What do I see in today’s LA Times (intrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), but an oped from Adam Bellow, pushing his book (which I criticize less harshly than it deserves below) and extolling nepotism. He suggests that the answer to the increasing concentration of power that he recognizes and lauds is – ‘trust us’.

Some observers warn that the return of dynastic families is a dangerous trend, but such critics underestimate the degree to which the values of meritocracy have been absorbed in American culture. Today’s successors generally hold themselves to higher standards than anyone else would ever set for them. Far from having a big ego, what they have is an inflated super-ego. This is our best protection against the darker side of nepotism and makes the return of dynastic families something to celebrate rather than fear.

It just keeps getting better and better. Some other folks have looked askance at Bellow’s article…I particularly like Kenneth Cavness’ Tom Paine quote, which is so good that I’ll reproduce it here:

But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hereditary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of good and wise men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the foolish, the wicked, and the improper, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

Kieran Healey suggests another application for Bellow’s ‘Three Laws of Nepotism’; they apply perfectly well to affirmative action, as well. Go read the whole thing…

In this month’s Atlantic, a lot to write and think about. A great article on “Supremacy by Stealth” by Robert Kaplan that I put on Biggest Guy’s night table for him to read, and that I’ll follow up on in another post.

And an infuriating article “In Praise of Nepotism” by Adam Bellow, son of Saul – taken from a forthcoming book of the same name.

The article isn’t available online, so let me set out some quotes:

Since we are clearly not going to get rid of the new nepotism any time soon, Americans must come to terms with it. That means learning to practice it in accordance with the unwritten rules that have made it, on balance, a wholesome and positive force. If history shows us anything, it is that nepotism in itself is neither good nor bad. It’s the way you practice it that matters. Those who observe the hidden rules of nepotism are rewarded and praised; those who do not are punished, often savagely. These rules – derived from my own study of dynastic families, from the biblical House of David to the Kennedys and the Bushes – can be reduced to the following simple injunctions:

1. Don’t embarrass me. The first rule of patronage has always been that the protege’s actions and manner reflect on the patron. By holding a patron responsible for his protege’s performance, the Mandarins of the Chinese imperial bureaucracy introduced a powerful corrective to the potential for nepotistic abuses. This is also the corrective built into the modern nepotistic equation.

2. Don’t embarrass yourself, or You have to work harder than anyone else. If the protege is obligated to respect the patron, he is equally obligated to respect himself and his colleagues. A democratic society is founded on a moral commitment to equal opportunity, and those who enjoy advantages of birth must make an effort to counteract the natural resentment of those who do not. That is why “good” business heirs display outstanding dedication – arriving early, leaving late, and in other respects going out of their way to win the approval of their colleagues. This is what distinguishes the new nepotism from the old: other people must prove their merit before the fact, but nepotees must prove it after.

3. Pass it on. Although nepotism is considered selfish, it proceeds from the generous impulse to pass something on to one’s children, and this we think of as entirely praiseworthy. But if nepotism is in some respects a two-way street, it is also a one-way transaction. We therefore express our gratitude to our parents in the form of generosity to our children. This wholesome consciousness implies a certain humility and an acceptance of morality.

Above all, it is high time for us to get over our ambivalence about the “return” of dynastic families. This country is now old enough to have accumulated a large number of great families, and we can no longer deny their many obvious and constructive contributions. Americans admire the Adamses, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedys not just for their unity – a value that is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve in our mobile society – but for their sense of common purpose and the spirit of public service that they foster. There is much to be said for these “aristocratic” features of dynastic families, and as long as these families observe the meritocratic rules of the new nepotism, we really have no basis for complaint. Indeed we should not only respect great families, but try to be more like them. rather than simply seeking to punish or stamp out the bad kind of nepotism, we should reward and encourage the good.

My first reaction on reading this was that the satire hadn’t quite worked; I was looking for the ironic stretch, and never found it. A closer reading, and a bit of Google searching, led me to the conclusion that Bellow is actually serious, and that he believes that the kind of dynastic despotism he represents (along with, sadly, Lizzie Grubman and the Hilton daughters) represents the hope of the republic.

My second reaction was to be annoyed that the Atlantic, a magazine I devour and consider a touchstone, would publish such an offensive piece of tripe. But I reconsidered. They have done a valuable service, as has Bellow himself, to whom I give full marks for courage, given the shellacking I am sure he will take once his book hits the stands this month. They have brought this issue out onto the table and made it clear that the ‘Class War’ isn’t only an issue on the left. By writing this article, and publishing it, Bellow and the Atlantic have in essence thrown down the gauntlet.

