Once again, do cry for Venezuela

The New Neo Posted on by

Chavez, that populist champion of the common man, has followed the path of hubris to close the most popular TV station in Venezuela, the 53-year-old RCTV.

Why? He accused the station of supporting the 2002 coup against him, of some apparently trumped-up violations, and of fostering capitalism with its soap operas. The people of Venezuela will now have to be satisfied with the sterner stuff of state TV, which will replace it.

I doubt this particular move will enhance Chavez’s popularity. But since abolishing certain constitutional guarantees and consolidating his power, he no longer needs to be popular, and the people of Venezuela may find they don’t have much to say about it anymore except to protest and have water cannons fired at them.

[Daniel in Venezuela has much more, and it’s not pretty. And Fausta has a podcast.]

Memorial Day: mourning the war dead, honoring the war dead

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Before Memorial Day became a national three-day weekend in 1971 and the official kickoff to summer festivities, it was Decoration Day.

I’m not all that ancient, but my earliest recollection of the holiday is of the latter name. It was a day on which people brought flowers and flags to graves of the war dead, and maybe held a parade featuring some tottering old vets and their strange hats.

One also might be stopped by an elderly gentleman selling a poppy. Not a real poppy, but one made of crepe paper. This somehow had to do with the whole thing as well, but exactly how I didn’t know. That mystery was cleared up in fifth grade, when our poetry-forcefeeding teacher (see this) made us memorize the poem “In Flanders Fields:”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place…

The poppies had to do with mourning for the dead, this much I knew, and the poem related to a huge battle of World War I, a war that was never given much attention in our American history classes (I had to learn about it on my own, later). Like much of the poetry we learned in grade school, the poem isn’t good poetry; it’s really propaganda verse. But as such it gets its message across loud and clear.

That message is of loss and mourning for the war dead, true enough. But the larger message is that they died for a reason, and the corollary is that mourning then is an empty exercise if it doesn’t take account of the context of their sacrifice and follow through on it:

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep…

Call it jingoistic, call it hawkish, call it simplistic. But it points out something I’ve been thinking of this Memorial Day, and that is that although mourning the loss of the war dead is absolutely part of the day, that’s not the same as honoring them.

There’s enormous disagreement on how best to do this “honoring.” Some think protests at Memorial Day parades is the best way to “support the troops.” Some (and I am among them) agree with President Bush when he said in a Memorial Day speech at Arlington: “Our duty is to make sure this war was worth the sacrifice.” And part of that process is to continue to have the will to do so, and to change tactics when necessary and give a new approach time to work.

Yesterday I saw a special on Fox News about a group of 80-something WWII vets returning to the beaches of Normandy where they had landed on D-Day. One of the things that caused these tough old guys to tear up as they gazed at the now-tranquil sands of Omaha was speaking of the memory of their comrades who had died all too young on those beaches. The other was receiving the tributes from the locals, including young people who had no personal memory of the terrible ordeal that was WWII. One of the vets waved his hand at the group of smiling children and said that this, this was why we did it.

David Corn explains it all: the Democrats can’t count

The New Neo Posted on by

I wondered here why the Democrats pursued a “withdraw the troops” strategy they knew was doomed to failure with a President who was bound to veto every bill they sent with no hope of override. This particular post-mortem on the Democrats’ “cave,” written by David Corn (a liberal himself), offers an explanation: he says they can’t count.

He writes that the Democrats tried to have it both ways—end the war and support the troops, withdraw and be perceived as not caving, a high-wire balancing act of oxymorons—and that it can’t be done, at least not with the “strategy” they mapped out.

True. But since I believe the Democrats actually can count (and of course Corn was being facetious–wasn’t he?), what really was behind this seeming obtuseness, which has left them looking weak and divided?

Well, as Corn writes, it’s the fact that they are divided. They never had the Republican votes needed to override the veto, but they never even had the Democratic ones, either. In the end, many of their ranks defected in order to avoid being perceived as weak on defense. And the Democratic leadership should have known in the first place that this was going to happen.

