San Francisco

The New Neo Posted on by

In San Francisco today, and it’s not even foggy. I am fortunate enough to be staying with relatives/friends who live not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Who doesn’t love San Francisco? It’s such a unique and lovely city–and of course there’s the food. I hope I don’t give the impression I’m obsessed with food–but, well, it is one of the major pleasures of life, and San Francisco is one of the best places to indulge. So, I plan to do just that, and there’s a birthday celebration (not mine) this evening that should provide a good venue for doing so.

Whenever I drive or walk around this beautiful place, the thought keeps recurring to me: what do they do about these hills in the snow? How can they get up them in the ice? And then I remember that no, I’m not in New England, and there’s never any snow here. For some reason that’s a hard concept for me.

Paul Robeson (Part II): a mind can be an impossible thing to change

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In attempt to begin to answer the questions posed at the end of Part I, I did a bit of research.

Here, for background, is some general biographical material on Robeson, showing what a trailblazer he was, the sort of discrimination he faced, and some of the emotional turmoil of his life (notice, once again, how the article glosses over Robeson’s Communist alliances, to the point of making him seem almost like an innocent victim of McCarthyism):

Paul Robeson (1898 – 1976)

Born Paul Leroy Robeson on April 9th 1898 in Princeton, Paul Robeson (as he was later to become known) was the youngest of 5 children. His parents were Reverend Drew and Maria Louise Robeson. His father was a former slave who had escaped to freedom at the age of 15 and had gone on to earn theological degrees at Lincoln University. Paul’s mother was a schoolteacher.

When Paul was just 6 years old, his mother died after her clothing caught fire over a coal stove. He was not at home when the accident occurred. A couple of years later in 1907, his family moved to Westfield where Paul’s father built a small church and started ministering. Paul started attending an integrated public school for the first time.

By 1910, Reverend Robeson had moved his family to Somerville and became the pastor of St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion Church. Around this time, young Paul started showing his talents in music, athletics and oratory.

When Paul was 17 he won a 4-year scholarship to Rutgers in a state wide written competition. He became the 3rd African-American to attend the 500-student private college. At 6′ 2″ and weighing 190 lbs, Paul made it into the football squad, but he was benched when Washington and Lee College refused to take to the field against a black man. His coach regretted it and didn’t bow to peer pressure after that. In fact, Paul was placed on the All-American team of coach Walter Camp and during his 4 years at the university, Paul racked up 15 varsity letters in 4 sports and became Rutgers’ star scholar, orator and singer.

In May 1918, Paul’s father died at the age of 73. Two years later, Paul started attending Columbia University Law School and paid for his own tuition by tutoring Coach Sanford’s son in Latin and playing professional football. It was during 1920 that he met Eslanda ‘Essie’ Goode, who was a pathology technician. She later became his wife and was the one who encouraged Paul to take the title role in ‘Simon The Cyrenian’ at the Harlem YMCA. His performance caught the eye of several experienced theatre people.

In April 1922, Paul made his professional acting debut as Jim in ‘Taboo’ at the Sam Harris Theatre. He also starred in a British production of the play entitled ‘Voodoo’ in London.

Paul graduated from law school in 1923 and was taken on by Louis William Stotesbury at Stotesbury and Miner, a New York law firm. However, a white secretary refused to take dictation from Paul and so he resigned ending his short law career.

Paul’s path continued in the arts and he debuted in the lead role of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘All God Chillun Got Wings’ in Greenwich Village. The play caused some controversy as it cast a white woman as Paul’s wife. During 1924, Paul also sang his first formal concert at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and starred in his first film entitled ‘Body and Soul’.

In 1925, Paul did a 16-sing concert of black spirituals in New York and it launched him into the spotlight. He was signed with an agent, James B. Pond, and toured and recorded 4 albums for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Although he was becoming a huge success, Paul was still being treated badly in the USA and was denied hotel accommodation in many cities during his concert tour in 1926. He continued to tour in 1927 and Essie gave birth to their only child, Paul Robeson junior in early November.