The decline in income and class mobility for the average American is one of the three or four most dangerous issues that we face as a nation today. The increasing concentration of wealth, income, and power – not a threat from the outside – are what place our nation at the most serious risk. We will eventually defeat the anti-Western, anti-modern forces combating us today, but we may do so only to wither from within, as the legitimacy that ties us together collapses, sucked dry by privilege.

Bellow proposes that we take a bug and declare it to be a feature; that the increasingly frozen nature of our society holds promise – because it will give us more enlightened rulers.

The America that I love has it’s share of spoiled children (I’ll confess that I’m one and grew up with many of them in Beverly Hills), and has never promised to be fair. But they have always been seen as the inevitable imperfections of the system, and the unfairness as something we were mildly ashamed of. Never before has someone had the colossal nerve to hold that unfairness up and call it hope.

The America that I love – of country music stations and diners, as well as symphony halls and dining rooms set with Christofle – is one in which Bellow’s pronouncements in one would lead to an ass-kicking, and in the other social suicide.

Personally, I look forward to using this book as part of my arguments to reimpose the estate tax.

The book is supposed to be published this July; I can only hope it comes out on Bastille Day. I’ll close with Mark Twain’s comment on the Terror and the inevitable end result of the kind of republic of the elites that Bellow envisions:

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors of the… momentary Terror’, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

– Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

UPDATE: See the follow-up article “Bellow Redux“, which includes a priceless quote from Tom Paine… and a comparison that may surprise you.

UPDATE 2 My talk with Bellow, and my own apology.
–

Today is the prologue individual time trial in the 100th Tour de France.

Lance Armstrong is starting at 1:05pm EST today, and is favored to win his 5th straight victory. Only the incredible (literally – his resting heart rate was supposedly in the low 30’s) “Big Mig” Miguel Indurain has ever won 5 in a row; not Mercx, not Anquetil, not “le blaireau” Hinault – all of whom are legendary bicycle racers and have won 5 times each, but not 5 in a row.
I was a mediocre amateur cyclist through college and grad school, which meant that when I had a chance to be a suiveur (one of the guys in the cars) at the ’78 Tour, I could appreciate just how insanely hard it is. The weakest rider on the Tour is an incredible athlete, and I tip my helmet to all of them and wish them success.

Everyone is familiar with Lance’s story; he’s become an icon, recognizable even here in the U.S. where cycling is an ‘incidental’ sport.

Today he stops being a cancer survivor, a philanthropist, a marketing tool – he’s an athlete literally at the summit of his sport, and I’m picking up a six-pack of Shiner Bock (his favorite beer) to crack when he crosses the line in Paris July 27, after he pedals 2,125 miles and winds up wearing le maillot jaune.

From Page Smith’s great history A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution:

In addition to the general demoralization produced by uncertainty about all business and commercial transactions, there hung over the heads of all the colonists, patriot and Tory alike, the deadly specter of war and revolution.

No one could be sure that the next day would not bring a British man-of-war sailing into the harbor of Boston or New York or Charles Town, bristling with guns and carrying British troops to put the Stamp Act into effect by force of arms. And however some colonists might boast and bluster about their determination to resist the tax to the last drop of their blood, they were perfectly well aware of the hazard of taking up arms against the foremost military and naval power in the world. Many of them knew at first hand the fighting qualities of the redcoat, the skill and courage of his officers, and the awesome machinery of war at the command of Great Britain. Any colonist in his right mind must have felt his hot blood run cold at the thought of armed conflict with the legionnaires of the mother country.

–Volume 1, page 233

As we celebrate the Founders’ bold declaration today, let’s not forget that it was a step which they took well aware that it was fraught with risk and the potential for disastrous cost.

We celebrate our freedom today because brave people risked theirs, as well as their treasure and their lives, to gain it for themselves and their descendents.

As I enjoy my day of leisure, I’ll spend at least some of time thinking about them and their courage – something I would have done even without my own news – and wondering what it is that we ought to be doing today to preserve and improve freedom for ourselves and our descendents in turn.

Happy 4th of July.

The planned blogging activity today was some quick coverage of the various bloggers who attended and their intelligence and quick wit, etc. Then I was going to sit down and finish something for the 4th of July to put up tonight.

As Patio Pundit notes in his good comments about last night, plans change.

If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you’ll know that I have three sons by two mothers – they are 19, 17, and 6. For the last five years, they have been the primary focus of my life.