Of course, it might be that not only did those Democrats voting for troop funding not want to be perceived as weak on defense, they really wanted to not be weak on defense. I still believe that some members of Congress operate more on principle than on politics, although those who do risk becoming endangered species, for obvious reasons.

What’s behind the Democratic miscalculation, if not a literal inability to do the math? I have come to the conclusion that their leaders aren’t very good at understanding the limits of their own power in their own party.

Why they have this lack I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to be a mathematical problem. Perhaps it’s the result of the hubris and pride that often comes to the powerful of all persuasions and all parties. It takes a certain skill to lead a group of legislators and keep them on board, and part of that skill is knowing how far you can take them before they will bolt. That’s more than a matter of arithmetic, it’s one of psychology, and I think Reid and Pelosi may be a bit tone-deaf in that department. They may be able to count heads, but I don’t think they can account for minds.

To the border: the descent of spam

The New Neo Posted on by

My email spam folder grows larger by leaps and bounds; now it takes only a day or two for it to reach the two hundred mark. I enter with hip waders on and quickly skim the subject titles before deleting them, because every now and then a bona fide communication gets stuck in there and I want to fetch it. Otherwise, I’d rather not in go there at all, thank you very much.

But this process allows me to keep track of spam trends, and in recent months there’s been a very disturbing one. Oh yes, the messages from distressed daughters of deceased minor imaginary third-world officials wanting my help (“Beloved one”) to liberate some money are still in there, as well as the canceled e-bay accounts I never had, notices from pseudo-banks, all sorts of stuff about mortgages, and rhapsodies on the benefits of green tea. Oh, and of course, the major ones: buying drugs, sex in general, and a thousand creative varieties of penile enhancement in particular.

But I’m not talking about those. I’ve grown used to those. No, I’m talking about ads for incest. Or, rather, I would assume–since I’m not clicking on them and never will click on them–ads for websites that feature photos of what purport to be incest.

The titles of the emails–which I will not reproduce here–are very graphic and changeable, but they always refer to incest in one of various forms. And I find this development to be exceedingly puzzling because, at least as far as I know, incest is not a source of titillation for most people, but rather a turnoff.

Freud may indeed have felt that some sort of incestuous feeling underlay human sexual motivation, but way underneath, so far underneath that it was turned into something else. Most of us experience revulsion at the very thought.

The fact that spammers have decided that graphic representations of incest would appeal to people is not a good sign. What does it mean? In reminds me of those attempts to serve esoteric foods to revive the faded palates of royals who’ve eaten too many delicacies in their lives and are bored, bored, bored: tongues of hummingbirds, monkey brains, that sort of thing. Whether these culinary stories are apocryphal or not doesn’t matter; it’s the principle that I’m talking about, and that is the fact that the spammers are trying to appeal to the jaded palates of people who’ve grown used to ordinary pornography and find it lacking in pizzazz.

And this reminds me–as do so many things, it turns out–of the work of Milan Kundera, especially the last chapter of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, entitled “The Border.” The border to which Kundera refers is manifold, but part of it concerns the line where rampant and indiscriminate sexuality (either in the name of hedonism or the name of liberation) becomes stripped of meaning and depth–and in fact, in the end, of sensation itself.

The spammers have crossed the border, I’m afraid.

Muslim moderates, Muslim secularism

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Here’s a must-read (and it’s relatively short, too) by Robert Spencer on the topic of Muslim secularism.

We often speak of the need for moderate Muslims. And it’s undoubtedly true that some Muslims are indeed moderate. But as Spencer points out, that is no guarantee against a repressive Muslim theocracy such as that in Iran which, once imposed (even if this is initially done democratically), is very difficult to reverse.

Ataturk of Turkey was aware of the dilemma back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when he instituted a number of exceedingly important reforms there that made it far less likely that the country would ever come under the sway of a repressive Muslim theocracy. And, although there is currently a threat of theocrats taking over in Turkey, so far Ataturk’s institutional reforms have held the line against it.