In 1928, Paul performed the song ‘Ol Man River’ in the play ‘Show Boat’ in London. It created such a sensation that he performed for the King of Spain after the Prince of Wales recommended it.

The following year Paul and Essie were refused entry into the Savoy Grill in England and repercussions about this were felt all the way to the Parliament.

In 1930, Paul played Othello and found it to be his most fulfilling role to date. His wife published a biography on him entitled ‘Paul Robeson, Negro’. This fuelled the tension between them and they started speaking of divorce. In 1931 however, Paul fell ill with a nervous disorder after a 3-month concert tour of the USA and was bedridden for a week. This was to be the first sign of a depressive disorder that would shadow his life.

The divorce talks were back on the cards for the Robesons in 1932, but they reconciled after Paul’s mistress, an English actress called Yolande Jackson, broke off their engagement to marry a Russian prince.

In 1933 Paul starred in his first “talkie”, Paramount’s ‘The Emperor Jones’ and a year later toured the Soviet Union and wanted to settle his family there in 1935 as he felt all races were treated equally.

In 1936 Paul featured in 2 films, ‘Song of Freedom’ and ‘King Solomon’s Mines’. He also decided to send his son, Paul Jr to a Soviet Model School in the hopes it would shield him from the racial oppression of American schools.

Paul filmed the movie ‘Jericho’ in Egypt and helped Max Yergan found the Council on African Affairs (CAA) in 1937. He went on to establish the Negro Playwrights’ Company in 1940. When Paul became a chair for the CAA in 1941, the FBI placed him under surveillance believing him to be a Communist.

Paul received the NAACP’s highest honour, the Springarn medal in 1945 at a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel. His son, Paul Jr married a Jewish girl, Marilyn Paula Greenberg in June of 1949 and hostile crowds threatened their wedding procession.

Paul became the first American banned from TV in 1950 when NBC stopped his appearance on ‘Today with Mrs. Roosevelt’ under the new Internal Security Act. All this stemmed from his being labelled a Communist and in 1953 he was blacklisted from record companies, but he funded his own label and recorded 2 albums, ‘Paul Robeson Sings’ and ‘Solid Rock’.

In 1958 Paul celebrated his 60th birthday and India declared a Paul Robeson Day on March 17th. Paul also released his autobiography entitled ‘Here I Stand’ and his passport was finally returned to him after many years.

During 1961 Paul suffered an emotional collapse whilst on a visit to Moscow and was hospitalised for several months. He suffered throughout the year from bouts of exhaustion and chronic depression. He was finally diagnosed in 1963 at a Berlin clinic as having Paget’s disease (a bone disorder) and at the same time, Essie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. On December 13th 1965, Essie died just before her 70th birthday. The following year, Paul moved in with his sister, Marion, who cared for him.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the FBI stopped investigating Paul Robeson and 2 years later, in 1976 Paul suffered 2 strokes in less than a month and died at the age of 77 in Philadelphia.

Note the staggering effects of racism on Robeson, and how it dogged his footsteps most of his life despite all his fame. Note that his father had been a slave. Note another Jewish connection through his son’s marriage (more about that later). Note the fact that he had a severe emotional collapse while visiting Moscow in 1961 (the same site as his meeting with Feffer but over ten years later, and about five years after the shattering revelations contained in the Khrushchev Report, detailing Stalin’s crimes).

This article offers some insight into what caused Robeson to become a Communist–or, rather, an extreme Communist sympathizer (apparently, he was quite careful never to officially join the Party):

A critical journey at that time, one that changed the course of his life, was to the Soviet Union. Paul Robeson author Duberman depicted Robeson’s time there: “Nights at the theater and opera, long walks with [film director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories … all in the context of a warm embrace.” Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins, “that the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. ‘Here, for the first time in my life … I walk in full human dignity.'” Diggins went on to assert that Robeson’s “attraction to Communism seemed at first more anthropological than ideological, more of a desire to discover old, lost cultures than to impose new political systems. … Robeson convinced himself that American blacks as descendants of slaves had a common culture with Russian workers as descendants of serfs.”

