Or, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Drudge home screen, May 24 at about noon EST.

2 Comments

Obama wants Europe to “ease up” on the austerity measures it’s imposed (sort of imposed) on Greece and other spendthrift countries. Don’t let them go into default now, when it could (indeed surely would) have serious consequences for the world economy, but wait until, say, the middle of November 2012 when Obama will be home free or (as I think) out on his ear.

I find the spectacle of an economic incompetent like Barack Obama lecturing anyone on what they should do to mend the economy faintly ludicrous.  But to complete the comedy, I do have a modest proposal. Why don’t all these anti-austerity campaigners put their money where orifice is? Obama wants Europe to shovel some more money to Greece, Spain, et al. in order to “stimulate” their economies (and forestall yet more economic embarrassment before the U.S. election).

OK, fine.  Why doesn’t he set an example and invest some yet-to-be-determined billions of dollars from the union pension funds in (for example) Greek bonds?  Why doesn’t Paul Krugman, who is always wanting the our government to confiscate more of your money to spend on stuff, allocate, say, 50 percent of his retirement fund to Greek bonds? The New York Times should follow suit, as should other individuals and entities who have been loudly demanding we spend more to “stimulate” our way out of debt.  Just a thought  . . .

5 Comments

So now Chris Matthews isn’t the only one experiencing a little thrill when he thinks about Barack (omit middle name) Obama. The recent revelation that from the early 1990s until the day before yesterday—or, to be more accurate, until Obama made his decision to run for president—a biographical pamphlet circulated by his literary agents described him as having been “born in Kenya” has been setting the world of Twitter atwitter.

What should we think about that? An agency spokesman who claims to have been responsible for the “born in Kenya” wheeze has publicly said that it was a mistake, a typographical error, a slip of the pen that just went “unchecked” for, um, sixteen-seventeen years. I can understand that. She meant to write “Hawaii” and wrote “Kenya” instead. Could happen to anyone. They look and sound enough alike, don’t they,  that no one noticed. You meant to write “there” and you wrote “their” instead. You meant to write “cup” and you wrote “floccinaucinihilipilification” instead. No one—no one at the literary agency, not the author himself—could be expected to notice. You understand that, right?

Well, maybe that is an unprofitable line of inquiry. However it happened, the take-away here is not that Obama was really born in Kenya.  As my friend Roger Simon points out in “The Mystery of the Kenyan Birth,” the noteworthy thing is that it is one more puff in the cloud of unknowing that surrounds the president.

It’s been pretty foggy in those precincts for some time.  During the 2008 campaign, many of us asked the question: “Who is Barack Obama?” It wasn’t a question that Obama’s official PR firms—The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc.–were interested in, no sirree, but it was a question that some of us pajamas-wearing-bitter-enders asked ourselves when we weren’t snake handling or nuzzling our firearms.

It’s a question that has recurred as more and more pieces of the Obama jigsaw puzzle have worked their way loose and exposed little gaps or fissures in the story.  The most recent one concerned Ms. Composite, the girlfriend who didn’t exactly exist.  But there have been other revelations, or, rather, revelations of non-revelation. Turns out the book filed under “Autobiography” ought to have been filed under “Teen Fantasy,” “Mystery,” or some other rubric in the fiction section.

Pages: 1 2 3 | 278 Comments

Attentive readers will recall the announcement in these virtual pages of an impending event sure to electrify the literary bourse, the publication  — in just a few weeks now — of my new book  The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Twitter may not yet be atwitter with the news, but you, discerning soul that you are, can be the first on your block to pre-order the book, which will be available in a wide variety of electronic formats in addition to the usual page-turning, hardcover print edition, by the simple expedient of clicking here. And that’s not all: in my continuing effort to bring cheer to a weary public, I am delighted to unveil today, Friday, May 18, 2012, the second preview of coming attractions, this from the book’s preface:

It is one of the great mysteries—or perhaps I should say it is one of the reliable reminders of human imperfection — that higher education often fosters a particular form of political stupidity. [The philosopher Roger] Scruton anatomizes that stupidity, noting “the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticize would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country.” This peculiar mental deformation, Scruton observes, involves “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” It is a stage, he writes,

through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers. The Cambridge spies [Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, et al.] offer a telling illustration of what [this tendency] has meant for our country.

It is also telling that this déformation professionelle of intellectuals encourages them to repudiate patriotism as an atavistic passion and favor transnational institutions over national governments, rule by committee or the courts over democratic rule.

