Making music: on playing the cello

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to play the cello.

Well, perhaps “play” is too strong a word. I was chosen for the instrument (no, that’s not a typo; I was chosen for it, rather than the reverse) in fifth grade, at the public elementary school I attended in New York back when all such schools had numbers instead of names.

They tested us to see who had some musical aptitude, and for what instrument. Some of these tests were pretty simple. For example, one was as simple as “Are you a boy or are you a girl?” Stringed instruments went only to girls (Jascha Heifetz, eat your heart out), and cellos went only to tall girls.

I was a tall girl back then, although I’m not anymore (no, I haven’t shrunk; it’s the pictures that got small.) I reached my full height around fourth grade, and so in fifth I was still much taller than average, considered a good candidate for a big instrument like the cello.

And I could differentiate between on key and off, an absolute prerequisite for any stringed instrument. After all, on a cello, you create the notes; they’re not ready-made.

A few drawbacks to the cello: carrying it back and forth to school twice a week was an arduous task, especially when I had to carry hefty books as well (this was in that punishing interval before backpacks became standard but when bookbags after first grade were only for nerds.)

And, of course, as with all musical instruments, you had to practice.

I understood practicing in principle. I even liked the gorgeous rich mellow sound a cello makes, and wanted to emulate it. But the gap between that sound and the one I managed to create was too immense to be bridged, even in my imagination. In other words, I wasn’t motivated enough to put in the hours required.

Although I never really managed to make a truly pleasant sound, I did learn just enough to saw away at that cello in the junior high school orchestra, and even put in a couple of years with the high school group, where our repertoire leaned heavily towards Sousa marches that had no cello part (we were supposed to play from the trombone sheet music). I didn’t make much progress in all that time, and I quit in mid-high school, with no regrets. Listening to the cello was fine, but playing it held no special interest for me, and I haven’t really thought about it since.

Until the other evening, that is. I was at a meeting of my book group (great book, by the way: Cry the Beloved Country). A gleaming cello was leaning against the wall in the hostess’s dining room, and she told us she was just starting to take lessons, a lifelong dream. She gave a demonstration of what she’d learned so far—basic scales.

Afterwards, the cello was passed around so we all could have a go at it. And as it came close to me I felt a strange sensation, a certain feeling in my arms and hands of being about to start something familiar—and yet almost from a previous life, it seemed so long ago.

My friend who’d taken a couple of lessons had to prompt me even to remember the fingering for a simple scale. I took the cello from her, positioned my left hand on its neck and my right on the bow, placed the bow on the strings, pressed down, and began.

It didn’t sound like Yo Yo Ma, but it didn’t sound half bad. It sounded as though I’d actually played a cello before, once upon a time. My body memory had kicked in, and all these little habits sprang forth as though they’d only been hibernating all that time: how hard to press, how to move my right wrist back and forth in a wave motion, how to lean slightly on the inside edge of the bow with the downstroke and the outside with the upstroke, and even how to create a bit of tentative vibrato with the left hand.

Probably the sound was better than my old cello for the simple reason that this was a better cello: richer, fuller, more resonant. I’d forgotten what it was like to create music with my own hands, and to feel it vibrate in every cell of my body and every corner of the room. Writing is wonderfully creative, but there’s nothing physical about it except the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.

The creation of music is very physical. The most personal and direct form of that physicality, of course, is singing; there, one’s body is the instrument (dance, the art I know best, is even more so in that respect). In playing a stringed instrument the body is the medium that evokes and releases the music, but ultimately the creation of the sound depends on the interaction between the two.

I’d forgotten, but it was wonderful to remember.

FIDDLER JONES
—-Edgar Lee Masters

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off to ‘Toor-a-Loor.’
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill–only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle–
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Democracy, its spread, and the neocons (Part II: Iraq)

The New Neo Posted on by

Neocons are accused of having started the war in Iraq in order to further the naive and unattainable dream of bringing liberal democracy to the Middle East.

But the Iraq War was actually a multi-determined one—although the Left often seems to focus sequentially on whatever cause they might be critiquing at the time, pretending for the moment it was the only cause of the war, or at least the most important one.

I doubt that the goal of imposing democracy, in and of itself, would ever be considered a justification for war, even by neocons. The reasons for this war that were stated most often and emphatically were (in no particular order) (a) defensive: the idea that Saddam actually had WMDs or was developing them shortly and might give them to terrorists and/or threaten neighbors (b) humanitarian: the repressiveness and extreme cruelty of his regime, including sadistic torture and mass murder on a large scale; and (c) legal: his violations of the terms of the Gulf War armistice, including his lack of cooperation with UN arms inspections, which also of course ties in with the first reason.

But critics of the war routinely disregard these reasons—or, rather, they cite them only when trying to debunk them (“no WMDs”). They see the “real” impetus behind the war as having been to control that country’s oil (the complaint on the Left) and/or to impose democracy on Iraq (this is a complaint of both the Left and the isolationist wing of the Right, although each group complains for different reasons).

To the isolationists on the Right, neither humanitarian motives nor the goal of making Iraq a democracy would have justified an invasion. Only the idea that Saddam represented a substantial and uncontrolled threat to our security, or that of our allies, would have sufficed.