And in the same article we find Robeson’s response to the Khrushchev report and its revelations:

After World War II, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union froze into the Cold War, many former advocates of communism backed away from it. When the crimes of Soviet leader Josef Stalin became public–forced famine, genocide, political purges–still more advocates left the ranks of communism. Robeson, however, was not among them. National Review contributor Joseph Sobran explained why: “It didn’t matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might be abused. In 1946 the former All-American explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: ‘The coach tells you what to do and you do it.’ It was incidental that the coach was Stalin.” Robeson could not publicly decry the Soviet Union even after he, most probably, learned of Stalin’s atrocities because “the cause, to his mind,” Nation contributor Huggins theorized, “was much larger than the Soviet Union, and he would do nothing to sustain the feeding frenzy of the American right.”

So it seems that Robeson’s love for Communism was rooted in his idea that it was the antidote to the racism that had tormented this very proud man all his life. In this, of course, he was utterly mistaken, but it was a powerful dream that he could not relinquish: “Here, for the first time in my life…I walk in full human dignity.” When push came to shove and Stalin’s crimes became known, Robeson, like so many others, faced a choice between clinging to an ideal and rejecting that ideal because of the horrifically flawed reality that it had become. Like so many others, he clung to the power of the dream rather than face a harsh reality. (Once again, in describing this, I am not offering an excuse; merely an explanation. Robeson is responsible for his own moral failures.)

By this time, Robeson’s betrayal of Feffer had already occurred. Robeson was a brilliant man and one who believed deeply in human rights. If I had to guess, I would say that at some later point it became nearly impossible for him to continue to deny to himself that he had been tragically mistaken in serving a cause that in fact had made a mockery of those ideals. Caught in a trap, he couldn’t see his way towards renouncing his Soviet dream and his own complicity in those very crimes. But the knowledge of what he had done may have seeped in anyway, causing a deep and irreconcilable depression. It is no accident, to my way of thinking, that Robeson’s first breakdown occurred in Moscow, post-Khrushchev. The scene of the crime–or crimes.

(Conclusion tomorrow…Part III.)

Gastronomic interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to put in a plug for the best Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles, IMHO: the Carnival on Woodman in Studio City. Cheap, plentiful, and delicious–who could ask for anything more?

For me, Mideastern food is the best type of food on earth. I first ate it when I was about seven years old, and it was a revelation. An uncle took us to an Armenian restaurant in Manhattan, and when I took my first bite I thought, “Where have you been all my life?” It was as though until then I’d been eating in black-and-white, and now the food was in Technicolor. In those days, the only ethnic foods around tended to be Italian (pizza and spaghetti, and if you were really adventurous, some lasagna), and old-time Chinese of the chow mein and chop suey variety, plus a few soggy eggrolls.

For years afterwards, I made quite a pest of myself unsuccessfully begging my parents to take me back to the Armenian restaurant. It wasn’t until I was grown up that Mideastern food became readily available, and I could indulge my craving. I also acquired a stable of Mideastern cookbooks, and cooked up a storm.

If you go to the Carnival, order the combo appetizer plate: tabooli, falafel, baba ganoush, and hummus. Or, actually, order anything.

(Driving up to San Francisco this afternoon. More culinary adventures await.)

Paul Robeson (Part I)–a mind can be an impossible thing to change

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This post isn’t really another one about Radical Son, although it was sparked by a story that appeared in the book.

Horowitz relates a bloodcurdling incident in the life of the great Afro-American actor, singer, football player, Columbia Law School graduate, and Sovietophilic Communist-supporter Paul Robeson. The story, and that of Robeson’s life in general, illustrates the depths to which adhering to the party line brought this otherwise great man–and those depths, as you shall see, were very deep.

The trajectory of Robeson’s life is a highly cautionary tale of the ideological seduction of a gifted man by what was originally an idealistic dream, his failure to see the horror that dream had become, his severe moral compromise as a result, and the cost of that compromise to him and others. Robeson was a perfect example of just how very difficult it can be for a mind to change, no matter how insightful or otherwise intelligent that mind might be.

