Moving

Father of girls that I am, this made me cry, but it's most inspiring.

It's a story of the friendship of two little girls in dire circumstances.

Obama--Attraction and Repulsion

Blogging has been very light, as I've been preoccupied with business and personal matters. It's time, though, after the Indiana and NC primaries, to muse some more about Barack Obama, now the likely candidate and very possibly, after years of GOP fecklessness and in a troubled economy, our next President--with a comfortable majority in Congress.

I've got to confess that although I don't share most of his views, I like the guy. Perhaps it's that he's the most eloquent political figure we've had in a long time (since King, Kennedy, FDR, Huey Long?), and eloquence is something I admire. Perhaps it's that he seems more reflective than the average pol, something we need after the endless wonkish blather of Clinton and the lateral-/s/-laced blubberings of W. Perhaps it's that I find Hillary horribly grating. Even her improved oratorical style does not prevent her from uttering the same nostrums, laundry lists and clichés that annoyed me in the first place.

Despite my personal attraction to the guy, some things give me pause--the messianic cult around him, the skimpiness of content in his early campaign, and the leftist tilt he often shows when he does take policy positions. Sometimes something better shines through--for example, the wisdom of his opposition to the demagogic gas tax holiday McCain proposed and Hillary embraced.

In two areas he gives me pause. First, although he opposed the war in Iraq (easy enough for an Illinois state senator from South Side Chicago) and seems willing to negotiate with our adversaries, I don't know that he's eschewed interventionism in concept; he will be an interventionist with a humanitarian twist, perhaps. Leathernecks, welcome to Darfur.

It's also pretty clear that by reflex or instinct, he's a statist--a Nanny Stater who wants to use government to improve s morally, a centralizer who wants to regulate more and spend more, and an egalitarian who wants to soak the rich (if only a bit) to help the poor (at least in concept). He expresses these notions in conciliatory fashion. The Clintons are policy triangulators; Obama's a stylistic triangulator.

All of this rings my political alarm bells, but then, although there's much to admire in John McCain, he rings bells, too, and some of the same ones.

We are doomed, it seems, to live in an interesting political year, and perhaps an interesting quadrennium.

Obama, McCain, Bob Barr. Hmm. Stay tuned.

Apophatic Conservatism

Fleming's curmudgeonly post moves from expressing irritation at the foibles of bloggers to the difficulty of fathoming a basis for a revived conservative coalition.

There is a lot of conservative chatter out in the blogosphere. Much of it can be reduced to Rodney King’s question: “Why can’t we all just get along.” Unfortunately, most of these would-be peace-makers, drunk on their own ungrammatical effusions, have made themselves appear as stupid as Rodney King–and just as troublesome and even harder to repress. They spend their time lambasting “Paleos,” Catholics, Southerners, and even all Christians, wihtout knowing the first thing about “paleoconservatism,” Christianity, or the South. Then they wonder why they cannot build a coalition. I had hoped, by beginning a serious dialogue on the early Church, Protestants and Catholics might begin to find some common ground. In fact, that is exactly what has happened. Can we develop the same common ground on more political topics? Why not? Where do we begin?

Perhaps, like Marxists schooled in their squabbles, conservatism seems more fragmented from the inside than the outside. Catholic traditionalists, nationalists, Southern revivalists, libertarians, and so on appear to have very different views. Whether they are "conservative" in the dictionary meaning of the world is often questionable.

This brings to mind a couple of adages. First, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The second is the supposedly Arab saying, "I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the infidel." In short, it is easier to define what we are against than to agree on the reasons.

There is an approach to theology in the Orthodox tradition called "apophatic":

Apophatic theology—also known as negative theology—is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation, to speak of God only in absolutely certain terms and to avoid what may not be said. In Orthodox Christianity, apophatic theology is based on the assumption that God's essence is unknowable or ineffable and on the recognition of the inadequacy of human language to describe God. The apophatic tradition in Orthodoxy is often balanced with cataphatic theology—or positive theology—and belief in the incarnation, through which God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

One can approach conservatism in a similar fashion--we don't agree on who we are, but we have a consensus on what we're against. For me, the essence of conservatism is a recognition of human fallenness, the danger of tinkering with the unarticulated and inarticulable habits of soul and society evolved over generations, and the probable wickedness and folly of all "progress," all utopias and systematic programs for change, especially when imposed by a powerful state.

In short, a conservative coalition might form around rejecting the idea of progress, schemas and programs for comprehensive change, the impulse to reform everything, and powerful and centralized government--which today also means opposing interventionism in the name of crusades for democracy. We define ourselves, that is, by what we are not.

It might be a start.

