Explanations vs. excuses, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

The coverage of yesterday’s London terrorist attacks has shifted somewhat from facts about the bombings themselves to reactions and analyses of those reactions. Many express solidarity with the British and make references to their history of courage in the face of those who have tried to break their will in the past. Others blame Bush and Blair’s recent Iraq policies for angering the Moslem world and providing motivation for the bombings.

Of course, I’m of the former group and not the latter. But I want to make clear that I am one of those people who actually is interested in the “why” of the bombings. I like searching for explanations; I find it valuable. Keep in mind the difference between explanations and excuses, a distinction I wrote about here.

To summarize the idea I discussed in that rather lengthy post: seeking an explanation for a phenomenon is a neutral process. The results can be used to make excuses for that phenomenon and its perpetrators–to blame others and fail to place the responsibility on the actors themselves. But the results can also be used to try to understand and to counter or change the phenomenon in the best and most efficient manner.

The entire “bring democracy to the Arab world” neocon enterprise is predicated at least partly in such an explanation. Whether that explanation ends up being correct remains to be seen. But the analysis goes something like this: why has terrorism in the world of Islamicist extremists reached such a fever pitch and acquired so many adherents? The neocon explanation–at least in part–is that the citizens of most of the countries involved are under the thumb of either doctrinaire brainwashing theocrats or brutal dictators, or in some cases both. Human rights are very compromised in these countries, exploitation is rife, the people have almost no say in their governments, and the economies are stagnant. If these things can change in the direction of people gaining autonomy and freedom, it is likely that the people will not only rise to the occasion but that these vicious ideologies will lose a great deal of the misery on which they feed and grow.

Well, that’s certainly an explanation, but it’s no excuse. With it comes a plan that emerges from the explanation. You are, of course, free to agree or disagree with the reasoning behind the plan as well as the likelihood of its being achieved.

Leftists offer another explanation: Western imperialism and occupation and exploitation leave the poor third-worlders with no options but to blow up people on subway trains in London. I won’t bother to argue the merits of that one–it’s been done many times before, and you either buy those arguments or don’t buy them; at this point I doubt I’ll change your mind. But this explanation is not just an explanation, it is an excuse. It excuses the perpetrators of the bombings and makes them into victims.

I believe that the explanation for the bombings that Amir Taheri offers in this column has validity. His summary explanation is as follows (and I urge you to read his column in its entirety for the details of the religious underpinnings behind this point of view–hat tip: Dr. Sanity):

But sorry, old chaps, you are dealing with an enemy that does not want anything specific, and cannot be talked back into reason through anger management or round-table discussions. Or, rather, this enemy does want something specific: to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make round the clock and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.

I would add to Taheri’s explanation still another one, nonreligious in nature: a nihilistic rage and urge to wreak destruction, to be seen as (and to see oneself as) the most powerful and baddest dude on the block.

As for the motivations of those who make apologies and excuses for terrorist murderers, I offer the following, which appeared as part of this post by Neuro-Con. Neuro-
Con quotes a commenter named Michael McCanles at Belmont Club (and, by they way, if you have a moment, please read Belmont Club’s latest).

McCanles writes:

Fear of envy” (i.e., the “evil eye”) is for anthropologists a major embodiment of this narrative’s central obsession. Thus: Islam must hate us because “we” have robbed them of something that they want: thus the incongruous overlay of the marxoid group-conflict model on top of terrorist motivations. The nice thing about this narratival explanation is that it allows the teller a hidden modicum of control. If we can say “they are attacking us because of something that we have done, then all we have to do is correct it by giving them what they want, and all will be well. Thus we control the situation because our actions are the root of the evil being done us.” This is why leftists are so dedicated to scapegoating and fingerpointing.

An excellent explanation–not an excuse–for the behavior of so many leftists.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a quick-change artist

The New Neo Posted on by

A certain issue has come up several times in the comments section, so I thought now would be a good time for me to try to set it straight. It has been raised mainly by some resident quasi-trolls, and I’ve addressed it before, but only in the comments section, so perhaps most people didn’t see it. I’m spotlighting the answer here so that there will be no misunderstanding–although, somehow, my guess is that those who want to misunderstand will still feel quite free to do so.

In my “about me” section, I wrote the following fairly glib and surface explanation of my history:

I’m a lifelong Democrat mugged by reality on 9/11. Born in New York, living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I’ve found myself leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. My friends and family are becoming sick of what they see as my inexplicable conversion…”

So, we have our theme: lifelong Democrat mugged by reality on 9/11 converts to neoconism and alienates others.