Here, by the way, is the basic liberal/leftist view of Robeson’s life: Afro-American artist as victim. As we shall see, if you stick with me through this one, the truth is far more complex–and, I think, far more interesting.

In Radical Son, Horowitz writes that during WWII Josef Stalin had created a group called the Jewish Joint Anti-fascist Committee, designed to improve relations with his anti-Fascist Western allies such as the United States. The Russian Yiddish poet Itzhak Feffer was a member of the group (one of the Jewish parts of the “Committee”). While on a visit with the group to the US, he and Robeson (who spoke fluent Russian, by the way) became fast friends. After the war was over, however, in the late 1940s, Stalin–who had murdered countless people from the 30s on–now decided it was the Jews’ turn, after all. Feffer was a fairly well-known literary figure and a Party stalwart, but this didn’t prevent him from being among those arrested.

There were rumors in the US about what was happening. Robeson visited the Soviet Union around this time and asked to see Feffer. Horowitz writes:

[Robeson] was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was the Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked him how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us, ” he said. “When you return to America, you must speak out and save us.”

After his meeting with the poet, Robeson returned home. When he was asked about Feffer and the other Jews, he assured his questioners that reports of their imprisonment were malicious slanders spread by individuals who only wanted to exacerbate Cold War tensions. Shortly afterward, Feffer, along with so many others, vanished into Stalin’s gulag.

It was not that Robeson had not understood Feffer’s message. He had understood it all too well. Because it was Robeson, near the end of his own life and guilty with remorse, who told the story long after Itzhak Feffer was dead.

This story literally made the hair on my arms stand up. I knew Robeson had been a Communist, or at least a Communist sympathizer (although whether or not he was technically a Party member is more or less irrelevant, so openly dedicated was he to the cause). But how could he have been guilty of such betrayal on a personal level? And why? I also wondered about Horowitz’s source for the story. Perhaps it wasn’t even true. To whom did Robeson tell it “near the end of his own life and guilty with remorse,” and why?

(To be continued…in Part II.)

More evidence that I’m not so young anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, I don’t quite get it.

I was in the elevator at my Woodland Hills motel, and in walked a lovely young girl. By “young girl” I mean she was somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six; I can’t quite tell the difference nowadays. Long pale straight blond hair, angelic features, sweet as anything, polite and smiling. Her T-shirt, black and sleeveless, had the following printed on the back in large letters, “Vomit is erotic.”

Yes, well of course. I’ve often thought so. Haven’t you?

I can only imagine her T-shirt was ironic. But it seemed very very sad to me, nevertheless.

Journalists through the decades: tenure?

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I know I’ve written quite a bit about the book Radical Son, in which David Horowitz details the process by which he changed from activist leftist to neocon (see here and here for examples of my posts).

But the book is one of those gifts that keeps on giving. One of the most intriguing aspects of Horowitz’s tale, at least to me, is found in certain throwaway details that have taken on a different light in recent years, post-9/11.

Although the book was published in 1997 and therefore the portraits Horowitz paints of various figures on the journalistic left are frozen at that point, time has of course moved on and we’ve seen some interesting changes happen to a number of those people.

Horowitz isn’t the sort to pull his punches, so part of his book is an attempt to show how very vicious some of his former colleagues on the left were when he “turned.” The phenomenon I described here, in “Condescension and leaving the political fold,” was operating very strongly in Horowitz’s life when he emerged from a few years of thought and relative political inaction to announce his change of mind in a series of hard-hitting articles and lectures. As apostates, he and his writing partner Peter Collier not only found doors closed to them in the publishing world that had heretofore been open, but Horowitz experienced a great deal of personal animosity from former friends (including a woman who actually spat at him, I seem to recall):

Although we [Horowitz and Collier] were best-selling authors, there were no longer friendly pages for our writings in its influential liberal journals–the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and (now that we had shown what our apostasy meant), the Washington Post. These were reserved for our literary executioners–Gitlin, Hitchens, Blumenthal, and friends.

These names may be strikingly familiar to you. Todd Gitlin is a prominent leftist critic of Bush, and Sidney Blumenthal is a former Clinton aide who is well-known as one of Clinton’s biggest defenders during the Lewinsky scandal. They are both still on the same side as they were when Horowitz wrote his book.

