Bent Notes

As of this writing, congressional leaders of both parties, both presidential candidates, and economic advisors are meeting in Washington to discuss the bailout plan W outlined in last night’s address to the nation.

The idea is that it will restore the financial system’s health quickly enough that the American taxpayer will realize a return on its outlay of $700 billion.  Sounds good, but also quite iffy.

It doesn’t look like a purely free-market solution to this is in the offing, since this catastrophe has its roots in a fuzzy melding of the public and private sectors.  That said, I hope and pray there will be a camp within the assemblage meeting with W that will press for the way forward that comes the very closest possible to such a plan.

As every grown-up knows, the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility.  Underneath the layers of bundled mortgages and deals and cleverly wrought instruments for growing wealth and government guarantees against failure lie actual exchanges of money for for promises to pay it back at a given interest rate.  Someone said, “Yes, I’ll loan you this amount of money on terms involving this amount of time for paying it back at this rate of return,” and someone else saying, “Okay, is this the dotted line where I sign?”  If either of them thought it unlikely that he or his organization could make good on what they were freely obligating themselves to, they’re not particularly wise individuals, are they?

Now, compound that by all the subsequent operators who saw home prices rising and said, “Hey, man, even if a lot of these loans are risky, bundling them together in this favorable market is a cool way to make some cheddar!”  We have to presume that the folks on this level understood the degree of risk in what they were doing as well.  Don’t we?

It looks to me like our culture’s zeal for ever-more slickly designed gizmos, with ever-more bells and whistles - think iphones and Blackberries and voice-activated GPS devices - permeated the financial world.  The main difference, it seems to me, is that microchips and plastic and steel and aluminum aren’t inherently risky substances.  You combine them into this product or that, and you can rely on them to do their thing as what they are.  Mortgages and other loans, in contrast, may, shall we say, decay over time.  They may fall prey to slow payment or even default.  This makes designing super-fancy financial products out of them kind of a shaky proposition.

So what I hope gets trumpeted loudly at the gathering in Washington today is this:  Let’s determine to the best of our ability who is responsible for each of the various aspects of this mess and hold them accountable as much as possible and minimize the burden to the American taxpayer, who needs to see his or her overall burden reduced anyway, as much as possible and as soon as possible.  Free people keeping their own hard-earned money is the real key to moving pst this perilous moment.

Larry Kudlow interviews Alaska governor Sarah Palin.  This is the stuff that can win elections.  This is the stuff that can rescue America and Western civilization.

Herman Cain on the fate of Senate Bill 2958.  And kudos to Mary Landrieu for having the courage to beak ranks with her Freedom-Hater party on this one.

China has hacked its way into our government’s top-secret databases.

Ahmadinejad now says his oil-rich country needs 50,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium.

And we can’t do a thing now, thanks to the clueless Reasonable Gentlemen, turf-and-ambition-addled careerists, and out-and-out Freedom Haters in the most sensitive and crucial postions in our national-security apparatus.

The continuation of Michelle Malkin’s interview with Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown-Up.

My next Republic column, which will appear in this coming Sunday’s edition, is on what it will take for our society to recover its ability to recognize evil.

Since I submitted it, I’ve had my moments of submitter’s remorse.  Do I really want to get that heavy, I’ve asked myself.  Wouldn’t it have been better to get one last bit of publicity mileage out of the opportunity for Barbecue at the Sunset Terrace, the booksigning / Sunday brunch / special musical performance / silent auction I’m organizing, which will be held that day at Tutto Bene, a wine cafe / art gallery in Bloomington?

Today, such doubts are gone.  In spite of my schedule for today (appointments for writing assignments, a Jazz from Bloomington board meeting, errands), I find that I can’t help but think about evil. 

Certainly, I’ve run my mind back through what I saw, thought and felt on the orginal 9/11 - the one in 2001.  And how all those thoughts and feelings were rekindled about a year and a half later when I went to Ground Zero.  There’s no precedent for the vile, demonic plot those specific jihadists concocted.  And now we know that such jihadists routinely work on such plots all over the world.  That’s what’s meant when people say, “I relaized life would never be the same again.”

But events of the last couple of days have sparked my consideration of the degree of pervasiveness of this evil, and the multifarious and insidious forms it can take.  A column on evil is indeed timely when one considers things like the full-page ad MoveOn.org took out in yesterday’s New York Times, or the expression of such sentiments by sitting representatives and Senators - Reid, Lantos, Skelton, Wexler - while the general in question is in Washington to brief them.