This was done, as Spencer points out, not by making Turkey a “moderate Muslim” country, but by adopting a nearly Western-style separation of church and state—in other words, secularism. And secularism isn’t really a traditional Muslim concept at all, it is an affront to it. That is why Ataturk represented a huge break with Muslim tradition, and why a similar break is so difficult for other Muslim countries.

Spencer writes:

[F]or peaceful Muslims to prevail over the proponents of jihad and Sharia, they must be prepared not just to ignore, but to reject explicitly, the elements of Sharia that are at variance with accepted norms of human rights and with government that does not establish a state religion.

This is a huge leap. It’s also the underlying reason that democracy, in and of itself, will not necessarily save or even help the Muslim world. I have always tried to be explicit about that by using the term liberal democracy—that is, democracy with protection of human rights, including separation of church and state—to refer to the goals for government in that part of the world and elsewhere. And encouraging liberal democracy is a far more difficult and lengthy proposition than instituting pure democracy, which unfortunately is no bar to tyranny.

UN as toothless enabler

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Here‘s another reason the UN has become a net liability rather than a plus—not just to US interests, but to the cause to which it purports to be dedicated: world peace.

One of the oft-ignored reasons for the US appeal to the UN before invading Iraq was an attempt (a vain one, as it turned out) to give teeth to the UN’s ability to police the nuclear capabilities of rogue states and aggressive dictatorships with designs on their neighbors.

Previously, Saddam had flouted the UN for years with impunity. And now Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, has allowed Iran to laugh even louder than it had already been guffawing at the ludicrous antics of the impotent UN. Some “watchdog.” It’s a toothless old chihuahua that not only has no bite, but no bark as well.

ElBaradei’s coddling of Iran has become so flagrant that, in a rare show of unity (a unity that, now that Sarkozy is President of France and Merkel Chancellor of Germany, might become less rare in the future), envoys from Britain, the US, France and Germany will be delivering a protest to Dr ElBaradei. I’m sure he’ll be deeply upset [/sarcasm].

Blinking first: what did the Democrats think was going to happen?

The New Neo Posted on by

The consensus appears to be that the Democrats in Congress have blinked on the issue of troop withdrawal (see this and this and this, for starters).

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has followed the story. From the start, it’s been clear that the Democrats spearheading the effort did not have the votes to override Bush’s certain veto of any such measure.

That’s why I’ve referred to the Democratic campaign to force withdrawal and/or fundcutting as “theater” and “games.” There never seemed a realistic chance of the measures actually becoming law; to do that would require Republican support of a magnitude that was extremely unlikely to be forthcoming.

The surprise to me is not the Democratic flinch in the face of Bush’s “stubbornness.” The surprise is that this course of events is a surprise to anyone. The MSM—and some of the Democrats—are certainly acting as though it is (although perhaps this is a bit of theater as well; sometimes it’s hard to tell the players without a program).

The Democratic base is angry. This is not surprising. After all, the base in both parties is composed of the diehards, the fanatics who don’t pay a whole lot of attention to practicality or the law of thirds, or whether something actually has a chance of being implemented or not.

But the leaders themselves should be more hardnosed, since they’re the ones who have supposedly logged years of experience in political realities of the legislative kind. Who among them could ever have truly believed that this particular portion of the battle was likely to end any other way? Posture to the antiwar base, gain support for your efforts, ignore the message it sends our enemies, then back off when you see you don’t have the override votes, and hope you get an “A” for effort.

Some Democrats seem to recognize this, such as Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia, who says, “It [the backoff] was a concession to reality.”

Others, including Presidential candidate John Edwards, seem rather out of touch with reality (or more in touch with their own continuing theatrical performance). Edwards, who has staked out the antiwar wing of the party as the bulwark of his support, is in favor of drawing the following line in the sand:

Congress should send the same bill back to [Bush] again and again until he realizes he has no choice but to start bringing our troops home.