But the other name, Hitchens, refers of course to Christopher Hitchens. Two of the most negative portraits in Horowitz’s book–and, as I said, he’s not one to pull punches, so the negative portraits are very negative–are those of Hitchens and the leftist Paul Berman, both of whom Horowitz reports as having been especially cutting and personal in their attacks on him (not very hard to believe about Hitchens, but Berman surprised me).

Both Hitchens and Berman have themselves undergone certain, shall we say, changes since the book was written. Although both still self-identify as being on the left–Berman especially–both have came close to becoming apostates themselves post-9/11 (although neither has gone anywhere near as far as Horowitz has in that respect), and both have gotten flak from former colleagues for their support of the Iraq war.

It is especially interesting to me that these two were vociferously and personally opposed to Horowitz at the time of his turning, and yet later both ended up doing a not insignificant bit of turning themselves, a fact which strikes me as deeply ironic. Now, Hitchens himself has experienced some of the ostracism he dealt out to Horowitz. Of course, Hitchens being Hitchens, he probably couldn’t care less (or, if he does, he’ll never tell).

But here is Horowitz’s vivid portrait of Hitchens back in the late Reagan years, when Horowitz had just said goodbye to the left, and both men were appearing on the public television show “Book Notes,” hosted by Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s (in a remarkable feat of media longevity, Lapham remains its editor–and you may recall him as the man whose name recently, like that of Robert Fisk, became a verb, in Lapham’s case for his remarkable time-traveling abilities prior to the 2004 Republican Convention):

As a Trotskyite himself, Hitchens had few illusions about the utopias that the Left had built, but–like Tom Hayden and Jim Mellen–he was driven by internal demons that could not be pacified. This inner rage fueled his animus against the country that had treated him so well, and prompted him to compose a recent article which provided a rationale for Shi’ite terrorists at war with the West…Sitting across from me at Lapham’s right, Hitchens looked like a badger, his mood black and his head, with hooded eyes that scowled in my direction, sunk deep into his neck cavity. As soon as we began the proceedings, his bile spilled onto every surface; souring the entire mood of the show, which reached its nadir when I mentioned the passage in which I had written about my father’s funeral. “Who cares about his pathetic family?” Hitchens snapped.

It is interesting to note that, although Hitchens has for the most part come over to the neocon side, and thus I appreciate and agree with quite a few (although not all) of his articles and points of view, Horowitz’s description of him strikes me as spot on. When Hitchens is on one’s side, his biting wit and ability to skewer the opposition are appreciated; when he is on the other side, beware. But, agree or disagree with him, he does seem to be motivated by an anger that appears to have some sort of internal genesis, and his nasty remark about Horowitz’s father ties in perfectly with strains noted in the recent dialogue between Hitchens and his brother. One can safely say that Hitchens was certainly not then and is not now a sentimentalist about family.

One particularly fascinating detail of the above quote was that, according to Horowitz, Hitchens had written an article that seems to have been some sort of apologia for Shi’ite terrorists. The post-9/11 Hitchens would probably like to forget that.

Speaking of forgetting, I wondered whether, now that Horowitz and Hitchens have moved closer together in policy matters and have shared the strange experience of losing friends and colleagues over it, they are now on speaking terms with each other despite their conflicted history.

Well, it turns out they are; apparently politics does make strange bedfellows, unmakes them, and then makes them once again. In this 2002 article by Horowitz, he writes, “Christopher [Hitchens], who is also my friend…” And then there is this, promoting a rather remarkable excursion, “Tour London with Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz.”

Horowitz’s book is replete with names from the past that still resonate now, in addition to Hitchens. The same crew of commentators and journalists seems to have been around for decades: Alexander Cockburn, Lewis Lapham, Seymour Hersch, Sidney Blumenthal, Eric Alterman, Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Hendrick Hertzberg, and Martin Peretz. All have roles, small or large, to play in Horowitz’s book, and all are still writing in very influential periodicals today. Most of them are more or less on the same side now as they were then; only a few are “changers” like Horowitz and Hitchens.