Bloggerai

Thomas Fleming is the grey eminence of Chronicles, a paleocon site inhabited by a variety of fairly rare political fauna, united by a distaste for interventionism and the federal gummint. He likes to write about topics like Beowulf and the early fathers of the church, rather than today’s Rasmussen poll (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Today Fleming put up a post that had two themes, both worthy of comment. The first is the feckless idiocy of much bloggery:

Which came first in America, the narcissistic obsession with personal trivia or the blogosphere? In other words, did Internet blogging reduce the mentality of young Americans to the level of mind-numbing chatter about what they had for breakfast or what they think about Obama or did blogging only give an opportunity for the already brain-dead to talk about themselves?

I suppose I know, already, that the second answer is the correct one. I’ve spent the past 30 years, at parties, conferences, rides on the O’Hare shuttle bus, and coffee hour after church, listening to strangers tell me about the wonders of their RV, their vacations in Disney World, their opinions on pop music, and their political prejudices. Beware of the Republicans, who are plotting to enslave American workers; beware of the Clintons, who are plotting to make themselves dictators. What are most political blogs but cellphone conversations overheard on the runway before the plane takes off. The good thing about blogs–including this one–is that you don’t have to read them, but when the bloggers are shouting into their telephone or cornering you at coffee, they are impossible to escape.

Here Fleming is being a bit curmudgeonly, I think. Gossip about the misbehavior of the dog, the hats or scarves of the church-ladies, breakfast, and so on, are the sinews of social life. Live in isolation and you start to miss this stuff. Even I, a self-proclaimed curmudgeon, feel impelled to lighten up and enjoy the chatter I hear while on line at the post office or the market.

Reading the ramblings of the accredited commentariat, that is, those who get paid, I cannot say that they are wiser than those of the better bloggers. Indeed, because they must dance for their supper, they seem more inclined to effuse contrived ephemera.

Blogging, and especially commenting, combines the vices of spontaneity, isolation, and permanence. We write without thinking much, without the raised eyebrow or the "Ahem!" of our interlocutor to curtail our folly, and our drivel is preserved in pixels and bytes even when we think better of it. The catharsis of writing a really ripping letter to the editor and then crumpling it up and trying for a three-pointer in the trashbasket has been lost.

Bloggery is no worse than daily stuff-and-nonsense; it just doesn't disappear as chatter does when the sound waves dissipate. A word to the wise, or better, to the heedlessly garrulous.

More on TF's second point, later.

Ten Questions

Silly me. I thought the Presidential campaign would be dull. It's depressing (as Mr. Roach says, like watching the Iran-Iraq war), but has had quite a few twists and turns more than faintly amusing.

I watched the debate last night. Both BHO and Hillary lost. The questions were terrible. Here are 10 questions I'd like to ask. I don't think any of them was.

Ten questions I’d like to hear, but haven’t:

1. Should we secure the Mexican border, whatever your views on legalization? If so, how? If not, why not?

2. Never mind mimosas with Weathermen–will you sell cluster bombs to Olmert? Will you outlaw torture, period?

3. What is NATO good for these days? Why not dissolve it?. What overseas military deployments (other than Iraq) will you reconsider, if any, and why?

4. Do you support any efforts at greater degree of energy independence? Aside from “green job” pipedreams, how would you achieve it?

5. Some young people are unsuited for college, and college for them? Can we do anything to train them so they can support themselves and their children?

6. Are you for trade restriction in any form, or for more negotiated trade deals? Or do you prefer to have it both ways?

7. Were (a) bank deregulation; and (b) bankruptcy “reform” mistakes? Should they be corrected?

8. Don’t you think the “war on drugs” is stuff and nonsense? Should we have done with it? Are there too many people in prison? What should we do about it?

9. What corporate welfare would you cut, if any?

10. Can you propose any federal policies to promote heterosexual marriage and two-parent families?

Not holding breath.

Oy, Vey is Mir!

Nelson Rockefeller ate his Nathan's hot dog, Gerald Ford his tamale, and Barack Obama tried to bowl.

Hillary Clinton did not profit by their example.

HT: Lonewacko.

A Link You Can Use

"Oh my God! There's an ax in my head!" in over 100 languages.

There's a board game, too.

Don't ask.

Academics v. Jacksonians

Michael Barone is one of the most astute political analysts around. For one thing, he meticulously studies data, such as demographics and voting patterns.

Here he shows that on the whole, Hillary Clinton does well among what Barone calls "Jacksonians," basically the people that never watch PBS and work at real jobs if they are employed. Many of them are Scotch-Irish--that's a whole nother discussion. Obama does well among blacks, of course, but also among "Academics," either folks who actually are affiliated with universities, or people who graduated from one or are employed by the government. The pattern is pretty consistent, except for a few places, such as the Wisconsin primary.

The Jacksonian candidates have usually won the Democratic nomination, and when they didn't, the candidate got clobbered (Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern). This year, it looks like the Academic candidate, Obama, may win, aided by his near-unanimous support among blacks.

