RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/04/07/140407crbo_books_packer?printable=true&currentPage=all

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died there—remained tied to the conventions of the nineteenth century while trying to convey the unprecedented horror of industrial warfare, a condition of existence so murderous and absurd that a romantic or heroic attitude became impossible. The essence of modern understanding is irony, Fussell argued, and it was born on the Western Front.

Fussell wasn’t wrong about the Great War, but, in his insistence on its newness, he underestimated the staying power of military myths for each generation. Fussell cited a newspaper story about a London man who killed himself out of concern that he might not be accepted for service in the Great War, and noted, “How can we forbear condescending to the eager lines at the recruiting stations or smiling at news like this.” But in the summer of 1968 Tim O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old in a small Minnesota town, a liberal supporter of Eugene McCarthy and an opponent of the war in Vietnam, submitted himself for induction into the United States Army. O’Brien couldn’t bring himself “to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world,” he wrote, in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” his 1973 Vietnam memoir. “It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.” Was O’Brien’s fear of dishonor entirely different from the impulse that drove a forty-nine-year-old man to throw himself under a van in 1914?

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Last weekend a small but well-armed and -armored federal task force under the Bureau of Land Management was forced to back off in the face of a group of unarmed (or lightly-armed) patriots on horseback and on foot in a gully near Bunkerville, Nevada. The courageous citizens who approached the federal barriers were told by bullhorn that they would be shot if they came any further, but they kept coming anyway.

This was a huge victory for those American patriots who want to re-establish the rule of law under the United States Constitution. For the past two days I’ve been browsing patriot networks, Second Amendment sites, and YouTube channels, and it’s clear that the libertarian resistance has been electrified by what happened at the Bundy Ranch. Ordinary citizens stood up to the federal government, and the feds backed down.

However, as most of us surmised on Saturday, this was merely a tactical retreat on the part of the BLM and the Obama administration. We are now in a “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” situation, which is untenable from the point of view of the federal government. In order to work their will upon the American people, the feds must be seen as invincible. But they aren’t — they’ve just proven that they don’t have the guts required to gun down patriotic citizens in cold blood. They have no broad-based support among the people — all they have is fiat money and the unlimited firepower that money can buy.

The invincibility of the federal behemoth must be re-established, and quickly, so expect a Round Two. According to the following report from a reader named Warren Smith, the BLM has backed off from the Bundy Ranch, but has not departed the area. They may well be planning further operations in that part of Nevada.

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Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
“The dinosaurs surviving the crunch” was how Stephen Sondheim described women living an outdated lifestyle and grimly aware that “everybody dies.” If Sondheim had the slightest interest in the less exalted subject of economics, he would apply that descriptive to a host of companies and industries trying to beat the hooded man with a scythe, aided by their regulators.

The most recent example comes to us courtesy of New Jersey’s automobile dealers—with an assist from their regulators and Governor Chris Christie—who have decided to follow the lead of Texas, Maryland, and Virginia and declare that Tesla, the maker of electric cars, has violated state law by attempting to sell its cars through its own network of stores rather than through franchised dealers. The New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers (NJCAR), feeling threatened by a firm that sells fewer cars in a year than General Motors sells in a day, contends that the regulations do nothing more than bring Tesla into line with other manufacturers to create a level playing field, the sort on which beleaguered competitors prefer to compete so long as the referee/regulator is on their team. For “level playing field” read status quo.

If Tesla is allowed to eliminate the middleman, Ford, General Motors, and other manufacturers will follow suit, whines NJCAR. Yes, the consumer would save money, but if Governor Christie allowed this new and possibly more efficient method of distribution to take hold in New Jersey, he would surely lose lots of dealer votes and their financial support. So Christie, no stranger to issues in the transportation sector, told Tesla it can keep its stores as galleries but not discuss price or take orders. Any orders would have to be placed in stores in other states (Texas does not allow any such referrals), which would of course reap the sales taxes associated with the sales. Other states are under pressure from dealer organizations to follow New Jersey’s lead, or at minimum New York’s, where the governor and the legislature have cut a deal to allow Tesla to keep its five stores—but no more.

