Blithely, Blithely

Marx the answer?

2006-12-24T09:37:00.000-06:00

Walter Benjamin, a long dead German genius . . . dissects [19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire] the author of "Les Fleurs du Mal" ("The Flowers of Evil") with a Marxist scalpel, among other unusual literary procedures.

Unusual? The reviewer, Leslie H. Whitten, Jr. in Wash Times, must be kidding. The Marxist scalpel is standard in many quarters, where the great visionary’s notions hold full sway. Thoroughly romantic notions, we must add, to go with us latter-day romantics who love grand schemes and never heard of Occam’s advice not to multiply things without good reasons.

When Stanley Fish, recently UIC dean and much-cited Milton scholar, became head of English dept. at Duke U., for instance, “he pretty much single-handedly transformed a staid and tweedy department of old-fashioned litterateurs into a teeming, buzzing hotbed of trendy, avant-garde professors touting the very latest in Marxist, Queer, feminist, and deconstructionist criticism,” said Edward T. Oakes in First Things for Nov. 2001.

When Frederick Crews sent up Fish with his “How Milne Works” panel, a takeoff on Fish’s How Milton Works in his 2001 book Postmodern Pooh, one of the panelists was the Marxist Carla Gulag, who quotes her mentor Frederic Jameson, including Jameson’s real-life contention that the German philosopher Heidegger's "political commitment" to Hitler was "morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism."

Of course, the Marxist preference much predated Fish at Duke in 2001. “Marx goes to the heart of the problem,” the critic Dwight MacDonald wrote to a college classmate in 1936. To the same man he wrote: “I’m growing more and more intolerant of those who stand—or rather squat — in the way of radical progress, the more I learn about the conservative businesses that run this country and the more I see of the injustices done people under this horrible capitalist system.”

Joseph Epstein is quoting MacDonald in his review of A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (Ivan R. Dee) in The New Criterion for November 2001.

It’s all an infitesimal part of the American intellectals’ love affair with pie in the sky as offered by the sage of the British Museum, who had not the slightest idea how his vision would become reality but loved it anyhow, as did and do his followers in academe — like the guy looking into the clear but deep pond (still waters, you know) who bent over to kiss his reflection and fell in, never more to breath God’s air. Yes, it’s you I’m talking about, Narcissus, wherever you are in 2006.

As for Benjamin, he “saw in Baudelaire a tragic magnificence,” says reviewer Whitten, who credits him with giving us “extraordinary insights” into Baudelaire, who died of illness related to the veneral disease he had gotten in his teens. The book is THE WRITER OF MODERN LIFE: ESSAYS ON CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, by Benjamin, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press). Whitten, author of The Rebel: Poems by Charles Baudelaire -- American Versions, takes Benjamin seriously here, let the record show.

Shirt wisdom

2006-12-14T15:28:00.000-06:00

Shirt in Shirtworks window: “I’m sorry (in advance).” Very good. Captures the pro forma nonsense of the very public apology, as by comics who go off half-cocked.

You were wondering about me?

2006-12-08T10:26:00.000-06:00

So was I. I took a test at How Liberal Or Conservative Are You? and discovered this:

***Your Political Profile:***

Overall: 85% Conservative, 15% Liberal

Social Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Ethics: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

============

How did I merit this? By my answers to these qq:

Protecting the environment is a primary social responsibility we have, regardless of how it effects businesses.

· Not exactly

· True

Immigration policies

· Should be less strict. Immigrants enhance this country.

· Should be more strict. Too many people enter illegally.

Gay marriage

· Should be legal and given the same rights as heterosexual marriage.

· Should not be legal. Marriage is between a man and a woman.

Public education could be improved by

· Having a voucher system

· Revoking No Child Left Behind

If you smoke marijuana...

· You should be punished with a slap on the wrist

· It's your business

Affirmative action

· Gives minorities and women a level playing field

· Is unfair, outdated, and hurts those with the most merit

Carrying a gun is:

· Taking responsibility for one's own defense, and admirable

· Dangerous and sketchy

Some people have less luck than others

· False

· True

Social Security:

· Is simply a transfer payment that should be replaced by personal accounts

· Can easily be fixed by making the rich and employers pay more

Taxes should be...

· Cut to stimulate the economy and give people more of their money back.