Then, up under the blog title, I used the phrase, “things changed after 9/11.” A similar thought.

A little personal history is in order here. When I first started my blog it was a very private thing, read by about two people, and one of them was me. I didn’t know what would happen over time in terms of readership. I knew the following, however: I wanted to write a lengthy and leisurely explanation and exploration of my political journey. It would start at the beginning and continue up through 9/11 and all the way to the present. It would be, perhaps not my “letter to the world that never wrote to me,” but my “letter to the friends and relatives who would not listen to me.”

I didn’t think they’d ever really read it–and, in fact, almost to a person, they haven’t, at least so far. That may not change. But I wanted to write it anyway. And so, from the start, with the name of my blog and my description of myself, I focused on the “change” aspect of my story without giving any details of it for quite a while. It took some time before I was ready to tackle it, and part of that process was coming to terms with trying to get a wider readership and getting disciplined about writing here more often than just a few times each month.

So I did all those things, and so far I’ve been extremely gratified and amazed by the readership I’ve gotten. Another early plan I had was to attract other “changers,” so that the comments section would evolve into a forum for them to exchange ideas and experiences, sort of like a support group (it’s the therapist in me :-)). And I’ve been pleased to see some version of that happening, too.

But those early flip pronouncements of mine about my change, using catchwords like “mugged by reality on 9/11,” simplified the story to the point where it can be easily caricatured by some such as a recent commenter who wrote, as part of a lengthy rant, “9/11 ‘high-jacked’ [neo-neocon] to the twisted world of American conservatism, where a hit against us changed the way she thought…”

Well, I don’t believe I ever used the word “high-jacked” (or even “hijacked”); I said “mugged,” which connotes something different. First and foremost, it’s a reference to the famous definition of a neocon offered by one of the originals, Irving Kristol. Secondly, it denotes a sudden act of violence to which one must react in some way, not an actual taking away of a person as in a kidnapping or hijacking. So let me clarify: 9/11 did not actually change my point of view, not at all. It merely acted as a strong and sudden catalyst, the starting point for what turned into a fairly lengthy process encompassing several years of incremental change.

In fact, as I think some of my most recent “change” posts have indicated, there were glimmerings of the change to come even way back in earlier decades, before 9/11. And of course I’ve not yet written of 9/11 and its aftermath, except very briefly. So if I’ve led anyone to think the change was sudden, let me make it crystal clear (Kristol clear? Sorry, can’t resist!) that it was not. Although I see 9/11 as the catalyst, the entire process was slow to develop, and took about two and a half years to reach the point where I could really accept what had happened–that I had actually crossed that gaping crevasse discussed in this post.

A great deal of my change had to do with my slow re-evaluation of the veracity and agenda of the media in regard to the events of the years following 9/11, and also a re-examination of the Vietnam War and the role the media played in the course of events there, and how the two tie together. But, as I said before, that’s a story that I will tell in subsequent “change” pieces–and, believe me, it’s not a short one!

Many, if not most, of those who think I underwent some magical “aha!” moment in which 9/11 happened, and presto! I changed, would no doubt prefer to trivialize the thought process I underwent. To debunk it makes it seem less threatening. But I also realize that I may have had a role in their misconception–the way I phrased things may have actually been misleading and led to the misunderstanding, so I wanted to do my part to correct that.

The technology of death vs. life

The New Neo Posted on by

I was watching a feature on CNN today that mentioned that terrorist bombers make a special effort to have their explosives go off in an enclosed space because it maximizes the carnage. Thus, today’s London subway bombers may have timed their bombs to detonate not only on the subway, but also while the trains were in a tunnel.

The report described some studies from Israel, a country which has experienced more of these terrorist events than anyone else (with Iraq no doubt taking a close second). Apparently, the Israelis have found that one of the advantages of having security guards posted at the entrance to nearly every public place is that bombers who are spotted by guards are often forced to set off their explosives prematurely, in an open rather than a closed area. In this way the guards often sacrifice their own lives to prevent more people from dying.

That’s certainly heroic under any definition of the word. I am amazed at how many people are willing to take on such a task. As much as the existence of suicide bombers depresses me and makes me wonder about the future of humanity, the presence of guards–as well as those volunteering for police duty in Iraq–reassures me.