The matter of recognizing evil is of paramount relevance.  You do recognize the MoveOn ad and the pronouncements by the legislators to be evil, don’t you?

When I write a column that touches on some aspect of the current world war, I always wonder if I perplex, or maybe even infuriate, those who mainly know me from my roles as a musician, arts journalist or cultural historian.  It’s worth considering.  I have a career I’m developing here.  In less urgent times, I might make other column-writing choices, but at this juncture in the life of my country, I can’t see what else I’d have the paper run this coming weekend.

There is lots of coverage of memorials and lots of reflection on the unfoliding significance of this date six years hence, but the one that’s essential is Victor Davis Hanson’s piece in Front Page magazine.

Ever since I first read Witness by Whittaker Chambers over twenty years ago, I’ve thought it would make a fantastic movie.  Turns out someone much closer to the cinema industry than me has had the same vision.

I’ve come to an interesting assessment of the state of the world in the past few days.  There’s a lot going on, some of it encouraging, a lot of it alarming, some of it silly and sad (see post below), but none of it really surprising.  Everything that’s unfolding is the playing-out of trends that have been in place for some time.

Take this delegation representing the Arab League that visited Israel.  Actually, only two countries - Jordan and Egypt - sent officials.  Headlines are hailing this as some kind of historic event.  But get to about the third paragraph under any of the headlines and you see what they’re offering Israel:  a comprehensive Arab peace (as if they can deliver that) in exchange for Israel giving up all territory outside its original 1948 borders.  Talk about non-news.  This has been the position of every Arab entity that didn’t explicitly have Israel’s obliteration as its agenda since 1973.

Pakistan has the jitters about its prospects for stability since its Supreme Court ruled for the reinstating of its chief justice, a poke in the eye to Musharraf.  Appeals for calm have been issued.  Yet another Pakistani leader does what he can to cling to power in Islamabad while in the remote areas of the Hindu Kush, tribal leaders provide all the accomodations al-Qaeda needs to perfect its designs.  Since the late 90s, a nuclear arsenal has been at stake, which is, shall we say, noteworthy.

This Gordon Brown character in the UK is casting his nation’s lot with the rest of a fatally cluesless Europe, forbidding government officials from identifying bombing plotters as Muslim, and saying that the UK - US partnership is going to take on a different tone now.

One of our two major political parties here in the US - the one with a majority on Capitol Hill - says that the only thing left to debate is just how to get our troops out of Iraq.  This is their stance at the very time when all reports indicate that the surge is working.  This is the same party that took the same stance regarding Vietnam beginning in 1968, when the yippies, after the Grant Park riots, opted to “work within the system” - in other words, begin the McGovernization process which has continued apace ever since.

The North Korean situation - well, see my most recent post on that.  No sooner had it shut down the Yongbyon reactor than Norkor said that the US had to remove it from the State Department list of terror-sponsoring nations, and dole out a bunch of goodies.  The basic NorKor bargaining position for fifty-some years.

So there’s not a lot occurring on the world stage, or in our own halls of government, that would cause one to start a blog post with, “Hey, look at this unexpected development!”  I don’t suppose that will happen until those in a position to influence the twists and turns of history are guided by common sense rather than wishful thinking.

As the fever pitch of Iraq-policy screeching ratchets up this coming week, consider these on-the-ground observations about where things stand.

Fred Barnes on Lugar’s speech in the Weekly Standard.  My senior senator caught Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome many years ago, but it may now have progressed into Hegel’s Disease.

The Senate couldn’t revive the Kennedy / McCain / W exercise in crass-manipulation-of-feelings-over-principle-and-security.

I started to feel pretty good about it yesterday as various Senators frantically tried to concoct amendments and get backing for them.  So much stuff got tacked onto the basic amnesty, pulling it every which way, that the basic patty-cake-with-lawbreakers at the core of the thing could no longer stand the strain and wound up in tatters.

Okay, now all you members of that august chamber: debate the truly important stuff, like the height of the fence and the gauge of the wire on top of it.

Of course, the MSM is playing up the defeat-for-Bush angle.  Appropos of my post below, “The Mind of W,” it’s a strange new world when my reaction to such headlines is “And a damn good thing, too!”

Appropos of the previous post, particularly my harping on the cluelessness of Western leaders, I’m at another one of those junctures at which I wonder just what makes W tick.

I understand that he comes from the Bush family, known for its foreign-policy “realist” friends like Scowcroft and Baker, and that his father was prone to bouts of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, one of which proved politically fatal (when he sent Richard Darman to Capitol Hill to work out a budget deal with the Freedom Haters, who ate him for lunch and picked the meat off the bones and made Bush 41 wind up negating his “read my lips; no new taxes” vow).

