The White Peril 白禍

One of the guys at worked asked why, given how willing I am to spout off about politics, I wasn't watching the pageantry at the DNC. This from Kerry's acceptance speech is part of the reason:

Before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes and ears to the truth, they should remember what America is really all about.

Please tell me he didn't actually say that?

Linda Ronstadt was not, unfortunately, arrested for assaulting Elvis Costello songs or fraudulently marketing herself as (gag) an "interpretive singer." Maybe the statute of limitations has run out, which is a pity. However, her praise of Michael Moore did get her booed and thrown out of the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas.

I do wish the owner had been more up-front than to say that the problem was with her "[espousing] political views." It's hard to believe that if she'd dedicated a song to President Bush, the owner would have had her escorted out on principle. It would have been more enjoyable for me, at any rate, if he'd simply expressed deep concern over her physical safety, given her obvious distance from and incomprehension of her audience. But maybe he was thinking that potential visitors to the casino will want a firmer guarantee that the same sort of thing won't happen at future performances.

Virginia Postrel points to an expansive article by Bruce Bawer, which gives side-by-side reviews of a half-dozen books written by American and European authors about the US and its role in the world. It starts to be a bit of a slog toward the end, but it's great stuff, all of it. The first book he filets is by one Mark Hertsgaard, whose excerpts read like Amritas's Kevin Kusoyama, only more cartoonishly leftist. Here's Bawer's response to a spiel I've heard more times than Carter's has pills (the first sentence is his summary of Hertsgaard's argument, not his own opinion):

America, in short, is a mess�a cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans don�t know this already, it is, in Hertsgaard�s view, precisely because they are Americans: �Foreigners,� he proposes, �can see things about America that natives cannot. . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.� What he fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, �Ricki Lake,� �C.S.I.,� and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren�t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur�s assertion that non-Americans �have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,� Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it�s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they �know� about America is very wide of the mark.

Honey, the stories I could tell! Lectures about how oppressive America is are especially comical coming from gay men visiting Tokyo from countries where homosexuality is illegal. (And I can't count how many times such guys have broken off in the middle of fulminating about America's spiritual emptiness to shriek, "I love this song! Don't you love this song?" when some Britney video came on over the bar.)

Later, Bawer cites a book by Jedediah Purdy, who has a more sensible approach to assessing how foreigners view us and what it means:

Plainly, Purdy has no delusion that the foundations of anti-Americanism are noble; and he finds it ridiculous to speak of an �imperial America.� Yet he can still see why even highly Americanized foreigners refer to the U.S. as an empire. Why? Because as they struggle to learn and speak English and to find a comfortable meeting place between America�s culture and their own, these foreigners are acutely aware that Americans don�t have to make a comparable effort. English is our language; American culture, our culture. It is our exemption from this otherwise global burden of adaptation, Purdy suggests, that makes us seem �imperial.�

I would only add that it really is true that Americans abroad--which is the only place foreigners who don't come to America will meet us--are frequently not on their best behavior. That's not unique to us, of course. Everyone feels unrestricted by the usual rules when away from home. But in combination with our political and cultural dominance, bad behavior from Americans feels like an extra affront to a lot of foreigners.

Added after the strongest earthquake we've had in weeks: Amritas noticed the Kevin Kusoyama remark above, so I'd just like to point out that I think the Professor's job is secure. Being a good writer and empathetic person, Amritas has managed, in creating him, to give Kusoyama a multi-dimensional personality. He annoys you the way a real person would.

Hertsgaard, however, writes like a computer-generated composite of the last ten years of Mother Jones and The Nation (and yes, I still read them frequently enough to feel qualified to make such a slam). Here's the excerpt that dumbfounded me most:

Our foreign policy is often arrogant and cruel and threatens to �blow back� against us in terrible ways. Our consumerist definition of prosperity is killing us, and perhaps the planet. Our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery. Our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press. Our precious civil liberties are under siege, our economy is dividing us into rich and poor, our signature cultural activities are shopping and watching television. To top it off, our business and political elites are insisting that our model should also be the world�s model, through the glories of corporate-led globalization.