In the first few months after 9/11, and during the later escalation of bombings in Israel as the intifada heated up, as well as the Madrid bombings, I often wondered what a nation can do to deal with such awful possibilities. In this country, we’ve been remiss about the need to have more checkpoints and guards, because we are loathe to surrender our freedom. In addition, over the nearly four years since 9/11, we’ve been lulled into what may be a false sense of security by the relative calm here.

I’ve heard the argument that security guards won’t do much anyway, because then the bombers will just seek out different targets and use other methods, such as blowing themselves up on a city street. And while that is no doubt true, today’s CNN piece reminded me that the presence of guards would still be likely to make it more difficult for bombers to kill the maximum number of people possible.

War and violence have historically been limited by technology, and as technology advances, the opportunities to kill advance. This has always been true, and defenses against weapons have always lagged behind the invention of the weaponry itself. For example, suicide bombings on a subway would not have been possible but for the invention of lightweight explosives–in the olden days, the sheer volume of explosives necessary would have made it impossible to carry enough on one’s person to do widespread damage.

We are still scrambling to figure out the proper response. I doubt it will be a single technology, and it won’t happen overnight. History tells us that human ingenuity coupled with human rage dictates that new technologies of destruction will be developed and used, and that we will always be scrambling to defend ourselves against them. So far, the forces of humanity and preservation have prevailed, but it hasn’t been easy, and the death toll has been high, particularly in the 20th century. So far, the 21st seems to be continuing the trend.

Thoughts on the terrorist strike in London

The New Neo Posted on by

Some disjointed thoughts from me on the abominable bombings in London, which were timed for rush hour to maximize the loss of innocent life:

Dennis Ross on Fox News just now. He expressed something that many of us have been thinking for some time now, but that one rarely hears a diplomat say (this is not an exact quote from him, but it is more or less what he said):

The War on Terror is a misnomer. Terror is just a method. This is really a war on Islamic fanaticism.

And Tony Blair used a word I’d been thinking of: barbarians–the type of word that just a few years ago I would have thought to be as archaic as the historic barbarians themselves. Blair looked angry, too, in his statement, a restrained but white-hot clenched-teeth sort of fury: The purpose of terrorism is just that–to terrorize–and we will not be terrorized.

Ross also mentioned another thing I’d been thinking about, that attacks such as these in London are paradoxical for Al Qaeda. They want to show us they are still active and determined to strike with impunity and great viciousness. On the other hand, attacks such as this on the civilian population, designed to cause a “Spain effect” (appeasement and withdrawal), can instead cause some who would otherwise sympathize with the terrorists and/or make excuses for them to harden their hearts and their resolve against them. Let’s hope for the latter from the Brits, who certainly showed a great deal of grit in the past when faced with the Blitz.

I am glad that there doesn’t seem to have been any of this “maybe it’s the IRA” business that would have paralleled what initially happened in Spain and that caused a backlash there in some of the populace against the government. This present attack had all the earmarks of Al Qaeda from the beginning. Unfortunately, from bitter repetition, we now know only too well what those earmarks are.

The terrible stunned and traumatized look on the faces of the bloodied survivors of the bombing also brings back 9/11 memories.
It seems an amazing coincidence to me that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in London today for the bombing. Who better to address Londoners and to empathize with how they feel right now? Watching him speak brings back for me those first days after 9/11, when he showed previously unguessed-at fortitude and leadership.

For more, Norm Geras offers a guide to local news on the subject of the London bombings.

Political change: unidirectional?

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens made some interesting statements in this interview (via Seekerblog).

Here’s Hitchens describing an experience he had while in Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War, at a time when he positively hated George Bush Sr.:

I was bouncing around in a jeep with some Kurdish guerillas at that point. And on my side of the windshield, there was a big laminated picture of George H. W. Bush. And I said to them, “Look, comrades, do you have to do this? For one thing, I can’t see out of my side of the windshield. But for another, I know quite a few reporters in this area and might run into one of them at any moment. And I don’t want them seeing me in a jeep that has this guy’s image on it. So do you have to?” And they said, quite soberly and solemnly to me, “No, we think we should have this picture because we think, without him, we would all be dead, and all our families would be dead, too.” And from what I’d seen by then in that region, I thought, that’s basically morally true. I don’t have a reply to that. I don’t have a glib one and I don’t have a sound one. It’s true. So at that point my criticism of the war became this: that it had not been a regime-change war, that the slogans of liberty and justice that had been used to mobilize it had not been honored. But if they had been, I would have been in favor of it. It’s a narrow but deep crevasse to cross, and once you’ve crossed it, I’ll tell you this, you can’t go back over it again. You can’t find yourself on the other side of it. Some of you may be in transition across this crevasse yourselves or be thinking about it. I warn you: don’t cross over if you have any intention of going back, because you can’t.