Them’s fightin’ words, all right. But what do they actually mean?

This is a sincere question on my part, not rhetoric. Even if I were an antiwar Democrat I don’t believe I’d understand exactly what Edwards is trying to say here, and that I’d consider his statement an exercise in illogic and futility.

There’s an old adage, variously attributed to Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So I wonder why John Edwards thinks that spending Congress’s time passing versions of the same bill over and over again, and sending them to the same President, who has vowed over and over again to veto them, would somehow get different results.

Perhaps Edwards is merely indicating to his base that he resembles them in his devotion to principle, and would ignore reality with the same doggedness they do, and thus is their champion and soulmate. What does it matter to them if the whole thing is a waste of time for a Congress that really ought to be paying more attention to passing meaningful legislation that might actually be of some benefit to people?

It’s not that I’m against perseverance. I understand that some tasks take time, and that hanging in there and trying again can ultimately accomplish them, especially with a slight but sometimes significant change of strategy. After all, that’s why I think the so-called “surge” and the appointment of Petraeus have at least a fighting chance of changing some things for the better in Iraq.

But this case is different. Pushing the same bills towards the same single and immovable object (Bush) is not going to have a different result. There are few imponderables and unknowns in the equation, unlike so many other human endeavors.

What leverage did the Democrats ever have over Bush, anyway? He’s not running for re-election, nor does he appear to think the political futures of moderate Republicans such as Susan Collins or Norm Coleman or Gordon Smith are worth paying the price of retreat in Iraq.

Whether you like Bush or hate him, it’s clear that Iraq is the single most important battle of his Presidency by far. In my opinion that’s not just because he’s loathe to admit he might have been wrong, but because he thinks it’s one of the most important battles in the world today. Whether you agree or disagree about his motives, it’s difficult to think of a single thing the Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) could have done to make him back down and sign these bills. Certainly the action of repetitively passing the bills and sending them to him never had a chance of doing so.

Reading between the lines, I imagine that the Democrats really thought that the constant repetition would build a powerful groundswell of popular feeling that would put increasing pressure on the Republicans in Congress to change their vote and ultimately to override Bush’s veto. I suppose that could still happen. But my prediction is that Bush himself will never back down on this one, and that any Democrat who thinks he will is living in a dream world—or a political theater.

The Palestinians: when does a victim stop being a victim?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reflecting on the current carnage between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza, and on the ongoing violence in the Tripoli Palestinian refugee camps, Ralph Peters has written an article in today’s NY Post claiming that the Palestinians have been victimized for a long time, but not by the Israelis: by other Arabs, and by their own home-grown Palestinian leaders.

There’s no doubt about it, if you study history. The Palestinian refugees have been kept in a state of misery by the fellow-Arabs among whom they’ve stayed for decades (and now generations) as a sort of prominent window display of suffering. The goal? To prove Israeli perfidy, deflect attention from Arab failings, and get the world’s attention and sympathy.

If at any point there had been any true intent to absorb the Palestinians into the local population in the way of refugees almost everywhere (and in the case of the Palestinians the task would have been relatively easy, because they differ so little both ethnically and culturally from the people in the countries in which they found their somewhat dubious “refuge”), it would have been done long ago.

One of the sad things about the Tripoli violence is that it’s an example of the exploitation of the Palestinians by their brethren Arabs. As often is the case with a weakened host, the Palestinian camps in question have apparently been taken over by foreign al Qaeda elements that seem to have been the initial cause of the violence. The camps themselves were previously off-limits to the Lebanese, who’ve steered clear of them in a long-established agreement with the PLO, a group clearly incapable of keeping out even more violent elements than themselves.

As in the case of most long-term welfare recipients, the Palestinians have been ill-served by their singular history of having been on the UN dole for almost sixty years. As journalist (and Hemingway wife) Martha Gellhorn presciently wrote back in 1961 (quoted in this post of mine, which I urge you to read in its entirety):

The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war….[T]oday, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad.

