Stromata Blog

A Personal Note

Only rarely do I use this space to record the trivia of my life. Other folks’ quotidian events may be fascinating enough for that treatment, but mine aren’t. Not even I truly care what I ate for breakfast, how much it rained today, what I did last weekend, etc.

Today I make an exception, if only as an excuse to post the accompanying photograph. At the end of this month, I’ll be retiring after 21½ years with my current firm, and some of my colleagues marked the occasion with a cake, the icing of which reproduces a picture taken of me in much younger days. (I have no idea how the image is transferred from pixels to cake; it is truly a miracle of modern technology!) The date was July 1977, soon after that year’s Westercon in Vancouver, B.C. The painting I’m holding is the first piece of artwork that I ever purchased at a science fiction convention. (It hangs today in my living room.) The red beret was then my favorite headgear, unfortunately lost a couple of years later in the course of moving from New York to Chicago. The photographer was my old friend Bill Seil, who was at the time a newspaper reporter and is now ensconced in the Boeing PR apparat. In between, he wrote a mystery novel that I recommend to fans of Sherlock Holmes or the Titanic or both.

One effect of impending retirement has been light blogging. Who knew that stopping work took so much effort? Next week all that will be behind me. Of course, I may discover that, when I’m free to choose, updating a blog won’t be one of my preferred activities.

Actually, I won’t be giving up professional work completely. After three decades enveloped in ERISA, that would be too traumatic a change of pace. Also, I don’t want to let my employable skills atrophy right at the moment when, as Instapundit puts it, the country’s in the very best of hands. I may even resume blogging about pension matters, which I used to do but largely abandoned for fear that I might write something that would contradict the interests of a client.

According to news reports, many new retirees are nervous and fearful these days. I’m not. During most of my adulthood, our country has been in better shape than anyone would have predicted circa 1977, because Jimmy Carter inoculated us against liberalism. Barack Obama looks to be the booster shot that will get us through the next 30 years.

Barry and the Pirates

Eugene Kontorovich, an expert on the law of piracy [yes, I too am disappointed that there’s more to it than “Catch ’em and hang ’em”], is unimpressed by The Administration’s Pathetic Piracy Policy:

In the wake of the sudden public attention generated by the seizure of the U.S. vessel, both the president and Secretary of State Clinton vowed to crack down on the international criminals. But the measures they promised are pathetic. The highlight of Clinton’s four-point anti-piracy plan is to “seize pirate assets.” I admit when I first heard this I thought it was a joke. Pirates do not have money in London or New York banks. Somalis are more likely to have asses than assets. The pirates put in their booty into mansions, cars, multiple wives and qwat. How will Clinton freeze that? . . .

I am not being unfair to Clinton’s plans. The asset freeze is the most aggressive of her proposals, the rest of which include holding “meetings,” a “diplomatic team to engage” Somalia’s transitional government; and tasking other officials to “work” with the shipping industry on their self defense measures. . . .

Indeed, as I've recounted elsewhere, since the beginning of the piracy epidemic last summer the United Nations has passed five Security Council resolutions on the subject– all under its binding Chapter VII authority. No other issue, not even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (to say nothing of the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka or the ongoing genocide in Darfur) has commanded as much of the Council’s attention. Yet the piracy epidemic has only increased apace. In the days after Obama announced that the U.S. would be getting tough on pirates, as if to mock his words several more vessels were seized, including another American ship.

It’s possible, though, that the Obama folk have accidentally hit on one effective anti-pirate measure. Commenting on the photos of the smiling survivor of the Maersk Alabama brigands, Mr.Kontorovich says,

One thing is certain. The defendant has won second prize in the piracy lottery. . . . From the moment he was captured by US forces, the alleged pirate’s life expectancy went up by decades. In the coming months, years and maybe decades, he is likely to get the best nutrition and accommodation he or anyone he knows has ever had. Given that he did not kill or injure anyone, a life sentence is very unlikely. If he serves 15 years in a federal prison and is then allowed to remain in America, he will likely come out the healthiest, most educated and perhaps oldest former Somali pirate around.

That sounds like a reward rather than a punishment, and one’s first impulse is to deplore it. But let’s recall the old military maxim about building a “bridge of gold” for the enemy. Somali Pirates most likely don’t have strong ideological or religious motivations; they take up sea robbery as an easier and more lucrative trade than dirt farming or drug dealing. If surrender is attractive, and the alternative is a bullet in the head, their first reaction to resistance may well be to throw down their arms. At least, we can hope so. The rest of the Clinton-Obama strategy doesn’t bid fair to repeat the success of Pompey against the Cilician buccaneers.