He is speaking of a specific position regarding the justification for the Gulf War, but I think he is also speaking generally of political change and political changers.

It does appear, for the most part, to be a one-way street (except for Churchill, who famously said “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat”). It’s certainly not a path that’s commonly traversed–one of the major topics of my “change” series is how difficult the negotiation over that crevasse can be. But, once crossed, that path seems ordinarily to go in one direction only (hint: it’s the same way we read, left to right).

Why is this? Those on the right would say it’s because the position of the right is more grounded in facts, logic, and experience, and that of the left on hopes and dreams and wishes. The former tend to be the province of maturity, the latter of youth. The former can overrule the latter more easily than vice versa.

It’s an oversimplification, no doubt, but I think it has a certain validity nevertheless.

Sluggish

The New Neo Posted on by

This spring/summer so far has been unseasonably wet. Although ordinarily we’re not troubled too much by them, the other day while I was doing some gardening one of these lovelies crossed my path:


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The photo doesn’t really do it justice. There was the largeness of the thing, combined with its more-than-generous quotient of glistening slime, not to mention my surprise at seeing it sashaying around right out there in the open.

My immediate response was to want to kill it. I knew it was going to be feasting on plants I would rather it not eat. But since we don’t have that many slugs ordinarily here, I’d never gone about killing one before.

It quickly occurred to me that there seems to be a top limit on the size of the sort of thing I’m willing to squish with my foot, and that limit had definitely been reached long before we hit “slug” on the ladder of the animal kingdom. The same thing is true with flying creatures–I can do mosquitoes and flies, but I balk at those large moths.

My Japanese beetle routine, which involves plopping them into a jar of alcohol, didn’t feel adaptable to something this large, either. Pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel seemed like a bad prospect, too, as well as the trouble involved in the disposing of the corpse. So I watched it slink on by and did nothing.

Looking it up, I see that the suggested solutions are varied, but none seem ideal. Here is the best description I’ve found that explores the available recommended and non-recommended methods for offing a slug:

Now, how to kill the little buggers. The beer-in-the-tuna-can method has never been at all effective for me. The slugs hang over the edge and sip at the beer, but very few have ever fallen in. (They do seem quite partial to beer, however.) As for salt, some say it is extremely cruel, a feature that undoubtedly makes it more attractive to many. But the main disadvantage is this: if you salt or otherwise chemically attack slugs, they dump all their slime in their death throes–years’ worth at once! The stuff is ineradicable and you are stuck with a yard full of repulsive silvery slime globules.

I once entered the yard of a neighbor and found eight or ten slugs, impaled on a shish kebab skewer, writhing upright in her garden. “A deterrent,” she muttered darkly when I questioned her about this grisly spectacle.

Geese and skunks alone among members of the animal kingdom are said to eat slugs, and some keep them for this purpose. To my thinking, the spectacle is too revolting to endure.

My husband, to prove himself manly, has used the following method: he picks them up with his bare hands (geeklike behavior, in my opinion), and when they roll up in a ball (the burnt sienna-and-orange variety that plague my yard change shape from banana to papaya when attacked), he hurls them out into the street. Then he runs back and forth over them with the car. Charming behavior which I hope was not genetically transmitted to my children.

Perhaps I should just hope we return to our normal amount of rain.

Left vs. right: mistaken vs. evil?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I want to recommend this post by Clive Davis. He quotes Roger Scruton as saying that those on the left consider those on the right to be evil, whereas the right considers those on the left to be merely mistaken.

I think that, as a generalization, this holds up fairly well. But there is no question that there are numerous exceptions. There is a vocal segment on the right that considers the left to be evil. Recall the group that thought Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, for example, and you need look no further.

Scruton writes that, ” if I can persuade [those on the left] that I’m not evil, I find it a very useful thing.” I recall a similar effort at persuasion on my part. It worked with some of my friends and relatives, but didn’t work with others. But I resent, and still resent, their idea that any supporter of a hawkish or conservative cause should automatically be regarded as “evil until proven not-evil.” This was a revelation to me, and not a pleasant one.