Actually, I guess he could be Pat Buchanan as easily as he could be the NPR commentator he actually is; those extremes met a long time ago. But anyway, what frustrates me about his type is that most of their policy criticisms have an important kernel of truth to them. I, too, am worried about our foreign policy, the creeping power of amoral and unaccountable bureaucrats, cronyism, and journalistic travesties--though probably not in the ways Hertsgaard has in mind.

The thing that's obscene is that he's saying these things in a book whose overall objective is to put America in the context of the rest of the world. I found myself staring at that "a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery" and wondering, Runaway bureaucracy and kickbacks? Dude, ever heard of France? Germany? Singapore? Japan? As Bawer says (he focuses more on the journalism and human rights angles than on political structures), Hertsgaard and so many of his fellow travelers have no sense of proportion. They can't articulate how the ability of the people to check excesses of government and corporate power varies from system to system, so even their accurate criticisms aren't very useful.

Added the next morning at 11-ish: Agenda Bender does a brief but deadly number on meaningless moves toward bureaucratic transparency and efficiency. He refers specifically to the Palestinians and the UN, but he could be talking about lots of countries in Europe and Asia, too.

Ooh, ooh...I've figured out something else I want everyone to shoot me for!

Er, maybe I should rephrase that. It's just that I'm all giddy now that I know it's super-cool to be all involved in the 2004 Presidential election. We know this because (1) the celebrities we all emulate are wearing T-shirts encouraging us to vote and (2) the author of a book called Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat has a quotable opinion on how emotionally-charged the whole contretemps will be.

Now, you're probably thinking I'm about to say, "If I ever use the fact that I've written a book called Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat to get an airing for my political opinions on an election in the middle of a war, please shoot me." But you'd be wrong...not because you probably shouldn't, but because that's not the worst thing in the FOXNews.com article. No, really:

While many celebs aren't shy about letting the world know their political leanings, others are more interested in simply encouraging people to get involved in the process.

Field said Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are among the stars who have gotten decked out in her �Let�s Vote!� shirts. Yoko Ono also purchased one, according to Field.

�Many celebrities have come in and bought them,� she said. �And since they�re celebrities, they�re seen. Maybe they�ve decided they want to be a billboard.�

So here it is: If I ever engage in political activity of any kind ever at all ever that gets publicly glommed on to by Paris AND Britney AND Yoko, please...

...oh, you know what? Never mind. Because if that ever happens, I'll be desperately trying to save my honor by committing seppuku with the nearest plastic picnic knife before you can get your weapons out and loaded.

In fact, thinking about the sort of people who might be moved to go out and vote by a message across Paris Hilton's breasts may drive me to do it anyway.

You gotta love stories like this. The USDA is thinking of redesigning its food pyramid, which tells you the recommended number of daily servings from the various food groups. The reasoning is...well, you can see here (note the assumptions packed into the use of but in the second paragraph):

The [United States Department of Agriculture] is asking for public comment on whether to replace the pyramid or update it, Hentges said. He was taking no stand on that choice. "We do not have a preconceived notion," he said.

Federal officials say about 80 percent of Americans recognize the pyramid, but about 66 percent are overweight or obese.

And clearly this is because the federally-approved graphic representing the ideal diet is the wrong shape. The entire article paints a pathetically humorous picture of a nation of affluent, literate, free citizens--with more dietary choices than most of history's emperors--who have no prayer of figuring out how to eat well without the USDA. No joke. This is the second paragraph from the article:

Too many are confused by the recommendations and can't figure out how to implement them. The proof, Agriculture Department officials say, is that two out of three Americans are fat.

I doubt any higher-ups from the USDA are reading this, but just in case, here is my public comment: No one gives a flying f**k about the food pyramid. Go think about something else.