Biggest Guy, as I call him, is spending the summer here, back from his first year in college at the University of Virginia. He’s been back for a month, but our respective work schedules and all of the ‘back home social activity’ that he’s been engaged in kept us from spending any time alone together, until today.We had a bunch of errands to do together, which involved a lot of time in the car, which as is usually the case with the two of us, turned into a fairly serious set of discussions about how each of us is doing. When I asked him how he was and commented that he’s been pretty reserved, he explained that he’s been contemplating things.

He’s been thinking about science and business, and whether those will make him happy right now. I explained that this was a pretty normal state for a 19 year old, and wryly added that certainty would be something he would give up on much later in life. If not those, I asked, what?

The military, he responded. He likes to fly (he has about 15 hours in gliders), and he’s also interested in the Air Force PJ’s. His Grandpa Charles was a General in the Air Force – well, the French Air Force – and maybe he feels a legacy there.

We talked about it some more, and left it that he wasn’t thinking about dropping out of school, but that he was going to look into ROTC and other things that he could start doing in Fall when he gets back to school. He’d made up his mind, he explained to me.

He asked what I thought about it, and how it made me feel.

I told him that intellectually, I thought it a good thing for two reasons: First because, given who he is, I think that issues of masculinity and of ‘an adventurous passage’ that he could point, to are extremely important to helping him cross the boundary between boy and man. I’ve known that those issues have always been important to him, from the time he was a small, smiling boy. Second, because we live in parlous times, and each of us has to pay our dues. I’ve never felt lessened by the fact that I did not serve in the ’70s. But I also have never felt the level of threat that I feel today. If I believed as I do and I was 19 today, I don’t doubt that I’d share his thoughts if not his actions.

Emotionally, I’m more than a little stunned, and I have a number of contradictory feelings that I’m going to be trying to assemble for a while.

Obviously, I am damn frightened. One of the forces that has driven me to want to deal with the political/ military issues that we face right now Right Now is my absolute desire not to leave them behind for my children. I’ve always been achingly aware that I have two teenage boys, and I know very well what wartime could mean for them.

And I’m proud. Surprisingly it’s a mixture that has only a small part of hand-over-the-heart-and-sing-the-Anthem pride, and a very large part of pride in a young man who can look for what he wants, decide on it, and choose a path that even he admits appears dauntingly difficult. And do so, as he explains it, because it meets his needs – not mine, or his mothers’, or anyone else’s. He told me that he feels that it will take him toward becoming the kind of man he wants to become, as opposed to the kind of man that he’ll become if he just waits around.

Over the next few days, we’ll see how the moms take it. I’ll connect him to some of my military and ex-military friends, and I’ll trust that they’ll help guide his decisions and thoughts with a healthy dose of reality.

Obviously, he’s not shipping off anywhere except his job at a local restaurant today. Nothing in what we’ve discussed is certain. But he’s a pretty determined fellow, and now it looks as though he’s put his foot on a path where I can’t guide him. And by doing that alone, he’s taken some large steps toward being the kind of man he wants to be.

We’ve talked in the past about the Democrats for National Security, a new think tank forming in Washington D.C.

I just got their newsletter, which sadly isn’t available on the web. So I’m making it available below.

Note that I am 100% in agreement with the basic principle espoused – that the key to homeland security isn’t new federal police forces (or powers), but is in better staffing, training, and equipping existing local public safety teams, and in creating an information infrastructure that will make it possible for information to move upward, to allow national-level analysis and intelligence, laterally, to better enable coordination between agencies, and downward to let the analysis and intelligence to be moved downward to the street levels where it can be used.

As Glenn Reynolds puts it so well, think about “a pack, not a herd”.
July 2 Newsletter from Democrats for National Security:

“On Sunday, the Council on Foreign Relations released a new report warning that nearly two years after the September 11 attacks, the United States remains dangerously vulnerable to terrorist attack and that funding at all levels of government must be increased.

Today, The Hill newspaper (which covers Congress) published an article reporting that the House Republican leadership is disinclined to make the House’s Homeland Security panel permanent.

What these reports indicate is a total lack of leadership on Homeland Security from an administration that would rather give massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans than spend the time, effort, and money to prevent another terrorist attack like the one that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. Bush’s fiscal folly not only threatens our financial security, it imperils our nation’s security.