It made me realize the huge influence a rather small number of people has had in shaping political perceptions in the US and around the world for many decades. In how many other fields would a book written about events occurring mostly in the 60s through the 80s contain so many names that were still highly influential in the year 2005? Do journalists, like academics, have tenure?

Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué

The New Neo Posted on by

A recent issue of the New Republic featured this article entitled “The Killing Machine” by Alvaro Vargas Llosa. The subject is Che Guevara, that familiar and longstanding “logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic.”

That seems to be what it’s come down to: Che as poster boy (literally). Vargas Llosa calls him “the socialist heartthrob in his beret.” Perhaps that’s all he is now to most of those who sport his dark and brooding image on their “mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts.”

Che’s visage has had remarkable staying power; I remember it was already in vogue when I was in college. He’s been dead for thirty-eight years now, and the legend only grows–although, if he hadn’t been good-looking and photogenic, he’d probably be an obscure footnote to history by this time.

Although Che is far from forgotten, his true history is. How many of those sporting reproductions of his photo as a fashion statement know much about what he actually stood for and the crimes he perpetrated? For in fact, as the article’s title indicates, he was quite the “killing machine.”

The article is available by subscription only. But it provides many details of Che’s life as a man in love with violence, both as a strategic tool and for its own sake. He left a number of writings that attest to this point of view, and his actions were consistent with it. The handsome and debonaire Che was instrumental in setting up the apparatus of Castro’s police state, and was in charge of a kangaroo court that rubber-stamped the executions of anyone he thought might be getting in the way:

At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people’s lives and property, and to abolish their free will.

His economic policies were laughable and helped lead to Cuba’s impoverishment:

The great revolutionary had a chance to put into practice his economic vision–his idea of social justice–as head of the National Bank of Cuba and of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959, and, starting in early 1961, as minister of industry. The period in which Guevara was in charge of most of the Cuban economy saw the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing–all this in what had been one of Latin America’s four most economically successful countries since before the Batista dictatorship.

His stint as head of the National Bank, during which he printed bills signed “Che,” has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: “[He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.”

Why bring this all up now? It’s a reminder that there is always a certain element ready to idolize, lionize, and popularize a thug, as long as he meets the criteria of being from a third-world country and against the US (never mind that, within that country–in Che’s case, Argentina–he was a member of its elite). Some may idolize him because he’s a thug, some may not know or care what he is as long as he’s popular and it’s cool to wear the T-shirt, while some may need to idealize him beyond all recognition in order to join the worshipping crowd.

Vargas Llosa’s article quotes a little rhyme devised by a group of young Argentines to mock this phenomenon:

…an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: “Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,” or “I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why.”

Perfect, indeed.

California dreamin’

The New Neo Posted on by

Dreaming of what? Of real estate.

I picked up one of those “Homes and Land of the San Fernando Valley” freebies from the supermarket. Glossy pictures of page after page of home listings. Most of the actual buildings look surprisingly modest from the outside, although their insides might boast six bedrooms and a private theater.

I’ve also noticed that, at least in their photos, the realtors themselves are all dolled up, very slick and glitzy. As a group, they look as though they keep the plastic surgeons of the region mighty busy. The realtors of New England are more the banker types, trying to convey the idea that they’re sober and trustworthy. But the realtors of southern California resemble movie stars–or maybe TV stars, or telemarketing stars. “Stick with me and you’ll be a star, too.”

But the prices are a giggle, an absurdity. Over the years, I’ve watched them move up and up and up, but this is beyond belief. No home appears to be priced lower than about $550,000. Most of them are well above one million, and many are above two. Here’s one of my absolute favorites:

GREAT STARTER HOME IN HIDDEN HILLS
Wonderful starter home on prime street in Hidden Hills. Beautiful wooded lot…Potential to build your dream estate here, great upside for developers. $1,175,000.

I know that Hidden Hills is one of those exclusive gated communities, so I suppose this represents the low end of the Hidden Hills market. But surely the phrase “starter home” is a bit of a misnomer?

