it.

But I think it will take more than a well-articulated message. Possibly that would have been enough earlier, but by now so many people may have turned so far away from hearing what is at stake that I don’t think even a leader such as Churchill could deliver it properly at this point. I think that actions will speak much louder than words, in the end, and unfortunately those actions might be terrible enough to grab our attention and fills us with a “terrible resolve.”

Garden pride

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the time of garden hope and burgeoning garden pride. It’s the honeymoon when everything is going well and the bugs haven’t arrived yet for their tasty meals, nor has the drought browned and crisped the foliage, nor have the weeds taken over and the gardener given up the struggle against them.

To those who don’t garden (and until a few years ago I counted myself among their ranks) this sort of post seems a bit quaint and more than a little dull. My apologies. But to those of us who garden or who like flowers, especially in the short and therefore greatly-appreciated gardening season in the Northeast, it’s a deeply satisfying time of year.

And so, without further ado, I’ll show you what I mean:

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shade2.jpg

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And I think even Van Gogh might be pleased with this one:

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Defending Chavez: enemy of their enemy

The New Neo Posted on by

I was thinking of Hugo Chavez recently because I was at a party Saturday night and his name came up in a rather odd context. I noticed a youngish women carrying a fluffy white dog in her arms. I went over to admire the pooch, a very amiable animal. When I asked its name, her answer was “Hugo Chavez.”

I wondered why the moniker, and the owner said that, although when Chavez came to the UN and called Bush a “devil” he wasn’t exactly exercising good diplomacy, she admired him for telling the truth and she wanted to pay tribute to him in some small way. I’m not so sure naming a small curly-haired dog after Chavez is really a form of homage, but I asked what she thought of Chavez now. Her answer was rather evasive; she said she knew some Venezuelans who liked him and some who didn’t like him.

No doubt. But when I asked her whether they’d changed their minds since the recent closing of the TV station, she said she hadn’t spoken to them since that had happened. But clearly she was predisposed to like and to defend Chavez.

This may seem a small thing. But the incident pointed out to me the ubiquity of the old adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Chavez is clearly a dictator who has imperiled the democratic process in Venezuela, and anyone on the right or the Left who truly believes in democracy should have no problem recognizing that. But hey, he called Bush a devil, so he can’t be all that bad, can he?

And then today I read Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club’s post pointing out the fascinating spectacle of figures on the British Left (including some journalists) defending Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s war against the dissenting media in his country.

Hypocrisy and double standards are certainly not the sole province of the Left; I’m well aware that the Right is capable of such things as well. But this seems to be an especially egregious case, as Fernandez points out in a later comment to the thread:

A lot of people in the media argue that “giving the other side a voice” is part of their job. Nor would they concede that a news outlet can be guilty of “abetting” anything until it is proven in court. It seems to me that the closed TV stations have been nowhere convicted — and here is the irony — except in sections of the Western press itself.

And what is so amazing is the sight of people like Pilger justifying a level of media censorship he would never consent to be applied to himself. You have the spectacle of professional journalists cheering the shutdown of large sections of a country’s media industry simply because because it is politically convenient.

Lest you think Pilger’s opinion is irrelevant, please read this for some of the man’s history. Like quite a few of today’s Leftists, he’s been a journalist since the days of Vietnam. If you read the linked article, you’ll notice that back then Pilger was responsible for the meme that US bombing of Cambodia caused the rise of Pol Pot and that therefore America was implicated in the horrific killings that followed. That line of argument is accepted as an article of faith by the Left and even by most liberals today. It’s been exceedingly influential, and yet it rests strongly on the undocumented evidence of the utterly partisan, socialist-leaning, and far-Left Pilger. Thanks to our guarantee of freedom of the press—which I of course support—Pilger is free to say whatever he wishes and would defend his own right to do so as well as Chavez’s right to do the opposite. Go figure.

Read Pilger’s recent love letter to Hugo Chavez. Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder, and Pilger is glowing in his praise of this enemy of his enemy:

In the time I spent with Chavez, what struck me was how un-self-consciously he demonstrated his own developing political awareness. I was intrigued to watch a man who is as much an educator as a leader….What he’s clearly doing is building ordinary people’s confidence in themselves. At the same, he’s building his own political confidence and his understanding of the exercise of power.

Well, I certainly have no quarrel with that last sentence. Chavez understands the exercise of power, as does Pilger.

Blog talk radio: dancing and leadership (not necessarily connected)

The New Neo Posted on by

I was a guest of blogger Fausta‘s today on Blog Talk Radio (click here for the audio). You’ll hear a lighter side of neo-neocon, especially the first half of the show, in which ex-ballet student Fausta and I compare notes on our rough days in the tough dance trenches. Really, it was brutal.

In the second half we discuss leadership and how difficult and rare it is to demonstrate that quality these days.