Nearly Two Years After 9/11, the United States is Still Dangerously Unprepared and Underfunded for a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, Warns New Council Task Force”

Overall Expenditures Must Be as Much as Tripled to Prepare Emergency Responders Across the Country
———————————

June 29, 2003 – Nearly two years after 9/11, the United States is drastically underfunding local emergency responders and remains dangerously unprepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil, particularly one involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-impact conventional weapons. If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address the urgent needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could be even more devastating than 9/11.

These are the central findings of the Council-sponsored Independent Task Force on Emergency Responders, a blue-ribbon panel of Nobel laureates, U.S. military leaders, former high-level government officials, and other senior experts, led by former Senator Warren B. Rudman and advised by former White House terrorism and cyber-security chief Richard A. Clarke. This report marks the first time that data from emergency responder communities has been brought together to estimate national needs.

The Task Force met with emergency responder organizations across the country and asked them what additional programs they truly need–not a wish list–to establish a minimum effective response to a catastrophic terrorist attack. These presently unbudgeted needs total $98.4 billion, according to the emergency responder community and budget experts (See attached budget chart.)

Currently the federal budget to fund emergency responders is $27 billion for five years beginning in 2004. Because record keeping and categorization of state and local spending varies greatly across states and localities, the experts could not estimate a single total five-year expenditure by state and local governments. Their best judgment is that state and local spending over the same period could be as low as $26 billion and as high as $76 billion. Therefore, total estimated spending for emergency responders by federal, state and local governments combined would be between $53 and $103 billion for the five years beginning in FY04.

Because the $98.4 billion unmet needs budget covers areas not adequately addressed at current funding levels, the total necessary overall expenditure for emergency responders would be $151.4 billion over five years if we are currently spending $53 billion, and $201.4 billion if we are currently spending $103 billion. Estimated combined federal state, and local expenditures therefore would need to be as much as tripled over the next five year to address this unmet need. Covering this funding shortfall using federal funds alone would require a five-fold increase from the current level of $5.4 billion per year to an annual federal expenditure of $25.1 billion.

“While we have put forth the best estimates so far on emergency responder needs, the nation must urgently develop a better framework and procedures to generate guidelines on national preparedness,” said Rudman, who served as Task Force chair. “And the government cannot wait to increase desperately needed funding to emergency responders until it has these standards in place,” he said.

The Task Force credits the Bush administration, Congress, governors and mayors for taking important steps since 9/11 to respond to the risk of catastrophic terrorism, and does not seek to apportion blame about what has not been done or not done quickly enough. The report is aimed, rather, at closing the gap between current levels of emergency preparedness and minimum essential preparedness levels across the United States.

“This report is an important preliminary step in a process of developing national standards and determining national needs for emergency responders,” said Council President Leslie H. Gelb, “but the report also highlights the need for much more work to be done in this area.”

The Independent Task Force, Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared, based its analysis on data provided by front-line emergency responders–firemen, policemen, emergency medical workers, public health providers and others–whose lives depend upon the adequacy of their preparedness for a potential terrorist attack.

The study was carried out in partnership with the Concord Coalition and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, two of the nation’s leading budget analysis organizations.

Jamie Metzl, Council Senior Fellow and a former National Security Council and Senate Foreign Relations Committee official, directed the effort. The Task Force drew upon the expertise of more than twenty leading emergency responder professional associations and leading officials across the United States. (A list of participating associations is attached below.)

The Task Force identified two major obstacles hampering America’s emergency preparedness efforts. First, because we lack preparedness standards, it is difficult to know what we need and how much it will cost. Second, funding for emergency responders has been sidetracked and stalled due to a politicized appropriations process, slowness in the distribution of the funds by federal agencies, and bureaucratic red tape at all levels of government.

To address the lack of standards and good numbers, the Task Force makes the following recommendations:

* Congress should require that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) work with state and local agencies and officials and emergency responder professional associations to establish clearly defined standards and guidelines for emergency preparedness. These standards must be sufficiently flexible to allow local officials to set priorities based on their needs, provided that they reach nationally-determined preparedness levels within a fixed time period.

* Congress should require that the DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services submit a coordinated plan for meeting identified national preparedness standards by the end of FY07.

* Congress should establish a system for allocating scarce resources based less on dividing the spoils and more on addressing identified threats and vulnerabilities. To do this, the Federal government should consider such factors as population, population density, vulnerability assessment, and presence of critical infrastructure within each state. State governments should be required to use the same criteria for distributing funds within each state.

* Congress should establish within DHS a National Institute for Best Practices in Emergency Preparedness to work with state and local governments, emergency preparedness professional associations, and other partners to share best practices and lessons learned.