The Left, however, has traditionally considered that military intervention in other countries can be justified for humanitarian reasons. In fact, humanitarian reasons alone are often considered by the Left as sufficient for such intervention. So, why their objection to overthrowing Saddam?

Saddam’s rule was widely acknowledged as tyrannical and murderous; this fact is really not in dispute. So, to the Left, the invasion should have been overdetermined, not underdetermined; the fact of Saddam’s butchery of his people ought to have been enough. But the Left opposed the war from the start with such vigor that one can only conclude humanitarian considerations and goals were hollow in this case.

So, was it Bush Derangement Syndrome—anything the nefarious Bush does is automatically wrong? Alliance with internationalism and “old Europe,” which had its own reasons for opposing the war (hint: they were not humanitarian)? Or was it the fact that Iraq has strategic importance to the US (unlike, for example, Haiti), and that deposing Saddam could benefit us, making the prospect of doing so a self-interested one as well as a humanitarian one and therefore automatically suspect (only when a war is for purely humanitarian reasons, it seems, does it pass the Left’s muster)?

Or is it the fact that the Left likes to make a big to-do about its humanitarian goals, and yet almost always opposes the possible ways to free a people from an oppressive regime, such as military intervention or other means of forced change, such as assassination? (See this, for example.)

Once the decision was made that it was necessary to remove Saddam, the US faced the question of what its role should be in determining what sort of government might replace him. These were the choices: (a) walk away and let things sort themselves out without US help (likely to result in much bloodshed and a new tyrant of some sort, and perhaps a worse one); (b) in the time-honored realpolitik manner, install a dictator friendly to us who would crack down on the opposition in a Draconian way; or (c) try to help establish a functioning liberal democracy.

The Bush Administration choose (c) as the best of a bad lot (“bad” in the case of (c) only because of its difficulty in execution), and in doing so they made the error of underestimating the murderous forces arrayed against them. But those who criticize the decision are comparing choice (c) to an imaginary ideal alternative that simply did not exist.

What about the alternative of not going to war, and leaving Saddam in power (really, the only remaining one)? If that had happened, no doubt his own carnage and obscene cruelty to his people would have continued—and, on his death, would have gone on under the hands of his murderous sons, schooled almost from birth in sadism and power. And, when sanctions against Saddam were lifted (as they would have been—and fairly quickly, at that), all the evidence indicates that he might indeed have assembled a nuclear and/or chemical arsenal and given it to terrorists to use, or threatened his neighbors with it. These arguments about the probable results of inaction in Iraq are pooh-poohed by the Left, of course, who need to ignore them in order to maintain their own stance.

But why were all the alternatives in Iraq either so bad—or, if desirable (democracy), so very difficult to achieve? Some people are of the opinion that Islam is innately incompatible with democracy. But there are countries in the world (Turkey, for example) in which the two coexist, although somewhat tenuously. And Iraq itself has its own history with democracy: a system of constitutional monarchy somewhat resembling the traditional British one, with a bicameral legislature featuring an appointed branch and an elected branch, and a Constitution. This phase lasted approximately 25 years, from 1925 to the early 1950s, and was toppled in 1958 by a military coup that ended the monarchy and abolished the parliament. That ushered in the current era of dictatorships, culminating in Saddam, who had learned from the errors of previous dictators and consolidated his power through a long-lasting reign of terror.

Yes, Islam and democracy are a not an easy match, but they seem to be a possible one. Another—and perhaps more important reason—it’s been difficult for democracy to gain traction in Iraq is not any inherent and absolute incompatibility, but that fact that a population as traumatized as the people of Iraq have been under decades of Saddam have had their social contract broken. To use a therapy cliché, the country has become dysfunctional, both structurally and psychologically. Saddam unified the nation through force and through fear, warring against all groups who might be his rivals. Thus, the seeds of great anger and the need for payback were sown on the part of the victims, as well as the creation of a climate of distrust, one in which the use of violence had become the standard way of dealing with differences. And this climate had lasted for decades.

Another factor not to be ignored in the difficulty of establishing an Iraqi democracy is the influence of its neighbors such as Iran, who have a vested interest in causing instability in Iraq to spiral, and who see a golden opportunity to create a sphere of influence there.

The difficult task the Bush Administration took on in Iraq was not impossible, in my opinion. But it required a great deal: commitment to a fairly lengthy period of occupation, knowledge of the best way to go about the task in terms of balancing firm guidance with increasing Iraqi autonomy, the effective sealing of the borders, willingness to suffer US casualties that would be far greater than in a quick operation such as the Gulf War, and a US public who understood the long-term need for commitment and sacrifice as well as the possible payoffs of success.

It’s very clear that not all of those necessary elements were in place. Some deficits were the result of errors in judgment or execution in situations that could or should have been anticipated; some were due to the rise of unforeseeable circumstances.

But wars virtually always contain errors and surprises. I remain of the opinion that declaring “failure” in Iraq is premature, and that if the will were there on the part of the American people, Iraq could still—over a period of some years—become a functioning if imperfect democracy, with the ability to defend itself against internal and external threats. But I am not at all convinced that we have this will.

However, I am well aware the task is a difficult one. As far as I know, Iraq is the first time it’s been tried under these exact conditions. Can a nation that has been under the lengthy sway of a brutal and divisive dictator who is then violently overthrown by an outside force, a nation with divisive factions and a weak history of democratic institutions, lacking a strong sense of national identity, be rebuilt as a democracy after a war to depose that dictator? A further question, if the answer is in the affirmative, is what the minimal conditions would be for the success of such a transformation.