The right ideological credentials mean never having to say you’re sorry By Victor Davis Hanson
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How do you ensure that you won’t be ostracized, denounced, or fired if you are a media celebrity, captain of industry, or high public official?

For some, sexist banter is certainly no problem. Stand-up comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c–t and a tw-t, but suffered no ill consequences. David Letterman joked on air that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex with Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game. There was no downside to that either. President Obama tosses around “sweetie” as he wishes. No problem with that. No one believes Barack could be condescending to women.

It is not just that sloppy speech can, with the right ideological insurance, become irrelevant. Inconvenient truths can be insured against too. Barack Obama’s female staffers make far less than do their male counterparts, at least by the quirky sort of standards that the president himself applies to others to win petty victories in his vaunted war against the war against women. Bill Clinton had sexual relations with a young staffer, in what feminists would call a classic exploitative situation of disparate power. Most such bosses would be fired for hitting on their young assistants. If Woody Allen were not insured as a left-wing filmmaker, he would have been ostracized out of Hollywood.

Racism is not necessarily a job killer either. How could it be, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed during the 2008 campaign that a “light-skinned” Barack Obama spoke with “no Negro dialect.” Joe Biden, himself a candidate in that election, said of Obama that he was the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Despite such racist drivel, a fully ideologically insured Biden was rewarded with the nomination for vice president.

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In After America (available here, he pleads, and the profits of which go to support my free-speech pushback against Michael E Mann), I write inter alia about Fort Hood, and in particular the disgraceful statement by General Casey, and the Pentagon’s absurd decision to classify what happened as “workplace violence”:

In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put that down as mere confirmation of your long-established “research interests”. If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in a micro-regulated credential-obsessed society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

And “Allahu akbar?” That’s Arabic for “Nothing to see here”.

Pace General Casey, what happened was not a “tragedy” but a national scandal.

Anwar al-Awlaki and his comrades have bet that such a society is too sick to survive. Watch the nothing-to-see-here media driveling on about “combat stress” and the Pentagon diversicrats issuing memos on “workplace violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hat-check girl, the wish for a quiet life leads to death, and not that quietly. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!”, the PC kindergarten teachers won’t be there for you.

That’s true not just during the attack but for the ensuing half-decade: General Casey and the other “parade generals” (in that useful British phrase) and the vast swollen Pentagon bureaucracy have not been there for them. Mariah Blake has a piece in Mother Jones, of all places, that lays out in painstaking detail how, for Major Hasan’s victims, the United States Government has spent the last four-and-a-half years adding insult to the injuries he inflicted.

Full disclosure: If Ms Blake’s name rings a bell with readers, she’s the lady who interviewed me for the Mother Jones story about Mann vs Steyn. I wasn’t too thrilled with the way that turned out, if only because it made me sound a bit of a loon. But, on reflection, I am a bit of a loon, so maybe Ms Blake just zeroed in on the salient feature. Be that as it may, her Fort Hood piece is unsparing in its bleak portrait of what happens after the President, the cabinet secretaries and the other bigshots have departed the memorial service and you’ve outlived your usefulness as photo-op prop. Take Army reservist Keara Bono-Torkelson, who was shot in the back by Hasan:

She recalls the nurse at the Army hospital where she was rushed for treatment patting her on the head and telling her she was fine. Only weeks later, when she visited her family doctor in Missouri, did she discover that she also had a bullet lodged in her head.

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Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder called Americans a “nation of cowards” who put “certain subjects . . . off limits”? Holder, of course, was referring to “subjects” that in fact we do nothing else but talk about non-stop – the refusal of whites to admit the persistence of white racism and its responsibility for all the ills afflicting the black underclass. To quote Paul Krugman for this received wisdom, “Race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.”