* Congress should make emergency responder grants in FY04 and thereafter on a multi-year basis to facilitate long-term planning and training.

To deal with the problem of appropriated funds being sidetracked and stalled on their way to Emergency Responders, the Task Force recommends:

* The U.S. House of Representatives should transform the House Select Committee on Homeland Security into a standing committee and give it a formal, leading role in the authorization of all emergency responder expenditures in order to streamline the federal budgetary process.
The U.S. Senate should consolidate emergency preparedness and response oversight into the Senate Government Affairs Committee.

* Congress should require the Department of Homeland Security to work with other federal agencies to streamline homeland security grants to reduce unnecessary duplication and to establish coordinated “one-stop shopping” for state and local authorities seeking grants.

* States should develop a prioritized list of requirements in order to ensure that federal funding is allocated to achieve the best possible return on investments.
Congress should ensure that all future appropriations bills for emergency responders include strict distribution timelines.

* The Department of Homeland Security should move the Office of Domestic Preparedness from the Bureau of Border and Transportation Security to the Office of State and Local Government Coordination in order to consolidate oversight of grants to emergency responders within the office of the Secretary.

The Task Force on Emergency Responders is a follow on to the Council’s highly acclaimed Hart-Rudman Homeland Security Task Force, which made concrete recommendations last October on defending the country against a terrorist attack.

Established in 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations is a nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank, dedicated to increasing America’s understanding of the world and contributing ideas to U.S. foreign policy. The Council accomplishes this mainly by promoting constructive debates, clarifying world issues, producing reports, and publishing Foreign Affairs, the leading journal on global issues.

From The Hill – July 2, 2003
—————————————–

House Security Panel May Not Survive, Leaders Hint
Conflicts Threaten Committee’s Future
By Hans Nichols

House Republican leaders have signaled that they are disinclined to grant permanent status to the panel that will oversee the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

GOP aides say the political will and motivation are not there because making the Select Committee on Homeland Security a permanent panel would create a jurisdictional conflict that the leadership would prefer to avoid.

But some lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, say that the committee’s probationary status prevents it from discharging the full and vigorous oversight that the new requires.

Word that the GOP leadership had little interest in making the Homeland Security panel permanent was apparently made clear at an informal June 11 meeting between roughly a dozen GOP chiefs of staff and Scott Palmer, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s (Ill.) top aide. Several of senior aides confirmed their attendance, but the Speaker’s office says their interpretation of the message is faulty.

The meeting took place a week after … and in the shadow of … a Homeland Security Committee hearing at which DHS officials enraged members.

“The committee was unhappy on both sides of the aisle with what they received at this hearing,” said Vince Sollitto, spokesman for Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.), the committee’s chairman.

House aides say the new department is not treating the panel with respect.

One person who attended the meeting says Palmer laid out the leadership’s strategy in response to a Republican aide who expressed concern about the political ramifications for the GOP in the 2004 elections if DHS does not work out its organizational kinks, let alone fails to discharge its mission to protect the nation from future terrorist attacks.

The aide, who works for a committee member on the panel, told Palmer that the committee isn’t being taken seriously by DHS personnel, citing the curt and poorly prepared June 5th testimony by top DHS officials.

“The message we got was, it’s not going to happen. Period. They just don’t want the fight,” said one participant at the meeting with Palmer.

Palmer told the participants that that three chairmen … Reps. Don Young (R-Alaska) of Transportation and Infrastructure, James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) of Judiciary and Billy Tauzin (R-La.) of Energy and Commerce … would balk at making Cox’s Homeland panel permanent.

The thinking does not sit well with committee members or their top aides, who worry that the Democrats will seek to fortify their national security credentials by criticizing the administration’s handling of a massive new bureaucracy that was set up only after President Bush dropped his initial opposition.

At the June 5 hearing, Paul Redmond, the department’s assistant secretary for information analysis began his testimony by telling the committee: “I have no prepared statement.”

Redmond’s posture caught committee members, both Republicans and Democrats, off-guard.

“I understand that his opening statement is that he has no opening statement,” said a dumbstruck Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ).

Redmond retired yesterday for health reasons.

As evidence of an emerging Democratic strategy, GOP aides cite a press conference held the Monday after Redmond’s testimony and two days before the Palmer meeting. Democrats accused DHS of fronting a cavalier attitude toward its congressional minders.