Where have you gone, Steven Den Beste? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

The New Neo Posted on by

I miss Steven Den Beste.

No, I never met him; and yes, I know he’s not returning to political blogging (he still blogs on anime here).

He’s very ill; and, what’s more, even if he weren’t, I don’t get the sense that he’s the type who would respond to pleadings from his audience. He’s no Andrew Sullivan, playing the “Hello I must be going” game. He’s the type who makes up his mind and that’s it. No looking back. At least that’s what I imagine.

But I still miss him, and hope he’s doing well. I think, when I reflect on it, that he was my favorite blogger. There was nothing easy about him; no cheap shots, no funny stuff. He didn’t pander, and he was the hardest worker imaginable, churning out reams of lucid prose on a daily basis. I never understood how there were enough hours in a day for him to write as much as he did, even if he was working round the clock. And of course I didn’t know at the time that it was done at enormous physical cost to him because he was suffering from a progressive degenerative illness. When he quit blogging about a year ago in July, 2004, he cited both the illness and a massive psychological burnout that seems to have come from the fact that almost all the mail he got—and he got a lot of it—was negative.

I felt guilty, having never written him an e-mail myself that let him know how much I admired and appreciated his work. I wrote one afterwards, but he never replied, nor did I expect him to. I like to think it was because he was inundated with similar missives.

Den Beste had never impressed me as being the type to care whether people appreciated him or not, though. In fact, Bill Whittle famously called him the “Krell Mind Machine”–and those of you who read the book The Forbidden Planet in your youth and loved it (as I did), or saw the movie, will understand what Whittle was getting at. But I suppose even the most cerebral of us—and Steven Den Beste was nothing if not cerebral—have feelings, too (something that should be glaringly obvious, but is sometimes clear only in retrospect).

To those of you who got into reading blogs after Den Beste had retired and who don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to visit his archived writings. Here’s a guide. Of course, it’s not the same as reading his analyses at the time he wrote them. For example, during the buildup to the Iraq war, when the US was presenting its case (interminably, it seemed) to the balky UN, I recall that it was Den Beste who had the best (yes, puns are irresistible) writings on the situation. He was the one I relied on.

You had to be patient to stick with Den Beste—he wasn’t what you’d call a quick read. Step by laborious step, he’d take the reader through a beautifully and logically reasoned argument or explanation, and he didn’t really care how long it took. He respected his readers and figured they were up to the task—and for him, they were. He sometimes dealt with minutiae and technical things (after all, he’d been an engineer), and some of his posts were arcane. If on a certain day he wanted to write about something obscure and tech-y, or anime—well then, that’s what he wrote about that day (and that’s the day I might take a break from his blog). But most of the time he worked large, weaving together examples from disparate sources in new and unexpected—and, above all, deep—ways, bringing the sharp order of his mind to the chaos of politics and world events.

As Den Beste himself put it (and he put it best) in this essay about the process by which he wrote his articles, he used an “internal mechanism” which was especially “good at…finding non-obvious relationships.” That was indeed his specialty. In the same essay, he says: I write about something because I’m compelled to, because it’s often the case that if I don’t, then I can’t get it out of my head. Putting my thoughts into print relieves an internal pressure which also isn’t easily described.

That came across in his essays. He seemed to be a pressure cooker of some sort: throw in a bunch of data, seal the top, add heat, and the pressure would build until—voila!—out came a tasty feast, in his case an intellectual one, cooked in far less time than conventional pots and normal pressure could ever accomplish. It’s not surprising he burnt out. Even if he hadn’t had an illness, I can’t imagine anyone keeping up that sort of pace.

Den Beste was a master of the long essay form and a blog pioneer, beginning in early 2001, when most of us had never even heard the word “blog.” I’m a practitioner of the medium-to-longish essay myself, and I tip my proverbial hat to Den Beste for setting the bar very very high.

Should I? No, don’t think so

The New Neo Posted on by

I had no idea when I planned my trip, but it turns out that today is Disneyland’s 50th birthday.

Well, it seems serendipitous–after all, I’m here, it’s here; a rare confluence of events.