Surely somewhere in America, there's a pig with trichinosis or a slaughterhouse with substandard sanitation to keep you occupied. As far as nutrition goes, we wouldn't exist if thousands of years of our ancestors hadn't known how to combine foods for a healthy diet without the assistance of a food pyramid. Granted, the problems nowadays are somewhat different. It used to be that, say, knowledge of the Three Sisters (a garden stand combining beans, squash, and maize) was precious to Native Americans because it made sure no nutrients were missing from the diet. Today, we're so decadently rich we want to avoid getting too much nutrition.

Still and all, everyone in America knows that you need fresh fruit and vegetables, starchy foods, and (because most of us can afford them regularly) meats, in moderate portions, for a balanced diet. Unless you're insane, you know that you can't expect to eat nothing but Entenmann's pound cake and be healthy. Whether you think enriched wheat flour and high-fructose corn syrup are the foods of Satan, or think meat and carbohydrates shouldn't be eaten at one sitting, or never eat anything but organically grown plant foods, or whatever, doesn't change the list of essential nutrient-rich foods much. Those who prefer to eat yummy products with low food value will not be enlightened or guilt-tripped by a revised food pyramid into changing their eating habits. The taxpayers, however, will be out yet more money, and an office-full of busybodies in an industrial park will have something to do for the next few years. And we all know that's what's really important.

I keep not commenting on things Alice in Texas says because it's fun to go to the site of someone you have no communication with and occasionally see yourself linked. (Seeing yourself upstaged by having your ideas fleshed out with more point and humor than you yourself managed is not fun, though it is instructive.) Unfortunately, homeschooling four children appears to make it difficult for her to hang around in gay bars where we might meet, so our mutual introduction will have to be on-line. So, taking her links as an offer of a handshake, let me say, Welcome to America, Alice...uh...from a guy who lives in Japan.

Anyway, she's almost always right on, as when she says this:

But then, liberals have always had a problem with boundaries. They would like all walls taken down, giving everyone free access to everyone else's possessions and property, allowing us to be one big happy family all together. Because if only people would simply hand over everything they most treasure to complete strangers, the world would be a nicer place. Oh yeah. You see, it's all about stuff.

What most bewilders me about such people is their ability to act, on the one hand, as if our kind of social order were so natural to the human organism that you can meddle with it at will without making it collapse...and then to display, on the other hand, a tendency toward control-freak micro-planning when they get their hands on actual institutions. But as Alice encapsulates here, there's a whole skein of other, equally nasty assumptions involved: that there's a fixed amount of good fortune to go around, that therefore envy is the natural and proper reaction to others' good fortune, and that it's better to make everyone equally miserable than to allow unequal outcomes of any kind.

I can't tell whether Eric Scheie is seriously stumped or playing up the naive tone for effect, but all the questions he raises about some current definitions of rape are good ones. Not for the first time, a woman college student who got drunk and went back to a dorm room with two college guys is accusing them of rape.

In an accompanying article, a "mutual" standard is announced, and the reason I'm putting it in my blog is that I am having conceptual difficulty understanding it:

"The good that can come out of this is that more people will see the problem for what it is," Bath said. "We have to educate young women about this issue, and we also have to educate young men. Don't put yourself in position to be a victim or a perpetrator.

"Young men, including athletes, have to be made to understand: You're not entitled to sex. And if the woman is drunk, you're even less entitled to sex. It's a crime."

OK, let's parse that.

I think I have a pretty good idea how to avoid being a victim. But how do I avoid putting myself "in position" to be "a perpetrator"? Any idea what that means? I mean, usually, the way I manage not to perpetrate crimes is simply by not perpetrating them.

Position? Do they mean sexual positions? Or merely in any tempting locations? There are sexually attractive people in many locations; does this mean that there should be no dating? No kissing? No heavy necking?

Analogizing to other forms of crime, does that mean that people shouldn't work near money lest they put themselves "in position" to be a perpetrator?