· Something the rich pay more of. They can afforded.

It's more important for our country

· Reduce the deficit and national debt

· To help the poor and helpless

The Fed should be more concerned with

· Controllling unemployment

· Controlling inflation

The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders.

· False

· True

Everyone has a right to health care, even if they can't afford it

· False

· True

All authority, by its nature, should be questioned

· False

· True

Abortion should be...

· Completely legal and available

· Restricted, discouraged, or illegal

Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.

· True

· False

The war in Iraq is justified

· True

· False

The problem with the US justice system is:

· Too many plea bargains and loose interpretations of law

· Not enough rehabilitation and prisoner's rights

The death penalty

· Is appropriate in select cases

· Is a violation of human rights

Close call

2006-12-04T09:25:00.000-06:00

Firefox just saved my bacon, as it does with its anti-phishing service. Bank of America stuff this time. BEWARE!

Trapped

2006-12-03T21:29:00.000-06:00

Ostensibly picking up on gospel notion of not being distracted by lesser concerns, preacher digs up tried and true chestnut, list of woes of rest of world compared to us, offering exercise in guilt-tripping for one of your most guilt-prone of audiences: sunday churchgoers, especially those eager beavers who show up at early mass.

It's like telling a dirty joke at Vegas, easy way to get a laugh; so here it's easy way to get attention. Cheaply. It's a double win for preacher, who fills his need (a) to get our attention and (b) to promulgate his sense of what's right and wrong with the world.

Meanwhile, as to being caught in a trap, which is the gospel message, one in which Christians are too often caught is that of self-flagellation. But the preacher prefers to see us in that trap and in fact facilitates it.

Delicious, informative

2006-11-11T18:39:00.000-06:00

Red Baron four-cheeze pizza deserves a huzzah or two or three. The lady of our house and I just had it for Sat. night dinner after a hard day of shopping and reading — she did the former, I the latter (about blogging). And we are ecstatic or at least well pleased. Buy some today!

The reading was of a book I can also recommend, Blog Wild!: a Guide for Small Business Blogging, by Andy Wibbels, a Portfolio book from Penguin. Even for the blogger of several years like me, it has good info, mainly so far, at p. 50 of 275, on technical aspects. The author, “a blogging evangelist,” offers his GoBlogWild site for further reference.

Bon Mot

2006-09-01T08:16:00.000-05:00

“When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” said the runner in “Chariots of Fire,” quoted by Bill Bennett just now on his “Morning in America” show on WIND-AM-Chi.

That’s a good one.

Let's get our verbs right

2006-08-30T09:56:00.000-05:00

A jump in advanced placement test scores is good news to Oak Park-River Forest High School administrators, though it's dampened by a drop in the number of minority students enrolling in AP classes,

says Oak Leaves.

Dampened? The writer means caused? Unless the gap has been closed, in which case this blog missed a major story.

Govt schools suck?

2006-08-30T08:48:00.000-05:00

The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment [says ABC’s John Stossel], but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state -- run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."

A teachers’ union president said that? Phew.

Sleepyhead?

2006-08-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

Sunday, 9:35 a.m. Email to Oliver M. Thomas Jr., President, New Orleans City Council

Mr. Thomas:

Did you oversleep this morning and therefore miss (a) Fox on Sunday with Chris Wallace and (b) a briefing on Hurricane Ernesto, as Wallace just said? "Apparently overslept" were his words.

-- Jim Bowman

Later:

----- Original Message -----

From: Oliver M. Thomas

To: jimbowman@ameritech.net

Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2006 9:37 AM

Subject: Re: Sleepyhead?

No was at there studio and he wouldn't let me go on because he had sheriff Lee on , so I went to WDSU and did my report there .
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Device

At Bread Kitchen

2006-08-26T11:47:00.000-05:00

. . . a few weeks ago, two women, probably mothers:

#1 with boy, probably son, age 6 or so, at his beck and call, hops up from little table of his choosing (she meets his requirements) many times in course of 15–minute muffin breakfast, depositing stuff in trash container or getting napkins. She has an itch.

#2 with little girl, probably daughter, tells her to pick a table, she picked an adult one, settles self there while woman gets muffins, even saving stool for her with her yellow and red mini-backpack, waits. Woman brings muffins, sits on saved stool, crosses long legs, pulls out paper, reads while little girl eats, looking into space, relaxed. A few bites and she's off to the little kids’ area and book shelf, gets a picture book, returns and looks it over.

