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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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July 02, 2009 10:31 PM The Washington Post: was anyone really surprised? by Roger Kimball, from Roger's Rules What can I say? That Katharine Weymouth, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, was shocked, shocked to discover that her marketing department was selling places to a series of “intimate and exclusive” political salons at her house? Or, rather, was she shocked and dismayed to discover that her marketing department had been discovered selling [...] Click here to read the entire article » Jul 02, 2009 05:01 PM by James Bowman
I can’t resist the urge to gloat just a little. As I pointed out in my book Honor, A History (have I mentioned this before?), it was the American unfamiliarity with the honor culture of the Middle East which led to the fuss about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction — something that the left continues to this day to see as the fons et origo of their undying hatred of our 43rd president. Did Bush not lie? And did people not die? If so, it seemed to me an odd sort of "lie," since it was given as the reason for an action which, if it was a lie, the President himself must have known was bound to expose it as such. Much more likely, I thought, was a mistake on the part not only of our intelligence services but those of every other country in the West — a mistake born of the failure of "post-honor society" to understand a primitive honor culture in which "Saddam was far more likely to keep hidden the fact that he didn’t have WMDs than that he did" — even if it cost him his life. (Honor, A History, page 30). Now, thanks to a freedom of information request by the National Security Archive, we have the transcripts of a series of interviews that the FBI conducted with Saddam Hussein in 2004 in which the former dictator confirms that this was indeed the case. As Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post sums up these interviews and "casual conversations" in this morning’s paper,
So now we know better, right? Don’t bet on it. The American propensity to ignore the role of honor in geopolitics and substitute for it a sort of ethics writ large continues undiminished to this day. It is what lay behind our new President’s recent apology tour of Europe and the Middle East, for example, and shows no sign of abating. President Obama’s continuation of Bushite policies and practices appears to copy the bad as well as the good.
Coincidentally, I notice in today’s Wall Street Journal a review by Jonathan Karl of ABC News of Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year, by Alistair Horne, which comments that, in spite of being too "chummy" with his subject, "Mr. Horne doesn't ignore the major criticisms of Mr. Kissinger — he acknowledges, for instance, the amorality of Mr. Kissinger's maneuvers when he was faced with the dismal human-rights violations of his friends in Beijing and Moscow." Here we go again! With all due respect to Messrs Karl and Horne, "amorality" is exactly the wrong word there. Morality and ethics belong to the world of civil society, not to international relations, where questions of honor always predominate, whether we recognize them or not. America has a very bad habit of not recognizing them, and acting as if behaving morally herself or inducing other countries to behave morally on the international stage were what diplomacy is all about. It isn’t. And Henry Kissinger’s success as a diplomat was largely owing to the fact that he recognized the honorable component of international relations in a way that neither his fellow American diplomats nor his critics could understand. Saddam Hussein may have been a brutal dictator who thoroughly deserved to be hanged, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from him, so let him have the last word:
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Jul 01, 2009 03:39 PM
A number of well-meaning lefty acquaintances are slightly distressed over Nicolas Sarkozy's recent decision to support banning the burka from France. Is this not too much of an encroachment on religious freedom, ask a good many liberal interventionists who feel obliged to prove, time and again, that being anti-Islamist does not mean being anti-Muslim. A libertarian bridles at the thought of the state dictating what outer garments a person can and cannot wear in public places. But before you condemn Sarko l'Americain for his hyper-secularism, Christopher Hitchens invites you to consider his defense of the Fifth Republic with an anecdote along the lines of "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" (except much more minatory):
Which, as Hitchens goes on to write, is rather how repressed misogynists in the Muslim world would like their wives and daughters to view the world. Fadela Amara, an Algerian-French humans rights activist who is also Sarkozy's Housing Minister, expressed shock at how many women in her country are “being put in this kind of tomb,” which Amara didn't feel compelled to clarify as a voluntary burial. When President Obama spoke from Cairo last month, the burka prohibition was the only internal Muslim debate to which he alluded and upon which he took a definitive stand--for the reactionary side. This was a failure of moral leadership noted at the time by David Frum, who then enlisted the excellent Ayaan Hirsi Ali on his NewMajority.com blog to explain the multiculturalist-in-chief that oppressive headgear is not elected by every Muslim woman living in Amsterdam or Hamburg or a Parisian banlieue. Indeed, so self-isolated are religious ghettos in these European citiies that it's often impossible for the state to determine just how many burka wearers are subject to clerical or domestic coercison--which is another way of saying most of them probably are. Hirsi Ali's political career was launched, it's worth remembering, after she pressed the government of her adopted Netherlands to look more assiduously into the number of female genital mutilations performed on Dutch kitchen tables. The birthplace of Spinoza found that recommendation too insensitive to tolerate. But Hitchens' practical point is just as useful: Try beating a speeding ticket by presenting the highway patrolman a driver's license with your face entirely shrouded. Or turning up at an airport to board a plane with a similar means of identification. If defenders of the burka are willing to respond to such challenges by saying that certain instances may in fact warrant the public removal of a garb that is religiously mandated to be worn in public at all times, then how can they claim legitimacy for their position either according to confessional or civil libertarian lines?