And this brings us to yet another irony: that relativism and tyranny, far from being in opposition, are in fact regular collaborators. (See below, “What’s Wrong with Benevolence.”) This surprises many people, for it seems at first blush that relativism, by loosening the sway of dogma, should be the friend of liberty. In fact, as Mussolini saw clearly, in its “contempt for fixed categories” and “objective truth,” “there is nothing more relativistic” than fascism. And it is not only fascism that habitually makes use of relativism as a moral softening-up agent. Modern liberal democracies champion reason in the form of a commitment to science and technology, but there, too, relativism shows itself as the friend of various strains of dehumanization. As Gairdner notes,

wherever the materialist attitude of modern science is combined with relativism, we can predict that moral and political statements will soon emerge about the worthlessness of some forms of human life and how we ought to be eliminating certain classes of unworthy people such as “unwanted” children by abortion, or the very old, or Jews, or the infirm by outright genocide or euthanasia.

Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations. “Where conditions permit,” Gairdner writes, the strong step in,

either to impose a new regime or, as in the Western democracies, where overt totalitarianism is still unthinkable, to further permeate ordinary life with the state’s quietly overbearing, regulating role. Relativism is the natural public philosophy of such regimes because it repudiates all natural moral or social binding power, replacing these with legal decrees and sanction of the state.

Tocqueville did not, I believe, use the term “relativism,” but he vividly delineated its political progeny in his description of democratic despotism, another leitmotif in the reflections of The Fortunes of Permanence.

“Permanence”: It is curious how hollow that stately word sounds to modern ears. Are we moderns not on the side of innovation, the untested, the new? In the preface to a collection of essays called Giants and Dwarfs, Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, insisted that “the essence of education is the experience of greatness.” Almost everything that Bloom wrote about the university flowed from this fundamental conviction. And it was just this, of course, that branded him an “elitist.” In fact, Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction. The Fortunes of Permanence aims to disturb that complacency and reaffirm the tradition that made both the experience of and the striving for greatness possible.

To find out what happens in the end, pre-order your copy of The Fortunes of Permanence now!

5 Comments

A friend sent me the following graphs.  I’d seen, indeed posted here, some of them already; some were new to me. Taken together they tell a sorry story of failure.

Pages: 1 2 | 90 Comments

You can always count on The New York Times. If there is even the shadow of a hint of an adumbration of a possibility in engaging in moral relativism to the advantage of our enemies (which means to the disadvantage of America), there they are, Johnny on the spot.

The latest example from the Times’s archive of moral equivalence is “The Poetry of al Qaeda and the Taliban.” The what  of al Qaeda and the Taliban? The poetry of terrorists and cullers of clitorises, the beheaders of journalists and assorted infidels, the blowers-up-of New York skyscrapers and Bali nightclubs?

Yes indeed. This emetic little piece, from yesterday’s “Opinion” pages, is by one by Faisal Devji, “A fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the author of the preface for the forthcoming anthology Poetry of the Taliban.”

Eager to rush out and order that tasty-sounding volume? No, nor I. “Elegy for the statue of Bhudda I smashed.” “Ode to Wives I have Beaten.” “Threnody for the Multitude We Murdered in New York.” “Sonnets on Semtex.” “Ballad on a Beheading.” The possibilities are endlessly nauseating.

“Poetry,” writes Mr. Devji, “has long been part of Muslim radicalism.” So what? Hitler liked painting Alpine landscapes.  Big deal.  That didn’t make the Nazis any less thuggish. And the fact that Muslim terrorists retreat to rhapsody when they aren’t murdering people or maiming and otherwise brutalizing their womenfolk does nothing, absolutely nothing, to exonerate them. Mr. Devji argues that “By excluding the aesthetic dimension from our analyses of militant texts like those recovered from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani lair, we miss a crucial opportunity to confront the humanity of their authors.” Wrong. By ignoring these disgusting sentimentalizing effusions, we avoid the moral trap of adumbrated by the phrase tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. The human, all-too-human face of evil is plenty conspicuous. Our problem is mustering the courage to see it plain and see it steady, avoiding the temptation of aestheticizing it out of account.