Funny Jewish fella

2006-08-24T12:03:00.000-05:00

"Why are you dressed like that?" asks the Jewish mother of her son when he visits her wearing the uniform of a naval officer. "Because, Mama," he explains, "I just bought a boat, and I'm the captain." To which, smiling fondly, she replies, "Well, by you you're a captain. And by me you're a captain. But by a captain are you a captain?"

That’s Norman Podhoretz in Opinion Journal, asking Is the Bush Doctrine Dead? The president's critics are wrong. That includes the neocons.

He continues.

Which is to say that, like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush may be an ideologue "by" most politicians (who believe in nothing much and are always ready to trade a principle for a political gain), but "by" an ideologue he's no ideologue.

Which is to show you can be funny while serious.

Sexual innuendo

2006-08-03T09:48:00.000-05:00

How’s this for Lib-Dem crude? It’s a list of Republicans and other undesirables who support Sen. Joseph Lieberman in his primary race with an anti-war zealot:

Who Blows Joe?

Impediment

2006-08-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

Juan Cole lost out as a tenured prof at Yale because of his insufficient scholarly record, says David White, not because right-wingers pressured anyone, as charged. The relevant committee did, however, note other matters:

"What first blindsided them," [former Yale Prof Mary] Habeck explained, "was his political involvement in so many controversial topics. I can say unequivocally that at the beginning, they weren't aware of Juan Cole's blogging life." [Italics added]

Yes. How can you be a trustworthy scholar while so involved? Can’t be done, sez I.

Lost for words

2006-08-03T07:49:00.000-05:00

Call it McLuhan’s revenge:

[O]ur new post-literate Democrats have largely come to live in an image driven, magical world, where a picture of a coffin coming back to the United States or a weeping Iraqi in a war-torn village trumps the hard fact that Iraqis have more freedom than ever before in their history.

That’s investment-fund man Eric Singer on how TV’s “images without consequences” — one-night stands without pregnancy, gang-bangers made to look attractive, divorce without harm to children — have taken over the second-oldest profession, politics. McLuhan’s after Marshall M. in his Gutenberg Galaxy, consideration of which leads Singer to see us as “higher apes at a watering hole,” the hold being TV.

That being so and mainstreamers being mostly Democrats, conservatives should be more in the game, countering this “image driven, magical world” inhabited by “post-literate Democrats” with “a positive patriotic story to be told in images that the public understands,” if offered only on the Internet. Government should be in this game:

[T]here is no excuse for having an empty propaganda war chest. . . . the failure to use images effectively to promote the War on Islamo-Fascism undermines support for, and ultimate success in, the War.

Otherwise, it won’t happen, since

most of our leading media outlets suffer from Stockholm syndrome. Unlike World War II, we do not know why we fight, and we do not know our enemy. Because we are in a preventive war, and not a reactive war with millions already dead, the government finds it does not have the same panoply of tools available to FDR, such as internment, widespread censorship and propaganda. Worst of all, the genuine heroism of our troops is buried under a bushel.

Citing the recently released movie “United 93,” which “captured the consequences of letting terrorists get control,” he calls on individual, especially bloggers, “to join the image wars on the side of America,” urging, “Let a thousand videos bloom.”

Half an orange

2006-07-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

Druin Burch MD, a working physician and teacher, does two U of Chi books up fine — DR GOLEM. How to think about medicine, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, and CATHARSIS. On the art of medicine, by Andrzej Szczeklik — in the 6/9/06 Times Lit Supplement (subscription only). He’s a winner for literacy and precision, as in this:

Dr Golem, say the authors, "knows neither his own strength nor the extent of his ignorance". It is a theme that seems little more than dust-jacket propaganda, and as soon as their authorial confidence grows -as soon as they feel they're addressing an actual reader instead of a wavering bookshop browser -Collins and Pinch drop the forced analogy and get on with their real business.

Yes, that wavering browser, there to be hooked. Have we not been that person? Burch notes the authors’ “urge to popularize [that] leads to occasional melodrama.” Have we been there too? Also, there are “errors of fact” which Burch explicates neatly and with assurance.