We need to know the answers, because it is possible that another set of circumstances might arise in the future–especially in this brave new world of rogue nations and international terrorism—in which we find we have no realistic alternative but to invade another country and try to rebuild it. My guess is that we can and should be far more cautious about doing so next time, both in our threshold for invasion and in the comprehensiveness of the plans we make—that is, that we learn greatly from our mistakes.

But, unfortunately, we may again find ourselves in the regrettable and dangerous situation in which all possible choices we face are very bad—and that the neocon agenda is (to paraphrase Churchill)—the very worst of them, except for all the others (although I will no doubt be labeled “warmonger” for even venturing to say it).

But the truth is that developments in recent years have made it possible, for the first time in history, for rogue nations and/or terrorists—or both in league with each other—to wreak havoc on the West. It used to be that such elements either threatened only their own people, or that the destructive power of their aggressive acts were limited by their own undeveloped technology. But technological advances in weaponry combined with modern communications and ease of travel, as well as an influx of money, have it possible for a small and fiercely angry group to obtain weapons with enormous destructive power, and to deploy them against the West, with the help of rogue nations and leaders who feel their own interests lie in such an attack.

Encouraging the growth of liberal democracy in the region would short-circuit that process, if successful. The big question is, of course, can it be successful, and what are the keys to that success.

Do the Iraqi people themselves want a liberal democracy? The high voting turnout in the elections can be seen as a “yes;” or, if one wants to be cynical, as a strategic effort to grab power for one group against another (of course, this is not incompatible with democracy; peaceful elective power struggles are part and parcel of it).

The evidence is that many Iraqis value liberty, however, even if they have no idea how to effectively combat the forces conspiring to deprive them of it. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, New York Times journalist John Burns, a reporter who has observed and written about Iraq for many years (and who is certainly no neocon), and who has spoken to a large number of Iraqis, said:

…so yes, I do believe, number one, that most Iraqis still believe that for all of the price they have paid, amidst all of this chaos, that the possibility of a different kind of future for the country that was opened by the arrival of American troops was net an advantage….

And then Burns stated the dilemma in all its complexity, including the fact that we don’t yet know whether the goal of liberal democracy is possible there:

[M]y sense of it is that if [the Iraq reconstruction] fails, that history may say it was mission impossible from the beginning, which is to say that when you remove the carapace of terror that Saddam had imposed on that society, what was revealed underneath it was an extremely fractured society which had never resolved the question of power, political and economic power…[A]n extremely complex, extremely violence-prone society, a society that has proven to be resistant to, not yet ready for, and maybe will not be ready for a very long time, for Jeffersonian democracy of the kind that the United States hopes to install there. We’ll have to see what history’s verdict is, but my sense is that Iraqis still, in the main, are happy at least that Saddam is gone, very unhappy about other things, but happy to see him gone.

Iraq has been a tragic country for a long time. It remains one today. But history has not yet given its final verdict on whether it will continue to remain so indefinitely.

Oh, those lying neocons

The New Neo Posted on by

[Apologies for the delay, but part II of “Democracy, its spread, and the neocons” will be coming tomorrow.]

Commenter TC asserts in yesterday’s thread on neocons and democracy that neocons lie for strategic reasons, and that Paul Wolfowitz actually admitted to lying to the American people about the reasons for the Iraq War:

You might recall…that it was Paul Wolfowitz’s own admission that the WMD story was simply the most ‘convenient’ one available – and that regime change, preventative (imaginary) war-was the real rationale.

In the above comment, TC is backing up this earlier comment of his in the same thread, in response to a challenge by commenter Ariel to come up with a specific instance of neocon lies:

It’s neoconservative doctrine–Wilsonian stuff–‘lying for the survical of the state’.

If you don’t know that than you don’t know anything about neoconservatism–for the neo-con’s the ends jusfify the means.

I don’t need to do research for you.

This is a common meme, and one of its favorite illustrations is the Wolfowitz interview statement that TC references, which was widely characterized by the MSM as an admission that the WMD argument for the war was only used because it was “convenient,” not because it was believed or was important.

Of course, as it turns out, if one actually does do the research for oneself, that is not what Wolfowitz really said.

Fancy that.

Even though this is very old news, I bring it up now because I think it’s both instructive and typical of the sort of distortions I’ve spoken of so often, and it’s also relevant to the series I’m writing at the moment.

Here’s a discussion of the issue at Patterico, and here’s the acerbic Christopher Hitchens’s take on the mischaracterization of Wolfowitz’s remarks.

What did Wolfowitz actually say (and see the full transcript of the Wolfowitz interview if you have the patience to wade though the entire thing, which I freely admit I have not done)? This is the statement involved:

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.

It is crystal clear that Wolfowitz was saying something quite the opposite of the MSM characterization of his remarks–and that either journalists have no reading comprehension, no ability to express themselves in English, or are purposely distorting his remarks; take your pick.

