Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Black Socrates and the Red Scare

Thursday, 8 October 2009 by bbbeard.

First, a cautionary tale. Some time ago I read a critique of multiculturalism, the central parable of which went as follows: it seems that there was once a classics professor, tasked with teaching a sophomore course in Plato’s Apology. As the professor explains:

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture? Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?

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An Anhistorical Presidency

Tuesday, 6 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Michelle Malkin has tweaked the other Michelle about her remembrance of things past — specifically, about her memories of sitting in her daddy’s lap while watching Carl Lewis at the Olympics. The fact that Michelle O was 20 years old when Lewis first ran in the Olympics makes her remark a trifle unsettling. Well, okay, in fairness, MO started her sentence by referring to Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, earlier competitors, but the sentence doesn’t parse in any way that is flattering either to her or to her dad. Maybe Barack was borrowing the teleprompter. And fair’s fair, W was pilloried for less creepy assaults on his mother tongue. As it were.

In any case, it put me in mind of our President’s strange detachment from facts about the past. There have been gross errors in interpretation, as when he expressed a belief that leaders like FDR and Kennedy showed the path of virtue by negotiating with our enemies. Well, Kennedy did at least have a summit with Khrushchev, although the summit itself has been described as “disastrous”. But FDR never met with any Axis leader; nor was Joseph Stalin considered an enemy to the United States during FDR’s lifetime. But there have also been peculiar personal exaggerations, as when Obama claimed his parents met because of the (1965) march on Selma — which happened four years after BHO was born. And he has engaged in unnecessary mangling of family history, too, as when he claimed his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz, Buchenwald — so sue me!

My personal favorite is when he credited Muslims with inventing the magnetic compass, an assertion that no doubt came as a surprise to our Chinese friends. This claim came in his Cairo speech, in which he more egregiously (and erroneously) claimed that John Adams wrote “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” Those words appear in the English version of the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, and are attributed to Joel Barlow, not John Adams. Of course, the fact that Obama even thought it was a good idea to bring up the Treaty of Tripoli in an entreaty to the Muslim world is baffling. The Pasha of Tripoli abrogated the Treaty in 1801 when Jefferson refused to pay, initiating a chain of events that are memorialized in the Marines’ Hymn.

Most recently, he visited the United Nations and claimed “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside.” Again, this is a very odd statement from a self-proclaimed “student of history”. One imagines the German and Japanese Ambassadors exchanging puzzled glances over this claim, thinking their translators had malfunctioned.

I fear that we are led by a man whose “study” of history has been seriously distorted by the Marxists he sought out on the Columbia campus, by the race-baiter in the pews of whose church he sat for twenty years, by the political allies he made in Chicago, and by the friends he has chosen to man his administration and to help draft legislation.

In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler urged his readers to understand the times in which they live, in order that they might participate in history and not merely stand outside as spectators. Obama seems to have intuited that, at this moment of world history, the Leader has no need for Comprehension, for Understanding of What Is, for Appreciation of What Has Gone Before, the Leader only has a need to have a vision of What the World Could Be. His dwindling but still-numerous followers seem to agree.

And that is a cause for apprehension.

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The Meaning of Art

Wednesday, 5 August 2009 by bbbeard.

One of the minor stories making the rounds of the blogs this week is about an anonymous artist who is posting a depiction of President Obama as the Joker from The Dark Knight.

Reactions range from chuckles on the right to hysteria on the left.

Personally, I found a revelatory moment in this. My entire life has been lived in the era of “modern art”, promulgated for the most part by talentless hacks who hide behind any of a number of rubrics, e.g. “art is about challenging our preconceptions”, “art is about getting us to see things differently”, “art is about knocking out the scaffolding under the structure of power”, “art is about getting government money from the National Endowment for the Arts” &c.

Here at last is a true specimen of what those modart poseurs were claiming to try to achieve (well, except for the NEA part). The poster attacks and undercuts the most powerful man in the world with visceral imagery — tied cleverly to pop culture — and a single loaded word, “socialism”, that carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. The subversive message cannot be countered or argued away, because the message is visceral and not intellectualized. It is aesthetic precisely because it is a tonic to counter our anesthetic age.

It’s not hard to find commenters who are baffled by the association of the statist Obama with the anarchist Joker, but to me the message is clear: Obama is a person bent on destroying the ‘old’ order of this country (in which freedom is a higher value than equality), and he is using the even older tropes of the left to do it. Obamaphiles can’t see this happening, of course, so they are bewildered by the spreading anger that this President inspires. They lash out with charges of racism, and try to diminish the poster as “dangerous and mean“. They really don’t “get it”. Their outrage is undercut, as usual, by their record of passivity in response to similar images of the previous occupant of the White House.