Burch explains how scientific medicine works, as in deciding about steroids:

It was perfectly reasonable to expect steroids to reduce inflammation in traumatic head injury and save lives. Doctors gave them for years before a proper trial was done. Getting it underway wasn't easy, since everyone could see for themselves that steroids worked -at least until the study proved that they actually killed.

Folk knowledge, even among experienced Emergency Department doctors, is treacherous. The human body is too complicated to fathom out treatments based on common sense and first principles.

As for the other book, the less said the better. Dr Golem has its faults, but it’s also a “steady, generally clear-sighted explanation of some of the ordinary within medicine.”

None of these good qualities make their way into Andrzej Szczeklik's Catharsis.

Instead, his interest in mysticism -by which he means a mental system that prefers vagueness to meaning, coincidence to causation and pomposity to criticism -permeates his book like a bad smell.

This author also has facts wrong, as in his “defective accounts of the benefits of prostaglandin.”

[T]rue or false, [however,] the facts are buried beneath mountains of fatuousness. "I'll stand by you", says Szczeklik at one point, "I won't desert you. Together we shall look mortal danger in the face."

Then he dissolves into page after page of references to snakes in medical history and etymology that are supposed, somehow, to coalesce into profundity.

He is “grandiloquent where he means to be lyrical, condescendingly expecting the reader to mistake random cultural allusions for meaningful connections,” living as he is

in the world inhabited by senior hospital consultants unable to distinguish between the daily importance of their job and the ordinary nature of their wandering thoughts.

This is bad enough for the writer, but worse for us who take U. of Chicago Press seriously:

It is distressing that a publisher could have mistaken this rambling monologue for a "life-affirming work (that) gives spiritual resonance to mundane medical moments and disenchanted science by embedding them in a rich blend of myth and art". I wonder if they actually did.

He’s not alone.

Literature for the God-free

2006-06-16T21:24:00.000-05:00

The art of poetry resides in “lay[ing] verbal pattern over the void of a god-less universe,” something Mallarme could do with as much conviction musing on a box of glaced fruit as he could contemplating the “drame solaire” of death and rebirth.

That’s Patrick McGuinness reviewing Roger Pearson, Mallarme and Circumstance (Oxford) in Times Lit Supplement, 6/9/06, speaking of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) —

leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine . . . a provincial school teacher who came to Paris to live a bourgeois life on the rue de Rome, but published allusive, compressed poems, which suggested rather than denoted. He saw that his purified language gives "a purer meaning to the words of the tribe."

Purified? Maybe denuded. For him the world “has no intrinsic pattern,” says Pearson. “Poetry offered on these terms never just ‘gives’ meaning or value, it always ‘confers’ or ‘bestows’ it,” says McGuiness, quoting him.

It’s this way with some people: they decide. As songstress-philosopher P. Lee put it, that’s all there is. It’s an illusion. But Mallarme believed in the illusion, calling it “the truth, these glorious lies.”

The poet Thom Gunn has him using language “to burn the humanity out of poetry,” says McGuiness, who quotes Gunn: Mallarme “destroyed/ Flesh, passion, and their consequent confusions.” The reader of Chesterton, especially as explained by Hugh Kenner in his 1948 book, Paradox in Chesterton, will recognize this effort as a triumph of the disembodied rational.

Mallarme would make things right, however, “translating” the world, seeking not to abolish it, said Pearson, “but to perfect it.” Which was good of him.

Image problem

2006-06-13T20:20:00.000-05:00

See Phila. Inquirer story about the restaurateur who won’t take down the sign saying it’s English-only if you want your order filled. City’s human relations commission is complaining. Could be big hearing on the matter. Councilman Kenney says it’s bad for the city’s image. He means what the restaurateur is doing, but I think what the commission is doing is bad for Phila. image.

Whole-hearted

2006-06-13T09:47:00.000-05:00

The Whole Foods founder-CEO, John Mackey, is a born again free-marketer:

His philosophy [when he started as a former commune-dweller in 1978], he explains, wasn't exactly pro-profit or pro-capitalist: "Politically, I drifted to the Left and embraced the ideology that business and corporations were essentially 'evil' because they sought profits. I believed that government was 'good' (if the 'right' people had control of it) because it altruistically worked for the public interest."