An Apology Worth Making

As a substantive matter, I’m delighted that President Obama now supports the Colombia free trade agreement, ratification of which was blocked by his party during the last Congress. Indeed, it brings to about four the number of his Administration’s actions that I can endorse, the others being –

• continuing the anti-mufsidun campaign in Afghanistan;

• refusing to participate (albeit after too much vacillation) in the racist-authoritarian Durban II conference;

• letting the Navy shoot three Somali pirates without handwringing about the Geneva Conventions.

I have just one quibble: During the election campaign, as Jim Geraghty reminds us, candidate Obama reviled Colombia as a land where the government violently oppressed innocent workers. Now that he sees our closest Latin America ally in a less demonic light, might it not be time for another apology?

The President professes to believe that his loudly expressed contrition for “America’s mistakes” boosts our country’s standing in the world. Well, here is a mistake. Surely a mea culpa is in order. Or is eius culpa, eius maxima culpa as far as the Great Apologizer is willing to go?

Shakespeare and the Supremes

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article on what the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court think about the pseudo-controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Justice Stevens naturally got featured billing. His belief that the “true author” was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or, as the man himself preferred, “Oxenford”), has long been known to people who pay attention to such matters, even if it was a surprise to many commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy. Of greater novelty were the revelations about the views of other members and former members of the Court: Justices Scalia and Blackmun are also identified as Oxenfordians, Justice O’Connor as a generalized anti-Stratfordian and Justice Ginsburg as a possible advocate of the very longshot candidacy of John Florio (though she admits to having “no informed views”, a statement that could be applied to other aspects of her thought). The Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Souter and Alito declined to comment.

Justice Scalia’s heterodoxy may be disconcerting to admirers of his judicial philosophy, but, based on the brief statement he gave to the Journal’s reporter, it is in character. He read an Oxenfordian monograph when he was a boy and apparently maintains his allegiance in order to annoy his wife. The only argument he is quoted as making is, “It is probably more likely that the pro-Shakespearean people are affected by a democratic bias than the Oxfordians are affected by an aristocratic bias” – not exactly compelling.

Justice Stevens’ reasoning – if that is le mot juste – is presented at greater length, and is of such tawdry quality that I’m relieved not to have him on the Stratfordian side. The nadir is an argument that I’ve never before seen from even the least perceptive Oxenford backer:

Shakespeare dedicated two narrative poems to the earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, “who also [like Oxenford] was a ward of Lord Burghley and grew up in the same household,” Justice Stevens says. “The coincidence...is really quite remarkable.” He asks, “Why in the world would William Shakespeare, the guy from Stratford, be dedicating these works to this nobleman?”

For the same reason that hundreds of other Elizabethan commoners penned dedications to the nobility, in the hope of monetary and other rewards. One need only read the what the poet wrote to Southampton to realize that these are not the words of the holder of the oldest title in England to a much younger man whose earldom went back only three generations. From Venus and Adonis:

Rght Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen; only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather : and never after ear [plow] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest, I leave it to your Honourable survey, and your Honor to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.

And The Rape of Lucrece:

The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

We are also told that “Justice Stevens admits there’s a ‘fringe’ element of anti-Shakespearians who spin elaborate but unlikely theories.” With a little digging, the reporter might have discovered that the Justice himself has written a complimentary missive to one of the theorists furthest out on the fringe (though not absolutely the nuttiest slice of the fruit cake – that honor belongs to the pair of linguists who claim that Oxenford wrote not only Shakespeare but almost all other Elizabethan literature).

As the saying goes, “The country’s in the very best of hands”. Thanks to a man who is incapable of understanding the prefaces to Shakespeare’s poems, unlawful enemy combatants have habeas corpus rights and homeowners don’t have rights under the Fifth Amendment.

Christos Aneste!

Today is Easter in the calendar of the Orthodox Church. I got home from the Paschal service a little while ago and have now eaten as much breakfast as my stomach will tolerate after seven weeks of (neither utterly rigorous nor scandalously lax) Lenten fasting. Ideally, one should have a lamb dish. My godfather’s family used to serve a very good lemon-flavored lamb soup. This morning I had ground lamb patties, which are at the apex of my culinary skills.

Outsiders envision Orthodoxy as the most rigid and uniform of faiths, with every gesture of the priest and people prescribed and immutable. The reality is almost the opposite. Since being received into the Church, I have belonged to seven parishes. Their Easter customs have differed so widely that a superficial observer might well have assigned them to different denominations. The length of the service has varied from 2½ to five hours. Some carry the epitaphios around the church building; others do that on Holy Friday, or not at all. In the parishes with the shortest and longest services, almost the entire congregation stayed till the very end. At the rest, half or more left early. There are many other variations.