Rep. Jim Turner (D-Texas), the ranking member on Homeland Security said: “Recent hearings of the House Homeland Security Committee clearly revealed to each of us … and, I think, to every member of our committee … that when it comes to preparing America to meet the threat of bioterrorism, the Department of Homeland Security is broken and needs to be fixed. America clearly is at risk by this failure.”

Rep. James Langevin (D-R.I.), another committee member, said, “Those of us who witnessed last Thursday’s hearing with Mr. Redmond, including many of our Republican colleagues, were absolutely astounded at the lack of progress made by the intelligence arm of DHS since its creation and the lack of attention being paid to seemingly obvious threats.”

Langevin continued: “This is an urgent situation that must be rectified immediately, and it will require strong leadership on the part of Secretary [Tom] Ridge.”

The Homeland Security panel has until September of next year to make recommendations on its future status.

Asked about Palmer’s plan for the Homeland panel, Sollitto said: “I’ve heard nothing on that and have no comment on that.

“[Discussions] about its permanent status would be premature .” The committee is engaged in aggressive oversight on the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that congressional intent is followed,” he added.

“klaatu” commented on my post below about doom & gloom. As his comment was a thoughtful representation of a position with which I respectfully disagree, it’s worth further comment. This isn’t a ‘Fisking,’ as I don’t think that his points are self-evidently stupid; but I think there’s a critical place where his point of view is fundamentally flawed.
Klaatu’s point of view was as follows:

Doomster and proud of it.

From a fellow “doomster,” the columnist Pete Hamill:

“Over the past six months, in conversations with old friends or with strangers, I keep picking up a new kind of bleakness.

‘I can’t even watch the TV news anymore,’ one friend said. ‘Three dead in Gaza gets one minute, followed by another American shot in Iraq, a minute and a half – and then they cut to Scott Peterson and I turn the thing off. Even in 1968, in the worst of everything that year, there was some hope. Not now. It’s gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.’

The bleakness index contains many items: the mediocrity and cynicism of politicians in both parties; the merging of religion with politics, from Peshawar to the Potomac; the growing power of true believers in our government; the wretched runup to the Iraq war, the war itself and the bloody aftermath. We’ve known since 9/11 there are lunatics out there, some so crazed with religious visions that they’d try to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the world’s glories. Reason has fled. Vandals haunt our nights.

Welcome to the real world, Pete. The forces that exploded into your attention on 9/11 have been building for decades, and other people – pretty much anyone who read the local news in places like Great Britain, India, Sri Lanka, or Spain – not to mention the entirety of the Middle East and Africa – has been living with them at least since the 60’s.

Meanwhile, the American government says it feels free to launch preventive wars, the way the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. Vice President Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, is building a prison camp in Guantánamo, complete with execution chamber. And the bloody quarrel between Israelis and Palestinians goes on and on.

It’s hard to find consolation, for popular culture is also a wreck. Most prime-time TV is insulting to human intelligence. Movies are comic books. Popular music is calculated junk. Exuberance is gone, along with joy or even the artistic defiance of the ’60s.

In public life, facts don’t seem to matter much. Through sustained propaganda and ingenious presidential photo ops, illusion dominates the political debate. In Iraq, nobody’s found weapons of mass destruction or a factual link to Al Qaeda. Yet the polls show that as many as 65% of Americans are in favor of their own deception.”

The full column is here.

I think that if you’re cheerful these days, you’re either stupid, insane, a chaos-and-war- lover, a “true believer” seeing the apocalypse coming or so because of medication.

Well, I’m certainly bummed that Pete and klaatu are so depressed about things. Somehow my core response is to envision Woody Allen, standing next to the pale woman in the art museum, listening to her bleak description of the painting they are both examining, finally works up the nerve to ask if she has any plans for Saturday night.

“I’m killing myself,” she replies.

“How about Friday night?” Woody asks.

Folks, the world isn’t a sitcom in which a hapless but inherently sage parent can resolve matters in twenty-two minutes or an action-adventure movie, where the hero defuses the bomb and winds up two hours later on a beach in Bali with the scantily-clad secret double agent/temptress.

We humans are a problem-solving species. But most people know that it is inevitably part of the solution to any problem that it creates new problems. Before the automobile, the streets of New York City were awash in horse dung. After the invention of antibiotics, the population began to rise. We step down the stream from rock to rock, each step risky itself, and each destination rock slippery and itself no safe harbor.

In the specific case, we’re riding in a canoe down a stream; up until now, we didn’t realize that there were rapids. But the rapids have always been there and now it’s our turn to have to navigate them.