Wolfowitz is not saying WMDs were a cooked-up excuse or a meaningless one or even–in the widely disseminated headline about his remarks–a merely “convenient” one. He was saying that, in a bureaucracy in which many different departments with understandably different emphases are trying to make a policy statement together, it makes sense to emphasize the policy statement on which they all agree–and in this case it was WMDs. It was a real and important reason at the time (although subsequent events have made it clear that the intelligence relied on was deeply flawed), so real and so important that all involved happened to agree on it. Perhaps it was even the one reason on which they all did agree (and, by the way, count the Clinton administration and most of the world as in on that agreement).

We can–and have–argued about WMDs ad nauseum. The evidence is that Saddam didn’t have them, but the evidence is that he wanted to, and that he had the power and the plans to reconstitute his WMD programs as soon as sanctions were lifted. But that’s not the point here; the point is what Wolfowitz actually said in his interview and how this reflects on the issue of purported Machiavellian neocon lies.

It’s a meme that will not die, and it’s both connected to and symptomatic of the demonization of, hatred towards, and misunderstanding of neocons. It also illustrates the typical sloppiness of the work of the MSM, and the use made of that sloppiness by polemicists such as TC in spreading the word.

And now I’m going to quote Winston Churchill again. Yes indeed, I’m sure that, as another commenter pointed out, there are many who despise the man. I don’t admire everything he ever did, but I most definitely greatly admire many things about him, and one of them is his way with an aphorism. And it was Churchill who made the following wonderful statement, as true today as it ever was when he first said it:

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Democracy, its spread, and the neocons (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

Neocons believe that the spread of liberal democracy–democracy with safeguards for human rights and liberties–would be of general benefit to the US, to the citizens of the countries involved, and to the world.

Although I’m sure there are some exceptions, most neocons also believe that the spread of liberal democracy to countries that have not known it before, or that knew it only briefly and/or erratically, is neither inevitable nor easy. But they believe it is possible rather than impossible.

Contrary to the notion of some critics, however, neocons neither prefer nor require that such transformation to democracy be accomplished by force–a peaceful evolution, relatively sudden or relatively gradual, is far superior. However, neocons are unwilling to rule out force under certain circumstances. A circumstance that could justify the use of force would be a country or leader constituting a serious threat to the US or its allies, one that doesn’t appear containable by other means. Neocons most definitely do not advocate warring on nation after nation for the sole purpose of installing democracies.

About the desirability of liberal democracy itself, neocons tend to be in basic agreement with Winston Churchill on the subject:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence thought liberty was both the universal desire of all humanity and an “unalienable right” of all human beings, and that this was a “self-evident” truth. (This fact, by the way, was one of the reasons even the framers knew–and many wrote in their private papers–that ultimately slavery would have to go, and that retaining it at the outset of the establishment of the country was a hypocritical, strategic, and ultimately tragic compromise with the high principles stated in the Declaration).

And, of course, the value of liberal democracy is not all that self-evident to the numerous tyrants who readily deny people liberty–and even life–for their own purposes (as the Grand Inquisitor understood all too well).

Why do I bring all of this up? In my recent discussion of the reasons neocons are so hated, commenter Loyal Achates (not a neocon, to be sure) advanced this critique of the neocon agenda:

Neo wonders why the liberals could be opposed to the advancement of liberal democracy by military means, and comes up with a rather elaborate psychological explanation. A simpler answer might be, I dunno, that so far it hasn’t actually led to liberal democracy but chaos and ruin. One might well ask why non-Communists are opposed to providing food for everyone by collectivizing the farms: duh, it doesn’t work and people starve.

Actually, I was wondering something quite different, since I disagree with Loyal’s notion that neocons predominantly advocate advancing democracy by military means. I certainly don’t, and I’ve not heard of anyone who does. Nor do I think that bringing democracy to Iraq was the only reason–or even the major one–for the invasion of that country.

But let’s put aside those arguments for a moment while I address Loyal’s assertion that we know that the idea of advancing democracy by military means is wrong in the practical sense because it’s already been proven that it just doesn’t work.

Loyal compares the promotion of democracy through military means to Communist experiments in collective farming, in that he feels both to be self-evident failures. But that’s only true if you define Iraq as a failure at this point (I believe this would be premature) and if you discount post-WWII Germany and Japan, both cases in which liberal democracy was imposed as a result of those countries’ defeat in war (they both had a stronger prior tradition of democracy than Iraq did, but in both cases it wasn’t all that strong and it wasn’t all that liberal).

That’s not to say that Iraq and Germany/Japan are similar places; they are not. But there’s no denying that the present form of liberal democracy in both Germany and Japan are direct results of their defeat in war, and a subsequent occupation and rebuilding effort spearheaded by the US. So it’s at least possible, under certain circumstances.

Loyal’s “neocon agenda=collective farms=failure” analogy also breaks down if you consider the fact that we have a great deal of evidence in the case of collective farming, multiple and repetitive failures in both economic and human terms all around the world with no apparent successes; whereas the number of attempts to impose democracy through military means just isn’t all that that large. And, among that small number, as I said, only Iraq so far could be arguably counted as an actual or potential failure. The others are successes. (South Vietnam, by the way, doesn’t count, since we were not trying to defeat South Vietnam itself and install a liberal democracy, but trying instead to conserve a system already in place in the South–with some rather violent changes of personnel along the way–and to stop the North from taking over and installing a Communist government.)