Davis’s post goes on to quote writer Nick Cohen as crediting (or blaming?) his own change of heart on certain topics to having read Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism. (Hmm, perhaps that’s next on my list.) Here’s Cohen on the subject of changing one’s mind:

I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies.

I consider it highly ironic that, in his autobiography Radical Son, David Horowitz fingers none other than that very same Paul Berman as having been one of his most most vicious attackers when Horowitz underwent his own neocon conversion (I plan to say more about this topic in a subsequent post). Life is an interesting journey, is it not?

Report on the Fourth

The New Neo Posted on by

How was my Fourth of July? Just fine, thanks.

To begin with, the weather, which had been fairly vile for weeks, turned magnificent for the entire weekend. Unless your goal was to swim (which mine wasn’t), it was perfection itself. Of course, being a few degrees too cool for ideal swimming has never stopped most New Englanders from doing so–there were plenty of people at the local beaches.

I did the classic things: went to the family party of some friends of mine (pool, barbecued chicken, homemade apple and strawberry-rhubarb pies, all ages from the very elderly through one-year-olds). I brought along my ninety-one-year-old mother, and I wish I’d brought a camera, too, to photograph her extremely red-white-and-blue outfit. At night, I watched a half-hour long show of fireworks over the ocean with a crowd of onlookers including other friends of mine, their grown children, and their two absolutely adorable grandkids, who were delighted to hold a series of small sparklers in their careful little hands.

How about you?

Comet Wars

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but this story fired my imagination. It is the stuff of which science fiction movies are made.

My first reaction was sheer awe. But my second reaction was, “Hmmm, I guess Star Wars wasn’t such a completely ridiculous idea after all.” And in this case, I’m not talking about the movie.

Before I get a million, “You’ve got to be kidding, you idiot!” comments, let me just say that I Googled “Star Wars Reagan” and came up with about a million hits, the first twenty of which I checked out, and all were totally negative about the program. The technical and financial problems seem, to say the least, formidable (although I wouldn’t consider Frances Fitzgerald to be an objective judge of this particular situation).

The purpose of this post is merely to state that I wonder whether the comet probe success has any relevance to the task of missile interception.

Already, though, Star Wars hasn’t been a total loss. See this for the story. Since the BBC said it, you know it must be true; they wouldn’t be giving the program credit for anything if it hadn’t been fully earned.

Liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a post I wrote back in April, but it seems appropriate for the Fourth, too, so I’m repeating it.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a prepoderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyachinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me–I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

The New Yorker wishes us a very happy Fourth of July

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent “change” post I mentioned in passing that I still read the New Yorker, despite my disagreement with almost everything political in it.

I wrestle with the fact that I continue to support them by subscribing, but I can’t seem to break away (am I an enabler?). Every time I think it’s all over between us, they come up with something wonderful like Adam Gopnik’s “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli” (no link on the Web, unfortunately) or this article about Bronson Alcott, by Geraldine Brooks.

I’ve just begun reading my latest issue, and already I’m angry. The date of the magazine is July 4, and the cover is entitled, “Party of One,” featuring a very glum and lonely Uncle Sam, sitting at a party table in front of a “Happy Birthday” cake festooned with candles. Ah, yes, back to the old “unilateralism” meme–although in this case Uncle Sam seems more shunned than shunning. He appears to have invited some guests–after all, there are place-settings on the table–but they are all no-shows. At any rate, for whatever reason, he’s all alone, and on his birthday, too.

But inside the issue there are far bigger problems than on the outside, although I’ve only gotten as far as the very first piece, the initial “The Talk of the Town” article. It’s written by editor-in-chief David Remnick, and in it he criticizes Edward Klein’s execrable gossip-mongering hatchet job on Hilary Clinton, “The Truth About Hilary,” a book which appears to consist mainly of rumors that she knows lesbians and is sexually cold.

My disagreement is not with Remnick’s critique of Klein’s book. The difficulty comes later. First, there is this passage, which is fine:

In better times, in a better world, the shoddiness of [Klein’s book’s] reporting and the vulgarity of its writing would place it safely beyond discussion. In our own time and place, though, such books are not only published but sell in the hundreds of thousands, and their toxicity has a habit of further poisoning the political groundwater.

“Such books;” indeed–for example, the recent abomination on the Bush family, written by Kitty Kelley. Remnick, to his credit, and despite his own Bush-hatred, does manage to make very brief mention of Kelley’s book, calling it a “trash biography.”