The anonymity of the artist lends an air of credibility — literally “street cred” in this case — to this satire. An anonymous street artist speaks volumes with a single image, while the Bush-bashing images of incorporated media like Vanity Fair (Bush as Joker) and LA Weekly (Bush as Vampire) and the New York Times (Bush as Frankenstein/Hitler) are merely tired and asinine.

And to those who might find anonymous posters unfair and disturbing, I suggest that the government-organized cult of personality around President Obama is far more creepy. A thousand U.S. elementary students make the world’s largest beaded mosaic to celebrate the leader’s birthday!? Yes, we can! Remind you of anybody?

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Strongly Weakly

Friday, 31 July 2009 by bbbeard.

WASHINGTON.D.C. (BBB) — The Obama administration today touted the latest results of the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, said to an admiring press corps, “We would like people to note that the latest results of the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll are tout-worthy. In particular we want to focus on the unprecedented number of likely voters who feel strongly about President Obama. Early in this administration, we struggled with ’strongly’ numbers in the low 60%-ish range, but our non-stop efforts to engage Americans in the political process have boosted the total number of strongly feeling voters into the 70% range.”

After uncharacteristically pointed questions about the proportion of strongly feeling voters who actually approve of the President, Gibbs urged the press corps to focus on the overall trend, and not try to “micro-interpret” subcategories of poll results. “We feel the hard part is getting people to feel engaged in the political process, and we feel we’ve been doing a great job with that. We don’t want to dwell on day-to-day shifts in ‘approve/disapprove’ numbers because in the long run those don’t count nearly as much as getting people involved. We like to say, ‘We are the people you’ve been waiting on. Um, for.’ ”

For a closer view of the trends in the Rasmussen poll, click on the thumbnail below.

For a closer look at the “not strongly” voters, click on the next thumbnail:

Asked what it would take to get more of the “weakly feeling” likely voters to feel strongly about the President, Mr. Gibbs suggested that upcoming plans to bring the overnight package delivery business up to the government standards would be a centerpiece of fall plans to rejuvenate the economy. “Once we purge greedy doctors, greedy bankers, and greedy oil companies from the public square, it will be time to purge greedy overnight package delivery companies. You know, why should it be fifty times the cost of stamp to deliver a package overnight? Americans pay a higher percentage of their GDP to overnight package delivery companies than any other country. We are way overdue for reform. And our polls indicate that this issue will help more people than ever feel strongly about the Obama Presidency.”

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Lagging Indicator

Thursday, 2 July 2009 by bbbeard.

On the heels of today’s dismal unemployment report, the Wall Street Journal has an article out today:

Republicans Blame Obama Policies for Job Losses

Republicans are using today’s report on further U.S. job losses and the highest unemployment rate, 9.5%, in 25 years to criticize President Barack Obama’s administration on its fiscal policies.

While I certainly concur that Mr. Obama’s economic policies are worthy of severe criticism, I think this particular grandstanding is unwarranted. The reason is that unemployment is a lagging indicator of the economy’s performance. In layman’s terms, that means that unemployment peaks sometime after the trough of an economic downturn, not at the trough, or before. A rule of thumb is that unemployment lags about six months, although sometimes the lag can be longer. So June’s unemployment is largely due to factors in place before Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Now, arguably, Mr. Obama’s party gets the lion’s share of the blame in setting up the mortgage crisis that triggered the current downturn. But I understand that reasonable people can differ on the causal factors that brought us to our current juncture.

And there are those who point to Mr. Obama’s election as being a turning point in economic expectations. After the election of the most leftist President in our history, this argument goes, money started to flow out of investments and into various safehavens (like mattresses and gold). The main datum supporting this theory is the continued lackluster performance of the stock markets. The DJIA, for instance, is still down 13% from election day, including a 200-ish point drop today (the NASDAQ Composite, though, is up 1.2% since election day). By this theory, we should set the line of scrimmage not on inauguration day, but on election day plus one, when Mr. Obama set up his Office of the President-Elect. And again by this theory, the six-month lag was struck in early May 2009.

But I’m not arguing that right now. Maybe I believe it, maybe I don’t — I’m still on the fence. In the long run I don’t think it will matter much, because in the long run I think we are in for a Japanese-style “Lost Decade“, due fully to the incompetence of the Obama administration. But only time will tell.