Another problem with Loyal’s argument is the errors made in postwar Iraq. Whatever one believes those errors to have been (in my case, I think that paramount among them was the failure to get the looters under control at the outset, and the kid glove treatment handed al Sadr), there’s a general agreement that there were a great many of them. If this is so, how can we measure whether or not any perceived failure in Iraq might have been a result of those errors?

If the occupation in Iraq had been executed flawlessly in terms of tactics and Iraq was still experiencing the kind of sectarian violence that’s going on there today–then, paradoxically, this would be a stronger argument against the viability of the endeavor of establishing liberal democracy there in the first place. But the more inept the occupation is seen to be, the more any resultant problems can be regarded as flaws of execution rather than problems with the basic concept itself.

The bottom line is that it’s just not possible to tell much of anything from the single example of what’s happened in Iraq; as they say in science, the n is too small.

That’s not to say that Loyal couldn’t be proven right in the end, and that all future attempts similar to the one in Iraq, if tried (and they may never be tried), will inevitably end in failure. Maybe there’s just something about the endeavor that goes against the human grain in some basic way–as collective farming seems to–something that will make every effort ultimately fail.

But such a conclusion would be extremely premature. There’s not enough evidence at the moment to allow us to decide that all such efforts are doomed to failure, just on the basis of what’s happened so far in Iraq. And, in fact. there is some evidence that could lead us to conclude the opposite (post-WWII Germany and Japan). The preliminary answer might be that success depends on a host of conditions, including the previous experience of each country with democracy, whether the country has undergone the exhaustive process of a long war and a resounding defeat, whether it has a pre-existing strong sense of nationhood, how much effort and direction the postwar occupiers are willing to put into the process of reconstruction, how well they understand the particular conditions and demands presented by each country, and how much patience the American people has for the task.

[Part II coming tomorrow.]

When the mudroom isn’t just a place to put your boots, and oxblood isn’t just a color:

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Hansel and Gretel’s house may have had one of them, along with a thatched roof and a cozy hearth. In my student days, I lived in a rented house that had one in the basement.

But these dirt floors are different; these dirt floors are chic and upscale.

Or perhaps I should use their more refined name: earthenware floors. According to that linked New York Times article, they are more popular in California and the Southwest than in the east–well, who woulda thunk it?–although not exactly mainstream yet.

But don’t imagine that these are your father’s–or your grandfather’s, or your great-grandfather’s–dirt floors. These are installed by homeowners and/or “natural builders,” the greenest of green architects, who specialize in using materials closest to their natural state.

Modern dirt floors are sealed with linseed oil and beeswax to become “theoretically” (the Times‘s word, not mine) water-repellent. The floors are reputed to reduce heating costs, have an environmentally lighter footprint, and look attractive as well.

The latter quality is where that oxblood comes in–literally, in this case:

Aesthetically, earthen floors are “really special,” said Frank Meyer, a natural builder who has installed 15 in Austin, Tex. “After a while they look like an old cracked leather couch,” he said. “When people walk in, they don’t say, ”˜Oh, nice floor.’ Everyone gets down on their hands and knees to admire it.” Mr. Meyer has used natural pigment to create designs in some floors, and he said some builders add the blood of oxen for maroon coloration.

There are a few problems, of course. High heels leave their mark, even though the floors are finished within an inch of their lives. Dirt floors are not recommended for kitchens or bathrooms, for rather obvious reasons. And a certain Ms. Altenbach, enthusiastic owner of an earthern floor who also owns some matching dogs that aren’t house trained, indicates that the combination can get a bit rustic; she admits that stains are occasionally left on the floor. But she says the:

…imperfections just add to the character of the floors…Some of the stains show, but it only makes these floors more beautiful, like an aging leather jacket.

Yes, I’ve often noticed how dog pee adds a wonderful patina to an old leather jacket, haven’t you?

The intelligentsia, history, and the existence of evil intent

The New Neo Posted on by

Ruth Dudley Edwards has written an article that appeared in the Telegraph, entitled “Sleepwalking With the Enemy.” It’s about the tendency of so many in the West, especially the intelligentsia, to make excuses for and downplay the threats of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarians such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

Her personal background, as she outlines it in the article, positions her to see things a bit differently than some of her colleagues in the British writing world:

I grew up in the Republic of Ireland under an authoritarian religion that bossed about submissive governments; as a British public servant, I saw the damage done by pusillanimous jobsworths; as an historian of the 1930s, I learnt how the wishful thinking of the deluded intelligentsia helped Hitler and Stalin; researching a book on the Foreign Office I came to understand the limitations of a diplomacy that believes the best of everyone; and fascination with the wilder shores of Irish republicanism that I encountered at my mad granny’s knee led me subsequently ”“ as a journalist and campaigner ”“ to spend many years in intellectual combat with militant Irish republicanism, struggling, with some success, to understand the terrorist mind.

Another example of how personal history colors our political outlook. But the part that really caught my attention was this, her description of her experience studying that instructive first draft of history, the newspaper:

When I left the public service, researching and writing the biography of the publisher Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, and then a subsequent history of The Economist, made me realise how many clever people are fools…I read enough Times and Economist leaders written by Oxbridge double-firsts welcoming the encouraging signs of statesmanship emanating from Herr Hitler to disillusion me forever about the wisdom of the commentariat: the default mindset is still to resist the notion that evil exists and that when bad people say bad things, they may just mean them.