The goad has worked; the Palestinians became masters of propaganda, if nothing else. Oh, and of killing. As Peters points out, now that they’ve had a chance at self-government in Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal of 2005, they have made a bloody (literally) mess of it.

But why expect anything else? Despite their status as victims of their Arab brethren, and as poster children for victimization in general, they have become victimizers—not just, or even primarily, of the Israelis their suicide bombers target—but of other Arabs, and of themselves.

This is not a new story. In fact, it’s a very old one. Arafat was probably the most corrupt and violent victimizer of Arabs in the post-WWII age. He robbed his own people blind, yes, and killed so much of the opposition that many moderate Palestinian voices (and they did exist in greater numbers in the past) were silenced effectively, and forever, by death. (If you are curious to know some of the details, please pull up a chair and read “In a Ruined Country: how Yassir Arafat destroyed Palestine,” an article written by David Samuels that appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Atlantic).

But Palestine was not alone; Arafat’s modus operandi was to wreak havoc wherever he went. Where, for instance, did the name “Black September”—used by the Arafat-affiliated terrorist group that put the PLO on the map with the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre—come from?

“Black September” originally referred to the events of September 1970, in Jordan. The Palestinians are, after all, virtually identical in ethnicity to most of the population of Jordan, and originally Arafat and many Palestinian refugees found a home there. But he tried to overthrow the government of that new home, and so King Hussein saw fit to do a little housecleaning—to the tune of approximately seven to eight thousand Palestinian dead—in September of 1970, eliminating the Palestinian presence there in order to preserve his own rule.

The Left is relatively silent about events such as these—after all, the perpetrators were not the Israelis, so who cares?—but the result was that Arafat and thousands of his troublemakers were expelled from Jordan and took up residence in a little place known as Lebanon, where they proceeded to wreak more havoc. The until-then relatively stable Lebanon has never been the same since their arrival.

Wading back into the history of the formation of the state of Israel always brings out bitter contention and argument. I’ve no desire to refight that battle at the moment, although it almost inevitably comes up in the comments section (and I’ve noticed that posts about Israel tend to be powerful troll-magnets).

So I’ll just say here that, whether you believe the Israelis cruelly drove the Palestinians away, or whether you think the Palestinians—with the strong encouragement of their fellow-Arabs—cooked their own goose by refusing the country they were handed by partition and leaving Israel to make room for the easy Arab victory and takeover they thought would follow, their subsequent history has been as equal-opportunity dealers of destruction, chaos, and death.

So, when do victims such as the Palestinians stop being objects of sympathy and become acknowledged as the perpetrators of misery, some of it their own? When will the world demand that the Palestinians cease riding their victimization and using it as an excuse for corruption and brutality? I think that time is long overdue.

Martha Gellhorn thought so too, back in 1961:

It is hard to sorrow for [the Palestinian refugees] who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt…[they] cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless”¦.

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

And remember, that passage was written before the 1967 war.

Leadership and style: Sarkozy, JFK, LBJ, and GWB

The New Neo Posted on by

Nidra Poller’s article about Sarkozy’s first few days in office reminds me once again of how important leadership can be in setting a new tone for a country and giving it a fresh breath of hope.

Maybe this is just a honeymoon, and the energy flowing through France right now will stagnate once again. But maybe not. For the moment, at least, it appears that a country that seemed mired in listlessness and old patterns of special interest groups has a new belief in itself, and a notion that things might actually have a chance of changing for the better there.

Among the reasons I find Sarkozy a fascinating figure is that he seems to possess qualities of leadership that are rare these days. “Leader” has been a somewhat tainted word in recent decades, perhaps because we associate it with brutal tyrants and/or mindless followers. In addition, the rebellious spirit of the 60s is not dead; those “question authority” bumper stickers are still in evidence, and those sporting them are inclined to question whole notion of leadership.