Yet Holder was unwittingly accurate, for there is a subject the mainstream culture and political discourse never touches: what Harlem Renaissance novelist Claude McKay called the “yellow complex.” This is the psychological condition of light-skinned blacks that was explored in novels of the 1920s like McKay’s Home to Harlem and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Back then, the mulatto or light-complexioned black, especially the well educated, lived in a social and psychological limbo, excluded by racism from the white world, and forced by segregation to live among darker blacks whom they often despised and looked down on. Yet darker blacks themselves experienced conflicting emotions, at once attracted to and resentful of the light-skinned who scorned them.

Thurman’s Emma Lou is a sympathetic portrait of this complex from the perspective of a woman whose mother is a mulatto, but who inherited her father’s black skin: “Emma Lou had been born in a semi-white world, totally surrounded by an all-white one, and those few dark elements that had forced their way in had either been shooed away or else greeted with derisive laughter.” When she matriculates at an exclusive Negro college, she despises Hazel, another dark-skinned girl who attempts to befriend her, as “just a vulgar little n***** from down South.” Emma Lou “was determined to become associated only with those people who really mattered, northerners like herself or superior southerners, if there were any, who were different from whites only in so far as skin color was concerned.” What she discovers, however, is that most of the light-skinned students to whom she is attracted despise her as much as she despises Hazel.

A creation of racism and segregation, the psychology explored in this persistent theme of classic black literature was supposedly transcended by the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s. In black identity politics the poles of value were reversed: the snobbish mulattoes or blacks who lived by so-called “white” values were attacked for “acting white,” and authentic black identity comprised everything that separated blacks from the white majority, whether complexion, accent, or especially political ideology, morality, and virtue. Blacks of any shade who adopted proper English, social decorum, or traditional virtues were scorned as “Uncle Toms” and “race traitors.” Though millions of American blacks rejected much of this ideology, it reshaped public discourse and popular culture, and created today’s racial orthodoxy.

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In a stunning admission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy revealed to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) that the agency neither possesses, nor can produce, all of the scientific data used to justify the rules and regulations they have imposed on Americans via the Clean Air Act. In short, science has been trumped by the radical environmentalist agenda.

The admission follows the issuance of a subpoena by the full Committee last August. It was engendered by two years of EPA stonewalling, apparently aimed at preventing the raw data cited by EPA as the scientific foundation for those rules and regulations from being independently verified. Two studies, the 1993 Harvard Six Cities Study (HSC) and the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 1995 Cancer Prevention Study II, had verified that fine airborne particles measuring 2.5 micrograms or less were responsible for killing thousands of Americans every year. They became the baseline by which the EPA regulated particulate emissions from power plants, factories and cars. Airborne particles of that size are equivalent to approximately 1/30th the diameter of a human hair.

Apparently Smith and other Republicans had an inkling of what was going on at the EPA last November. At that time, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced the Secret Science Reform Act aimed at barring the agency from proposing new regulations based on science that was neither transparent nor reproducible. “Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups,” Schweikert said in a statement. “For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions.”

The bill was co-sponored by Smith, as well as fellow House Science Committee members Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) and Randy Neugebauer (R-TX). Smith echoed the concern expressed by Schweikert. “It appears the EPA bends the law and stretches the science to justify its own objectives,” he said. “The EPA must either make the data public, or commit to no longer using secret science to support its regulations.”

At that time, McCarthy was singing a different tune. She defended the EPA’s “high-quality science,” and referenced a report by the Office of Inspector General praising the EPA for its research. In testimony before the Committee, she insisted that science is the “backbone of the EPA’s decision-making.”

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Last Tuesday, on April 8, Brandeis University rescinded its invitation to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree from the institution. Brandeis caved in the face of intimidation from CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups, as well as a student petition on Change.org and a faculty petition – the contents of which have now become known.

The faculty petition is a textbook case of leftist pathology and of how “progressives” demonize true heroic freedom fighters and push millions of victims of totalitarian regimes and ideologies into invisibility for the sake of their own egotistical and destructive agendas.

A case in point in this ugly leftist narrative is how the signatories of the Brandeis petition have succeeded in banning a woman from their university who is the victim of female genital mutilation (FGM), suffered under an Islamic knife because of Islamic doctrine. She represents millions of Muslim females — mutilated and mutilated-to-be. And yet the signatories of the petition are callously indifferent, because they have their progressive program to attend to and fulfill.