It does appear that there’s often something about the intelligentsia that makes them especially hobbled in seeing the existence of evil intent. And I say this as a person with some experience in academic life. Perhaps it’s some combination of the rather protected lives many intellectuals lead, the insular bubble in which they live; the hegemony of multiculturalism, and postmodernism with its moral relativity; the sincere desire for the world to be at peace, and the need for psychological denial in order to believe that goal is achievable–and, unfortunately, another factor one should least expect in academics, ignorance of history.

Getting Feith: Emily Litella, ace reporter for the WaPo, says “never mind”

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was in the middle of preparing a piece about the Washington Post article that described the Pentagon’s sharp criticism of Douglas Feith for giving too much credence to some faulty prewar intelligence reports of a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Rearching the post was interesting, as research often is. It lead me to read quite a bit of background about Feith and his detractors, including this New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, written in May of 2005, which contained the following interesting passage:

[Feith’s] detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well.

Remember, this was written nearly two years ago. Carl Levin has apparently been Feith’s Inspector Javert for quite some time. The current WaPo story featured Carl Levin in his new role as Armed Services Committee Chairman, finally able to stick it to Feith via this Pentagon report.

I discovered many other choice tidbits along the way: a much-reported (originally by Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack) quote from Tommy Franks that Feith was the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.

But then, in his own autobiography, Franks had written that he was only quoting others, and that what he actually had said was: Word is going around that Feith is the fucking stupidest…”

The whole tale was replete with that sort of thing. But one fact became crystal clear: Feith had annoyed people–angered them, even–with a personal style described as arrogant. That made him the fall guy for everyone, since there were plenty of mistakes and errors to go around–as there are in any war and occupation, especially one of this complexity. Those in Pentagon, State, the CIA, and the Department of Defense could say, who, me? No, not me; him! And Feith seems to be the favorite “him” to blame.

Perhaps where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Perhaps Feith really is–if not the fucking stupidest man on the face of the earth (remember, I’m just quoting here)–then perhaps the fucking stupidest man in the Pentagon, State, the Department of Defense, and the CIA.

Somehow, though, I doubt it. I bet there’s at least a couple who are stupider (ah, yes, and maybe women, too).

Feith doesn’t sound especially stupid to me in the New Yorker article–but then again, I haven’t ever worked for him. He’s quoted there as saying that, prior to the invasion, his group drew up all sorts of dire contingency plans for postwar Iraq, but that the military didn’t listen. For example, he warned them to prepare for serious looting in the aftermath, although his warnings were apparently disregarded by Franks.

Feith also proposed–well, let’s hear the stupidest man on earth tell it himself:

…a plan to train five thousand Iraqi exiles to accompany American troops in the invasion. Feith and Perle, who supported the idea, claimed that centcom subverted the plan. “Central Command saw the training of Iraqis as a pain in the ass,” Perle said… Feith did not argue that a force of Iraqi exiles would be a panacea, but he said that they could have aided in translating, in guiding, and in vetting local officials.

Well, although I agree it’s no panacea, I’ve heard stupider thoughts, I must say.

While I was mulling over all this furious buckpassing, I came across another error. This one had nothing to do with Iraq, however. It had to do with the story itself. The Washington Post had printed a correction, and it’s a whopper. It turns out that the Pentagon report in question had contained very few of the reported quotes about Feith, and none of the most serious ones.

In a correction almost as long and involved as the original article (okay, that’s hyperbole; but it’s plenty long and plenty involved) the Post said that the most critical quotes attributed to the Pentagon report had actually been issued by none other than Feith’s old nemesis himself: Carl Levin.

It’s a little unclear how reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith could have gotten the story so very wrong. Did Levin make the incorrect attibution himself? Or did they rush to print without exercising due diligence, or even minimal diligence? Or all of the above? How could they have mistaken Levin’s report for the Pentagon’s? After all, this is the Washington Post, not a blog; I bet they don’t work in their pajamas. But this error makes it seem as though they were writing in their sleep.

I’ll resist any “stupidest man on the face of the earth” jokes. But I won’t resist an Emily Litella reference: “never mind” seems to be the name of the game.

And I wonder how many who read the original story will ever hear of the correction?

Hating those dreadful neocons (Part II): Right and Left unite

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote yesterday in Part I, neocon-hatred is sometimes connected with poorly-veiled anti-Semtism. But there are many other reasons that some people on both Left and Right hate neocons. This post will, of necessity, contain many generalizations; I don’t mean to say that all on the Left or Right hate neocons, or even that all neocon-haters are motivated by the factors I’m about to discuss.

On the Right, paleocons have plenty of ideological disagreements with neocons. There’s a certain amount of anti-Semitism among a few paleocons (think Pat Buchanan), but more commonly there’s the idea that neocons have perverted the conservative agenda for their own nefarious and antithetical purposes. In other words, they’ve hijacked the party and infiltrated the mind of George Bush, wielding undue influence, hypnotizing him into betraying conservative impulses.

Paleocons believe in liberty and justice for all, but the “all” doesn’t tend to include anybody outside our borders, at least not though our own direct efforts. They are willing to defend this country—and will do so vigorously—when it is attacked. But otherwise, isolationism is common (although not universal) among paleocons. And, when not isolationist, paleocons tend to be of the school of realpolitik, supporting whatever dictatorship happens to be perceived as best fitting our interests.