There are certainly many others of the genre from which to choose, including–it turns out–that of the New Yorker’s very own Seymour Hersh, who wrote the trash biography The Dark Side of Camelot back in 1997. It’s a good parallel to the Klein book, because of its concentration on the sex life of its subject, and its heavy use of anonymous sources (something of a trademark for Mr. Hersh).

But no, Remnick doesn’t mention it–although I can’t say I actually expected Remnick to critique the trash written by one of his own writers.

But what book does Mr. Remnick see fit to mention right after the above quote, as a parallel to “The Truth About Hillary?” Let’s see:

…further poisoning the political groundwater. In the last election cycle, the Kerry campaign was slow to recognize the importance of the Swift Boat slander, and, by the time it did, the damage could not be undone.

So, a book containing not a single sexual innuendo or anonymous source is compared with one composed of nothing but. A book that is written by a group of men who served heroically in Vietnam, all of whom go on the record to make their allegations up front and have plenty of documentation to back up their claims, is compared to a shadowy bunch of sexual insinuations. I strongly suspect that Remnick has not even read Unfit for Command, a tightly reasoned book that actually reads a great deal like a legal affidavit.

Maybe the Fourth of July isn’t the best time to read the New Yorker.

The lesser of two evils: responsibility

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of my Reagan post, an interesting question came up. How responsible are politicians (or, as they used to be called, statesmen–now we’d have to say “statespeople” instead) for the consequences of their actions? Are they responsible for all of them? Should they be able to have foreseen everything?

Of course not–but how much foresight is it reasonable to require of them? How much is humanly possible? And do we understand that there are no actions one can take in the political realm that don’t have some negative consequences?

Commenter “Huan” had the following excellent point to make: people are responsible for their actions, but “the lines of guilt only go so far”–otherwise the arguments will resemble “butterfly wing flutter causing a hurricane bizarro world” absurdities.

That’s a pretty good description of some of the arguments I’ve heard from the left that attribute every evil on earth to the actions of the United States. Although the entire science of ethics is an attempt to make the best and most moral decisions knowing that, in the real world, a perfect decision is not possible, sometimes it seems to me as though the left is dedicated to ignoring that obvious fact (except, of course, on the not-so-rare occasions when they themselves have been the ones making the decisions with the terrible consequences).

(Huan’s “butterfly wing flutter” is a reference, by the way, to chaos theory, which states that there are always unpredictable results to any event.)

I read a story a while back that brought the point home to me that no one can know the ultimate effects of their (or anyone’s) actions. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember the book, so I can’t offer a link, but the author was talking about an incident in Hitler’s early adulthood:

During Hitler’s “struggling artist” days he went through a period in which he was down and out. He wanted desperately to be a painter, but was twice refused entrance by the Academy of Arts in Vienna. He even stayed for a time in a shelter for the homeless. At one point, he became desperately ill and was in fact near death, but was found by a kindly couple who took him in and nursed him back to health.

So here we have three acts that might have changed the course of history. If only the Academy had thought better of his art, he might have finished out his life as a journeyman painter. If the homeless shelter hadn’t fed and housed him, would he have survived? And of course that kindly Good Samaritan couple, the protagonists of the story that grabbed my attention–did they later have reason to regret their well-intentioned act? In one version, I think the couple even may have been Jewish–which makes me think the story was apocryphal. But no matter–true or not, it illustrates a point.

Obviously, these acts are somewhat different than the decisions a politician faces when deciding whether to support the lesser of two evils. Feeding the homeless, nursing the ill–surely, these are unambiguously good acts, and we would never want people to stop performing them. But, like the flutter of those butterfly wings, we can’t ignore the fact that even unequivocably moral acts can have terrible consequences. However, we cannot hold the people committing those acts responsible for all those consequences–even though, if they were to learn of those consequences, they themselves might feel terribly guilty.

Politicians make decisions constantly, and must bear the consequences. But, in judging the degree of their responsibility, we need to be cognizant of what they knew at the time, what could have been reasonably predicted as consequences–and, most especially, what were the available alternatives, and what were the likely consequences of not acting.

That’s an awful lot to chew on. It’s far easier to make facile criticisms that assume the 20/20 perfection of hindsight.

One of the best writers on the scene–and yes, a neocon, although certainly not a neo-neocon–is Charles Krauthammer. He recently wrote a highly recommended article (hat tip: Dr. Sanity). It features, among many other things, an excellent discussion of the “lesser of two evils” dilemma. If you have a moment, please take a look.