But leadership shouldn’t be questioned or rejected reflexively. A true leader can be bad or good; he/she is rarely indifferent. One of Bush’s great lacks is his inability to convey true leadership—a quality hard to define, but people know it when they see it.

Leadership is always somewhat connected with style, which seems an unfortunate and trivial thing until you think about it—because, after all, “style” is made up of many things, some of them deeply connected with character, and only some of them superficial. Sarkozy’s can-do and energetic style communicates the perception that he has the ability to act effectively, something France has apparently been hungering after for quite some time now.

France is lucky that Sarkozy appeared when he did—although that raises the ancient question of whether leaders make history or history makes leaders (I believe both are true). The US is hungering for something or someone similar, I think, and none of our candidates for 2008 quite make the grade.

The initial rush of enthusiasm for Obama reflected this desire, but unlike Sarkozy, Obama seems fuzzy around the edges and very green in terms of experience. McCain has the disadvantage of seeming like yesterday’s papers. Clinton and Giuliani have been around a long time, as well, and we’ve grown somewhat tired of them. The others seem to lack a certain je ne sais quoi, or to be too slick, or to be too narrow in their politics, to generate much excitement.

One of the most important things a leader conveys is hope. Despite being an older candidate, Reagan (whom I didn’t like at the time) had this quality in spades. The extremely youthful JFK had it as well, in addition to a wit and charm that was entertaining and refreshing (take a look at some of his old press conferences to see what I’m talking about, although the clips in question aren’t his best, at least according to my recollection).

I distinctly remember that one of the many sorrows of the Kennedy assassination was the contrast between Kennedy’s freshness and energy and his successor LBJ’s leaden qualities. And this despite the fact that Johnson had proven himself to be a Congressional leader of towering proportions. But the role of Senate Majority Leader, which Johnson held for six years until he was elected Vice-President under Kennedy, requires different qualities of leadership than that of President.

Johnson was a wheeler-dealer and arm-twister (as well as intimidator) extraordinaire in the Senate, but these qualities didn’t help him when confronted with the morass of Vietnam, and his ability to communicate with the American people was poor. When he spoke in his capacity as President, this man—who in private had a sharp and scatological tongue—seemed plodding and almost dim-witted.

In fact, the much-later-released private tapes LBJ made of his telephone conversations show a very different man from his public persona. As Harry Middleton, former Johnson aide and director of the LBJ library says:

The presidential president was very formal and very stiff in many of his press conferences and public statements. One on one, to small groups, he was colorful, witty, funny, a marvelous character. And that’s the way he was in the telephone tapes.

The tapes show, however, that Johnson’s mind was cloudy and muddled on the topic of what to do about the Vietnam War. His doubts were voiced almost every step of the way—at least in private.

Leaders can have doubts, but they need to be decisive after they weigh the issue, and to somehow convey that sense of conviction. LBJ did not, and his inability to plot a Vietnam course that made sense to him as well as convey that he had done so were part of the tragedy of his Presidency and of that ill-fated war.

In George W. Bush’s case, I don’t think he’s plagued by internal doubts to anywhere near the extent that Johnson was. His critics would say that he’s not plagued by enough of them, even when evidence is overwhelming that things need changing (the surge was too late, for example). I tend to agree somewhat with those critics. But in addition, Bush suffers from another LBJ affliction: an uninspired public delivery that fails to communicate whatever it is that the public perceives as the leadership it needs. And that has been part of the tragedy of his Presidency.

The occupation of Iraq: forty years in the wilderness?

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I was at a talk recently given by one of my favorite Boston journalists and bloggers, Jules Crittenden. The conversation turned—as conversations often do these days—to the war and occupation in Iraq.

One of the themes that came up is the pace of change in a nation such as Iraq, previously subject to decades of bitter strife and vicious violence. This is where the realms of the political and the psychological intersect; generations brought up under a system such as was present in Iraq under Saddam are likely to hold different assumptions about the social contract, cooperation, and violence as a political tool than people brought up in a more civil and peaceful society tend to share.