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July 01, 2009 12:41 PM It’s not easy being green by Roger Kimball, from Roger's Rules Actually, Kermit the Frog is probably singing a different song these days. After all, what’s easier, more fashionable, more excruciatingly politically correct than “being green”? Longtime readers know that I am fond of Harvey Mansfield’s formulation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Most people chuckle when I quote that (you see what troglodytes I [...] Click here to read the entire article » Jun 30, 2009 04:29 PM by James Bowman
As a student of the media and, therefore, an inveterate scandalologist, I am fascinated by the new direction which the Mark Sanford scandal has taken. Normally, the media’s salivation at any hint of hidden salaciousness is as reliable as that of Pavlov’s dogs, so it was hardly surprising that the initial reaction to Governor Sanford’s press conference last week in which he confessed to his misdeeds was treated like any other sex scandal. But suddenly, it seems, the penny has dropped. Two separate articles, one by Christina Nehring,in The New Republic online called "In Defense of Mark Sanford" and one in today’s Washington Post "Style" section by Neely Tucker entitled "A Scandal Beyond Sex" cry out, in effect: Hey, wait a minute. This guy’s in love. Ms Nehring, who has just written a much-noticed book she calls A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century, writes that
Mr Tucker of the Post is even more admiring: "Their electronic epistles," he writes of the two love-birds, "are startling and something rarely seen anymore: adult love letters."
I suppose it’s something to hear the media confess to even vague embarrassment about reading other people’s intimate communications, but the comparison of this nationwide — if not worldwide — media blitz to the discovery of a family secret speaks volumes. At least aunt Polly doesn’t have to worry posthumously about having her intimate secrets published on the front page of The Washington Post. The idea that the media might have any duty to respect Governor Sanford’s privacy in a matter of love occurs to Mr Tucker no more than it does to any of the more coarse-grained and prurient-minded scandal-mongers of his trade. Could this be because, in his mind, the media’s craving for narrative has already turned this private event in a public life into a fictional romance without his even realizing it? Abelard and Eloise, Tristan und Isolde, Lancelot and Guenevere, Romeo and Juliet — now Mark and Maria are lovers for the ages in just the same way. This must be why Mr Tucker hints that he sees his own reflection in the Sanfordian mirror, writing that the passionate e-mails "make you stop what you’re doing and wonder if you are as alive as the people writing these across continents to each other." Actually, I don’t wonder this about me but I do wonder it about him. If I were Mrs Tucker, if there is a Mrs Tucker, reading this over the breakfast waffles, I would be stirring uneasily in my seat right about now. Mark and Maria, in other words, have become an illustration not only of the speed at which life becomes fictionalized in the media but also of the reason that it does, which is the narcissistic tendency of the times to see ourselves in everything around us and especially in works of fiction that seem to offer insights into our own lives. I remember being struck by reading in David Maraniss’s biography of Bill Clinton that our forty-second president’s reaction to a production of King Lear when he was at Oxford was to see it as a ratification of his own desire to go into politics! Than that, it is hard to imagine it possible to be more self-absorbed, but I feel sure we are today trying the limits of self-absorption to an extent that might even make Bill Clinton gasp with astonishment. One of my favorite poems in Consumed, the recently published volume of verse by my friend and former pupil, David Hill, is titled "Romeo and Juliet — free delivery" and it goes like this: He never knew a finer hour, that priest! There, in a nutshell, is what the therapeutic culture has done to romance and to literature in general in our time. All such magical fictions have lost their magic by becoming instead just more fascinating facts about our fascinating selves, something for us to trot out modestly when — the day is bound to come — we’re interviewed on TV about our fascinating lives. Now that the media’s indignation over George W. Bush has given way to their indignity over Barack Obama, it seems that even scandal ought to be about us.