It is a challenge, and it will be risky. There’s no guarantee that there won’t be rapids below these. It certainly is the case that choices we made over the last years put us here. But it’s also true that, had we made different choices, we might have faced other, more dangerous waters.

But I’m not interested in being led by people who look upstream and talk about how much worse things will be in the future, and how we should have taken that branch twenty years ago. The future we face is coming regardless of our desires.

The future belongs to those who would paddle into the rapids, committed to seeing the other side. Too often, the left side of the boat – the side that in my lifetime used to propel the boat forward, embracing the future – is checking its oars.

It would matter less if it was just a matter of arguing about steering the boat, if the issue was between two different paths into the future.

But somehow klaatu and Pete Hamill have come to stand at the depressed, helpless center of things that would as soon capsize now and avoid all the future pain they see coming. And the inarticulate rebels – the anti-Modern, anti-Western rage that sits at the heart of what I call “Bad Philosophy” doesn’t only put them at risk, but all of us.

Societies proceed on faith. It is the accumulation of faith – in society, in laws, in our fellows – that compels civilized behavior, and allows the complexity that delivers the computers and electricity that allow you to read this today. That faith depends in large part on our belief in the future.

I’ve got a very different faith than Trent does. But I believe in the future, and I’m happy to sit here, helping paddle the boat down toward the sound of the oncoming rapids.

I don’t do it for fun, this isn’t some kind of recreation to me. I do it so that my sons can live on the other side of the rapids, and in turn face rapids of their own.

Anyone who believes they can live in another way – who expects their life to be led entirely in calm waters – is spending entirely too much time in front of the TV.

I took the car to work today, and on the way home – tired of the CD’s I keep meaning to change in the changer – I turned on the radio. Drivetime radio in Los Angeles is all talk and ads and far too little music, so as I hit the buttons, I got KCRW and NPR’s “All Things Considered”. They were covering the vast psychological toll that peacekeeping in Iraq is having on our troops; the sonorous, self-righteous tone of impending defeat rang through the soft, concerned tones of the reporter as she interviewed depressed troops and the psychologists the military has sent out to help them. Collapse, it seemed could come any day.Defeat, and doom everywhere. Death, pain, ruin.

Somehow those have become the coin of our realm. GGonzalez had an excellent point in his comment about journalism below “But even if the facts are correct, there will always be selectivity of information and, equally important, selectivity of presentation.”

There is no circumstance so good that it doesn’t leave itself open to the possibility of bad outcomes, and when we select the information and presentation in the one way that fits the story we want to tell, we can tell a story of impending disaster almost as well as one of victory. Nick Kristof was willing to tell a story that he hadn’t planned on, and I’ll read him with more respect because of it. Somehow, sadly, every time I listen to NPR I leave some of my respect for them behind.

There’s something in me that is pleased at the notion that the worst thing that can happen to our soldiers is depression.

And another that worries that our true vulnerability isn’t material but spiritual – philosophical, as I usually put it.

Then sometimes I read stories like this, and I don’t worry so much. The NPR brigades may be near emotional collapse, but the Palmdale poets and Vietnamese postal workers seem to be doing OK.

For myself, when I find myself nodding, mesmerized by the soft voices of defeat, there are a number of answers. The soft slide of a motorcycle tire as you round a corner just fast enough, followed by the hard kiss of the pavement on a knee slider. My son’s grin of victory as he lays down a full house. My sweetie’s smile when she wakes up. The view from the hills, through the newly clear Southern California air, and out over the distant towers of downtown Los Angeles. You doubtless have your own.

And art. Always art.

I once quoted Mark Doty:

I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
…

That’s how it begins – but not how it ends…

UPDATE: See also this follow up post. Societies proceed on faith. That faith depends in large part on our belief in the future, and that future will have patches of dangrous rapids. I’ve got a very different faith than Trent does. But here’s why I’m happy to sit here, paddling toward the sound of the oncoming rapids so my sons can live on the other side – and in turn face rapids of their own.

Two really good columns in the NY Times today.

Nicholas Kristof – not exactly at the front lines of the ‘Democracy in Iraq’ movement – speaks out with honest ambiguity about what the invasion has brought. With a photo that isn’t for the squeamish, he confronts his own opposition to the war.

Since I’ve been accusing the Bush administration of cooking the intelligence on Iraq, I should confess my intentions. Countless Iraqis warned me that they would turn to guerrilla warfare if U.S. troops overstay their welcome, so I thought I’d find an Iraqi who had had his tongue or ear amputated by Saddam’s thugs and still raged about the U.S. That would powerfully convey what a snake pit we’re in.