That’s one of the reasons I always thought the postwar occupation of Iraq was going to have to be longer, and more directive, than those planning it seemed to think it would need to be. I had hoped they were correct, but it turns out they were not. Part of the reason, it must be said, is not anything about the Iraqi people themselves, but rather the intervention of their non-good neighbors Iran and Syria. But part of the reason is the understandably heavy and destructive psychological, political, and sociological legacy of the Saddam years.

I don’t believe, as some therapists do, that the mind is set virtually in stone very early in childhood. But I do believe that fundamental change is difficult, and that it is much easier to work with a younger generation to effect change in a society than it is to count on the older people.

The Palestinians know that full well, as do the makers of cigarettes. Still another example is the Biblical Passover story.

As the tale goes, after the Jews were freed from slavery they wandered in the wilderness (that’s the correct translation; it was not technically a desert) for forty years, one of those numbers in the Torah that is meant to stand for “a long time.”

Why? Why weren’t they rewarded by being shown the Promised Land instantly, or at least more quickly? The text says that they sometimes pined for the safety of their days of slavery in Egypt, and yearned after some of the good food that wasn’t available to them any more (manna from heaven apparently wasn’t quite as tasty as good old Egyptian melon).

The interpretation that I learned years ago, and that appeals to me most, is the following:

The [story] teaches us that there are no short-cuts to the Promised Land, and no instant transformation from bands of liberated slaves into responsible, self-governing nation; no generation of redemption (dor geulah) without a generation dying out in the desert (dor ha-midbar) preceding it.

So it’s not surprising that things are going slowly and laboriously in Iraq, and as I’ve written earlier, I never expected otherwise. Trying to create fundamental change in a broken society is one of the most difficult things to effect, and always has been, but as I wrote in the piece just linked, all the alternatives we faced (and still face) were worse.

It would be great if the Iraqi people had forty years in which to wander in the wilderness. But they don’t; the forces trying to destroy what they are trying to build are too powerful. But they certainly need and deserve more than a couple of months of our continued patience.

Hormones, heart disease, and breast cancer: first, do no harm

The New Neo Posted on by

For years, hormones were touted as the panacea for the menopausal and post-menopausal (dare I say, “aging”?) woman. HRT (hormone replacement therapy) was seen to be a fountain of youth in all respects, and who wouldn’t want that? Skin benefits, heart benefits, sexual benefits—you name it, hormones had it.

But in recent years the bloom is off the HRT rose. First it was the sad fact that, contrary to earlier reports, hormones not only didn’t prevent heart disease in women but even seemed to cause more of it. And recently the news from researchers is similar about breast cancer: hormones appear to either encourage new cases or accelerate the growth of already-present but as-yet-undiagnosed ones.

It’s a real bummer, to be sure. Although I’ve never taken the things, most of my friends do, and they’ve all had to make some tough decisions about symptom alleviation vs. risk of death.

The other question that comes to mind is: how on earth could medical researchers and doctors have gotten it so wrong, and for so long? And how do we know they are right now?

The short answer to the second question is: we don’t know. Our need to make our lives close to risk-free, although understandable, is unattainable. The short answer to the first question is that scientists use the best data possible at the time to make recommendations.

For example, as this article makes clear, the early data on hormones and heart disease was so promising that doctors felt secure in recommending them. In fact, the long-term studies on the topic were undertaken with such optimism, based on earlier and more limited studies, that doctors were convinced the larger studies would only serve to prove how very beneficial hormones were in preventing heart disease. They were shocked when the evidence proved them exceedingly wrong.

There is a certain amount of hubris in medicine, and a bit more caution when prescribing potentially dangerous drugs and interventions would be in order, so that the old oath of “first, do no harm” could be fulfilled. But doctors are also responding to our own demands for a pain- free life and eternal youth, and our impatience with the slow pace of medical knowledge and its fits and starts progress.