Then there's the entitlement issue. Certainly, I am not entitled to sex. Agree completely. I never thought I was. The statement makes me wonder whether there is an entire new class of people out there who believe in sexual entitlement as a matter of right. Is that true? What have I been missing?

Then there's this:

if the woman is drunk, you're even less entitled to sex. It's a crime.

Only if the woman is drunk? Isn't that sexist? Or is all drunken sex a crime?

(The article he links to is here.)

Part of the problem may be a generation gap. When we arrived at college in 1991, there was a sexual assault session as part of freshmen orientation. It was one of those that we were herded to--you didn't just show up and have the ability to skip out on it. In it, we were given to understand that, basically, a woman was permitted to say no at any point between "Hi, can I buy you a drink?" and orgasm. If the man didn't stop, he was a rapist. (Yes, they kept the language scrupulously gender-neutral, but we all knew they weren't trying to prevent crew guys from being mounted and pinioned by sorority girls.)

This was before the infamous Antioch College behavior code, which required explicit verbal consent at every step along the way. Still, the undisguised intention was to let men know that they could be considered rapists if they did anything to displease the women they slept with. So even though I think such a definition of rape is inequitable, infantilizes women, treats straight men like lowest-common-denominator barbarians, and prevents everyone from assuming adult responsibility--though I think all those things, I've been hearing people talk that way since I was 19. It repels but doesn't faze me.

Along those lines, I was most interested by this: "The statement makes me wonder whether there is an entire new class of people out there who believe in sexual entitlement as a matter of right. Is that true?" I don't think it's true specifically. What I think is that the leftish nannies in charge of student life programs can't resolve a certain conflict in their thinking. (Well, there are many conflicts they can't resolve, but I'm speaking of just one here.) Their overarching message is that all choices are equal and that individualism means feeling free to act on whatever impulse wafts into your pretty little head.

Naturally, 18-year-olds living away from home are going to take this to mean free sex, as part of a more general sense of entitlement. Then student life dean-types have no choice but to back and fill and point out that, well, no, dear, you aren't really entitled to sex with anyone and everyone just because you want it. Desires must be refereed, and since academic feminism is the highest priority among such people, the woman gets to make all the choices and the man gets to make none of them.

One of the most darkly hilarious aspects of our freshmen orientation about sexual assault came at the end. The perky graduate student had led our group of ten or so students through discussions about why you were a rapist if you had sex with a partner who was drunk, a partner who was high, a partner who said no but didn't stop you later when you fumbled with her bra again, or a partner who tried to push you away when you'd already been copulating for ten minutes. She wrapped things up by saying, "Well, I'd just like to point out that, while it's okay to say no, it's okay to say yes, too." Really? Well, there you go. That makes it all clear. It isn't surprising that, after four years in the charge of such people, a lot of college kids end up more confused about sex and sexuality than when they arrived as teenagers.

Added 5 seconds later: I would just like to point out that I'm aware of the ambiguity in "there was a sexual assault session as part of freshmen orientation" and decided to leave it in because I got a giggle out of it. Rest assured that the only things actually being assaulted during the session were morality, ethics, logic, and common sense. This is why we go to college, right?

There aren't many fascinating things about CNN.com, but one is the frequent distance between its photo captions and the content of the stories they're attached to. Check out this story, headlined "Coping with in-flight violence." The accompanying photo shows...well, I'm not sure who's subduing whom there, but the caption pretty clearly says, "As a passenger it's best to leave it to the experts when flying." If you fly frequently, you're already silently qualifying that statement in your head, and if you read the accompanying story, you get:

"If -- and that could be a big if -- air marshals are on board it would be preferred that the passengers allow them to do what they have been trained to do," Hamilton said. "Passengers must cooperate with them and do exactly as told.

"Federal air marshals have credentials and will identify themselves as soon as practical. It will be easy to see who they are. They will not identify themselves until after someone has identified themselves as a terrorist/hijacker," Hamilton added.