But no, I won’t go. I must confess, I’m no Disney fan. As a child I actually had a sort of horror of cartoons–all those animals being squished pancake-flat and then popping up again, phoenix- and accordian-like, only a tiny bit the worse for wear.

Even back when I first visited Disneyland in 1960 (perhaps on its fifth birthday? I liked it at the time, by the way) it was mild stuff like the teacup ride that was my cup of tea. My mother and I did the teacups and the like, while my brother and father went on to heartier fare. And, although I did manage to ride the Matterhorn, I kept my eyes closed most of the time.

Then, as a parent, I put in many a long hour in lines at both Disney parks. But now that the child is grown, no need any more to pretend. I just don’t like the place.

I hope this post doesn’t end up being the most controversial thing I’ve ever written.

Action and reaction: prayer

The New Neo Posted on by

At American Digest, Gerard van der Leun has written an interesting piece on prayer and why it isn’t often answered in the way people might want (and sometimes even expect) it to be.

Reading it brought to mind an article I read quite a few years ago on the subject of prayer. It appeared where I would have least expected it–in some magazine like Esquire, or perhaps Vanity Fair, which I think I was probably reading in a dentist’s office.

Unfortunately, I no longer recall the author’s name or the magazine in which it actually appeared. But the premise of the article was that the writer, a complete nonbeliever who was experiencing some sort of huge crisis (midlife or otherwise), decided in his desperation to pray daily, even though he was without belief. He kept this up for a year or more, not knowing quite where he was going with it, and he found to his great surprise that the very act of prayer had an effect–but the effect was on him.

Prayer didn’t necessarily get him what he wanted, not by a longshot. But he ended up changing as a person. He changed what he wanted, and changed what he was praying for, or praying about. He was calmer, more accepting, more “spiritual.” And this was true even though he initially felt awkward and stupid praying, and was without any belief for quite a long time.

If you go back to one of my early pieces on change, I wrote:

So here is a somewhat dry (and, mercifully, relatively brief!) introduction to the topic of how therapists view the process of change in therapy.

Of course, like any other discipline, therapy has no lack of theories from which to choose. But the one that made most sense to me when I was studying marriage and family therapy was the idea that change can occur on any–or all–of the following dimensions: cognition, feeling, and behavior (another way to describe the three would be thought, emotion, and action). I would also add a fourth, the spiritual, but for the purposes of therapeutic change or political change we can safely ignore that one…

Intervening to change one dimension could end up changing another, and ultimately changing them all. The idea was that lasting change could start anywhere, but would then (at least, ideally) cause a ripple effect that would end up changing the family or individual on all three dimensions.

To use a very simple example with an individual: changing a thought (“I’m ugly”) could lead to a change in behavior (going out more) that could lead to a change in feeling (from depression to joy). It usually seems much easier to start with either a thought or a behavior, because they are fairly easy to define and describe (to operationalize). Usually the change in feelings would follow the other changes.

So, my interpretation of what happened to the author of the article was that he changed on the behavioral dimension, and it sparked a change on the fourth dimension, the spiritual one, and probably on the others as well.

This certainly is not an attempt to take the mystery out of the process of prayer. I think there’s still plenty of that left. But it is a framework for understanding part of the more mundane human dimension of what might be happening when a person undertakes a practice of prayer.

With age, wisdom?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of my recent post about the direction of political change, neuroconservative asked:

I wonder what you (and the other neos here) think your younger self would have made of your older self? More broadly, how do you imagine that thinking liberals encode the fact that neo-cons exist but neo-libs don’t? This is hard for me to answer, since I have always been conservative.

Interesting question, I think. My guess is that my younger self would have ascribed it to a phenomenon I’d always heard about””that of people in general growing more conservative as they grow older. As a young person, I probably would not have thought much about why such a thing might occur. I probably would have thought it to be some sort of natural phenomenon, like getting wrinkles or gray hair or sagginess or all those other signs of fusty old age that of course were never, never, ever going to happen to me.

The fact that one might actually grow wiser with age, or might increase one’s store of information about history and human nature and what it all means, would probably have been a somewhat alien concept to me at the time. Sad, but true.