So I began asking for people with missing tongues or ears. I got a tip about a man in Basra who had had his tongue amputated for criticizing Saddam. He had moved away, but I found a friend of his, Abdel Karim Hassan.

“A thousand thanks to Bush!” he told me. “A thousand thanks to Bush’s mother for giving birth to him!”

Hmmm. I hadn’t expected a tribute to the Mother of all Bushes.

Then I heard about Mathem Abid Ali and tracked him down in the southern city of Nasiriya. I’ve posted a photo of him on nytimes.com.kristofresponds (parental guidance is suggested). Mr. Abid Ali deserted the Iraqi Army, was caught, taken to a hospital and given general anesthesia … and woke up with no right ear.

“Children looked at me, and turned away in horror,” Mr. Abid Ali said bitterly.

So I asked Mr. Abid Ali what he thought of the Americans.

He thought for a moment and said: “I’d like to make a statue in gold of President Bush.”

So, facts got in the way of my plans for this column. But sometimes that’s a good thing. I do think it’s important for doves like myself to encounter Saddam’s victims like Mr. Abid Ali and their joy at being freed. Iraq today is a mess, but it’s a complex, deeply nuanced mess, etched in shades of gray.

No matter what side you are on, you have to confront the complexity of this situation and be willing to look at the facts. That’s not an excuse for passivity, though…

Krugman has a slightly hysterical column about the plumbing behind modern party politics, and the unassailable fact that one side seems to have more experience with plumbers than the other.

…describing the weekly meetings in which Senator Rick Santorum vets the hiring decisions of major lobbyists. These meetings are the culmination of Grover Norquist’s “K Street Project,” which places Republican activists in high-level corporate and industry lobbyist jobs … and excludes Democrats. According to yesterday’s Washington Post, a Republican National Committee official recently boasted that “33 of 36 top-level Washington positions he is monitoring went to Republicans.”

Of course, interest groups want to curry favor with the party that controls Congress and the White House; but as The Washington Post explains, Mr. Santorum’s colleagues have also used “intimidation and private threats” to bully lobbyists who try to maintain good relations with both parties. “If you want to play in our revolution,” Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, once declared, “you have to live by our rules.”

Lobbying jobs are a major source of patronage … a reward for the loyal. More important, however, many lobbyists now owe their primary loyalty to the party, rather than to the industries they represent. So corporate cash, once split more or less evenly between the parties, increasingly flows in only one direction.

And corporations themselves are also increasingly part of the party machine. They are rewarded with policies that increase their profits: deregulation, privatization of government services, elimination of environmental rules. In return, like G.M. and Verizon, they use their influence to support the ruling party’s agenda.

Now I tend to think it’s a little more complex and deeply nuanced than that – I think the democrats can’t use this issue as effectively as they should because they have their pants just as far down around their ankles as the GOP does.

But if you want to know how we’re governed – and why government increasingly lurches from crisis to crisis, read this column and the LA Times’ great two – part series on the amazing correlation between lobbying success and hiring the children and wives of powerful legislators.

In my morning paper some more annoying news (note that the LA Times website requires equally annoying registration – ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’ works – and gives you an amazing number of popover and popunder ads. Give it a break, guys…I hardly use the site any more because of them):

Labels Will See Music File Sharers in Court

Unable to stamp out Internet music piracy through education or threats, the record labels on Wednesday said they will start suing thousands of people who share songs online.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America announced that it plans to spend the next month identifying targets among the estimated 57 million people using file-sharing networks in the United States, focusing on those offering a “significant” amount of songs for others to copy.

Then, in August, RIAA will file its first lawsuits, President Cary Sherman said.

And in July, I’ll stop buying new CD’s from the majors. I understand the cat-and-mouse they are playing with the file swapping services, and that until they figure out how to make the new models work, there is going to be a certain amount of pain. But their unbelievably heavy-handed approach – in which they use the cost of litigation itself against individuals who may or may not be knowingly violating the law – is one which I won’t support with my dollars. I just don’t want to play with people who play like this.

I own about 1,000 CD’s, and have a 3 – 4 disc a month habit. I’ll be shopping for used discs or discs sold directly by the artists for the forseeable future, and I’ll be sending Cary Sherman a message to that effect (by snail mail, since the RIAA doesn’t have any way to contact them on their website).

UPDATE: Joe shares some thoughts on the artists’ perspective.