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June 29, 2009 01:59 PM The Potemkin Presidency meets a moment of sanity in The New York Times (with an observation from Hilaire Belloc and an admonition from Friedrich Hayek) by Roger Kimball, from Roger's Rules Let me start with the observation from Hilaire Belloc. In his book The Servile State, Belloc writes that “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” I rather doubt that President Obama or any of his inner circle is a student of Hilaire Belloc. But they have demonstrated again and [...] Click here to read the entire article » June 27, 2009 01:21 PM A “green” economy vs. a productive economy, or how America became a third-world country with first-world feelings of moral superiority by Roger Kimball, from Roger's Rules The House of Representatives just took a large step towards refashioning the United State into a Third World economy with first world self-regard. The so-called “cap and trade” (”cap and tax” to its opponents) bill, sponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey (remember those names, voters), squeaked by 219-212. (The roll call is here: check [...] Click here to read the entire article » June 26, 2009 05:12 PM Nightmare on Main Street, in which we think about some really big numbers by Roger Kimball, from Roger's Rules “One of the great follies in legislative history.” That’s how John Hinderaker at Powerline describes the bait-and-switch — I mean the cap and trade — bill that is due to be voted on in the House of, er, Representatives imminently. As with the 1000-page non-stimulating stimulus bill that Obama shoved down your throat mere days after [...] Click here to read the entire article » Jun 25, 2009 05:49 PM by James Bowman
Kudos to John Dickerson of Slate for sounding a rare note of compassion in the midst of the Mark Sanford scandal. The minute Sanford started speaking, the reviews poured in via e-mail and Twitter. He was rambling, confused. He didn't tear up enough when talking about his wife. He favored his mistress. He answered the questions too thoroughly. All these judgments seemed absurd. A man standing in front of a bank of cameras in the middle of a complete collapse is going to say a lot of things poorly. The snap judgments failed to acknowledge a grain of the fundamental human carnage we were witnessing. You can laugh at Sanford, as you can laugh at a video of a wrecked Amy Winehouse falling all over her house. But at some point, even though they did it to themselves, you have to feel sorry for them as human beings. You can do that, I think, and not be a fan of adultery or drug use. I'm not offering Sanford’s humanity as an excuse. I’m just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. My thoughtful colleague William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan were exceptions. Maybe there are others. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford’s human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he’s caused, the hypocrisies he’s engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all. This last bit of his observation is particularly important. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe that it is concern for the pain Governor Sanford has caused his wife and children which leads his critics to deny, in effect, his humanity. Apart from anything else, much of that pain is caused less by the adultery itself than by the opportunity its being made public provides the humanity-denying Twitterers and e-mailers to make their unfeeling comments. The Governor’s privacy is also that of his family, whose feelings of humiliation in the business are given no more consideration than his own. Hypocrisy is a different matter. As I pointed out only the other day in the case of Senator John Ensign, it is the media crusade against hypocrisy which makes it necessary for public servants to confess their private misbehaviors in this appallingly embarrassing fashion in the first place. The self-serving media dictum that the cover-up is worse than the original offense is now accepted cultural wisdom. That the embarrassment of such displays as Governor Sanford’s and Senator Ensign’s is not felt as much by the media as it is by those whose private lives they are holding up for public inspection is owing entirely to the assumption that hypocrisy is the sin against the media spirit — that spirit in whose name all things hidden, whether for good or for ill, must be exposed to the public view. That’s the sin, the sin of trying to reserve a scrap of privacy from the klieg lights’ glare, which is now thought to justify any cruelty. Yet what is so bad about hypocrisy after all? It seems to me to be a necessary lubricant to any moral system attempting to advance a standard of behavior more rigorous than that of, well, of how people actually do behave — which is to say, no standard at all. To watch these hypocrisy-haters sneer, you’d think that the only way for one to have moral principles was always to observe them oneself. But, clearly, that cannot be the case. If it were, there would be no more moral principles at all, since it is in the nature of humanity to fall short of them. That’s why it sometimes seems that doing away with moral principles altogether is precisely the goal of those in the media and elsewhere who are most savage against hypocrisy. What they hate is not that someone has fallen short of his own standards; it’s that he ever dared to have any standards in the first place.
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Jun 25, 2009 04:17 PM
Join the Chicago Associates of The New Criterion for a talk, book signing, and cocktails with National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser, author of Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. There will be copies of available for purchase at the event. Hosted by the founder of the Chicago Associates, Zach Christenson. Thursday, July 16 6:00-8:00 PM The Hunt Club 1100 N. State Street Chicago, IL
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