However, one thing is clear at this early juncture — Mr. Obama’s economic team thought they were immune from the normal operations of the national economy, including the lagging indicators. The blog Innocent Bystanders has been standing by, holding their feet to the fire, as it were. Back before the memory of most Obama voters, when the administration was arguing for its trillionish “stimulus” bill, they put out a claim that without the stimulus bill, unemployment would peak at around 9% in the third quarter of 2010. With the stimulus bill, they claimed, unemployment would peak at 7.5% in the third quarter of 2009. Here’s is IB’s graphical summary of their prognosticatory skills:

One might be tempted to judge the Obama team’s economic competence by this yardstick. I am.

Now, it is a hopeful sign that the rate of increase of unemployment slowed. I hope this is a harbinger of moderation in our economic situation. I think the next couple of months will tell us a great deal about the future. If unemployment continues to climb — and in particular, if it resumes its previous rate of increase, watch out. On the other hand, if June really was the peak month, if unemployment drops back to 9% by the fall, the markets may stabilize, money may begin to flow back into investments, and no one will remember how badly the Obama team blew their economic predictions.

But I am not hopeful. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives just passed H.R. 2454, the ACES Act, which will raise the cost of energy — which is to say, the cost of just about everything — by a hefty amount (the discussion over at Transterrestrial Musings suggests about 25%). Recent reports also suggest an unwillingness of international lenders to fund the Obama deficit. Democrats are determined to take action on the health insurance situation, and many bystanders fear the worst. None of these leading indicators bode well.

Now the official LEI put out by the Conference Board shows three consecutive months of increases in the leading index. But it doesn’t take into account the political environment. We shall have to see if economics can trump politics. If the recklessness of Congress can be restrained — if ACESA is held up or stripped in the Senate, if “health care reform” can be stopped — then maybe we’ll get through this, even with the massive deficits that Mr. Obama has created. By the way, here’s a reminder:

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Why ’slippery slope’ is not a fallacy

Thursday, 11 June 2009 by bbbeard.

Now the Obama administration wants to limit ‘executive’ pay across the private sector, not just for companies receiving TARP funds. People were warned this is the next step. This is crazy. The people in government who think this is an appropriate function of government skipped a few classes somewhere along the line — maybe they should google ‘enumerated powers’. They have no wisdom or insight, only power. Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. Hayek warned us.

Do we really want some idiot in Washington deciding how much we earn, whether we get promoted, and ultimately who we work for? The ostensible principle here is that companies, and by extension, people, are not competent to decide how to allocate their resources, so ~~people with guns~~ helpful government bureaucrats must step in. The reality is that government, far from being competent to run our lives, is corrupt and incompetent.

Some folks said the TARP limits were justified because those companies came to the government “hat in hand” for help, and other folks nodded their heads. Now the excuse for the power grab is that companies do not act in their own “long-term” interest. When the limits are extended to lower and lower level employees, they will stop referring to “executives” and claim the government must control all salaries out of “fairness” — after all, why should my secretary earn more than the secretary next door? They, the leftist/statist/socialist/communist/progressive/fascists — call them what you will — believe there is no room for freedom in this country, and that “society”, by which they mean themselves, must decide what is fair. They have no idea how the economy operates, and they don’t care, because they cling to some mistaken concept of how it “should” run. They have no idea how wealth is created, and they don’t care, because they think no one should be wealthy. They have a word for such a society: Utopia. (It means ‘nowhere’, but they think that’s ironic, not prophetic).

Michael Moore, famed left-wing economist, now wants to turn GM into a railroad and windmill company. Moore once formulated a principle upon which he thought the economy should be based: no one should make anything they can’t afford to buy. So, no yachts. No luxury cars. Oh, and by the way, no buildings larger than the minimum construction worker can afford to buy. No airplanes larger than a kit plane. No railroads (I guess he’ll make an exception for high-speed rail). No factories. No oil wells. No power plants. No shipping containers and no ships. No MRI machines. No radio telescopes and no space stations.

The problem — apart from the simple fact that in this Utopia, life will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – is that decapitating the economy starts a cascade. If no one is allowed to own a yacht or a Cadillac, then no one will be hired to make them, and those people will be thrown out of work. If no one is allowed to make a power plant, no one will have electricity. If there are no airplanes or railroads or ships, all your goods will have to be produced within walking distance. This is not some weird fevered right-wing chimera — this is social policy as formulated by Michael Moore and left-wing idols like Mahatma Gandhi. Another description of Gandhi’s Utopia is “crushing poverty”. Think Calcutta, not Knightsbridge.

Hope and change, indeed. More like envy and disaster.

UPDATE: The Yahoo link to the original story is broken (as happens a lot with time-limited news stories), so I replaced it with a screen shot of the story. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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