This analysis does not portend well for Obama in a race with McCain, who is Scotch-Irish by descent, and can cut into the Dems' vote. Of course, Obama has the war (depending partly on how it goes) and the economy to help him.

One partial answer to Obama's dilemma--Jim Webb for VP. He may be a stiff, but the Jacksonians are his people.

Try Thizzle

Here.

HT: Dreher.

Whopee

Is that Sen. McCain ridin' high, singing "Bomb, bomb Iran"?

What a choice we have: Major McKong, the relentless apparatchik and would-be national nanny, or the UNICEF-card internationalist Messiah called to restore "dignity" to the suffering peoples of the world.

Snippets

Yes, I'm returning again to Jeremiah Wright.

We have been exposed, time after time, to the sensational and seemingly offensive snippets of the sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, based on which we are asked to judge his parishoner, Sen. Obama.

But wait a minute. Aren't we supposed to consider the whole, or at least the context in which a man makes a statement?

I went back and listened to 10 minutes of the sermon, in which Rev. Wright refers famously to the 9/11 attacks as "chickens coming home to roost," explicitly echoing Malcolm X's statement to the same effect regarding the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy. (I so far haven't found Rev. Wright's collected works on line, although we will, Oscar, we will, no doubt alongside the songs of Ashley Alexandra Dupré--but only YouTube snippets under 10 minutes in length).

The sermon goes off on the 137th Psalm (136th to you Orthodox), "By The Waters of Babylon," a lamentation sung by exiles on their flight from the Bablylonian sack of Jerusalem, which ends in a fantasy of revenge:

O wretched daughter of Babylon,
Blessed is he who shall deal with you
As you dealth with us;
Blessed is he who shal get the upper hand
And dash your infants against the rocks.

To be sure, Rev. Wright goes off by way of a kind of footnote and rattles of the sins in the origins of this country, from the ethnic cleansing of the Indians to Hiroshima.

If God judges nations, as the Bible says he does, asks Rev. Wright, does not the U.S. have much to answer for as did the Kingdom of Judah? Although I might list different sins, it is hard to gainsay that notion.

But Rev. Wright does not leave it there, instead personalizing his message, saying that he must look to the heart of Jeremiah Wright, and examine his own relationship with God. This is traditional Christian teaching--look to the log in one's own eye, not the splinter in one's neighbors. This notion is antithetical to Americans' embrace of self-congratulatory exceptionalism, but is neither heretical nor wrong.

One could well ask whether, later in the sermon, Rev. Wright discourses not just on the injustices perpetrated by white America, but on the self-inflicted wounds of the black community. This would seem essential in a self-proclaimed Africa-central church. As might be expected, Pat Buchanan offers us a riff on these.

The notion of judgment, however, is not confined to churches tinged with Black Nationalism. Abraham Lincoln, who may not even have been a Christian, in his Second Inaugural spoke of the horrors of the Civil War as divine judgment for the sin of slavery (we'll leave the debate about Abe's sins out of this post). Commenters at places such as Chronicles, many of them White Southerners, castigate the state, and sometimes the nation, in terms as harsh as Rev. Wrights. Frederica Mathewes-Green, focusing on abortion, wonders what we have coming to us, although remembering Abraham's bargaining with God over Sodom, sees hope in the millions who, although their faith is a naïve and heretical thing, maintain a simple faith.

Long story short, Rev. Wright's style and his references may be peculiar to a particular politics, but his reference to judgment is neither unorthodox nor silly.

It is easier to see madness in Rev. Wright's references to conspiracies, such as the supposed origins of AIDS in a plot to kill blacks, or a similar plot to spread drugs in that community. This type of theory is rife in the black community, I hear, and wrong-headed though these accusations are, they are not without some basis, whether it's the Tulsa riots or the Tuskegee Experiment, that at least explains in part the willingness to expect the worst.

Not dissimilar is the tendency of many Jews to see every negative reference to Jews or to thje state of Israel as motivated by murderous antisemitism, or conservatives who saw Bolshevism in every tepid proposal for reform.

I hold no brief for the Rev. Wright's theology, or for black nationalist nostrums generally. I do believe, however, that like anyone else's statements, his should be viewed in context, and Sen. Obama, who is is own man and not a creature of his pastor, evaluated for his own statements and program.

Tentative ruling: statements, skillful and interesting; program, profoundly mistaken.

Exactly: Charles Murray On Obama's Speech

It’s about time that people who disagree with Obama’s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I’m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We’ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he’s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril.

I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.

In other words, you don't have to agree with him, but give the man some credit.

Usually we wait until politicians we oppose are retired or dead to do the Strange New Respect thing, as with liberals on Barry Goldwater.

You don't have to vote for the guy, but give him some credit.