There are also some constants: the cry of Christos aneste! (“Christ is risen!”), of course, and the hymn beginning with those words; the dousing of all the lights, after which the priest comes through the royal doors bearing a single candle, from which he lights another, and the illumination spreads throughout the church; the reading of St. John Chrysostom’s wonderful Easter homily; the distribution of red Easter eggs at the end of the liturgy.

At the very first Orthodox church I attended, the priest explained one year why the eggs are red: After Nero’s famous persecution of the Christians of Rome, St. Mary traveled to the city, made her way to the emperor’s presence and placed in his hand an egg stained with blood. I repeated that story many times. A friend (non-Orthodox) who found it interesting asked several of his own Orthodox acquaintances about it and discovered that it was unknown to them. Eventually he found a Serbian priest who vaguely remembered reading something to the sort in a collection of Balkan folk legends. A curious example of how wrong one can be about what “everybody knows”.

And now I ought to go to bed, so let me close by quoting Chrysostom’s words:

“O grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” [I Corinthians 15:55]
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!
For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the First-fruits of them that slept.

And the hymn of the feast:

Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

May the coming year be filled with blessings for all.

Unlucky Pirates

Some days a hard working buccaneer just can’t catch a break. Consider the Somali pirates who were holding Captain Richard Phillips. The U.S. Navy was under orders to attack them only if the hostage was in “imminent danger” of death. Then, through sheer bad luck, one pirate pointed a gun his way at the very moment when all three accomplices presented clear targets to SEAL snipers.

John Hinderaker states the obvious:

It is inconceivable that a President would order the commander on the scene to stand idly by if a hostage’s life was “in imminent danger.” What is still unclear, based on early accounts, is whether that condition was actually satisfied. The commanding officer has said that one of the pirates was seen pointing a weapon at Phillips, which satisfied the “imminent danger” standard and caused him to order the snipers to fire.

Perhaps so; I’m happy to take him at his word. . . . But it appears that what triggered the rescue was that all three pirates stuck their heads into view at once, and the commanding officer took advantage of the opportunity by ordering the snipers to fire.

Or let me hazard the guess that the SEALs were ordered to watch for a moment when they could take out the pirates with a single volley, without much regard to how “imminent” the threat to Captain Phillips might be.

I would like to believe that this outcome is what President Obama intended all along, that through nod and wink he passed down the word that “imminent danger” was to be interpreted as loosely as Justice Ginsburg construes the Constitution. The purported restrictions on the Navy’s aggressiveness would then have been mere shadows to mislead the more timorous souls at the State Department.

I would also like to think that the New York Times was misinformed when it reported –

The Defense Department twice sought Mr. Obama’s permission to use force to rescue Captain Phillips, most recently on Friday night, senior defense officials said. On Saturday morning, the president agreed. . . . [April 13, 2009, p. A1 (print edition, apparently not on-line)]

What Mr. Hinderaker labels “inconceivable” was, if the Times is accurate, the actual state of affairs during the first four days after the assault on the Maersk Alabama.

The President has now pledged to “halt the rise of piracy” – a worthy goal. Let’s hope that this statement’s expiration date comes after the pirates have suffered many more unlucky days.

The President’s “Jewish Friends”

Despite his years of palling paling hanging around with Jeremiah Wright and other antisemites, President Obama has “Jewish friends”. He says so himself, and I believe him. I wonder, though, whether they are as singular in their views as he makes out.

Talking to students in Turkey yesterday, the President offered, according to news reports, the following comparison (noticed by Abe Greenwald:

Obama ended his first overseas trip as president with an appeal to the world to put aside stereotypes and misconceptions: the view by many Muslims that Israel is to blame for all problems [and] similar views in reverse by “some of my Jewish friends,” . . . . [emphasis added]

Is that true? We’ve all heard about the brisk sales throughout the Moslem world of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Do some of the President’s “Jewish friends” mutter similar thoughts about a mullah-led conspiracy to dominate world finance? Large numbers of Moslems cheer murderers of Jews (and Americans, too – Palestinians were photographed dancing in the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attacks). Barack Obama personally knows Jews who applaud random attacks on civilians? Almost all Moslem-ruled countries have expelled almost all of their Jewish residents. Is the Obama family on friendly terms with the heirs of Meir Kahane?

Let me hazard a guess of whose accuracy I am extremely certain: In point of fact, President Obama is not a friend of, and has never even encountered, any Jew whose opinions parallel in the slightest the bigoted notions that are commonplace throughout the House of Islam. I shall not try to guess why he attributes such foul sentiments to “friends”.