But, as he indicated, not all flights carry air marshals.

"You can't put them on every flight," said Mark Bogosian, a first officer who crews Boeing 757-767s for a major U.S. airline. He said he knows that because flight crews are told when an air marshal is on board and who it is.

"Unless law enforcement is on board, especially now with cockpit doors locked, the passengers and flight attendants are the first line of defense." Bogosian said. "If law enforcement is not on board and there's an incident, it is up to the flight attendants and the passengers."

In other words, if (purely felicitously) you wander onto an airliner that's been assigned an air marshal (which you won't know until an emergency begins), stay out of the way and do what you're told. Otherwise, it's you and the flight attendants, baby. Just hope the gay ones are the gym-bunny/tae kwan do-class type! It isn't until two-thirds of the way down the page that you learn that the article is publicizing...a book about self-defense for airline passengers. No, I'm not kidding.

I realize that these issues are not simple. Keeping air marshals undercover allows their existence to be used to intimidate hijackers but avoids the expense of putting one on every plane. It also prevents terrorists from taking them out before turning on the passengers, and so on. What sticks in my craw is the way leaning on agencies (or private groups funded by same) for sustenance and protection is constantly portrayed as the desirable state of things. Learning how to take responsibility for your non-specialist self is presented as the outlier, the special case, the thing you do when your minders are busy with other things and you're caught off-guard.

Training flight attendants to deal with hijackings would mean more if they were armed. They are, after all, the particular subset of "professionals" and "experts" who know the ins and outs of the planes they man. More than the passengers, they would be able to use their familiarity with the environment strategically. Besides, how cool would it be if one of those hard-bitten, frosted-haired old dinosaur stewardesses on American or United planted herself in the middle of the aisle, growled, "The captain has turned the seatbelt sign ON, sir!" and saved a planeload of people by shooting a terrorist? Her 300 million countrymen would adore her forever.

Well, probably not all 300 million. In a few days, there would be a story on Reuters headlined, "Flight 123 'heroine' may have committed procedural violation." There would be investigations and soul-searching and a stack of new clearance forms and a segment on Crossfire. Knowing this, passengers who can't arm themselves, and who can't depend on armed crews to protect them, may as well make the best of it and learn how to knee miscreants in the groin. It'd be nice if CNN realized that was the real story, though.

It looks as if news of the beheading of the Lebanese-American marine may have been a fake-out; still, some people are getting understandably itchy over the fact that the abduct-and-execute cycle has been repeated a few times over the last several months without decisive response from the coalition side. Reading Susanna Cornett's assessment made me wonder about something for the millionth time since 9/11. It's something that seems so obvious to me that it's been unnerving to see no one commenting on it directly.

The Onion, in its post-9/11 issue, had as one of its fake headlines "Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York," or something like that. What made it funny, of course, was that it represented a truth that's a little deeper than the usual idea that salt-of-the-Earth types in flyover country think we city-dwellers are crass and materialistic and sinful and arrogant. I don't mean that the outpouring of affection for 9/11 victims and survivors wasn't genuine, or that the sense of solidarity with New York and DC wasn't genuine, or that anyone but the most odiously opportunistic ideologues believes that those places deserved to be attacked.

I just mean that 9/11 did little to counter--indeed, played directly into--the idea that our big cities are where dangerous things happen and that you can avoid danger by staying out of them. Which is to say, I think that people believe America is vulnerable, but I'd have no trouble believing that most people don't feel that they themselves are particularly vulnerable...largely because they don't live in New York, LA, Chicago, DC, and maybe San Francisco or Houston. There are, plainly, good reasons to think that way. When an al Qaeda affiliate told Japan is was on the to-attack list for supporting the US, it was here in the middle of Tokyo that our train lines removed trash bins from station platforms and other security measures were taken.