I also understand that he was a fairly aimless dude until the age of 40, at which time he became a resolute Christian and started thinking about the role of taxation in economic vitality (which bostered his supporters’ confidence that he wouldn’t make the same mistake his dad had made).

But, jeez, how does a guy who lowered our taxes and offed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime in Iraq drink the Kool-Aid with such regularity?  I won’t recite the litany here.  (It includes steel tariffs, the prescription drug expansion of Medicare - oops, there I go; said I wouldn’t rehash the old stuff.)  The latest two examples suffice aplenty: his enthusiasm for the amnesty bill, and this teaming up with Olmert to shore up Abbas.

Theories abound.  His mind is fixed on the daily threat matrix.  His faith gives him a big idealistic streak.  He’s Jeffersonian.  He’s Wilsonian.  (Never mind the moonbat theories.  Go read HufPo and Daily Kos if that alternative universe is where you live.)

As I say, he was kind of all over the place and not very good at the stuff he dabbled in until he was solidly into middle age.  He does seem to have been pretty much drawn to the business world, though. 

There are a lot of business people out there whose hearts are in the right place on the broad questions - free-market economics, strong defense, traditional values - but show themselves to be a bit underbaked when it comes to policy specifics.  Maybe W is sort of like that. 

It’s clear he’s principled and a man of integrity.  Maybe he has a well-fleshed-out world view and he’s just lousy at articulating it.

It’s a shame.  He had such a great first two years as prez.  I guess he’s a case study, by way of negative example, in the need for a leader who’s a total package, like Dutch was.

Bill Gertz at the Washington Times says that new intelligence pretty well zeroes in on a flow of arms from China through Iran to these outfits we’ve been hearing about Iran arming lately, like the Taliban.

The world is such a messy place.

Consider China, for example.  We need China’s help (I guess) in the matter of the six-way talks and the attempt to get North Korea to denuclearize.  We’re also eyeball-deep in a trade relationship with them.  But let us not kid ourselves about the vast impoverished interior of that country, which looks a lot different from the cosmopolitan coastal cities like Shanghai.  Let us likewise not forget the Communist Party clampdown on free expression, freedom to organize political alternatives, and use of the Internet, or persecution of Falun Gong, Christianity, and other expressions of spirituality.  Everybody lauds Nixon’s overture to Mao in 1972, but it behooves us to ask whether it led to a more or less morally clear relationship with that country.

Or consider Pakistan.  Much is made over how Musharraf is an ally, and how it’s important to bolster him because if radical elements in the Pakistani intelligence service or army toppled him, we’d be dealing with a full-fledged nuclear rogue state at least as dangerous as North Korea.  True enough at least on the surface, but let us remember that the Musharraf regime was one of the last forces to remain allied with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, as we were beginning our invasion there.  We had to do some heavy-duty arm twisting to get Musharraf to do his about-face.

Ditto for Saudi Arabia.  That was the other last remaining Taliban ally.  Realpolitik dictates that we not bring that up once we have brought such countries on board, since there are more pressing matters at hand, but someone ought to keep the perspective of recent history in mind.  Or even longer-term history, if you want to talk about the status of women or Christians there.  Do we really think that these countries are being palsy-walsy with us for anything other than opportunistic reasons?

It’s this gooey, foul-smelling level of world affairs that makes, for me, arguments about how the US had diplomatic relations with Saddam in the 1980s, or, going back a bit further, with the Somoza regime in Nicagagua in the 50s and 60s tiresome and irrelevant.  Hell, Churchill and Roosevelt sat down with Stalin to forge a tactical alliance in the 1940s.  They had to!

None of this is an argument for crass utilitarianism.  In fact, quite the contrary.  The way for a righteous country like the United States to maneuver through these situations is to remain steadfastly fixed on our values and our strategic goals and only have truck with the shady, morally muddled actors of the world insofar as it moves our agenda ahead.  And then, when they’re no longer useful (and especially if, like Stalin or Saddam, they show themselves to be outright dangerous), drop them like a hot potato when and if we’re ever able, with nary a thought about it.

You may have already seen this.  It’s showing up all over the web.  I say it can’t appear in too many places.  From 1992, Senator Albert Gore excoriating the Reagan and Bush I administrations for not recognizing the threat - as in terrorism support and use and pursuit of WMDs - posed by the “monster” Sadddam Hussein of Iraq.