(Hoo-hah with him to governmental altruism.)

"I believed that 'profit' was a necessary evil at best and certainly not a desirable goal for society as a whole," he writes. "However, becoming an entrepreneur completely changed my life. Everything I believed about business was proven to be wrong."

This was not exploitation, as he’d been taught:

"No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the marketplace; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers."

Business, he concluded, is “a win, win, win, win game." Lots of people don’t think so, however. They don’t buy into what he calls “the freedom movement,” which

"remains a small, relatively unimportant movement in the United States today," he writes [in Liberty Magazine]. "As a businessman who knows something about marketing and branding, I can tell you the freedom movement is branding itself very poorly."

Its proponents spend too much time on “side issues, such as the legalization of drugs, and not enough on the big picture.” Instead, they should address “the direct correlation between economic freedom and societal progress.

The message should be that business, working through free markets, has arguably been the world's greatest force for human progress and our collective well-being, delivering increased prosperity, less poverty, extended longevity and democratic freedoms.

Can he say that?

Fighting words

2006-06-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

Chew on this:

"That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise." —John Stuart Mill

So much for good-doers in government, with all their good ideas for us.

Tense game

2006-06-11T07:17:00.000-05:00

“When he hit it, Broussard is pretty good over there so at first I thought he had a chance," Pierzynski said. "Once we saw it go through, we knew we had the game. It was big because we were down a couple of times and kept finding a way to come back. ... That's the way we won a lot of games last year."

That was White Sox catcher Pierzynski discussing game-ending hit by Iguchi last night in 4–3 win over Indians. He means, “When he hit it, we thought Broussard had a chance because he’s pretty good. . . . we had been down . . .”

No intent here to hold the catcher to logical talk. We know what he meant. But there is intent to discuss sports announcers’ mangling of tense. Italics will get a lot of use in this discussion. Stay tuned.

Tacos with hard-boiled eggs and yellow rice!

2006-06-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

For a candid, no-holds-barred expose of immigrant culture in New York with emphasis on Brooklyn, see Complex Tacos, whose soft lede sets the pace:

So, this morning I started to write a big long post on immigration patterns in New York, all very nicely contextualized by a super-pleasant bicycle trip to Red Hook for tacos on the beisból field last weekend. But the more I wrote the later it got, my plans to go to the gym got pushed aside, my plans to be early to work so I could go to the gym at lunch were foiled, and my pithy little idea became an unfocused rambling with no really good points or thoughts, which made way too much out of one little steak and cactus taco. Sometimes things happen this way.

Not sure I approve of “pithy” as used here, but otherwise,

Eat your heart out, Chicago Tribune feature writers!

So Economics Isn't Enough, Huh?

2006-06-06T08:37:00.000-05:00

This from Robert Murphy, as Mises Institute emailing, deals neatly with unwarranted cross-fertilizers, and I do mean fertilizer, who turn up periodically in Groves of Academe:

The latest trend for making economics more "scientific" is to incorporate results from other disciplines, such as psychology and neuroscience. Now as an Austrian economist, I welcome just about any criticism of the neoclassical mainstream. However, some of the proponents of the newfangled ways often overstep when they criticize "flaws" with basic economic principles.

For example, consider a recent CNN article that deals with "dread" and procrastination, and why we supposedly need something more than orthodox economics to appreciate the issues. Here's an excerpt:

Standard economic theory says that people should postpone bad outcomes for as long as possible, because something might happen in the interim to improve the outlook.
In real life the "just get it over with" reaction is more likely, said Berns, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. He offers a personal example: He usually pays credit card bills as soon as they arrive instead of waiting until they're due, even though "it doesn't make any sense economically."

Now this outcome isn't counterintuitive, irrational, or anything else, and I don't need to use neuroscience to make the point. There is a positive probability that I might miss the due date — due to a car accident, postal worker strike, extended illness, abduction by aliens, or just plain forgetfulness. Every day I postpone payment, the probability that I will be assessed a ridiculously high late fee increases. On the other hand, what is the benefit? Buying a 15-day bond?

For most people, the money used to pay a monthly credit card bill is sitting in a fractional reserve checking account, and that's why paying your credit card bills right away makes perfect sense. On the other hand, "standard economic theory" would suggest that huge financial institutions don't pay their bills early "just to get it over with," and it would also suggest that people wouldn't rush to bring in their library books (because of low or no fines). Guess what? Standard economic theory is perfectly correct in these "predictions."