President Bush has betrayed paleocons by being a big spender. But their perception of even greater betrayal stems from the fact that Bush listened to the siren song of the neocons, who managed to talk him into a costly and useless war that has, among other things, caused the Party to lose the control of Congress so recently gained and hard fought.

Another factor is that paleocons, unfortunately, don’t have much of an answer to the underlying problem of the rise of Islamic totalitarianism. This may be another part of the reason for their anger. Their traditional answer: pulling back, hunkering down—doesn’t cut it in the modern world as easily as it did even fifty years ago. This time, the enemy came here; in fact, it probably is here. The world forces that created Islamic totalitarianism are not going away easily, and the other traditional paleocon approach—realpolitik: supporting, dealing with, and in many cases allying with and helping whatever dictator happens to suit our purposes—has failed to contain it.

The neocons offer an alternative that goes against the paleocon grain. As for the justifications behind the Iraq War, the WMD argument is the only one a paleocon would tend to see as valid, and the postwar failure to find actual WMDs only adds to the sense of betrayal.

Some paleocons actually see neocons as liberals by another name. And they’re not that far off, in a way; neocons do not tend to share much of the cultural and social conservatism of paleocons; in this, many neocons do have more in common with liberals.

But of course, liberals seem to hate neocons even more strongly and universally than paleocons do. In a way, this is puzzling; after all, the neocon agenda involves the liberation of third-world peoples from tyranny. Is that not a traditional liberal, (and Leftist—although Leftists have different goals for any such “liberation”) agenda?

For liberals, though—at least recently—one of the subtexts of liberation around the world is that it must be altruistic and for humane purposes only. That is, our motives need to be pure. The neocons are considered much too bold about our own stake in the matter. Their belief that liberal democracy (meaning: democracy accompanied by guarantees of human and civil rights and liberties) is a desirable thing for those countries themselves is not so bad. The problem is their idea that this is not merely an altruistic principle, but rather that furthering the cause of democracy around the world would benefit the US, and that this could at times be done by military means.

Liberals see the neocon agenda as a form of imperialism and/or colonialism, another big no-no (see here for my previous discussion of colonialism and Iraq). That’s the underlying reason that wars of liberation are only defended by liberals if there is no US self-interest involved; that’s the only way the war would be free of the “colonialism” taint.

Any hint of self-interest is not only defined as colonialist exploitation in the economic and political sense, it also smacks of the violation of certain sacred cultural relativistic principles. Cultural relativism, originally a corrective to certain racist ideas of innate superiority, has slowly morphed into something quite different: a morally relative inability to make judgments about the actions of any country—with the strange exceptions of the US and Israel, who are always guilty, by definition. That way, the Left asserts its superior tolerance of others.

Liberals and the Left feel they have the corner on nobility and humanitarianism: it’s their territory. Those on the Right are defined as heartless red (not blue) meanies. So the motives of those on the Right when they cite humanitarian concerns are always suspect. The Right, by definition, is about money, exploitation, bloodthirstyness. Only when the Left wants a war of liberation can it really be one of liberation.

So we have the odd spectacle of watching liberals twist themselves into pretzel-like contortions trying to fit the old isolationist stance of the Right into the liberal agenda. People are supposed to get whatever dictatorship they deserve, I suppose; that’s most respectful of their cultural mores.

For liberals and the left, Bush Derangement Syndrome comes into the mix, as well. Even though he’s not a neocon, he listened to neocons. So those who hate Bush anyway hate neocons more because of their connection to him, and those who hate neocons anyway hate Bush more because of his connection to them–in an ever-increasing loop of anger.

This why liberals and Leftists who criticize the Iraq war must downplay the justifications for it given earlier by the Clinton administration, or the fact that it involved vioations of international UN agreements on the part of Saddam. No, it must be a solely neocon war, and its flaws are due to the stupid neocons, not just the flawed (and correctable) execution of a just and correct war that many of them supported when Bill was talking about it (such clips exist, by the way; I’ve heard them).

And so we have the interesting spectacle of Right and Left united—perhaps temporarily—in the chill grip or realpolitik and/or isolationism, and against the neocons.

Hating those dreadful neocons (Part I): cavils about cabals

The New Neo Posted on by

Neocons are the folks so many people love to hate. And hate to love.

To many, “neocon” has become an epithet. And this was true quite some time before the Iraq War.

Some of the people using the term that way haven’t any real idea of what a neocon stands for. Some have an idea, but it’s vague and/or incorrect. And, no doubt, some who hate neocons know quite well what they stand for.

One of the things that prompted this post is an encounter I had with a good friend of mine recently. She and I hadn’t discussed politics in quite a long time, after a few initial forays into the topic hadn’t gone well. She’s not very political anyway, and it’s not something I need to talk about, so we got into the “agree to disagree and leave it at that” mold.

I was stunned, however, when she brought up politics herself, much to my surprise. She was clearly agitated and quite disturbed by something; she was hemming and hawing as she said she needed to ask me a question.

Apparently she’d spoken to another friend of hers who’d insisted that neocons have a pernicious approach to, among other things, freedom of speech–to wit, they wish to end it. “Is that really true?” she asked me.