There’s a grimly sobering but quite important column in, of all places, today’s New York Times, by, of all people, the two top Clinton-administration Defense officials, William Perry and Ashton Carter, and a former Livermore Laboratory scientist, Michael May.  They point out that it’s statistically likely that a mushroom cloud will rise over an American city at some point.  Their concern is whether we’ve given sufficient thought as to how we’ll respond.  They say that, unlike the Katrina situation, there will be no dispute about the federal role.  State and local governments will be in over their heads.

I’m on board with that.  Such an attack would be an act of war.  The federal government will have to immediately consider whether any other places are vulnerable, as well as trace the origin of the attack.

While I think Perry et all are right-on as far as they go, what I wonder is whether we’re intellectually and spiritually perpared for such a situation.  Sad to say, I’m inclined to think most of us will scramble to save our own hide, period.

A magazine editor I frequently work for sent me to see a production by a repertory musical-theater company in a nearby tourist town.  It was a vaudeville-style series of skits and song-and-dance routines.  Long on deliberate corn.  The theater was filled with the target audience: blue-hair ladies looking for a Branson-lite experience.  The cast wore costumes like Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty.  Still, I can’t help but get choked up at any credible rendition of “America The Beautiful” or “The Marines Hymn.”  My heart swells at such chestnuts as “You’re A Grand Old Flag” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

When my editor gave me the assignment, she said, “We ought to cover this, although I’m not feeling so patriotic these days.”

On another recent assignment, I was interviewing a mixed-media artist who has traveled extensively ovet the past thirty years and also studied Buddhism with some degree of seriousness.  Still her art inescapably reflects that distinctly American ranginess.  In remarking on this, she said, “I’m definitely steeped in my culture, but I’m not patriotic or anything like that.”

I realize that the above only gives an anecdotal indication of where our society is.  Still, how likey would it have been fifty years ago for an arts journalist to hear two such remarks in the space of a week?

When the likely scenario occurs, people with that mindset won’t feel personally dissed for their identity as citizens of the beacon of freedom to the world.  No, they’ll huddle in their basements and whimper about “root causes” and what a “tragedy” it is.

It’s the runup to Independence Day.  How many of us will take the time to reflect on Mr. Jefferson’s thunderous document, on the uniqueness of a nation-state being founded on a idea - the idea of human freedom - rather than geographic or ethnic happenstance?

Maybe a big smack upside the head will restore us to such considerations.  Maybe.  Then again, maybe the smoke, radiation and infrastructure breakdown will be so great that will be reduced to such basics as staving off anarchy.  And someone way down the road, after centuries of tribal fiefdoms, kingdoms and empires, will have to give birth anew to the shining notion of a free people under a living God.

Finally, BN has somebody to enthuse about, rather than make excuses for their shortcomings.  (Okay, Fred got on board with McCain-Feingold, but as far as I know that’s the goofiest move he’s ever made.) 

We’ve got the real deal here.  An utterly human, personable, seasoned, brilliant, principled, articulate and unafraid statesman.

In descending order, if it can’t be him, BN gets stoked by -

- Romney

- Giuliani

-Hunter

-Brownback

The things you gotta ask yourself are:

- who is realistically electable, and

- who can make mincemeat out of the H-word creature in a debate and show her for the socialist phony she is.

 These people qualify in descending order on the first count, but any of them could handle the second requirement.  One, though, could do it grandly, in a way that would have all Americans with intelligence and integrity levels above the level of slugs leaping out of their armchairs and pumping their fists into the air.

The number one fan of the man from Tennessee!

As I recently said to a commenter here at BN, I’m big into fun.  I’d love to devote all the space here to cool stuff - great music, conversations about (and pictures of) food, sharing of new discoveries in the worlds of literature and visual art, some sports excitement, travel tales.

But I set Bent Notes up to be a forum for the total spectrum of my experience as a human being and American citizen, and every day of this new century, I have come across some sad or alarming development that warrants my examination.  I go about my daily life against a backdrop of the rot of Western civilization, the very foundation that makes my stimulating and rewarding life possible. 

So many of the catagories on the right side of this page - the ones with “dhimmitude” in the title, certainly, but also the ones like Politics and National Security and Culture and Character & Virtue - contain posts that tell the story.

I don’t remark on everything that comes across my radar screen.  Not only is my time a consideration, but also my ability to keep a constructive frame of mind (and have some fun).  Sometimes I link to some other blogger who’s already covered a particular development in a manner with which I concur.