Economic understanding: $17

Another excerpt:

In other words, the mere information that you're about to feel pain "seems to be a source of misery," George Lowenstein, a specialist in economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in an accompanying review of the work.

Did we need MRIs to tell us this? While you're explaining the mysteries of the universe, Dr. Lowenstein, perhaps you can help me out with this one: There's this kid in my neighborhood who mows lawns in exchange for green pieces of paper. Now why the heck would he do that? It's almost as if the expectation of future spending seems to be a source of present happiness. Isn't that amazing? Perhaps I'll apply for a federal grant to get to the bottom of this ubiquitous phenomenon that stumps mainstream economists.

My sarcasm aside, the point should be clear: Economists have known for a long time that expected future pleasures and pains yield currently experienced pleasures and pains. Indeed, without such phenomena, human action wouldn't occur at all — i.e., the actor is always acting now in order to remove future uneasiness. Bohm-Bawerk devoted some space to this very fact in his treatise on capital and interest, which he wrote way back in the 19th century.

Mainstream economic models certainly do make ridiculous assumptions concerning "rational" behavior, and much of the experimental and behavioral economics literature is useful in pointing out these flaws. However, mainstream economic models are not synonymous with orthodox economic principles. We should avoid the temptation to think today's professors in the white lab coats know far more about economics than the "old school" thinkers. Especially when it comes to basic economics, there is rarely anything new under the sun.

Robert Murphy is the author of The Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State . Send him mail. See his articles. Comment on the blog.

The man and the hour

2006-06-05T14:34:00.000-05:00

How's this for national purpose?

Upon his very first entrance into the House of Commons as Britain's new Prime Minister on May 13, 1940, Winston Churchill only received a lukewarm reception from the assembly, while at his side, outgoing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was heartily cheered. Churchill then made this brief statement, which became one of the greatest calls-to-arms ever uttered. It came at the beginning of World War II when the armies of Adolf Hitler were roaring across Europe, seemingly unstoppable, conquering country after country for Nazi Germany, and when the survival of Britain itself seemed quite uncertain.

It amazed the Germans, by the way, that Churchill could be photographed in his open car surrounded by everyday people on an English, maybe London street.

What he said, in part:

============================

In this crisis I think I may be pardoned if I do not address the House at any length today, and I hope that any of my friends and colleagues or former colleagues who are affected by the political reconstruction will make all allowances for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.

I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.

You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward toward his goal.

I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, "Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."

Saving Islam

2006-06-05T14:15:00.000-05:00

Reviewing Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh (Yale University Press, 288 pp., $30), in City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple gives individual Muslims credit for trying to rescue Islam from infidel-beheaders with their claim "that Islam really [means] peace and tolerance," because it doesn't:

While their implicit recognition that peace and tolerance are preferable to strife and bigotry did these Muslims personal honor, the claim regarding Islam was both historically and intellectually preposterous. Only someone ignorant of the most elementary facts could believe such a thing. From the first, Islam was a religion of pillage, violence, and compulsion, which it justified and glorified.

Not the evident truth of the doctrine itself,

to quote Gibbon with regard for what, with characteristic irony, he called the primary reason for the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the civilized world . . . explains the exponential growth of the Dar-al-Islam in its early history.

But, says Karsh, Islam was

from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today.

Religion was not the issue:

Islamic imperialism, in Karshs view, illustrates three transcendent political truths: the Nietzschean drive to power, Michels iron law of oligarchy, and Marxs economic motor of history. Religious feeling, on this reading, is but an epiphenomenon, a mask for what is really going on.

On the other hand, says Dalrymple,

The urge to domination is nearly a constant of human history [including among Christians]. The specific (and baleful) contribution of Islam is that . . . by allowing nothing to human as against divine natureit tries to abolish politics. All compromises become mere truces; there is no virtue in compromise in itself. Thus Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims.

The answer, says Karsh, is for Islam to become a "private faith rather than a tool of political ambition," which would spell "doom" for Islam, says Dalrymple.

In this sense, I am an Islamic fundamentalist. The choice is between all and nothing.

Hmmmm.