The Brandeis faculty petition, written on April 6 and addressed to President Lawrence, stresses “the horrible message” that inviting Ali to the university “sends to the Muslim and non-Muslim communities at Brandeis and beyond” because of Ali’s “virulently anti-Muslim public statements.” Aside from complaining about Ali’s truth-telling about Islam, the petition also issues a dire warning about the “unnecessary controversy” that the human rights activist’s presence would bring to the campus.

To be sure, who needs nightmarish scenarios like debate and intellectual diversity when the Marxist Left has already lovingly bestowed the peaceful the Party Line?

The petition then references the major issues with which Ali is concerned: female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honor killings. “These phenomena,” the petition flippantly notes, are not “exclusive to Islam.” This is a standard and perpetual tactic of obfuscation and equivocation employed by the Left whenever a monstrous evil is labelled in a totalitarian enemy. It serves as an excuse for inaction by presupposing that if a crime is committed by someone else, somewhere else, that it somehow justifies doing and saying nothing in the face of a crime being perpetrated on a mass scale right before our eyes – and one that we can do something about.

The former NSA contractor, in league with journalist Glenn Greenwald and others, has exposed nothing illegal. He has done great harm.
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Mr. Fox, a British Conservative, is a member of Parliament and former secretary of state for defense.

Peace and security are not the natural state of affairs. It is a fact of life that many of those who live comfortable middle-class existences in affluent, liberal, pluralistic democracies in the 21st century seem to have forgotten. Those who live without a full grasp of the risks and sacrifices taken by others on their behalf will not understand the constant battle for law and freedom against disorder, anarchy and terror. Just as a gardener fights a constant war against untrammeled nature, but casual observers see only order and tranquillity, a constant struggle is being waged against the forces of disruption and destruction so that we can take the safety and security of our daily lives for granted.

For our intelligence services to operate effectively, and to protect us from these threats, they need to be able to do things in secret, secrets whose public disclosure would be damaging to our national interests. We depend on the legal and moral partnership of our governments and the employees and contractors it uses to maintain the confidentiality of these secrets. Yet all of this has been imperiled over the past 10 months by the slow public parading of intelligence secrets stolen by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, working with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and others. As recently as last month secrets were still being spilled, this time about an NSA malware program.

What are the size and scale of our intelligence agencies that so agitate their critics? In the case of United Kingdom, it is around £2 billion a year. Put another way, this is less than 0.3% of total government expenditure or the equivalent of how much we spend on the National Health Service every six days.

For the U.S., the comparable figures are 0.7% of total government spending, around only 5% of the defense budget.

Is the American President still interested in his job?
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The White House on Monday said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Russia is stirring the unrest in eastern Ukraine, but President Obama hasn’t yet decided if further sanction are warranted. That’s how the Associated Press put its dispatch from Washington on the crisis in Ukraine, and the juxtaposition is a perfect summary of the current state of U.S. foreign policy.

Vladimir Putin uses Russian special forces to cow a neighbor and steal territory, while Mr. Obama agonizes about what to do.

“We are actively evaluating what is happening in eastern Ukraine, what actions Russia has taken, what transgressions they’ve engaged in,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “And we are working with our partners and assessing for ourselves what response we may choose.” This is from the same President who has been saying for weeks that any further Russian transgressions into Ukraine would be met with harsh sanctions. Mr. Putin must laugh out loud when he reads this stuff.

Meanwhile, the government in Kiev is getting the message that it had better fend for itself and has begun to meet one of the offers from Mr. Putin that it can’t refuse. Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said he is now open to a national referendum that would grant greater autonomy to regions of the country. Mr. Putin wants to hive off eastern and southern Ukraine into what would essentially be a Russian protectorate and leave Kiev with a rump state. The U.S. has refused to send Ukraine lethal military aid, and Kiev may be looking to sue for peace to avoid an outright invasion.

We know Mr. Obama didn’t run for President to engage in great power politics, but it is still part of the job description. Is he still interested in doing his job?