If I had then gone to my closet, taken out a Klan hood or a Nazi armband and put either (or both) on, I don’t think she would have been especially surprised. But instead, I tried to give her a little summary course on what neocons are about, including the fact that neocons actually don’t advocate invading country after country to accomplish the spread of democracy and human rights, and that the invasion of Iraq (although I don’t particularly want to raise that discussed-ad-nauseum-topic again here) was multi-determined; the goal of spreading democracy alone probably would not have been enough to have gone to war there. I also told her that neocons don’t necessarily support the exact ways in which the Bush administration has handled post-invasion Iraq, nor do they always agree even with each other.

And, of course, they’re all for freedom of speech. In fact, they advocate it. Because the type of democracy neocons favor–democracy with human rights and constitutional guarantees, so-called “liberal” democracy (ironic, that, is it not?)–includes freedom of speech, naturally.

The conversation ended–she seemed relieved, and asked for a recommendation for something to read to learn more. I mentioned a book I’m about a third of the way into, by Douglas Murray, entitled Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.

It’s one thing to disagree with neocons on substantive issues, and especially on strategy. That’s not hatred; that’s argument and differences of opinion. It’s quite another to consider them evil, and ascribe to them positions they do not advocate, although many do. This is an emotional thing; and there’s an emotional basis for it–or maybe several emotional bases (that’s why this is Part I; there’s a Part II coming).

As I said, this antipathy is hardly a result of the Iraq War; it was present beforehand. What’s it about?

It takes a different form than the rabid hatred of Bush, referred to in the blogopshere as BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome). BDS has to do with a perception of Bush as stupid, theocratically inclined (for the US, that is), anti-science, nuclear-mispronouncing and of course, warmongering (remember, he planned 9/11, at least according to my spam mail).

No, except for the “warmongering” part, the neocons are hated for other reasons. They are considered smarter, though just as evil, if not more (actually, Bush is often portrayed as their clueless dupe).

Neocons are widely perceived as Jewish. Although it’s certainly not the case that all of them are, it’s true that Jews are overrepresented among them. And so it is impossible to ignore or discount the influence of that perennial favorite–anti-Semitism–on the phenomenon of neocon-hatred, although of course many people who hate neocons will try to do exactly that.

Note, for example, the predominance of the word “cabal” in so many diatribes against neocons. Here’s information on the term, which means “a conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers.” And, of course, there’s derivation of the word, which is not at all obscure or difficult to figure out:

The term cabal derives from Kabbalah (a word that has numerous spelling variations), the mystical interpretation of the Hebrew scripture, and originally meant either an occult doctrine or a secret. It was introduced into English in the publication of Cabala, a curious medley of letters and papers of the reigns of James and Charles I that appeared in 1654.

But the use of the word “cabal” alone does not an anti-Semite make. One of the many hallmarks of anti-Semitism, however (almost a fingerprint), is a situation in which Jews are not allowed the same sort of leeway others are; when they are held to higher or different standards than the rest. So neocons are not allowed to simply be a group of people who share a particular approach to foreign policy–for example, much as the realpolitikers are–and with whom many happen to disagree. An approach which, like all approaches, is flawed, and leads sometimes to difficulties. An approach advocated by people who are sincere and well-meaning, but perhaps misguided, according to detractors.

No, they are evil plotters, bent on controlling the world for their own nefarious purposes, much like those Elders of Zion we’ve heard so much about:

…[The Protocals of the Elders of Zion] is an antisemitic literary forgery that purports to describe a Jewish plot to achieve world domination…Scholars generally agree that the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, fabricated the text in the late 1890s or early 1900s….he Protocols are widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature, and take the form of an instruction manual to a new member of the “elders,” describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation….It is still frequently quoted and reprinted by antisemites, and is sometimes used as evidence of an alleged Jewish cabal, especially in the Middle East.

The idea that a small group of plotting Jews are trying to take over the world has a long and illustrious history, I’m afraid. The plotters here are seen as incredibly intelligent and almost magically powerful, not stupid–although evil.

Hitler, of course, was perhaps the best example of one who ascribes wholeheartedly to the “evil Jewish cabal” theory. Here are some words he penned as he was about to kill himself, when all was lost for his glorious Reich. To his dying day, it was still the Jews, the Jews, the evil plotting Jews. This is the form the accusation took, which is the pertinent point:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked solely by international statesmen either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests…[F]rom the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew against the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its henchmen.

Am I saying that neocon-haters are Nazis? No, no, a thousand times no. But the idea that neocons are “an evil Jewish conspiracy” rather than “a group of people sincerely trying to come up with a solution to the problem of third world misery as well as the threat angry Islamic totalitarians present to us” is an example of demonization of those with whom one disagrees. Hitler represented an extreme of this same impulse.

One can certainly disagree with the solutions neocons offer in terms of theory or practicality or effectiveness. But that’s true of almost every approach to policy. It’s hard, however, to see how anyone could disagree with the ultimate desirability of the “neocon agenda,” if achieved–democracy and human rights for all, although one can easily disagree with the details of its execution (I certainly have). But demonizing the neocons themselves and their motivations, in the way of the neocon-haters, is quite another story, and indicates that something else is at play here.

[Part II tomorrow: other reasons behind neo-hatred, on both the Left and the Right.]