Smart Power: The Record So Far

As Abe Greenwald puts it, “Today’s rocket launch by North Korea capped off what has been a remarkably successful first quarter for the world’s most toxic regimes and troublesome bad actors.” He goes on to recount the good news in which tyrants and malefactors have reveled since January 20th. It’s a long list, yet incomplete – no mention of, for example, Russia’s steps toward establishing military bases in Venezuela or the Administration’s clumsy, though thankfully abortive embrace of Durban II or its legitimization of the UN’s (anti-)Human Rights Council or the rapturous reception given by the Arab League to the genocidal dictator of Sudan.

Not all of the setbacks for the cause of liberty and civilization can be blamed directly on President Obama. It’s obvious, though, that his accession didn’t all at once make America popular with our enemies or our sunshine friends. Nor is there any reason to think that his diplomatic style – a combination of bluster, America-bashing and inaction (the first and last being particularly on display vis-à-vis Pyongyang) – will yield dividends in the future. Mr. Greenwald’s conclusion is almost too optimistic:

Influence is now in the hands of bad actors that see the Free World’s reluctance to take a stand. They and their enablers within international bodies are setting the global agenda. Everyone else is reacting. In three months, the Obama administration has not failed one foreign policy test but six, by this reckoning. The only national security areas in which the president has acted soundly are in Iraq and Afghanistan. And those have been matters of continuing or expanding Bush policies. There are still nine months left in the year.

In Afghanistan, however, the limited assistance that NATO furnished President Bush is evaporating. Soon that war will be in reality what Iraq was only in phony headlines: the U.S. going it alone. My confidence that President Obama will persevere in the face of criticism from his Left is only slightly above nil.

To be blunt, the reason why America’s long-time detractors have been rapturous about Barack Obama is their perception that he will take the noisome United States off the world stage. So far, they have little ground for disillusionment.

Mark Steyn encapsulates the direction in which “smart power” is leading us:

The western world has no will. So we approach a state in which the planet’s wealthiest jurisdictions, from Norway to New Zealand, lack any capacity to defend their borders, and the planet’s basket-cases, from North Korea to Sudan, will be nuclear powers.

We’ll see how that arrangement works out.

The Bow Seen Round the Blogosphere

I’m of the school that believes Presidents have the right to make up their own standards of protocol. Martin Van Buren insisted on formal levées. Andrew Jackson threw the White House open to whoever wandered in. And each of them was right. So, if Barack Obama has decided that the way to approach foreign heads of state is, on the one hand to bow and scrape (the foot extended to the rear is the scrape part of that phrase) and on the other to give chintzy official presents, that’s fine with me. It’s also likely to be fine with the dignitaries involved; they have more important concerns than the politesse of a republican magistrate.

The significance of the deferential gesture toward King Abdullah of the House of Saud is the insight into this mysterious President’s mentalité. He does not bow to Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, his wife gets rather chummy with her. Then, upon encountering Abdullah informally in the middle of a crowd, he reacts just like a junior Arabian prince. Why the difference?

I can’t think of a plausible explanation that doesn’t imply, at best, a naive view of how diplomacy works. One can sort of imagine that the President intended to soften up the old despot with this gesture of public flattery. Or perhaps he thinks that the possessor of Mecca and Medina is the Moslem counterpart to the Pope, so that bowing displays respect for one of the world’s major religions.

Forsooth, I’d like to take up the idea of a desperate leftist: that Mr. Obama (6' 1½") merely “contorted” his body in order shake hands conveniently with Abdullah, who is a several inches shorter. I once shook hands with Ronald Reagan, who topped me by half a foot. It would be delightful to “remember” that one of our country’s greatest statesmen bent his knee on the occasion of our meeting. Had I controlled a few oil wells, he might have kissed my hand.

Addendum: Back in 1994, the New York Times took it amiss when President Clinton started a bow toward the Emperor of Japan, even though he caught himself and straightened up almost instantly. So far, neither the Times nor any other major media outlet has so much as mentioned President Obama’s far more noticeable obeisance.

Update (4/8/09): The “contortion” theory, mocked supra, has now become the Official White House Spin. As reported by the generally pro-Obama site Politico:

The White House is denying that the president bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a G-20 meeting in London, a scene that drew criticism on the right and praise from some Arab outlets.

“It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Politico accompanies its story with a video of the encounter. It takes a great deal of, um, imagination to reconcile the visual evidence with the White House explanation. Even better is a photo snapped from the rear [source: Sydney Morning Herald]. In order to shake hands, the President had to lower his head almost to the King’s chest and extend his right leg??

Is there a word for that in Austrian?