But there's also an extent to which the sense of what is safe and what is dangerous is based on feel. This is just speculation, but I'd be willing to bet that most people's sense of threat would become much more urgent if the next attack were on, say, Dallas instead of Philadelphia. It's not that people value people in one place more than another. It's just that everyone knows that Philadelphia is a City, whereas Dallas has the image of a piece of middle America that happens to have a lot of people (even though Dallas is waxing and Philadelphia waning in socio-economic prominence). I realize that I'm glossing over other differences--between regions, and also in the ways population centers form now vs. the way they formed when the traditional great American cities were rising. But to many Americans, more on the basis of common sense than any kind of reverse snobbery, the BOS-WASH and SAN-SAN cities, along with Chicago, are in a somewhat different mental zone from the rest of America. That's not a problem in and of itself, but it probably doesn't help bring home that, while future attacks may begin in our love-to-hate-them metropolitan areas, they won't stop there.

Right after 9/11, Joanne Jacobs wrote something that was, as usual, bluntly true and compelling. Her old blog archives don't work, but it's still on Instapundit:

They hate us because we're big, powerful and rich, while they're small, weak and poor. Our culture is dynamic, confident, global and free. Their culture is rigid, defensive, parochial and tyrannical. We're winners. They're losers, and they resent it. U.S. support for Israel is a detail. We could let our foreign policy be dictated by Yasir Arafat, and they'd still hate us.

I don't know that US support for Israel is a detail, exactly--except insofar as this isn't all about hatred of the Jews. Israel, as much as America, represents how you can triumph over adversity when people are freed to use their resources to accomplish what they wish, and not sentenced to the circumstances they were born with.

I've given up trying to explain this to nice but knee-jerk lefty guys when the subject turns to politics: As a people, Americans do not believe that there's only so much happiness or wealth to go around. You can always make more--not by waving a magic wand, but by working hard and looking for new places to contribute. The sort of sappy progressivism that says we can wipe out all the darkness and ambiguity in our life as organisms if we just plan better is unrealistic; the kind that says we can make the means to prosperity more accessible, and give society a more diverse and resilient set of responses to disaster, is so much a part of our reality that it's easy not to see it most of the time. Almost 230 years after the Declaration of Independence, and it's still working.

Happy Fourth of July.

I was going to post an addendum to what I wrote a few days ago about respect for public spaces, in response to something Nathan had said on the same topic. Then Nathan was no longer able to log in to his own site's comments, and it seemed unfair to reply to him when I knew he couldn't reply back. But then, I figure the issue of obscenity in popular culture is unlikely to be solved between now and when he arrives home; it'll still be hot, one might say, when he's in a position to get back to it.

What I was going to say was this: I think that social liberals' knowing "most people won't" turn off the television to avoid certain content means something different when we're talking broadcasting in general from when we're talking about the Superbowl specifically. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for broadcasters to assume that young children are in bed or away from the TV by late evening and that programs with sexual or violent themes are acceptable at that hour. Whole 24-hour channels that parents know are going to be minefields of things you can't explain to an eight-year-old don't seem to me to cause ethical problems, either, as long as everyone knows what they are. (Even better is if people can block them.) However well it may serve the aims of the atheistic elements who want to destroy society...or whomever...the people who make the decision to put television sets in their children's rooms so they can watch unsupervised are the parents.

The problem with the Superbowl escapade was that it violated the gentlemen's agreement to acknolwedge that whole families watch together and keep it away from anything more controversial than bad calls and shocking sums spent on whiz-bang advertisements. The FCC's barging in strikes me as wacko; so did the way so many people seemed to take the tack that the female breast itself was some sort of Mound of Discord. The aims of aggrieved parties would, it seems to me, have been better served if they'd gone with measured, slightly contemptuous condescension. Communicating by letter and telephone that they were so very appreciative of the broadcasters' desire to put on a piquant show...but that they planned to boycott any organizations involved because of the poor judgment about what the audience would find acceptable...could have been devastating if they'd followed through.