7 Comments

I don’t scrutinize the comments here as closely as I might. But every now and then I notice something special, e.g., this little bijou about “Craven and Pusillanimous at the Chronicle,” my post on Naomi Riley’s rustication from what James Taranto calls the Comical of Higher Education. It provides an excellent example of the intellectual subtlety and rhetorical suppleness of today’s academic Left:

Wow. First time reading this blog and the level of ignorance is astounding. Cultural ignorance, cultural intolerance, and shear racism run rampant here. Mr. Kimball–does it really stroke your ego to have followers who are trapped in such mind-numbing provincialism? Are you really that unsure of yourself, that insecure? Your own post was nothing but a half-witted smear–don’t pretend that it had any intellectual rigor or thought behind it. It was simply the equivalent of throwing out some red meat and turning the dogs loose. You are nothing more than a provocateur, and not even a mentally stimulating one.

Here’s to the steak tartar!

10 Comments

The Chronicle of so-called higher education, that is.

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote a column for “Brainstorm,” the Chronicle’s blog, called “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” When I say that there was nothing new in Ms. Riley’s column, I do not mean to disparage it. No: it is a splendid piece, a public service, really. It performs exactly the same service as the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone knows, though few have the temerity to say, that “Black Studies” is an awful confidence game: an exercise in racial grievance mongering utterly without scholarly merit. In this, I hasten to add, it resembles many other pseudo-disciplines invented since the late 1960s to provide a home for intellectually challenged but politically fermenting denizens of our universities: Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Transgender Studies, etc. etc. Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with twentieth century academia could be summed up in the word “workshop.” “Studies” is the new “workshop.” Take a look at the “dissertations” Ms. Riley describes. They are cringe-making in their awfulness. Consider:

• “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,” by Ruth Hayes. “It began,” Riley writes,  “because she ‘noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.’ How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.”
•  Then there is “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. . . . She explains that ‘The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.’ The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.”
•  Riley’s pièce de la résistance is a work by La TaSha B. Levy. “Ms. Levy,” the Chronicle writes, “is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” Riley asks: “The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?”

And on it goes. Riley concludes with this sterling bit of advice: “If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.” But of course if you subtract the racialism from such works you would be left with… nothing. That’s what they essentially are: politicized exercises in race mongering.

Pages: 1 2 | 59 Comments

Sigh. The widely reported comment of the newly elected president of France, François Hollande, that his “true enemy” is “the world of finance” made me shake my head in… well, I was going to say “disbelief,” but that isn’t quite right. I believe it all right. It’s just that I am wearily aghast at the spectacle. Is there a more vivid example of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again”? Haven’t we been down this socialist, anti-capitalist road before? Don’t we know where it leads? Hayek provided the relevant street sign: it reads “Road to Serfdom.”

So M. Hollande does not like “the rich.” Has he not heard Aesop’s story about the goose that laid the golden egg?

A cottager and his wife had a Hen that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed that the Hen must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed it. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the Hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were assured day by day.

Here’s a question I would like to ask François Hollande (I’d like to ask it of Barack Obama, too): just where does he think money comes from? I sometimes wonder if socialists suffer under a species of arrested development. Some credulous children believe that the stork brings babies. So it is that socialists tend to believe that money comes from “the rich.” Need some dough for your social program? Simple, take it from “the rich” (however you define that elastic category) and give it to someone else via a government bureaucracy you have set up.

But what happens when the rich cease to be rich? What then?

Pages: 1 2 | 75 Comments

So, Tucker Carlson, according to Democrat strategist Jehmu Greene, is “a bow tie’n white boy.” That’s what Ms. Greene said on Megyn Kelly’s show America Live.  I think it was the “white boy” part that was supposed to be particularly offensive. As one bow-tyin’ white boy to another, however, I find it more pathetic than irritating. Why is it that Democrats are cruising around accusing everyone in sight of being racist when it is they, not the objects of their ire, who engage in the racist behavior? Harry Stein, in his new book No Matter What . . .  They’ll Call this Book Racist, has some intelligent things to say about that.

It’s perfectly ok with me if Ms. Greene thinks she is disparaging me when she identifies me by my race and shaves a few years off my age. What I find totally unacceptable is her implicit condemnation of the bow tie.  Please, let’s leave bow ties out if it.  After all, what has that innocent bit of haberdashery ever done to her?  In an earlier column, I had occasion to ponder the mystery of why the bow tie drives a certain species of  liberal around the bend. They see a perfectly knotted bit of silk and … bang! It’s like a red flag to a bull. This recent insult to they bow tie prompts me to repeat that earlier column from 2008, in which I call for the creation of a “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Bow Tie.”

Read the article on the next page.

Pages: 1 2 | 66 Comments