Another factor in my being a little selective is the dizzying pace with which simply astounding instances of self-hatred by supposed leaders of Western civilization occur.  Again, a look through the archived examples of dhimmitude here reveal a complete abandonment of fealty to basic Western values on the part of leaders in education, the arts, journalism and diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic.

The most distressing place to see this, though, is within the bodies and offices of government of my own country, the United States of America.  This is where I live, and where I ought to be able to expect my elected representatives to believe that my freedom is worth defending.  I can no longer expect that.  Some of the most prominent among them do things like go to Davos, Switzerland and tell an international gathering that includes one of our enemies, Iran, that the US has become an international pariah, or go to Syria and give that nation’s dictator inaccurate information about what Israel is willing to do to achieve “peace.”

As I say, these gravely distressing acts of West-hatred and Constitution-trampling come along with such regularity now that one must guard against being numbed.  But when the Senate Majority Leader says quite publicly that “this war is lost,” meaning the Iraq theater of our current world war, while the new strategy for victory is still only partially in place, it’s time to get one’s brain around the magnitude of what he’s commiting.

Where to start with the havoc he’s wreaking, the harm he’s doing?  Would the signal he’s sending to our enemies be the place to begin?  Or maybe the demoralization of our fighting forces?  Or maybe the deepening of the rift between our military, and the portion of the public - such as families - involved with it, and that swath of our population that has no sense of the military’s role in our national life (beginning with our survival)?  Or the obscuring of the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief and the executive branch’s role ast the setter of foreign policy?

It must be pointed out that the examples enumerated above - this latest and most egregious one, but also the others - all involve members of one of this nation’s two major political parties.  These acts are most decidedly representative of that party’s overall thrust today.

What ought to disturb anyone who still harbors a glimmer of hope for the survival of the West, and particularly that most Western of nations, the United States of America, is that the other major party doesn’t offer much of a bastion of clarity to which one might run from the rot that has the Freedom-hater party in its grip.

I’m still determined to contribute to the sum total of humanity, nobility, and even groove and fun in this world, but I do so knowing full well that the forces of ruin have secured a stronghold in high places and the tipping point for the civilization in which I do my contributing has nearly been reached.

It’s a little after six in the evening and I can already tell it’s gonna be wall-to-wall Virgina Tech on cable TV tonight.

Yes, it was horrifying. Yes, it’s off-the-charts sad.  But the place of something like this in the passing parade of human history can be summed up thusly:  Once in a while, some guy who has been a pressure cooker of fury for years goes off and wastes a bunch of people.  I know the forensics experts, the ballistics experts, the grief counselors and the psychiatry experts can fathom layers of significance of this thing for the next - well, until the next Big Unfortunate Catching Up Of The Statistical Likelihoods.

But what we really want out of this is an indulgence of our tabloid-level hunger for the wacko, the tawdry, the grisly, the confrontational.  Before this, it was Don Imus.  Before that, it was Anna Nicole.

Do you remember what had everybody riveted just before 9/11?  Shark attacks.  There was a little spike in the frequency of them, well within the overall curve since shark attacks have been monitored.  But it was enough of a blip to create buzz.  

These stories play best if there’s an angle that can be done up as heartwarming.  Somebody’s successful struggle against severe injury or fright or grief.  It helps us feel a little less sensationalism-hungry if we can bask in the warm fuzz of a hug or a smile.

I really don’t want to come off as callous here.  This was a biggie in the sense that this guy really wreaked some havoc.

Now, the next thing I probably need to do is head off any polemical jabs along the lines of, “Well, Mr. BN, aren’t there always wars and simmering unrests between nations, regions and demographic groups?  What makes the present mix of tensions and conflicts on the world stage any different from any previous moment in history?”

It’s this.  Real bad folks are getting their hands on nearly unspeakably horrific means of inflicting mass hurt.  You wanna talk rampage and carnage?  We’re nail-bitingly close to a point of seeing big cities end their existences in an hour’s time.

All I’m saying is that we can prevent a Virginia Tech bloodbath to the gazillionth power if enough of us pay attention to what people like Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osam bin-Laden, Hugo Chavez, and Christopher Hill, Condoleeza Rice, George Bush, and  Tony Blair are up to and give our assessment of their performances with all thevocal forthrightness available to citizens of a representative democracy.

The odds of a VT-type situation are tiny, and, statistically speaking, it only affects a few people.  And we can’t prevent every last occurrence.  We jus can’t.  Maybe we can’t prevent a twilight-of-the-gods phase to our current world war either, but we have a better chance of it.  It starts with giving it our attention and applying our intellects and hearts to it.